A History of Zionism (89 page)

Throughout its history Mizrahi has been plagued by dissension between those who regard themselves first and foremost as Zionists and the others who put orthodoxy above Zionism. Mizrahi ideology is a compromise between two extremes: it rejects Zionism as a purely secular movement, claiming that the spiritual and moral values of Europe have only limited value, that the Jewish nation without religion is a body without a soul, that religion and nation constitute an indissoluble unity.
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Religion, in other words, must be the core of Zionism, and the religious tradition has again to become the law of the Land of Israel. Yet, in contrast to Agudat Israel, Mizrahi has always argued that religious faith without the national spirit was only ‘half Judaism’, and has insisted, again in contrast to the ultra-orthodox, that the Hebrew language must be the language of both spiritual and daily life. The Antwerp congress (1926) put the ideology into one brief formula: ‘The Mizrahi is a Zionist, national and religious federation striving to build the national home of the Jewish people in Palestine in accordance with the written and traditional laws.’

Two of the younger and most active leaders, Rabbis Meir Berlin and Y.Y. Yishman, were in America during the First World War and helped to build up the organisation there. 1922 was a milestone in the history of the movement: the seat of the executive was transferred to Jerusalem and
Hapoel Hamizrahi
, the workers section, was founded. During its early phase the movement had been dominated by rabbis, but gradually lay members gained a larger share in the leadership. One of them, Professor Hermann Pick, became the first Mizrahi representative on the Zionist executive. Special emphasis was put during the 1920s and 1930s on educational activities both in Palestine and in eastern Europe. A women’s group was started and its youth section gained many adherents. In Palestine the Mizrahi established its own bank as well as a building workers cooperative. Later, with the arrival of the first members of Hapoel Hamizrahi, several kibbutzim and suburban settlements, such as Sanhedria in Jerusalem, were founded. The ten kibbutzim of Hapoel Hamizrahi had in 1967 about four thousand members.

In Zionist politics the Mizrahi at first supported Weizmann but later turned against him to join the right-wing opposition against the labour parties. It was basically a middle class party and therefore opposed the takeover of the Zionist executive in 1931 by the Left. These policies caused dissension. The orthodox workers’ section, which subsequently joined the Histadrut, opposed this turn to the Right. It advocated ‘Jewish Socialism’, claiming that Socialism need not necessarily be materialist and atheist in character; that, on the contrary, Socialism based on the concepts of social justice as presented in the Bible was both legitimate and desirable. The Mizrahi leadership was not at first greatly impressed by these dissenting voices. On the contrary, its failure to influence Palestinian and Zionist politics in the spirit of Jewish orthodoxy caused a further hardening of its attitude.

At the Cracow conference in 1933 Mizrahi decided to intensify its struggle against the non-orthodox, both in the Zionist movement and in the elected institutions of Palestinian Jewry.
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This caused further friction in its ranks. The German Mizrahi left the world federation in 1931 (partly in protest against the anti-Weizmann line), and there was resistance to the new course in Britain, Austria and Switzerland as well as in Palestine. Hapoel Hamizrahi claimed, not without good reason, that by pursuing narrow class interests the movement would cut itself off from the very masses it wanted to influence in the spirit of Jewish traditions. Unity was restored after several years of dispute, but the Hapoel Hamizrahi emerged from the conflict greatly strengthened and more independent in its outlook and policy.

Youth Movements

Zionism was a movement supported predominantly by the young generation when it first appeared on the European scene, and youth movements have played an important role in its history ever since. The
Bilu
consisted of boys and girls in their late teens and early twenties, and those who came to Palestine with the second and third immigration wave were mostly of this age. The early supporters of Zionism in central and western Europe were students who met in corporations such as
Kadima
in Vienna; another
Kadima
was founded in London in 1887, well before Herzl’s time. Similar groups were founded in Breslau in 1886, in Heidelberg (
Badenia
) in 1890, in Berlin in 1892 (
Jung Israel
), in Czernowitz (
Hasmonea
) and in several other universities. It was one form taken by the reaction against the emerging antisemitic movement which had its bastions in the universities. Some of these groups saw their main task in cultural work among their members, others put the stress on physical prowess. It was not uncommon for them to provoke duels with antisemitic students in order to demonstrate to themselves and and others that Jews were not cowards. These student corporations accepted political Zionism only gradually, but once they did so they became the backbone of the movement in Germany and Austria and in later years provided its leadership.

In 1913-14 Zionist students in Germany organised group excursions to Palestine. On the very eve of the First World War the local associations merged into the
KJV
, the central organisation (
Kartell Jüdischer
Verbindungen
) which was to play an important part in central European Zionism after 1918. While the students movement pre-dated political Zionism, the idea of promoting physical education was first mooted at the second Zionist congress by Max Nordau and Professor Mandelstam. It was given further impetus at the fifth congress, when Nordau coined the phrase
Muskel Judentum
(muscle Jewry).
Bar Kochba
, the first big Jewish sports club, was founded in 1898 in Berlin. The movement rapidly spread to other countries and at the sixth congress it was decided to form an international federation of Zionist sports clubs. In 1921, at the Karlsbad congress, this became the Maccabi World Organisation, which in 1930 had about forty thousand members in twenty-four countries. In 1932 the first Jewish Olympic Games (the Maccabia) took place in Tel Aviv. Some of these clubs attained a considerable reputation particularly in athletics and boxing (Germany), and swimming, skiing and athletics (Austria and Czechoslovakia). Many boys and girls came to Zionism through these clubs. It would be a mistake to assume that the whole Zionist movement graduated from intense ideological discussions, and the study of Borokhov and Buber. The great emphasis put on physical education, traditionally neglected among the Jewish communities, was part of the Zionist campaign to normalise Jewish life, and it may have been influenced by the Czech Sokols.

An independent Jewish youth movement, free from control by adults, developing its own specific youth culture, came into being in 1912-13 with the establishment of the
Blau Weiss
in Breslau and Berlin. The impact of the German youth movement, the
Wandervogel
, was considerable: Blau Weiss adopted the same organisational forms. Its members sang the same songs and went on hiking and camping trips. It was permeated by the same neo-romantic mood, the protest against vulgar materialism and the artificial conventions of society, by the desire to return to a more natural, sincere, spontaneous life. What prevented the integration of young Jews in the German Wandervogel was partly the emergence of antisemitic tendencies in a movement which originally had been non-political: some German groups introduced a
numerus clausus
, other refused to accept Jews altogether, and in 1913 there was a country-wide discussion on whether Jews could and should be members.
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Moreover, assimilated as most German Jews were, many of them felt they could have no place in a movement which drew so much of its inspiration from the mystic folk spirit so frequently invoked, in which elements of Teutomania and Christianity were so deeply ingrained.

When war broke out, the members of the Jewish youth movements in Germany and Austria volunteered for the army. But if the experience of the war drove so many of their German contemporaries towards an exalted German patriotism, many young Jews discovered that whatever their legal status they were not regarded as fully fledged Germans by their fellow soldiers and officers. Some rediscovered their Jewish identity as a result of their first contact with east European Jewry. Blau Weiss, which had sympathised with Zionism from the beginning, was fully converted to it during the war, even though the internal disputes about ‘what is Jewish’ continued. With all its Zionist commitment, the movement was deeply immersed in German culture. One of its leaders confessed that his ‘dreams ripened under northern firs’, not under oriental palms. Others admitted that the good old German songs appealed to them more than the artificial Hebrew ones, whose meaning they did not understand. At a youth meeting in Berlin in October 1918 one of the spokesmen of the Blau Weiss declared that Zionism had to be liberated from the dead weight of tradition, and that a national revival did not necessarily entail the indiscriminate adoption of outworn religious dogmas and cultural beliefs.
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Such heretical views aroused a storm of indignation, but indignation alone did not answer the questions about the Jewish content: the German youth movement continued to serve as the organisational pattern and the ideological inspiration for Zionist youth. In one decisive respect, however, Zionist youth went far beyond the Wandervogel: at the Prünn meeting of the Blau Weiss in 1922 a resolution was adopted committing its members to emigrate to Palestine and to work and live there together. It had been the great weakness of the German youth movement that despite all the solemn declarations of personal commitment it had always been a transit camp: most of its members dropped out once they graduated from high school.

The Jewish youth movement wanted to succeed where its German contemporary had failed, to establish a
Lebensbund
, not a summer camp but a life community. The first Blau Weiss members went to Palestine in 1921-2, others followed in 1923 and 1924 and established a small agricultural settlement and also a workshop in the city. These attempts failed, partly because the members had been insufficiently prepared for working life in Palestine and partly because of the economic crisis of 1925-6. Blau Weiss ceased to exist in 1927, but this was by no means the end of the Zionist youth movement in Germany; many of its members eventually found their way to Palestine.

During the 1920s and the early 1930s several more Zionist youth movements came into being (
JJWB, Brit Haolim, Kadima, Habonim, Werkleute
). Some of them subsequently established their own kibbutzim in Palestine (the
Werkleute
in Hazorea) while members of others (such as the religious
Bachad
) joined either collective or cooperative settlements. From an ideological point of view these groups, with their unending disputes about cultural and political issues, were a fascinating, ever-changing amalgam of Socialist or, at any rate, anti-capitalist elements (with Marx and Gustav Landauer as the strongest influences), cultural Zionism (Buber), the German youth movement, and to a growing degree
haluziut
, the idea of commitment to a working life in Palestine. Not all of those who committed themselves to a life in a kibbutz joined one in the end, and of those who did join, not all remained. Eventually, however, a higher percentage of German Jews went into agriculture than of immigrants from any other country.

The victory of Nazism gave a fresh impetus to the Zionist youth movement. The membership of
Hehalutz
, founded in Germany in the early 1920s on the initiative of, among others, Arlosoroff, rose to fifteen thousand after 1933, of whom seven thousand went to Palestine within the next three years, most of them joining existing kibbutzim. Of the younger members, those aged sixteen or less, several thousand reached Palestine with Youth Aliya, an enterprise directed by Henrietta Szold, the veteran American Zionist leader. They were absorbed in children’s villages (such as Ben Shemen) and kibbutzim, where in a two-year training course they were taught the essentials of agriculture, learnt Hebrew, and received a general education of sorts.

The impact of the German youth movement was not limited to the German-speaking countries of central Europe. It exerted a powerful influence on eastern Europe as well. Hashomer Hatzair, of which mention has already been made, came into being as a youth movement subscribing to the principles of scouting.
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Its cradle was in Galicia. During the war years some of its leaders came into contact with members of the German and Austrian Jewish youth movements and the pioneers of a new, free education (S. Sernfeld). Their vanguard reached Palestine in 1920-1. Like the Blau Weiss, they were not yet by any means convinced Zionists. Nietzschean ideas about the fulfilment of the individual played a central role in their
Weltanschauung.
Later, the movement spread from Galicia to Poland, Rumania, Lithuania and many other countries.

By 1930 Hashomer Hatzair counted thirty-four thousand members and was by far the strongest youth movement. It had also become unequivocally Zionist and radically Socialist in character and subscribed to the idea of kibbutz life. Not all its members stood the test: many dropped out for personal reasons, others because they no longer accepted the ideological orientation of the movement. Left-wing critics claimed that there could be no synthesis between the aims of Zionism and revolutionary Socialism. They saw a ‘tragic conflict’ between the two, and in view of the overriding importance of world revolution they opted for Communism, or in some cases for Trotskyism. The right wing (mainly in Latvia and Czechoslovakia), on the other hand, maintained that there was already too much politics in their movement. The secession took place at the third world conference of Hashomer Hatzair in 1930. Most members of this group found their way into Mapai.