The Emergence of American Zionism

Mark A. Raider

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781479861279
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The images of Zionist pioneers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--hard working, brawny, and living off the land--sprang from the ascendent socialist Zionist movement in Palestine known as "Labor Zionism." The building of the Yishuv, a new Jewish society in Palestine, was accompanied by the rapid growth of Zionism worldwide.

How did Zionism take shape in the United States? How did Labor Zionism and the Yishuv influence American Jews? Zionism and Labor Zionism had a much more substantial impact on the American Jewish scene than has been recognized. Drawing on meticulous research, Mark A. Raider describes Labor Zionism's dramatic transformation in the American context from a marginal immigrant party into a significant political force.

The Emergence of American Zionism challenges many of the prevailing assumptions of Jewish and Zionist history that have held sway for a full generation. It shows how and why American Labor Zionism--"the voice of Labor Palestine on American soil"--played such an important role in formulating the program and outlook of American Zionism. It also examines more generally the impact of Zionism on American Jews, making the case that Zionism's cultural vitality, intellectual diversity, and unparalleled ability to rally public opinion in times of crisis were central to the American Jewish experience.

1
The American Setting

On the eve of her departure for Palestine in January 1920, Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, wrote to her friend Alice L. Seligsberg: “It will take the gentleness of the dove and the wisdom of the serpent if the situation [in Palestine] is to be met in a constructive spirit.”¹ Szold’s statement prefigures American Zionism’s transformation into an important political force. It also reveals a distinct American Zionist sensibility that stressed the need for consensus politics and practical schemes for the Palestine Jewish community’s development. Szold recognized that the effectiveness of American Zionist leadership, on the one hand, depended on good relations with American Jewry’s elite non-Zionist patriarchs, especially those of the American Jewish Committee, and the cooperation of the Jewish immigrant community, from traditionalists to members of the nonZionist Jewish workers’ movement. On the other hand, it required close collaboration with the leaders of the World Zionist Organization, the Yishuv, and, at a later date, the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

Such a multifaceted orientation contains the seeds of collaboration and the potential for cooperation. It is germane to both American Zionism and the American Jewish experience, which, by virtue of its distinctive postfeudal and postemancipationist origin, differs fundamentally from that of European Jewish society. American society’s “sheer formlessness,” it has been observed, allowed Jews to live side by side with other heterogeneous groups. This unique situation gave rise to the expectation that the pattern of “true American living [would be] worked out by immigrants and [native-born] Americans in a continuing process of give and take.”²

European Jewry, however, was forcibly segregated from mainstream society until the eighteenth century when the movement for Jewish emancipation began. Not surprisingly, emancipation was especially strong in western and central Europe owing to the numerical insignificance of the Jews in these lands, their facility for social and economic modernization, and the relative speed of their legal amelioration.³ In contrast, the Balkan and east European Jewish communities were seemingly impenetrable to the forces of emancipation. Because of strong traditional values in these areas and the enforced separation of the Jews living under Russian and Romanian domination, a core of Jewish intellectuals emerged, arrayed against the camps of both Western assimilationism and Eastern religious orthodoxy. Neither the doctrine of emancipation nor the helpless torpor of Jewish life under the old regime offered them hope for the future.⁴

Nonetheless, in the early nineteenth century, some Jewish thinkers broke away from the traditional Jewish mainstream. These Zionist forerunners argued that the creation of Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel was a necessary prelude to the redemption of the Jewish people. In short, even before the Russian pogroms of 1881–1882 erupted following the assassination of Czar Alexander II, both Western emancipation and the east European status quo were under attack from a variety of nationalist positions.⁵

That the pogroms destroyed hopes for Jewish emancipation in Eastern Europe is well documented.⁶ Particularly striking is the fact that the liberal leadership of Russian Jewry failed to meet the challenge of Jewish selfdefense and relief. In the ensuing vacuum, the Pale of Settlement was wracked by widespread communal misery, in which the ideologies of Jewish socialism, territorialism, and nationalism rapidly took root and flourished. These new ideological camps were largely made up of young people and thus contained a strong element of generational conflict;⁷ all shared a predilection for Russian populism. The Jewish intelligentsia followed the example of social revolutionaries like the Narodnik (People’s Will) Party and sought to create a bond with the toiling masses by “returning” to the people.⁸ Even after the pogroms, Russian Jewish radicals continued to uphold this notion as the guiding principle of their political and cultural work. The most obvious problem they faced was that of Jewish refugees. A rivalry immediately developed between the Amerikantsy, notably the Am Olam (Eternal People) movement that advocated Jewish resettlement in the United States, and the Palestintsy, represented by the socialist Zionist Bilu pioneers who favored Jewish colonization in Palestine.⁹ Notwithstanding economic pressures, the debate among radical youth turned on the question of whether the United States or Palestine was more suitable for Jewish national renewal.

On the other side of the Atlantic, “Zion” and the “Land of Israel” always enjoyed pride of place in American consciousness. Since the days of America’s Pilgrim fathers and the early settlement of New England, the notion of rebuilding Zion had been a persistent theme in American life and letters. The leaders of colonial New England—mostly divines and scriptural authorities—strongly influenced early American society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their biblical perspective spawned the principle of “covenant theology” and gave rise to the democratic political tradition that distinguished early American life.¹⁰ This bipolar existence always was subject to the practical exigencies of the New World. Gradually, though, a highly cosmopolitan American outlook emerged, one in which the eschatological concept of the “return to Zion” was central but that nevertheless sought ways of making—through both voluntary and persuasive means—the emergent American society into a fully Christian nation.¹¹

From the outset, colonial America and later the United States provided fertile terrain for successive waves of incoming European immigrants, including the ideas and movements they transplanted to American soil. By the nineteenth century, the northeastern seaboard had become a center of liberal political and religious trends.¹² To this the Jewish immigrants brought their Old World mentality, a mélange of rational, spiritual, and cultural attributes.¹³ In most urban centers, the admixture of different Jewish immigrant groups led to communal friction. For example, an extraordinary instance occurred in 1882 when Boston Jewish leaders shipped back 415 Russian Jewish refugees to New York, fearing that the new immigrants would become a financial burden.¹⁴ On the whole, however, even though American Jewish life was punctuated by periods of ethnic rivalry and division between yahudim and yidn, American Jewish society generally proved to be a congenial atmosphere for newcomers from central and eastern Europe.¹⁵ As the Boston communal leader Abraham P. Spitz remarked in 1892:

We who live in this great country, God’s most favored land . . . can hardly realize the persecutions to which our coreligionists in Russia have been subjected. . . . We must and shall receive them with open arms. . . . We must teach them the manners and customs of an enlightened community . . . thus enabling them to become useful and desirable citizens.”¹⁶

By the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States were greeted by a relatively stable communal infrastructure, one that for the most part was prepared to care for them. They also found an environment that provided them with the scope and inducement to define their own communal needs and create mechanisms for self-support and mutual assistance.¹⁷

The rapid acculturation of Jewish immigrants in the United States led to the proliferation of local Zionist societies.¹⁸ Like other immigrant associations, the Zionist clubs were not large, and their membership rosters were far from stable. But their presence was felt in the wider community. Viewed historically, the strength of American Zionism was never contingent on its size or, at a later stage, its fund-raising ability. Instead, American Zionists were most influential as leaders who helped inculcate in American Jews a sense of kinship and responsibility for the Yishuv and who helped build bridges between the two societies.

The earliest American Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) groups were east European transplants that sprang up throughout New England beginning in the 1880s.¹⁹ Initially, these groups, also known as Hovevei Zion, considered themselves part of the European mother organization, as is apparent in a “special notice” issued by the Lovers of Zion Society of East Boston in 1899:

Dear Member:

You are hereby given Notice that this Society will meet hereafter on every Sunday at 11 a.m., in Ohel Jacob Hall, Cor. Grove and Paris Sts., and no notices or Postal Cards will be send to this affect [sic] hereafter, except on Special Meetings.

You are also requested to be present at the meeting which will be held next Sunday, as there is very Important Business to be Transacted such, as to send the (Scheckel) 25c. for each good standing Member to the Central Federation of Zionists in Wiena (Austria.)

You are also notified that Mr. A. Fin has been dully [sic] selected as a Collector for this Society and is authorized to Collect Dues and other fees, until further notice.

With greeting for Zion,
Per order of LOUIS B. MAGID President
Nathan Bloch Sec’y²⁰

Throughout America, a plethora of Hebrew-speaking clubs and fundraising associations were organized for land purchases in Palestine, and by the turn of the century, the United States was home to scores of different Zionist groups with Americanized names such as the Uptown Zionist Club, Oir Zion Lodge, Dorshei Zion, Hebrew National Association, Zion Literary League, International Order of the Knights of Zion, Flowers of Zion, Bnai Zion, Bnoth Zion, Ladies’ Zion League, Helpers of Zion, Maccabees Zion Branch, American Daughters of Zion, and Philadelphia Zionist Society.²¹ As these colorful names reveal, early American Zionists displayed a variety of cultural, religious, and political interests. This pluralistic environment also encouraged the establishment of local branches of the Mizrahi Party, a religious Zionist movement dedicated to the resettlement of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel according to the precepts of the Torah, and the Labor Zionist Poalei Zion Party, which interpreted the cause of Jewish national liberation in Marxist terms. Most urban centers even included a few Zionist synagogues with names like the Bialystocker Congregation Adath Yeshurun, Adas Zion Anshe Kowno, Ahavath Achim Anshe Usda, Poel Zedec Anshe Ilio, Tifereth Jerusholaim, and Chemdath Zion.²² This array of Zionist immigrant creations augmented the existing communal infrastructure of native-born American Jews.

The pluralistic character of the New World differed dramatically from the restrictive environment of Europe. Whereas American Zionism continued to identify with the European mother organization, American Zionists were also inclined toward a synthesis of Zionism and American ideals. This was especially true of native-born Jews sympathetic to Zionism, many of whom sought to promote Jewish national sentiment as a facet of modern American Jewish identity. In 1905, Josephine Lazarus, sister of the poet Emma Lazarus, suggested that “Zionism, like Americanism, is an emancipation, a release from enforced limitation and legislation, from a narrow petty, tribal polity of life, whether social or religious, and from old-world prejudice and caste.”²³

A similar sensibility prevailed in the Jewish immigrant sphere. Jews of east European extraction, however, also exhibited a marked degree of ambivalence about American society that reflected their distinct cultural orientation. As early as 1888, for example, the maskil (enlightened Jew) A. A. Rogovin observed that although American Lovers of Zion operated in a climate of unprecedented freedom, Jewish nationalism in the New World was nonetheless constrained by its own problems.

The members [of Hibbat Zion] live in the land of America, a land in which a large part of our brothers has forsaken our Torah and language and does not want to hear about the land of our fathers. For what do they lack here! The rich and powerful people who pay their rabbi twelve thousand dollars a year have already erased any mention even of Jerusalem from their prayer books. And also many of our less pretentious and younger brothers have already forgotten Zion even without erasing its mention from their books, since they do not pray at all. They know neither our Torah nor language because they have not studied. Even those who brought their knowledge with them from Russia and Poland seek to discard it.²⁴

Successive waves of east European Jewish immigrants underscored the debate about Jewish identity in the New World. East European Jewry’s nationalist impulse, however, was not totally unprecedented in American Jewish life. An incipient form of devotion to Zion, as we have already seen, had existed in the United States since the colonial period.²⁵ This sentiment reached a climax in 1825 when Mordecai M. Noah, an eccentric diplomat, devised a grandiose scheme to create a Jewish state on an island in the Niagara River opposite Buffalo, New York.²⁶ In another curious episode, Warder Cresson, a convert to Judaism who briefly served as the American consul in Palestine, assumed the name Michael Boaz Israel and established an agricultural colony near Jerusalem in 1852.²⁷ Finally, the well-known poet Emma Lazarus advocated the restoration of a Jewish homeland in her An Epistle to the Hebrews (1882–1883).²⁸

Lazarus was profoundly influenced by a monograph entitled Autoemancipation: Ein Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen von einem russischen Juden (Autoemancipation: an appeal to his people by a Russian Jew) (1882).²⁹ Published anonymously by Leon Pinsker in the aftermath of the Russian pogroms of 1881–1882, this proto-Zionist treatise became the manifesto of Hibbat Zion.³⁰ Reflecting on Pinsker’s essay, Lazarus noted: “The incidents of current Jewish history, the swelling voice of Jewish patriotism, [and] the urgent necessity of escape from an untenable position among the nations, have combined to transform me into one of the most devoted adherents to the new dogma.”³¹

Such nationalist views did not differ dramatically from those of Lazarus’s contemporary Rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal who, despite his unfamiliarity with Pinsker and his loyalty to Reform Judaism, gradually came to consider Palestine “a practical solution to a philanthropic problem.”³² Felsenthal later developed a religious rationale for his Zionist proclivities, but at this early stage he, too, believed in American Jewish noblesse oblige.³³

In the late ninete...