Jabotinsky's Children

Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism

Daniel Heller

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691197128, 9780691174754
• eBook ISBN: 9781400888627
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

How interwar Poland and its Jewish youth were instrumental in shaping the ideology of right-wing Zionism

By the late 1930s, as many as fifty thousand Polish Jews belonged to Betar, a youth movement known for its support of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Zionism. Poland was not only home to Jabotinsky's largest following. The country also served as an inspiration and incubator for the development of right-wing Zionist ideas. Jabotinsky's Children draws on a wealth of rare archival material to uncover how the young people in Betar were instrumental in shaping right-wing Zionist attitudes about the roles that authoritarianism and military force could play in the quest to build and maintain a Jewish state.

Recovering the voices of ordinary Betar members through their letters, diaries, and autobiographies, Jabotinsky's Children paints a vivid portrait of young Polish Jews and their turbulent lives on the eve of the Holocaust. Rather than define Jabotinsky as a firebrand fascist or steadfast democrat, the book instead reveals how he deliberately delivered multiple and contradictory messages to his young followers, leaving it to them to interpret him as they saw fit. Tracing Betar's surprising relationship with interwar Poland's authoritarian government, Jabotinsky's Children overturns popular misconceptions about Polish-Jewish relations between the two world wars and captures the fervent efforts of Poland's Jewish youth to determine, on their own terms, who they were, where they belonged, and what their future held in store.

Shedding critical light on a vital yet neglected chapter in the history of Zionism, Jabotinsky's Children provides invaluable perspective on the origins of right-wing Zionist beliefs and their enduring allure in Israel today.

1

Jabotinsky Encounters
Polish Jewish Youth

ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1927, the train carrying Vladimir Jabotinsky arrived at six o’clock in the morning to Dworzec Wiedeński, a vast, palatial train station in the heart of Warsaw. Crowds of the city’s Jews had begun to fill the platform an hour and a half beforehand.¹ By the time he arrived, the entire station was packed with his admirers.² Over the course of five weeks, as he wound his way through central Poland and Galicia, delivering speech after speech in Włocławek, Sowiniec, Łódź, Kraków, and Lwów, Jabotinsky reported the same scenario to his wife, Anya: “The trip is continuing as it began—the masses await at the train stations, the halls are full, and it seems to me like there is success.”³ He took special notice of the throngs of young Jews following his every move.⁴ In the industrial city of Białystok, which lay on the edge of an immense forest, he recounted, “on the streets, there are thousands of youth screaming, ‘Long Live Jabotinsky!’” In a city nearly two hundred miles northeast, known in Yiddish as Vilne and famed for its vibrant Jewish religious, political and cultural life, he recalled how “over the course of a long hour, the crowds paraded me through the streets. Masses of youth shouted, ‘Hooray!’”⁵

The excitement Jabotinsky expressed to friends and family about young Polish Jews would have been a welcome break from his frequently tortured letters concerning the Union of Revisionist Zionists’ financial woes and inability to recruit members since its founding two years beforehand. If the letters’ recipients were indeed relieved, they would have been all the more surprised by Jabotinsky’s enthusiasm for Polish Jewish youth. Despite Poland being home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, the Revisionist movement’s protocols rarely made reference to the country prior to Jabotinsky’s trip.⁶ Youth were similarly on the fringes of the Revisionist movement’s political map. Until Jabotinsky’s arrival in Poland in the winter of 1927, neither he nor any members of the Revisionist Executive in Paris had undertaken any serious initiatives to develop youth movements. Yet by the year’s end, Jabotinsky considered Poland a Revisionist heartland, its Jewish youth his most important disciples.

This was more than just a shift in geographic orientation. One week into his trip, he confided to Anya that he was encountering not only scores of new supporters but a mode of political behavior that differed dramatically from his own:

There is something unpleasant—I’ve felt it for some time now, and now I’m beginning to be frightened by it . . . they are beginning to transform me into a myth: “that man who” . . . My chubby body and my bald spot leave no impression. . . . Worst of all, this myth is beginning to transform into a legend about a “leader” [Duce] . . . I fear, more and more, that precisely this will bring us to “power” (God help us!), not a way of thought, and not a program, but rather panic about the lack of success in Palestine, and the stupid legend about the new rebbe [a rabbi of a Hasidic dynasty] who performs miracles. Even ruling through accepted ways is repulsive enough. . . . And already, there is nothing to be done. . . . And on the other hand, perhaps all this will increase our longevity?⁷

Jabotinsky’s confession was, in part, an acknowledgment of his failed attempts to achieve substantial support by other means. At the founding of his movement, he insisted that Revisionism’s appeal lay in its rational, logical critique of the Zionist Organization and its leader, the brilliant chemist Chaim Weizmann. Myths and slogans could serve as the handmaidens of modern politics, but journalism and public debate would be the key to political success. It was not surprising, then, that Jabotinsky’s early recruitment efforts for the Revisionist movement focused primarily on members of the Jewish intelligentsia—whether émigrés from Russia living in Berlin and Paris, university students in Vienna, or journalists and politicians in Salonika who were educated in the westernized French-language schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. In Jabotinsky’s imagination, Polish Jews, with their appetite for myths and hero worship, were of an entirely different nature. By likening politically active Polish Jewish youth to supplicants of rebbes, the spiritual wonder workers and leaders of the Hasidic movement, the devoutly secular Jabotinsky branded them as proponents of a traditional, “backwards” past.

At the same time, however, Jabotinsky’s brief reference to being perceived as a Duce linked Polish Jewish youth to a new mode of politics gaining popularity across Europe. Politicians increasingly believed the political choices of ordinary people were guided by emotion rather than reason, a preference for aesthetics over ideas, and a desire for a strong leader. Politics had to be no longer intellectually sound but emotionally appealing. The politics of emotion had been a crucial component of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and the mass electoral politics that emerged in western and central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The recent years of war and revolution made political elites in the 1920s all the more alert to the power of mass politics. Far from the preserve of fascists or communists, mobilizing the passions, rather than the intellects, of their intended recruits was given pride of place by politicians across the political spectrum. Torch-lit processions, tumultuous rallies, sporting events, and other public spectacles were designed to project an image of unity and strength, and to awaken the passionate loyalty of participants and spectators alike.⁸ Youth movements became a critical means for political activists to cultivate these political practices. With hundreds of young Polish Jews awaiting his arrival at train stations across the country, proclaiming him their leader, Jabotinsky came face to face with this new mode of politics.

The young Jews who greeted Jabotinsky not only enticed him to consider recasting his style of political leadership. They also revealed to him that Poland’s political scene, and Polish nationalism in particular, was exerting a profound influence on their self-image as Zionists, as well as on their expectations of the Revisionist movement. Their attitudes toward socialism, militarism, and authoritarian leadership were inspired in part by Józef Piłsudski’s recently established Sanacja regime. Over the course of his trip to Poland, Jabotinsky became convinced that there was much to be gained by aligning the Revisionist movement’s political platform with these attitudes.

Uncovering the story of Betar’s establishment in Poland, this chapter explores how Jabotinsky’s encounters with Polish Jewish youth not only changed the geographic orientation of his political activism, but also transformed how he conceived of his role as a leader and the political platform that would bring him to power. The story told here reveals how the young Polish Jewish adherents of Revisionism, many of whom drew inspiration from elements of Polish nationalism, did not simply accept a political vision imposed from above but played an active role in shaping it as well.

The Swamp: Jabotinsky on Youth and Polish Jews

Jabotinsky’s initial ambivalence toward young Polish Jews can only be understood when set against the backdrop of his experiences as a Zionist activist in the preceding decade. During the First World War and its immediate aftermath, Jewish youth were at the heart of Jabotinsky’s political activity. As soon as the war began, nationalist political activists of stateless nations across Europe formed military legions to fight in the service of the Triple Entente or Allied forces. They hoped that their service would be rewarded at the war’s end with a state of their own. In November 1914, Jabotinsky set out to organize a Jewish Legion to fight under the command of the British Army, whom he predicted would conquer Ottoman Palestine. He insisted that Jews would only be able to stake their claim to the territory if they participated in its conquest. After spending several months in Alexandria with Joseph Trumpeldor, who commanded several hundred Jewish volunteers to transport munitions and goods for British forces in Gallipoli, Jabotinsky traveled to London to make his case to British government officials. With the exception of Chaim Weizmann, who was similarly courting the support of British statesmen, most Zionist leaders accused Jabotinsky of endangering the movement’s official policy of neutrality. The most vehement opposition came from Britain’s thirty to forty thousand draft-age Russian Jewish youth, whom Jabotinsky had insisted would join Jewish battalions in droves. Their opposition was not without cause. While Jabotinsky was conducting his campaign, the British government was threatening to force young Russian Jewish immigrants to choose between joining the British Army or being deported back to Russia. They were equally repulsed by Jabotinsky’s suggestion that they serve in an army allied with tsarist Russia, from which they had fled.⁹

British government officials eventually acquiesced to Jabotinsky. Largely thanks to Chaim Weizmann’s diplomatic efforts, they were increasingly (and mistakenly) convinced that Jews wielded tremendous political power, and that Zionists could convince Jews worldwide to support the British war effort.¹⁰ Raised as a devout Protestant, and enchanted by legends from the Bible, Britain’s prime minister from December 1916, David Lloyd George, was also enthralled by the prospect of his government helping Jews return to their ancient homeland. Religious sentiments easily fused with colonial ambitions. British officials believed that control of Palestine could provide them with access to the Suez Canal and help them create an overland route to India. Many British officials hoped that their declared support for Zionism could free them from the commitment to France they had made the same year, that Palestine would be under international rule.

In July 1917, the Jewish Legion came into being. Some five thousand volunteers from Palestine, the United States, and eastern Europe were divided into three separate battalions. Three months later, British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour declared British support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Yet Jabotinsky’s sense of victory was short lived. By the time the first Jewish Legion’s battalion, with Jabotinsky at its helm, set off toward Egypt in February 1918, British forces had already conquered Jerusalem. When all the legion’s battalions finally reached Palestine, they experienced little action on the front. They were instead commanded to conduct spadework for upcoming offensives and to patrol hills north of Jerusalem and in the Jordan Valley. Worse still for Jabotinsky was the fate of the legion after the war drew to a close. Despite his fervent efforts through 1919, he was unable to convince the Jewish soldiers with whom he had served that their longing for demobilization was tantamount to national betrayal.

When attacks on Jerusalem’s Jewish population broke out during the Muslim religious festival of Nebi Musa one year later, Jabotinsky briefly experienced a surge in Zionist support for the reestablishment of the Jewish Legion. Several weeks beforehand, he had helped to establish a volunteer group of several hundred armed Jewish men known as the Haganah (the Defense). In the wake of the riots, Palestine’s new British rulers arrested Jabotinsky and nineteen Haganah members who had attempted to defend Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem’s Old City. They were sentenced to three years of hard labor. Their internment quickly became a cause célèbre for Jews in Palestine: visitors flocked to Jabotinsky’s prison cell in Akko. By the time Jabotinsky and the Haganah members were granted amnesty three months later, he was complaining that Zionist leaders and the Jewish public at large had abandoned him and his fellow prisoners.¹¹ On his return to Europe in September 1920, he accepted Weizmann’s offer to serve as the chief fundraiser for the Jewish National Fund. Soon after, he joined the executive leadership of the Zionist Organization. Under Weizmann’s leadership, the organization controlled the principal charities of the Zionist movement, oversaw much of the administrative affairs of Jews in Mandate Palestine, and was seen by British officials as the representative body of the Zionist movement. In the months that followed, the executive’s members grew increasingly irritated by Jabotinsky’s demands for the British government to establish a Jewish defense force, permit the mass immigration of Jews, and dismiss any officials who were unsympathetic to the Zionist project. Jabotinsky increasingly accused the Zionist Organization’s leadership of being incompetent and too timid in their interactions with British officials. On two occasions, Jabotinsky offered his resignation to Weizmann in protest, only to retract his decision soon after.

Tensions between Jabotinsky and the Zionist Organization’s leaders reached their zenith in December 1921. News surfaced that Jabotinsky had secretly met that summer with Maxim Slavinsky, a member of the Ukrainian Democratic Republic’s government-in-exile, to propose forming Jewish gendarmes under Ukrainian command. Between 1918 and 1920, as many as 150,000 Jews had been murdered during pogroms led by soldiers in the Ukrainian army. The sole purpose of the agreement, Jabotinsky would later explain, was to provide protection to Jewish inhabitants of towns and cities that the Ukrainian Democratic Republic’s army hoped to reclaim from Soviet rule. Although the government-in-exile collapsed soon after the summer, rendering the agreement impossible to fulfill, Jabotinsky’s actions were nonetheless widely condemned by most Zionist leaders. Many accused Jabotinsky of tarnishing Zionism’s reputation by allying with antisemites. Others feared that the agreement endangered Zionist activists in the Soviet Union, already deemed suspect by the Red Army. In January 1923, the day after leaders from the Zionist Organization voted to open an official investigation into his pact with the Ukrainian government-in-exile, Jabotinsky resigned from the Zionist Executive. He claimed he was doing so to protest their handling of the Zionist project in Mandate Palestine. Indignant and unrepentant, he accepted an offer to serve as editor of Rassvet, a Russian-language Zionist newspaper staffed by a group of impoverished intellectuals, many of whom had been Jabotinsky’s colleagues in Russia. In June, with wife and son in tow, Jabotinsky joined Rassvet’s staff in Berlin, where as many as 360,000 émigrés from Russia had fled.

Jabotinsky’s early articles in Rassvet gave vent to his frustration with the Zionist movement. In a short column published on October 28, 1923, he lashed out at the Jewish public. He began by claiming that the paralyzing passivity of the Jewish “masses” was destroying any opportunity for Zionist national ideals to be carried out. Equally culpable were Zionist leaders. Instead of determining the correct path for the “masses . . . standing with one foot in the ghetto,”¹² they had adopted and succumbed to the Jewish public’s mentality and demands. The task of a Jewish politician, Jabotinsky continued, was to relentlessly criticize the public, not to coddle its members. Should their leaders fail to live up to this task, the Jewish masses would remain trapped in their destructive patterns of thinking and behaving, which Jabotinsky dubbed “the swamp.”¹³ If describing the Jewish masses in this fashion was not provocative enough, the final lines of Jabotinsky’s essay were ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terms
• Introduction
• 1: Jabotinsky Encounters Polish Jewish Youth
• 2: Little Fascists?
• 3: Obedient Children, Reckless Rebels
• 4: Poland, Palestine, and the Politics of Belonging
• 5: Taming the Shtetl
• 6: Terror
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• A Note on the Type