Season 2: Episode 23 - The New Jew

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Awake, tribe of Judah, called Zev Jabotinsky. Nature beckons with the spring. Passover beckons, the day of Exodus, liberation from our chains. Well, I'm definitely looking for a little bit of liberation. And frankly, even a healthy dose of redemption. Because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 23, The New Jew. Did you ever wonder how the Jews went from being fueled for the fire of the ovens of Europe to a world-class military power in the space of less than 50 years? How the smiling, virile Israeli soldier replaced the hunchback, shady-looking banker as the iconic Jewish image of the 20th century? If you have, then it's time we talk about the question of the new Jew. Because as part and parcel of the quest for national awakening, Early Zionism is going to harness all the romantic energy, all the social psychology, and all the evolutionary vision that the 19th century has to offer in order to create a new Jew.

And what exactly that means, or really how exactly it looks, depends on which Zionist you ask. Groundwork for this project of the new Jew has been underway for some time in our story. First of all, let's get one thing straight. Our whole journey through Spanish history, and the bits of its continuation that we've seen in the story of the Sephardic Diaspora, tells us that the image of the Jew as a weak figure, divorced from the land, from war and culture, is largely an Ashkenazi one. And even in Europe, we saw the Enlightenment break a whole bunch of the molds of what it meant to be a Jew that came with them out of the Middle Ages. And in particular, we witnessed the brutal assault of history on the citadel of religion.

And as the Jews shattered under the blows of modernity into reformed conservative Orthodox Judaism, we saw already that something new was emerging. This something new, combined with the rapid acquisition of civil rights that we call emancipation, created Jewish citizens of many nations, all of them eager to be more French than the French, more German than the German, even while holding on to their mosaic persuasion. And for reasons both obvious and less so, the early Zionists found little satisfaction in a new brand of Judaism. No matter how progressive or pluralistic or historically conscious, what they wanted was a new Jew. And because of the pressures they perceived ratcheting up around them, they wanted that new Jew now.

And that means that we're talking about a revolution rather than an evolution. And don't forget that the simple meaning of revolution is always to come back around to where you began. It's a return to origin. And that's why so many successful revolutionaries throughout time, be they spiritual or political, have claimed to just be restoring the lost glory of what was. In our story, we saw this in Hasidut's claim of a return to its prophetic roots. We saw it in that essential element, if you recall, of the mad, redemptive vision that sprung from Shabtai Tzvi of Shlilat HaGalut, the negation of exile through a return to place of origin. We also touched it in the story of the Hebrew Renaissance and the desire of its poets to express themselves in our ancient mother tongue.

And the founding fathers of Zionism certainly saw a return to origin as the path towards the future for Am Yisrael. And the culture that underlies the new Jew that they construct will be built in many ways on that wonderful phrase of the pre-state days, min hatanach el habalmach, from the Hebrew Bible to the striking arm of the pre-state army. Min hatanach el habalmach, and everything in between just falls away. Now, lest you think that this was some strange conspiracy, that the world's most successful attempt at social reconstructing happened when a bunch of guys got together in a room and said, we gotta do this better. Just realize, this quest for the new Jew is not always so self-aware. The express purpose of Zionism is the re-embodiment of a nation, and the people are just the obvious material for the project.

So far, in our story, we've seen practical Zionism, political Zionism, and cultural Zionism. And they're all struggling with the question of how do we re-embody a nation after 2,000 years living as scattered people and religion. Let's refresh their basic approaches in order to set up their relationship to this project of the new Jew. First of all, at this stage it's clear that what unites all Zionists is that they agree that Zion is the only fit vessel for Jewish nationhood. They just differ in their approach of how to fill it. And don't forget, there are plenty of non-Zionist national movements at this stage, as well as non-nationalist Jewish movements. We'll come back to some of these, especially the universalist cosmopolitan ones.

But for now, onward to Zion. Practical Zionism is exemplified by the Chovey Zion, that movement, the lovers of Zion that sprang up in the late 19th century. And if you want to understand or really see their contribution to the New Jew, you have to know that Chovey Zion began as a colonial-style enterprise. Yes, that's right. I used the C word. Colonial. Colonialism. I say it again, but sooner or later, if you want to dig into the guts of Zionism and understand what it was and who we are today, we need to put to rest the colonial narrative. That perspective which chooses to view the Jews and our national aspirations in the land of Israel through the same lens as it views the Dutch and their imperial aims in South Africa.

And today, colonialism is a dirty word. and its meaning has morphed, so when people hit each other with it, it's a little bit hard to know what they mean. I mean, frankly, as far as I could tell, both from my experience and from the dictionary, at this point, the meaning of colonialism is any practice of domination which involves the subjugation of one people to another. And I would even say that it doesn't have to be one people to another. In our world, you can get away with saying that yuppies are colonizing poor neighborhoods and that ideas can colonize unsuspecting minds. Basically, any weak party in a power struggle can use the C word and bring to bear the full weight of historical injustice on their impressor.

And I get that. I get that usage about the imbalance of power. But the word's origins are specific, specific and brutal, and located in our time period, right now in the 19th century, when the European nations are slicing up the gold, conquering peoples and settling lands in a mad race for power and resource. And here, in the 19th century, colonialism refers to the assertion of political and economic control over a dependent territory in a brutal fashion. And it's most often driven by a powerful mix of cultural supremacism, racial pseudoscience, and a quasi-religious desire to enlighten the heathen. Now remember also, in this definition, all colonies have a mother country to which they are subordinated and for whom they are developed.

That's why, of course, the American colonies broke away from England. No taxation without representation. Remember all that and the Tea Party? And furthermore, the mother country's culture serves as both a tool of conquest and a standard of cultural enlightenment. It's quite complex. And you can see then right away that the Zionist Project doesn't exactly fit this mold. Certainly not the 19th century one. I mean, what's the mother country of Zionism? And on whom will the territory they get their hands on be dependent? Aside from the fact that the Jewish narrative is that we're coming home, not colonizing somebody else's land, the vast majority of Zionist activity had nothing to do with exploiting the soil of the land of Israel on the behalf of someone else who lived somewhere else.

The successful Zionists will be those looking to build the land and be built by it, not exploit its resources and labor pool. Nevertheless, the accusation doesn't come from nowhere. And in fact, if you want to find where there's a handle for the colonial epithet, it's here in the first Aliyah, this first wave of immigration that led up to the foundation of the modern state. And this is the heyday of practical Zionism, which had a decidedly colonial flavor. Because at first, the farms and homesteads that were the dream of these early lovers of Zion almost universally failed. Even with the support of the Mikve Yisrael Agricultural School, which we discussed, conditions in the land of Israel were simply too difficult for the idealistic or opportunistic would-be Jewish peasants that actually made the leap from Europe to the Middle East.

And after breaking themselves on rocky soils and getting sick from malaria, most left within the first year. The efforts which did ultimately prove successful were largely due to the intervention of Hanadiv, as he was known, the famous known benefactor, whose support made this first aliyah even possible. And that anonymous benefactor was, of course, the banking magnate, Baron Edmund de Rothschild, who, having seen the distress of Russian Jews, and witnessed in particular pogroms of 1881, came to the conclusion that the solution to the Jewish problem was immigration to the land of Israel. And he became the massively wealthy patron of the larger settlements like Zikron Yaakov, Yishon Litsion, Rosh Pina, and many other smallers, and he rebuilt them on modern scientific principles, planning the agricultural, economic, and residential lives of the inhabitants from top to bottom.

His initial vision was classic, late 19th century social reform. The well-planned environment produces as healthy and upright a citizen as can be. And the baron created the foundation of Israel's wine industry as well. He planted vineyards, he built bottling faculties, and thank God you should know that the land continues to give its glory of wine more and more every day. Get out there and drink a bit of the wine on the land of Israel. But the baron's premise may have been repatriation. And his vision was of a new, healthy, and socially reformed Jew. But his method ended up being decidedly colonial. First of all, his well-planned world just looked the part. With its geometric streets and socially designed housings, it was a bit of Europe dropped right in the Middle East.

And furthermore, in this age, it was a rare European who could help but see a primitive culture when they looked at the lives of the Bedouin and the Arab peasant farmers who lived around them. And finally, the wine industry just fit the colonial economic a little bit too well. Cheap labor from the local Arab population was way more probable than the work of immigrants, especially because they couldn't handle the climate all that well and expected to be treated, well, like Europeans. It didn't take long. Before proper business evaluation dictated it was wiser for the new Jew to be a plantation owner than a peasant, and significantly easier because there was only a trickle of Zionists at this point coming over from Europe.

This was the approach to national embodiment, taken by practical Zionism, which repelled the Chatham, and against which he raised in his essay, This is not the way, as we spoke about in the last episode. And as we'll see, this practical Zionism was ultimately swallowed up by the centrality of Jewish labor, the antithesis of a colonial mentality. That story lies ahead, but for now, practical Zionism did leave a bitter colonial taste behind in a lot of people's mouths, not to mention some stunning visuals. Next is cultural Zionism. Achadam, as I'm sure you recall, believed that in order for the physical return of the land to be anything more than an empty effort, it required first the revival of the national spirit.

Spirit, in his vision, must precede the flesh. He didn't see rapid repatriation as desirable or even possible, but in the place of the baron's gradual, well-funded colonial ventures, Achad Am dreamed of a Hevra Lemofet, a model society rooted in the depths of Jewish culture, reborn on Jewish soil. Its smallness in number would be outweighed by the virtue of its members, and he pictured the products of such a cultural, agricultural, intellectual oasis as the shining youth of Am Yisrael, ready to go forth to their nation to trigger a spiritual revolution, and then on to the world to bring about their secular redemption. And since cultural Zionism saw the path to re-embodiment as a rebirth of national spirit, their new Jew was the poet-philosopher, creator of and product of Hebrew culture.

And finally, for now, there's the political Zionism, which was born with Herzl. The political Zionists more or less shared the aims of the practical, in that they saw physical repatriation as the solution to the Jewish problem But they rejected the gradual suppose for reasons both practical and ideological Practically these men saw the tidal wave of destruction which awaited the Jews in Europe. Herzl, Nordau, Jabotinsky, they all knew that the gradual approach would amount to too little, too late. I mean, Herzl wrote about it in his diaries. Jabotinsky actually lived to see the beginnings of the disaster. And Nordau, the famed critic of European culture, wrote the following about it before he was a Zionist or even identified as a Jew.

Europe will not be able to avoid the great and violent sundering of nationalities for much longer. The 20th century will hardly draw to a close without witnessing the end of this world historical drama. Before then, a large part of Europe will experience trouble and spill much blood. It will see many atrocities and crimes committed. one will rage against peoples and mercilessly cross races. Pretty crazy, huh? So in the face of imminent catastrophe, gradualism loses appeal quickly. But the political Zionists opposed the colonial approach on ideological grounds as well. Herzl was interested in returning upright to our land, under the full recognition of the world powers that it was indeed ours. It's true that he saw the colonial powers as the ones handing out pieces of the globe in his day, He wasn't looking to them to establish the right of the people of Israel to return to the land of Israel.

He just wanted them to help make it happen. So gradual infiltration was not part of Herzl's vision. He saw a mass return to nationhood, marked by recognition by the other nations of the world of the Jewish people as a people in its land, and a proud return of the Jews to their nationality. To the political Zionists, Anything less than an upright stature marks an unhealthy national psyche. Lack of pride and doubt in the rightness of national rebirth are the hallmarks of exile in their eyes, and will lead only to failure. When we get to Zeb Jabotinsky, we'll speak of the role that Hadar, the glory and pride, played in his national vision. So, for now, everyone's trying to reverse the process of disembodiment that we call exile, and to find a way to take a new form as a nation in its land.

And they know that in order to do this, they need a new relationship between spirit and flesh, between the physical vessels of nationhood and its cultural, spiritual manifestations. As I said above, few of the Zionists liked our old European look. The image of the exiled Jew takes on a downright anti-Semitic tone in some early Zionist thought. They don't see gentleness, wisdom, patience in the form of the exiled Jew. They see a hunchback, pasty-faced, dirty ghetto Jew who'd never tasted the sign of freedom and didn't know how to stand up straight. Or they saw a servile, emasculated, emancipated Jew bowing and bending, sometimes over backwards, in order to be more German than the Germans, more French than the French, anything, so long as he's not asked to stand up for himself as a Jew.

These images will be seared into the eyeballs of Zionists of every stripe, who more than anything else wanted to take the upright posture of a free people. But they had a lot of body issues. In so many ways, they'd internalized the hatred of their oppressors. And so they saw the hooked-nosed, bearded, hunched-over Jew as an embodiment of a diseased form we'd taken in exile. And they longed to be healthy and free. As well as tall, strong, and blonde, go take a look at the Jewish National Fund posters from the early 20th century, and you'll see what I'm talking about. But body and soul had parted ways long ago for this people. Just listen to these words from Freud about exile, taken from his 1939 essay Moses and Monotheism.

The preeminence given to intellectual labors throughout some 2,000 years in the life of the Jewish people has, of course, had its effect. It has helped to check the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular ideal. Harmony in the cultivation of intellectual and physical activity, such as was achieved by the Greek people, was denied to the Jews. In this dichotomy, their decision was at least in favor of the worthier alternative. Now Freud may have been happy about our heavy tilt toward the mind in favor of the muscles, but the Zionists were being driven by the Jewish problem to seek re-embodiment and that meant that the pendulum would have to swing fairly far back toward the flesh before any harmony between the physical and the intellectual could even be hoped for and in order to achieve that to our practical, cultural and political Zionism we need to add a new category muscular Zionism In his opening speech at the Second Zionist Congress in August of 1898, Max Nordau invented one of Zionism's most powerful and challenging ideals, the muscle Jew.

The speech as a whole was about the necessity of creating a new type of Jew, one who's physically strong and morally fit. Two notions which join perfectly together in the turn-of-the-century conception of masculinity and nationhood, which underlay Nordau's speech. The famous phrase came out as he argued that Zionism awakens Judaism to new life and achieves this morally through the rejuvenation of the ideals of the Volk, the essential spiritual nature which underlies peoplehood, and corporally through the physical rearing of one's offspring, in order, as he says, to create a loss muscular Judaism. once again. It's an idea, muscular Judaism, that most people have never heard of, but one which will prove so foundational to the Zionist dream that they're quite familiar with it when it walks the streets of Israel today.

And anyone who knew Nordau from before his Zionist days would have been astounded to hear him say it. Max Nordau was born Simon Maximilian, or Sincha Sudfeld, in July of 1849 in the city of Pest, 11 years before Herzl. His father, Gabriel Sudfeld, was the rare combination of an Orthodox Jew and a Hebrew poet. And like Herzl, Nordau began his education in a Jewish elementary school, but moved on to a Catholic grammar school and eventually all the way up the ranks until he received a medical degree from the University of Budapest in 1872. And in a familiar story, at a certain point, Simon Maximilian changed his name fled his home city, and traveled around Europe making a living as a journalist. In 1880, he finally settled in Paris, and that would remain his home until the outbreak of the First World War.

And in the place of the traditional worldview which he abandoned, Max Nordau took pan-European cultural assimilationism as his heritage. Personally polylingual, liberated from what he saw as the conventional patriotism of bourgeois society, he defined himself as an intellectual. He was a citizen of the world rather than of any particular nation, and certainly not a Jew. At this point, cosmopolitan was a description which Nordau embraced with joy. Max Nordau lived by practicing medicine, but his real passion was as a cultural critic. In 1883, he dropped the bomb on Europe with his work, The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization. I mean, if the title doesn't say it all, just listen to the table of context.

Many, many, Tecumfarsin is chapter one, you are weighed in the balance and found wanting or a view of the countries of the civilized world. Number two, lie of religion. Number three, the lie of monarchy and aristocracy. The political lie, the economic lie, the matrimonial lie. And last, but certainly not least, the importance and abuse of the power of the press. well, so by the 1890s Mac Norder had become a household name throughout Europe his books appeared in scores of editions in dozens of languages he was critic, philosopher, playwright, sociologist, novelist, journalist, psychologist and physician and the heart and soul of his critique of the society around him was his belief that the modernist culture he saw was a sign of decay rather than growth kind of like a really good mold is fluorescent.

Nordau, in general, saw man as a rational creature. He saw man's role within the evolution of nature as the development of reason. In his view, evolution requires that man suppress instinct and emotion in favor of reason, restraint, and discipline, everything modernist culture rejected. To Nordau, science was the highest of human endeavors, religion the most backwards, and art was a little better than religion. And furthermore, Nordau was a true social Darwinist. He believed that development of civilization is the process by which man furthers the life of rational unity with his fellow human beings, which in his vision means everyone eventually reaches the culture of cosmopolitan Europe, if they stick it out.

He was no nationalist, that's for sure. In Nordau's eyes, the primary unit of society was unquestionably the individual. To regard society, he says, the state or humanity actually, and not just symbolically, as a living, unified creature is to be naive, is to indulge in unbelievably superficial word fetishism. That's a classic. In 1892, Nordau reached the height of his fame as a critic with the publication of his book Degeneration, which reviewers labeled as a polemical hailstorm unleashed on modernist culture. Nordau, once said, was able to assemble in one book nearly all the elements and many of the personalities involved in modernism. His word for it, however, was not modernism, but degeneration.

The cultural world, charged Nordau, is but one monstrous sick room where the air is filled with anguished groans, and where on the beds suffering writhes in all its forms. We stand in the midst of a serious spiritual disease, a sort of black plague of degeneration and hysteria. Because Nordau's evolutionary perspective saw healthy, vital energy, which resulted, of course, from rational humanity, as the sole driving force for progress, and therefore its absence signified degeneration. And progress wasn't just a cultural or aesthetic question, it was a moral and biological one. To Nordau, degeneration was a potential catastrophe for the human species. So he saw the turn of the century as more than just shifting styles of art.

To Nordau, if the degeneration which resulted from this loss of vital cultural energy went on, it meant the end of civilization. Such was his state of mind, and his evaluation of the state of his beloved European culture, when Theodor Herzl came knocking on his door in November of 1895. Now, the Jewish state had just been published, and an acquaintance who was worried by the state of mind, which Herzl's pamphlet clearly revealed, suggested that he go see Max Nordau. The hope was that Nordau, in his capacity as a psychiatrist, would take Herzl on as a patient. Remember, many people thought Herzl was a total madman the first time they saw the Jewish state. Ah, but oh the ironies of life, because instead of recommending a cure to the distraught young man with visions of national grandeur, the story reported by Nordau's children is that after three days of intense conversation and argument, Nordau exclaimed to Herzl, If you are insane, we are insane together.

Count on me. And he became, from that point on, Herzl's most famous convert, and his companion in building the Zionist movement. He helped organize the First Congress, he delivered its keynote in his capacity as a world-famous personality, and I hope you recall, from last episode, he picked up his pen in defense of Herzl against Akhada Ham's attack. But Nordau's writings over the next two decades show he never really managed to make peace between his cosmopolitan side and his newfound nationalism, and perhaps that he never even tried. It was clear for all his misgivings that he saw Zionism in some sense as a cure for the cultural degeneration he had so violently and ineffectively criticized. And he also saw it as a cure for a personal feeling of sterility and rootlessness.

He says that the very thought of Jerusalem can call forth this effect in a man whose entire life has been one long striving toward liberation from all unproven and unprovable traditions, demonstrates triumphantly once again how much we remain Jews at the bottom of our hearts, even those of us who during the greatest part of our lives have lost every feeling for living Judaism. And, as we noted in the introduction, Nordau surely shared political Zionism's pragmatic evaluation of the future of Jewish life in Europe So with his conversion to Zionism opponents began to throw back Nordau cosmopolitan ideals in his face They quoted him as saying that the crime of the century is nationalism as teaching that evolution leads mankind away from hostile tribes into large, peaceful groupings.

And Nordau didn't even try to deny the appeal of their arguments. He hadn't given up, it seems, at least entirely on his universal cosmopolitan vision. If nationalism avoids going astray, he says, then it is a natural phase in the process of development from barbaric, egotistic individualism to altruism and a free humanity. And furthermore, he adds, an oppressed, persecuted, despised Judaism amongst anti-Semitic peoples is of no value for mankind. A free, strong, vital Judaism will be a useful co-worker in the progress of humanity. But his strongest reply to his critics was simply pragmatic. Go tell it to the Romanian and the Russian Jews, and they'll answer, but we have to eat somehow. So Nordau came to see political Zionism as a practical solution to the Jewish problem, and perhaps as a remedy for the cultural degeneration against which he'd fought his entire life.

As we said in his vision, Zionism awakens Judaism to new life. It renews and makes it young again. And through the alliance with his Volk, that essential spiritual national nature and idea, by the way, which he rejected as hopelessly romantic and irrational in his early life, Nordau thought he found a source of energy which would help him overcome the inertia and lethargy of turn-of-the-century culture. But this was not a vision of a romantic awakening of the national spirit. That's why Herzl turned to Nordau to attack the cultural Zionists. who saw it as such. And Nordau disliked in cultural Zionism what he saw as a mystical approach, a certain conservative nationalism which looked into the past for its origins rather than ahead to its future.

And, you know, again, the ironies of history. Today, Ahad Am is hailed as the father of liberal, universalist Zionism, while Nordau, or really Jabotinsky, his disciple, are seen as the arch-conservative nationalists. So Nordau was moved. He was moved by the regenerative potential of Zionism, and he set himself to be the prophet of a free, strong people. And that free, strong people had to have muscles. The first Jews to heed the power of Nordau's call for muscular Judaism were those who formed Zionist gymnastic associations. It may sound strange, but it's part of a larger movement in turn-of-the-century Germany. And Nordau published his first complete expression for his call for muscular Judaism in an article in the second issue of the Jewish Gymnastics Journal, which was the central paper of the Bar Kokhba Gymnastics Association.

There, Nordau once again raised his cry, we must think again of creating a jury of muscle. Again, for history is our witness that such once existed, but for long, all too long, we've engaged in the mortification of our flesh. I'm expressing myself imprecisely, he says. It was others who practiced mortification on our flesh, and with the greatest success, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of Jewish corpses in the ghettos, church squares, and highways of medieval Europe. He says that in the narrowness of the Jewish streets, our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully. In the dimness of our sunless homes, our eyes developed a nervous blink. He goes on in the article, which is highly worthwhile reading in the whole, and he praises the choice of the name of the gymnastics club, The Bar Kochba Gymnastics Association.

You know, it may not sound strange to you today, but Max Nordau almost single-handedly rehabilitated Bar Kochba for Jewish history, and certainly in Zionist historiography. Go back and listen to episode 11 in season 1. When we last saw Bar Kochba, he was the precipitator of national disaster. He was a false messiah condemned by the sages, specifically because of his sinful reliance on his own strength. But to Max Nordau, he was the ultimate muscle Jew, and therefore a ripe national hero. In this article, Nordau described Bar Kokhba as a hero who refused to suffer any defeat, and who, when victory was denied to him, knew how to die. He was the last embodiment in world history of a battle-hardened and bellicose Judaism.

Now muscular Judaism, in the context of turn-of-the-century culture, could easily be dismissed as part of the broader modernist obsession with what's called Lebensreform, life reform, physical fitness, health, and body culture. And we need to see it as such. Remember, on some level the Jews are just like everybody else, only more so. But this muscle Judaism plays a particular role in the development of political Zionism and in the new Jew. Because political Zionism would have remained a dream without muscular Judaism, as frankly would cultural Zionism as well. Because without a generation of physically fit, nationally minded, and militarily oriented Jews, any territory granted by the world powers would have been lost to the brutal fortunes of the time if it had been granted in the first place.

And therefore there would have been no physical rebirth in the nation, or a spiritual awakening either, at least not one that could have caught root. As he says, Zionism has awakened Jewry to new life. Morally through the national ideal, materially through physical rearing, we must think once again of creating a Jewry of Mussels for the first time since Bar Kokhba, that does there exist amongst the Jews an inclination to show themselves, to show the world, how much vitality they still possess. and when Herzl died in 1904 worn out from his globe-trotting quest to gain international support for a Jewish home in the land of Israel Nordau was his obvious successor and indeed he was asked to assume the head of the movement but despite the honor he refused the mantle of leadership passed on to David Wolfson also one of Herzl's earliest supporters and then eventually over the next decade the leadership of the Zionist Congress passed into the hands of a group of Eastern European practical Zionists, and that's when Nordau left the movement altogether.

But he did not fade from the public scene. Being who he was, he took up pen against all comers, and he kept up numerous and violent conflicts with other Zionist thinkers until his death in 1923. Now, political Zionism, as Herzl and Nordau originally conceived it, was modified by the pragmatism of the new leadership. The grand vision of a Jewish state wouldn't be taken up again until the 1930s, when Zeb Japotinsky developed his own particular nationalist movement. But that's a story for a later episode. Here's Nordau, complex character, and there are elements from his thought that continue to shape our country in incredibly visual ways down to this very day. In particular, there's a lot more to be discussed about the role Nordau played in reshaping the nature of Jewish masculinity, which was so crucial to the success of the Zionist project.

Because the gymnastic clubs, inspired by Nordau's muscular Judaism, will soon give way to the youth groups, the Jewish labor and paramilitary movements of pre-state Palestine. But for now, the story goes on. And in this chapter, the key takeaway from Nordau's philosophy is that element of social Darwinism, which taught that political institutions cannot be effectively changed faster than the character of the people involved. Which is to say, in order to awaken the nation, Zionism needed a new Jew. And in Nordau's vision, that Jew was big, healthy, and strong, and ready to defend himself. You know, there may be no greater temptation than to claim you've identified a critical point in history. Nothing's more satisfying than saying the battle at Waterloo is the hinge on which the 19th century turned, or Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon gave birth to the Roman Empire.

The problem with such an approach is not just that it's horribly oversimplified. I mean, I could argue that Caesar was more a result of the death of the Roman public than its cause. It's also that any seminal moment which nations and historians point to as crucial to the national narrative can't possibly be divorced from the story which is constantly told about it. And sometimes the event is small compared to the layers of myth which it carries. and even further, sometimes those layers of myth overwhelm the event altogether. So Kishinev was a moderate-sized town in the principality of Moldova, renamed Bessarabia when it was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1818. It was a multi-ethnic city, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Germans, Armenians, Greeks, the Roma, and of course, the Jews.

And in fact, at the turn of the 20th century, the Jews made up nearly half of the population of Kishinev. They would be found in every aspect of life, from the leaders of industry to farm laborers to the desperately poor. And by the end of the 19th century, Kishinev had also become a major cultural center for the Jews. Jewish printing and journalism, there were Hebrew papers, Yiddish papers, there was even a Russian language, Zionist Weekly. But by far the most popular newspaper in Kishinev was not in Yiddish or in Hebrew. At least amongst the non-Jews, it was the Russian language Bessarabian, published by Pavel Khrushchev, vehement and popular anti-Semite. He regularly published articles with headlines like Death to the Jews and Crusade Against the Hated Race, and it only helped his sales.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that when in the late winter of 1903 a Ukrainian boy was found murdered about 25 miles north of Kishinev, and in the same week a girl who had committed suicide was declared dead in a Jewish hospital, that the Bess Arabian began to declare in print that both children had been murdered by the Jews for the purpose of using their blood in the preparation of Matzah for Passover. It was no surprise, as I said, nor considering the history of violence associated with such blood libels, were people particularly shocked by what follows. The rioting began on Eastern Sunday in traditional fashion. Now just for the sake of full disclosure, you should know that my great-great-grandfather was dragged to death behind a wagon through the middle of his town in just such an Easter Day ritual.

But the Kishnet program was not your average riot. Mobs rampaged through the Jewish districts for two whole days, undeterred by the police or the Russian army. Or according to some, they were assisted. Two days, two days of burning, smashing, raping and killing. And when it was over, 49 Jews were dead, 500 wounded, 1,300 homes and businesses were destroyed, 2,000 families left homeless, and no number is known for the number of women brutally violated. But in addition to the horror which swept over the Jews of the region from the experience, Kishinev quickly became a symbol. Russian intellectuals, for the first time, men of international standing like Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, published condemnations of the crime, and suddenly the word pogrom entered the world's lexicon.

The media outlets of the Zionist organizations claimed to have uncovered proof of collusion between the local police, the rioters, and agents of the empire, and overnight Kishinev became a symbol of the imperial Russian brutality against its Jews, of an organized plot to crush them under its heel. These reports, by the way, whose historicity had been challenged since the imperial archives were opened to historians after the fall of the Soviet Union, nevertheless still serve as a backbone of many historians' perspective on Kishinev. Now, that's not to say that there was no connection between the Russian government and anti-Jewish violence. After all, Tsar Nicholas II had only the year before appointed Plebe as Minister of the Interior, with the goal of breaking the back of the revolutionary movements that were now spreading like wildfire through the empire.

And the minister had decreed early in the year that some 90% of the revolutionaries in Western Russia were Jews. He's the one whose solution to the Jewish problem was summed up in the quote, real or apocryphal, a third will convert, a third will emigrate, and a third will be massacred. This was also, by the way, the very year that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, classic anti-Semitic concoction that claims to be planned for world Jewish domination, it first appeared in 1903. But my point is that the truth of historicity pales in comparison to the sweeping power of the narrative that surrounded Kishinev and served as a real impetus to action. In the case of Kishinev the first movement was to flee Or at least that how the story goes You know you may have noticed that we haven spoken about American Jewry yet Now not the time don be nervous Maybe I'll do an interlude soon.

But in the context of this episode, you do need to know that Jewish immigration to America happened in basically three waves. There was an early movement of Sephardic Jews, associated with the colonial period that we touched on with the port Jews. There was a second wave of German Jews, concentrated in the mid-19th century when things were really rough. And then there was the tidal wave. Between 1880 and 1920, nearly 2 million Eastern European Jews fled the old world for the new, seeking a better life in the Golden Medina, the golden country of the United States. And at this point, more than half the world's Jews were living in the Russian Empire. Now an honest historian will tell you that many factors motivated this move.

economics, sociology, religion, but a storyteller will focus on Jewry's collision with Tsarism, as exemplified by the pogroms of the 1880s and by Kishinev. You know, when you read certain Zionist historiography, it makes it sound as if Kishinev were the plug that got pulled out of the bathroom, and you can just hear Russian Jewry like flowing out to America. A chosen few who make up the second Aliyah, that critical wave of ideological immigration, made it to the land of Israel, which we'll discuss at a later date, while the majority went looking for the good life in the U.S. of A. And that split narrative, which way they chose to run, is going to lay the mold for many conflicts down to our day. This despite the fact that most of Russia was actually untouched by pogroms, especially the northern provinces from which the earliest and heaviest migrations came.

But when it comes to historians, the relationship between Jewish migrations and anti-Semitic violence is an honest debate. And I don't need to add my issues as a storyteller, and it's really not the focus of our episode. Because what I want to speak about is the role which the story of Kishnab played in cementing the Zionist ethos of self-defense, that ultimate embodiment of Nordau's vision of muscular Judaism, Jews who knew how to fight and, if necessary, die. And that far outpaces any relationship to the facts of the event. And in order to appreciate how it happened, you have to know just a bit about the poet laureate of the Hebrew Renaissance, Chaim Nachman Bialik. Chaim Nachman Bialik was born in 1873 in Rady, a small town in the Ukraine.

He was raised by his grandfather, a wealthy, religious businessman, who by all accounts struggled to impose a strict Jewish education on his wild and undisciplined grandson. By the age 13, Bialik had a reputation of an ilui, a prodigy. We know this story. And apparently was being consulted on questions of Jewish law. At 17, he left home to attend the Yeshivat Volojin. Go back to episode 19 for the backstory on this famous institution. But it was here at Volojin, much to the horror of the Rosh Yeshiva, I'm sure, that Bialik began to write his first poems and discovered the nationalist, spiritualist, secular writings of Ahad Ha'am. Young Chaim left the Yeshiva and its world. and he traveled to Odessa, then the beating heart of modern Jewish culture.

And he met there Achada Am, Moshe Leib Lillenblom, and other cultural Zionist leaders. The Hebrew Renaissance moved into full swing and became an increasingly important element of Zionism, as you recall, in the wake of the 1897 Basal Congress, as we discussed. And in 1903, Bialik was appointed the joint editor of Hashiloach, the Hebrew periodical founded by Achada Am. He was publicly hailed as a prophet of Jewish nationalism. And that, by the way, despite the fact that the bulk of his poetry dealt with personal themes of struggle and sadness. In fact, it was a strange dichotomy that Bialik would live out his entire life. In the eyes of the public, he was a literary hero. But he once wrote to his wife, The people regard me as something worthy of respect, but I know I'm a nothing and nobody.

So as the Kishnit pogrom was unfolding, Bialik was at a meeting of Odessa's Jewish Literary Circle, the Conversation Club. All the leading lights of secular Jewish culture were there. The historian Simon Dubnow, essayist Achata Am, editor-publisher Joshua Ravnitsky, and that's just to name a few. And at the circle's April 7th meeting, they were devoted to a lecture by a little-known journalist named Vladimir Jabotinsky, age 23. His theme for the lecture, which was also his first major appearance on the Zionist circuit, was Pinsker's essay, Auto-Emancipation. And this is how the historian Dubna recalled the evening in his memoirs. It was the night of April 7, 1903. Because of the Russian Easter, the papers had not been issued for the previous two days, so that we remained without any news from the rest of the world.

That night, the Jewish audience assembled in the Bezada Club to listen to the talk of a young Zionist, the Odessa wunderkind Vladimir Jabotinsky. Young Agitator had great success with his audience. In a particularly moving manner, he drew on Pinsker's parable of the Jew as a shadow wandering through space and developed it further. As for my own impression, this one-sided treatment of our historical problem depressed me. During the break, while pacing up and down in the neighboring room, I noticed sudden unrest in the audience. The news spread that fugitives had arrived in Odessa from nearby Kishinev and had reported of a bloody pogrom in progress there. In the weeks after the reports of the massacre poured in and the narrative of conspiracy by the imperial government to crush the Jews took hold, Bialik was commissioned by the Jewish Historical Society of Odessa to travel to Kishinev and interview the survivors.

And that he did. He went from house to house, filling five notebooks with horrific testimonies of violence. but when he was finished, he turned his back on his journalistic assignment. It would take almost another 90 years before the complete source material that Bialik gathered was published but his literary response to the horror of Kishinev swept the Jewish world before the year was out. His mind filled with the words and images of the masker Bialik retreated to his in-law's home and within months had crafted what would become his most famous poem in the city of slaughter. Arise and go now to the city of slaughter, into its courtyard wind thy way. There with your own hand touch and with the eyes of your head, behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay, the spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.

The poem is in a stylized, almost biblical Hebrew, harnessing the full power of the prophets and channeling his horror and rage. It's worthwhile to read it, in the original if you can. It's a landmark of Hebrew poetry, Jewish culture, and certainly of Zionist history. But the big question is, what is it actually about? Now there's no question that at first glance the poem appears to be a realistic description of the horror of the massacre and a ringing condemnation of Jewish passivity in the face of the enemy. Note, he writes, to probe both text and context, the standard presentation of In the City of Slaughter as a rallying cry for Jewish self-defense begins to fall a little short. First of all, the poet turned his back on the concrete testimony that he himself had gathered.

Trial transcripts, his own documentation, and newspapers of the day demonstrated that Kishinev was distinguished from other programs by the readiness of the Jews to defend themselves. Just listen to this from the April 24th front page report of the American Yiddish language daily, The Forward. Armed with knives and machetes, the murderers broke into Jewish homes where they began stabbing and killing, chopping off heads and stomping frail women and small children. If such a vicious, enraged mob would have attacked a Jewish town somewhere in Volan or Lithuania, thousands of Jews would have been killed in an hour's time. Vacation of Jews are tough, healthy and strong as iron and fearless. When the murderous pogromists began their horrible slaughter, Jewish boys and men came running and fought like lions to protect their weaker and older brothers and sisters.

So, if that was the case, why did Bialik offer a portrait of crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers peering from the cracks? Now, this isn't the place for a full literary analysis in the city of Slaughter, but I will say this. A deeper text analysis shows that the poet's real desire was to combine and subvert the prophetic writings, in particular Isaiah and Hezkel, Ezekiel. He was attacking not the passivity of the Jews, but the theology, the martyrology, and ultimately the God whom he held responsible for that passivity. But that depth of critique was lost on most Bialik's contemporary readers, and even on most historians, frankly. In the city of Slaughter stirred young Jews across Russia to organize self-defense groups, and they succeeded within the year of blunting the force of pogroms in places like Gomell, in the city of Slaughter, along with much of Bialik's other poetry, also became the foundation of the literary canon of modern Israel.

And as such, it's not an exaggeration to say that his images of Kishinev burned the horrors of exile and the disgusting helplessness of Diasra Jury into the minds of generations of Israeli children. And it served as a rallying cry for the self-defense which was at the core of the Zionist awakening. Now just one more word. As I noted, Bialik's Hebrew is of the highest order. He's weaving biblical passages, midrachic allusions, and modern imagery into a stunningly powerful presentation. Powerful, but largely inaccessible to his generation. Even those who could read Hebrew were overwhelmed by the depth and texture of his style. A translation was in demand. And the one who rose to the task was none other than the young journalists that had been presenting his thoughts on auto-emancipation as word of the massacre first reached Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky.

And we'll give this crucial figure of modern Jewish history full treatment in due time, don't worry. But for now, let his translation serve as an epilogue to our discussion on the evolution of the new muscular Jew. It would take Jabotinsky over two years to complete his translation, largely because it was Bialik's poem which inspired him to learn Hebrew in the first place. As he said, if such poems are written in Hebrew, it's worth learning the language. But already in 1904, Jabotinsky had published a poetic introduction to Bialik's work, which propounded the view that the poem was nothing other than an indictment of Jewish passivity and occult arms. And it was a view that would become crucial to Jabotinsky's view of Zionism, and which would mold the reader's perception of Bialik's poem down to this day.

As Jabotinsky says in that introduction, Hear, O Israel, your one and only hope is you yourself. There's nothing worse or more worthy of shame than being the object of attack. Throw away your despicable abasement, so that in its place will grow muscles, manliness, and pride in your heart. The epigraph at the head of his poem reads, Im ananili meili. If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? these famous words of the great sage Hill the Elder became a rallying cry for nationalist Zionism but you know Javotinsky left off the second half of Hill's quote and when I'm only for myself what am I? so I just want to invite you all the third season is coming up send me your ideas, questions, thoughts things that you'd like to hear in the coming season.

I also want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money to help keep this show free and well-distributed. And I want to invite you to join them. Go right now to ravmike.com. You'll see in the upper right-hand corner the little button that says Be a Patron. You can click on through for a little bit of her podcast support. I want to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many wonderful people. And I want to thank the Pardes Institute. p-a-r-d-e-s dot org dot i-l for building an institution that lets me teach so many amazing Jews I want to thank you for listening I'm Rav Mike Feuer and this is The Jewish Story