Subject: JUICE Pioneers 5
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 01:47:50 +0000
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il>
To: pioneers@virtual.co.il
Subject: JUICE Pioneers 5
==============================================================
World Zionist Organization
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
==============================================================
Course: Pioneers of Israel
Lecture: 5/12
Lecturer: Doron Geller
To all JUICE subscribers: We will not be sending out lectures next week,
due to the Passover holiday. Our next lectures (no. 6) will be sent to you
on Tuesday, April 21. Happy Pesach.
Berl Katznelson was born in 1887 in a religious yet modern home in Russia,
and was a voracious reader from an early age. As a young man he had already
developed a reputation as an independent-minded thinker on a variety of
contemporary problems. He threw himself into the revolutionary fervor that
was the Russia of his youth, and like many young Jews he could easily have
lent all of his formidable energies solely to the Russian revolutionary
movements seeking to depose the Czarist government and institute a socialist
or Communist structure.
He became attracted to and joined, for a short time, a Jewish self-defense
group in Russia that advocated political terrorism against the Czarist
regime; however, he was turned off by their lack of interest in the revival
of Hebrew and the settlement of Eretz-Israel.
By 1908, after much intellectual and emotional searching, he decided to
prepare to make his life in Eretz-Israel. He learned manual labor, but was
not particularly adept at it, and he became deeply depressed. Like many
Jews who became Russian revolutionaries, joined the non-Zionist Jewish
worker's movement called the Bund, or became Zionists committed to settling
the land of Israel, they were all indelibly marked by the Russian character
of their day. The year 1908 was already deeply in the midst of the Second
Aliyah - a group of people deeply influenced by the Socialist and Communist
fervor swirling around them in the Russia of their birth. Walter Laquer
writes that the "Jewish Socialists inherited from their Russian mentors
unending doctrinal squabbles as well as the axiomatic belief that it was the
first commandment for any Socialist worth his salt to arrange his life in
accordance with his beliefs . The unity of theory and action was not open
to debate. From the Populists (a group Tolstoy could be associated with)
they took over the firm conviction that manual labor was a cure for almost
all ills; the Second Aliya was in some ways a repeat performance of the
going-to-the -people." as practiced by one Russian socialist group called
the "Narodniks". Of course, a Zionist could not help but see that
idealistic as many of these Russian socialist or communist revolutionary
groups were, they were above all concerned with the fate of the peasants or
poor industrial workers. Most Jews were neither of these - and thus the
non-Jewish Russian idealists often had little concern for them. The
Zionists recognized that. To create a Jewish agricultural and working class
in Palestine was in may ways the raison-d'etre of the Zionist movement This
was perhaps uppermost in Berl Katznelson's mind when he sailed for Jaffa in
1909.
As with most newcomers to the land of Israel, he saw and met scornful,
disillusioned veterans of settlement, leaving for America or returning to
Russia. Ben-Gurion was later to estimate that 90% of Jewish immigrants to
Palestine left soon after their arrival. But it was different with Berl.
He had had his reservations about which direction his life was to take in
Russia. This was no longer so. As he made his way among both newcomers,
emigrants, and swarms of Arabs on this most ancient of Mediterranean ports,
he knew this was his final destination. The past was broken.
We don't know exactly why Berl felt this transformation. But according to
several writers, most young pioneers arrived with a feeling of elation,
confidence, faith that they participating in a new world order based on
justice, brotherhood, and respect. By being Zionists, many members of the
Second Aliyah felt that they were part of a wider revolution in human
consciousness and social organization. They particularly felt an affinity
with Soviet Russia after it was established in 1917 - a fact which
distinguished the vast majority of his comrades from Berl.
Berl always felt himself to be first and foremost a Jew, and did not trust
in Gentiles or their movements - however noble and idealistic they might
sound. He never had a Gentile set foot in his house, nor did he ever
attempt to maintain any kind of relationship with them. This was certainly
due to the most traumatic experiences so many Jewish communities underwent
during the Russian pogroms of 1903 - the most brutal occurring in Kishinev.
Berl was never able to forget or overcome his distrust of non-Jews after
that. This was despite his genuine and sincere warmth for Jews - and
especially those who agreed with his socialist philosophy and accepted his
moral authority.
Despite his earlier indecision regarding where he would live and what course
his life was to take, he did not leave Eretz-Israel for a decade after he
arrived in Palestine. This differentiated him from many other pioneers who
did visit relatives in Russia, or, as leaders, were compelled by
circumstance to raise funds for an expanded awareness of the Zionist
movement in Europe and in America. It was as if he had abandoned a sinking
ship - which is how he viewed the diaspora - and clung to his new mooring
(p.27) - building a new Jewish society and engaging in personal
self-transformation - in Eretz-Israel. As Berl later wrote; "At the very
moment I came ashore it was clear to me that this was my final destination.
All that had gone before was ended for me.I knew there could be no other
shore for me." Indeed, he never returned to Russia. It was only as an
emissary of the movement that he traveled abroad more than ten years later.
Berl first went to work as a laborer at Ein Ganim, about an hour from Jaffa.
Conditions were tremendously hard; Europeans, unused to the climate,
nevertheless insisted on grueling, monotonous labor under the blazing sun
for pittances (a fact which led Walter Laquer to characterize them as "the
strangest workers the world has ever seen."). They wondered, as Berl did,
if they were up to the task. Their inspiration in creating something new and
perhaps unequaled in human history propelled them onwards. "There was a
strong romantic-mystical element in the young pioneers.it was a left-wing
socialist who wrote that there was a mysterious thread linking Modi'in (the
home of the Maccabees) and Sejera (the new agricultural settlement in lower
Galilee). Massada, where in Roman times the Jews had fought to the last man
rather than surrender, again became a great symbol. But this is not to say
that apocalyptic forebodings dominated their thoughts. On the contrary,
they were full of vitality and, in the beginning at least, of optimism.
They were taking possession again of the homeland which had been lost to the
Jewish people as a result of a series of historical misfortunes. They
wanted to put down roots as quickly and as deeply as possible, and in
countless excursions on horseback, or more often riding a donkey or on foot,
they explored their new homeland. For many it was like revisiting an
ancestral home of which they had so often heard."
This was certainly the case with Berl; as we shall soon see, he wandered all
over the Palestinian coast and hinterland his first few years in the
country, exploring and acclimating himself to the beautiful, natural
surroundings which were again coming into bloom due to the tireless efforts
of romantic young pioneers like himself. There was much compensation in
their efforts, despite the difficulties. They ate together, worked
together, shared the enchanting beauty of the Galilee and Judaea - where
most of the settlements of the Second Aliyah were established. They watched
the sunrise, and the sunset - often bathing in a nearby stream after a hard
day's work. Anyone who has ever been in Israel knows what an awesome
experience a sunrise or a sunset amidst the lush, beautiful, uniquely
Eretz-Israeli natural surroundings can be.
Berl wasn't a natural physical laborer in any sense of the word, which was
the case with many of his fellows. But driven as they were by ideology, a
profound sense of Jewish destiny, and responsibility towards creating a new
Jewish individual in a new Jewish society, they were able to harness
themselves to the task and persist. Friendships helped immeasurably. Berl
soon befriended A.D. Gordon and Yosef Haim Brenner, fascinating persons in
their own right who also abandoned bourgeois lifestyles, and against their
natural talents and inclinations, devoted their lives to labor. Both Gordon
and Brenner saw something very special in Berl, as did many other more
veteran and older members of the yishuv and the Zionist movement as a whole.
Berl was actually quite happy working in the orange groves of Ein Ganim,
proving to himself that he was indeed capable of working as a manual
laborer. But the sensation did not last for long. Not long after he
arrived in Palestine, in the winter of 1909, he fell ill to that most
ubiquitous sickness of the early pioneers - malaria. He and Brenner ( who
suffered from malaria as well) took turns nursing each other back to health.
After he recovered, he wandered all over the Galilee and Judaea. He loved
the natural landscape, the shape of the hills, the bubbling springs, the
fresh mountain air and beautiful valleys. The flowers, the trees, and the
way the sunlight appeared were all different from his native Russia. He was
falling in love with his new home. He roamed freely all over the country -
an itinerant laborer and explorer like many members of the Second Aliyah.
He did not become attached to any particular place, job, or woman - although
apparently he had many of all of them - for years after he settled in
Palestine. He took trips, worked all over the Galilee, made relationships
and moved on. And he was among contemporaries who felt very much as he did.
Suddenly, after a life of carrying the heavy, often solemn responsibility of
being a Jew in the diaspora, he and many others like him suddenly felt free,
as if they had cast off the chains of their past existence.
This may explain why for years - almost a decade after he arrived in
Palestine, actually - Berl did not travel to Jerusalem despite traveling by
foot all over the central and northern parts of Palestine. The fact that
Jerusalem is the holiest and most prayed-for place in Judaism and Jewish
history, coupled with the fact that Berl was willing to go anywhere and
everywhere in Palestine to familiarize himself with his adopted homeland,
makes such behavior exceedingly strange at first glance.
If we look at what brought these young idealists to Palestine, the reasons
why Berl and others did not visit Jerusalem - or Hebron or Safed, for that
matter - become more clear.
Those who came to Palestine came to create a new Jewish life, free, full of
vitality, bursting with the spirit of youth and renewal. Judaism as a
religion certainly had an impact on them - they drew much of their
inspiration from the Bible. But they were also consciously leaving religion
behind. Jerusalem was symbolic of what they had left behind. As they must
have known, many of the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem were haredi
ultra-orthodox, who spent their days studying and praying. Most of them did
not work, preferring donations from their co-religionists in Europe. Those
who did work, usually Sephardi orthodox Jews - would not dream of working in
the fields and communes that the members of the Second Aliyah were setting
up. (There were some exceptions, such as the small group of orthodox Jews
who founded Petakh Tikvah in 1878 and after that failed, again in 1881).
Moreover, despite the fact that religious Jews had prayed to return to
Jerusalem for more than 1800 years since the destruction of the Second
Temple in 70 C.E. - the ineradicable fact was that they had not done so.
Zionism was a movement of action and empowerment, and thus they saw
traditional Jewish religion and social organization as engendering weakness,
powerlessness, and passivity. The Zionists revolted against all of that in
one fell swoop by moving to Eretz-Israel. They were taking life into their
own hands. The place to do that was in the fields and settlements they were
establishing all over the country - which was despite the fierce opposition
of the Jewish religious establishment in Jerusalem ( for the most part,
religious Jews everywhere were united against the settlement efforts of the
Zionist pioneers).
For the Second Aliyah, the Galilee was the "enchanted " land of
Eretz-Israel; open space, green fields, horses, hills, and mountains,
plowing, sowing, harvesting, the Kinneret - for a young romantic, an
absolute dream. The living conditions, however, were close to horrendous.
They lived in ramshackle huts, often sleeping on dirty mattresses in
over-crowded rooms - which was not an optimal environment in terms of
hygiene. Despite the Second Aliyah ideal of setting up independent
cooperatives, for the first five years after their arrival (we recall that
Second Aliyah members began arriving in 1904) no such institutions existed.
They were forced to work for overseers, who had little sympathy for them or
their motives. Berl and others wished to eliminate the managerial system
and work not only for themselves but for the benefit of the entire group -
without oppression, competition, or unfair labor practices.
Berl, as one of the leaders of the Kinneret farm, helped to stimulate this
process in the winter of 1911. Working conditions had deteriorated to the
point of sickness and despair. Berl helped organize a strike which
successfully led to the removal of the manager. Soon after, after repeated
requests, the Zionist Organization was willing to listen to and even finance
efforts to establish independent workers' cooperatives.
Things were going Berl's way. He was chosen as a workers' representative at
the conference of Judaean Workers in Petakh-Tikvah at the end of 1911. His
biographer Anita Shapira writes, "This conference illuminated spheres of
action which were to remain close to Berl's heart throughout his life. Its
most important resolution related to the establishment of a workers' sick
fund. In light of the conditions of neglect and of poverty which
characterized the Second Aliyah, this decision marked a historical
turning-point. At Berl's suggestion, it was decided that the fund be
financed from the savings' of its members. Thus, the poverty-stricken
workers' association undertook the tasks of the non-existent family and of
the Yishuv, not yet mature enough to shoulder its own responsibilities."
Berl also advocated the greater dissemination of the Hebrew language, which
was still not used by many new immigrants, some still preferring their
native languages of Yiddish, Russian, or Polish (or simply having difficulty
with Hebrew). Berl was known for the Hebrew lessons he would give on the
settlement of Kinneret after ten at night, and in fact he became known as an
accomplished Hebraist. Meanwhile he had taken an interest in vegetable
farming at the colony of Ben Shemen, and perhaps to his surprise, he
developed a knack for creating interesting strains of vegetables. He was
certainly more effective with this more intellectual work than with
day-to-day manual labor, which he was clearly not suited for.
At the same conference the following year, Berl argued for the necessity of
workers' settlements, "not as appendages to larger colonies, but as
autonomous smallholder villages, where the workers and their families could
support themselves by cultivating their own farms." These were known as
moshavim. He proposed that only Jewish labor be used in the new farms, in
that using Arab labor would lead to a diaspora-like situation in which the
gentiles worked while the Jews were merely the overseers and gathering the
profits. That was not what Zionism was about, nor did he wish to see the
Yishuv deteriorate to a situation like this. He was also adamant with
protecting workers' rights and preventing land speculation. Jewish
settlement of the land was the sine qua non for him, and he wished to
institute in law all that was possible to protect workers' rights and make
the acquisition of land for Jewish labor as reasonable as possible. He
became actively involved in the development of the Yishuv along the
Socialist/Zionist lines he so believed in. "Mounted on a donkey or trudging
on foot after a day's work, first at Ben Shemen and later at Ein Ganim, he
toured the colonies, kvutzot and moshavim, smoothing out differences and
settling disputes among members of the various parties." He was becoming
more well-known and admired by the rank-and-file of the Yishuv as well as
international Zionist leaders. He had a mission, and he was accomplishing
it; the Zionist dream was coming true before his eyes, and in no small part
due to his efforts.
But the lack of inner peace which drove him from place to place attacked him
again and again, despite his increasing stature and successes. Already in
the summer of 1912, he was ready to leave Ben Shemen in Judaea and return to
the Galilee. "`The nomadic spirit has enveloped me in its wings again...'"
he wrote. He was torn between the desire for companionship and the desire to
be alone and protect his privacy and independence.
In 1912 Berl Katznelson was 25 years old. He had been in the country for
three years, and had had a long-standing relationship with Leah Miron,
stretching back a decade. In 1912, their mutual childhood friend Sara
Schmuckler immigrated from Russia to Palestine. He rapidly struck up a
romantic relationship with her. It was not hard to see why he so wished to
be alone. He did not wish to relinquish his privacy, nor did he wish to
commit himself to any particular woman. He continued his Bohemian
life-style with both women, going to and fro all over Galilee and Judaea,
never settling down even while he progressed as a leader in the cooperative
settlements that were emerging under his watchful eye and encouragement.
His refusal to settle down was in fact another rebellion against Jewish life
in the diaspora, which saw marriage, profession, children, and religious
devotion as the sine qua non of a meritorious Jewish life.
By 1914, Berl had returned to the Kinneret settlement, which deserves some
mention due to the fascinating spell on all who ever worked there -
reminding one of the settlement of Bittania, also on the Kinneret, where
Meir Ya'ari held sway over his devoted followers.
There are many famous settlements in Eretz-Israel from the First and Second
Aliyot: Petakh-Tikvah and Gedera, the first areas settled by the Bilu;
Hadera, which survived as a settlement despite the dreaded malaria; Tel Hai
in the Upper Galilee, because of the heroism of Joseph Trumpeldor and its
other defenders; and Degania, as the first successful experiment in
collective settlement. Kinneret, however, left an indelible impression on
all who ever lived there due to its intoxicating beauty.
The shining lake amidst the arid landscape was a natural miracle. People
have been intoxicated by the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) from Biblical
times and surely long before that. The hills surrounding the lake seem
majestic in their splendor. The young pioneers were enthralled by the
valley and the trees and light, the intense quiet and the beautiful,
changing colors from dawn to dusk. At night, as the moon shone over the
quiet lake, and one looked up to see the eerie stillness of the hills, one
became enchanted. As one contemporary wrote; "`Often, at night, one would
come across some young man lying alone and listening to the murmur of life
in this corner of the world, and to the tremor of his own heart in response.'"
Those who lived and worked on the Kinneret never forgot their experiences
there. But it was quite difficult for the young Ashkenazi, Russian-born
pioneers to endure the intense heat of the day; few stayed after the First
World War ended in 1918, and Berl was among those who left. But an amazing
cast of characters were there at one time or another, even if just passing
through. Such individuals include A.D. Gordon and Yitzhak Tabenkin,
theorist and politician of the Socialist labor movement in Palestine,
respectively, as were Leah Miron, Sarah Schmuckler, and another woman who
was destined to become one of Berl's lovers, Rachel Katznelson (no
relation). All of them were special people, with highly complex natures.
"They were solitary individuals, given to bouts of deep depression which
affected the entire group. Extreme individualists, they were rebels in
search of a new way of life: egalitarianism, the return to nature, social
community, self-fulfillment in agricultural work. And beyond these
aspirations each maintained his own outlook, each had his own personal
devils." Each individual at Kinneret felt free to express himself in his or
her most natural way. Although they disagreed, argued and disputed, in many
ways this was just like family; "`...we felt that we were closer than
brothers.'"
It is hard to say exactly what bound this group so tightly together. Like
many young idealists, they yearned for hardship, difficulties, obstacles;
they felt like they were living life in its deepest sense. Certainly the
great Russian writers, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with their glorification of
the peasant and life in nature had its impact on them. In any case, they
became bound inextricably together for life. Wherever their paths later led
them, every meeting with a member of the Kinneret farm was a cause for
celebration and joyful reminiscing the rest of Berl's days.
It was also a time of experimentation, of trial and error. None of them
were really farmers, but were trying to live their lives according to an
inspiring ideology. The amazing thing was, despite many, many setbacks,
these members of the Second Aliyah did actually succeed in becoming not only
adequate farmers, but their progeny would become the most innovative
agricultural workers in the world.
Berl was not one to forget culture, either, and set up an agricultural
library, arranged for lectures, and of course taught Hebrew to the less
fluent at night.
In the summer of 1917, however, at the age of thirty, Berl got up and left
again. He apparently got deeper into his triangular love affair than he
expected. Although Leah Miron had come first to Palestine and had been his
companion and lover for years. his relationship with Sarah Schmuckler, as we
have seen, had developed to a similar status. Neither of the women seemed
particularly bothered by this arrangement - perhaps another revolt against
bourgeois values and conventional standards of morality. But suddenly and
unexpectedly, Berl fell in love with Sarah. Perhaps out of guilt to Leah,
he felt compelled to leave the settlement he had made his home for the
previous three years. Before he did, however, the three played out the
characters of a Russian novel in great detail, explaining and trying to
understand their emotions to one another. Berl in particular tormented
himself, although Leah, for her part, did not take the news nearly as badly
as he thought she might.
Perhaps this was just the time to go and pay a visit to the Holy City of
Jerusalem. This is exactly what Berl did in August 1917 - his first visit
to the Holy City after nine years in Eretz-Israel. It seems to have been a
good market for his vegetable creations more than anything else, however,
which drew him there. Jerusalem did not enthrall him as the Galilee had.
He felt out of place with so many Arabs around, a situation which reminded
him of darker days in Russia. He and the others had to be constantly on the
watch for theft, and Berl even got into a scuffle with an Arab who was an
itinerant worker on Berl's vegetable farm. (A day for the rest of his life
he called "the Day of Ibrahim"). Notwithstanding that, he enjoyed the
company, particularly of the women. Despite his love for Sarah, it was at
this time that he entered into amorous relations with Rachel Katznelson
after some time working together.
This group, however, soon drifted apart. Berl entered the service of the
British Army in the Jewish Battalion. He took no part in the war, and after
it ended and Palestine was designated as a national home for the Jewish
people - whatever that may have meant (the term was deliberately ambiguous)
- Berl left manual labor altogether.
Berl became a leading ideologue of the labor movement in Palestine
thereafter until his death in 1944. He began urging labor unity through
speeches and forums from the end of the war, when he and Ben-Gurion -
another more politically-minded young labor leader, met in the Jewish
Battalion. A great step was taken in this direction by the establishment of
the Histadrut - a General Federation of Jewish Labor - in Haifa in 1920. It
took responsibility for many spheres of workers' activity in the Yishuv -
settlement, defense, trade unions, education, health, housing, banking, and
even culture. Full union was only achieved among the various socialist
labor parties in 1930 with the establishment of Mapai, of which Berl played
an instrumental part.
Politicking, however, was not Berl's main contribution to the Yishuv -
Ben-Gurion was much more cut out for that than he was. Berl's main
contribution was in the sphere of cultural affairs and the creation of a
social environment more or less modeled on his image of how the regenerated
Jewish people should live in the Yishuv. He was able to give formal
expression to his ideas with the establishment of a labor daily newspaper,
Davar, in 1925. He wanted a paper that would influence every worker's
household. In fact it was hard to convince the Histadrut to finance the
production of a Hebrew daily, but he succeeded in overcoming their doubts,
and the paper was a great success (it only closed down in the early 1990's).
While the Histadrut, mainly guided by Ben-Gurion, directed and organized a
labor society in Palestine on large scale, Berl was able to use Davar as an
educational tool, an instrument for creating a common social, ideological,
and cultural milieu in Palestine. Readers remained loyal to it for decades,
and in all fairness it could be said that the paper did indeed mold two
generations of Palestinian Jews.
Many of the ideas he held dear to his heart were expressed in that paper.
One of the most interesting aspects of Berl's character and thought was his
attitude towards the continuing relevance of religion in a modern,
secularized Jewish state. Like many Zionist pioneers, Berl was a product of
the Eastern European Jewish shtetl or small village, where religion played a
major if not decisive factor in their lives. Like A.D. Gordon and other
Zionist pioneers, Berl was to discard his traditional upbringing but he
never lost his love for Judaism. Perhaps it was only a matter of nostalgia
for a romanticized past. But other pioneers often did not share his
nostalgia for Judaism - some, even many, grew to almost hate Judaism as a
religion, holding it responsible for the truncated existence of diaspora
Jews. Many pioneers chose to eat pork on Yom Kippur, for example - not only
a non-kosher food, but on the holiest fast day of the Jewish year. When the
left wing labor movement, Mapai (which he helped to create), opened its
summer camp on the 9th of Av (a fast day in the summer mourning the
destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E.), Berl "severely
reprimanded them in the columns of Davar: `What is the value and what are
the fruits of a liberation movement that has no sense of rootedness: that
casts (the past) out of memory, that instead of imbuing its bearers with an
appreciation of the nation's sources, blurs the memory of its origins.Would
we be capable of a movement of revival if not for the fact that the Jewish
people stubbornly preserved in its heart the memory of the (Jerusalem
Temple's) destruction.Such is the vitality of a symbol that crystallizes in
the annals of a nation." He held that the same awe and reverence should be
reserved for the Festival of Passover, which celebrates the liberation from
bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. How could the Zionists,
re-enacting this most ancient festival in modern times, neglect its symbolic
power?
One must remember, of course, that those like Berl and A.D. Gordon still had
fond memories of religion in their youth, while many other Zionists did not.
Those who disagreed with Berl held the Jewish religion directly responsible
for the supplicating, passive nature of the Jew in the diaspora in the face
of Gentile criticism and violence, and there was little with which Berl
could say to counter that. In effect he agreed with much of that analysis.
But he felt that the holidays and festivals still held a strong emotional
appeal, and were also vehicles for creating social cohesion and national
solidarity. He viewed the Shabbat as a necessity for the new secular state
in the process of creation, for example. As he wrote "`For me...the Sabbath
is one of the pillars of Hebrew culture and the first social achievement of
the working man in human history.' It was a social and cultural treasure
belonging no less to the Zionist worker than to orthodox Jews." We should
take note how he saw the Sabbath in contemporary times as rest for the
working man; he envisioned the Zionist state as a nation of workers, and a
state-instituted day of rest would do much to resuscitate the soul of the
enervated worker, while once again providing a sense of social and national
cohesion.