Jerusalem did not attract him. The city was a maze of stinking alleyways and a mosaic of faiths, hallucinations and primal urges, fanaticism, corruption and decay. Everyone there skirmished with everyone else, and most of the city’s inhabitants, both Arabs and Haredim, abhorred Zionism. During his first two years in Palestine, Ben-Gurion had traveled around the country, but without ever going to Jerusalem. The Arabs and devout Jews he encountered in Jaffa and Petah Tikvah seem to have been quite enough. His first visit to the city did not occur until soon after his return from his visit in Płońsk. At the end of 1908, he went there to prepare, along with Ben-Zvi, for the impending Po’alei Zion convention in Sejera. Unlike Lake Kinneret, whose beauty he recounted in vivid colors, Jerusalem did not inspire him. In his next letter he provided his father with his impressions of an uplifting encounter with Hayim Nahman Bialik in Jaffa, but offered not a word about his visit to Jerusalem.1 In the meantime, Palestine had changed dramatically.
At the beginning of 1908, the Zionist Organization had opened an official bureau in Palestine, naming Arthur Ruppin, a German economist and jurist, to head it. The appointment reflected a growing awareness of the need to take practical measures to promote the Zionist dream. Up to this point, the movement had put most of its efforts into diplomacy. The well-funded Palestine Office operated in Jaffa and soon became a central player in the country. Ruppin eventually came to be seen as the father of the new Jewish settlements. Among his achievements was the establishment of Jewish training farms and labor details, one of which settled in 1909 on the southern shore of Lake Kinneret. Its members lived as a commune, called Degania, “the mother of the kibbutzim.”2
On one of the days of the terrible week that Ben-Gurion and his comrades endured in Sejera in April 1909, several dozen Jews from Jaffa assembled on the beach just north of the city to participate in a lottery for plots of land on which they planned to build a new neighborhood, Ahuzat Bayit.3 It was the embryo of Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city. Ben-Gurion followed these events, but his own practical work did not yet extend beyond the bounds of his tiny political party.
On Pesach, the Po’alei Zion convention resolved to publish a Hebrew-language periodical in Jerusalem, to be called Ha’ahdut (The Unity). Several of the people whom Ben-Zvi invited to join the staff turned down his offer, so he suggested to Ben-Gurion that he come to Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion toyed with the idea of refusing. He claimed that he did not know how to write and that he had been solicited only because Ben-Zvi wanted a bona fide worker on the staff. But it didn’t take much to persuade him. Ben-Zvi offered him his first opportunity to do something he was good at and liked—he was a proficient writer, and the future of the Jewish people interested him more than the cows and chickens of the moshavot. Working on the newspaper would help him achieve his goals. He was twenty-four years old. City life might also cure his loneliness.
*
He was not involved in founding the journal; by the time he reached Jerusalem nearly everything was ready. Another party leader would soon arrive from Russia, from the same town as Ben-Zvi. Ya’akov Vitkin, who soon changed his last name to Zerubavel, became Ha’ahdut’s editor in chief. Ben-Gurion referred to himself as an editor, but he actually worked as a proofreader and translator. His salary was only a bit higher than what he had earned as a laborer in Zichron Ya’akov, but it was more expensive to live in Jerusalem. He handed over most of the money to a woman who was also a party member, in exchange for which she cooked his dinners. Sometimes he went hungry, he later related.4
His first home in Jerusalem was the Floyd House, built by one of those Christians who had come to Jerusalem from America in the hopes of finding his God. Nonreligious Jews had trouble finding housing in the city because most Haredi Jews refused to have them as tenants. Ben-Gurion had a dim room in the house; in lieu of a bed he laid some boards on two crates. All the house’s tenants shared a single bathroom.5
For Ben-Gurion, it was a gamble. Ben-Zvi was the party’s leader; when he arrived, he blocked Ben-Gurion’s advancement. Now he was giving him work. Ben-Zvi was a warmhearted type. Ben-Gurion accepted his authority and the two became friendly. As long as Ben-Gurion did not try to shunt Ben-Zvi aside, Yanait could also handle him. She recalled his tone of voice, always clipped and emphatic.6 He used that same clear-cut and incisive style in an article he wrote for the first issue. It was a fierce personal attack on the chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire. Rabbi Haim Nahum, located in Istanbul, was not only the empire’s top Jewish religious authority, but also served as the Jewish community’s senior representative before the Ottoman authorities. He was visiting Palestine at the time the article appeared, filling what was clearly a political role. Ben-Gurion demanded that Nahum, “the religious official,” as he called him, restrict his activities to purely religious matters. Contradicting his advocacy of strict separation between religion and the state, he also attacked Nahum for not furthering Jewish national interests, as other nations were doing in the wake of the Young Turk revolution.
The shortage of manpower required each member of Ha’ahdut’s staff to write multiple articles for each issue, so they also wrote unsigned pieces or used pseudonyms. Another piece by Ben-Gurion in the same issue railed against the fact that several of Petah Tikvah’s leading citizens had not permitted a few of the workers to welcome Rabbi Nahum with a Zionist flag. As was customary in journalistic writing at that time, and as he had done previously in some of his letters, Ben-Gurion used some of the most charged words he knew in depicting the incident: “A nightmarish hallucination during a night of horror … terrifying … shameful treason … national provocation.”
Ben-Gurion’s third contribution to the first issue was a report from the field, based on his personal experience as a laborer in Zichron Ya’akov. He provided a more-or-less balanced account and signed the piece “Tzofeh,” meaning “Observer.”7 Once, while in Haifa, Ben-Gurion caught the newshound bug—when he learned of an attack on the farmers of Yavne’el, he wired his office: “I’m going to the Galilee.”8 But he generally wrote opinionated analytical articles.
The first radical Hebrew-language socialist periodical appeared initially as a forty-four-page monthly and then as a weekly. Its print run was 450 copies.9 Its masthead stated that it was published by the social-democratic Hebrew workers’ party of Palestine. These words were carefully chosen, as Yanait later related; they showed that the party no longer saw itself as Marxist. They did not repudiate socialism, but as Ben-Zvi put it, “At this time the immediate task is the most important thing, creating a Jewish society in Palestine and organizing workers to defend their interests.”10
It was in this context that the Zionist movement discovered the Jews of Yemen, some of whom had arrived in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, arguing that they could and should replace Arab laborers. “This is the simple, natural worker, able to work at anything, with no shame, no philosophy, and no poetry, either,” one newspaper wrote. “And Mr. Marx certainly not to be found either in his pocket or his brain.”11 Arthur Ruppin, chief of the Palestine Office, also advocated employing Jewish workers instead of Arabs. He searched for “Jewish Arabs” who would make do with the conditions and wages that Arabs accepted, and the Yemenites fit the bill. While they were paid better than Arabs, they took less than European-born workers. He resolved to bring more Yemenite Jews to Palestine. It was not an easy decision for him, because they were dark-skinned. Ruppin maintained that there was no such thing as a dark-skinned Jew, but hoped that he could also find fairer Jews in Yemen.12
It was the first time that the Zionist movement took the initiative in bringing Jews to Palestine, not because it was ostensibly offering them refuge or redemption, but simply because they were needed to achieve Zionist objectives. The need to import labor from Yemen became more acute because of a mass exodus of European Jewish immigrants who had arrived in the Second Aliyah. It was in this context that one of Ben-Gurion’s friends, Shmuel Warschawski, was sent to Yemen. At the time, he was the secretary of the new neighborhood that would become Tel Aviv. He and Ben-Gurion had first met in Yavne’el; Warschawski later changed his name to Yavnieli. Disguised as a rabbi seeking answers to halachic questions, he located able-bodied Jews in Yemen and gave them money for their passage to Palestine.13
Ben-Gurion was not involved in this operation, but he supported it enthusiastically. “Ashkenazi workers are certainly superior to Yemenites,” he maintained, as they were “cultured” and had a “mental advantage,” but, he acknowledged, only a small number of them had adapted themselves to conditions in Palestine. The Yemenites were a different sort of “human material.” They were accustomed from childhood to labor and they did not have many needs. “From these elements a class of workers connected to the soil can be created,” he said. He supported bringing them also because the Yemenites were Ottoman citizens. “The entry of the Yemenite laborers bolsters our political position,” he wrote. The “Yavnieli immigrants” numbered more than twelve hundred. Many of them encountered prejudice and humiliation in the country. Ben-Gurion came to their defense, demanding “total equality, with no exceptions, nowhere and in no way.”14
At the paper, Ben-Gurion focused from the outset on Zionism’s political goals, a niche he carved out for himself that writers more senior than him generally did not write about. His work on Ha’ahdut enabled him to consolidate some initial thoughts on several of the fundamental questions presented by the prospect of life in a Jewish state. He believed that he knew how to solve the Jewish question in Palestine and prepared himself to take part in addressing it.
He still did not know how to lead. His party lacked influence and he did not carry much weight within it. At this point, he had not said anything very original. His aptitude was not for framing new ideas but for carrying them out politically.15 But his political analysis now suddenly provided him with the standing of a pundit worthy of attention. When he later needed the help of the American consulate, they already knew of him there. In this context, Ben-Gurion made one of the most important decisions of his life—he shed his original family name and chose himself a Hebrew name that he used to sign his writing from this moment onward. At the time, it served only as a pen name.
*
Yosef Ben-Gurion had been a Hebrew statesman of the first century A.D. He had assumed leadership of Jerusalem, in tandem with the high priest. It was then that Jewish rebels had begun to organize to oppose Roman rule. Bloody conflict broke out among the Jews. The contemporary historian Yosef ben Matityahu, better known as Josephus, praised Ben-Gurion for belonging to a noble family, but also because of his free speaking “for democracy”; he had “as great boldness and freedom of spirit as … any of the Jews.” He devoted himself to fortifying Jerusalem. He was murdered during one of the waves of fanatic madness that swept through the city. According to Josephus, Ben-Gurion found his end not only because of his high pedigree but also because of his “free speaking.” The impression is that he lost his life in an attempt to save his fractured people from themselves. Josephus enumerates only his noble characteristics as a statesman, as if he were a man without a past who was born a hero, just as Ben-Gurion liked to believe that he was born a Zionist. Changing one’s name was an accepted practice at the time. It was meant to disconnect the person from life in exile and create a new Hebrew identity in Palestine. The historical Yosef Ben-Gurion’s first name also sat well on David Yosef Gruen. He might have read Josephus long before, or he might have first encountered the historian in Jerusalem. Rachel Yanait, whose former name had been Golda Lishansky, was an avid reader of Josephus and taught his books at Jerusalem’s Hebrew Gymnasium high school. Ben-Gurion may also have known that Micha Josef Berdichevsky, the author he so admired, had adopted the name Ben-Gurion in 1899. There was something else as well—the great opponent of the historical Ben-Gurion had been Shimon Bar Giora. Josephus portrays the latter as the thuggish leader of a brutal gang of terrorists who sought to make himself dictator of Palestine. Apparently Ben-Gurion’s murderer was one of Bar Giora’s henchmen. In taking his new name, David Yosef Gruen made his hostility to Bar Giora and Hashomer part of his new identity.16
Ha’ahdut’s printing press and editorial offices were located for a time in the Ezrat Israel neighborhood, north of Jaffa Road. This was not by chance, apparently, as it was a relatively inexpensive and liberal area. A number of members of the staff also lived there. Ya’akov Yehoshua, a longtime resident, recalled that they looked like Russian revolutionaries, dressed in embroidered Russian shirts and patched trousers, with a cap flattened on their heads and sandals with no socks. The local barbershop and pharmacy were their meeting places; they drank a lot of tea, debated into the small hours of the night, and at least once a week, on Saturday nights, partied by singing songs in Hebrew and Russian.
Aharon Reuveni, Ben-Zvi’s brother, wrote a roman-à-clef about them, in which he changed Ha’ahdut’s name to Haderech (The Road) and Ben-Gurion to Givoni, a glum sort “with his face frozen in a barely controlled subversive obstinacy.” The other writers for the journal talk about him when he is not around and laugh at him behind his back. He likes very sweet tea, they gossip—he fills half the cup with sugar. One character says that a passion for sweet food is shared by all those who advocate sublime ideals; everyone laughs. He is different from them—he is interested in abstract ideas. They refer to him as a fanatic and compare him to Savonarola, the Dominican friar and doomsday preacher who for a time became a power in fifteenth-century Florence. When he disagreed with someone, he gave him a disdainful look. They didn’t like him. “He lacks any living feeling for living people,” the novel’s protagonist says.17
Ben-Gurion once wrote a short story praising Jerusalem’s stonecutters over the generations. He was trying to be funny. It was a childish piece worthy of mention only because his colleagues did not stop him from publishing it. A month later, he wrote a short drama in honor of May Day with the title “The Labor Holiday.” It, too, was unworthy of publication, but no one prevented him from making a fool of himself. No one said, “David, not this one.” Both these works were bylined with the pen name “Ba’al Hahalomot,” meaning “The Dreamer.” On at least one occasion he went to the theater and published a scathing critique under the name of Dan. The story, direction, and acting of the “lovers of the Hebrew theater” who staged the show was “soulless,” lacking psychology, he maintained.18
Shortly after Ben-Gurion made his home in Jerusalem, Shlomo Zemach followed. They met often, sometimes together with Ben-Zvi. Zemach published stories in another journal, Hapo’el Hatza’ir (The Young Proletariat). Once a week the two of them would take a walk along the Old City walls, visit the Western Wall and a Turkish bathhouse, returning home before dawn.19 Zemach had a girlfriend, who would soon become his wife. Ben-Gurion had no one. He sometimes attempted to contact Rachel Beit Halahmi, who already had a baby girl. In a postcard he sent her, also signed by Shlomo and Hemda Zemach, he invited her to spend a few days in Jerusalem. She didn’t come.20
*
At the end of 1910, Ben-Gurion issued a call to found a “national political organization” that would represent the Jews of the Ottoman Empire and lobby the government and parliament to attain Jewish rights. Up to that time, there had been no such central institution. It was his first political article. It would have been hard to guess that he was a novice—he wrote like an experienced commentator. Alongside his praise for the empire’s treatment of the Jews throughout its history, he complained of the suspicion with which the Young Turk government viewed Zionist settlement. He described at length Arab attacks on Jewish settlers: “The moshavot are in a state of war,” he declared, and risked a bold assertion: “The local government almost abets the murderers and robbers, who will continue their deeds with no fear of the government.” He stressed in particular the hatred of Christian Arabs. In this context he mentioned Naguib Azoury, an early Arab nationalist who declared in 1905 that the Jewish and Arab national movements were fated to battle each other until one defeated the other. Azoury’s followers, Ben-Gurion wrote, were sowing hatred of Jews throughout the Arab nation.21
At the beginning of 1911, the Jewish world and Ben-Gurion himself were scandalized by an article the Hebrew novelist Yosef Haim Brenner published in the newspaper Hapo’el Hatza’ir. The subject was Jews who had converted to Christianity.22 Brenner maintained that there was a Jewish national identity independent of religion and that this identity had no need of the precepts and observances of the Jewish religion. Supporters of Hapo’el Hatza’ir in Odessa, among them Ahad Ha’am, demanded Brenner’s dismissal from the publication; if not, they threatened, they would cut off the financial support they had provided to the journal.
Hapo’el Hatza’ir was a competitor to Ha’ahdut, but Ben-Gurion took the side of Brenner. He stressed in particular the violation of Brenner’s freedom of speech. “Who puts limits on what is in the heart?” he asked. He kept himself outside the real point at dispute, stating only that religion and politics should not be mixed. “Religion alone and nation alone,” he asserted. But he could not keep himself from referring to the Haredim as “the blacks.”23
Ben-Gurion and his colleagues at Ha’ahdut lived in a secular enclave, but they did not divest themselves of all religious observances. Rachel Yanait later related what one Yom Kippur eve looked like. “We went up to synagogues and peeked inside through their shuttered windows,” she wrote. “For whatever reason, we didn’t dare go inside, perhaps because of our secular garb, perhaps because since becoming Zionist workers of Po’alei Zion we were cured of going to synagogue.”24
At that time, Jerusalem had a population of about seventy thousand, of whom forty-five thousand were Jews. Ben-Gurion had never before been part of such a large Jewish majority. He wanted to turn it into a unified force and to make the Haredim partners in the government of Jerusalem as a whole. But in this context he spoke of “the conquest of those communities,” meaning a revolution in the Haredi way of life, and advocated for yeshivot, the religious seminaries where most Haredi men studied, to provide general and professional education as well. But the Haredi way of life was too strong to allow such changes; Ben-Gurion did not yet understand that.
The article in which he made this proposal was not antireligious—in it, he also condemned those of his colleagues who treated the Haredim with contempt. But the language was, as was his wont, very blunt. He called for “purifying the filth” and replacing it with “healthy elements.”25 He did not reject the practice of Jews in Palestine seeking financial support from Jews overseas. The New Yishuv, as the non-Haredi recent immigrants were called, were no less dependent on Jewish philanthropists in other countries than were the Haredim, who were called the Old Yishuv. He himself solicited donations for Po’alei Zion.26 The argument was over control of the money. That was the main subject that interested him when he finally managed to get elected as one of the local party’s delegates to the World Union of Po’alei Zion, which convened in Vienna in July 1911. He was delighted to make the trip. That summer he had again been overcome by a longing for home.
He made his second visit to the country of his birth in the five years since his move to Palestine. Shlomo Zemach happened to be in Płońsk at the time, as was Rachel Beit Halahmi; she had gone there to give birth to her second daughter. Ben-Gurion did not dare go into town, because he was officially a deserter and had left Poland on a passport that was not his. In Warsaw he was more anonymous. He asked Rachel to meet him there. She did not.27 But his sister Rivka had in the meantime married a well-off businessman from Łódź and they gave him a warm welcome. Ben-Gurion had long since stopped pressing his family to settle in Palestine; his sister Feigele wanted to study in Berlin, and Ben-Gurion asked his father to support her.28
*
Brenner soon left Hapo’el Hatza’ir for Ha’ahdut. It was an important acquisition and Ben-Gurion did not miss the opportunity to impress his father. “The famous author Y. H. Brenner has taken my place on the staff,” he wrote. “He will be literary editor.”29
At the age of twenty-five, with a pretty firm conception of who he was, Ben-Gurion played with the idea of representing the Jews of Palestine in the Turkish parliament; maybe he could even be the government’s minister for Jewish affairs.30 In the meantime, he intended to study in Istanbul like some of his friends. But first he had to spend some time in Salonica, which was also under Ottoman rule.
A few days after he arrived in Salonica, Ben-Gurion received a piece of advice: under no circumstances should he reveal to his Jewish landlady that he was Ashkenazi. There were many Jews in the city, and nearly all of them were Sephardim. Young Ashkenazi men like Ben-Gurion were thought to be involved in trafficking women.31 From time to time he had to explain why he did not speak Ladino, the principal language of Salonica’s Jews. For the most part he did not understand them and they did not understand him. “All around me is that world of the Sephardi Jews, so alien and distant from me in its customs and language,” he wrote to his father.32 He lived in a small room; the mattress lay on the floor, a kerosene lamp beside it, with books and papers strewn around it. He stayed up until the lamp went out.33
He did not go to Salonica happily. As he lacked a high school diploma, Istanbul University insisted that he complete his secondary studies. He preferred to do that in a different city, before joining the students Ben-Zvi and Israel Shohat, who had diplomas and had gone straight to Istanbul. Salonica was less expensive to live in than the capital city. In his memoirs, Ben-Gurion wrote that he chose Salonica because it was “the most Jewish city in the world.” He marveled in particular at the large number of Jewish laborers. And there was also “that matter,” as he insinuated to his father—the university was not content with the classes he took in Salonica and demanded to see his high school records from Poland, which he did not have. Ben-Gurion dealt with that problem in the same way that people back then managed with such bureaucratic annoyances—Ben-Zvi obtained a forged diploma for Ben-Gurion, from the gymnasium high school he had attended in Russia. Ben-Gurion asked his father to pay for the forgery and to destroy his letter forthwith.34
*
His father was also paying his costs in Salonica. His paralegal business was going well at the time, and he expanded into offering parabanking services.35 Ben-Gurion apprised him of his progress. “The Turkish language isn’t as hard as I thought,” he wrote.36 Four weeks later, he felt that he knew the language well enough to assert that Turkish was not yet worthy of being called a language. “You can’t express a single modern idea properly in it,” he maintained.37 He began taking French lessons as well.
His Turkish language teacher was another student, Yosef Stroumsa, three years younger than he was. The two became friends, and three months later Stroumsa stopped charging for the lessons. They would go for walks along the beach each day and talk, in Turkish, about everything. It seems to have been another very intense friendship. The two needed each other. “Those were my happiest moments that year,” Stroumsa later recalled. “All of me, I owe everything to him.” Ben-Gurion wrote: “He was my Turkish teacher, and I was his guide in life.”
But the impression is that he hated every day of his nine months in Salonica. He frequently wrote of his loneliness. Stroumsa’s first impulse was to deny that his companion had been lonely. “Ben-Gurion didn’t need people,” he said. But on reflection he confirmed that Ben-Gurion missed his family and friends very badly and wrote to them once a week.38
Like his previous letters, the ones he sent from Salonica display extreme swings between happiness and depression. As he matured, he became more aware of his psychological dynamics. “Here, I began in joy and ended in sorrow,” he once wrote. “Is that the result of the circumstances of my life or a fundamental characteristic? Even in my happiest moments I just cannot shake free that profound melancholy that has penetrated my entire being.”39
He sent several articles to Ha’ahdut, one of them in Turkish, and kept tabs on his party.40 In the meantime, he tried his hand a bit at local politics. On one occasion, he broke into a rally where a Jewish member of parliament was speaking and protested that the speaker had said nothing about Palestine. Stroumsa recalled: “All the Jews there were astounded—what did he want of us? What is he saying?” Ben-Gurion tried to set up a branch of Po’alei Zion in the city, hoping to enlist Jewish sailors who could serve as the kernel of a Hebrew fleet in Palestine. The city’s socialists, almost all of whom were Jews, were hostile. Most were not Zionists. It was another conflict between Zionists and socialists, reminiscent of his contention with the Bund in Płońsk.41
Politics already ran in his veins, and he missed home badly. His landlord was religious, and everything was “kosher,” Ben-Gurion wrote, putting the word in quotation marks, “but the Haggadah does not speak to me and the soup dumplings are tasteless.” In his father’s home there had been “secret moans … that wove fine threads and webs of woe and longing … My entire soul is drawn there.” He had also experienced such moments in Palestine, generally on holidays, he added. God willing, he wrote in Turkish, Mashallah, they would all be reunited in Palestine.42
*
While he was in Salonica, Turkey fought a war with Italy. It was his first war. The Turks issued an expulsion order against Italian nationals; in Salonica nearly all the deportees were Jews. Ben-Gurion reported this tragedy matter-of-factly, blaming the deportees themselves for their tragedy. They were Jews who had lived in the city for centuries, but had never accepted Ottoman citizenship. Ben-Gurion remarked that “Jews like to remain obstinate even when it hurts them and never think of their future.” His father noted that Ben-Gurion himself had not accepted Ottoman citizenship. Ben-Gurion explained that he first had to be accepted to the university, because otherwise he would be drafted into the Ottoman army. Students were exempt from military service.43
He was indeed accepted, and moved to Istanbul, but then war broke out between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Balkan countries. Ben-Gurion’s letters read like dispatches from a war correspondent. “The shadow of war stretches over the entire city,” he reported.44 He saw lots of soldiers, some of them mounted on horses; the rail terminal was closed because all the trains had been placed in the army’s service. It was his second war.
On the first day of his studies, at the end of his second class, the university rector came into the room and demanded that the students volunteer for the army. The university enrolled seven thousand students, but only twenty-nine had enlisted. The rector said he was ashamed of them and walked out; the students went home. Turkey was fighting to retain its control over the Balkans. It was the empire’s darkest era, Ben-Gurion thought, comparing its predicament to that of the Jews just prior to the destruction of the Second Temple. He viewed the war as a clash between Islam and Christianity and maintained that even if Turkey won the war, Europe would not allow it to savor its victory. “We may be on the verge of a European war,” he suggested. “In any case, it is clear that we are on the verge of huge historical events that will send Europe’s politics on an entirely new path.”45
It was a prediction that could have been made only by a person living on the margins of the European theater, looking at it from the outside. From the inside, everything still looked stable and hopeful. Forty years of peace had granted the world a wonderful complacency, wrote Stefan Zweig, who lived in Theodor Herzl’s Vienna. “Never had Europe been stronger, richer, more beautiful, or more confident of an even better future.”46
The university’s lecture halls filled with wounded soldiers; studies were halted. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi returned to Palestine. Ben-Gurion was not sure he could return. He considered going to Damascus to learn Arabic. He thought that, as an attorney in Palestine, he would find Arabic more useful than Turkish.47 But in the months that followed he did little. He returned to Ha’ahdut, met with other members of Po’alei Zion, and joined a medical mission that went to Tiberias when a cholera epidemic broke out there. “If I die in Tiberias I name you trustee of my legacy,” he wrote to an acquaintance.48 Four months later, he was back in Istanbul.
*
His father continued to send him money. The bank transfers from Płońsk were often delayed, apparently because of the war. The same thing had happened in Salonica. Ben-Gurion griped about this in reproachful impatience in almost every letter. Of course, he appreciated the help he was receiving. “I will never be able to repay you even a small part of all the sacrifices you are making for my studies,” he wrote. But he reminded his father that this was a compact of sorts they had made—he would study, and his father would pay.49
Some of his letters home seem to have been meant to make his father feel guilty. Once he wrote that his lack of money had almost killed him. He came down with scurvy, the result of a severe lack of vitamin C in his diet. The doctor attributed the condition to “chronic non-eating.” Ben-Gurion told his father that he suffered from agonizing pain in his mouth: “I couldn’t sleep or eat.” Sometimes he took a loan. “I have already had a number of bad experiences, but I never in my life had times like these,” he wrote toward the end of his second year of studies. His health was deteriorating “and like always,” at the toughest moments he remained penniless. It was time to take stock. “Apparently both of us made a terrible mistake,” he wrote to his father. “You took on something that was beyond your means and I agreed to live in conditions that are liable to ruin all my physical and moral fortitude.”50 In January 1914, he became so ill that he spent several weeks in the hospital.51
Ben-Zvi shared a room with Ben-Gurion in a small boardinghouse. Yosef Stroumsa of Salonica had come to Istanbul to complete his studies and Ben-Gurion invited him to join them. It was a crowded bachelor student room, not clean, but apparently, contrary to what Ben-Gurion had written, none of them went hungry at any stage. Ben-Zvi worked as a teacher to pay for his studies; Ben-Gurion lived off his father and did not work. “They were like two brothers,” Stroumsa later recalled. “More than two brothers—they were always together.” Ben-Zvi had his Rachel, and others had girlfriends as well; some were already married. According to Ben-Gurion, he also had Turkish and Arab friends, but they never spoke about Jewish affairs.52
Sometimes he apologized for his impatience. Waiting for money drove him insane, he explained. “It seems to me that I am not the irate type at all, but when you live in Istanbul in conditions like mine and you get into a mood like mine, even iron nerves can burst and crack.” But he had no reason to fear that he would be left without means. Stroumsa testified years later that Avigdor Gruen sent his son’s monthly allowance. He didn’t send a lot, but he was never late, Stroumsa claimed. If so, money coming late could not on its own have plunged Ben-Gurion into a profound crisis of the type he described. He complained of “nervous anger and depression” and “distress and pain,” adding that “I cannot bear my mental distress—it is an internal hell for me.” A few days later, he wrote: “There are moments when I would be happy if I could at least weep like a small child—perhaps the tears would take on some of the oppressive psychological suffering that has no outlet.” Again he apologized: “Sometimes a heavy sigh breaks through my imprisoned emotions without my even being aware of it.”53
His father and his sister Rivka suggested that he return home, as his father already had before. Ben-Gurion was furious. The goal he had set himself was “a question of life,” he wrote, and only death would prevent him from achieving it. Suggesting that he give up on his goal was tantamount, “morally and spiritually,” to suggesting that he commit suicide. He therefore wondered whether his father was even willing to assist him anymore. Rivka also often sent him money. He told her to stop—if she persisted, he would send it back. In any case, she sent more to their sister Feigele in Berlin, he noted resentfully: “Do whatever she wants with her money, but leave me alone.”*54
He excelled at his studies, receiving a ten, the highest grade, on most of his exams. Once he sent a postcard to Rachel Beit Halahmi telling her about his high grades—he made a point of noting that Ben-Zvi had gotten only a six on a test that he had received a ten on, and on which Israel Shohat, also in town, had earned only an eight. In his reports to his father he also frequently noted that most of his friends got lower grades than he did.55 “I tried and I made it,” he reported to his father at the end of exam period. At first he tended to disparage the quality of the university, just as he had the Turkish language and Oriental culture as a whole. When he advanced and excelled at his studies, he stopped making such comments. In fact, the faculty was a fairly good one.56
*
They were a band of young people from Palestine who were drawn to Istanbul by the revolutionary spirit of the Young Turks; so were many Arabs. Some of them later worked in the legal system in Palestine; three were appointed judges, and one served on the Supreme Court. Others found their way into the political elite. Israel and Manya Shohat were also there. Yosef Stroumsa recalled that, from time to time, Shohat would visit Ben-Zvi, his close friend from Hashomer. If Ben-Gurion was in the room, he and Shohat would have arguments and soon start shouting at each other.57
Shohat postured as if he were the leader of a nation, the head of a government-in-exile. When the Balkan Wars broke out, he claimed to have persuaded the Turkish war minister to establish a Jewish regiment in the Turkish army that would defend Palestine. When nothing came of that, Shohat offered the Turks fifty mounted volunteers that he would enlist from among the students from Palestine and members of Hashomer. He claimed that he had been appointed commander of the unit, with officer rank. Nothing came of that scheme, either. Ben-Zvi, for his part, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Jewish sailors from Salonica to move to Palestine.58 He and Ben-Gurion were active in the Jewish student association in Istanbul and attended the Po’alei Zion convention in Kraców and the Zionist Congress in Vienna. It was Ben-Gurion’s first Zionist Congress; most of the delegates outranked him. He seemed by this time to have made up with Rivka; he went to Łódź for Pesach and his father was there as well. It was Ben-Gurion’s third visit to Poland since leaving.
*
With their exams behind them, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi boarded a Russian passenger ship in Istanbul on July 28, 1914. They were scheduled to arrive in Jaffa ten days later. The Austro-Hungarian crown prince had been assassinated a month before and the winds of war had begun to blow in Europe. On Saturday, August 1, soon after they set sail after a stop in Izmir, word reached the ship that Russia had declared war on Germany. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi found themselves facing their third war. Among the dreams that were shattered at that moment nearly everywhere on the globe was Ben-Gurion’s hope of achievement his father had never enjoyed—being a real lawyer.
A few months later, he was already thinking about the war’s implications for Zionism’s future. “One doesn’t receive a country, one conquers it,” he declared a few weeks after the outbreak of the Great War. “We will conquer Palestine by developing it,” he wrote. This was the essence of practical Zionism, which had come to the fore after Herzl’s death and the failure of his efforts to obtain Palestine by diplomatic means. But the central idea in the article could have come from Herzl himself: the Jewish people’s principal task was to prepare for the peace conference that would be convened after the war. The world had to grant the Jewish people an autonomous homeland in Palestine to which Jews could immigrate without restrictions. Cautiously, and choosing his words with great care, he stated that “Palestine belongs to Turkey” and stressed that the Jewish public in Palestine remained, “as always,” loyal to the Ottoman Empire.59
On the afternoon of Thursday, December 17, 1914, soon before it was time to light the candles on the fifth night of Hanukah, Turkish police forces surrounded the Jewish neighborhoods on the edge of Jaffa—Tel Aviv, Neveh Tzedek, and Neveh Shalom—and imposed a curfew. They broke into houses, dragged out their inhabitants, and brought them to a nearby police compound. A few hours later, the police put the Jews on Italian ships that left Jaffa that same night. The ships took them to Egypt, which the British had proclaimed a protectorate the month before.
An eyewitness described heartbreaking scenes: “A six-month-old baby was left in his cradle because his mother was captured on the street and put on a ship without giving her the opportunity to take her child … Children were sent on ships without their parents … Many fell into the sea and were saved only thanks to miracles, while what happened to others remains unknown to this day.” Prior to this the authorities had issued an order expelling all citizens of enemy countries, including fifty thousand of the eighty-five thousand Jews who were living in Palestine at the time. Almost all of these were Russian subjects. On Saturday another mass expulsion took place.60
A furious debate broke out at the Ha’ahdut offices in Jerusalem. During the three months since Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi had returned from Istanbul, they had tried to persuade the Jews in Palestine to renounce their Russian citizenship and apply for Ottoman citizenship instead. The immediate goal had been to avert the prospect of thousands of Jews having to leave the country, whether by choice or expulsion. Ben-Gurion’s political thinking on this point was a bit outlandish—Turkey was an unlikely ally for the Jews. He was well acquainted with the internal rot that plagued “the sick man of Europe,” and his attitude toward Turkish culture was manifestly Orientalist. Furthermore, he had witnessed the empire’s fiasco in the Balkan Wars. Despite this, he did not think it impossible that Turkey would win.
He considered himself an Ottoman patriot and cheered when the Turks abrogated the superior rights that foreign subjects enjoyed in Palestine. “Turkey is leaving slavery for freedom,” he declared. He called the Ottoman Empire “our country.” Thousands of Jews were now left without the protection of the consulates of the countries they had come from, but Ben-Gurion believed that loyalty to the Ottoman regime would, after the war, promote Zionist interests. He thought of a Jewish national district within the Ottoman state. Nor did he give up his dream of representing the Jewish public as a Turkish Cabinet minister.61 Along with Ben-Zvi, he revived the proposal to establish a Jewish volunteer militia to defend Jerusalem. In the meantime, he went each morning to the offices of the chief rabbi, where he sat at a desk covered with a green cloth and registered the Jews who had decided to take Ottoman citizenship. He and Ben-Zvi sported red fezzes. “Real Turkish officials!” was how Aharon Reuveni described them in his novel.
It was not an easy decision to forgo Russian citizenship, in particular for young men who had evaded service in the czar’s military. It would make them liable for conscription into the Turkish army. Both Zionist workers’ parties called on Jews to remain in Palestine, but there were also other opinions, including on the Ha’ahdut staff. Several members confessed to their colleagues that they had no desire to die in defense of the Ottoman homeland.
Givoni, the Ben-Gurion character in Reuveni’s novel, declares that he is willing to pay a very high price in human lives in order to achieve his people’s historic destiny. Anyone who leaves the country is a traitor, he declares, adding, “If I had authorization to do so, I’d put the country under lock and key and not let a single soul leave.” The explanation that Reuveni has Givoni offer is this: “Five thousand Jews who fall in Palestine are more important for us, for our future, than ten thousand who flee and save their lives in Egypt.” His colleagues remark sarcastically that he seems to have no compunctions about taking responsibility for so much bloodshed; one thanks God for putting the Jews at the mercy of Djemal Pasha rather than Givoni.62
Djemal Pasha was one of the leaders of the Young Turks and the commander of the Syrian and Palestinian front. He would play a leading role in the Armenian genocide and was an outspoken opponent of Zionism.63 The editors of Ha’ahdut were unsure whether to write about the deportations from Jaffa. It was a difficult decision, especially for Ben-Gurion as a supporter of the Ottomans. He reluctantly supported publication of an agonizing account that maintained that the deportation was not, in fact, aimed at foreign nationals but was directly aimed at Jews, including those who were Ottoman citizens. A few days later, the authorities shut down the periodical, confiscated the last 127 copies of the recent issue that they found in its offices, and locked the printing press.64
*
A few weeks later, Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion were arrested and taken to the grandiose government house in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. According to Ben-Gurion, they were arrested because their names appeared on a list of participants in the Zionist Congress of 1913. They were treated reasonably well. Ben-Gurion wrote that his interrogator was a coarse man, “but not overly aggressive in his coarseness.” He wanted to know everything about Po’alei Zion and Hashomer, and seemed not to know the difference between them. Both, as far as he was concerned, were secret subversive organizations. Ben-Zvi recalled that they made friends with their guards, to the point that they were allowed to come and go as they pleased.
To avert deportation, the two of them penned, in Turkish, a heartfelt patriotic letter to Djemal Pasha. Ben-Zvi went so far as to seek Djemal out in person at his headquarters in the Augusta Victoria mansion on the Mount of Olives. Rachel Yanait went with him and watched from a distance, hiding among the cypresses. Ben-Zvi managed to address the Turkish commander in person; Djemal knew who he and Ben-Gurion were, but said there was nothing to talk about. The two were plotting to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and they would be deported to Egypt. Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion plunged into deep depression. Their friends organized a farewell party at a local hotel, but Ben-Gurion preferred to be alone. It was not easy for him to come to terms with the collapse of his conviction regarding Zionism’s Turkish future. Ordered by the authorities to report for deportation in Jaffa, the next day they rented a horse-drawn carriage, at their own expense, for the trip. When they arrived, they were incarcerated for several days. Yanait was given permission to make farewells. A candle burned on the table. When it went out, Ben-Zvi and his girlfriend went out into the corridor. He bent over and kissed her. Ben-Gurion remained in the room.65
The deportation was meant to be permanent; they had also been expelled from Istanbul University. They arrived in Cairo without documents, only a letter of recommendation they had received from the American consul in Jerusalem, Otis Glazebrook. Henry Morgenthau, the United States envoy in Istanbul, also kept tabs on the two. Meanwhile they traveled, went to the museum, climbed pyramids, and waited to receive Egyptian laissez-passer papers. On Pesach eve Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “We are going to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt and to conduct a Seder by the tombs of Pharaoh.”66
In the weeks that followed, the two friends took an interest in the fate of thousands of refugees from Palestine and followed the activity of two Russian Jews who were already famous. One was an officer, Joseph Trumpeldor, a dentist who had fought heroically and lost his left arm in the Russo-Japanese War. He had come to Palestine in 1912 with several companions. They had originally joined a communal farm on the shores of Lake Kinneret, but then went to work at Degania.
The second was a well-known Odessa-born Zionist journalist, author, and translator who signed his articles with the pseudonym “Altalena,” meaning “swing” in Italian. His real name was Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky. In his hometown he had advocated establishing a Jewish self-defense militia. Trumpeldor had managed to flee Palestine before being threatened with deportation; Jabotinsky had arrived in Egypt as a roving correspondent. As Egypt was a British client, the two men proposed to the British that they enlist Jewish refugees into a volunteer military unit; the idea was approved. The result was the Zion Mule Corps, which took part in the Gallipoli campaign. The working assumption was that the Turks would be defeated and that it would thus be wise to help the British.67
Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi rejected the initiative for two reasons—they feared, with good reason, that providing military aid to an enemy of Turkey could have catastrophic consequences for the Jewish community in Palestine. They also continued to believe that Turkey might well remain in control of Palestine after the war, when it might grant the Jews autonomy. Turkey was, after all, on Germany’s side, and many people believed that Germany would emerge victorious. Ben-Gurion’s support of Turkey was in keeping with long Jewish tradition, which had a Zionist version as well, according to which it was best to obey whoever was in charge, everywhere and always. Beyond that, the two friends were peeved that Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor had carried out an idea that they, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, had failed at when they proposed it to the Turks. It was another Jewish armed force initiative in which Ben-Gurion had not been involved.
From a Zionist point of view, it was logical to prevent Jews from leaving Palestine. There was also logic in advocating that Jews should take out Ottoman citizenship so as to avoid deportation. Indeed, some Jews enlisted in the Turkish army.
But for many, the decision to remain in Palestine cost them their lives, whether they did so out of Zionist patriotism or for other reasons. As the war went on, conditions in Palestine worsened and thousands died of hunger. Ben-Gurion saw this, too, as one of the prices to be paid for Zionism.†68
He himself had not yet received Ottoman citizenship. He later claimed that he and Ben-Zvi applied for it and even paid the required fee; perhaps they were deported before the process was completed. When he entered the United States, his documents identified him as a Russian citizen. In early 1917, he also declared himself to be a Russian citizen.69 In later years, Ben-Gurion found it difficult to acknowledge that he had erred when he encouraged the Jews in Palestine to take Ottoman citizenship. “It may have been a mistake on my part,” he wrote, “but under those conditions I would again oppose leaving the country.”70
*
Had he wanted to, it seems that he could have remained in Egypt, but he wanted to go to the New World. At the age of twenty-nine, without a profession, he knew that he would never be a lawyer and, most likely, not a Turkish Cabinet minister, either. He no longer did manual labor and depended for his livelihood on money sent from overseas, in part from his father. But he had one big advantage over many others his age—he knew what he wanted to achieve and that he was capable of learning. His next stop was America.
On passage to the United States he marveled at the expanses of the Atlantic Ocean. He penned poetic depictions of the waves and the play of the light, just as he had done when he first sailed from Płońsk to Palestine.71 His friends and acquaintances, who generally saw him as a glum introvert, would have had trouble believing that such romantic passages could have been written by him.
*
On May 16, 1915, the first skyscrapers appeared in the distance. Ben-Gurion was stunned. From the moment he had settled in one of the third-class berths on the Greek ship Patris with Ben-Zvi, he had been carried away by the American dream that he had carried with him since childhood at the beginning of what everyone called the American Century. America sparked his imagination; he was almost as excited about going there as he had been about going to Palestine. The pulse of life in the most modern and democratic country in the world fascinated him, he wrote. When gulls began to circle the Patris, he stopped thinking about the awful food served on the ship; he suddenly identified with the myth of America’s Founding Fathers. In his diary he wrote: “We, who want to build a new land in a wilderness out of ruins, need to learn how the deportees and persecuted people from England founded a huge, rich country with unparalleled treasures and creative power.” In later years, he would compare the conquest of the American West with the conquest of Palestine. During the trip he began to study English.
His diary records a fantasy that he had from time to time—he travels to New York and surprises his friends there, not having informed them of his arrival. Shmuel Fuchs is not mentioned by name, but the “friends” he writes of are reduced, by the next page, to a single one. In anticipation of their meeting, Ben-Gurion again gave himself over to nostalgia, harking back to their “innocent and dreamy boyhood” when they were still “imbued with an illusion that was both naïve and pure.” When they met again, they would be able to consider which of the two of them had made the right choice—the dreamer who had gone to Palestine and into politics, or his beloved friend, who sought his fortune as a dentist in Brooklyn. Either way, Ben-Gurion noted, “since I have been flung to America, I need to do some things there for Palestine.” He was overjoyed when he realized that he would arrive in New York in time to celebrate the Shavuot holiday there.72
* His eldest brother, Avraham, was in the meantime planning to set up a lottery in Palestine. Ben-Gurion wrote him that he was mistaken if he thought that “the filth and sordidness” of the ghetto would gain him redemption in Palestine. (Ben-Gurion to his father, April 3, 1913, in Erez 1971, p. 264.)
† Historians estimate that about fifteen thousand Jews applied for Ottoman citizenship, while about eighteen thousand left Palestine or were deported. During the war, Palestine’s Jewish population fell by about thirty-five thousand, from eighty-five thousand to fifty thousand. (Giladi and Naor 2002, p. 457.)