America gave him a warm welcome; the immigration procedures were simple and brief. “The Americans know the secret of speed,” he said in awe. The mandatory medical examination was also less humiliating than he had feared. He declared his intention of becoming a citizen and in the meantime received a visa allowing him to live and work in the country. “Hooray!” he wrote in his diary, just as he had when he first came ashore in Jaffa. Waiting for him outside Ellis Island, the immigration center on the southern tip of Manhattan, were several members of the local chapter of Po’alei Zion. They conveyed to him awful news from Płońsk—a German bomb had hit a synagogue, killing some eighty people, among them Shlomo Zemach’s father. The battles raging around Płońsk at the time were covered closely by The New York Times. Ben-Gurion’s father and the rest of his family were safe and whole.1
Ben-Gurion was not immune to the fabled culture shock that often strikes people making their first visit to New York. It hit him like a “driving rain,” with a force that he did not forget as long as he lived. During his first days in the city, he wandered Manhattan’s avenues, dizzy and with no clear destination. On the third day he felt like he had already been there for weeks. His diary conveys enthusiasm—and here and there a bit of sarcasm—about the multistoried buildings, huge stores, endless streets, carriage and automobile traffic, masses of pedestrians, the whirlwind of colors and voices, the constant rushing, the uncontrollable desire of everyone to advertise something.
America presented him with two major challenges that required him to reexamine his most fundamental beliefs. As a self-proclaimed socialist, he had to cope with the recognition that America’s power was the power of capitalism—there was no great demand for socialism. As a Zionist, he sought to enter into conversation with the more than two million Jews who, finding a new homeland in the United States, had begun to feel at home there. There was not much demand for Zionism, either. America’s Jews reminded him of his father: “They claim to be Zionists, but they don’t come to Palestine.”2 Only a small number of them understood Hebrew; he still lacked fluency in English. For the most part he spoke Yiddish. It was not the best way to get to know America.
*
When they arrived in the United States, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi made a point of presenting themselves as emissaries from Palestine, stressing that they had come for only a short time. When he had to cite his profession on some official form, Ben-Gurion wrote “journalist.” That placed him in the ranks of other writers who sought to further the Zionist cause, among them Herzl and Jabotinsky. On his way over, Ben-Gurion had considered the possibility of publishing a Hebrew daily in the United States.3
His hosts took him at face value. They decided to send him and Ben-Zvi on a lecture tour to party branches, as emissaries from Palestine were more interesting than refugees and exiles. In the meantime, they organized a series of festive receptions, making long speeches in their honor and reporting their arrival to the Jewish press. “It’s a bit ridiculous,” Ben-Gurion remarked.4 Their hosts viewed Ben-Zvi as the senior of the two. They lived in a room they rented together in Brooklyn and, at first, lived hand to mouth—Ben-Zvi gave lessons, Ben-Gurion wrote articles. The party also supported them.
Po’alei Zion in America had been established as an extension of the party in Russia. Its activists, almost all immigrants, among them some relatives of Ben-Gurion’s, brought with them the party’s platform as well as the ideological differences that had preoccupied them in the Old Country, with all the intrigues and plots and the rivalries with other parties. There were chapters in several American cities, but only about three thousand members and sympathizers, constituting about half of the supporters of the Zionist labor movement in the United States. The movement put out a Yiddish newspaper in New York, Der Yiddisher Kempfer, with a print run of six thousand.*
Ben-Gurion had known some of the American Workers of Zion before his arrival, and they all had heard of him. Nahman Syrkin, the acknowledged intellectual leader of the party in America, related how he had tried, several years previously, to purchase Palestine from the Turkish sultan. He suggested enlisting tens of thousands of young people in the Hehalutz (“The Pioneer”) movement, whose members were committed to settling as farmers in Palestine. Pinhas Rutenberg, a Russian revolutionary and terrorist, regaled Ben-Gurion with a plan to establish a Jewish army that would conquer Palestine.5
*
For the most part, the Jews Ben-Gurion first encountered in America seemed to be in a pitiful state. He barely recognized his cousin. “His face had grown gaunt and his posture bent and he had aged entirely,” he recorded, noting that his cousin’s children spoke English and knew only a bit of Yiddish.6 One of Rachel Beit Halahmi’s brothers introduced him to the Association of Young Płońskers in America. He found them disagreeable. “Vacant, hollow, without any substance, lacking all aspiration,” he wrote in his diary.7
Shmuel Fuchs was not one of them—he was not in town at the time. Ben-Gurion met his girlfriend, who was a Bundist. A few weeks went by, but Fuchs did not return. On Sunday, July 7, 1915, Ben-Gurion entered this in his diary: “Today there is a Po’alei Zion picnic. From what I’ve heard, S. Fuchs will come. We have not seen each other for twelve years … Tomorrow I leave.” The next day, Ben-Gurion set out on a mission to the party chapter in Rochester, New York, the first stop in a lecture tour that included several other cities as well. His diary relates: “I was supposed to leave here at one, but I missed the train by a few minutes, wasting me the entire day, I’ll arrive in Rochester only at eleven at night.” There was not a word about Fuchs. Maybe he was at the picnic, maybe not. Maybe Fuchs was there and Ben-Gurion wasn’t; maybe neither showed up. Or perhaps they both went and saw each other, and Ben-Gurion decided to repress that moment and not even mention it in his diary. Many years later, when he was prime minister, he remarked that he and Fuchs had met in New York. “I told him about our endeavors in Palestine and he slowly returned to Zionism,” Ben-Gurion wrote. That was not entirely accurate.8
Fuchs belonged to Po’alei Zion when he first came to the United States, but he seems to have gradually lost interest in the party. He studied dentistry at New York University, married, enjoyed professional success, and bought an apartment building. He published poems and stories in Yiddish, some of them under the pseudonym “Emmanuel,” a name he afterward gave to his son. He associated with other Yiddish writers and poets, gave them money, and supported the Yiddish theater.9
Ben-Gurion’s lectures to Po’alei Zion chapters around the country were aimed at seeking out young people who might possibly go to Palestine, and in the meantime to recruit them for Hehalutz, which was ostensibly devoted to promoting pioneering settlement in Palestine.10 In conjunction with the tour, the party’s Central Committee issued a call to its members to join that organization. But a close examination shows that Hehalutz’s immigrants were also intended to serve as a military force. Its goals went through several formulations, at one point stating: “to organize a special group for self-defense in Palestine.” In a discarded version preserved in the Ben-Gurion Archives, this passage, in Yiddish, is followed by two Hebrew words in parentheses, meaning “defense group.”11 The Hehalutz charter, quoted by Ben-Zvi in his memoirs, states that the organization will operate “physical fitness and military exercise clubs.” The members were required to commit themselves to accepting the discipline imposed by the leadership.
*
Ben-Gurion traveled alone, generally by train; he lodged with party activists. He did not always know if they would be waiting for him when he arrived; at times they weren’t. Sometimes his hosts had forgotten to organize a lecture. “The comrades did not prepare anything,” he complained at one point. That happened, “as expected,” in Youngstown and Canton, just as it had previously in Pittsburgh. Canton was no great loss, he said; from the start it had not been worthwhile sending him there. But he was put out by the snafus in the larger Jewish communities of Youngstown and Pittsburgh.†
The party members in New York saw him as their emissary, and probably hoped that his appearances would help raise money for the party and subscribers for its newspaper. But he was not a great orator and did not attract big crowds; some who heard him later recalled that he spoke tediously and without imagination. Other speakers told stories; Ben-Gurion recited facts. Sometimes his speeches made a strong impression, but they were not lyrical. As a result, he was not very popular. Sometimes he spoke before an audience of barely twenty; forty was a good turnout. Once he canceled an event in Cincinnati because Justice Louis Brandeis was scheduled to speak elsewhere that same evening.12
*
At the end of August 1916, Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion asked Brandeis to intervene with Ambassador Morgenthau in Istanbul and obtain for them permission to return to Palestine.13 At the time, the two of them still believed that Palestine might well remain under Ottoman suzerainty, although they realized that another outcome was certainly possible. They thus had no way of knowing whether the military force they wanted to put together would operate on the side of the Turks or against them. In any case, Hehalutz was presumably meant to operate against the Arabs. And it might have been under Ben-Gurion’s control. But that did not happen. “The response was not massive,” Ben-Gurion wrote; the American branch of Hehalutz numbered only about a hundred members.14 It was a failure. Ben-Gurion was a long way from getting American Jews to move to Palestine.
He spent most of his time with other members of his party, but here and there he stepped out of that narrow world and took a look around. He followed the presidential campaign and later recalled the suspense leading up to Woodrow Wilson’s election to a second term. “The fate of the World War depended largely on the results of the election,” he wrote. In Nashville he saw, for the first time, what he called “the Negro Pale of Settlement,” the “Pale” being the term for the area the Russian authorities compelled Jews to live in. When he boarded the trolley, he saw two signs indicating that the seats in the front were for whites and in the back for “colored,” as blacks were then referred to in America. “When you enter the car, the whites sit in the front seats,” Ben-Gurion wrote to Ben-Zvi. “If any room is left the blacks are also allowed to sit (but heaven forfend not on the same bench as the whites). When people go out, the whites exit first, and then the blacks.”‡ Ben-Gurion also saw separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. Having grown up on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he was angry, hurt, and ashamed, he wrote, and told Ben-Zvi that when he went to see a movie he sat with the blacks. An usher immediately approached him and demanded that he sit apart from them.15
Here and there he took a break from politics. He was staggered by the sight of Niagara Falls, almost forgetting the convention he had traveled to Buffalo for, even though it had taken place in a large, packed hall. He often wrote about water, but the encounter with “the abyss upon abyss of magical miracle” brought on an almost religious experience. “Sit here mutely, son of Adam, and listen to this roar that has not ceased since the six days of creation,” he wrote in his diary. “Sit here mutely and watch the sprays of foam that swathe this great sight—gaze mutely.”16
Some of his letters and writings suggest that in America, too, Ben-Gurion suffered from sudden mood swings. His handwriting was generally even and legible, arranged in neat rows, with uniform margins and spacing, more or less. But there were times when his penmanship turned frantic, angular, hard to read, almost violent in appearance. The lines wended, there were no margins, they plunged down sharply toward the bottom left corner of the page.17 In the months that followed, he would devote himself primarily to writing. It was a wise decision; thanks to his writing, he soon came to be recognized as more important a figure than Ben-Zvi.
A while after founding Ha’ahdut, Ben-Zvi wrote an article in memory of one of the men murdered at Sejera, Ya’akov Plotkin. The article was printed in Yizkor, a memorial book issued in Jaffa in 1911; it would become a cornerstone of the heroic mythology of the labor movement in the Land of Israel. According to the book’s cover, it was meant as a memorial to fallen Hebrew workers—they were not identified as members of Hashomer. It was devoted to eight men, six of whom fell at Sejera. Alongside eulogies, the book also included literary works, among them contributions by Shmuel Yosef Agnon and one by Shlomo Zemach. The book was a still-hesitant attempt to shape a secular culture of national memory. The words of the traditional Yizkor prayer, recited in synagogues on holidays, were revised; the opening words, “God will remember,” were changed to “The Jewish people will remember.” An article on the value of giving one’s life for a cause said that the thousands of religious Jews who had accepted martyrdom “in sanctification of God’s name” had done so only to save their individual souls, whereas the workers memorialized in the book “set out to be killed in order to redeem the honor of their nation.” The introduction included a political message in the form of a call to the Arabs to work together with the Jewish settlers to make “our barren land” bloom. The book came out in Hebrew; its editors were the elderly Y. Z. Rabinowitz and Yosef Haim Brenner. There were many typographical errors; Ben-Gurion did not contribute.18
A few months after their arrival in the United States, after they had begun to give lectures before party chapters, Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion realized that there was a shortage of written material on Po’alei Zion and Palestine in Yiddish. At their suggestion, the party decided to issue a Yiddish edition of Yizkor. It was an attempt to create a common mythology for the Jews of Palestine and America. The task of preparing the book was assigned to a number of veteran editors of Ha’ahdut who were then living in New York, among them Ben-Zvi. They took out the literary works, added the names of victims who had not been included in the Hebrew edition, and portrayed them as glorious heroes.
The book was also given a different introduction, written by Ya’akov Zerubavel. Printed in small, dense type over six pages, it was grueling to read. The main purpose was to extol secular Judaism and disparage the religious lifestyle. This could be seen in a contemptuous article written by Brenner that had not appeared in the original. The cover featured a drawing showing a mounted member of Hashomer. Similar drawings, in art nouveau style, appeared in the book itself. Its subtitle declared that the book memorialized “the guards and workers” of Palestine; in his introduction, Zerubavel referred to Shimon Bar Giora. Ben-Gurion wrote a fascinating autobiographical piece about his first years in Palestine. It was placed close to the end of the book.19
This publication was a huge success. Memorial evenings were held all across America, and Ben-Gurion became a sought-after guest. He finally had a story—how he had arrived in Palestine, shaken with malarial fevers, gone hungry, how he had felt.20 Quite naturally, his mood soared. “Have you gotten together with Woodrow yet?” he asked Ben-Zvi, who was then in Washington, D.C.21
*
Most of the response to the book was positive. But a Bund sympathizer who wrote under the name Moissaye, Joseph Olgin, published his “thoughts” on the book under the title “The Jewish Colonies in Palestine Were Founded on the Catastrophe of the Arabs.” Its main point was that the Arabs were the ancient owners of Palestine and that their war against the Jewish settlers was a just one.
At this point, the Zionist movement was already often being asked to explain how it saw life with the Arabs. Ben-Gurion stressed that the country could be prepared for the absorption of four to five million Jews. He extolled their cultural and moral superiority and promised that the development would also bring about a renaissance of its Arab inhabitants. He cited Petah Tikvah as proof—it was home to five thousand inhabitants and another three thousand Arab laborers made their living there, he proudly related. There was not a word on his aspiration to replace them with Jewish laborers.22 When the edition sold out and demand had not been satisfied, a second edition was decided on and this time the project was assigned to Ben-Gurion.
He showed himself to be a strong-minded editor. He maintained that Zerubavel’s introduction was nothing more than “inflated polemics in an ostensibly poetic style.” Ben-Gurion tossed it out and wrote a new one, half the length at only three pages. Unlike Zerubavel, he wrote in short, powerful sentences. The heroes he memorialized came out looking like gods: “They came not as beggars but as conquerors,” Ben-Gurion began. That was followed by a period and then: “In the beginning was the deed.” And so he went on. The message was nationalist and secular and related to the dead heroes themselves. They had created a “religion of labor” and shed their blood in defense of the land. And unlike Zerubavel, Ben-Gurion did not issue a call of peace to the Arabs. He said that they respected only those who knew how to defend themselves. He moved his autobiographical piece up to the start of the new edition, right after his introduction. Revising the order in which the fallen appeared, he gave the first two slots to the two men who had fallen in the incident he himself had been involved in back in Sejera. He deliberately wrote “workers and guards,” in that order. Furthermore, he removed all mention of Bar Giora.
He did the editing job almost on his own, and also oversaw production. In the process, he had to learn a new profession and make endless decisions that required command of the tiniest details. These included what paper to use, what format to print the book in, and what graphics and illustrations to include. The result was a high-quality album in a silvery cloth binding, elegantly printed on high-quality stock. It made “a huge impression,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his father.23
It looked as if Ben-Gurion had begun to realize who his target audience was. The book he edited provided readers with Jewish patriotism and much tear-jerking self-righteousness. This mix enabled them to adulate new heroes, Yiddish speakers like themselves, to identify with and be proud of them, without being expected, even by implication, to leave the good country that had taken them in in order to follow in the footsteps of their heroes. That was the main difference between the two editions—Ben-Gurion’s Yizkor was more optimistic. He seems to have caught on to the role played by hope in the American ethos.
Nothing he had done in his life up to this point gave his reputation as much of a boost as editing this book. All the articles he wrote and all the lectures he gave taken together likely did not garner him as large an audience as Yizkor. Suddenly, he became one of the most prominent figures in his party. As he worked on the book, Ben-Gurion asked Ben-Zvi to return to New York from Washington to help him with the editing, making it clear that he would not be an equal partner. Ben-Zvi did not come. The massive editing job that Ben-Gurion planned, such a short time after the previous edition had come out, and no doubt the replacement of the introduction, were slaps in Ben-Zvi’s face. Ben-Gurion even removed his friend’s name from the list of editors; he could have been more forbearing. The book’s dizzying success seems to have been one more provocation for Ben-Zvi. “There was a dispute between me and Ben-Gurion,” he remarked in his memoirs.24 But Ben-Gurion offered him a new project, a much more ambitious and challenging one that the two men would collaborate on—a comprehensive scholarly work, in Yiddish, on the geography and history of Palestine. Ben-Zvi consented. Ben-Gurion began spending each morning at the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, passing the stone lions crouched at the bottom of the stairs, sitting at one of the wooden desks in the huge reading room. He very much liked the work. He focused largely on the books that had been written by survey delegations and Christian visitors to Palestine in the nineteenth century.
The two divided the book’s chapters between them. Ben-Zvi wrote mostly about the country’s history and geography; Ben-Gurion wrote about its names, boundaries, and legal status, and in particular about its inhabitants. They traded drafts of the chapters they wrote and commented on each other’s writing. They did some of their research at the Library of Congress in Washington and other libraries. “I neglected all my activity and entirely gave myself over to my research,” Ben-Gurion told his father. He worked from nine in the morning to ten at night; he even restricted his daily newspaper reading to the trip from his home to the library. Ben-Zvi also devoted himself to the project. On one or two occasions the two resumed party activity. In April 1917, Ben-Gurion’s name appeared in The New York Times for the first time, as one of the speakers at a large rally organized in the wake of the toppling of the Russian czar.25
One of his acquaintances in New York recalled that he also found time to have fun at Coney Island, see movies, and go out with women. One of them, Pauline Moonweis, agreed to accompany him to the library and copy out pages that he marked. The work lasted for a year and a half. On January 15, 1918, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that he had completed the last chapter.26 In the meantime, one of the great dramas in Jewish history had taken place, as well as another drama in his personal life.
*
About two years previously, after dinner, the British foreign minister, Arthur James Balfour, left his home in the company of Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born chemist and Zionist activist who had settled in England. It was after midnight. Weizmann spoke most of the time as Balfour listened. Weizmann had presented the basic thesis in the past—that the interests of the Zionist movement were identical to those of the British Empire, and vice versa. It was therefore worthwhile for the British to conquer Palestine and to establish a Jewish protectorate there. Weizmann, a man of great personal charm, offered Balfour a great historic vision. He spoke the language of statecraft and politics, but also evinced a great religious awareness. Balfour’s inclination was to accept Zionism as part of his Christian faith. It was a beautiful night; the moon stood in the sky. In March 1917, Balfour told the Cabinet: “I am a Zionist.”
In April the United States entered the war alongside Britain; in November, Balfour issued a written declaration that recognized the right of the Jews to establish a “national home” in Palestine. General Edmund Allenby’s army was advancing on Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion presumably followed its progress; it was one of the reasons he supported American entry into the war, unlike some of his friends.27
*
Ben-Gurion almost certainly read about the Balfour Declaration in The New York Times; the headline was “Britain Favors Zionism.” What that meant was that Great Britain recognized that the Zionist movement represented the Jewish people. Weizmann spoke of the declaration in biblical terms: “Since Cyrus the Great there was never, in all the records of the past, a manifestation inspired by a higher sense of political wisdom, far-sighted statesmanship, and national justice towards the Jewish people than this memorable declaration.”28 In the public eye, Weizmann was now the leader of the Jewish people. Ben-Gurion knew him, knew that he was working on the cause in London. Furthermore, the phrase “national home” was not foreign to him—it was the term the Zionist movement used to evade stating its real goal, a Jewish state. But the Balfour Declaration came as a total surprise. It apparently took him time to grasp its historic significance. He termed this public recognition of the right of the Jews to establish a national home in Palestine as “a great marvel” without parallel since Bar Kokhba’s rebellion against the Romans, but he tended to play down its practical significance. England could not return Palestine to the Jewish people, he wrote. Only the Jewish people could return it to themselves, through labor and settlement. In one of his speeches he illustrated this idea with an example: just as a woman cannot give birth to a baby in place of another woman, so one nation cannot create a national home for another nation.29
He had not been involved in obtaining the Balfour Declaration; presumably that bothered him. His initial dubiousness about it thus had a sour tang to it—Weizmann had made history while he was sitting on Fifth Avenue reading books. Most likely Weizmann would have reacted the same way had it been Herzl’s achievement. Ben-Gurion would later copy into his memoirs an article he wrote in 1915 in which he called for, among other things, taking action so that the postwar peace conference would recognize the Jews’ right to build their future in Palestine. The article appeared two years before the Balfour Declaration, he stressed, and when the declaration “materialized,” he and his friends were already in touch with British representatives regarding the formation of a Jewish Legion that would fight in Palestine.30
The Balfour Declaration engendered a huge national awakening, while at the same time reigniting the debate over Zionism itself. The New York Times published a long piece by a well-known Reform rabbi denying that the Jews had a national identity. Their historic mission, he argued, was to disseminate their spiritual message. To that end, they needed to be scattered among the nations of the world. American Zionist leaders were not enthusiastic about Ben-Gurion’s chilly reaction to the declaration, so he tried to walk back from his reservations in two further articles. The Balfour Declaration had brought Zionism in an instant, “as if by miracle,” to the “verge of realization,” he wrote, but the Hebrew homeland still had to be created, a “more important, serious, and more difficult task” than achieving the declaration.31 The drama that accompanied the declaration also compelled him to abandon, once and for all, the hopes he had placed in Turkey since his arrival in Palestine. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was no less difficult to admit that Jabotinsky had seen the Turkish defeat coming before he himself had.
A few weeks later, he had an almost instant epiphany, arriving at a new and unnerving realization—the Turkish age had ended and the Age of Britain had arrived. This took place in the celebrated Great Hall of the Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln once made a seminal address against the expansion of slavery. The room was filled to bursting; the audience had come to celebrate the Balfour Declaration and to announce the establishment of an action fund of $40,000. The crowd was enthusiastic, The New York Times reported. The newspaper named Ben-Gurion among the speakers. Another newspaper, Ben-Gurion reported to his father, called his speech “sublime and terrible.” Ben-Gurion had been in a frenzy, he wrote: “I know only that I was almost beside myself when I spoke. I felt only the storm raging in my soul—and that storm fired words from my mouth.”32
Five days later he married Pauline Moonweis.
*
She worked as a nurse in the clinic of a gynecologist named Shmuel Elsberg, who liked to host young intellectuals of Po’alei Zion in his home. Ben-Gurion was sometimes among his guests, and it was there that he first set eyes on her. Four years younger than he, she had been born in Minsk, then a part of Russia, and came to New York as a teenager. Like many other immigrants who grew up using two languages, she was fluent in both Yiddish and English. When they met at the home of Dr. Elsberg, Ben-Gurion was still not fully articulate in English. They spoke Yiddish.
As one might expect of a young woman who had gone to nursing school, Moonweis was self-confident and candid and had an acerbic sense of humor. She had had another romantic relationship prior to Ben-Gurion. She was impressed by Ben-Gurion’s idealism, or perhaps actually by his strong opinions. In photographs taken at the time he looks like a fairly good-looking boy—the aquiline nose that was his most prominent feature, along with his sensual lips, gave off an air of manliness and confidence. She looks intelligent and pleasant; he was probably happy to have found a woman shorter than himself. She wore round eyeglasses of the type favored by Emma Goldman, the American anarchist leader; according to Ben-Gurion, she admired Goldman and was herself an anarchist. She later confirmed this, by implication.§33
On top of that, she was not a Zionist. Until meeting Ben-Gurion, she had never dreamed of ever living outside the United States. When they fell in love, he told her that if she consented to marry him she would have to leave America and accompany him to a poor, small country where there was no electricity or gas. She agreed. So it was that on Wednesday morning, December 5, 1917, the two of them went to the Office of the City Clerk in Manhattan and officially became man and wife. He was thirty-one years old, she twenty-seven.**
It was 11:30 in the morning. Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary: “I have taken a wife”; he did not mention her name. They didn’t invite anyone. From the clerk’s office she went on with her day, while he went to party headquarters. Philip (Pinhas) Cruso, who knew them then, recalled that Ben-Gurion had disappeared for three days. We had meetings, but he never showed up, he related; Ben-Gurion appeared on the fourth day and said, “Say mazal tov to me, I got married.” It was known that Paula was in love with another party member, even if he had not shown much interest in her. “That’s why it was such a surprise,” Cruso explained. Ben-Gurion went on to the offices of Der Yiddisher Kempfer and placed a wedding notice, in Hebrew. In doing so, he gave her a Hebrew name, Penina, putting “Paula” in parentheses. In Hebrew he spelled her last name like that of King Monobaz of Adiabene of the first century C.E., who according to legend converted to Judaism.
They did not throw a party and did not go on a honeymoon. According to Paula, her family opposed her marriage to Ben-Gurion because he was a Zionist.†† When, many years later, she was asked what had been the happiest day of her life, she said it had been the day she gave birth to her oldest daughter.34
In the months that followed, Ben-Gurion worked with Ben-Zvi to complete their book. They could hardly have found a better time to put it out, immediately following the Balfour Declaration. By one estimate, twenty-five thousand copies were sold.35 The cover named the authors as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; Ben-Gurion was finally the first. “Two-thirds of the book is mine,” he wrote to his father.36 The central claim of the book was that most of the fellahin, the Arab peasant farmers in Palestine, were not of Arab descent. Rather, they were the descendants of Jews who had lived in Palestine before the Arab conquest. The only real Arabs, he argued, were the Bedouin tribes.‡‡
The fundamental assumption was that Palestine had not emptied of Jews following the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70. They had continued to live there, primarily in the Galilee, and most of them were farmers. When the Arabs arrived at the beginning of the seventh century, most of these Jews adopted Islam and began to speak Arabic, and by doing so survived. The consequence was the creation of a variety of mixed identities, but most of the Muslim fellahin living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean belonged to “a single racial type,” Ben-Gurion asserted categorically. “Much Jewish blood flows in their veins, the blood of Jewish farmers who chose, in their time of distress, to repudiate their religion so as not to be uprooted from their land.” He based this claim largely on anthropological information he found in libraries. The fellahin, he wrote, had many traditions much like those described in the Bible as Jewish; they preserved biblical personal names and the names of biblical settlements, as well as Hebrew words.37
From a scientific standpoint, the thesis was highly controversial; its political significance was that the Jews had never left their land and continued to live there. It was solid proof that Zionism did not require clashing with the fellahin. It was also unequivocal proof that “Jewish blood” rather than religion determined Jewish identity. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi did not go into all that; they simply presented their finding as if it represented proven scientific truth.
They also drew the map of the Land of Israel as if it were no more than a geographical issue. In doing so, they discarded the borders that, according to religious faith, God had promised to his people. They termed these “ideal borders,” while themselves sufficing with “actual borders.” In the north they included Mount Hermon, the headwaters of the Yarmouk River, the Litani River, and the city of Sidon. The eastern border was traced far beyond the Jordan, including the Hauran plateau. They did not mark a border in the eastern desert, because they presumed that the area of the land would expand or shrink in keeping with the national home’s ability to exploit the wilderness. In the south the border extended from El Arish to Eilat. It was a Zionist compromise between what Ben-Gurion later described as Greater and Lesser Palestine. The land so bounded, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi observed, had more than a million inhabitants. In other words, they did not claim that the land was empty. They did, however, assert that it was a “land without a nation” and that it “awaited a people.” They grounded the Jewish right to settle the land not only in history; they offered ecological arguments as well. “The land of flowers and the sun,” they wrote, “the consummately wonderful land without parallel on the globe,” has become a wasteland, “innumerable thorns and thistles cover the beautiful valleys.” The gardens and forests had vanished, the mountain slopes were lifeless. All this had occurred because it was a land without a nation. With the return of its people, its natural treasures would bloom again.38
They did their best to maintain an understated academic style; they presented claims and counterclaims, backed with lots of dates and tables of figures. The project turned out to be much more extensive than they had expected, requiring a number of volumes; for now, they had completed only the first. Ben-Gurion said he was not pleased. But after two years of work, sixteen hours a day, he had reached the conclusion that a book as comprehensive and thorough as he had hoped to write would require fifteen years of labor.§§
In the meantime, events impelled him to put down the pen and take up the sword, he wrote. He was referring to the efforts to establish the Jewish Legion.39
*
The story began with Trumpeldor’s Zion Mule Corps and continued in London. Ze’ev Jabotinsky shared an apartment with Vera and Chaim Weizmann in Chelsea. He sought the establishment of a Jewish Legion that would participate in the conquest of Palestine, under the command of the British army. Weizmann did not oppose the idea; he understood its political value and its symbolic significance, but remained very cautious. His principal goal was to promote the Balfour Declaration, and he wanted nothing to stand in the way.
When Britain declared general conscription, the question arose of what to do with the about thirty thousand Jewish men of military age—the schneiders (meaning “tailors”), as they were called—who had emigrated from Russia. Most of them hoped to evade enlistment. The interior secretary, Herbert Samuel, searched for a way to go easy on them and kept deferring their mobilization. In the meantime, the number of British dead was rising, and as Ben-Gurion later related, “considerable justified anti-Semitic agitation began.” In February 1917, the government demanded a decision—the Jewish immigrants should either enlist or return to Russia. Unwillingly, but with no other choice, Weizmann had to deal with the issue. He proposed acceptance of Jabotinsky’s program for the establishment of a Jewish Legion. When the United States entered the war, Weizmann proposed a similar arrangement for American Jews.
Pinhas Rutenberg, who had already spoken of this with Ben-Gurion, and Ben-Gurion himself went to see Justice Brandeis and proposed that a Jewish battalion be formed in the U.S. Army as well, and be deployed in the conquest of Palestine. Brandeis brought the idea before President Wilson. The president sent Brandeis to the British, reverting this initiative to London, to Weizmann and Jabotinsky. At the end of July 1917, the British War Office declared that enlistment could commence.40
Ben-Gurion spoke with the British ambassador to Washington and, during the months that went by before London approved the plan, he devoted himself to promoting Jewish enlistment. “Immigrating to Palestine in khaki uniform became a very popular slogan,” wrote Ben-Zvi, who was also encouraging Jews to volunteer.41 In the meantime, Ben-Gurion had become fed up with the intrigues and disputes in his party; he claimed to have been the victim of “personal attacks” and described “irritability and filth” that he attributed to the influence of American politics. They fought over, among other things, the allocation of party funds to activity in the United States and in Palestine. Ben-Gurion resigned from the party Central Committee.42 At the end of April 1918, he reported to the British consul in New York, and a few weeks later he was sworn into His Majesty’s army and set out for Windsor, Canada, where he began his training.43 Paulichke, as he had begun to call his wife, was miserable when he left her, just half a year after they married. She felt hurt, frightened, and offended—and she was pregnant.
On the way to his training camp he passed through several cities. Members of their Jewish communities awaited him, pressed forward to shake his hand, asked him to make speeches, bore him on their shoulders, gave him and his companions flowers and chocolate. Six weeks of drills and rifle practice followed. From time to time the soldiers had to dismantle their tents and put them up again; they had kitchen and guard duty; from time to time they stood for inspection and were taken out for parades.
Nothing they did indicated that they were going to be deployed on a real front. “The military training we received is insufficient by any standard,” Ben-Zvi wrote. Indeed, its main purpose was not military but rather political and symbolic. The Legion represented Zionist ideology, with its own flag and insignia; the soldiers formed a committee that represented them to their commanders. They made a variety of demands, such as the supply of kosher food. They had stationery printed, with a Hebrew logo. Ben-Gurion used the camp phone and received calls as well, organized a memorial rally for Herzl, and read The New York Times. The British commanders adapted themselves to the Legion’s exceptional nature. As part of this, they engaged in extended negotiations before Private 3831, Ben-Gurion, David, as he was referred to on his military documents, agreed to accept the rank of corporal. He thought he would have greater authority as one of the soldiers, but in the end accepted. “I have a special job,” he told his wife. “Anyone who has a complaint or thinks he was done an injustice comes to me. And if someone wants to know something, he comes to me. Add to this three meetings of the Committee and then you have my entire daily schedule.”44
According to one document, twenty-seven hundred men enlisted in the Jewish Legion in the United States. These included soldiers who volunteered for Jewish and Zionist reasons, but there were others who were “uncouth types and criminals from birth,” Ben-Gurion wrote. He was especially proud of how he handled a man who had been imprisoned at Sing Sing. The man was “a thief from Pennsylvania” who bragged about his wife being a whore. His encounter with this man strengthened his faith in humankind, he said: “I also believe in the sinner.” The former convict had donated five dollars to help pay for the Herzl memorial event.45
*
Ben-Gurion’s letters to Paula read like those written by a boy to his mother from a summer camp. “I’ve become a pupil again,” he wrote, and said that he looked like a boy of fourteen or fifteen. One would not guess that these were the letters of a soldier who had volunteered to fight in a war that had already claimed the lives of fifteen million. “I feel a little intoxicated by my new life,” he told her. “It is very pleasant to wake up with the sun and it is pleasant to shower on the lawn in the fresh early morning air.” It was probably not the right thing to write to a woman he had left to go through her pregnancy alone, but he frequently wrote to her about his love and described it as a little boy’s love. For her part, Paula diligently took on the role of new mother. She reminded him again and again to brush his teeth. He promised her that he was doing as she said and that he was also laundering his handkerchiefs. Ben-Zvi wrote similar letters to Rachel Yanait.46
Paula wrote to her husband as often as three times a week, in English. Sometimes he received four or five letters at once. His letters to her, numbering in the dozens, were in Yiddish. “I want to hold you, not only in my heart but also in my arms and to my bosom,” he wrote after several months of separation. “I want to gaze not only on your picture but on you yourself, to embrace you, to press you to my heart and kiss you, to kiss with love that has been held back and stifled for so long.” A few months later, he wrote: “I feel as if I am in love with you for the first time, and I seek your lips, your arms, and I want to press you against me, to embrace you with burning hands, to stand by your bed, to lean over you and cling to you, to give myself over to your arms and to forget everything but you, like then, happy in your close love, together, arm in arm, lip to lip, heart to heart.”
He recalled the magical night that lulled them to sleep after covering them “with a coverlet of rapture and bliss” and impelled them “to be together, together.” He reminded her of the morning hours, when both of them were intoxicated with their love, “together in our arms, together in our hearts.” Even then, he seems to have had trouble dividing his time between his work and his love; work came first, as if there were no real choice. “Do you recall the few moments in the morning when I set aside my work and came to you, and a few times, after sleepless nights of work, I found you sleeping and I woke you with kisses on the mouth and embraces of your bare arms, and your eyes pleaded with me to stay a little longer. And more than your eyes, my heart shouted: Remain, remain, and both of us counted those few moments that passed so quickly.”47
But more than they portray a private love story, the letters put on display a role-playing game between two symbolic characters that took the place of the real David and Paula. At first she was just his “wife,” as he wrote in his diary on their wedding day; that same day he invented a new name for her. She continued to sign her letters with her original name, Pauline. She called her husband “Ben-Gurion,” and that is how he signed his letters to her. He loved her as a “wife,” “mother,” and “sister.” In a will he wrote at this time, he divided custody of the baby between her and his father in Płońsk.***
In the role-playing, she was the injured, suffering, and accusing party; he was the transgressor, agonized by guilt feelings.
Her letters conveyed severe, sometimes heartbreaking distress. She told him about annoying neighbors and pains in her legs, which had swollen during the pregnancy. She had trouble falling asleep and suffered toothaches, and the baby kicked her. The money he arranged for her had been delayed. But more than anything else she wrote of her loneliness. He was the only one she could share her troubles with and he was not around. She pleaded with him to allow her to join him in Canada; he replied that the trip was too expensive and that he might have to leave the camp any day. “You are a bad lover, husband, and father,” she wrote to him, and again and again reminded him to keep his promise to her, which was apparently that he would not be unfaithful and would not be killed. “Everything is gloomy and dreary in my life,” she wrote. “I feel so miserable … I read all your letters today and you could imagine how much I cried … and why shouldn’t I cry, have I got anybody as near to me as you? You are my all [sic] life … and the rest seem to be dead to me … I never thought I could love so sublimely, but one (God) knows how much I love you … I picture, when I will come back from the hospital, nobody to welcome us … As nobody could take your place, you are so good, especially to me … I suppose I don’t deserve anything better, and I have to suffer.”48
His responses proceeded in stages. At first he answered her claim to have been hurt with his own: “You think, dear, that had I loved you more, I would not have volunteered for the Legion. Why do you know me so little!” He promised her that he was one of those people whose love was forever. After this, he sympathized with her and tried to take on himself, if he could, some of her suffering. “When I read your letters,” he wrote, “I feel everything that you feel and suffer everything that you suffer.” He said he missed her and desperately wanted to be with her. In the third stage, he sought atonement: “I want to fall at your feet and plead for your forgiveness.” Then he promised her that her suffering would only enhance his love. “Now it is more than love,” he wrote. “You are my saint, the suffering angel who hovers around me without my seeing, to which my soul is drawn, on which gaze my heavenward eyes, for I see you standing on high, above me; because what you have done is so great that I sometimes want to remove my hat and bow, bow down low to your valor, which I will not cease wondering at and adoring all my life.” In the end, he depicted his service in the Legion as the essence of their love and happiness: “The greatest thing that I could do now for you is to part and volunteer for the Legion, to leave you with an unborn child and set out for the front, because that deed will sanctify our love and prepare the happiness of our lives.”
When he fell in love with her and decided to unite their lives forever, he wrote, he did not want to give her “tiny, cheap, everyday happiness,” but rather prepared for her “the greatest, most holy, most human happiness, acquired with suffering and agony.” He was delighted to discover that she was capable of suffering together with him “for the sake of a great thing.” There was an almost contractual element to his approach, like that which governed his relations with his father during his period of study. “We melded in our love and there is no longer ‘I and you’ between us,” he wrote, “but instead my heart is your heart and your heart is my heart … and I still believe that I am not the only one who volunteered, but that both of us volunteered for the Legion.”49
On display again here was a complete identity between the needs of the Zionist struggle and his personal feelings. Perhaps it was simply egotism on his part. Maybe he had been uneasy with the routine life of a married man; perhaps he viewed marriage as a division of roles between a warrior man and a woman whose duty was motherhood. Maybe he abandoned Paula as his mother had abandoned him. Perhaps he really believed that the Jewish Legion was worth the price that Paula had to pay, as if it were the judgment of history. Whatever the case, no one had compelled him to enlist; he did it of his own free will. It was probably the only way he could return to Palestine, and service in the Legion finally added a military chapter to his political biography. During the next world war, Ben-Gurion could comment, as if incidentally, “It is not easy and not pleasant to be a soldier. I remember well the days and nights of immense boredom, when my friends and I were in uniform.” Those who heard him might have concluded that they were listening to a seasoned fighter.50
*
By the end of the war, five thousand soldiers had served in the Jewish Legion. They came from England, the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Palestine. Some of them managed to take part in the final stages of the conquest of Palestine from the Turks. But the Jewish unit established in America was a Zionist illusion, of zero military value. Like Bilu and the American branches of Hehalutz, its principal contribution to the Zionist struggle was the myth it bequeathed to the movement.†††
On the way from Canada to Scotland, Ben-Gurion imagined himself “at the head of the Hebrew battalion on its way to fight for the redemption of the land.” The sea was a bit rough, he noted in his diary, and he was slightly nauseous. Corporal Ben-Gurion did not, of course, stand at the head of the battalion, and he would miss the “redemption of the land.” By that time, the British had controlled Jerusalem for half a year, after taking it from the Turks. Chaim Weizmann had already ridden in a Rolls-Royce with General Edmund Allenby, the commander of the British forces in Palestine, to the peak of Mount Scopus. There he laid, “in the name of the Hebrew army,” one of the cornerstones of the Hebrew University. About six thousand guests attended the ceremony; Lord Balfour sent his personal greetings. Ben-Gurion and his comrades-in-arms had landed on the shores of Britain two days previously. He immediately set out for London and the office of Po’alei Zion there, in Whitechapel.51
On August 12, 1918, Ben-Gurion received a rifle, and three days later set sail with the rest of his battalion for France; from there they continued on to Italy. On his way to the front, to deal the final blows to the Turks, he could tell himself that he owed them a lot. Thanks to the Turks, he’d gone to America, an introverted, clueless guy. He didn’t want to be a laborer, and couldn’t be a lawyer. During the three years he spent in New York, his youth came to an end; he married and acquired self-confidence. In the process, he came to understand the huge power of the capitalist United States, the advantages and disadvantages of its Constitution and governmental structure, and the good and bad aspects of the American melting pot.‡‡‡52
London was still the center of Zionist activity, but Ben-Gurion already sensed that the future lay in America. His encounter with American Jews was disappointing, even if Palestine was not yet ready for mass immigration, as he told them.53 He knew how to treat people like Shmuel Fuchs with forgiveness, but as a Zionist, he was frustrated by them. He knew that the future of Zionism depended to a large extent on the money of American Jews, which made him all the more frustrated.
But this first American episode in his life entirely changed his feelings about himself, and consolidated some of the fundamental elements of his personality: the ability to learn, the skill to express himself in writing, and his romantic sensibility. He gained fame as a journalist and an author. He gained a livelihood—not wealth, but enough to support his wife. He still did not look like a national leader, but his constant involvement in the Po’alei Zion’s machine broadened his political experience. He had contact with people of influence, among them the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. It was an acquaintanceship that enabled him to say that he was only one individual removed from the president of the United States. He sensed that a great historical responsibility lay on his party: “We must now grasp the greatness of our destiny; if we don’t, we will cause a tragedy for generations to come,” he wrote.54
*
It took them almost three weeks to reach Egypt’s Port Said. “I have returned to my land with my rifle in hand, under the Hebrew banner, a member of the Jewish Legion,” he wrote to his sister.55 In fact, his military career came to an end, for all intents and purposes, without him having heard a single shot in battle. Allenby was not enthusiastic about the members of the battalion coming to Palestine; most of them remained in Egypt. Ben-Gurion came down with dysentery and was again hospitalized for several weeks in a military hospital. There he followed the news from the front and wrote: “I fear that our battalion will not arrive in time to participate in the conquest of the land.”56 Meanwhile, Jabotinsky’s battalion made it to Transjordan and participated in the fighting there.
On September 17, 1918, while Ben-Gurion was still in the hospital, he received, six days late, a telegram from New York informing him of the birth of his daughter, Geula. His first reply was restrained, almost formal. “I take part in your happiness and joy and partake of your pain and your concern and your suffering,” he wrote to Paula. He added: “God has given us a precious, great, and beloved gift … a new world is revealed to you.” He wanted to embrace and kiss her and the baby, he went on. Then he declared: “Our land is already free; the light of the great, free, and happy tomorrow of our people is now breaking on the mountains of Judea and the Galilee.” After this, he asked how she was doing financially and how her Hebrew lessons were going, and he asked her to send him by mail his Hebrew–French dictionary. It had red covers, he added.
A week later, he found warmer and more personal words. It was his thirty-second birthday on the Hebrew calendar. “I am not capable of conveying to you in words what has come over me since I received the telegram … my heart trembled with joy. A few short words, but God, what great substance and what great happiness they brought me.” He sent her “loving and blazing love to our precious baby and to you, Paulichke, my dear.” Unusually, he even evinced a bit of humor: “Send me a picture of you and the baby and write to say if our girl is a little bit smart, even if only as much as her father, and full of charm, if only as much as her mother.” Paula wrote to him: “Despite the fact that she looks like you, she is so pretty.” In this letter, too, he noted that Geula came into the world at a tragic and sacred moment, toward a great future, and returned to his decision to abandon her at the time of her pregnancy and birth. “This awareness weighed on my heart like a heavy and terrible stone, but, Paulichke, that is what had to be,” he wrote.
In his third letter he entirely set aside history. He told her for the first time of his illness and hospitalization, and how at the time of the birth he was plagued with fearful nightmares, and how much happiness he had received from her cable. His absence from New York only increased the intimacy between them, he promised. “There is intimacy that is truer and more real than physical closeness,” he told her, “the intimacy of a great, immortal spirit, the eternal unity of souls.” He sent her his impressions of a book he read in the hospital, Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. “The entire book breathes a great love of humankind,” he told her, and recommended that she read all ten volumes, even if they bored her in some places.
On October 2, 1918, he wrote in his diary: “Yesterday morning the English entered Damascus. The redemption of the land is complete.”57 The world war lasted for about six weeks longer.
* Mizrahi, the religious-Zionist movement, had three times the membership of Po’alei Zion. In 1918 all the Yiddish newspapers in the United States taken together had a print run of about half a million. (Raider 1998, pp. 33, 41; Teveth 1977, p. 312, note 30.)
† He carefully recorded his expenses down to the last cent during the trip, such as $1.91 for a train ticket, $0.50 surcharge for a sleeping car, $0.20 as a tip to the porter. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, July 26, 1915, Dec. 2, 1917, BGA; Ben-Gurion to Hirsch Ehrenreich, Dec. 29, 1915, Jan. 6, 7, 1916, in Erez 1971, pp. 330, 333, 334.)
‡ Many years later, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion recalled how shocked he had been when he first encountered discrimination against blacks in the United States. It especially troubled him that there were Jews who supported it. “Had I been a Negro I would have been the ultimate anti-Semite,” he remarked. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, Nov. 9, 1940, BGA; Ben-Gurion to Ben-Zvi, Feb. 3, 1918, BGA, general chronological documentation; Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Feb. 12, 1953, May 3, 1960, NA.)
§ Many years later, Shimon Peres related that Paula, as everyone had come to call her, had told him that, had she wished, she could have married Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who was living in New York at that time. Peres said that he asked Ben-Gurion if that was true. Ben-Gurion replied that Paula had once gone to hear Trotsky speak; when she returned, she said that he had fallen in love with her. “He didn’t take his eye off me during the entire speech,” she said. When he asked, she told him that her seat had been in the middle of the front row. (Peres and Landau 2011, pp. 30–31.)
** According to census records, she was born in 1890, but her Israeli identity card listed her year of birth as 1892. There is no reason to believe that she provided American census-takers with incorrect information. (1910 United States Federal Census, Pauline Moonvess, ancestry.com; identity card, Paula Ben-Gurion, BGA, personal documents.)
†† Pauline Moonweis’s name appears in American records in a number of spellings. Another member of the family was the Israeli writer Gabriel Moked, whose last name was Moonweis before he Hebraized it. He recalled that when he was a boy, Paula bragged to him about her aristocratic origins, as opposed to Ben-Gurion’s proletarian family. The marriage certificate lists him as David G. Ben-Gurion. In other American documents he identified himself as David Gruen Ben-Gurion. (Gabriel Moked in conversation with the author; United States World War I Draft Registration Cards 1917–1918, FamilySearch https://familyserach.org.
‡‡ Ben-Zvi and Yanait had previously tried to find Bedouin of Jewish stock. (Yanait Ben-Zvi 1962, pp. 34, 58, 74ff.)
§§ The book appeared in Hebrew in Israel only years after their deaths. It was a semiofficial edition; a few chapters were omitted, including the one on the descent of the fellahin. (Ben-Gurion to his father, July 1, 1919, BGA; Ben-Gurion to his father, Dec. 5, 1919, in Erez 1971, p. 445.)
*** Ben-Gurion, “a.k.a. David Gruen,” as he wrote in his will, asked that the baby be given the name Yariv (meaning “fighter”); he expected a son. If it were to be a girl, he asked that she be named Geula (“redemption”). He wanted the child to be sent to school in Palestine and asked Paula to learn Hebrew, so that she could speak that language with his son. He bequeathed her $2,000, the proceeds of his life insurance, and $500 to his father, along with a request that he use the money to visit Palestine at least once a year. (Ben-Gurion, will, May 28, 1918, BGA, general chronological documentation, 1916–1918; Ben-Gurion 1971a, p. 104ff.)
††† Many years later, an official publication of the Israel Defense Forces asserted: “The Legion had to be established simply in order to prove that the Jewish people were prepared to fight for the Land of Israel and spill its blood for it.” (Elam 1984, p. 332.)
‡‡‡ Leo Deutsch, a Russian revolutionary in exile who shared Ben-Gurion’s table in the New York Public Library, recalled that Ben-Gurion read a great deal about the history of American political parties, as well as “practical guides in the techniques of swaying the masses.” Soon after arriving at the library, Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary data on the high proportion of black soldiers in George Washington’s army. (Grodzensky 1965.)