On a summer Saturday in 1958, Ben-Gurion received a visitor from America. The guest professed that he was an atheist, and added that his wife was not Jewish. Their daughter adopted her mother’s non-Jewish identity, but he had had his son circumcised. Ben-Gurion asked him why circumcision, if he was an atheist. “I don’t know. I want him to be a Jew. There’s something irrational about it,” replied the guest, Cyrus Leo Sulzberger II of The New York Times. “What is Judaism?” Ben-Gurion asked him. Sulzberger said that he didn’t know. The next day, Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet about the conversation. That same day the Cabinet addressed the question: Who is a Jew?1
He was one of those world leaders who believed that they could change the course of their people’s history. His ideological resolve was unbending, his imagination unbounded. Both told him that everything was possible, and nearly every price seemed reasonable. It was the foundation of his strength as a leader—people believed in him because he believed in himself. His colleagues in the leadership thus allowed him to make some decisions on his own. His values and worldview were more like those of a British and American liberal than of the socialist he claimed to be, or the totalitarian that his enemies accused him of being.
During the thirty years that preceded the founding of Israel, he played a decisive role in moving the Zionist project forward and in establishing the political, military, social, economic, and cultural infrastructures that made it possible to establish a Jewish state as soon as the British left Palestine. His success was not complete, nor his power absolute, but during its first fifteen years, Israel grew stronger and, under his leadership, laid the foundations for its further progress after he left the scene.
He was much less influential over the Jewish people as a whole. The Zionist movement had always failed to persuade most of the world’s Jews that it was right—that was its greatest failure. It proved helpless against Hitler and Stalin; that was its greatest tragedy. The Zionists were able to save only a small fraction of the Jews persecuted by the Nazis, and until many years after Ben-Gurion’s time failed to persuade the Soviet Union to allow its Jews to settle in Israel. The war for Palestine put an end to the communal life of most of the Islamic world’s Jews; most of them ended up in Israel. That was the longest-lasting imprint Ben-Gurion left on world Jewish history.
Both his admirers and his rivals agreed that he was his generation’s most singular man. But, paradoxically, his uniqueness was almost a norm for many members of his generation. As Jews, they were anomalous in their non-Jewish surroundings; as Zionists, they were anomalous among Jews; as Israelis, they were anomalous in their Arab surroundings; as supporters of the labor movement, they were anomalous in Israel.
Ben-Gurion could conduct a philosophical debate with an atomic physicist on whether the cosmos is a mind, but he left some of the fundamental questions of Israeli existence unanswered.2 The man who posed these questions with the utmost clarity was Shmuel Fox. Could the Jewish nation be reborn in its ancestral land without incurring the curse of having to live by the sword? What was the connection between Israel and the Jews of the rest of the world? And what was secular Judaism? Fox intimated that he might have settled in Israel had he had answers to these questions. Ben-Gurion chose to live there even though he thought that the country might well live from war to war for generations to come; he wanted to believe that he was a “secular Jew” even though he was unable to define what exactly it was that made a person a Jew. He also had a hard time defining who was a Zionist.3
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The British high commissioner Arthur Wauchope once asked him what the Jews were: A religion? A race? The British used the term “race” in the sense of both ethnic group and nation, which made the question even more complicated. “I said, number one, recognizing themselves as such,” Ben-Gurion wrote, summing up his reply. “Number two, recognition by others, that is the refusal of the gentiles to recognize the Jews as English, French, German, etc.”4 He tried to tiptoe around the question as if it were a minefield. “A Jew is a Jew,” he once pronounced at another opportunity. “I am a Jew and nothing else. It’s enough to be a Jew.” It was a problem that threatened political coexistence between secular and religious Jews.
Since Israel was defined as a Jewish state, it required a law laying out who was and who was not a Jew, among other reasons to determine who had a right to become an Israeli citizen. During the mid-1950s, there was a rise in the number of Eastern European immigrants who arrived in Israel with non-Jewish spouses, women in most cases. Ben-Gurion demanded that they be accepted as Israelis, “even if the woman is a German,” he said. “Not every German is necessarily a Nazi.”5 They generally received Israeli citizenship under the terms of the Law of Return, which provided that every Jew, with minor exceptions, could become a citizen. According to Ben-Gurion, the law granted Jews a right that had always been “intrinsic to them” because they were originally from Palestine. That right had preceded the establishment of Israel and was constitutive of the state, he said. It was in this spirit that he fought for the law’s poetic name.6 The question was how to register the children of such mixed couples. The Interior Ministry classified the children according to their mother’s religion, in accordance with Jewish religious law. In the winter of 1957, the issue came to a head in the case of Aharon Steinberg, a five-year-old boy whose parents lived in an immigrant camp not far from Pardes Hannah.
The father was a Holocaust survivor; his first wife and the three children he had had with her were murdered in Poland. He married again, this time a non-Jewish woman. They had two children. Aharon died a short time after his family arrived in Israel. Because he was the son of a Christian woman, and had not been circumcised, the parents’ request to bury him in a Jewish cemetery was rejected by the Jewish religious authorities. But the Christian authorities refused to bury him in a Christian cemetery because his father was Jewish. The bereft parents bore their son’s body to the local municipality building. A local rabbi ordered that the boy be buried outside the fence of the town cemetery, in an open field. The father was not permitted to say the traditional kaddish prayer. The story set off a public uproar. “A horrible thing has happened,” Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet. “It is no wonder that it became a sensation. It is a stain not just on Israel but on Judaism as well. We have always spoken against anti-Semitism, against discrimination, and against racism.” The debate over registration thus took on the dimensions of a national identity crisis.7
In March 1958, Minister of the Interior Israel Bar-Yehuda, of Ahdut Ha’avodah, ruled that any person who in good faith declared himself to be a Jew would be registered as a Jew, unless he could be proved not to be. The directive did not accord with Jewish religious law. The two religious Cabinet members resigned. The government did not fall as a result, but Ben-Gurion wanted them back in. At first he tried to pretend that the dispute was merely an administrative matter, and as such he focused on finding a formulation to permit registration in a way that would skirt the issue of the essence of Jewish identity. When that failed, he suggested that parents who declared in good faith that they were Jews would also be required to affirm that they did not adhere to a different religion, and to state that their sons were circumcised. The question remained open, not just because it did not require any external evidence of Judaism for girls, but also because the religious establishment’s ritual circumcisers would most likely refuse to perform the operation simply on the basis of a parental declaration. Ben-Gurion proposed that the Cabinet solve this problem by instituting “national circumcision,” which would be performed by doctors. The ministers held a lengthy debate over the significance of this surgical intervention; all of them were men, as Golda Meir was not present at the meeting. Ben-Gurion insisted circumcision be included in the definition of a child’s Judaism with almost religious fervor. “This has been a sort of clear mark of Judaism for many generations,” he declared. “I don’t know if it began in the time of Abraham or not. I wasn’t alive at that time. I don’t know if the story told in Genesis is a legend, myth, or historical truth. I tend to think that it is historical, but for thousands of years it has been a clear mark among the Jews.” He warned that if the State of Israel set it aside, the split within the Jewish people would grow deeper.
Ben-Gurion did not demand mandatory circumcision for boys of veteran Israelis. Uncircumcised boys of secular Jewish parents would still be counted as Jews. Cases of this sort were extremely rare in Israel, but Ben-Gurion fought for the principle.
“A Jew can be an unbeliever but still be a Jew,” he maintained. He noted that other religions also practiced circumcision.8
The principal question remained unanswered, and the major goal continued to be political—to restrict the power of the official rabbinate. As part of this, Ben-Gurion sought not only to institute “national circumcision” but also to rule on the status of communities whose membership in the Jewish people was controversial—he insisted that the Karaites and Samaritans, two groups that split away from the main body of Judaism in ancient times, be accepted as Jews. While he always claimed not to believe in race theory, he said that “a Cushite woman can’t be said to be Jewish”—referring to the woman whom Moses married according to the book of Numbers. Traditionally, the term “Cushite” was understood to mean “dark-skinned,” and in the modern Hebrew of the time it was the equivalent of “Negro.” But ten years later, he accepted the Jewish status of the Falashas, as the Jews of Ethiopia were called then. He claimed that he had not worked to enable them to immigrate to Israel because he did not know if they wished to do so.9 Here, too, he seems to have operated as a politician facing off against a religious establishment that still refused to accept this group as Jewish. It was also as a politician that he had the Cabinet resolve to ask several dozen “wise Jews” to weigh in on the riddle of Jewish identity.
The question was put to fifty-one rabbis, philosophers, writers, and scholars, all of them men. Most lived in the United States or Europe. They were ostensibly asked only for their advice on the registration issue, but in fact they were asked to define who is a Jew. It may have been the only time in history that a government asked citizens of other countries to help it demarcate its own identity. The replies offered nothing new and did not provide a solution; ultimately, the initiative was no more than a curiosity.10 This poll of “wise Jews” also grew out of Ben-Gurion’s difficulty in coping with the question of marriages between Jews and non-Jews. He believed that life in Israel ensured that the children of such intermarriages would live as Jews, whereas the children of intermarriages living elsewhere would grow distant from Jewish tradition. He took a great interest in the fate of the thousands of Jewish children who had been saved from death during the Holocaust when Christian families and convents provided them with shelter. He saw them as a national asset. He warned against allowing them to be educated as Christians, and demanded that they be returned to their parents or placed in public institutions in Palestine.11 But he opposed intermarriage in principle. “I think that it is not a good phenomenon,” he said. “Not good, first, for the marriage itself. It causes a lot of complications. But there are exceptions.”12 On this point, he had trouble separating his role as a national leader from his own son’s story.
During the last week of January 1946, Amos Ben-Gurion telephoned his father to tell him that he had fallen in love and had decided to get married. He had already written to his mother. He was serving as an officer in the British army at the time. Two months previously, he had fallen ill and was hospitalized at a military hospital in Liverpool. His parents opposed the marriage. Ben-Gurion rushed to England to explain to him “the extent to which this is not desirable,” principally for him and his future. The father was not optimistic. “I am not certain that I will manage to get him out of the mess he has gotten himself into,” he wrote to Paula. The problem was that Mary Callow was not Jewish. She came from an Anglican family living on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. She was close to completing her nursing studies and had met Amos in the hospital. Their decision to marry certainly could make living in Palestine problematic for them, but it was even more of a problem for Amos’s father, then chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive.13
Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward marriages between Jews and non-Jews was fairly conservative. It was a phenomenon he had first encountered in childhood. An uncle of Rachel Nelkin, the first girl he had loved, had married a non-Jewish woman and converted to Christianity. Shlomo Zemach later recalled that when the uncle, who lived in the Polish quarter of Płońsk, passed through the Jewish quarter, children would jeer him by shouting “Nel-kin the a-pos-tate.” Sometimes he would need to call in the police to escape them. Ezra the scribe, the biblical figure whose name Ben-Gurion and his friends had chosen for their first organization, had commanded: “Now then, do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or let their daughters marry your sons” (Ezra 9:12, 10:3). Ben-Gurion had been about eighteen years old when he read in a newspaper that Max Nordau, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement, was married to a non-Jewish woman. He was so upset by the news that he immediately wrote to his friend Shmuel Fuchs. Nordau had been mentioned as a possible successor to Herzl as president of the Zionist Organization. In a newspaper interview he said that his family life was liable to expose him to libels and slanders.
Ben-Gurion later told of the first time he had encountered an intermarried couple at Sejera. There was a Jewish teacher there who had married a non-Jewish woman. In 1936, Ben-Gurion had been told by Rabbi Yehuda Maimon, a prominent religious Zionist leader, that among the refugees arriving from Germany were at least a thousand gentile women. “I said that we will not do as the Nazis did,” Ben-Gurion wrote. He asked Rabbi Maimon if he would not allot an immigration certificate to a German Zionist with a Christian wife. Maimon said he would do so, but that if he had only a single certificate to give, he would give preference to a Zionist without a Christian wife. Ben-Gurion recorded his answer without comment. Three years later, he rejected marriages between Jewish women and Arab men. “I am very much in favor not only of reaching an agreement, but also closer relations, contacts, and cooperation. But I am not now prepared for my daughter to marry an Arab, and not for religious reasons. I am not religious. And not for racial reasons, but because as I see it an Arab is still not on the human level that I would want for a man who marries a Jewish woman.” In 1966 he asked his close associate Avraham Wolfensohn what he would say if his daughter were to tell him that she wanted to marry a non-Jew. Wolfensohn replied that he would not oppose it. Ben-Gurion asked: “Even if she were to fall in love with a Negro?” Wolfensohn said he would not oppose a marriage “to any man she falls in love with—I am opposed to racism.” Ben-Gurion’s reply was: “It’s not that simple.”14
That was why, partly because of his concept of Jewish identity, and partly because of the “libels and slanders” Nordau had cited, Ben-Gurion tried to persuade his son to leave his beloved. He referred to his meeting with Amos as a “hearing,” as if it were a party caucus rather than a heart-to-heart conversation between father and son. “It would be useless, nor is there any reason, to get angry or reprimand him,” he wrote to Paula. “Force and shouting won’t change anything.” He hoped that all was not yet lost, but didn’t really believe that. “I think that the matter is not all that serious yet, although I am not certain that it is not serious,” he wrote, composing one of those convoluted sentences that often served him in times of crisis. He tried to solve the problem with “friendly treatment, without any compulsion or duress,” he wrote. He had not yet met Mary herself. He failed utterly.
He was late for the wedding—Amos and Mary were waiting for him on the track at the Liverpool railway station. They had already wed. “Mary made a good impression on me,” Ben-Gurion reported to Paula cautiously. According to Amos, his father fell in love with Mary at first glance, and even whispered in his ear: “It’s good, it’s good, it’ll enhance the stock.” Ben-Gurion’s report to Paula offered no physical description of their daughter-in-law. “She is an intelligent and strong-willed girl,” he wrote. “She knows and understands what awaits here. She loves Amos profoundly and is ready for everything. She is concerned that her parents will not under any circumstance grant their consent to what she has done. And perhaps they will not want to speak with her. But her desire is to follow Amos like Ruth did in her time, to leave everything and become a Jewish woman in every respect.” To stress her good influence on their son, he added: “Amos has stopped smoking. He promised Mary and me that he would not smoke anymore. He has also become more frugal.”15
While he was still hospitalized, Amos was visited by Liverpool’s chief rabbi, Isser Yehuda Unterman. Ben-Gurion sent him an emotional thank-you letter. “I will never forget this act of kindness,” he wrote.16 Following the marriage, Ben-Gurion asked Unterman to convert Mary, apparently hoping for a rapid process. The rabbi replied “with sorrow and offense,” as he wrote in a letter that rebuked Ben-Gurion in a way not many others ever had. He was well acquainted with the intermarriage problem, Rabbi Unterman wrote, and he also knew Amos’s story quite well. He had twice invited Amos to his home, once orally and once in writing. If he had come, he would almost certainly have spoken to Amos about his love for Mary when “it was still not too late.” He speculated: “It is possible that something of what I said might have gotten to his heart, and at least he would not have taken such a hasty and impetuous step.” He noted that he had, with God’s help, succeeded in preventing a few other young men from “falling in the trap of a foreign woman,” but Amos had not come. Unterman hinted that, as the leader of the Jewish people in Palestine, Ben-Gurion might bear some of the responsibility not only for his son’s behavior but for that of Amos’s entire generation: “How wonderful it is that we ‘extremists’ seek the company of young people and our hearts are full of fondness for them, to the point that we disregard some transgressions and sins; and they, the ‘tolerant ones,’ who preach open-mindedness, keep their distance from us. It is unfortunate.” To the point, he instructed Ben-Gurion that a proper conversion could take years; he proposed finding Mary an appropriate teacher.
Ben-Gurion wrote to Mary that he was receiving a steady stream of congratulations on their marriage, and assured her that she would be warmly welcomed in Palestine. He promised to help her and indicated that he had three reasons to do so: “You, Amos, and baby.” She was in the early weeks of pregnancy; Ben-Gurion hoped to arrange for her conversion prior to her arrival in Palestine and the birth of his grandchild. As luck would have it, a Reform rabbi from New York, Joachim Prinz, happened to be in London; he and Ben-Gurion were longtime acquaintances. Ben-Gurion invited him to his office and, according to Prinz, showed him telegrams from Paula in which she demanded a conversion. Amos should not dare return home with a non-Jewish wife who had not yet converted, she wrote, according to Prinz.
He promised to make it easy for Mary, but, he related, she did not make it easy for him. She said that it was her intention to live in Amos’s country and to be part of his nation. She declared that she did not believe in the central tenets of Christianity, but refused to deny that, while living with her parents, she attended church. She also categorically rejected Rabbi Prinz’s suggestion that she change her name to Miriam. Prinz convinced himself that she would not remain in Palestine, and gave her a conversion certificate. But, as he was a Reform rabbi, the rabbinate in Palestine refused to recognize her as a Jew. Rabbi Prinz occasionally met Paula in later years, and wrote that she told him that she also did not consider her daughter-in-law a real Jew. Mary remained in Israel, and many years later underwent an Orthodox conversion.17
Ben-Gurion worked on Yom Kippur and ate pork, but reference to the latter was removed from the collection of his letters to Paula that was published after her death.18 That sort of partial and rather indeterminate “secularism” was practiced by many Jews, with individual differences. Berl Katznelson did not eat pork, but once, while in London, went to visit Karl Marx’s grave on Yom Kippur. Yitzhak Navon attended synagogue on Yom Kippur, but spent the rest of the day listening to Radio Damascus, he wrote in his diary.19 Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward Judaism remained indefinite throughout his life, just as it had been from the day he arrived in Palestine. He was only rarely seen in a synagogue, and when he went, it was generally when he was overseas. He claimed that the first time he went to a synagogue service in Israel was on the day of the Knesset’s inaugural session. He made a point of saying that he did not pray there. “I hope that your God will forgive me that transgression,” he replied to a citizen who had written to ask him about the incident.20 He sought the roots of his identity in the Hebrew Bible, to which his Zionism was also closely tied. “The endurance of the Jewish people,” he once wrote, “is rooted in these two things: the State of Israel and the Book of Books.”21 He sometimes compared Zionism to religion, speaking of the “Zionist faith,” and once even referred to the “Zionist commandments.” He saw Zionism as “the light secreted in the soul” of the Jewish people.22 But he did not leave it at that. During one of those innumerable debates over religion’s place in Israeli public life, he offered a monologue that opened with what was almost a supplication: “I cannot say that the Torah came from heaven. The Torah was written by human beings. But its value is no less for having been written by humans. On the contrary, if it came from heaven, what portion does the Jewish people have in it? The greatness of the Jewish people is that it wrote this Torah … Some believe that the Torah came from heaven, but I do not believe that. I am another kind of Jew.”23
That was a precise definition of how he felt, and even more so of what he hoped for. He wanted to be “another kind of Jew.” But the fact that he did not believe that a scion of the Jewish nation had a right to affiliate with a different religion showed that he did not believe in an entirely secular form of Judaism. The same could be said of his opposition to intermarriage and his insistence on male circumcision. In a forlorn attempt to grapple with this contradiction, he once said, referring to the classic code of Jewish law, “The Shulchan Aruch is a Jewish value for me, but we are not obligated to live our daily lives according to its strictures.”24 And there was also God.
Ben-Gurion was no atheist—he never denied God’s existence. But, influenced by Baruch Spinoza, he did not see God as a super-entity outside nature. His inclination was to identify God with Nature, including human existence. He believed that the Jewish people chose God before God chose the Jews. From the time when he first tried to put this idea into words, when he was eighteen, he had found proof of it in the text of the book of Joshua, “You chose God for yourselves” (Joshua 24:22), as well as in Deuteronomy 26:17–18. This thesis was important to him, because a nation that chooses its God is one that shapes its own historical destiny, just as Zionism advocated.
Spinoza was, as he saw it, “the greatest Jewish philosopher since the canonization of the Bible” until Albert Einstein. He also regarded Spinoza as the “first Zionist” of the last three hundred years. In one of the early articles he wrote after his retreat to Sde Boker, he demanded that Spinoza’s works be translated into modern Hebrew, so as to rectify the injustice that the Jewish establishment had done him when it banned him and his works in perpetuity.25 His article cited a theory that Spinoza’s ideas derived from Buddhism; he was inclined to agree. But Buddhism seems to have fascinated him chiefly because he saw it as an ethical teaching devoid of God, maintaining that humankind could craft its own moral values and shape its own fate. “In my opinion, Judaism is a historical experience,” he wrote in his diary, but he had trouble elucidating for himself what he meant by that. “God is a cosmic, universal, eternal being. It is true that the Bible is full of faith in the Creator, and there can be no doubt that Moses, Jeremiah, and the other prophets heard God’s voice, but God did not speak to them. The whole story of the burning bush and Mount Sinai are episodes in Moses’s history, not the history of God.”26
His struggles with the nature of faith grew more profound as he aged, when he increasingly came to believe in the existence of a God of some sort, even if not the God of Jewish faith. “The Jewish faith is part of Judaism, but Judaism is not part of the Jewish faith,” he wrote, “because Jewish faith has changed through different generations.”27 At the end of 1967, he wrote: “I believe in God, but on the matter of the 613 commandments there are different opinions … so the matter is not at all simple.”28 A year later, a visitor asked him if he believed in God. “The question is what you think when you say that word,” he responded. “Most Jews see it as an old man with a big beard sitting on his throne. And he speaks … I do not believe that God spoke … but I also don’t believe that there are only physical forces in the world. I cannot presume—and I asked one of the great men of science—that the brain is just a physical process.” He was referring to Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate of Jewish descent. When Ben-Gurion tried to persuade him that “the cosmos thinks,” Bohr responded that there were only physical processes in the universe. “How, by a physical process, could Newton’s brain arrive at such great innovations?” Ben-Gurion wondered. “Or Einstein’s theory, or any other scientific discovery? There is a thing called mind, no matter what it’s called, there is something higher than physical processes, in the entire universe.”
He told of a visit to Uppsala, Sweden: “They showed me a machine that measures millionths of a second,” he recalled. “I know that, theoretically, it is possible to divide a second not only into millionths but also into billionths and so on without end, but how do they do it?” The answer sounded simple: “They told me that the machine rotates very fast and that when I want to know, I stop it and then I know. And really, by this logic, that is a millionth of a second.” He knew that he walked eighty paces a minute, he added, “but a second is a short time, and it can be divided by a million?!” He could not imagine that there was not some higher power, or “ruler” of all this, he asserted, “a thing we call mind, but the name is not what determines it and it is not just a physical process. That’s that!”29 In 1970 he enumerated a number of principles that he saw as “the eternal essence of Judaism.” Among them were “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” At the top of the list he wrote: “The belief in one God who creates everything.”30 He did not concede his desire to be “another kind of Jew,” but he admitted that he could not be a wholly secular Jew, either.
His difficulty in defining his Judaism also made it hard for him to determine what relations ought to prevail between Israel and Jews who remained outside the country. His grandson Alon, whom Ben-Gurion had once referred to as half-Jewish and half-British, added a modicum of Zionist irony to this—he went to live in New York and for many years managed the Waldorf Astoria hotel.31
During his meeting with John Kennedy in 1961, the president pulled Ben-Gurion into a corner and, far from earshot of the other people in the room, told him: “You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York. I will do something for you.” He meant something in the area of aid for Israel. Ben-Gurion was shocked. “I’m a foreigner; I represent a small state. I didn’t come to him as a Jew, as a voter.” He was doubly insulted, first as prime minister of Israel and second in the name of American Jewry.32 Of course, he had known since World War I that that was how things worked. That was why he had then asked Ben-Zvi, who was in Washington during the war, if he had met “Woodrow,” meaning President Wilson. He took for granted that the road to realizing the Zionist program ran through the White House, and that American Jews should provide help along that part of the road.
But over the years he at times wrestled with trying to delineate the division of Zionist responsibility between the Jews of the Diaspora and those living in Israel. It was a complicated and sensitive subject, replete with internal contradictions, highly charged with ideological emotions that metamorphosed over the years. Ben-Gurion and his colleagues in the Zionist leadership never tired of holding forth on the issue in books, articles, and speeches. It was not just a philosophical question; it preoccupied Israelis constantly.
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In the summer of 1962, Israel was roiled by the cases of two Jews. One was a ten-year-old boy, born in the Soviet Union, named Yossele Schumacher. The second was Robert Soblen, a sixty-year-old psychiatrist who had been convicted in the United States of spying for the Soviet Union. He had been sentenced to life in prison but had been released on bail while his appeal was being heard. Yossele was smuggled out of Israel to New York; Soblen fled to Israel.
The boy fell victim to a family dispute over his schooling. His grandfather wanted him to receive a Haredi religious education. At one point, members of the Haredi extremist Neturei Karta sect intervened and spirited him out of Israel, dressed as a girl. “In my opinion there has not been such a scandal in Israel since it rose again,” Ben-Gurion said. He put the Mossad on the case. The Mossad chief, Isser Harel, showed the Cabinet broadsides and letters that Neturei Karta had written, in Yiddish, opposing Zionism. He charged them, among other things, with sabotaging the immigration of Jewish children from Morocco. The scandal set off an emotional debate over values that played on the bare nerves of Israeli “secular” identity. Yossele was seen as “the child of us all.” Getting him back was portrayed as a national challenge of unparalleled importance. Everyone was asking “Where’s Yossele?”
Ben-Gurion informed the Cabinet on July 1, 1962, that Yossele had been found in New York. He added that removing the boy from the United States and bringing him back to Israel required the consent of American immigration authorities. Later in his statement he said, as if it were a different subject, “At the request of the interior minister, I hereby announce that at 7:30 this morning, Dr. Soblen was flown to England … a physician was secretly sent with him, but he does not know that.” Another secret that Soblen presumably did not know was one that Ben-Gurion kept from his Cabinet as well—one of the passengers on the flight from Tel Aviv to London was an American secret agent who had arrived specially from the United States to accompany Soblen on his flight back to the USA.
The fact that Soblen had been expelled from Israel on the same morning that Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet about finding Yossele Schumacher resulted from a diplomatic deal. Harel had phoned the Israeli ambassador in Washington to demand that he call Attorney General Robert Kennedy to make the appropriate arrangements for Yossele’s return. Soblen, it seems, was deported precipitously, without even being given an opportunity to appeal, in response to an American demand, and in order to expedite the arrangements for Yossele’s return. Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that he assumed personal responsibility for Soblen’s deportation, despite the fact that he was Jewish. He displayed considerable anger at a Cabinet meeting. “I think it is a disgrace to our country,” he said. “There is a new Jewish hero, Dr. Soblen. A con man and swindler.”33 Soblen remained in London for a time. When the British authorities decided to extradite him to the United States, he took poison and died.
He was not the first Jewish criminal to seek refuge in Israel. The law said that they could be expelled, but in each case their stories revealed internal contradictions that challenged Israel’s ideological commitment to serve as a sanctuary for persecuted Jews.34 Ben-Gurion continued to see all the world’s Jews as a single nation, and was convinced that the return to Zion manifested the interests of all Jews. This led him to divide the Jewish people into four categories: Zionists, sympathizers, the indifferent, and enemies. Most Jews were sympathizers or indifferent. There are few Zionists in the world, he remarked. He saw this principally as a Jewish, not a Zionist, failure. “All the millions of Jews of past generations who have prayed and longed and hoped and wished and ached and yearned to the death for a return to Zion did not bring a single Jew to the land,” he said. “Has the Jewish nation returned to its land? Only a handful, individuals, a small number.”35
His fundamental assumption was that the right place for every Jew to be was in Israel, and that their duty as Zionists was to settle there. In 1950 he declared that “the Arabs don’t need to live here, just as an American Jew shouldn’t live in America.”36 But the Zionist enterprise was very much dependent on the philanthropy and support of Jews who did not want to live in Israel. Ben-Gurion himself had experienced that dependency, during his long period of relying on his father. Many Jews feared that Zionism would jeopardize their standing as the citizens of their own countries, as Ben-Gurion very well knew. “The aspiration for Israel to be the world center of the Jewish people puts the rights of the Jews in the Diaspora at risk,” he said. Many other Polish Jews regarded themselves as Polish patriots and never thought of leaving their country. So did Jews in Germany and other countries.37
The more secure his position as a local leader in Palestine became, the more Ben-Gurion was inclined to stress the duty of Jews overseas to assist in the realization of the Zionist project, even while remaining in their own countries. Less than a year after the Balfour Declaration, he proposed establishing a world Jewish congress with “governing power” recognized in international law; it would have the authority to levy taxes from the Jews of the world, with the money going to Palestine. In 1947 he returned to an old idea of his, describing the world’s Jews as “hostages.” They faced the danger of revenge attacks if Israel did not treat its Arab minority with “absolute justice.”38
He knew that without the influence of American Jewry, including their money and their votes, Zionism would never achieve its goals. And he realized that many American Jews were more useful to Zionism there than in their historic homeland. He thus learned to flatter donors who helped his party; he used a lot of exaggeration, as he had learned to do in America. “I think that the participation of the American labor movement is actually more important than the diplomatic victory of the Balfour Declaration,” he once wrote to an acquaintance in New York.39
The Zionist enterprise in Palestine thus had an interest in having Jews remain in other countries, and of wielding power and influence there. Ben-Gurion the ideologue did not want to admit this. “A Jewish Cabinet minister in England, or a Jewish viceroy in India, does nothing at all to solve the Jewish question,” he wrote.40 But, speaking as a “Zionist preacher” who sought to enlist maximal support, he once declared that Zionism was also bound to fight to ensure equal rights for the Jews of Poland, Russia, and “every other country.” Political and economic rights were no less important than national rights, he said.41 He sometimes maintained that the establishment of a Jewish state was not an end in and of itself, but rather only a stage in the Jewish people’s redemption. “The state is not for the Jews of Palestine alone, nor can the Jews of Palestine alone establish and maintain it,” he said. “The state is for the Jewish people and only if we mobilize the full capabilities of the nation will it come into being.” That was at the beginning of 1948. “We would not prevail without the help of the Jewish people,” he said; Golda Meir would later say the same. Just as Jewish supporters of Israel funded a large part of the War of Independence, in many cases in violation of American law, the nuclear reactor in Dimona would also be funded in part from contributions made by a select group of individual Jews around the world.42
This dependence was vital but frustrating, and sometimes humiliating. Ben-Gurion appreciated the solidarity he discovered among America’s Jews, but sometimes he could not restrain himself, as when one philanthropist regaled him with a description of his vacation home not far from Chicago, which he had named Palestine. “And why don’t you have a summer house in Tel Aviv and call it Chicago?” Ben-Gurion suggested.*43
Jacob Blaustein, the oil magnate and president of the American Jewish Committee, managed to obtain a written commitment from Ben-Gurion stating that Israel would not interfere with the lives of America’s Jews and would not try to ensnare them with dual loyalties. Here, too, Ben-Gurion acknowledged the legitimacy of Jewish life outside Israel, in contradiction of the principles of Zionism.44 But he also refused to recognize Diaspora Jews as Zionists and took pride in the fact that he had, many years before, put the word “Zionists” inside quotation marks when referring to Zionist activists around the world. Zionism in Palestine was, in his view, much more than Zionism elsewhere. “Singing ‘Hatikvah’ in Cleveland is a Zionist act,” he said. “To fight and build the Negev—that’s also a Zionist act, but is there not a difference between them?” Only a small number of American Jews agreed with him. Rose Halprin, the president of Hadassah, called his position childish.45
He kept abreast of the situation of the world’s Jews, noting that the influence they wielded in their home countries could also be problematic. As part of this, he analyzed, with trepidation, the standing of America’s Jews. There was no contradiction between being a Jew and being a citizen of the United States, he noted, and that was why Zionism could not succeed.46 Every manifestation of anti-Semitism could, in contrast, be a “boost,” as he liked to say. That was a fundamental idea of Herzl’s: “The anti-Semites will be our most steadfast friends,” he wrote. “The anti-Semitic countries will be our allies.”47 The Haavara Agreement between the Zionist movement and the Nazis, as well as the agreements to evacuate Jews from Eastern Europe and the Islamic countries after the Holocaust, were indicators of this thesis.
When the reparations negotiations with Germany ensued, it was of great ideological and political importance to Israel that it be recognized as the representative of all the Holocaust’s victims. This same principle once engendered a proposal to grant Israeli citizenship to each of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. Ben-Gurion expressed reservations but did not reject the idea out of hand. He feared that the Germans would see it as blackmail. It turned out that coordination with Jewish organizations outside Israel was a better way to get good results in the negotiations with the Germans.48
Many of those who made their lives in Israel, whether they came by choice or ended up there as refugees, felt that they had had a better life in “Exile.” Their difficult integration into Israeli society impelled Ben-Gurion to promote Israeli identity, especially among young people. It was one of the tasks he assigned to the army. The Jews of Israel, he maintained, are not “just a collection of Jews from the Diaspora,” as he put it. “It is impossible not to see that what we have here is a Jewish nation, bearing the characteristics of an independent people.” This approach also threatened a crisis with American Jewry.†
The need to persuade themselves that life in Israel was “fuller” than life elsewhere produced, among many Israelis, a tendency to look down on Diaspora Jews who had chosen to remain in their countries. Ben-Gurion shared this inclination. He on occasion voiced scorn for the Jews of the rest of the world, and sometimes he was ashamed of them. “What value do tailors and shoemakers have there?” he once asked Jewish labor associations in America. The Histadrut in Palestine, on the other hand, was working to create a more healthy social structure for the Jewish people, he maintained.49
“The most precious thing that the Zionist movement produced is not new ideas but a new human type,” he said at Mapai’s founding congress.50 He himself was not a good example of the “new Jew” that Zionism took pride in creating in Palestine. He remained essentially a Polish Jew, as he said, with his feet planted firmly in a social, political, and mental establishment created in Eastern Europe. He never entirely shed what the poet Shaul Tchernikovsky had called “the imprint of his native landscape.” Thick cords of memory and sentiment connected him to the days of his youth, and he was sometimes overcome by longing, as when he went to see The Dybbuk in Moscow. In 1950, after attending a production of Tevye the Dairyman in Tel Aviv, he wrote to the lead actor, Yehoshua Bertonov, that it had been one of the most profound and stunning events of his life.51
After settling in Palestine, he did all he could to maintain contact with the town of his birth, and his need to do so grew over the years. When his travels took him to Poland, he usually made a visit to Płońsk, even after his father left the town. When he told his father that he intended to visit, he said that he was “coming home.”52 Płońsk was his Jerusalem. He spoke Yiddish there. He wrote many of his letters to Paula in Yiddish as well. In Palestine he tried to deny his mother tongue, but as he grew older he became reconciled to it. In 1951 he supported doing away with a prohibition on producing plays in Yiddish, and at Cabinet meetings he sometimes peppered his speech with Yiddish expressions. It was the language whose accent could be heard when he spoke Hebrew or English.53
The limitations of Israel’s ability to absorb all the Jews who needed it, and his inclination to give preference to those who could be useful, provided an even greater challenge to the explicit internal logic of the Zionist vision.
*
At the beginning of the 1930s, Ben-Gurion was already well aware of the imperfections and internal contradictions of the ideology he had adopted in his youth. “All my life, for as long as I remember, I have been a Zionist,” he said in 1940. “But I always struggle, I always see that in everything I do, in everything I think, I am still not a Zionist one hundred percent.”54 From time to time he felt the need to enhance his Zionist consciousness. “Every Zionist finds himself assailing the Zionist within him,” he once said.55 Late in life he began to say that he was no longer a Zionist. “I do not know the meaning and definition of the term ‘Zionism,’” he wrote after the Six-Day War. “Once, in my youth, I thought I knew. Now I have my doubts about whether the word has any meaning at all.”56
It was his principal weakness: he led a movement that never agreed on its fundamental principles.
His schedule of meetings grew shorter, as did his diary entries.57 In one of the last interviews he granted, he again told the story of the Arab student who had been happy about Ben-Gurion’s expulsion from Palestine during World War I. He did not know what happened to that young man, he said once again. Maybe he had died in the meantime. Whatever the case, “he presented me with today’s picture,” he said.58
His bodyguards at Sde Boker and in Tel Aviv documented his routine. They saw to his meals and laundry and even ironed his shirts. Yehuda Erez noted with astonishment that Ben-Gurion was well dressed and perfectly shaven. He continued to work on his memoirs and to go out for his daily walk. Every few months he went to Jerusalem to visit Shlomo Zemach, who now complained of inactivity, boredom, and a weak heart. Ben-Gurion did not do much to improve his mood. “David was here for close to two hours yesterday,” Zemach wrote in October 1968. “He has gained weight, his face has gotten lumpy, and he sat there and talked the whole time and said the same things he said so many times before and the same hyperboles and the same fabrications and his same ‘me’ with him in the center of all the events and the moving force behind them.”
Zemach received the impression that Ben-Gurion enjoyed spending time with him, and when his bodyguard came into the room to remind him that he had to bring the visit to an end, Ben-Gurion “almost scolded him” and stayed put until the bodyguard returned and insisted that they go. Again he hurt his boyhood friend: “Of course, he reminded me of the hard times that my late father endured through a few low years,” Zemach related. “Once again he talked about the time he spent at Sejera and his heroic deeds there; again he said that the thing he had wanted most was to be a farmer. He spoke about Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan and Abba Eban and rounded it all off with Levi Eshkol. He said to me, ‘I will go to the Knesset, because I must explain to the nation why I am demanding that Eshkol and the entire government be dismissed. Of course they’ll say that I’m crazy, but I need to say what I think. It is my duty to say my word.’” But usually he was affable and pleasant, Zemach wrote, and was also happy to see his wife, Hanke.
Zemach and his wife were then living in a retirement home run by the Association of Israelis of Central European Origin. Ben-Gurion’s appearances, with his bodyguards, attracted attention; Zemach always received and parted from him with great respect. When he left, Ben-Gurion said, “I now have another corner in Jerusalem.” Zemach sensed that Ben-Gurion was very lonely and was in need of warm friendship. “And since boyhood friendship is forever, let us warm ourselves in its light,” Zemach declared. Rachel Beit Halahmi also visited Zemach, and showed him a letter she had received from Ben-Gurion. “I have only two people in the world who are close to me,” he wrote to her. “You, Rachel, and Shlomo Zemach.” So it was for two and a half years. “This afternoon Ben-Gurion came by and spent an hour,” Zemach wrote in December 1971. “His face is pale, his body stiff.” He discerned “low spirits” and remarked that “everything goes very slowly.”59
At about this stage, Yehuda Erez had to set aside his optimism and admit that Ben-Gurion was in decline. Several visitors who came to see him were troubled to find Ben-Gurion forgetful and confused; in some cases he did not recognize them. In February 1973, he was still planning to participate in a ceremony opening a new road in the Negev; everyone waited, but at the last moment his doctor forbade him to leave home.60 He was under constant medical supervision, but generally not ill, and he felt fine, although pains in his hand made it difficult to write.61 The newspapers were delivered every day, but his burning desire to keep abreast of events had dwindled; Erez noted that he was reading the issues of three days previously.62 He spoke about the Altalena and Arlosoroff’s murder, and finally revealed why he did not trust Yigal Allon: “He grew up with Arabs,” Ben-Gurion said.63
In August 1973, he was still in Sde Boker; the heat and the stuffiness of his cabin were unbearable. The fan wasn’t working. He lay on his bed, holding a jar for the sputum he coughed up. His bodyguards continued to see that he was properly dressed and clean. In coordination with the Defense Ministry, they encouraged his acquaintances to pay visits, to keep him from being lonely. One of his bodyguards, Aharon Tamir, offered Ben-Gurion a warm family atmosphere, inviting him for Friday night dinner at his home, where Ben-Gurion sat on the rug and played with Tamir’s baby daughter. It was a great kindness on Tamir’s part—during the final years of his life, nothing frightened Ben-Gurion more than the grim debilities of old age that awaited him. He tracked with awe Adenauer’s aging process, and once wrote in his diary: “Adenauer is eighty-one years old, and intends to remain in office for another ten years. There is an injection in Germany that was first invented in Russia that invigorates the life of an old man.” He told his personal physician, Dr. Chaim Sheba, to look into rumors he had heard of pills that could improve the memory, and sent another doctor to Switzerland for this purpose. “Death interests me,” he once told Haim Israeli, the director of the Office of the Minister of Defense. “At my age, I know that I am approaching it.” Were he to have the opportunity to live his life again, he said, he would study biology and investigate the human brain. As summer turned to autumn, Erez noticed that Ben-Gurion had stopped working on his memoirs; it was a sign that his end was near. “For eight months before he went, he no longer wanted to live. He had no desire, I remember that,” his daughter-in-law Mary recalled. “It was hellish to see and hear Ben-Gurion in that state,” Golda Meir said, “but it was for a short time.” Two years earlier, he had written to her: “I am sometimes incredulous that I am still alive. Almost all my closest and dearest friends are no longer among the living.”64 One of the last letters he sent was to Miriam Cohen. “I’d like to see you,” he wrote. The author Yizhar Smilansky (S. Yizhar) compared him to King Lear. Smilansky did not say which act of the Shakespeare play he was thinking of. Perhaps it was act 3, scene 2, in which Lear refers to himself as “a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man,” or perhaps act 4, scene 6, where Gloucester declares “The King is mad,” and then considers: “Better I were distract; so should my thoughts be severed from my griefs, and woes by wrong imaginations lose the knowledge of themselves.”‡65
*
On October 6, 1973, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a two-pronged attack on Israel; it was another round in the war that Ben-Gurion had taken into account when he began to act to achieve Jewish independence. More than twenty-two hundred Israeli soldiers were killed; only in the War of Independence did more die. Ben-Gurion spent the war at his home in Tel Aviv; Shimon Peres came by once or twice a day to tell him what was going on. A few days later, Ben-Gurion had a stroke, for which he was treated at Tel Hashomer hospital and then sent home. The hospital sent a doctor to examine him. “Ben-Gurion sat on the edge of the bed,” the doctor wrote in his diary. “He stared without moving and the bedsheet was wet.” Only men were with him, the doctor noted, apparently meaning his bodyguards. “Devoted, practical men of few words,” as he described them. “I looked around, and the house seemed cold to me, lacking any sign of a woman or of gentleness, I didn’t even see a tablecloth on the table or flowers, not even artificial ones.” He sat facing Ben-Gurion but had trouble establishing contact. “Facing me was an old and weary lion,” the doctor wrote. After performing a physical examination, he endeavored to check his patient’s cognitive abilities. “What do you think of the war, Ben-Gurion?” he asked. “What war?” Ben-Gurion responded. The doctor was aghast. “I thought at that moment about those people whose flesh perishes, but their place in history remains.”66
His eighty-seventh birthday was celebrated forlornly; he knew about the war. He signed a letter of condolence to an aide whose son had fallen, writing that this was the most serious and cruelest war so far.67 One of the wounded was his grandson, Alon. At the end of November, Ben-Gurion suffered another stroke and was hospitalized. Most of the few visitors who were allowed to see him were unable to communicate with him.68 Moshe Dayan was one of the last to come. “During his final days his mind was foggy,” he wrote. “He was unable to speak, his eyes were closed, and his mouth pursed. He looked as if he were deep in thought, but not troubled. On the contrary, his face looked gentle and serene. He left the world calmly, his life slowly ebbing away.”69
He died on Saturday, December 1, 1973, at close to 10:30 a.m. The Yom Kippur War, which ended five weeks earlier with survival, not victory, left the country deeply traumatized, and with the nebulous feeling that nothing would ever be the same again. Ben-Gurion’s death at this moment thus took on symbolic significance; Israel parted not only from a man but from an entire sense of national being. Everyone connected his decision to be buried in the desert with his vision of making the Negev bloom. It is doubtful whether he thought that a national tomb would draw more settlers to the region than the few whom he had managed to inspire to come to the Negev when he was still alive. It seems more likely that what he had in mind was Chaim Weizmann’s gravesite in Rehovot. Like Weizmann, he did not want to be buried in the shadow of Herzl, on the mountain bearing his name. Jabotinsky had already been reinterred and Eshkol buried there. Ben-Gurion also instructed that there should be no eulogies at his funeral, just as none were offered for his two friends at Sejera. The result was that the funeral consisted mostly of prayers. In a will he wrote just a few months before his death, he no longer fought to be identified as “another kind of Jew.” He did not order any changes in the traditional religious service. At his death he was fairly well-off financially; a short while before, his future heirs began fighting over the inheritance, the house in Tel Aviv in particular. In the end, he left it to the state, to be opened to the public; he also left his papers to the state. In addition, he asked that the cabin at Sde Boker be preserved as it was in his lifetime.70 He had lived a few years too long, but could have been grateful that he did not live to see Menachem Begin elected prime minister four years later. He probably never imagined that such a thing could happen, just as he never imagined that Begin, or anyone else, would ever sign a peace treaty with Egypt.
Shlomo Zemach died a year later. His quality of life had declined to substandard. He suffered from severe heart disease; by August 1973, he weighed only 117 pounds. “The thirst to write is of inestimable power,” he wrote in his diary; they were the last words he wrote. He had last seen Ben-Gurion in December 1971. They each griped to the other about “the spiritual decline in the country.” Ben-Gurion said: “If we do not remain decent, we will not remain here.” Zemach agreed with him, perhaps for the first time since that day on the Płonka, seventy years before.71
* As prime minister, Ben-Gurion once returned a check in the sum of $10 that an American Jew sent him. “We cannot allow ourselves to be the objects of charity,” he told the Cabinet. At the beginning of 1967, he traveled to the United States to raise money for Midreshet Sde Boker, an educational and research institution at the kibbutz. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, June 1, 1952, ISA; Ben-Gurion to Ha’aretz, Jan. 23, 1967, BGA.)
† When Richard Crossman served as a member of the Anglo-American Committee that laid the groundwork for the UN partition decision, he came to the conclusion that the Jews of Palestine were crystallizing into a nation distinct from the Jews of the Diaspora, in part because of their willingness to fight for their independence, just as the Americans became a nation thanks to the blood they shed in their War of Independence. (Crossman 1946, p. 203.)
‡ An old-timer from Płońsk once related that as a boy, Ben-Gurion acted in amateur theater productions at the firehouse, including King Lear. (Teveth 1977, pp. 39, 492.)