2JEWS, TURKS, ARABS
FIRST ENCOUNTERS IN THE LAND
Concurrent with Herzl’s intensive efforts to obtain a charter—and unrecognized by him—the beginnings of modern Jewish settlement were already present in Palestine.
PALESTINE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Palestine was a remote, backward province of the Ottoman Empire, which itself was in decline. Internecine wars and clashes between Bedouins and fellahin occurred every day, and the roads, controlled by robbers and bandits, were dangerous. The country was almost empty, with some 250,000 inhabitants, including about 6,500 Jews concentrated in the four holy cities: Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron.
Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Palestine had failed because an epidemic decimated his army during the siege of Acre in 1799. However, the campaign aroused the European powers’ interest both in Palestine and in the division of the Ottoman Empire, whose weakness had been exposed. In 1831 the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali Pasha conquered Palestine. He ruled it until 1840, setting in motion a process of stabilizing governance and reinforcing the inhabitants’ security that continued even after Palestine was restored to the Ottoman Empire following pressure by the European powers. Seeking to demonstrate that his government was enlightened compared to the Ottoman regime, Muhammad Ali permitted the European powers to send representatives to the Holy Land.
Consequently, when Palestine was restored to Ottoman governance, the authorities could no longer close the country to non-Muslims, and a system of capitulations ensured that the subjects of foreign powers could be protected by their consulates. Non-Muslims were granted rights equal to those of Muslims, and were even permitted to purchase land, on condition that it was managed in accordance with Ottoman law. France, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Germany all opened consulates in Palestine. A German Protestant bishopric was established in Jerusalem, soon followed by others. Building in the city had been suspended since the end of the sixteenth century, but now the Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Orthodox churches embarked on accelerated construction of churches, orphanages, hospitals, and schools. With the improved security situation on land and at sea and the decreased cost of transportation after the appearance of steamships, thousands of Christians set forth on pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The churches built hospices for them, the most impressive of which was the Augusta Victoria Hospital and Church, a magnificent building that dominated the Jerusalem skyline. In the middle of the century, the Templars, a German Protestant sect, began moving to Palestine; between 1868 and World War One they established seven colonies with some 2,200 inhabitants. The Templars were the pioneers of modernization in Palestine. Their colonies were a shining example of planning, order, and organization. They proved that despite the difficulties presented by the Ottoman government, European settlement in Palestine was possible.
By the end of the 1840s, steamships sailed regularly to Palestine from Marseilles, Odessa, and Trieste. In honor of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the first road in Palestine was laid between Jaffa and Jerusalem, and cart and carriage traffic between the two cities commenced. Until then transport had depended entirely on pack animals. Mail and telegraph services were opened, connecting Palestine with the outside world.
The Ottomans’ institution of civic order (relative to what had existed in the past) and subduing of the wars between local leaders, the cessation of Bedouin incursions into the villages, and improved health and education services all resulted in an increase both in the area of cultivated farmland and in population. By the end of the 1870s, the population had reached some 380,000, while the Jewish population had increased to 27,000. The most significant growth was in Jerusalem, where Jews had increased from 2,250 in 1800 (out of a total population of 9,000) to 17,000 (out of a total of 31,500). Even before Zionist immigration began, then, the Jews constituted a majority in the city.
The main increase was of Ashkenazi Jews. They had barely existed in Jerusalem at the turn of the century, but by 1880 they were more numerous than the Sephardim. The vast majority of Ashkenazim were concentrated in kollelim, charitable institutions based on country of origin that distributed financial aid raised in those countries to support the “Learners’ Society,” which was composed of yeshiva students who had wives and children but did not work for a living. This distribution of charitable funds was known as the haluka. Because very few Ashkenazim earned income, they lived in severe poverty. By contrast, the Sephardim generally did not follow the Learners’ Society model but instead gained their livelihoods from crafts and trade. Since they were fluent in the country’s language and conversant with its way of life, they could navigate local and even international trade and finance.
One of the new centers that attracted Jewish settlement was Jaffa. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Jaffa was a small, insignificant port city. With increased tourism and Christian pilgrim traffic to Jerusalem, the city grew and became the most important port of entry to the center of the country. In 1892 the railway between Jaffa and Jerusalem was inaugurated, heightening Jaffa’s importance. Surrounding the city were the first citrus groves in Palestine, which had been planted by the Arabs. The export of oranges under the “Jaffa” brand name turned the city into the country’s major export port. By 1880 its population had reached 10,000, including some 1,000 Jews. In the north of the country, the city of Haifa had begun to develop; in only a few years it surpassed Acre as the area’s major port.
EMIGRANTS AND IMMIGRANTS: AN OVERVIEW
In his memoirs Joseph Eliyahu Chelouche, born in Jaffa in 1870 of an immigrant father from Oran, Algeria, and an immigrant mother from Baghdad, describes an encounter between the first members of what would later be known as the First Aliya (lit., ascent [to the Holy Land]) and the contemporary Sephardi elite of Jaffa. The Chelouche family was very devout, and the men’s daily routine included not only prayers at the appointed time but also several hours of Torah study. A spacious room was set aside in their big house as a synagogue. Members of the Yesod Hamaʿala Committee, who came to purchase land for the first moshava (colony, pl., moshavot) established by Hovevei Zion (to be called Rishon Lezion), were warmly welcomed at the Chelouche home, though with some puzzlement: the visitors wore European attire (and some, spectacles), and although they spoke Hebrew—in which the Sephardim were fluent—there remained a gnawing doubt whether they were really Jews. Like the rest of the family, young Joseph wondered: if they were Jews, then why did they not observe the precept to wear ritual garments? Despite such doubts, relationships developed between the distinguished Sephardi families of Jaffa—the Chelouches, Amzalegs, and Moyals—and the first immigrants, who came to seek help in purchasing land in Palestine. For the newcomers, who did not speak the country’s language and were unfamiliar with its customs, the assistance provided by these families opened a portal to the reality of Ottoman Palestine, with its multiplicity of government officials and attendant obstacles to Jewish settlement, and provided tactics for surmounting these obstacles.
The founding of the first settlement with the specific nationalist goal of establishing a Jewish political foothold occurred in 1882, marking the start of a new period in the history of Palestine and the Jewish people. Vladimir Dubnow came to Palestine with the first wave of immigration as a member of the Bilu association (elaborated shortly). In a letter to his brother, historian Simon Dubnow, who advocated obtaining national rights for the Jews in the Diaspora countries, set out the goal of his group: “The ultimate aim or pia desideria is to take control of Palestine in due time and to return to Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for two thousand years.” Since he knew quite well what his brother would think of this, he added: “Don’t laugh, this is not a delusion.” This goal, he explained, required creating a solid Jewish economic foundation in Palestine: “In brief, to try and make sure that all land and all production is in Jewish hands.” He believed that establishing a Jewish presence in Palestine mandated learning to use firearms: “In free and wild Turkey anything is possible,” he noted, and added this vision: “Then . . . and here I can only guess . . . the grand day will arrive, the day whose coming was prophesied by Isaiah in his impassioned vision in the song of consolation. The Jews will yet arise, weapons in hand (if need be); and, in a loud voice, they shall proclaim themselves the lords and masters of their ancient homeland.”1 It is doubtful that the majority of first-wave immigrants shared these far-reaching dreams.
After encountering the country’s established Jewish residents, the new immigrants swiftly defined themselves as “the new Yishuv” (Jewish community) and their predecessors as “the old Yishuv.” These labels were supposed to denote different objectives, lifestyles, and “new” and “old” human types. Both the Palestinian and Diaspora press depicted the old Yishuv as fanatically ultra-Orthodox. Crowded into the four holy cities—above all Jerusalem—it lived on haluka funds, rejected any attempt at productivization or openness to the outside world, and was clearly opposed to the Zionist idea. The new Yishuv was described as enlightened and educated, establishing agricultural settlements, striving for a productive life, and possessing Zionist political awareness. But like any label, these definitions blurred the many variations present on both sides.
Despite its religious fanaticism, the old Yishuv had undergone slow processes of change and it included elements seeking modernization in employment and housing. The first settlers outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City came from the old Yishuv and were driven there by overcrowding. Jewish neighborhoods were built with kollel funds north and west of the city, heralding a readiness for change. It was Jews from the Old City who made the first attempt at agricultural settlement in Palestine, in 1878 at Melabes (later Petach Tikva). Although these settlers were motivated by the wish to observe the commandments connected with the Holy Land, their willingness to undertake a farming life was something of a revolution.
On the other hand, not every member of the First Aliya was worthy of the name “new Yishuv,” if that phrase was supposed to signal commitment to the Zionist idea. Many new immigrants were much like their old Yishuv predecessors; they hastened to Jerusalem in hopes of getting haluka funds. Many others were part of the big wave of emigration that left Eastern Europe during this period, particularly for the United States. These emigrants, who apparently constituted the majority of the First Aliya (1881–1904) and the Second Aliya (1904–1914), sought in Palestine what emigrants sought anywhere else: a better living; security—freedom from the terror of the pogroms and discrimination on the part of Russian authorities; and new hope for their children. They were city dwellers who wanted to go on living in a city, not attempt rural settlement. They had come to Palestine almost by chance, perhaps because they had heard that Lord Laurence Oliphant was settling Jews in Palestine or that Alliance Israélite Universelle2 supported settlement, or because sea passage to the Middle East was cheaper than to America, the journey to Palestine was shorter, and it would be easier to go back home.
The First Aliya also included relatively small groups from Hovevei Zion that had organized in their home countries, Russia and Romania, in order to purchase land in Palestine for Jewish agricultural settlement. Driven by nationalist motives, these groups included two groups of intelligentsia. The first, the Bilu association, consisted of young people, some of whom had acquired a higher education in Russia. Despairing of integration with the Russian people after the pogroms, they decided to “go to the Jewish people” and establish in Palestine an independent Jewish entity with dreams of Jewish sovereignty (similar to those of Vladimir Dubnow, although he himself soon returned to Russia). These youngsters were single, educated freethinkers, inspired by an ideal and a far-reaching plan to organize a mass movement. But their impressive intentions were separated from their ability to implement them by inexperience, lack of funding, and the reality of Palestine. Once they climbed down from the heights of their vision to the ground of reality, they gave up their grandiosity and focused on establishing a colony that would be a settlement model for people coming after them. A small, select group, the Biluim were motivated by Narodnik ideas they had absorbed from the Russian revolutionary movement, which they sought to apply to Zionism. They did not leave behind a real settlement heritage. The majority dispersed even before they arrived in Palestine, but after numerous travails a few dozen settled in Gedera, where they were compelled to observe a religious lifestyle. All that remained of their youthful dreams was the Bilu legend, a shining example for the groups of idealistic youth that followed in the decades to come, viewing the Biluim as the first link in their settlement genealogy. The second group comprised middle-class young people, educated property owners who held liberal views (it was members of this group whose behavior astounded the young Joseph Chelouche) and were motivated by nationalist ideas.
The rest of the Hovevei Zion members were middle-aged Jews who came with their families out of a combination of personal and nationalist motives. They wanted to live a free life in Palestine “under their own vine and fig tree.” In the main they were religiously observant, uneducated, and had no leadership. They were small shopkeepers or religious functionaries and knew absolutely nothing about farm work. Some had begun thinking about immigrating to Palestine even before the 1881 pogroms, but it was the Zionist awakening that followed the riots that moved them to put the idea into practice.
At this time immigration was an option, not a necessity, and many newcomers chose to leave the country after a short while, especially in the years preceding World War One, when their homes in Russia, Galicia, or Romania were still standing and immigration to America or elsewhere was still possible. For many Palestine was just a wanderer’s way station along routes through countries that had not yet closed their borders, so entering them did not require a passport. The accepted estimate is that the First Aliya comprised 60,000 men and women, of whom at least half left the country; some even put this figure at 70 percent. In 1904, on the eve of the Second Aliya, the Jewish community in Palestine numbered some 55,000 (including natural increase), of whom 10,000 to 15,000 belonged to the new Yishuv living in the moshavot and in Jaffa, as well as a few in Jerusalem and the other cities. In the following decade some 40,000 immigrants came to Palestine, and more than 60 percent of them eventually left, with some estimates putting that figure even higher.
The vast majority of Second Aliya immigrants were no different in character from those of the first. And like the first, the Second Aliya included an elite group of no more than three thousand: young, single men and women who came to Palestine on their own, motivated by nationalist idealism. Even among this group, there was a ruthless selection process. According to David Ben-Gurion, who came from Poland in 1906 when he was twenty and later became Israel’s first prime minister, 90 percent of them wound up leaving.3 But it was the members of this small group who shaped the national ethos, the historiography, and the leadership. When we refer to the Second Aliya, it is this select group that we mean.
The reality of emigration and settlement dictated that there was no direct correlation between immigrants’ initial motives and their actual conduct: many who came with neither expectations nor ideology became loyal patriots, whereas quite a few idealists who arrived ready to make sacrifices broke on the rock of their encounter with harsh reality and left. Before World War One immigration to Palestine was not a binding Zionist principle, and there was no stigma attached to leaving. Departures, either for a short time or permanently, were part of life in Palestine. Both Zionist leaders and luminaries of Hebrew culture came to visit, but did not remain. “The best of our comrades and of Zionists in general reside in the Diaspora and yearn, and that is enough for them,” complained Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who added, “They come from abroad—and then only to see the ancient and modern in our life—and go back.”4
AGRICULTURAL SETTLEMENT, 1882–1904
Although the new urban Yishuv, particularly in Jaffa, absorbed the majority of the immigrants, the image of Zionist settlement in Palestine was agricultural. Several factors contributed to this attraction to agriculture: the romance of tilling the soil, the immigrants’ limited skills, and the aspiration to lay the foundations of Jewish ownership of land.
Although it might seem that the capitalism emerging in Western and even Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century should have created an economic bias toward entrepreneurship, commerce, and finance, the appearance of Marxism reaffirmed the status of the worker. Marxists contended that it was only the proletariat that created durable assets with its labor; all other classes lived like leeches off the surplus value produced by the workers. This concept was a continuation of the thought of the eighteenth-century Physiocrats, who attached value only to workers in primary occupations, marginalizing the mediating factors in the economy. Both these schools of thought assigned the Jews inferior status since they were unproductive and exploited the labor of others. Modern antisemitism espoused this image of the parasitic Jew, which from the Enlightenment period onward penetrated the public discourse of Jews as well. All the modern Jewish philanthropic societies viewed tilling the soil as the way to save Jews from their supposedly marginal place in the economy and give them a productive role in society, and so they promoted initiatives for agricultural settlement projects throughout the world.
Another factor was the Romantic conception of the city—cradle of industrialization and the alienation it engendered—as the root of all evil. The ideal was, à la Rousseau’s Emile, to return to the lost paradise of innocence: the rural community, a life close to nature and physical contact with the elements. In Russia the Narodniks lauded the simple peasant who expressed the nation’s true, fundamental essence, as opposed to the nobility and the nouvelle bourgeoisie that had begun appearing in the cities. They saw the Russian peasant and his rural community as heralding the possibility of achieving a socialist regime in Russia without first walking the Via Dolorosa of brutal, depriving capitalism.
This attitude filtered down from the Russian intellectual sphere to the Jewish one. Zionist circles believed that a man who tilled the soil had a profound connection with his land—a potent antidote to wanderlust, another quality the Jews were accused of possessing. Living from his honest toil, the peasant developed characteristics such as a simple lifestyle, a love of nature, and independence. Of course this idealistic picture was a far cry from reality. As Berl Katznelson once remarked ironically, it was doubtful whether the young people who expressed extravagant admiration of that Russian peasant would be able to withstand the stink of pitch on his boots. The same romantic vision was attached to the Jewish agricultural worker, and the figure of the Jewish laborer tramping across his field was a central icon in Zionist propaganda. Even a level-headed, Western-educated man like Arthur Ruppin saw work in the fields as “the wellspring from which we revitalize our physical and spiritual life.”5
At this period the cities of Palestine had limited capacity to absorb new residents, and most of the immigrants who tried to settle in them were forced to leave the country. There was no industry to speak of, and it is doubtful that the country was at a level where industrial development could occur. Palestine was an agricultural country, so the simplest, most obvious solution for anyone seeking to immigrate there was to settle on the land and make a living from farming. The vast majority of immigrants had little means and no farming experience. Those with a small amount of capital did the math and figured out how much a plot of land, farming equipment, building a house, tilling and sowing the land, and waiting a year until they saw a crop would cost. Then, once their representatives had purchased the land on which they and their fellow association members would build, only the Mediterranean Sea seemed to separate them from a life of peace and tranquility. Those with no capital assumed that the philanthropic organizations would find a way to settle them on the land. Moreover, they knew that the settlement associations being organized to buy land would each allocate some land to a few families without assets. So from a distance, at any rate, it appeared that the means of making a living from farming were available and could be arranged in advance.
Beyond economic need and romantic ideology, there was the political vision: a concrete hold on the country’s territory through purchase and settlement of the land was believed by those known as “practical Zionists” to be the best way to create a Jewish right of possession in Palestine. Though not empty, the country was relatively sparsely settled, and just as the Templars had put down roots in its soil, so would the Jews. Any political achievements would derive from this act of settlement. This thinking did not drive the individual settler—especially not the poor, uneducated one—but it was in the minds of others: the Hovevei Zion committee members in Russia, known as the Odessa Committee; Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who had begun supporting settlers as early as 1882; the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), which established a new string of settlements in the first decade of the twentieth century; and the Palestine Office, established in 1908 and headed by Arthur Ruppin, which coordinated Zionist activity in Palestine.
Herzl dismissed all attempts at Jewish settlement in Palestine before a charter was obtained as “infiltration”—that is, irresponsible behavior inappropriate for a movement whose mission was establishing a safe refuge for the Jewish people, guaranteed by international law. He also feared that purchasing land before the charter was obtained would lead to speculation and increased prices. But popular instinct mandated laying the foundations of Jewish settlement in Palestine with or without a charter, in hopes that facts on the ground would ultimately determine the political order. This perception continued to mark the Zionist enterprise and became a seminal myth.
The Ottoman authorities were well aware of the Zionists’ aspirations and their efforts to expand the Jewish foothold in Palestine. There was already a separatist Christian movement in Lebanon, and the notion of importing to Palestine another such movement, which would lead to increased intervention there by foreign powers—adding yet another element of pressure to that already being exerted on the empire—was unacceptable to the Ottomans from the outset. What was more, the vast majority of the immigrants were not Ottoman subjects but came under the protection of the foreign consulates. These two reasons were suffcient for rejecting the Zionists’ efforts.
Yet added to these objections was the Arabs’ opposition to any strengthening of the status of non-Muslims in the empire, and to granting them equal rights in the wake of the Berlin Congress of 1878, which had weakened the empire politically. Sultan Abdul Hamid II attempted to tighten the kingdom’s loose bonds by appealing to religious sentiment: he declared himself Caliph of the Faithful and even built the Hejaz railway for the benefit of pilgrims to Mecca. The Arabs were a key constituency of the empire, and their opinion was important to the authorities. The local Arab leadership, Muslim and Christian alike, looked upon the wave of Jewish immigrants to Palestine with suspicion and hostility. Quite aware that the Jews had pinned their nationalist hopes on Palestine, the Arabs were not prepared to accept an invasion of their country by these foreigners. They had taken a dim view of the Templars’ settlement and felt even more strongly opposed to settlement by Jews.
As a result, the Ottoman government was antagonistic toward Jewish immigration and purchase of land. As early as 1881 the Turks prohibited Jews from coming to Palestine, and when the first Biluim arrived in Istanbul on their way to Palestine they were welcomed with the announcement that Jews could settle anywhere in the empire except for Palestine. Herzl tried vainly to have this policy changed by promising the sultan financial benefits, but his talk about a charter under international auspices only heightened Ottoman suspicion. Pressure from the Western powers insisting on the right of their citizens to settle in Palestine yielded a slight easing of the regulations: Jewish pilgrims were allowed to visit, at first for one month and later for three. Each local ruler enforced the rule according to his own understanding: in Jaffa the total prohibition was strictly observed, whereas in the ports of Haifa and Beirut the Jews were allowed to disembark. Harsh restrictions were imposed on land purchase and construction, but these ordinances were amended every other day as a result of consular pressure, leaving room for doubt with regard to the authorities’ intentions. This ambiguity gave the local rulers some flexibility, and bribery was common. The Jews took advantage of the loopholes in the ordinances, the authorities’ inability to enforce their policies, and the dire weakness—both political and ethical—of the executors of those policies. Still the harsh, hostile Ottoman policy was one of the main factors underlying the tremendous difficulties faced by the settlers.
In the first years of settlement, seven moshavot were founded in three main areas: southeast of Jaffa; on Mount Carmel and in Samaria (the area south of the Carmel range, not the Arab-populated area of the same name to the east); and in eastern Upper Galilee (see map 1). Rishon Lezion, Yesod Hamaʿala, Gedera, Ekron, and Petach Tikva were established by immigrants from the Russian Pale of Settlement, while Rosh Pina and Zichron Yaʿakov were established by Hovevei Zion from Romania. Except for Ekron, established by Baron de Rothschild, and Gedera, settled by the Biluim with the aid of the Hovevei Zion Odessa Committee, all were created by private initiative, with private capital.
The immigrants organized themselves into groups, generally by city of origin, to purchase land, most often from Arab owners, effendis, and Arab and other land brokers. This land was usually uncultivated, though some of it had previously been worked partially by tenant farmers. The soil was sandy (Rishon Lezion, Ness Ziona, Rehovoth, Gedera, and Petach Tikva), rocky (Zichron Yaʿakov and Rosh Pina), located near swamps (Yesod Hamaʿala and Hadera), or lacking surface water or good rainfall. The Arabs preferred hilly areas that were free of malaria, with abundant rainfall and springs, where they cultivated mainly fruit trees. Land on the coastal plain was considered to be of poor quality until the Jewish settlers discovered that the groundwater level was not very deep. They began pumping water with modern equipment and adapting their crops to the sandy soil.
However, all the detailed calculations the settlers had made before immigrating turned out to be optimistic in the extreme. As we have seen, shortly after the start of the first wave of immigration, the Ottoman government prohibited Jews from coming to Palestine, in particular for the purpose of buying land and establishing settlements. The shrewdness of some Sephardi Jews who were Ottoman subjects made it possible to register land ostensibly purchased in their names, but until the registration procedure was complete at the Land Registry, no buildings could be constructed. As a consequence, the entire timetable planned by the settlers went awry. It was also essential to pay bribes, adding to the settlers’ unforeseen expenses.
In most cases land purchase involved friction either with neighboring Arab villages displeased by the border marking of land purchased by the Jews; with sellers who were dishonest in their dealings with buyers; or with the tenant farmers whom the buyers sought to remove from their land. If the arguments were not about land borders or ownership, they were about the Bedouins’ grazing rights on stubble fields, or crossing rights and the use of the nearby spring or local well. Resolution of these clashes required substantial payments. If the parties went to court, the case dragged on for years. Meanwhile the buyers could not settle or build on the land; they and their families lived temporarily in the nearest town and were forced to dip into their savings. Finally, although the settlers did not come from the developed regions of Europe, they still aspired to a certain standard of public amenities that mandated a synagogue, a school, and a facility for medical treatment. These needs required further investment that had not been taken into account beforehand.
The Hovevei Zion associations were supposed to maintain settlers for the first year, until the first crop was harvested, but they never managed to raise the required funds. Since they transferred the money they did receive bit by bit, there was never enough to consolidate the settlement but only to meet its day-to-day needs. By the end of its first year, Rishon Lezion, the first moshava, found itself in crisis when it appeared that the field crops would not yield enough to cover expenses and ensure that the families could subsist from then on, as had been hoped. On top of such external problems, these European city dwellers found it diffcult to adapt to village life in the Middle East. They were inexperienced in the type of hard, fatiguing work required for agriculture. The hot climate was alien to them, mosquitoes and other insects made their lives a misery, and malaria was rife in some moshavot, leaving the settlers physically drained.
It was Baron Edmond de Rothschild who came to their aid. When in 1900, at the end of this period, Rothschild censured the Yishuv representatives by saying, “I created the Yishuv, I alone,” he was not exaggerating. He was not a professed Zionist and thought that any action undertaken by Jews in Palestine should be low profile, low key, and should eschew far-reaching political statements so as not to arouse government suspicion or Arab hostility. After Rothschild’s death in 1934 the Palestine press quoted an interview in which, regarding the issue of a Jewish state in Palestine, he had commented that the Jews should conduct themselves according to the rule set down by the French statesman Leon Gambetta following the cession of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany after the French defeat at Sedan in 1870: “Never speak of it, always think of it.” This was certainly wise counsel, but it did not take into account the diffculty faced by a national movement that had to sustain the enthusiasm of its loyal supporters and followers while asking them to conceal their feelings and remain loyal, even though their hopes for the future were not being bolstered in the present.
Within a few years, four moshavot came under Rothschild’s patronage (Rishon Lezion, Rosh Pina, Zichron Yaʿakov, and Ekron), and he also supported almost all the rest of them to some degree. He conditioned his support on transfer of title in the land to him, on management of the moshava by his representatives, and on his involvement being kept secret. This last stricture was not followed, and he entered local folklore under the sobriquet “The Well-Known Benefactor.”
The baron invested vast sums to secure legal ownership of the land and obtain building permits. His dealings with the authorities, through his officers and with the assistance of the French consul, helped ensure the continued existence of the moshavot and their protection against attack or government arbitrariness. To augment the farmers’ holdings in hopes of economic consolidation, Rothschild purchased large tracts of land adjacent to the moshavot. He also distributed land to moshavot residents who did not own any in order to expand the moshavot and make public services and security more effcient. He demanded that workers employed by the moshavot under his aegis be Jews, another way to boost their Jewish population. In addition he invested huge sums in developing the water infrastructure of the moshavot through relatively deep drilling of artesian wells and modern pumps.
The classic image of the tiller of the soil is the figure of the farmer plowing and sowing his land, and indeed the first moshavot were based on field crops. Field crops required neither a large investment nor irrigation, but providing a living for a farmer and his family by growing grain required some seventy-five acres per settler, and most farmers had far smaller holdings. The settlers envisaged not a life of plenty, but one of dignity from their labors, and despite his investments in infrastructure and public buildings and his support of needy settlers, Rothschild realized that growing cereals would not provide a dignified existence. Starting in 1885, on the advice of agricultural experts brought from France, the baron began converting the moshavot he controlled to a plantation economy. Thousands of acres of vines were planted. The moshavot he did not control, as well as those established in the 1890s (the most notable being Rehovoth and Hadera), followed this example and based their farming on monoculture. Rothschild built modern wineries in Rishon Lezion and Zichron Yaʿakov that pressed all the grapes produced by the moshavot.
The industrial plantation economy was unknown in Palestine, and as far as we can tell the baron duplicated the efforts of French inhabitants in the south of France and Algeria to introduce the viniculture economy. But the transition from field crops to an industrial plantation economy was not easy. The grape varieties introduced by the French experts were unsuited to the local climate, and more than once the farmers had to uproot the vines and plant new varieties. The Zichron Yaʿakov vineyards were invaded by the Phylloxera fly and had to be destroyed.
Initially the moshavot had been managed by elected committees, and the beginnings of democratic management emerged despite the internal disagreements typical of a group of people with no clear leadership who found themselves living in extremely harsh conditions. When the baron took over the moshavot, he disbanded all the self-government institutions and replaced them with his own managers in what was called a “custodian regime.” This act displayed considerable arrogance on the part of this modern Westerner toward Eastern European Jews, as well as the wealthy man’s lack of confidence in his protégés. What Rothschild wanted was to settle the land with simple, uneducated, unpretentious farmers, much like farmers in Europe. Thus, for example, the people he settled in Ekron, which he established, were illiterate and needed one educated man who could write letters for them to their families in Lithuania. The baron was not impressed by the educated elite of Rishon Lezion, or of Rehovoth a decade later, and was unwilling to support Gedera, the moshava of educated Biluim. In his view Jewish settlement in Palestine was to be founded on a specific human type: the modest farmer happy with his lot, looking no farther than the horizon, whose holding was his whole world. Yet the advanced methods and modern farming Rothschild introduced called for a different type of farmer who was aware of changing needs, understood technology, and was open to innovation.
The outcome of this contradiction was the introduction of an entire system of officials, experts, and instructors who managed every last detail of life in the moshavot. These offcials, some dedicated to Jewish settlement in Palestine and others with no interest in it, treated the inhabitants with insufferable lordliness, triggering several revolts. The baron supported his officials unquestioningly and had some farmers with independent views removed, extinguishing the spark of local leadership. His custodial regime bred moral decay in the form of a class of obsequious toadies who sought the offcials’ favor. Thus the initiative and resourcefulness of the independent farmer was replaced by dependence and debasement. Rothschild’s wineries pressed all the moshavot grapes at fixed prices that were subsidized well in excess of their real price.
By the end of the 1890s, there was a large surplus of wine for which there was no demand, and the baron’s officials were unable to sell it. But inside the moshavot the subsidy created a false impression of plenty. There were displays of luxury in clothes, dwellings, and education; the sons of the moshavot were sent to study in France on the officials’ recommendation. Zichron Yaʿakov was dubbed Little Paris: French culture—the culture of the ruling class—was a model for the younger generation. The saying “at the baron’s expense” reflected the atmosphere of extravagance and hedonism.
In 1887 the Hovevei Zion Odessa Committee, which perceived the baron’s assistance as the foundation of the settlement enterprise, strongly rebuked a group who revolted against the officials in Rishon Lezion. Yechiel Michal Pines, the patron of the Biluim, called the rebellious farmers “nihilists.” Ahad Haʿam censured them. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the fierce fighter for the Hebrew language and against the ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem, proclaimed, “Not with educated people accustomed to freedom, who cannot bear the yoke of masters, and all their thoughts all day long are of being free men, will Judea be built,” and warned, “in the moshavot they [the educated] are ruination, ruination, ruination.”6
Yet only a decade later, many of the same voices were raised criticizing the management of the moshavot and their objectives. Ahad Haʿam and his followers castigated the custodial system for creating decay in the moshavot. Baron de Rothschild’s investment had been enormous. According to the estimate of researcher Ran Aharonson, in the eighteen years of his involvement in the moshavot he invested £1.6 million, almost twenty times the total investment of Hovevei Zion in the same period. Yet the moshavot did not achieve economic independence. Apparently the baron concluded that the time had come to change the system, and at the end of 1899 he signed an agreement with the Jewish Colonization Association that transferred the moshavot to JCA control. The JCA, founded by Baron Hirsch, fostered Jewish agricultural settlement in Argentina, and in the second half of the 1890s it had also become active in Palestine. With the signing of the agreement, Rothschild transferred 15 million francs to the JCA for continued investment in the settlement enterprise.
The JCA’s approach was less paternalistic and more capitalist and rational. It ended the grape subsidies, decreased direct support payments to the farmers, and significantly reduced the number of officials and public servants. The farmers were told to cope on their own and restructure their farming economy. The Jewish workers, whose relatively high wages corresponded to the period of prosperity, were now dismissed and replaced by low-paid Arab workers. The JCA had no qualms about encouraging the unemployed workers to leave the country, and even provided them with passage. It did the same for members of the second moshavot generation who did not have a holding. Old vineyards were uprooted, the JCA encouraged a shift to mixed farming of field crops and plantations, and the first attempts at planting citrus trees were made. After a crisis lasting several years (manifested by, among other things, enthusiastic support of the Uganda Plan among the colonists), the older moshavot began to stabilize and consolidate. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the moshavot founded before 1900 achieved economic independence.
The JCA now reverted to the settlement model based on field crops and poor, uneducated, simple settlers. Its most important settlement enterprise was in a new area of Jewish settlement, Lower Galilee, where it founded five moshavot intended for experienced agricultural workers of proven ability. Since Lower Galilee has only scanty rainfall, the plan was to base the enterprise on field crops that need little water. To ensure that a settler could earn a living from his labor, relatively large holdings of about seventy-five acres were made available. The soil was rocky, and the settlers had to clear the fields before they could work the land. The JCA provided each settler with an inventory of livestock and equipment so that he could stand on his own two feet right away. According to the contract between the JCA and the settlers, the latter would be considered tenant farmers until they repaid the investment in their farm to the JCA. The five moshavot were established within walking distance of one another—the first example of planning Jewish settlement in a block. The remoteness from the center of the country, the settlers’ isolation and need to make do with little, and the field crop economy all carried a sort of magical appeal for the young people of the Second Aliya, who saw Galilee as a wonderland and its farmers as genuine tillers of the soil, in contrast with their mollycoddled counterparts from the plantation moshavot.
But the settlers’ life was extremely hard due to the sparse rainfall, a chronic shortage of water, and poor yields. Both natural disasters and human ones (Bedouin raids from Transjordan and belligerent Arab neighbors) forced the settlers to be prepared to fight for their lives and property. They developed a fiercely individualistic attitude somewhat resembling that of the Wild West.
In 1904 there were thirty Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine, with between 5,000 and 5,500 inhabitants. For many years it was these settlements that determined the boundaries of the Jewish Yishuv, from Metulla in the north to Beʾer Tuvia in the south (see map 1). To a great extent the settlement blocks formed during this initial period shaped the future development of the Yishuv. Later efforts were directed at extending these blocks and connecting them—a master plan already present in embryonic form in the distribution plans for these early settlements.
THE SECOND ALIYA AND THE
BIRTH OF THE PIONEERING ETHOS
After the Uganda crisis, the Zionist movement sank into a deep depression, which worsened after Herzl’s sudden death in 1904. The movement focused on everyday issues, for it was clear that as long as there was no change in the international situation, there was no likelihood of realizing the dead leader’s dream of obtaining a charter for Palestine. The older moshavot began to emerge from the crisis of the transition to JCA control, but the crisis mentality persisted, and numerous members of the second generation left the moshavot. It was amid this gloomy atmosphere that a new wave of immigrants began to reach Palestine—a group that would go down in history as the Second Aliya.
Like its predecessors, this influx of between 35,000 and 40,000 immigrants can be seen as the foam atop the great wave of Jewish emigrants leaving Eastern Europe at this time, most of whom went to America (between 1904 and 1914, some 1.2 million of them reached the United States). In the writer Yosef Haim Brenner’s description, “A family that wanted to rid itself of a problem sent the problem to Palestine.” He continued, “Only revolutions like those of 1905–1906, which roiled and shook our cooking pot in the Pale of Settlement and in one fell swoop sent tens of thousands of our people across the seas, also sent splinters to Eretz Yisrael.”7 Most of these immigrants wound up returning home, although a certain number remained and settled in the cities, mainly Jaffa. A minority, however, chose another path; and these left their mark on the entire Second Aliya.
The thirty years between the First and Second Aliyot changed the face of the Pale of Settlement, where most immigrants came from. Accelerated industrialization and modernization in Russia led people to move from small towns to district towns and the main cities of the Pale. One outcome of this urbanization process was greater radicalization of the younger generation. The increasing activity of the Russian revolutionaries, particularly the social revolutionaries who engaged in terrorist attacks against government figures, attracted young Jews, whose thought went: “Here are young Russians rising up against government tyranny, and if they can, so can we.” As we have seen, the Bund, a Jewish-Marxist party that aspired to advance Jewish workers’ interests, was founded in 1897, the year of the First Zionist Congress. The Bund aroused the pride of Jewish workers, instilling in them class and national consciousness and the hope that when the democratic revolution came, all religious- or nationalist-oriented discrimination would be eliminated.
In the wake of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, Jewish self-defense groups began organizing, with the support of the Bund and the Zionists. The radicalization process gained momentum following the wave of pogroms that rocked the Pale of Settlement after the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Radicalization of Jewish youth manifested itself in a plethora of ideologies and schools of thought. There were those who believed in the democratic revolution that would enable Jews to live in Russia as a minority entitled to maintain its exclusive culture as expressed in Yiddish language and literature (“Autonomists” and Bundists). Others, after the Uganda Plan and the failed efforts to obtain Palestine, were attracted to territorialism, a search for a territory for the Jews outside Palestine.
There were also, of course, the Zionists. But the Zionism of Hovevei Zion or Herzl seemed bourgeois; it had not achieved its goals, and it was incompatible with the spirit of those stormy times. Radical Zionist circles began to emerge: Tzeʿirei Zion (young Zionists) and Poalei Zion (Zionist workers). At first these entities were amorphous and less able to express positive goals than to define what they were against: the custodial regime in the moshavot (which they had learned about from Ahad Haʿam’s famous essay “The Yishuv and Its Custodians”); the far-reaching plans of political Zionism that had no grounding in reality; the petit-bourgeois character of Zionist activity. They wanted a different Zionism, one that would be meaningful not only for the Jewish collective, but also for the individual. It should embody a psychological revolution in the image of the Jew—a revolution of values, norms, and behavior. Tzeʿirei Zion emphasized national and cultural factors and strove for a life of morality and authenticity in the Land of the Forefathers, while Poalei Zion was influenced by the socialist ideas in the Russian street.
Ber Borochov created a synthesis between Marxism, then considered the dominant ideology, and Zionism. He explained that the Jews in their respective countries were unable to become part of the proletariat, the class of the future, because they were not allowed to work in industry. Instead they were being pauperized and turning into a proletariat of tatters, a lumpenproletariat. Consequently the Jews were doomed to be ground down in the imminent great battle between capitalism and socialism. In order to save themselves they needed a country of their own where they could practice a class war properly, and this country was Palestine. In Borochov’s vision this development would occur through objective, spontaneous processes, independent of human will. He asserted that socialist Zionists were not supposed to immigrate to Palestine for emotional reasons but would be driven there by these “objective” processes. Therefore there should be no use of immigration propaganda and no collaboration with the Zionist bourgeoisie. The role of Poalei Zion was to assist in the development of capitalism in semi-feudal Palestine; it was only after this vital stage in its historic development was reached that a socialist revolution would arise there. From today’s perspective the Poalei Zion worldview seems nothing more than a clumsy attempt to clothe a desired reality in theory; but bear in mind that Borochovism provided tens of thousands of young Jews with the synthesis that enabled them to connect the universal revolution—which for them represented the advancement of the human spirit—with their nationalist yearnings.
In 1906 Joseph Vitkin, a tubercular Hebrew teacher bitterly disappointed by his teaching experiences in the moshavot, published an “Appeal to the Youth of Israel whose heart is with their people and Zion,” in which he called upon idealistic young people to immigrate to Palestine. “Awake, O youth of Israel, come to the aid of your people! Our people is struggling, its land will soon slip out of its grasp forever. Hasten to its help!” He tried to prepare his readers for the trials awaiting them: “Ready yourselves to fight nature, sickness, hunger, people—friends and adversaries—strangers and brothers, haters of Zion and Zionists. . . . Ready yourselves for the hatred and brutality of those around you who will view you as a dangerous competitor.” Ultimately, “Many of you will fall, perhaps fighting sickness and anguish, hunger and toil, but those who remain and those who follow them will fill the ranks, and the war, this war of peace, will continue to victory.” He concluded, “Heroes of Israel, hurry and move forward. Renew the days of the Biluim with even greater energy, for otherwise we will surely and swiftly be lost.”8
Most of these young men and women came to Palestine on their own and remained single for many years. They arrived very young in a remote, unknown country, devoid of relatives or friends, without the backing of a movement, a society, or an association that might welcome them. The vast majority came without money or means, with the sole ambition of being workers in the Land of Israel. The years of the Second Aliya were also the years of the arrivals’ crisis of adolescence. They were wanderers; they worked for a time in the citrus groves of Petach Tikva, then the wind carried them to Hadera and from there to the Galilee, and so on. On one hand, this lack of permanence expressed their desire to get to know the country, while on the other it reflected a certain dissatisfaction, a lack of maturity and readiness to commit to a place, people, and way of life. Driven by the spirit of the Russian revolutionaries, they wanted a meaningful life and were not deterred by the suffering and hardship they took upon themselves. “We feared well-being,” wrote Rachel Bluwstein, who became known as Rachel the Poetess. “We yearned for sacrifice. . . .” Zalman Shazar described this emotion as “the joy of sacrifice.”9
From Russia the Second Aliya pioneers brought the political party as the accepted organizational framework. A “party” entailed an elected leadership, a platform that included the salient points of the group’s ideology, and a newspaper that would fight the party’s battles and present its ideology to the public. The first such party to be founded in Palestine was Hapoʿel Hatzaʿir (the young worker) in 1905. It did not espouse a predetermined platform, which was tantamount to a declaration that its members were not engaged in political theory but were anchoring themselves in Palestinian reality. They inscribed on their escutcheon “the conquest of labor,” by which they meant the entrenchment of the Jewish worker in agricultural work on Jewish land. In terms of culture they viewed the development of a Hebrew center of culture in Palestine and turning Hebrew into an everyday language as a national mission of the first order. For them the romanticism of being an agricultural worker connected with the idea that manual labor would redeem the Jew from the malady of generations. It would be a source of mental fortitude and create new attributes that would bring about a psychological revolution.
In 1906 the Poalei Zion party was established in Palestine. The Ramla Platform, its manifesto, was formulated in the spirit of Borochov by twenty-year-old David Ben-Gurion, who had arrived in the country just a few months earlier. Poalei Zion sought to become a proletariat, and therefore looked for manual labor in the moshavot. The party appears not to have imbued this work with the spiritual importance attributed to it by Hapoel Hatzaʿir, but rather saw it as an existential necessity. In reality the everyday interests of both these streams of thought came together in this agricultural work.
As we have seen, once the moshavot came under JCA control, hardly any Jewish workers remained in them. The youngsters who now began to arrive in the moshavot were a breed totally different from their humble, poor-spirited predecessors. They brought a strong sense of mission and a conviction that their role was to ensure the Jewish foothold in Palestine and the nationalist character of the moshavot. They were freethinkers, men and women who went out to work and spent their leisure time together, and they saw themselves as the avant-garde showing the way to those who would come after. They placed great value on their status as laborers, and the idea of overseeing the work of others—that is, exploiting their labor—was anathema to them. By the same token they rejected the earlier workers’ ideal of becoming landowning farmers. They wished to remain simple workers, and saw their labor as fulfilling their national mission. Taking a lesson from the fate of the First Aliya pioneers who had lost their ideals when they came under the baron’s patronage, and abhorring the ultra-Orthodox who lived on the charity of the haluka, they refused any support whatsoever. Their independence would only be preserved if they refused to associate themselves with any material possessions and zealously safeguarded their freedom from dependence.
The encounter between these radical, highly ideological youngsters and the reality of the moshavot was traumatic. “The pioneers of the First Aliya became speculators and shopkeepers trading in the hopes of their people and selling the aspirations of their youth for pennies. They introduced the idol of exile into the temple of rebirth, and the creation of the homeland was sullied by ‘idolatry,’ ”10 wrote David Ben-Gurion. Idolatry is one of the three exceptional Jewish sins of which it is said, “Let the Jew prefer death and not commit that sin” (the others are shedding blood and incest). In using these metaphors Ben-Gurion was identifying the profane and profaning “idol in the temple” with Arab labor in the fields of the moshavot. He thereby shifted the issue of Arab labor from the practical level of Jews obtaining work in the moshavot to the mythical level of breaking a taboo.
The clash between these workers and the First Aliya farmers was a clash of civilizations—between a conservative society and a radical one, between a traditionally observant society and one proud of its secularism, and between a society devoted to permanence and stability and one that rejected bourgeois values and material success. The farmers despised the youngsters as schmendricks (clueless or worthless people), while the youngsters characterized the farmers as national traitors whose desire for money made them willing to relinquish the Zionist idea of establishing a productive Jewish entity in Palestine. In the war of generations that flared, the farmers pointed to their hardships over the past thirty years and argued that it was important to maintain the economic stability of the moshavot as part of settling Palestine, that in any case there were not enough workers to sustain exclusively Jewish labor, and that perhaps living in peace with their Arab neighbors required that they not insist on this. However, these points went unheeded. The battle for Zionist public opinion, which closely followed the controversy in the press in Palestine and overseas, was won hands down by the Second Aliya workers, who thenceforth assumed the aura of redeemers of the nation, while the farmers bore the stigma of class egoism.
The debate on Jewish labor in the moshavot became a debate on the substance of Zionism. In 1912, after his third visit to Palestine, Ahad Haʿam published his essay “All in All.” Whereas in his previous essays “Truth from Eretz Yisrael” and “The Yishuv and Its Custodians” he had sharply criticized the situation in the moshavot, he now presented their achievements, their economic growth and independence. He described the successful farmer he encountered in the moshavot as an almost ideal figure, a kind of biblical Boaz, a proud, knowledgeable owner who oversees his workers and makes a living from agriculture but does not work himself. Then Ahad Haʿam posed the crucial question: “The foundations of life of any country lie in the rural masses . . . the rural masses in Palestine are not ours in the present, and it is diffcult to imagine how they will be created in the future.” He concluded that by his very nature the Jew was not cut out to be a tiller of the soil: “The Jew is too smart, too cultured, and is not capable of reducing his whole life and desires to a small plot of land and being happy with his lot, earning humble fare from it by the sweat of his brow.”11 All the hopes espoused by Herzl for Palestine as a “safe haven” therefore had no basis, since the Jews would always be a small minority within a large Arab majority. To Ahad Haʿam, this situation was a vindication of the “spiritual center” idea he had propounded from the outset, but for the believers in greater Zionism it was a death knell. The failure of the conquest of labor in the moshavot was not only a personal failure for these young people but also a national one, a diminishing of Zionist perspectives.
A social structure in which the landowners are a European minority and the workers natives is reminiscent of the colonial societies where the European minority ruled the local majority and exploited its labor. From the outset the Jewish society in Palestine did not fit this pattern. The new Jewish Yishuv was not established so that the motherland could send its sons and daughters to settle in a country it ruled and exploit the colony’s resources. Rather, Palestine was a unique case of mainly European settlers who chose to come to an undeveloped, economically undesirable country, and invest capital and labor in it for nationalist and ideological reasons. The settlers did not conquer the land; they purchased it. Still, the socioeconomic structure that evolved in the moshavot was similar to that in the European colonies, and the people of the Second Aliya rejected it completely. Since the French Revolution, revolutionaries, especially in Tsarist Russia, had accepted the slogan “The Land for Its Workers.” The people of the Second Aliya believed that maintaining the status quo in the moshavot meant living by exploiting another’s labor, and also posed the danger that one day the Arab workers would rise up against their Jewish masters and take possession of the land. Their socialist ideology made these youngsters sensitive to the potential danger inherent in the moshavot’s socioeconomic structure and its moral flaws.
The struggle for the conquest of labor in the moshavot failed. In some cases the farmers did not want insolent Jewish workers who challenged their employers. In others there were simply not enough Jewish workers to “conquer” labor. Worst of all, it turned out that even when Jewish workers were permanently employed, and managed to persevere in the hard, tedious work, they were unable to sustain life as cultured people who occasionally read a newspaper or a book, and it was certainly beyond their ability to start a family. This problem became more acute as the decade of the Second Aliya progressed and the young men and women grew older.
This last diffculty led to the idea that perhaps the idealistic, relatively educated worker with a need for culture was unsuited for the conquest of labor. Perhaps this would be better accomplished by those referred to at the time as “natural workers”—people to whom physical labor came naturally, who had no need to “conquer” it, in the sense of having to achieve a kind of victory over themselves in order to do such work. And it appeared that such natural workers were available.
During the First Aliya several thousand immigrants from Yemen had reached Palestine on their own initiative. At the end of the 1840s, the British had taken Aden, opening a window for the Yemenite Jews to obtain information through the Jewish press that reached the city about happenings in other Jewish communities. In the 1880s the rumor became rife that wealthy Jews were about to purchase Palestine and settle Jews there. The Ottoman rulers of Yemen strictly enforced all the humiliating anti-Jewish edicts in that Muslim country. The combination of harsh conditions in Yemen, love of the Land of Israel, and the hope of improving their lot there motivated Yemenite Jews to undertake the journey to Palestine. As Ottoman subjects they were permitted to enter Palestine, and the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the trip.
Reaching Palestine in several waves, the Yemenites settled in Jerusalem and Jaffa and made a living as artisans, silversmiths, construction workers, and stonecutters, occupations in which they competed with the Arabs. They had a reputation as industrious people who made do with little. So, at the moment when the Second Aliya workers were in the grip of despair over the failure of the “conquest of labor,” the notion of bringing in Yemenite Jews, who would integrate into the moshavot as “natural workers,” was born. Shmuel Yavneʾeli, posing as a rabbinic emissary from Palestine to the Diaspora communities for the purpose of raising charitable donations, traveled to Yemen to convert the Jews of that remote country to the idea of immigrating to Palestine, a journey that became part of Second Aliya mythology. Starting in 1909 waves of Yemenite immigrants again arrived in Palestine, with some 1,200 going to work in the moshavot. Their difficulties were exceptionally harsh: they were physically weak, inexperienced in agricultural work, and certainly no competition for the Arabs. Mortality from sickness was extremely high. By 1914 the Yemenites constituted some 5 percent of the Jewish population of Palestine, but “natural workers” they were not.
In its more abstract sense, the term “conquest of labor” referred to the Second Aliya workers’ efforts to adapt to physical work, and this effort was their formative experience. As Yosef Haim Brenner recounted, “Who can imagine the pain of the wretched Jewish intellectual who comes here in the hope of living a different, wholesome life of physical labor, with the smell of the field—and after a few days realizes that his dream is an empty one . . . that there is no hope for the Jewish people here, and that—and this is the main thing—he himself is unqualified for any form of labor. . . .’12 The literature and memoirs of the period are rich with descriptions of the difficulties experienced by the Jewish intellectual doing physical labor under the burning sun, competing with the far more experienced Ar1ab worker. Labor was held up as having moral value and being rich with therapeutic qualities for both individual and society. Accordingly the workers were considered the nation’s elite, sacrificing themselves for the national interest and carrying on their shoulders the realization of the Zionist idea in all its purity. Physical labor was also believed to bestow upon the individual spiritual qualities and a mystical connection with the country. Through it the individual Jew was redeemed from the heritage of exile. This was how the workers compensated themselves for their suffering as they labored daily in the moshavot.
In contrast with the socialists in Europe, who separated their worldview and their actual way of life, the Russian revolutionaries insisted on living in accordance with their ideals. Transferring this idea to Palestine meant that it was not enough to believe in the benefit of work in the fields over any other form of labor; one must live out that belief. It was not enough to believe that one should live without exploiting others; one must realize that belief in practice. However, only a small elite was capable of actually doing so. The vast majority of workers soon despaired of agricultural work, moved to the cities, and took up other occupations. Thus few of the writers and leaders who preached this doctrine actualized it in their own lives. Even so, they would testify to their time as agricultural workers as a way of associating themselves with the nation’s elite. Ben-Gurion, for example, only worked on the farm at Sejera for about a year, but referred to this short period as a formative experience. The pioneering ethos that inspired generations of young Jews, who saw it as combining the sacrifice of the social and the nationalist revolutionaries, was based on this principle of “realization” of the ideal in everyday life.
Toward 1909 a second wave of the Second Aliya began, and with it came some creative ideas that ended the standstill resulting from the failure of the “conquest of labor” in the moshavot. Educator and philosopher Joseph Vitkin and Berl Katznelson, who became an important leader of the labor movement, were among the first to offer ideas for alternative forms of settlement. The Arab worker, an experienced farmhand, was willing to work for a low wage because he already had land and family in his village, and working on a Jewish farm was a form of moonlighting. Since the Jewish worker could not compete with him, the Jewish worker must establish a farm of his own. Experience showed, however, that when workers became farmers they could not handle all the work themselves and wound up hiring Arab workers. And in any case the Second Aliya workers lacked enough capital to settle on independent holdings, but rejected financial aid since it led to subjugation and decay.
How to overcome these two obstacles? Here a practical solution preceded an ideological one. The Palestine Office, which had been active in Palestine since 1908, was headed by Arthur Ruppin, a Prussian Jew who was open to social experiments. Beginning in 1909 the Offce established farms on Jewish National Fund (JNF) land that were managed by agronomists and employed mainly, but not always, Jewish workers—the first time that the Zionist Organization undertook practical work in Palestine. On all these farms relations between management and workers were strained. One was the Kinneret Farm, where the workers went out on strike. The difficulties there indicated that a new form of organization was needed. On the other side of the River Jordan from Kinneret was another piece of JNF land called Umm Juni, which the Offce leased to a group of one woman and six men to work for one year, on their own responsibility. The first year ended with a profit. That was the beginning of Degania, “Mother of the Kvutzot.”
This experiment, undertaken almost by chance, became the basis of a new settlement model: national lands leased to workers. This was considered not philanthropy but national enterprise. The workers had no overseer, which reduced labor costs and eliminated friction. Later, Berl Katznelson added two further elements to this structure. The first was mutual responsibility: the group bore a common responsibility for labor, enabling weak, new, sick workers to integrate into the group. This was also a way to integrate women into agricultural work. Second, the group was part of a federation or movement in which the collective oversaw both the individual members and each group. The JNF was committed to Jewish labor on its land, and each of these elements constituted a check against the temptation of employing Arab workers. Self-labor was designed to prevent hiring the cheap labor of others, while mutual responsibility ensured that the group had authority over the individual who might be tempted. The federation’s authority over the group provided an additional layer of prevention against deviation.
This was the beginning of the concept of constructive socialism. On the eve of the Third Aliya in 1920, Brenner summarized the worldview of the Second Aliya members who had remained in the country: “Now this small camp that has remained is of one mind, that the salvation of the Jewish people and the Land of Israel will come not through prophets or people with high politics, not through citrus grove owners and not through a spiritual proletariat, but through groups of new workers who will come with tremendous strength and flow toward the purpose of settlement, either in kvutzot or workers’ moshavim (cooperative farms), in a proper collective-national manner.”13 He thus formulated a program for the coming years.
Workers’ settlement challenged the quasi-colonial settlement regime of the moshavot by presenting an alternative that, the workers contended, was not only more aligned with the national interest but also more ethical. It was intended to draw the socioeconomic sting from the Jewish-Arab encounter and limit the conflict to the political-national sphere.
The concept of independent workers settling on national land was an attempt to adapt the settlement system to the potential settler. The “natural worker” was the smallest of minorities among the Jews. The vast majority of impoverished immigrants who reached the shores of Palestine had no intention of settling in a village and engaging in manual labor. They wanted to settle in a city and continue working as artisans and in commerce, the traditional Jewish occupations. It was the idealists who chose agriculture, but they refused to accept competition with the Arabs, the humiliation of working under an overseer, and the condescension of the farmers. Workers’ independent settlement soon became known as “labor settlement.” This concept, which disparaged the moshavot—where Jews were said to not really “work”—made the most of the idealists’ strengths while minimizing their weaknesses. These relatively well-educated settlers wanted to invest all their strength and skills in the work and were open to technological innovations, desiring to learn from agricultural experience both in Palestine and elsewhere in the world. Full of initiative, they strove for constant modernization. Their independent, inquisitive character made them useless as someone’s subordinate but superb at working independently, running their own farms. In this way the individual interests of the radical workers who lacked means and the interest of Zionism were made to converge.
The transition to workers’ settlement meant relinquishing the “conquest of labor” in the moshavot. For the two workers’ parties this conceptual shift was diffcult. To the leaders of Hapoʿel Hatzaʿir, abandoning the moshavot was like fleeing the battlefield amid the fight for the “conquest of labor,” while for Poalei Zion the idea that workers would run a farm contradicted the Borochovist ideology of creating a proletariat. But such is the way of an immigrant country, where ideologies that do not pass the test of local reality are eroded and elites based on the old ideology are relegated to the sidelines, while new elites who manifest the new reality arise. By the eve of World War One, the idea of independent workers’ settlement on national land, supported by the Zionist Organization, was accepted by broad segments of the Second Aliya workers who had remained in Palestine. From now on the worker could claim the title of pioneer—a person who actualized the national ideal on a day-to-day basis, sacrificing him or herself on the altar of Zionism. During this period the workers were a small minority of the Yishuv, lacking both economic and political power, yet they possessed in embryonic form a claim to hegemony. The self-awareness of these people, the talents of their leaders and writers in formulating a public agenda and inculcating it in the minds of wide circles outside their own milieu, transformed this claim from the pretension of a few into a national ethos that few dared oppose.
This decision to establish workers’ settlements that would constitute a territorial space protected against penetration by Arab labor was to determine the character of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine as an entity existing not within the Arab population, but beside it. The decision was not self-evident; Jews had settled in Arab locations that became mixed Jewish-Arab cities. This was the case in the four holy cities, and also Jaffa and Haifa. When previous Bilu member Yaʿakov Shertok and his family immigrated to Palestine in 1906, he chose to lease a big farm in the village of Ein Sinia in the Ephraim Hills, a location remote from any Jewish settlement. They lived there for two years, then moved to the new Ahuzat Bayit neighborhood that had been built near Jaffa (and that would become Tel Aviv). This action was not considered unusual. There were Jews who tried to purchase land in Arab locations, and up to the 1929 riots Jews lived in Gaza and Hebron (but not in Samaria, the Arab heartland of Palestine). By the same token the Jewish moshavot were a focus of attraction for local Arabs, who resettled Arab villages that had been abandoned in the nineteenth century. Thus the option of creating a common economy and a mixed Jewish-Arab society in Palestine was not perceived as an impossibility. Although the idea of establishing a separate economy, which would entail (visible in retrospect) a society separate from Arab society, as a basis for an independent national entity was inherent in the idea of the protected, protectionist space of Jewish labor, it is quite clear that no one thought about this at the time.
JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS
Palestine under Ottoman rule was not a discrete political unit. The Galilee and Samaria were the two separate senjaks (districts) of Acre and Nablus, respectively, which came under the authority of the Beirut vilayet (province). The Jerusalem senjak, which included the central area of Palestine, the Hebron hills, the southern coastal plain, and the northern Negev, was important because of international sensitivity regarding the holy places, so it was under the direct authority of Istanbul. Despite this fragmentation, the first stirrings of an Arab national movement existed in Palestine, led by educated Christian Arabs. The Muslim Arabs were mostly loyal to the Ottoman Empire and had hardly any independent political awareness. Following the Young Turks’ revolution in 1908, which raised hopes for an enlightened regime that would permit expression of nationalist feelings in the empire, there were some displays of Arab nationalism in Palestine, such as the appearance of the Al-Karmil newspaper in Haifa, which preached anti-Jewish sentiments, but it is still diffcult to discern any particular Palestinian Arab national consciousness during this period. The Arabs were, however, aware of the Jews’ attempts to settle in Palestine and concerned about what they perceived as foreign incursion. In 1891 Arab dignitaries from Jerusalem sent a petition to the sultan begging him to stop the wave of Jewish immigrants coming to Palestine. In response the Sublime Porte (Ottoman government) promulgated a prohibition against Jews entering the country.
The debate on what was then termed “the Arab problem” was mainly an internal Jewish one, not a reaction to displays of Arab nationalism, and it revolved around the Jews’ behavior toward the Arabs. In his essay “Truth from Eretz Yisrael,” Ahad Haʿam censured the Jewish farmers for their mistreatment of their Arab workers (1891). Yitzhak Epstein, in his article “A Hidden Question,” cautioned against the dispossession of Arab tenant farmers that followed Jewish settlement, even when they were paid generous compensation (1907). Rabbi Benjamin (Yehoshua Redler-Feldman) proposed fostering and advancing the Arab population together with the Jews as a way of bringing the two peoples together (1911).14 Like their guide and mentor Borochov, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi (the latter of whom became Israel’s second president) thought that the Arab fellahin were descendants of the ancient Jews who had converted first to Christianity and then to Islam; now, with Jewish settlement, they would assimilate among the Jews. These ideas led to a lively debate in the Zionist press, but it is doubtful if the discussions had any practical implications: the Jewish Yishuv was still too young and sparse to constitute a real threat to the Arabs, while on the other hand it had nothing to offer them. Considering the Zionist movement’s lack of resources, ideas like Rabbi Benjamin’s were completely impractical.
However, a certain existential anxiety attended life in the Yishuv, and the Jews attentively followed what went on among the Arabs. Clashes between Jews and Arabs during this period were mainly disputes between neighbors over such issues as land, water, and grazing. In everyday life the Jews had to take measures to protect their lives and property, and the moshavot employed Arab guards, who often collaborated with thieves. Still, the principle of self-defense was an inseparable part of the ideology of the Second Aliya. The first Poalei Zion members to immigrate to Palestine had belonged to a self-defense group in Hommel, Ukraine, and brought this tradition with them as part of their program of changing the image of the Jew, as manifested in the willingness to defend Jewish lives and honor. In 1907 at Sejera, members of Poalei Zion formed the Bar-Giora secret society.
In 1908 the Hashomer (guard) organization superseded Bar-Giora, adopting as its slogan a line from a poem by Yaʿakov Cahan, “In fire and blood did Judea fall; in blood and fire Judea shall rise.” Hashomer was controversial; the colonists (Jewish farmers) felt that its members were inclined to provoke the Arabs, unnecessarily making relations with them more contentious. The members of the workers’ parties also had reservations about the organization. Its adoption of Arab symbols and accoutrements—the abaya, the keffyeh, bandoliers, weapons, the horse—seemed like a deviation from Jewish culture. The choice to be a guard was seen as a rejection of hard agricultural labor in favor of a romanticized use of force. Instead of the figure of the tiller of land, Hashomer fostered the image of the fighter, which seemed to contradict the workers’ philosophy. The importance of Hashomer in this period was far less in its actual actions than in the fact that it attempted to fashion a Jewish defense force in Palestine. Just as the Biluim were the root of the pioneers’ family tree, Hashomer was the ancestor of the Jewish defense force.
THE FORMATION OF A NATIONAL CULTURE
In the thirty years between the First Aliya and World War One, there appeared in Palestine not only the seed of modern Jewish settlement but also the embryo of a national culture. This culture was characterized by a secular Jewish identity, a shift to Hebrew as the spoken language, and a demand for independence from Diaspora cultures.
The two great cultural mentors of the period were Ahad Haʿam and Micah Josef Berdyczewski. The Bnei Moshe (sons of Moses) society founded by Ahad Haʿam was influential among the liberal intelligentsia in the moshavot, whereas Berdyczewski influenced mainly the Second Aliya. The contrast between the two created two poles of modern Jewish identity whose differences lay in perceptions of the Jewish past, its symbols and meaning, and also in what constituted a desirable image of the “new Jew.” Ahad Haʿam’s version of Jewish history was a moralizing tale of a people that by its very nature despised physical power and sanctified spiritual and moral force. In his view the Jewish experience was steeped in this quality, which had shaped its history. Berdyczewski, by contrast, saw this ostensibly moral quality as the consequence of the Jews’ national weakness, dating back to the destruction of the Temple. To him this characteristic resulted from the loss of the vitality and naturalness of a people living in its own land, who would possess intrinsic aggressiveness, spontaneity, closeness to nature, and aspirations for power.
Where Ahad Haʿam emphasized the principle “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts” (which he amended to “the spirit,” eliminating the rest of the verse), Berdyczewski thought that this emphasis suppressed the natural instinct of a nation not to flinch from the use of force. Ahad Haʿam sanctified the figure of Rabbi Yochanan Ben-Zakkai, who according to legend fled from besieged Jerusalem on the eve of the destruction and pleaded with the Romans for Yavneh, where he would establish a center of Judaism separate from Jerusalem (and which continued to exist after the loss of national sovereignty). Berdyczewski, for his part, extolled the zealots who chose to die on the ramparts of Jerusalem and not surrender. Yavneh and Betar (the center of the Bar-Kokhba revolt) became symbols of two competing versions of modern Jewish identity. The first saw spirituality as the essence of Judaism, while the other emphasized the existential being of the Jews. Ahad Haʿam hailed a Jewish identity that was not bound to observe the ritual commandments but did identify with historical Judaism. His concept was based on the assumption that there was one monolithic, complete, and authentic Jewish nature. Berdyczewski challenged this perception in the name of other Jewish qualities that had been repressed for generations by that hegemonic concept. He conjured images of power and heroism from the First and Second Temple periods, from Joshua and Samson and Saul to the Hasmoneans and the fighters of Masada, which until then the traditional Jewish historical narrative had overlooked and neglected.
Ahad Haʿam’s moralistic concept suited the Hovevei Zion intelligentsia, the first generation of settlers, but it was incompatible with the rebellious spirit of the Second Aliya generation, which challenged the Jews’ weakness. Berdyczewski’s dialectical concept, which extolled spontaneous vitality while calling for an opening to the culture of the larger world, attracted them more than did Ahad Haʿam’s image “The waters of Shiloah flow slowly,” which advocated Jewish seclusion from foreign influences out of fear of assimilation. Ahad Haʿam was highly esteemed as an honest critic, but Berdyczewski and the vitalist school of thought had more influence; Cahan’s poem “Habiryonim” (the outlaws), from which the Hashomer motto was taken, extols the zealots cast out and censured by Jewish tradition. These two versions of secular Jewish identity both contributed to Yishuv culture and were sometimes interwoven.
One of the most important changes to occur in Palestine was secularization. This process barely affected the ultra-Orthodox communities in Jerusalem, which adhered to their own way of life, but it was clearly evident in the First Aliya moshavot. The first generation there strictly observed the commandments, and life revolved around the synagogue; the first public building to be erected was the mikve, the ritual bath house. But the second and third generations rapidly became secularized, leading to a cultural clash as early as the 1890s. The moshavot were not closed to the influence of the world around them, and something in the atmosphere of Palestine and the rural way of life encouraged young people to turn their backs on religion. Although education in the moshavot was traditional, it included secular, nationalist elements, and the teachers, who were mostly nonobservant, also exerted an influence.
Disputes between religious and secular Jews mainly concerned conduct in public, such as theater performances or dances attended by both men and women. From these conflicts the younger generation emerged triumphant. They also adopted leisure activities from their Arab neighbors, including horse racing, Arab-style celebrations ( fantazias), and Bedouin dress (similar to that adopted by Hashomer). A “native” culture developed, characterized by speaking Hebrew, aggressive behavior that emphasized physicality, and a self-definition diametrically opposed to that of Diaspora Jews. Those residents of the moshavot who were actually born in Palestine clearly displayed this secular identity. What was more, by virtue of being native born, they felt entitled to leadership and used it to draw a distinction between their identity and that of the Second Aliya immigrants.
Secularization was even more pronounced among the Second Aliya members. They had come from traditional households, but the distance from home, the company of their peers, the experience of being young men and women together, and the absence of adult supervision all led to rapid abandonment of religious observance. S. Y. Agnon described this process ironically: “Rabinovitch has nothing to do with his Creator and nothing against his Creator. Ever since the day Rabinovitch left his hometown, it’s doubtful that he remembered Him. Many are the issues a person has to deal with, and he hasn’t got time to remember everything.”15 Nevertheless most freethinkers maintained their connection with Jewish festivals and rites of passage—marriage, circumcision, bar mitzvah, and death. The residual yearning for the traditional framework of life that had been lost with the move to Palestine was well described by A. D. Gordon: “Anyone who has not seen the spirits of the young people on the High Holy Days would not understand it or even believe it. One sees something very odd: our weekdays are far lovelier than those of our brethren in the Diaspora, and the Sabbath and festivals are far more beautiful in the Diaspora. We have tried to create new festivals, but to create national holidays according to logic and invention—is that not like ‘making’ poetry to order?”16
Gordon’s words reveal the diffculty of creating a new tradition without the magic of generations of ritual behind it. Researchers generally describe the formation of the national culture as a planned construction of something that had been predesigned. In fact there were a variety of complementary blueprints. One must speak not of calculated actions, but rather of copying patterns the Zionists were familiar with from national movements in Europe and adapting them to the Jews’ special needs and character. The creation of the national culture had actually begun in the Diaspora during the Jewish Enlightenment, with literature that opened before the Jewish reader a world of emotion and imagination. A vast enterprise of translation from Russian, German, English, and other languages created a corpus of world literature in Hebrew that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century slaked the thirst for a wider culture among the first Enlightenment generation in the Pale of Settlement. The titles included not only the best of world literature but also historical novels, plays, popular songbooks, children’s literature, and so forth. Hebrew periodicals also flourished, providing popular reading matter for young and old alike. This was the raw material out of which young readers shaped their worldview. Between the pages of the Gemara, Torah students concealed books and periodicals that stirred in them a longing for the realms of national pride, heroism, and willing self-sacrifice. These books, poems, and songs formed the Zionist narrative, and this shared experience created imagined communities that used the same texts, employed the same images, sang the same songs, and were moved by the same ceremonies.
Converting Hebrew from the language of prayer and sacred texts into the language of Hebrew culture, and beyond that into the language of the street and home, was one of the Zionist movement’s most magnificent achievements. A common language was considered the keystone for building nationalism, proof of a nation’s existence. The extraordinary nature of this achievement is most obvious when compared with attempts by other nations—the Irish, for example—that had only limited success in reviving an ancient language. The Zionist movement’s success was particularly amazing since it took place in the course of migration, settlement, and the formation of a national identity.
The need for communication between Jewish communities from East and West made Hebrew the natural choice; as we saw, the early immigrants of the First Aliya spoke Hebrew with the Chelouche family in Jaffa. This was one of the most persuasive arguments in favor of Hebrew and against Yiddish as the national language, even though millions of Jews spoke Yiddish. During the Second Aliya period, when this debate took place, it was still not clear whether Hebrew would overcome not only Yiddish but also the foreign languages that had penetrated the Jewish cultural arena.
Hebrew teachers in Palestine adopted the Sephardi accent because they assumed it was closest to that of ancient Hebrew, but this choice probably also expressed a latent tendency to distinguish between traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew and the new Hebrew of Palestine. The Sephardi accent was not easy for Eastern Europeans to master. Before his immigration Y. H. Brenner, one of the most important Hebrew writers, feared it greatly. Berl Katznelson sealed his lips for ten days after his arrival in Palestine until he had mastered the language. The Hebrew of Palestine was more easily absorbed by men, who were familiar with religious texts from their youth, whereas women had to learn it from scratch. In the same period Hebrew also became the language of literature and culture.
The heroes of the triumph of Hebrew were the teachers. Vacant teaching positions were few and far between, so the best minds in Palestine sought these jobs in the moshavot or the towns. With respect to the development of national educational and cultural practices in Palestine, teachers were a leading, elite group. The intelligentsia struggled to earn a livelihood even as its members formulated a Hebrew vernacular and teaching language, revived terminology they needed in their work, wrote textbooks, and adopted poems and songs that they disseminated among their students. The teachers also shaped the Zionist calendar and its attendant ceremonies: the fifteenth of Shevat, the tree-planting festival; the twentieth of Tammuz, Herzl Day; and the Hanukkah festival, which changed from a celebration of the miracle of the oil to a celebration of the heroism of the Maccabees. The agricultural significance of the three pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles) was emphasized, rather than their religious meaning. It was the teachers who initiated field trips to historical sites, like the graves of the Maccabees and Betar, with priority given to sites associated with the heroism and glory of the past. Thus did they inculcate knowledge and love of the country. For them religious memorial sites, such as the graves of the Patriarchs in Hebron or the grave of Rachel the Matriarch, were not desirable destinations. The founding in 1903 of the Teachers Association, the first such national body, reflected the teachers’ intense self-awareness and belief that they had taken on responsibility for an enterprise of historic significance.
In this young society the Bible was the seminal text. Yitzhak Tabenkin, a leader of the labor movement, wrote: “The Bible was a sort of birth certificate that helped bring down the barrier between man and the country, and nurtured ‘the sense of homeland’ . . . This manifested in close, firm contact with the Book and at the same time something so uncommon among workers—finding a Bible in almost every worker’s room.”17 The Bible symbolized the connection with the national past. It was a guidebook to the country’s fauna and flora and to ancient settlement sites that had been covered with the dust of generations and were now revealed—exciting sites like Mount Gilboa, the River Jordan fords, and the Ayalon Valley. It preserved historical memory—what Ahad Haʿam called “book memory”18—and also concretized the Land of Israel, forming a direct connection between past and present. It was a source of national pride, proof of Jewish creativity on the soil of the homeland.
But the Bible was also a text replete with universal aspirations for justice among nations and peoples, social equality, and world peace. In it could be found evidence for the doctrines of both Ahad Haʿam and Berdyczewski. A debate raged at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century over how to teach the Bible at the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa (shortly to become the Herzliya Gymnasium in the new city of Tel Aviv), reflecting different attitudes toward the significance of the Bible in the nationalist context. The teacher Ben-Zion Mossinsohn taught the Bible in the spirit of Julius Wellhausen’s biblical criticism, which addressed the Bible as literature written by humans that could be critiqued and amended. Zalman Epstein, a moderate religious Zionist, and even Ahad Haʿam, viewed this perspective as an affront to the nation’s most fundamental historical assets. The younger generation, on the other hand, eagerly espoused a secularist engagement with the Bible that tried to understand it in a modern, literal spirit through philology and archeology, without the layers of traditional associative interpretation that had enveloped it for generations.
Through the Bible Mossinsohn sought to instill in his students love of the Land of Israel and rejection of Diaspora life. In so doing he created a psychological divide between “here” and “there,” while appropriating the Bible for “here.” This controversial approach was opposed by numerous teachers, but it was congenial with the “native” instincts that the students had developed.
By 1910 there were several leading newspapers in Palestine. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s Hatzvi (the gazelle) or Hahashkafa (the perspective; it regularly changed its name to avoid Turkish censorship) expressed the Francophile views of the Ben-Yehuda family. Others were Haherut (liberty), the Jerusalem Sephardi paper; Hapoʿel Hatzaʿir, the organ of that party; and Haʾahdut (unity), the Poalei Zion paper, which after a short-lived attempt at publishing a Yiddish journal adopted the principle that Hebrew was the dominant language in Palestine.
There were dozens of educational institutions affliated with the national school system, from kindergartens to high schools, teachers’ seminars, the Bezalel School of the Arts, a conservatory of music, and so forth. Even though the majority of students studied in the traditional heders or the educational programs of philanthropic institutions such as the French Alliance and the German Ezra, the cultural climate of the country was shaped by the national education system. The bourgeois intelligentsia in Jaffa (after 1909, Tel Aviv) or Jerusalem found common ground with the Second Aliya workers; together they conducted the campaign to instill Hebrew culture in the Jewish world of Palestine, and their alliance formed that culture.
At that time the proportion of writers and other people of culture was quite high for the number of Jews in the country. Some of these intelligentsia had lived there for a short time, others for many years. To mention just a few, they included S. Ben-Zion, Y. H. Brenner, A. D. Gordon, David Shimonovich, S. Y. Agnon, Aharon Hareuveni, A. Z. Rabinovich, and Moshe Smilansky. They sought to spread highbrow Hebrew culture—mainly in the form of literature—but faced two diffculties: first, most of the Yishuv did not know enough Hebrew to enjoy reading this literature, and second, it preferred popular culture—and in Yiddish. Each time a Yiddish play was performed in Jaffa it drew large audiences of ordinary people who longed for entertainment in their mother tongue, entertainment that was sadly lacking in the scholarly Hebrew-language lectures delivered in the political party clubs or at the Herzliya Gymnasium, the center for the zealous imparting of Hebrew. People were also drawn to the circus, processions, gymnastic performances, or the cinema, which appeared at this time. To the intelligentsia these were debasing displays of cheap culture, unworthy of the enterprise of national rebirth, but they were in greater demand than lofty productions in Hebrew, replete with nationalist messages. Competition between Yiddish and Hebrew led to clashes between the Hebrew zealots and the Yiddish speakers. In their homes immigrants still spoke in their mother tongue; ordinary people spoke Yiddish, while the more educated spoke Russian or German, and the Alliance graduates spoke French. It was young people educated in Palestine for whom Hebrew was a spoken language.
Despite these conflicts, a Hebrew-culture community formed, which within several years demonstrated its power against external cultural pressure. The first incident that proved the existence of the Hebrew cultural republic went down in history as the Brenner Affair. Brenner, who enjoyed a preeminent moral position in the writers’ community and among the Second Aliya workers, published an article in Hapoʿel Hatzaʿir titled “Al Hizayon Hashmad” (on the phenomenon of conversion) in which he contended that conversion to Christianity was not worth a lot of discussion, since those who converted were in any case lost to the Jewish nation, which had far more important issues to deal with. He spiced his remarks with provocative criticism of the lofty status of the Bible in the national curriculum and of the rabbis, even adding that he did not totally reject Jesus of Nazareth as a historic figure. The article caused great consternation in the Diaspora, and Ahad Haʿam called upon the Odessa Committee to stop funding Hapoʿel Hatzaʿir. When the committee informed the paper of its decision to make renewed funding conditional on changing the editorial board, there was a universal outcry by writers and public intellectuals in Palestine. It was inconceivable that those who held the purse strings in Odessa should control opinion in Palestine. Bourgeoisie and socialists, educated people from the moshavot, and urban intelligentsia joined forces in this revolt, which reflected the existence of a distinct educated community in Palestine that insisted on its independence and rejected the idea that wealthy people sitting in Odessa could foist their opinions on it.
The second event that demonstrated the power of this intelligentsia became known as the Language War. In 1913 the board of governors of the Ezra society in Germany decided that some classes at the Technion, to be built in Haifa, and its high school (which became the Reali High School) would be conducted in German. A public protest was mounted against Ezra, demanding that the language of instruction be Hebrew. The protest started at the bottom among students and teachers, who organized a strike. The Teachers Association and the Zionist Organization supported this action somewhat tentatively as they made unsuccessful efforts to find a compromise. The dispute rapidly became a national issue. The striking teachers and students boycotted Ezra and set up alternative schools, which the Zionist Organization was forced to fund. Until then it had avoided involvement in education, a subject of contention between its religious and secular members. The involvement of the workers’ parties, all the newspapers, and the teachers and students put the Ezra society in a diffcult position.
Whereas the struggle between Yiddish and Hebrew was between two national languages, the protest against Ezra was against German linguistic colonialism. This fight against a foreign language united the entire new Yishuv, for the struggle was above all against an outside authority dictating cultural policy in Palestine. After reaching a compromise with the Zionists on the Technion in 1914, Ezra recovered to a certain extent, but it lost its momentum in the field of education, and when the British occupied Palestine, they closed all the Ezra institutions in the country.
On the eve of World War One, the Yishuv numbered some 85,000 people, approximately 12 percent of the country’s total population of 700,000. This represented an increase from 5 percent of a total population of 450,000 in 1880. More than half the Jews lived in Jerusalem, and between 10,000 and 15,000 lived in Jaffa (including Tel Aviv, which had been built as an adjoining garden suburb), whose total population had increased to some 45,000. On the eve of the war, the population of the agricultural settlements was between 12,000 and 12,500. After thirty years of Zionist settlement, there were forty-five agricultural settlements in Palestine. But beyond the actual existence of the moshavot, estates, farms, and workers’ moshavim, which all left their mark on the country’s landscape, these settlements represented an affrmation that the Jews were capable of being settlers and builders of the country. Despite its difficulties and weaknesses the Yishuv was dynamic and productive. It had an impressive educational system and an intellectual vibrancy that went far beyond the needs of the local population, expressing the intellectuals’ vision that in this place a new Jewish entity was emerging. A dynamic, engaged public opinion had developed, which participated actively in the Yishuv’s internal struggles.
Spiritual vibrancy was attended by social innovation. The concept of labor settlement and the experiments in private and cooperative settlement turned the Palestine of the Second Aliya into a sort of socioeconomic experiment. Everything was accomplished on a small, embryonic scale: farms to train women workers in animal husbandry and market gardening, the Merhavia cooperative, groups of vegetable growers, plant nurseries, workers’ groups for contract employment, the Sejera cooperative, and the kvutza at Umm Juni, which later became Degania. It was an atmosphere of agricultural and human experimentation, learning about nature and learning about human nature. The people from these core groups who managed to survive the war period were destined to become the germs of the Yishuv society during the British Mandate.
NOTES
1.Vladimir Dubnow to Simon Dubnow in St. Petersburg, Jaffa, 20.10.1882, in Druyanov, Alter (ed.), Ketavim letoldot Hibbat Tzion (Writings on the History of Hibbat Zion), reedited by Shulamit Laskov, vol. 1, Tel Aviv, 1982, pp. 522–523.
2.Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in Paris in 1860.
3.Bracha Habas (ed.), Sefer haʿaliya hashniya (Book of the Second Aliya), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1947, pp. 17–18.
4.Yitzhak Ben-Zvi to Kalman Marmur, Jerusalem, 20.8.1909, YIVO RG 205/104.
5.Arthur Ruppin, “Lecture at the 19th Congress, 1935,” Shloshim shnot binyan (Thirty Years of Building), Jerusalem: Schocken, 1936, p. 276. After Margalit Shilo, “Peiluta shel hahistadrut hatzionit beʾEretz Yisrael betekufat haʿaliya hashniya” (Activities of the Zionist Organization in Palestine during the Second Aliya Period), Haʿaliya hashniya: mehkarim, Israel Bartal (ed.), Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1997, p. 93.
6.Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, “Divrei yemei hashavua” (The Week), newspaper column, Hatzvi, 1887, 14, in Israel Kolatt, “Poalei haʿaliyah harishona,” Sefer haʿaliya harishona (Book of the First Aliya), Mordechai Eliav (ed.), vol. 1, Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1981, p. 345.
7.Yosef Haim Brenner, “Aliyot viyeridot” (Ups and Downs), in Sefer haʿaliya hashniya (Book of the Second Aliya), Bracha Habas (ed.), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1947, p. 21.
8.Joseph Vitkin’s appeal, March 1906: a facsimile of the original that is in the Labor Archive, appended to the Book of the Second Aliya.
9.Zalman Shazar, Tzion vatzedek (Zion and Justice), vol. 2, Tel Aviv: Tarbut vehinukh, 1971, p. 461.
10.Ben-Gurion’s memoir, Beyehuda uvagalil (In Judea and the Galilee), quoted by Zvi Even-Shoshan in Toldot tenuat hapoalim beʾEretz Yisrael (The History of the Workers’ Movement in Eretz Israel), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1963, pp. 73–74.
11.Ahad Haʿam, “Sakh hakol” (All in All), in Al parashat derakhim (At the Crossroads), 4, Berlin, 1930, p. 167.
12.Yosef Haim Brenner, “Bein mayim lemayim” (Between Water and Water), in Ketavim (Collected Works), vol. 2, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1978, p. 1188.
13.Brenner, “Aliyot viyeridot.”
14.Rabbi Benjamin, “Bereshit” (In the Beginning), Beinatayyim (Meanwhile), Jerusalem, 1903, pp. 95–104.
15.S. Y. Agnon, Temol shilshom (Yesteryear), Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1947, p. 450.
16.A. D. Gordon, “Heshboneinu im atzmenu” (Taking Stock with Ourselves), in Haʾaretz vehaʿavoda (Land and Labor), Central Committee of Hapoʿel Hatzaʿir, 1912.
17.Yitzhak Tabenkin, “Hamekorot” (The Sources), in the Book of the Second Aliya, p. 27.
18.This expression originates in Exodus 17:14.
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Shapira, Anita, Brenner: Sippur haim (Brenner: A Life), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Friedman, Isaiah, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism, 1897–1918, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Gilbar, Gad, Ottoman Palestine, 1800–1914, Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1990.
Scholch, Alexander, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development, Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C., 1993.
Shilo, Margalit, Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914, Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2005.
Baron de Rothschild
Morton, Frederic, The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait, London: Secker & Warburg, 1962. Schama, Simon, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, London: Collins, 1978.
Jewish-Arab Relations
Almog, Shmuel (ed.), Zionism and the Arabs, Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel; Zalman Shazar Center, 1983.
Caplan, Neil, Palestine Jewry and the Arab Question, 1917–1925, London: Frank Cass, 1978.
Gorny, Yosef, Zionism and the Arabs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Kedourie, Elie, and Haim, Sylvia G. (eds.), Zionism and Arabism in Palestine and Israel, London: Frank Cass, 1982.
Lockman, Zachary, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Mandel, Neville J., The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Shafir, Gershon, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Teveth, Shabtai, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Biography
Zipperstein, Steven, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Haʿam and the Origins of Zionism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.