A Russian Zionist enigma

Indiana University Press, £27.99 Reviewed by Colin Shindler

The surprising interest in Vladimir Jabotinsky over the past 20 years has been due more to the mystery of the inner beliefs and outward contradictions of this so-called “father of the Israeli right” than to his well-known Zionism. For some, he personified the perceptive liberal writer; others saw him as the rabid populist, attracting multitudes of impressionable youngsters by his magnetic, yet incendiary rhetoric. His colleagues regarded him in French revolutionary terms as “the Danton of our day”.

The American academic Brian Horowitz has attempted in the past to get behind the public face of this extraordinary Russian Zionist thinker. In this latest, absorbing book, Horowitz focuses on Jabotinsky’s years in Russia, drawing on detailed Russian and Hebrew sources.

During the 1930s, Jabotinsky wrote his autobiography. It was full of ambiguity and illusions and often economical with the truth in order to reinforce support among his followers, who included Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion.

The end of the 19th century was very much “a faceless epoch” in which rootless, Russified Jewish intellectuals could not discern a pathway for themselves. Jabotinsky was attracted by individualism and the Decadent Movement before he discovered Zionism. His sudden awareness about his Jewishness coincided with his premonition that there would be a pogrom in his hometown of Odessa.

A pogrom did break out but in Kishinev, in 1903, and, as Horowitz shows, affected the 23-year-old Jabotinsky so deeply that he outwardly turned away from Russian culture towards a redefinition of himself as a national Jew. He distanced himself from the Russian intelligentsia and disdained their apologies for the antisemitic Beilis Affair. Jabotinsky used the term

“asemitism”, coined by Russian thinker Pyotr Struve, regarding the indifference to accusations of racism (it seems a much better fit for many in the UK today). Yet, as part of the two-million strong, “inconsolable” Russian exodus that left after the October revolution, Jabotinsky would remain a Russian man of letters wherever he lived. He modelled himself on the Russian polymath, Mikhail Lomonosov and later on Theodor Herzl — and regarded himself, rather than Chaim Weizmann, as Herzl’s rightful successor. His early Zionism was influenced by the now forgotten thinker, Avraham Idelsohn.

There are still many lacunae in Jabotinsky’s odyssey. Horowitz points out that he visited Palestine for the first time in 1909, yet there are no letters or articles that reflect his state of mind during what was a stay of many months. With the opening of the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of Jabotinsky’s early writings were published. While academic detective work has peeled back several layers, there are still questions about this enigmatic and controversial figure. Nevertheless, Brian Horowitz’s excellent and fascinating account puts another brick in the wall.

Pictured above is Jabotinsky (centre) with Shimshon Yunitzman, Aharon Propes and Menachem Begin in 1933, reviewing a Betar parade

Colin Shindler is an emeritus professor at SOAS, University of London