Nachman Syrkin, Socialist Zionist: A Biographical Memoir and Selected Essays

By Marie Syrkin and Nachman Syrkin

Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924) was a political theorist, founder of Labour Zionism and a prolific writer in the Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German and English languages.

In this present volume, which was first published in 1961, his daughter Marie Syrkin reprints translations of some of his more influential essays, and remembers her childhood and youth and the wanderings of her family over the face of the earth at a time not only of danger and suffering, but of adventure and romance and real enjoyment.

A lively, engaging read!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789127454

Marie Syrkin

Marie Syrkin (1899-1989) was an American author, translator, educator, and Zionist activist. Born in Bern, Switzerland, she was the daughter of the Socialist Zionist theoretician Nachman Syrkin and his wife Bassya Syrkin (née Osnos), a feminist socialist Zionist. The family immigrated to the United States in 1908, settling in New York City, where Marie attended public school. She received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degrees, in English literature, from Cornell University. In 1925 she became an English teacher at the Textile High School in Manhattan, a job she held for over two decades. She visited Palestine for the first time in 1933 and also began to publish English translations of Yiddish poetry. In 1934, she was a co-founder and joined the editorial staff of the New York-based Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier, regularly publishing articles on Jewish cultural and political life, and current issues. She became the editor-in-chief in 1948, and continued to lead the journal for 25 years. She also wrote numerous articles for the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post. From 1937-42 she reported on the Nazi persecution of European Jewry, and advocated for the opening of Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine, and for the liberalization of the quota system that governed American immigration policy. Syrkin’s first book, Your School, Your Children, was published in 1944. After the war, in 1947, she interviewed Jewish Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps in Germany, on behalf of B’nai B’rith’s Hillel program, to recruit candidates for scholarships to American universities. She conducted interviews of Holocaust survivors in Palestine, which became the basis of her next book, Blessed Is the Match (1947). In 1950 Syrkin was appointed associate professor of English literature at Brandeis University and retired as professor emerita in 1966. She died on February 2, 1989, aged 89.

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

NACHMAN SYRKIN

SOCIALIST ZIONIST

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR

SELECTED ESSAYS

By

Marie Syrkin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

PREFACE 6

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR 7

Chapter 1 — KINNERETH: 1951 7

Chapter 2 — RUSSIAN BOYHOOD 9

Chapter 3 — STUDENT DAYS IN BERLIN 16

Chapter 4 — THE SOCIALIST JEWISH STATE 25

Chapter 5 — BASSYA 32

Chapter 6 — BEGINNINGS OF A MOVEMENT 35

Chapter 7 — TERRITORIALISM 47

Chapter 8 — THE VILNA DAYS 59

Chapter 9 — TO AMERICA FIRST CLASS 68

Chapter 10 — IN NEW YORK 73

Chapter 11 — DURING WORLD WAR I 85

Chapter 12 — PALESTINE 1920 95

Chapter 13 — OF PERSONAL MATTERS 103

Chapter 14 — LAST YEARS 113

Chapter 15 — EPILOGUE 124

SELECTED ESSAYS 129

BEGINNINGS OF SOCIALIST ZIONISM 129

THE SOCIALIST JEWISH STATE: 1898 138

CALL TO JEWISH YOUTH: 1901 158

MOSES HESS 164

THE APPEARANCE OF CHRISTIANITY 169

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 178

DEDICATION

For Zivia, daughter of Nachman,

and David, his grandson.

PREFACE

The personal reasons for writing this Memoir are self-explanatory and implicit in its pages. In addition, I hoped to suggest something of the intellectual and ideological ferment which led to the synthesis of socialism and Zionism in the movement whose disciples and leaders are now at the helm in the State of Israel. Perhaps nothing could better indicate the triumph of the idea than the fact that most of the surviving friends and comrades of my father, whose recollections I sought, were to be found in the realized Jewish State of which Nachman Syrkin had dreamed. The house in which I stayed while gathering material for this biography, too, had its poignant fitness: I wish to thank Golda Meir, Foreign Minister of Israel, for her friendship and hospitality during the months I spent in her home in Jerusalem.

Though I cannot thank individually all the friends whose memories were added to mine, I wish particularly to express my gratitude to Baruch Zuckerman who devotedly labored with me going over my father’s manuscripts in the various languages in which they had been composed—Hebrew, Russian, German, and Yiddish. I wish also to thank Zalman Shazar for his warm encouragement and counsel.

A special debt of gratitude is owing to Dr. Abram L. Sachar, President of Brandeis University, for the generous and sympathetic understanding he offered toward the furthering of this project—the recording of a page in modern Jewish history.

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR

Chapter 1 — KINNERETH: 1951

Nachman Syrkin

AT THE CLOSE of the brief, austere service Ben-Gurion stepped forward suddenly to the edge of the open grave and said in Hebrew, "Syrkin, hazonkha yitkayem, your vision will be fulfilled"; then he drew back into the shadows just as swiftly as he had emerged. His presence at the ceremony was unexpected. It was a long, hot trip from Jerusalem to the shores of Kinnereth in Galilee—too long for a harried Prime Minister to take. Besides, everyone in the country knew that Ben-Gurion had no liking for reburials: let the living come to Israel, not ash and bone. And this was the dusk of September 3, 1951, twenty-seven years after Nachman Syrkin had died in New York in 1924. But Ben-Gurion had come anyway to trudge up the wooded hillock near the gleaming waters of Kinnereth together with his comrades.

In the late twilight we gathered for the simple words of memorial to be spoken. It was almost dark when a girl from the kibbutz read a passage from The Socialist Jewish State, written in 1898: The Jewish state can come into being only if it is socialist; only by fusing with socialism can Zionism become the ideal of the whole Jewish people. It was then that Ben-Gurion made his dramatic, unpremeditated pledge, addressing directly one long dead.

All day remembrance of my father had been gathering reality—since early morning when the S.S. Yaffo, bearing his remains from New York, had docked in Haifa. All work had stopped in the harbor while blue-shirted workers carried the coffin down the ship’s gangway as the sirens sounded a final salute.

The port was crowded with the workers of Haifa, with representatives of all sectors of the labor movement, with delegates from towns, villages and kibbutzim—wherever the dream had tarried. Dignitaries of Mapai and leaders of Мараm had arrived from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. We stood together in the brilliant Mediterranean sunshine waiting silently while the coffin was placed on a green-wreathed tender for its memorial progress to Kinnereth.

But memorial is the wrong word. It was more truly a triumph than a commemoration. The idea was hailed rather than a man recalled. Before the procession started for its slow drive through Galilee, Abba Hushi, spirited Mayor of Haifa, spoke proudly of his city as the socialist city that Syrkin had envisaged; and all along the Jordan Valley the sun-brown boys and girls of the kibbutzim stood along the roads to throw armfuls of flowers on the coffin as the long cortege wound its way, reaching Kinnereth at nightfall.

Who was the visionary and what was his vision? I shall try to write of both.

It is all so jumbled—what I remember, what I was told, and what I learned later. If I were going to write an essay about a Zionist theoretician, as I have written in the past about Moses Hess, Herzl or lesser men, I would know how to set about my task. But it would be absurd and artificial for me to write formally about my father. At the same time I do not wish to dwell primarily on the quaint or whimsical in his personality or our family circumstances. If I had the ability that would make an amusing book. There was so much of the mad and improbable in his life that he could easily be transformed into a character. It will be hard to maintain the balance between intimacy and perspective which seems fitting for my purpose—to create the synthesis between the father of my childhood and youth and the political leader whom I evaluate through his writings and the recollections of comrades.

Some pretences I shall abandon at the outset: I shall not pretend to be objective; I shall not pretend that I do not view him as a remarkable figure for that is one reason why I wish to write about him—not chiefly because he was lovable and funny, though he was that too. And I shall not attempt to write about my father consistently in the third person—a notion which I had at first entertained as more seemly than a constant intrusion of the first person singular. But the result would be too contrived even if I could manage it. The technique must be straightforward if I am not to get bogged down in obstructive delicacies.

Chapter 2 — RUSSIAN BOYHOOD

Syrkin Nachman

WHAT WAS THE world of a Jewish boy growing up in Czarist Russia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century? The Government’s program for its Jewish population was curt and explicit: Pobedionostzev, adviser of Alexander III, and head of the Holy Synod, had given it a classic formulation: one-third of the Jews might be converted, one-third would emigrate, and one-third would perish. This, at any rate, was the goal Policy to achieve the objective was also not lacking. Forced to live in the Pale of Settlement, whose towns they could not leave for a glimpse of St. Petersburg or Moscow except by special dispensation, sharply restricted in the choice of occupation, barred almost entirely from higher education, the Jews of Russia were choking in a morass from which only a lucky few could escape. Political oppression plus severe economic and social disabilities were shrewdly calculated to drive the population to embrace one of the three solutions indicated. And if the suffering of constant persecution by law and edict was not enough, there was always the prod of sporadic pogroms to hasten the process.

At the same time, the winds of emancipation had begun to blow. The close defense of the ghetto, which had provided the solace of an absolute faith to its martyrs, had begun to loosen. Any intellectually eager, sensitive youth, fascinated by the riches of European culture, seething with dangerous, new, revolutionary ideas, impatient of the ancient shelter of the synagogue, would soon find himself, literally and symbolically, houseless on a Western street, trying to construct a new home, fashioned of ideologies and dreams. That such a lad would be a rebel goes without saying. It is easy enough to perceive what he would discard. More perplexing is the question of what he would keep. In the welter of conflicts Nachman Syrkin, born in Mohilev within the Pale, on February 12, 1868, was to make a singular choice and affirm a unique dual allegiance.

Yet Nachman himself belonged to the small, mercantile class which had made a comfortable niche for itself even within the restrictions of Russian Jewish life. The Syrkin family, prosperous, middle-class, could save its children not only from physical deprivation, but secure for them whatever privileges could be wrested from the regime by those with enough money and ability—primarily the boon of secular education.

The household owed its economic well-being to the energy of the mother, by all accounts an exceptionally able business woman. Her husband, Eliezer, was a gentle, retiring scholar, more at home in the study poring over a blatt Gemora (a page of the Talmud) than in examining ledgers. He was a direct descendant of the renowned sixteenth century Talmudist, Rabbi Joel Sirkes, whose grave in Kraków remained a shrine for pious pilgrimage till the Russian Revolution. In my youth my father’s obvious pride in his Yichus-brief, a long parchment on which the family tree of the Syrkins, beginning with the famous Rabbi Joel, was delineated, seemed to me a shocking bourgeois deviation. A true radical, I thought, should be less conscious of genealogy. But my father, though he early broke away from his orthodox moorings, never concealed his appreciation of the long line of Tabbis and scholars from which he sprang—the only aristocracy, that of intellectual merit, which he was ever to respect.

One gets a vivid sense of the iconoclast’s obstinate sense of tradition from the yellowing, crumbling, documents which Syrkin reverently preserved through a turbulent lifetime. Amid the exiles and uprootings of his existence the rigid, ordered world from which he sprang remained deeply precious to the man who, on the surface, became its foe. One also gets a glimpse of the orthodox world against which Syrkin, like so many of his generation, revolted.

I have before me the beautifully lettered parchment marriage contract of his parents, made out four weeks before the marriage which was to take place in 1858. The father of Zivia, the bride, promises a suitable dowry, 2700 rubles plus various presents for the groom. Then there is this significant stipulation: the father of the bride will support the young couple for four years while the groom studies. Support includes food, clothes, shoes—which are specifically mentioned—and living quarters with the in-laws. It is worth noting that Eliezer’s studies will, of course, not increase the family fortunes. The in-laws are not prudently investing in a future doctor or lawyer to insure their daughter’s eventual prosperity. On the contrary, the abstruse studies of Torah will, if anything, make Eliezer even less fit for a merchant’s career than nature had arranged. There will be a business which the efficient wife will run successfully in due time. But the light of learning is to be husbanded. Few things are more indicative of the traditional Jewish reverence for learning—not as a means but as an end in itself—than these routine clauses through which the gifted youth’s talents are assured further flourishing.

The rapid break-down of the stable, orthodox pattern is indicated by two later documents. According to one signed by several rabbis and dated 1881, Eliezer’s father has died leaving five prayer-stalls in five different synagogues in Minsk. The places are carefully enumerated and described. There is a pew between Zalman Horowitz and Hendel Goldman on the Eastern wall in the great old synagogue, and another in the new synagogue on the north side between Sissel Ha-Cohen Rappaport and Jacob Hillel Ettinger. The location of each of the five places is given in full detail—nothing is left to chance. This is the family’s most valued patrimony. The sons cast lots for the places and Eliezer is assigned his stall.

After Eliezer dies in 1902, the prayer-stalls again appear in a Rabbinical document. Now it is a question of disposing of the places to strangers. The heirs are given permission to sell the pews in the synagogue of Minsk. Among the signatories is Nachman ben Eliezer Syrkin, Doctor, Berlin. The need for prayer-stalls, except for Zivia who outlived her husband by a few years, is over.

How deeply Zivia Syrkin grieved for the loss of faith among her children is glimpsed from a letter in Yiddish she wrote to Nachman shortly before her death. It is a kind of informal will directed to all her children. After specifying the disposition of her personal possessions, she writes: "Keep your father’s Yahrzeit (anniversary of death); my own Yahrzeit you will know yourselves. I will ask you nothing more; I know it won’t help. The bitterness of that last phrase is self-explanatory: her educated children each of whom, including the girls, had received a good secular education as well as professional training (one son was a physician, even a daughter practiced dentistry) had strayed from the ways of their fathers, particularly her beloved Nachke whom she adjures separately: And you, dear Nachke, I want to remind you of the time when you stood at your father’s deathbed and he told you that there was a greater world than the one we see....Remember this, children, in this epoch we are living through, strive to remain warm Jews, and let your children know that they are Jews. Struggle for the Jewish people and may the Jewish people not perish because of you. This, children, is my wish and I hope that you will all fulfill it."

The letter in style and assurance is quite remarkable. It should be remembered that the orthodox Jew’s devotion to education did not, in that period, extend to the females of the household. Many women were barely literate. Zivia knew not only Yiddish but had an excellent knowledge of Russian, written and spoken. There is a rumor that she also knew French which, if true, would be a rare accomplishment since she had enjoyed no formal education and was self-taught.

Such a woman, a proud matriarch, worldly as well as pious, was bound to provide her children with the gymnasium (high school) and college training that she had lacked. At the same time, Jewish scholarship was not to be neglected. When Nachman entered the local gymnasium, his Hebrew education was continued with a rebbe, a private teacher, who came regularly to the house.

Not that it was easy for even a well-to-do Jewish child to get a secular education in Russia. Jews were excluded from most Russian secondary schools and universities. Even within the Pale only a small quota of the Jewish residents might enter the local high school.

The competition for the few places open to Jewish boys and girls in the gymnasia was enormous. The children who studied furiously for the stiff entrance examinations knew that, in any case, not more than 10 per cent of those who passed would secure admission even though the population of the town within the Pale might be predominantly Jewish. Often wealthy Jews would pay for the education of Christian students so as to increase the number of Jews proportionately eligible. Most of the eager young Jews longing to taste the delights of Western culture studied at home as externes, often tutored by the luckier candidates. They would be permitted to take the annual examinations without attending school; those who passed would receive a certificate to that effect. Getting into a university was almost impossible.

Nachman was one of the fortunate to be admitted to the Mohilev high school, where his record was good rather than brilliant. I judge on the basis of a certificate from the Gymnasium which mysteriously survived his wanderings. There is no piaterka (5), the highest mark in the Russian grading system, in this record which dates from 1878 to 1884. For one familiar with his subsequent development the schoolboy marks—if they are to be accepted at face value—are full of puzzles. Why did the boy who was to become an extraordinary linguist receive only 3 (satisfactory) in languages—Russian, Greek, Latin, French, German? He was to carry on his publicistic activities with equal polyglot facility in Russian, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and I can testify to his acute memory of Latin and Greek conjugations when he would indignantly note my errors in the years to come. The Russian teachers were apparently good drill masters if a mediocre pupil had so thorough a classical foundation. The 4 in history, geography, and religion looks more promising, and I am prepared to accept the 3 in science and mathematics. But something else in that yellowed record does not jibe: the 3 for effort and attention, and the 4 for conduct. With professional interest as well as filial concern, I try to reconstruct the boy who impressed his teachers as only moderately attentive though good in behavior. Did he daydream silently? He must have been lively enough judging from his tales of school-boy pranks with a boon companion bearing the uneuphonious name of Osherke. In my childhood I had a notion of Nachke and Osherke as a kind of Russian-Jewish version of Tom Sawyer and Huck except that their escapades were more intellectual, involving the ribbing of the pedagogues both at the Gymnasium and in the cheder, the Hebrew school, which played as large a part in their education as the secular studies.

Despite the social and political afflictions of the Jewish community, I have only to remember my father’s loud and delighted laughter as he recounted some adventure with Osherke to know that his boyhood was gay. His fellows called him weisser hund (white dog) not in opprobrium but because as a child he was fair, pug-nosed, gray-eyed, and mischievous. The image of his early youth which remains in my mind on the basis of his reminiscences is very different from the dark tales of poverty and oppression characteristic of Jewish memoirs of the same period. Of course, he enjoyed a comfortable, well-ordered home, rich in established ceremonial. But I think the explanation lies not so much in kinder outer circumstances as in the unquenchable vitality which was to remain beyond the animal liveliness of boyhood.

With particular relish he would tell how ingeniously the Jews of Mohilev circumvented the religious prohibition against carrying objects on the Sabbath in a public place by constructing an erub. According to Jewish ritual it was possible to transform a public domain symbolically into private property—the equivalent of a private home—by placing wires around the exits in such a way as to enclose the whole. Within the enclosed boundaries objects could then be carried even on Saturday. The Jewish community had a problem. Its more advanced elements were keen on Russification: a few able Jewish boys, lucky enough to be admitted, should enjoy the advantages of higher secular education so that they could become lawyers, doctors, and engineers. At the same time, the pious wanted these blessings to be gained with no loss of orthodoxy. The question of regular attendance at school was troublesome. A Jewish boy could walk to the gymnasium on Saturday and listen to the lessons though he could not write on the holy day. So far, so good! But there was another difficulty. The prescribed uniform of the gymnasist involved carrying a satchel of books. No latitude was permitted by the school authorities in this regard. Obviously, there was only one solution for the dilemma: the town had to be transformed into an erub. Naturally, city officials had to be kept in the dark in regard to this scheme. They could not be expected to condone even the symbolic transformation of a Russian town into Jewish property. The undaunted Jews of Mohilev literally pulled wires at night stringing them secretly at strategic points. When the required section was completely enclosed by invisible wires, the triumphant Jews declared it a private domain, ergo, a home! Unaware of their loss, the Russians were none the wiser and probably interpreted the Jewish students’ sudden readiness to carry books on the Sabbath as evidence of gradual enlightenment. This bit of ritualistic hocus-pocus never ceased to amuse my father, but it early filled him with a distaste for slavish adaptation through trickery, no matter how innocent. These were the servile shifts of the oppressed!

However, boyhood was not all jolly. The lad with good marks in conduct got himself expelled from high school in his teens because he resented a slurring remark about Jews made by a Russian teacher. This inaugurated the first of a series of expulsions precipitated by a defiant spirit and a vitriolic tongue. Nachman would not quiescently accept routine insults.

In the mid-eighties the family moved to Minsk, another city within the Pale. The eighties marked the end of the mild thaw perceptible under the rule of Alexander II. The political reforms instituted by that monarch during the first decade of his reign had encouraged the Jews of Russia to believe that their lot would improve in the dawn of a more liberal era. Some restrictions were actually lifted; the Pale of Settlement was enlarged and the forcible seizure of Jewish children for twenty-five year terms of military conscription to be served in remote provinces—a measure whose purpose was the conversion of the child-recruits to Christianity through coercion which only the stoutest could withstand—was abandoned. It seemed to the Jewries of Russia that the forces of emancipation which had liberated the Jews of Western Europe after the French Revolution were at last astir in the East. The drive for Russification, encouraged by the government, met with a more than perfunctory response among the Jewish intelligentsia and the small class of wealthy industrialists. Baron Guinzburg founded the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia in 1863. Its purpose was to modernize the Jewish masses by teaching them Russian and generally fitting them for a place in the new world they were to enter. Even the Hebraist luminaries of the Haskalah, the Enlightenment, were as anxious to transform the Jews as the Russifiers. In choicest Hebrew Peretz Smolenskin and Moses Lilienblum called on the backward Yiddish-speaking masses to break out of the darkness of orthodoxy, to leave the narrow world of the Talmud and to take their place in a modern, progressive society. This new secular culture would take shape in Hebrew; though Russian, too, might be used. Be a Jew at home and a man abroad, urged Judah Leib Gordon in a celebrated and much emulated bit of counsel.

The call did not fall on deaf ears. Russian Jewish youth, hungry for the culture of the West, eager to emerge from the stadtel, the cheder, the Yeshivah, to exchange medieval folk-ways for progress prepared itself with zest for the hour of equality, when the ghetto-bonds would fall from the full-fledged Russian citizen. But the illusion was short-lived. The second half of Alexander II’s reign saw a growing reaction. The bloody wave of pogroms in 1881 drowned the last dreams that Russification was the precursor to emancipation. In 1882 Leo Pinsker, physician and ardent Russianizer, issued his famous brochure, Auto-Emancipation, with a changed thesis. There was no hope in Russia; Jews would have to emancipate themselves by creating their own national home.

Pinsker was not alone. Other Jewish intellectuals, former leaders of the Haskalah like Lilienblum, despairing of the Enlightenment, became prime movers in the newly organized Chibath Zion (Love of Zion) movement, the precursor of political Zionism. A handful of young students calling themselves the BILU (Beth Yaakov Lekhu Wenelkha—О house of Jacob come ye, and let us go) left Russia to establish an agricultural colony in the wastes of Palestine. Minuscule numbers were actually involved in this early Zionist ferment among Jewish students and intellectuals but here and there handfuls of the idealistic and imaginative young began to seek a radical solution for the tragedy of their people. By 1884 there were Choveve Zion societies in Russia, Rumania and Galicia—enough to send delegates to a general conference of the movement in Kattowitz, Silesia.

Among the Jewish masses as a whole the more energetic and able sought escape through emigration—preferably to America, whose doors stood open and on whose Statue of Liberty the generous poetic invitation of Emma Lazarus was inscribed. The ancient Promised Land was less tempting than the new, and fired the phantasy of but a few foolhardy dreamers.

The love of Zion was not the only dream which aroused Russian Jewish youth. Many more threw themselves heart and soul into the Russian revolutionary movement. Salvation was to come not through a parochial concern with the Jewish question but through the ultimate socialist revolution. The Jew would be liberated in the universal liberation. Any assertion of nationalism, particularly Jewish nationalism, was the mark of the reactionary. Zionism was taboo for the Jewish members of the underground revolutionary and socialist parties. They languished in Russian prisons and Siberian exile, confident that their special Jewish woes would dissolve in the melting-pot of internationalism, in the brotherhood of man to be ushered in by the victorious revolution. The cleavage between the Zionist and socialist Jewish youth was complete.

In his autobiography, My Life, Leon Trotsky writing of his childhood in Russia in the eighties makes clear that the Jewish question troubled him little: "As the son of a prosperous landowner, I belonged to the privileged class rather than to the oppressed. The language in my family