Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. Uh, there's a special personal delight in introducing a cover up thing to you. Um, but I'll keep it short. Professor Jaco Rabkin, um, teaches history at the University of Montreal in Canada, and among his many works, at least two deserve to be especially mentioned in the context of an Israeli studies seminar.
First, his book, A Threat from Within a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, in which Professor Rapkin offers a detailed account of the history of Jewish opposition from ultra-Orthodox to Reform Judaism, to, uh, design his ideology and Zionism at large and to the State of Israel. Uh, this book won several prizes and was translated to at least 40 languages.
And, uh, second, I mentioned his more recent book, What Is Modern Israel, in which Professor Rabkin sheds new critical light on some of the more fundamental tenets of the Israeli polity, and his most recently published book, his co-edited volume details of which are available on leaflets we put outside his accredited volume on the modernisation and the title of his talk today is Israel The Russian Connection.
Professor Cohen, thank you for coming. Thank you. Well, it's an honour and a pleasure to be here. And I was told that I should be speaking for 35 minutes, which I will try to comply with. And to begin with, I would like to say that the adjective Russian has to be defined. I don't mean the the Russian Federation of Today. I rather mean the Russian empire of the turn of the 20th century, which included a large Jewish population.
So when I say Russian, I don't mean either Russian ethnicity or the current state of Russia, but the the the borders of the Russian empire. As you know, the Russian empire had a tremendous diversity of of of confessions of peoples. But there were also a great diversity of Jews on the territory of the Russian empire. And you starting with Bukhara and Jews in Central Asia and then Georgian and mountain Jews in the Caucasus.
But the protagonists of what we are going to talk about today are none of them, but rather the Jews in the pale of settlement. Or some people would call them the Yiddish land, the group of people who were united by common language with different accents and dialects. But the common language was Yiddish. And and they are the protagonists of the story.
We have to understand that the non Ashkenazi Jews, not only in Russia but also elsewhere, played a very insignificant role in the Zionist movement in the 1930s. The share of non Ashkenazi members of the World Zionist Organisation where you had to pay a symbolic amount to be a member. The percentage of non Ashkenazi Jews was 0.37%, which is slightly more than one third of a percent. That gives you the whole picture that the Russian Jews in fact, will see why became the.
Uh, the messengers of the Zionist idea. They spread the Zionist gospel around the world. So much so that, for example, in a book on the history of Moroccan Jewry and I was in Morocco promoting that book on Jewish opposition to Zionism. The author offered me his book, a very impressive book by Mohammed Habib, and he said in that book that the first Zionist cell in Morocco was started by Russian Jews from France. So we'll see why it is so important to understand the Russian dimension.
As you know, because I think one of the speakers earlier talked about I must have talked about William Hefner, and he is the Anglican chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna who introduced Herzl to the Zionist idea, to the idea of, oh, this was in the Oxford centre of Hebrew and Jewish studies. It wasn't here. Okay. Well, so, but you know, the story that this essentially a Protestant idea became accepted by Herzl and his friends by the end of the 19th century.
The idea of Ingathering, the Hebrews in the Holy Land by earthly means, without waiting for the Messiah, without expecting any miracles, just practically getting them there. And the. The founders of the Zionist movement, including Herzl himself. We're German speaking intellectuals of Jewish origin. Usually rather estranged from traditional Judaism, who had a very daring vision of what this Zionist project would be.
Actually, the person who coined the term Zionism later became disillusioned with the movement and turned into what the media called ultra-Orthodox Jewry and became very critical of the Zionist movement. But the Zionist movement really was a general staff of German speaking intellectuals. But the general staff, when we talk about it, presupposes that the generals have an army and they didn't have it.
They didn't have it because Jews in Austria, in Germany, in France, in Britain were either indifferent or actually hostile to to the Zionist idea. And what my namesake was just saying. The reasons were sometimes religious, but sometimes they were rather practical because many Jews in Western Europe and in the United States recognised an anti-Semitic motive in the Zionist message. Namely, the Jews are an alien element in European countries and they are eternally alien.
It's an almost mystical estrangement from the country they live in. Of course they didn't like it, and that's why these generals remained without the army. Now, where were the soldiers? The foot soldiers of Zionism. Where did they come from? Well, as you might guess, they came from the pale of settlement in the Russian empire. And the reason they came from that is a special condition in which Jews, in the pale of settlement, found themselves. As I mentioned, they mostly were Yiddish speakers.
They lived in the territory that was contiguous from the Baltic republics of today all the way to Odessa in the south. And they underwent partial modernisation. They became affected by the Jewish version of Enlightenment, the Scala. They many of them became irreligious. They abandoned Judaic practice. But unlike other Jews in France who would abandon Judaic practice, who would become secularised.
But in France, the person could move to Paris from his little town and adjust and become a freethinker and totally erase his Jewish identity. That option was not available to Jews in the pale of settlement because with a few exceptions, they could not move to the capital cities of Moscow and St Petersburg and they had to stay where they were.
So this unusual circumstance that they were in fact acculturated to largely to the Russian culture, they were secularised, but they did not have emancipation. They didn't have equal rights. That created a real identity issue. Who were they if they were no longer observing Judaism, but they were still speaking Yiddish and living in these Jewish shtetls? What were they? Of course, in Jewish tradition.
We have a whole series of terms that could be applied to people who abandoned Judaic tradition in Russia because of Arian criminal transgressor. And none of these are very positive terms. You wouldn't like to be called that way. So the new identity emerged secular Jew. And this is a key notion, I think, to understand the success of the Zionist enterprise among Russian Jews.
They became secular Jews and they fashioned their identity very much like people in their environment and who were in the environment, Ukrainians and Poles and Lithuanians, all the ethnic groups or national groups that didn't have political independence, that felt some of them felt oppressed by the Russian empire. And that is how they developed a national approach to national identity. And eventually when after the October revolution, they came to be known as Jewish nationality.
This term was invented Jewish nationality, which was the same people actually from the Russian Empire who found themselves in Palestine. Translated it into Hebrew. It became longue vue de, which is Jewish nationality. So what triggered really the success, the future success of the Zionist project among Jews of the pale of settlement?
Were events in the Russian Empire, namely the assassination of Alexander the second in in March 1881 in St Petersburg, and a wave of anti-Jewish violence that spread in the pale of settlement. In relative terms, the violence was much less significant than, say, the violence in Ukraine in the 17th century. However, the Jews were no longer the same. Even the 17th century, they interpreted this violence as divine punishment for their transgressions.
These secularised Jews understood it in modern terms, and therefore they were frustrated. They were angry. They were shocked at the prospects of integration that they felt were coming were becoming more positive. And Alexander the second, who was a relatively liberal emperor. These prospects became dimmed. And this frustration expressed itself in a desire for for revenge, for pride. And that's how the first units of Jewish self-defence were formed. So it was a modern response to violence.
Many Jews joined various revolutionary groups and became very experienced in revolutionary terrorism. I remind you that the word terrorism was not a negative term at that time. It was rather a proud term. People who were fighting against the officials of the terrorist regime proudly call themselves terrorists. So the. This is the environment in which the pale of settlement was living at that time. At the end of the 19th century, something else has to be mentioned.
Some Jews could leave the pale of settlement. These were university educated Jews or Jews who had certain professions or were particularly important merchants. They could move to St Petersburg. They could move to Moscow. They could develop pretty much like their brethren in Berlin or Paris. And these Jews were not sympathetic to the Zionist message. So those who became activists in Zionist movement were almost without exception, Jews from small towns, from the shtetls.
Now what characterised the shtetl was the threat of violence. That became very clear in the eighties, 1880s. And a mix of contempt and fear of the non-Jewish neighbours. In fact, the shtetls were largely segregated. If you look at the memoirs of Shimon Peres, you could clearly see that the non-Jews lived behind the forest. They were somewhere out there. They really didn't have much contact with them. They had no experience of mixed society, of mixed existence or coexistence, at least.
And that's why they became so open to the idea of the Zionist project, not in the violence and frustration of the end of the 19th century. There were three collective solutions that Jews in the pale of settlement opted for. One, the most traditional one was immigration. And that's how almost 2 million Jews left the confines of the Russian empire and moved largely to the new world to South and North America. Some of them settled here in Britain.
And except that there was some legislation promoted by Balfour that prevented them from settling here in 1905 of mistaken. So emigration was the most popular option. Another one was socialist revolution. And Jews in disproportionate numbers joined the boon to the Jewish socialist movement, the socialist revolutionaries, and, of course, the Social Democrats that later split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
And the Jews played a very important role in the October revolution in the running of the Soviet state in the twenties and thirties. And the third option was Zionism. In fact, out of the emigres from the Russian Empire, slightly less than 1% went to Palestine. So it's a very small group of people, 50, 55,000 maybe. And as I said, they were Jews, largely from the shtetls. With one exception, I have to mention, because we have an expert here, as are Putin's.
He comes from a big city from Odessa, but he really didn't. He was evicted very soon from the Zionist leadership. Quite successful people who really ran the Zionist establishment in Palestine were all, practically all of them from the shtetls. Actually, I wonder if Jabotinsky would be resurrected today if Likud would accept him as a member because he was way too liberal for today's Likud. But we don't deal with history, so we'll leave it aside.
The what characterise this Russian Jews in Palestine was their age. They were young by and large. They were mostly socialists of different views of from. Hard red to pink think they were ideologically committed to to building a new society and to building a new men. Very importantly, they were intrepid, radical and experienced in terrorism. So they knew that violence. Is a legitimate tool of attaining political goals.
They also were affected by the Russian romanticism of agricultural labour, of special relationship with the land. Some were followers of Leo Tolstoy. Who. Preached communal life and and connection with the land. What they didn't have is the any exposure to liberal politics, any exposure to ideas of equality or to civic rather than national rather than ethnic nationalism, because they lived their experience was not that experience of Western Europe.
It was experience of Eastern Europe in Russian empire. And as I said earlier, they did not have the experience of living in mixed society, where you have Jews and non-Jews collaborating and living as neighbours and peacefully. This had a very important impact on what Israel would become. What also united these people was a disdain for their own background. They wanted to build a new man and woman in order to build a new man. You have to disdain the old one.
So if you read the writings of the Zionist public, intellectuals like Joseph Brenner or Mirabal de Chayefsky or David freshmen, it sounds like a list of street names in Tel Aviv, but they were real people. At one point you would find a very undisguised, very clear self-hate. They hated what they used to be, and they wanted to be something else. This romantic image of a new Hebrew who would prove that they're no longer yeshiva students. And I have a quote from Ben-Gurion of 1922.
It's a very short quote. And he said, addressing a group of Zionist activists in Palestine. We are not yeshiva students debating the finer points of self-improvement. We are conquerors of the land. Facing a wall of irony. And we have to break through it. So this, you see, is a new Jew, a new Hebrew that emerges. This idea of being a conqueror and reliance and violence could be seen in poetry, in prose that was written at that time, but it could also see in mundane little details.
If you open the memoirs of Ariel Sharon, you would discover that as a boy, he received a bar mitzvah gift. When the boy turns 13, he usually gets gifts and he becomes adult according to Jewish tradition. Well, usually it's Judaic books, or in the more modern version, he would get a trip to Florida or something for an iPhone. But Ariel Sharon received an engraved Caucasian dagger as a bar mitzvah gift, a dagger which is highly unusual as a bar mitzvah gift.
To this day, I think. But it shows that the resort to violence was also educational. Educational in the sense that it helped to free Jews from Judaic moral strains, from emphasis on pacifism and compliance with the non-Jewish environment. It was educating the new Hebrew in the spirit of defiance and the willpower. And this was very important to the willpower, in spite of all the difficulties who became heroes of that group.
Again, I'm talking about Russian Jews only Yosef Tom Baldo, who became a modern hero. I don't know if in today's Israeli schools he is still venerated, but he certainly was. A few decades ago. He was a veteran of the Russia Japanese war and he was decorated with four crosses of St George, which is a very high distinction. He was killed in a skirmish with a local population in Palestine in 1920 and a phrase is attributed to him.
It's a variation of the Latin phrases, as a matter of fact, how good it is to die for the fatherland. Well, we don't really know what you said. His last moments, but that's what the legend says. And he became a hero. He's the person, the model that was held up for the new Hebrews that were being educated in Palestine. Another expression that found its way into the educational environment of the new Hebrew is in Hebrew. It says In Britain, there is no choice. We have to fight.
There's no choice. We we are. We have to fight. And Russian Jews not only made the leadership of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, but they also became the most influential group among military leaders of the future state of Israel. The man who did more than anyone else to introduce terrorism into Palestine was, of course, a Russian Jew, Avraham Stern.
And some of him of you may have heard of the Stern gang that the British didn't appreciate, particularly who was a member of several paramilitary groupings. But Russian cultural influence could be seen in the biographies of other military leaders. Moshe Dayan is the Weitzman. It's Huckabee and Arafat. Xavi. Rafael Epstein and of course, Ariel Sharon are all of Russian ancestry. And their propensity to use force is legendary. Um. And also what also characterises them is.
A lack of interest and a disdain for local population. And that disdain was, in a way, equal opportunity disdain. It was addressed both to Jews and non-Jews in Palestine. Actually, they disliked local Jews even more than this list, like local non-Jews, because they embodied everything that they hated religious behaviour, compromise with the authorities, this pacifist attitudes which they considered cowardly and not dignified. So they wanted didn't want to integrate into Palestinian society.
They wanted to create a separate society. And the word that they used was afraid to let me remind you of other terms. But I'm afraid that means separate development. That's exactly what it means. Another term, which I think is very important and I think it became a name. They re baptised the one of the ships of illegal immigration in the forties. I felt became in spite of everything, in spite of everything will our will will triumph.
This idea of triumph of the will is extremely important that even an old sentence, that is a phrase which is attributed to Herzl, if you want it, it's not a dream. So again, if you will, it it's not a dream. So the Russian Jews, in fact, formed the political leadership of of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. And you could see that in the composition of the Israeli parliament 1960, which is for decades after all, immigration from Russia had stopped.
In 1967, 70% of Knesset members were born in the Russian empire. And another 13 born in Palestine from Russian parents. So that makes 83 and that's 1960. And you wouldn't be surprised. Against this background that you would not find one Israeli prime minister who would not have Russian roots. Not one Russian meaning Russian empire. So the impact of Russian Jews is tremendous.
And they were. Keeping that political monopoly rather successfully because, say, German Jews, in spite of their contributions to culture and industry in Israel, remained outside of power circles. Needless to say, numerically very important. Non Ashkenazi Jews were also kept away. So. Russian Jews, in fact, created the political culture of what is today Israel.
And they also affected the international support for the for the Zionist project in the United States, particularly, uh, Jews of German descent were either indifferent or hostile to the Zionist project. But when the Jewish American Jewish establishment was replaced by Russian Jews, who by 1930s and forties became more wealthier and more active, uh, American Jewish community by and large supported the Zionist project. And that of course had a very important financial and political consequences.
So here we talk about the I just talked about the Zionist project, the Zionist enterprise, the early years of the State of Israel, and the importance of that political culture that had the vestiges and traces of, uh, of the shtetl culture, of the Russian shtetl culture. Now, if we move forward in time, we look at Soviet emigration to Israel beginning in the 1970s, which brought to Israel about 1 million Russian speakers from the former Soviet Union, by and large.
What characterises that population are some of the same traits that we mentioned earlier. Except they would be even amplified in the new immigration. They consider themselves member of the Jewish nationality because that's what Soviet official documents indicated. A Jew is a nationality. Locals Becker Ukrainian or Russian, for that matter, no. So they did not have. Any commitment or even knowledge of the Jewish tradition and Judaism.
They were they were very secularised, and they had a commitment to strengthen the European nature of Israel. European, in their understanding, what European is after experience in the Soviet Union, they didn't have any more knowledge of liberal democracy than people who left Russian empire because Soviet Union was hardly a liberal democracy.
Nor did they know about political correctness. What is important is that they were very committed to maintain and strengthen the Zionist nature of the state of Israel when they arrived in seventies, eighties and particularly in the nineties. They entered Israeli society much more successfully than other immigrant groups. If you compare it with Moroccan or Iraqi Jews who arrived en masse earlier, they didn't have a political impact that the Russian Jews have now.
Today you have the chairman of the parliament is a Russian of Soviet origin. You have several, I think a good dozen members of the Knesset who are of Russian origin. And the Russian is a very important language in in today's Israel, as any immigrant group, you tried to adjust by adopting the values of the dominant society. You usually don't want to acculturate to it dominated group but to the dominant group.
And so Soviet Jews became acculturated to this Israeli political culture and they adopted, for example, a certain denigration of the Arab and the ultra religious, the haredim, its militant ethnic nationalism and of course, the self-righteousness in discourse and behaviour. So these things are usually very easy to adopt when you arrive in a new country because that's what identifies you with the dominant group.
And in that sense they are not exceptional. So the very of their political integration in Israel was remarkably fast and remarkably durable. By and large, they vote for the right or extreme right. And quite a few of them, as you may know, are non-Jews, because the Israeli law of return is very liberal in the sense of defining who is allowed to immigrate to Israel. It's it goes all the way to grant one Jewish grandparent is enough to.
To authorise immigration to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. In fact, it's a variation of the Nuremberg laws of 1935. So quite a few are non-Jews, and some of them paraphrase a Russian writer, Alexei Nekrassov, who wrote while I quoted an English translation, You may not be a poet, but you must be a citizen. That was the motive. And today in Israel, you could hear you may not be a Jew, but you have to be a Zionist.
And in fact, many of them are very brave and courageous soldiers and integrated in the in the Israeli mainstream quite successfully. Since we are talking about about 1 million of Russian Jews, it's not surprising that in today, tourist statistics, the largest group of visitors to Israel come from the former Soviet Union. Putin once said that Israel is a little bit of Russia.
He visited there several times. There's a monument that he opened, inaugurated with Prime Minister Netanyahu to the heroes of the Second World War, not to the victims of the Holocaust, but it's in Netanya, in Israel. And there's quite important military and industrial cooperation between the two countries. And according to public opinion surveys, Russia is number one in terms among industrialised nations with positive opinion of Israel.
It leads the other industrialised countries. So we are talking about. Uh. Impact that was important in the beginning of the Zionist project and continues to be very important today. Right wing or extreme right wing parties in Israel maintain links with the right wing groups in Russia itself. Just as Israel has become a role model for right wing movements across the world. I don't want to belabour the point, you know that yourselves.
And in that sense, Israel is a very interesting case of partial modernisation. You remember half an hour ago I was talking about partial moral modernisation of Jews in the pale of settlement. And the Israel also is the case of partial modernisation, and that reflects Russian experience because all the Russian modernisers from Peter the Great to Stalin and TA, they wanted to modernise the country technically and culturally without political modernisation.
And that's why Alexander Herzen, another Russian writer, dissident writer of the mid 19th century, was very much concerned about Genghis Khan with the Telegraph. Well, in today's terms, you could say with advanced surveillance techniques. That idea that you could have technical modernisation with political modernisation at the same time is what characterised some cases of development.
And Israel, I think, fits that model in the sense that its political culture still carries the impact of ghettoised shtetls of Eastern Europe, this idea of ghettoised existence and the rejection of the new of the non Jew and technological and military modernisation of Israel.
Start-Up Nation progresses apace with the modernisation of its political culture, because as you as Israel becomes more and more advanced in technology, particularly in military technology, its political modernisation is very clear. It has a disdain for public international law. It exemplifies reliance on military power. Israel supplies surveillance and military knowhow to most repressive regimes in the world.
It practices overt discrimination that the new nationality law is very clear about it, and it inspires ethnic nationalism and and around the world, in fact, in Eastern Europe, in countries like Hungary, Baltic republics. Israel is hailed as an example of how a country should be run. It's run for the dominant group with excluded with the exclusion of the group, which groups which are dominated. Just to give you one example, and I'll stop there because I want to be disciplined.
The recent elections three years ago, right in Israel, one of the parties, the United, are at least received 13 mandates, which is quite respectable number. They were not involved in coalition negotiations because they were, to use the expression, beyond the pale, literally, they would not be involved in that.
Now, if you go somewhat North Latvia, the Baltic Republic of uh, where the Likud Party that gathered most votes in recent election was not involved in negotiations for coalition because they were considered pro-Russian party. So you have a certain similarity here that some a part of the dominant group and therefore legitimate and some internally remain beyond the pale. Thank you so much.