Auto-emancipation

Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of the successful rededication of the Second Temple and the re-establishment of Jewish [Israelite] sovereignty in the Land of Israel. The loss of that sovereignty was not so far in the past then. It was easy for the Hasmoneans to imagine what would constitute renewal. This is a political view. 

The miracle was that the sanctity of the state was restored and acknowledged by a Divine sign. This is the spiritual view endorsed by the Rabbis who were not the biggest fans of the Hasmoneans.

The debate between those who supported the Zionist project and those who didn't wasn’t about real estate. It was about what the Jewish people needed in order to survive. In a world where the speed of change seemed to be accelerating, there were those who felt that the best possibility was to jump into the fast-moving waters and be carried away from Jewish history and particularity, but the flow of history proved less fluid and accepting. The 20th Century rabbi Israel Levinthal often asked the question, “Steering or Drifting?” Zionism in its many forms, Jewish Territorialism and other ideas about the regeneration of the Jewish people all fall into the category of Steering.

Leon Pinsker was one of those who took upon themselves the task of steering. He was the son of Simchah Pinsker, a Russian Jew (from the Pale of Settlement) who studied Jewish texts in a scientific manner (like the Wissenschaft des Judentums group, but not among them). Leon (Yehudah Leib) learned to speak Russian as a child and was able to study at the University of Moscow. He studied Law, but found that he was unable to practice because of discrimination against Jews. He studied Medicine and became a doctor. He was involved with the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews, an organization devoted to helping Russian Jews assimilate into Russian culture. He returned to Odessa, which was the center of Haskalah in the Russian Empire, after he served in the Crimean War. He wrote for the Jewish journals that were published in Hebrew, but usually published his articles anonymously.

In 1871 there was a pogrom in Odessa. It was the second pogrom there that originated in the local Greek population. There were economic tensions between the Greek and Jewish populations related to the grain trade. In an earlier pogrom the Greek population was the sole offender, but in 1871, the Greeks were joined by Russians. This unsettled Pinsker. In the years following he wrote little and kept his head down. In 1881, in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Aleksander II, there was again a pogrom in Odessa, one of many throughout Russia. The next year, Pinsker published a pamphlet under his name entitled, “"Autoemancipation!" : Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen von einem russischen Juden” (Auto-emancipation: A Call to His Brethren from a Russian Jew). Ths pamphlet alone requires us to view Pinsker as an important figure in the history of Zionism.

Pinsker was a cautious person and moderate in his temperament, qualities that are mostly absent from “Auto-emancipation” on first reading. He uses his own term, “Judeophobia,” to describe the mindset of the non-Jewish world toward the Jews – naming it a kind of chronic mental disease.

“Having analyzed Judeophobia as an hereditary form of demonopathy, peculiar to the human race, and having represented Anti-Semitism as proceeding from an inherited aberration of the human mind, we must draw the important conclusion that we must give up contending against these hostile impulses as we must against every inherited predisposition. This view is especially important because it should persuade us that polemics are useless and that we should abstain from it as a waste of time and energy, for against superstition even the gods contend in vain. Prejudice and instinctive ill-will is not moved by rational argument, however forceful and clear. These sinister powers must be kept within bounds by force like every other blind force or simply evaded.”

He viewed the emancipation of the Jews offered by European governments with a jaundiced eye:

“The emancipation of the Jews is required as a postulate of logic, of law, and of enlightened national interest, but it can never be a spontaneous expression of human feeling. Far from owing its original to spontaneous feeling, it is never a matter of course; and it has never taken root so deeply that further discussion becomes unnecessary. … The Jew is not permitted to forget that the daily bread of civil rights must be given him.”

The direction that Pinsker steered towards was Auto-emancipation. The Jewish people could neither depend on others for their needs, nor expect to serve those needs in a land that was not their own. The differences between Pinsker and Moses Hess are pronounced. As a physician, Pinsker was much more pragmatic than Hess. He also came from the east. Hess believed that that great movement of the Jews toward a Jewish homeland would come from Russia, but he was not of that community and did not really understand it. While Hess had a background that made him familiar with traditional Judaism, he lacked a connection to contemporary leadership in the traditional world. Pinsker did have that connection. He was aware of the Hoveve Zion group, which included traditional and non-traditional figures. It pre-existed his involvement, but in the last decade of his life, he became an important leader of it.

Hess was concerned with the way that the society of the Jewish settlement would be organized and led politically. Pinsker was concerned primarily with the practical aspects. What could be accomplished and what would just be a waste of energy. Pinsker was willing to see Jewish settlement be established anywhere. The United States was an acceptable choice to him. He saw, as did Hess, the spiritual connection with the Land of Israel as significant. However, he was worried that, at his present moment, the Land of Israel was just not suitable for any kind of mass settlement. Aware as he was, based on his connection to Hoveve Zion, that the religious element in the movement would always see its fulfillment only in the Land of Israel, he did not dismiss it as the ultimate homeland of the Jewish people. He just thought that, for the Jews who were suffering right at that moment, a temporary home was better than none at all. For this reason, he is sometimes considered a Territorialist, but that is an overreach.

Just as Theodor Herzl was unaware of the writings of Moses Hess, he seems not to have been aware of Pinsker who had died several years before the writing of Herzl’s “The Jewish State.” Pinsker understood the need to take into account the attachment that traditional Jews had toward the Land of Israel specifically in a way that Herzl only came to understand in his final days. 

Pinsker understood that access to any piece of land would require some negotiation with a non-Jewish power. However, he lacked Herzl’s flash and his will to be that negotiating partner. He was not a diplomat. Although he had little faith in the success of the settlements that had been established by Hoveve Zion already, he agreed to try to supply them with continued support. He opposed further settlement on practical grounds, but in practice he did nothing to oppose it. He lacked Herzl’s techno-optimism, in part because he was farther away from the center of that development, but also because he experienced less of it.

Pinsker is now dismissed as merely a forerunner of the Zionist movement that Herzl more successfully built into an international mass movement. However, he was a vital force in the development of the Russian contingent within Zionism that was to be the strongest reservoir of early settlement and of practical labor. Unlike Herzl, his reaction to Anti-Semitism was not to view it as a problem that could be solved by the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Rather, he saw it as a prod towards a national regeneration for the Jewish people. The work that needed to be done was not for the benefit of humanity, but for the Jewish people itself. He did not see the Jews as lacking any mission as a people. He just doubted that any mission could be taken on until the Jews elevated themselves from the degraded position that they found themselves in.

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we find ourselves exactly in the place of Moses Hess, Leo Pinsker or Theodor Herzl. If we recognize that each of them responded to the conditions in which they found themselves, we can see in the differences that lay between them a call to make our contemporary thinking suitable to our own time.

Sources

“Pinsker, Simḥah and Lev,” Evyatar Friesel. Entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/2132 

Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. 

Pinsker, Leo. “Auto-emancipation.” translation by D.S. Blondheim, revised by Arthur Saul Super.