From Europe's East to the Middle East: Israel's Russian and Polish Lineages

by Kenneth Moss (Editor), Benjamin Nathans (Editor), Taro Tsurumi (Editor)

Overview

The overwhelming majority of Jews who laid the foundations of the Israeli state during the first half of the twentieth century came from the Polish lands and the Russian Empire. This is a fact widely known, yet its implications for the history of Israel and the Middle East and, reciprocally, for the history of what was once the demographic heartland of the Jewish diaspora remain surprisingly ill-understood.

Through fine-grained analyses of people, texts, movements, and worldviews in motion, the scholars assembled in From Europe's East to the Middle East—hailing from Europe, Israel, Japan, and the United States—rediscover a single transnational Jewish history of surprising connections, ideological cacophony, and entangled fates. Against the view of Israel as an outpost of the West, whether as a beacon of democracy or a creation of colonialism, this volume reveals how profoundly Zionism and Israel were shaped by the assumptions of Polish nationalism, Russian radicalism, and Soviet Communism; the unique ethos of the East European intelligentsia; and the political legacies of civil and national strife in the East European "shatter-zone." Against the view that Zionism effected a complete break from the diaspora that had birthed it, the book sheds new light on the East European sources of phenomena as diverse as Zionist military culture, kibbutz socialism, and ultra-Orthodox education for girls. Finally, it reshapes our understanding of East European Jewish life, from the Tsarist Empire, to independent Poland, to the late Soviet Union. Looking past siloed histories of both Zionism and its opponents in Eastern Europe, the authors reconstruct Zionism's transnational character, charting unexpected continuities across East European and Israeli Jewish life, and revealing how Jews in Eastern Europe grew ever more entangled with the changing realities of Jewish society in Palestine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812299571
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Series:	Jewish Culture and Contexts
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Kenneth B. Moss is Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University. Benjamin Nathans is Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Taro Tsurumi is Associate Professor in the Department of Area Studies at the University of Tokyo.

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Introduction

Kenneth B. Moss, Benjamin Nathans, and Taro Tsurumi

In popular discourse, Israel is often defined as an enclave of the West in the Middle East—either as "the region's only democracy" or as a "remnant of European colonialism." Many scholars, reluctant to adopt such single-minded categories, have nonetheless situated Israel and Zionism in contexts decisively defined by Western and Central European trajectories. In addition to the projection of West European imperial power overseas, these trajectories include the emergence and globalization of the European nation-state, the recasting of a Jewish national consciousness stamped by Europe's nationalist moment, and the rise of a newly racialized anti-Semitism. Situating Israel within these historical trajectories is particularly important insofar as the conflict in Palestine/Israel today is largely defined as a contest over statehood, national self-determination, and Israel's self-definition as a Jewish state—a point brought home most recently by the controversial "nation-state law" passed by Israel's parliament (Knesset) in July 2018, which declares that "the right to national self-determination in Israel" belongs "uniquely to the Jewish people."

Yet neither this retrospective view nor the definition of Israel as a Western enclave does full justice to historical reality. Most of the protagonists of Israel's founding—and indeed most of Palestine's Jews prior to the 1940s—were born and raised in Eastern Europe, in the territory that spans today's Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and parts of Russia. They were products of Eastern Europe's specific Jewish cultural formations (and intra-Jewish conflicts), as well as of Eastern Europe's distinctive path to modernity, in which multiethnic empire was the predominant form, both democracy and overseas empire figured very little, and the nation-state was both the focus of intense aspiration and late in coming. Indeed, one of the early puzzles of Israeli society was how East European Jews could have spawned, in the space of a single generation, a society renowned for its martial democracy. The present volume takes its point of departure from the simple proposition (which will grow more complicated in its elaboration) that there is much we cannot understand about the history of Zionism as an ideology and transnational movement, about Jewish life in Ottoman and British Palestine, and about the history of Israel without renewed attention to this East European genealogy.

Place, of course, is not synonymous with identity. Earlier experiences do not predetermine later trajectories, and we ought not fall into the trap—one with its own popular if increasingly faded pedigree in Israel—of seeing the history of Jewish life in Palestine and the history of Israel as essentially an extension of East European (Jewish) political and cultural ideals and conflicts into a putatively empty social space. In this volume's bid to renew and recast historical attention to the nexus among East European Jewry, the transnational movement that Zionism became, and the state and society that Israel is, the editors and participants do not seek to produce another version of this well-worn narrative. It does seem clear to us, however, that the historiography of Zionism, Israel, and Palestine needs to turn or perhaps return its attention to the history of East European Jewry in order to understand questions manifestly central to it—not least because of how differently historians have come to understand the modern histories of Eastern Europe and its Jewries in the past few years. To take one example: The question of Zionism's (and Israel's) relationship to European colonialism has rightly commanded a tremendous amount of historiographical attention in recent years. Yet even as historians have moved beyond polemical binarism toward a more nuanced appreciation of how Zionism was simultaneously permeated by European colonialist and Orientalist sensibilities and shaped by a peculiar kind of Jewish colonial condition, the filaments that connect this rather abstractly cultural story to the nationalists who founded the state of Israel and shaped its policies toward Jews and Palestinians remain barely visible.

One way to render those filaments visible is by applying the techniques of transnational history, an approach that highlights movements, ideas, and population flows operating across conventional nation-state borders, above or below relations among states themselves. In one sense, of course, transnational phenomena are nothing new in Jewish history; they have been a defining quality of the Jews' millennia-long dispersion, linking rabbis and merchants across far-flung regions. But transnational phenomena—including the Jewish variety—acquired new power and significance in the era of globalization. Novel technologies of travel and communication shrank the distance between Europe and other parts of the world, even as a new Jewish cohort of activist intellectuals, self-described modernizers, joined the fray. It also seems important to us to investigate further the specific and multilayered ways by which Zionism became an ever more transnational politics: A movement originating at the intersection of Russian Jewish and Central European Jewish agendas became entangled in the interwar period with British imperial politics, an increasingly U.S.-centered Jewish transnational politics, and—not least—Polish and Eastern European national politics, all at once.

David Engel's chapter in this volume (Chapter 9) illustrates the explanatory leverage of such an approach when applied to Eastern Europe and Israel. Engel reconstructs a tradition of thought and statecraft in interwar Polish nationalism in which the guiding principle was a conception of the state as the jointly held inalienable property of the Polish ethnonational community; on this principle, the Polish state was to serve both as executor of a neutral commonweal that might include all of Poland's citizens and as the caretaker of the real Polish people's property and the needs of its true owners. Engel begins to show us how, in their interaction with Polish ethnonationalism, Zionists contested but also absorbed and emulated this approach, which proved well-suited to the ideological needs of a movement that aspired simultaneously to some forms of supra-ethnic citizenship and democracy and to an aggressive program of compensatory institution building, land taking, economic development, cultural reformation, and ethnic self-determination for its Jewish majority. Anyone who studies the ways in which successive Israeli governments have treated Israel's Palestinian citizens (in relation to how they have treated Israel's variegated Jewish population as both subject and object of development) will experience a shock of recognition upon reading Engel's chapter. To be sure, for Palestinians in Israel and perhaps too under Israeli control in the occupied territories, the question of whether they are living under a West European model or a variant of the Polish ethnonational statehood model may seem academic. Yet historians have good reason to pursue the question of how such East European "solutions" to the problem of reconciling compensatory-developmentalist ethnonationalism, modern citizenship, and the fact of multiethnicity shaped Zionist practices toward both Jews and Arabs.

The payoff of a piece like Engel's lies in how it captures the impact of an East European ideological formation in Palestine and Israel—one of the themes of the present volume. Engel's essay also embodies a second concern central to this volume: rethinking the history of Zionism itself by reopening the question of how that movement, although transnational, was shaped and reshaped by the challenges of Jewish life in Eastern Europe—problems that changed dramatically over the sixty years spanning the birth of the Love of Zion movement in 1881 and the beginning of the destruction of East European Jewry in 1941. Unsurprisingly, the history of Zionism was for a long time written from within the ideological conflicts that consumed the movement. Historians naturally took as their research program an investigation of this or that aspect of what was understood as a sustained conflict between "political Zionism" and "cultural Zionism," or between "bourgeois" Zionists and those who combined their Zionism with socialist ideas, or between the movement's secular and religious streams. There was (and remains) much merit to such approaches. And there is surely just as much merit in the countervailing drive among more recent scholars of Zionism to seek out the affiliations of Zionist thought and imagination with largely West European forms of thinking about the East, about "modernity" and "barbarism," about Jews and Judaism, Arabs and Islam.

The present volume does not reject these approaches in favor of East European formations in the history of Zionist political culture, even in Eastern Europe itself. After all, if Eastern Europe had ever constituted a self-contained cultural zone—a notion which, as Larry Wolff famously demonstrated, may have been more a modern Western invention than anything else —this certainly became less the case in the era of Zionism's birth. Fin-de-siècle Eastern Europe experienced particularly rapid and wrenching change in social, economic, cultural, and political life even before the violent metamorphosis wrought by war and imperial collapse in the 1914-1921 "continuum of crisis." As historians of Eastern Europe have long recognized, Russian and other East European intelligentsias oriented much of their social thought and their competing visions of modernization toward some construal of the West. In Eastern Europe, as in the Ottoman Empire and points further east, modernity projects were shaped in relation to an initial impulse toward self-conscious "Westernization," and this was manifestly no less the case with Zionism than with other "East European" ideological formations that flourished in the region—perhaps indeed more so, given Zionism's pan-European presence.

This should not blind us, however, to the many ways that distinctive social, political, and intellectual terrains of imperial and postimperial Eastern Europe did bear powerfully on the character of the Jewish modernity projects born there, Zionism included. To rehearse some familiar but essential points in brief, Europe's eastern half was fractiously multiethnic—a region in which multiple populations, including the Jews, were pervasively distinguished—and often enough, divided—by religious confession and calendar, economic function, language, dress, endogamy, and, lending meaning to such differences, self-identity. This made for fluidity but, even more so, conflict, well before the rise of modern nationalisms. The political structure within which many Jews lived prior to World War I was a complicated mélange of interventions by imperial governments (often with results quite different from those the state had intended); the persistence of the traditional communal system (kahal), which in various ways continued to shape Jewish daily life; and emergent municipal and civic structures shot through with contradictions and tensions peculiar to the conflicted modernization project of the autocratic state and new forms of ethnopolitics.

In late imperial Russia, ethnic identity continued to be shaped by occupational differences: Jews were not merely an ethnic and religious minority but a loosely assembled caste of merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans in a still mostly agrarian society. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, these distinctions became increasingly politicized. East European Jews encountered a more complex terrain of ethnic antagonisms and emergent nationalisms than did their West European counterparts. Jews in tsarist Russia stood between Russian imperial nationalism and Polish and Ukrainian ethnic nationalisms, while suffering from popular anti-Semitic violence. Zionists both reacted against and emulated such plural nationalisms and violence. Furthermore, this distinctive sociopolitical matrix was matched by a cultural situation utterly unlike that of West European Jews. Whereas the Jews of Western and much of Central Europe encountered the late nineteenth century as part of the general European bourgeois Lebenswelt and as Frenchmen and Germans in their own eyes, the Jews of Eastern Europe confronted modernity for the most part as inhabitants of a distinct and densely encompassing realm of religious-cultural practices, beliefs, norms, and narratives that was deemed by all concerned to stand in some profound and unsustainable tension with that modernity. And those who survived the era of war and revolution in Eastern Europe experienced a wrenching political transformation unlike anything their West European Jewish counterparts encountered: a sudden transition from imperial subjecthood to a new world of aspiring nation-states for which the existence of minorities was not a given but a problem.

Part I of the present volume, "Imperial and National Crucibles," takes up that transition, exploring not just what Jews left behind but what they took with them after centuries of immersion in various East European imperial settings. Moving beyond the well-charted influence of Russia's revolutionary subculture on the formation of Jewish political parties, Israel Bartal, in Chapter 1, "'Little Russia' in Palestine? Imperial Past, National Future (1860-1948)," links population resettlement projects sponsored by the Russian imperial state, starting in the early nineteenth century, to subsequent Jewish ambitions for resettlement in Palestine. Decades before the Zionist movement embraced the idea of turning Jews into farmers and anchoring them in the lands of ancient Israel, the tsarist government sought to advance its hold over "New Russia"—another territory wrested from the decaying Ottoman Empire—in part by stimulating the migration of Jews from the northwest provinces of the Pale of Settlement. Much more was at work here than simply the technique of using managed resettlement to create geopolitical facts on the ground. Animated by Enlightenment notions of progress, tsarist authorities understood resettlement on farms in formerly Ottoman lands on the northern littoral of the Black Sea as a means to cure Jews of their lleged social parasitism, turning them into productive, useful subjects. Seen against the broader background of population policies in Russia's imperial borderlands, the waves of Jewish resettlement in Palestine between 1882 and 1923 (the various aliyot) begin to look less anomalous.

Just as the Zionist project of cultivating a Jewish peasantry owed much to its imperial Russian predecessor, Bartal argues, so too the urban culture forming in Tel Aviv in the 1920s and 1930s drew on the experience of Odessa and other port cities in New Russia, which had similarly sprung as if from nowhere. The radical émigrés from the tsarist empire who gathered in Tel Aviv quickly formed the New Yishuv's political and cultural elite, with ambitions for social engineering that matched those of the authorities in Saint Petersburg across much of the previous century. Indeed, as Taro Tsurumi notes in Chapter 2, "From Hyphenated Jews to Independent Jews: Collapse of the Russian Empire and the Change in the Relationships Between Jews and Others," a significant subset of the Zionist leadership in Russia was convinced that the social effects unleashed by the struggle to create a modern Jewish state would extend back to Russia's Jews, who even the most optimistic Zionists understood would continue—or so it seemed at the beginning of the twentieth century—to constitute the majority of the world's Jewish population. Contrary to the image of Zionists as having consigned the Jewish diaspora to the dustbin of history, Tsurumi uses the example of Daniel Pasmanik to illustrate a Zionism intent on elevating the Jews' status within the Russian imperial framework, recasting them as a nation-in-the-remaking, fully capable of forging alliances with other national groups within the empire, above all with ethnic Russians.

Tsurumi's investigation uncovers two unexpected phenomena. First, Zionists such as Pasmanik found themselves remarkably well aligned with their Jewish rivals, liberal activists such as Maxim Vinaver and Simon Dubnow, and for a brief period even collaborated with them in the campaign for Jewish political and civil rights in Russia. Rather than a purely tactical move, Tsurumi insists, engagement with domestic Russian politics represented a Zionist strategy of nation building within an imperial framework, and thus a sign of a certain reservoir of confidence vis-à-vis the majority Russian population. And therein lies the second unexpected phenomenon: In contrast to their fellow Jews in France, Germany, and other West European countries, whose social advancement seemed to require constant refutation of the charge that they constituted a "nation within the nation," many Jews in Russia—Zionists such as Pasmanik among them—became convinced that social advancement required that they assert themselves precisely as a nation among the empire's other nations.

It was not so much the collapse of the imperial Russian state in 1917 that put an end to such dreams—both the Provisional and the Bolshevik governments were prepared to preside over a multinational polity—but rather the massive wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that followed, claiming many tens of thousands of Jewish lives. Not only was the number of casualties incomparably greater than in previous pogrom waves (e.g., in 1881-1883 or 1903-1906); it was no longer possible, even for those so inclined, to place responsibility for the pogroms on the state, for the simple reason that during the latest wave of violence and civil war (1918-1921), the state had in effect evaporated. For Pasmanik and like-minded Zionists, Tsurumi writes, the multinational Russian incubator of Jewish nationhood had ceased to exist, leaving as the sole option the independent pursuit of a sovereign Jewish nation-state in the ancient homeland. Henceforth, Jewish nationalism would perform as a soloist rather than as a member of an ensemble.

As Anita Shapira notes in Chapter 3, "Jewish Palestine and Eastern Europe: I Am in the East and My Heart Is in the West," the Bolshevik Revolution cut off the transnational Zionist movement, including the Yishuv, from what hitherto had been its most important human reservoir. Emigration from the newly established Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was reduced to a trickle. In a sense, Zionists from the Russian Empire had always lived at some remove from Russia itself, insofar as the vast majority of them came from the empire's non-Russian peripheries, where they had lived among Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, and others. The Russians they knew best were the ones who populated the classics of Russian literature, the Bazarovs, Karamazovs, and Kareninas whom the émigrés took with them to Palestine. Surveying a wide range of memoiristic and literary representations of Russia and Poland by Jews in Palestine and later in the State of Israel, Shapira finds a stark divide. "Russia became a myth," she writes, "and admiration for it increased precisely because the real Russia was inaccessible." By contrast, among Jews from Poland, who dominated the waves of immigration during the interwar period, the increasingly bourgeois and militantly nationalistic tenor of Polish life remained both familiar and real. Among the left-leaning majority in the Yishuv, this generated a widespread antipathy to the Polish legacy, as contrasted with the abiding romance of Russia's soulfulness and universal ambitions. For Jews on the right, Shapira claims, Polish ethnic nationalism was both exclusionary and formative.

The multilayered relationship between Polish and Jewish nationalisms lies at the heart of Chapter 4, by Marcos Silber, "Stateless Nation: A Reciprocal Motif in Polish Nationalism and Zionism." In much of the existing historiography, Zionism in Poland has been portrayed as either an imported product, brought by Jewish immigrants from Russian-controlled Lithuania (the so-called Litvaks), or as a movement that developed locally as a compensatory Jewish response to hostile Polish nationalism. Both of these accounts reinforced an idea favored not just by Zionism but by Jewish tradition, namely, that modern Jewish nationalism drew on internal Jewish idioms and sources via a process of organic renewal from within. By contrast, Silber finds a deeply reciprocal relationship whereby nineteenth-century Polish writers came to terms with their own exile and statelessness—Poland having been erased from the map of Europe by the encroaching empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria—by appropriating the ancient Jewish motif of the nation deprived of its state but nonetheless intact and alive. The great poet Adam Mickiewicz, whose wife descended from a Jewish family belonging to the sect of Jacob Frank, was the key figure in the process of appropriation, a process that translated the ancient Maccabean revolt into the language of modern romantic nationalism, and thus into prototypes for Mickiewicz's generation of exiles who dreamed of resurrecting the Polish state.

Mickiewicz's image of Jews as the paradigmatic stateless nation, Silber shows, came to permeate nineteenth-century Polish literature, art, and public discourse. One of its unintended effects was to make ancient Jewish motifs palatable, even attractive, to acculturated Polish Jews who had been busily distancing themselves from traditional Judaism, only to find fin-de-siècle Polish culture taking an increasingly anti-Semitic turn. Polish literature in particular, with its contemporary valorization of the Maccabean rebels, served as a mold, Silber argues, into which Jews could "pour Zionist materials." Expanding on the chapters in this volume by Engel and Shapira, Silber traces the influence of Polish nationalism on Zionist Jews in terms of its productive as well as exclusionary effects, and not only on right-wing Revisionists, but across the political spectrum of the Yishuv.

The assumption that Jewish life in Palestine and Israel was deeply shaped by the East European Jewish background of so many of prestate Palestine's Jewish immigrants is, as we have noted, foundational in academic scholarship as well as in wide swaths of Israel's segmented and divided public memory and popular culture. Yet, as with any foundational assumption, particularly one bound up with the sense of self cherished by a society's dominant elements, this is one that is in perpetual need of critical scholarly scrutiny. Perhaps in part in reaction to the enduring power of this assumption, for several decades now much key revisionist work on the history of Palestine, the Yishuv, and Israel has deemphasized East European legacies and instead emphasized the powerful influence of local Palestinian factors and encounters on the evolution of Zionist, Yishuv, and Israeli-Jewish institutions. Well aware of this far-reaching challenge to the old paradigm, the chapters in Part II of the present volume, "Groups and Institutions," take upon themselves the task of revisiting the overdetermined history of East European "transplantation" onto Palestine's and Israel's soil with sharpened and chastened critical instincts.

Ziva Galili, in Chapter 5, "The Paradox of Soviet Influence: The Case of Kibbutz Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir from USSR," reconstructs how the political sensibilities and choices of the members of Kibbutz Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir in Palestine were pervasively shaped throughout the 1930s and beyond by beliefs, assumptions, and habits of thought born of the members' particular shared experience in early 1920s Revolutionary Russia. Many socialist Zionist movements in Palestine drew some sort of vague inspiration from the Revolution, but this particular cohort was forged in the unique alembic of the Russian Revolution's early sociopolitical experimentation, mobilization, and radical sociopolitical reordering. Consequently, they came to Palestine imbued with confidence in the possibility of "socialist construction" on a grand scale, extreme commitment to atheism and to socialist-ideological consistency generally, a vision of how class and national identities could be reconciled that was drawn not from socialist Zionism's synthesizer-of-choice Ber Borochov but from Bolshevik nationalities-policy assumptions, and a deep sense that revolution required all radical elements to unite into a single encompassing party. Where the first half of Galili's chapter reconstructs in rich detail the process whereby these sensibilities were implanted, appropriated, and negotiated among the tight-knit circles of the Ha-Shomer ha-tsa'ir movement in the early 1920s Soviet Union, the second part explores the tension-ridden "translation," in her felicitous term, of this ideological "legacy" in "the radically different context in Palestine." Galili reconstructs the influence of Soviet Marxist political-intellectual convictions on the kibbutz members' choices regarding the most fundamental questions of the era for Left Zionism generally, from the relationship of socialist Zionists to the rising power of Ben-Gurion's and Berl Katznelson's Ahdut ha-'avodah Party to the emerging conflict between Jews and Palestinians.

Iris Brown, in Chapter 6, "Triumphs of Conservatism: Beit Yaakov and the Polish Origins of Haredi Girls' Education in Israel," embodies the same careful delineation of a specific case of transplantation—and at the same time points readers toward a very different topic in the history of connections between East European Jewish and Israeli society: those between East European Jewish and Israeli ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, Judaism. Like Galili, Brown lays aside any general account of transplantation in favor of a focused reconstruction of the East European history (or histories) of a particular Israeli institution: the flourishing Beit Yaakov/Beys Yankev educational network, which provides a strict Orthodox education to girls and young women. Brown shows us, first, that through the 1920s, the Beys Yankev school system was actually a far cry from what it is today. Under the pedagogical leadership of the now-forgotten Shmuel Deutschlaender, Beys Yankev actually hewed to a line surprisingly close to that of nineteenth-century German Jewish Modern Orthodoxy, defined by the "encourage[ment of] a combination of Judaism and general culture." Yet the story here is not, as we might expect, of a surprisingly flexible East European Jewish traditionalism undone by a more consistently anti-modern ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel. Thus, second, Brown shows us that, in fact, Deutschlaender's humanistic curriculum was ejected from the Beys Yankev schools in the 1930s in Poland itself, by Hasidic educational leaders like Rabbi Yehuda Leib Orlean, who felt that Deutschlaender had "enmeshed" Beys Yankev "in the Enlightenment psychosis." In that sense, Beys Yankev came to Israel already purged of non-haredi sensibilities and suited to provide haredi society in Israel with women equipped to be self-sacrificing and self-directing bearers of Orthodoxy's mission to sustain its now-massive ḥevrat ha-lomdim, the "society of [male] learners" in which men are enjoined to devote themselves as far as possible to lifelong full-time study of Judaism's classical texts.

As ultra-Orthodoxy moves from strength to strength in contemporary Israeli society, new generations of scholars are investigating its history without the weight of secularist assumptions about its inevitable decline. In turn, these scholars are also going beyond a binary image of haredi Judaism as either a direct continuation of East European ultra-Orthodoxy (whether "vital" or "fossilized") or as something utterly recast by the radically new conditions of life in a declaredly Jewish state with a Jewish but non-Orthodox majority and public sphere. Benjamin Brown, in Chapter 7, "Hasidic Leadership: From Charismatic to Hereditary and Back," provides a study in religious phenomenology that constitutes a challenge to the very idea that the development of haredi Judaism in Eastern Europe or Israel—or anywhere else—can be satisfactorily explained in terms of the influence of external institutional contexts. Brown's essay concerns the hereditary mode of leadership that marks one of the defining features of Hasidism, the pietistic religious movement that came to dominate East European Jewish religiosity in the nineteenth century and that remains central to the ever-expanding global world of ultra-Orthodoxy today. Brown's chapter investigates three types of deviations or complications in the twentieth century and up to the present: cases of tzaddikim who were dynastic heirs but also wielded unusual charisma in their own right; cases of new, that is, self-made tzaddikim; and the recent phenomenon of mashpiʿim, preachers who are not tzaddikim but who nonetheless attract substantial followings among Hasidim, not least via new media. Brown is ultimately guarded in making claims about how these alternatives to dynastic leadership are connected, if at all, to Hasidism's undoubtedly wrenching transition from Eastern Europe to Israel. Brown's chapter presents an important challenge to historians' common assumptions about the determining power of institutional environments ("context") and exemplifies a newly vigorous conviction among scholars of Judaism that religious phenomena in modern Jewish history have to be approached as substantially autonomous structures that may be affected by the environment but also make their own history.

Several of the chapters in this volume take up a surprisingly under-researched variation on the question of the Yishuv's connections to East European Jewry, one that reverses direction to investigate the impact of the rapid interwar developments in Palestine/the Yishuv on East European Jewry. Chapter 8, Rona Yona's "Connecting Poland and Palestine: The Organizational Model of He-Haluts," examines the process by which the Polish branch of the Zionist scouting and settlement-preparation movement He-Haluts (The Pioneer), which emerged before and during World War I, was recast in the second half of the 1920s by Palestine's emergent United Kibbutz movement. By the time He-Haluts became the most important mass Zionist organization in crisis-wracked Poland in the early 1930s, its leadership, goals, and institutions were pervasively defined by Yishuv actors, ideals, needs, and struggles.

Yona's chapter is a study in disproportion and the power of motivated avant-gardes to reshape institutions, showing how, beginning in 1926, the newly consolidated United Kibbutz movement and its leadership at Ein Harod recast He-Haluts as a way to shape new cohorts of Zionist youth willing to commit to Ein Harod's demanding ascetic-collectivist experiment. In so doing, she shows, Palestinian kibbutz Zionism reshaped the whole sweep of left-leaning youth Zionism in Poland. Yona's essay goes beyond the complex tensions within the divided Zionist Left to demonstrate how, by 1933, even the defining tensions within the most important and consequential mass Zionist organization in Poland and perhaps the world were shaped primarily by intra-Yishuv struggles and agendas. In its detailed reconstruction of how new forms and institutions of socialist Zionism in the Yishuv recast Zionism in Poland, Yona's chapter marks a major development that builds on pioneering work by Anita Shapira and Yaacov Shavit, among others, and also offers a model for careful research on parallel phenomena, perhaps indeed beyond the socialist Zionist milieu.

In keeping with the present volume's goal of integrating the study of the Jewish Diaspora and Palestine/Israel, Part III, "Formations of Political Culture," deals with ideas about and practices of power that flowed between Europe and the Middle East both within and beyond Zionist circles. The Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union constituted a watershed in this respect, leading to a ban first on "bourgeois" Zionist activity and then on Zionism and all other forms of Jewish "nationalism" inside the Soviet Union. As a result, the resurrected Polish state that emerged from the collapse of Eastern Europe's empires after World War I (prefiguring the resurrected Jewish state that would emerge from the collapse of West European empires after World War II) became the demographic center of Jewish political activity in Europe.

In the era between the two world wars, diaspora Zionist history entered a new phase that would change the course of Zionist history in general. As David Engel demonstrates in Chapter 9, "Israel's Polish Heritage," Zionists originally conceived of Jewish nationalism within a multinational setting, and this premise continued in the Zionist movement in newly established Poland, a third of whose population was non-Polish. But the mainstream of the Polish establishment strongly held the idea of the state as the jointly held inalienable property of the dominant ethnonational community, and although Zionists criticized this idea outwardly, they began to absorb it and aimed to establish a Jewish state in Palestine as the exclusive property of the Jewish people. Similarly, as Kamil Kijek shows in Chapter 10, "Violence as Political Experience among Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland," the interwar era, with its authoritarian modernism and faith in the efficacy of violence, shaped the political culture of young Zionists and Bundists. Violence not only affected the material, physical, and external conditions of Jewish life, it also became an internal element of interwar Jewish political culture. Portions of Jewish youth internalized political violence in certain settings as part of the general pan-European drive toward radical transformative and coercive politics.

These changes in Jewish political experience coincided with the emergence of a new option for diaspora Jews. The Yishuv, which began to be perceived as a genuine Jewish society in the making, became an increasingly feasible destination for immigration, even by non-Zionists. Kenneth Moss, in Chapter 11, "From Zionism as Ideology to the Yishuv as Fact: Polish Jewish Reorientations Toward Palestine Within and Beyond Zionism, 1927-1932," frames Palestine's influence on Polish Jewry not in terms of intra-Zionist exchange but in terms of how the Yishuv's emergence as a real, viable society compelled ever deeper and more various forms of interest among Polish Jews of many stripes and reshaped Polish Jewish political imagination and judgment well beyond Zionist circles. Focusing on a period when growing numbers of Polish Jews sensed their future in Poland slipping out of their hands, this chapter anatomizes new approaches to the Yishuv among both committed members of Poland's Zionist subculture and a growing range of non-Zionists, including some affiliated with expressly anti-Zionist circles. In turn, it argues that these engagements bred not only greater openness toward Zionism's myths about national regeneration in the Land, but also the opposite: hunger for accurate understanding of the Yishuv as a society and deep interest in looking past Zionist rhetoric to investigate what alternative life chances the Yishuv might actually offer to Jews, collectively and individually.

Mihály Kálmán, in Chapter 13, "Hero Shtetls: Reading Civil War Self-Defense in the Yishuv," traces another interwar history of how a crisis in East European Jewish experience partially recast both Zionism and the Yishuv. Between 1917 and 1921, the collapse of the Russian Empire unleashed massive and gruesome anti-Jewish violence (pogroms) across formerly imperial territory, particularly in Ukraine. This unprecedented violence provoked Jewish self-defense efforts that were equally unprecedented in size, scope, and organization. But although outspoken Zionists were centrally involved in the self-defense, its place in Zionist memory proved complicated. Kálmán's chapter explores the complex and disputed place of revolutionary-era pogroms and self-defense in the interwar Yishuv, focusing both on the memory-work of immigrants to Palestine in the early 1920s (the Third Aliyah) who had themselves been involved in self-defense and on its mixed reception more broadly. Although the pogroms of the Russian civil war era were far more numerous and resulted in many more casualties across a far larger regional scale, in the Zionist narrative dominant in the Yishuv these pogroms continued to be overshadowed by the pogroms of 1881-1884 and 1903-1906, which bore a close connection to the First Aliyah and the Second Aliyah, respectively. In the Yishuv and in Israel especially in its first few decades, the memory of self-defense in Ukraine served as a source of inspiration for militarism and collective identity among Third-Aliyah immigrants in the Yishuv and the Haganah in particular, but remained marginal to a larger Zionist narrative focused on the Second Aliyah era and substantially closed to histories of the Diaspora after 1917.

Part IV, "Soviet Interludes," unsettles the notion that Jews in the USSR ceased to participate in Zionist and other transnational networks of communication and activism that lie at the heart of this volume. To be sure, chapters by Chizuko Takao and Benjamin Nathans concentrate on the early and late decades of the Soviet experiment, indirectly highlighting the extent to which the tumultuous Stalin era (1928-1953) did indeed isolate Soviet Jews (and other Soviet citizens) from the rest of the world. Before and after Stalin, however, significant numbers of Jews in the USSR remained or became linked to Jewish groups on other continents, whether in the Yishuv and the State of Israel or in the United States and other Western countries. And those groups in turn continued to wrestle, in new forms, with the question of whether to direct their energies toward the resettlement of Soviet Jews in the Jewish state, or to support diasporic versions of a Jewish future as well.

In Chapter 13, "American Jews and the Zionist Movements in the Soviet Union: The Joint and He-Haluts in Crimea in the 1920s," Takao explores Jewish agricultural settlements on the Crimean peninsula sponsored by the Soviet government and assisted by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), a transnational welfare organization. While Crimean colonization appeared to represent a stark alternative to the Zionist project in Palestine—"Trotsky versus Balfour," as one contemporary memorably put it—Takao highlights the two camps' shared ambition to cultivate a new breed of Jews, productive tillers of the soil and pioneers of collective human labor. Indeed, it was precisely the Zionist training farms in Crimea that came closest to embodying the Soviet vision of collectivized agriculture, several years ahead of the system violently imposed by Stalin during the first Five-Year Plan. That this early experiment was supported by the American Joint, representatives from the Yishuv, and the Soviet government makes it only more remarkable.

A half-century later, in the era of what Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev liked to call "developed socialism," such cooperation was unthinkable. The Cold War had redrawn the global map, and with it relations between Europe's East and the Middle East. Geography notwithstanding, the State of Israel now firmly belonged to "the West," and Cold War Zionism refocused the idea of Jewish freedom in an anti-totalitarian mode. In the final chapter of this volume, Chapter 14, "Refuseniks and Rights Defenders: Jews and the Soviet Dissident Movement," Nathans explores the uneasy relationship between a new generation of Soviet Zionists (those to whom Soviet authorities refused to grant exit visas became known as "refuseniks") and the broader Soviet movement for civil and human rights, a significant proportion of whose members were also of Jewish background. While Soviet Zionists made their case in terms of "repatriation"—a limited rationale well within Moscow's repertoire of ethnopolitics—Soviet rights defenders appealed to the more universal human right of freedom of movement, including the freedom to leave and return to one's country. Despite being divided by competing logics of collective repatriation and individual rights, refuseniks and human rights activists in the USSR were closely intertwined on a personal level and highly dependent on the same networks of sympathizers abroad. Both their conflicts and their overlapping struggles, Nathans suggests, echoed the fraught relations between respective predecessors in the late imperial era.

From Europe's East to the Middle East seeks to both renew and recast our understanding of the tumultuous and entangled histories of East European Jewry, the transnational movement that Zionism became, and the settler society from which the country that is contemporary Israel emerged. The editors are acutely aware of the dearth in this volume of voices speaking from and about the Arab/Palestinian population. No account of transnational influences between Eastern Europe and Palestine/Israel can claim to be comprehensive without including such perspectives. Insofar as the present volume accurately reflects the current state of historical knowledge, we consider this a pressing agenda for future research, no less significant for Israel's historical lineage than the Jewish population was for the societies of Eastern Europe.
Some of the chapters in the present volume contend with the entanglement between Europe's East and the Middle East by zooming in on its regional variations, applying distinctions between the Polish and Russian realms to the study of Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism. Both realms begin, in our account, as imperial spaces within the Romanov dynastic domain, only to go their radically separate ways in 1917: Poland toward an autonomous nation-state, Russia toward an altogether new type of state, a union of socialist republics. Both formations continued to shape and be shaped by Jewish ideas of nationhood and collective labor, respectively.

Other chapters, by contrast, emphasize transregional Jewish lifeworlds that resist being categorized as either "Polish Jewish" or "Russian Jewish," namely those of Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewry. With a historical momentum of their own, these lifeworlds have demonstrated unexpected staying power both in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe and in Israel, where they exercise a still-unfolding, ever-widening influence on Israeli society. They, along with other groups whose paths are explored in this volume, remind us that the history of Jewish migration from Europe's East to the Middle East is not reducible either to the history of Jewish nationalism or to the unfolding of a European imperial project. Indeed, once we understand migration as involving not just the unidirectional movement of people but the circulation of ideas and practices, we begin to confront in its full complexity a cardinal, perhaps the cardinal, feature of modern Jewish history: its transnational entanglement with the histories of other peoples.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Kenneth B. Moss, Benjamin Nathans, and Taro Tsurumi

Part I. Imperial and National Crucibles
Chapter 1. "Little Russia" in Palestine? Imperial Past, National Future (1860-1948)
Israel Bartal
Chapter 2. From Hyphenated Jews to Independent Jews: The Collapse of the Russian Empire and the Change in the Relationship Between Jews and Others
Taro Tsurumi
Chapter 3. Jewish Palestine and Eastern Europe: I Am in the East and My Heart Is in the West
Anita Shapira
Chapter 4. Stateless Nation: A Reciprocal Motif Between Polish Nationalism and Zionism
Marcos Silber

Part II. Groups and Institutions
Chapter 5. The Paradox of Soviet Influence: The Case of Kibbutz Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir from the USSR
Ziva Galili
Chapter 6. Triumphs of Conservatism: Beit Yaakov and the Polish Origins of Haredi Girls' Education in Israel
Iris Brown (Hoizman)
Chapter 7. Hasidic Leadership: From Charismatic to Hereditary and Back
Benjamin Brown
Chapter 8. Connecting Poland and Palestine: The Organizational Model of He-Haluts
Rona Yona

Part III. Formations of Political Culture
Chapter 9. Israel's Polish Heritage
David Engel
Chapter 10. Violence as Political Experience among Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland
Kamil Kijek
Chapter 11. From Zionism as Ideology to the Yishuv as Fact: Polish Jewish Reorientations Toward Palestine Within and Beyond Zionism, 1927-1932
Kenneth B. Moss
Chapter 12. Hero Shtetls: Reading Civil War Self-Defense in the Yishuv
Mihály Kálmán

Part IV. Soviet Interludes
Chapter 13. American Jews and the Zionist Movements in the Soviet Union: The Joint and He-Haluts in Crimea in the 1920s
Chizuko Takao
Chapter 14. Refuseniks and Rights Defenders: Jews and the Soviet Dissident Movement
Benjamin Nathans

List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"This rich and dynamic collection makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the various connections between East European Jewish history and Jewish society, culture, and politics in Ottoman/British Palestine and, later, Israel. The volume provides a welcome overview of many of the central themes and key questions regarding the intersection between these two societies in essays by many of the most important scholars working on this fascinating chapter in modern Jewish history."

Tel Aviv University Scott Ury

"This rich and dynamic collection makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the various connections between East European Jewish history and Jewish society, culture, and politics in Ottoman/British Palestine and, later, Israel. The volume provides a welcome overview of many of the central themes and key questions regarding the intersection between these two societies in essays by many of the most important scholars working on this fascinating chapter in modern Jewish history."—Scott Ury, Tel Aviv University

From the Publisher