Chaim Nachman Bialik is the greatest living Hebrew poet, and with his name the national revival is inseparably connected. Born in Volhynia, Russia, he had a Talmudical education. He started his literary career in the Ha’shiloach and other Hebrew reviews. He rose quickly to great fame, making a new era in Hebrew poetry. He has an epic as well as a lyric gift. His marvellous artistic instinct, his harmonious Hebrew, his liveliness of imagination, the melody of his verse place him in the highest rank. He is a national poet in the noblest sense of the term. He voices the feelings and traditions of generations. He has measured the groans of our people, has counted their sighs and tears, has gathered and sung them and played them upon the celestial harp of his Hebrew muse. Sometimes, like a rebel cherub, he sounds the trumpet of judgment against tyranny. He is familiar with every phase of Jewish thought and life, ancient as well as modern, in the Ghetto as well as in nature, but his heart is in Zion, and here the freshness and vividness of his colouring, the truth and life-like reality of his pictures, the enthusiasm of his hopes are unsurpassed. He is also distinguished as a writer of prose, and is active in the Hebrew Publication Society “Moriah,” at Odessa, which has enriched Hebrew literature by many valuable works.
Saul Tschernichowsky, born in Michailovka, Russia, by profession a physician, is, next to Bialik, the greatest living Hebrew poet. He is distinguished by depth and tenderness of feeling, fertile and ingenious fancy, profound knowledge of the classical world, the easy transition by which he passes from nature to man, exquisite sense of beauty and a highly developed taste for music, which makes his verse exceedingly melodious.
2. The Chovevé Zion and University Zionist Groups
We have more than once had occasion to mention the groups of Chovevé Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) which sprang up in Russia in the early eighties for the support of the pioneers of immigration into Palestine. Some account of the most important of these groups and of the outstanding personalities connected with them will indicate both the rapidity with which the movement spread, and the continuity of development between the Chovevé Zion and the new Zionist organization founded by Herzl. We shall find throughout that those who came into prominence in Herzl’s movement were almost without exception men who had been active for years before as “Lovers of Zion.” We shall find also that everywhere it was the Jewish University Student—and particularly the Russian Jewish Student, whether at a Russian or at a German or Swiss University—who, captured by the idea of the national revival, became the life and the driving force of the movement.
The first place among the Chovevé Zion groups belongs to that of Odessa, which became and has remained the headquarters of the whole organization. We have already mentioned three prominent members of this group—Pinsker, Achad Ha’am and Lilienblum (the last two in connection with their services to Hebrew literature). Among a host of other Odessa Zionists who have earned distinction, M. M. Ussishkin stands out most prominently because of the influence which his energy and determination have won for him. He graduated in engineering at Moscow, where he was instrumental in founding the B’nai Zion (“Sons of Zion”)—one of the earliest and strongest of the Chovevé Zion groups. Afterwards he went to Ekaterinoslaw, and only later to Odessa, where he has been the centre of Jewish national work in all its branches for some years. To him perhaps more than to any single man is due the return of Zionist effort to practical colonizing work in Palestine after the temporary concentration on political negotiation under Herzl. He has worked strenuously for the financial institutions of Zionism as well as for Palestinian colonization and the Hebrew revival.
Of the brilliant group of leaders which received its training in the B’nai Zion of Moscow we mention here the recently deceased Dr. Ephim Wladimirovitch [Jechiel] Tschlenow (1865–1918), Vice-President of the Inner Actions Committee of the Zionist Movement. After graduating in medicine at Moscow University, he settled in that city, and divided his life between the claims of his profession and those of Zionist work. He combined appreciation of the value of practical work in Palestine with a sound sense of political values. He had been twice to the Holy Land, and in a brochure, Five Years’ Work in Palestine (written in Russian and translated into German), produced an admirably clear and comprehensive record of recent Jewish achievements in the country.
Scarcely less important than the Odessa and the Moscow Societies were those of St. Petersburg, of Bialystok, of Pinsk, of Minsk and of Wilna, every one of which was a training-ground for men who afterwards became prominent in the Zionist movement. It was at Pinsk, his birthplace, that Dr. Chaim Weizmann, now President of the English Zionist Federation, began his Zionist activity, which was continued afterwards with such fruitful results at German and Swiss Universities and in this country. Wilna is the home of two Zionists, the brothers Isaac and Boris Goldberg, who hold a specially distinguished place both in Russian Zionism and in the movement at large. So in every Jewish centre in Russia the “Lovers of Zion” movement attracted the best of Jewish energy and idealism, especially among the youth, and the idea of the return to Zion took a firmer and firmer hold on the people and demanded more and more imperatively an outlet in practical work. In Poland and Galicia and Roumania, and to a lesser extent in Germany, the movement spread during the eighties and nineties of last century, so that when Herzl came on the scene the national consciousness to which he appealed was largely awakened (though not in those elements of Jewry to which he first addressed his call). In countries further west there was little progress until after the creation of Herzl’s organization. True there were Chovevé Zion groups in England and France, but the idea of the return had not really struck root in the Jewish communities of those countries. One of the great services rendered by Herzl’s organization to the cause of Jewish nationalism is that it has provided a bridge over which the Jewish spirit and the idealism of the reawakened Jewries of Eastern Europe could make their way into the Western communities and give them new life and a new sense of the realities of Judaism. Thus in Anglo-Jewry during the last decade or so there has been a marked tendency away from the polite conventions of assimilation towards a realization of the deeper and more serious implications of Jewishness; and only a remnant of the “old guard” still repeats the shibboleths of an earlier generation about Judaism as a “persuasion” and “emancipation” as a cure for all the ills of Jewry.
We have spoken of the part that the Jewish student has played in this evolution, and it is so important as to merit further examination.
The position of the Jewish students at the Universities of Western Europe at the beginning of the third quarter of the last century was a most deplorable one from a Jewish point of view. They had increased in numbers, belonging partly to the native Jewish populations and partly to Eastern Europe, nevertheless they were a negligible quantity. They were scattered all over Germany, Austria and Switzerland as units without cohesion or organization. Nationally they did not count: the chief principle of assimilation—which was at the time the general tendency of Western European Jewry—was to abandon Jewish national claims. Their attitude towards the religion of their fathers was one of indifference, want of faith, if not hostility. What marked them out as Jews was in fact only the treatment meted out to them by the anti-Semitic Students’ Societies, which hated and insulted them. And while the Jews born in the Western European countries were regarded as outcasts by the non-Jewish corporations and societies, the foreign Jewish students—mostly from Russia—were regarded as outcasts by the outcasts. The Western European and the Eastern European Jewish students were thus divided into two fractions.
Then the new spirit of Zionism made itself felt. A group of Jewish students at the Vienna University founded, in 1882, a National Jewish Students’ Association called “Kadima,”[¹] which was later, as we have seen, the first organization to extend a welcome to Herzl. These Vienna students have a better claim than any other similar organization in Western Europe to be regarded as the pioneers of the Jewish national idea.