Vladimir Jabotinsky's Story of My Life by Vladimir Jabotinsky

Author:Vladimir Jabotinsky [Jabotinsky, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Jewish, Europe, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Middle East, Israel & Palestine
ISBN: 9780814341391
Google: 6vPlCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2015-12-05T00:10:49.976540+00:00

In those days Pasmanik was a member of the central committee of Russian Zionists (together with Isaac Goldberg and his late brother, Boris; Leib Jaffe; and Dr. Joseph Lurie, the editor of the official weekly in Yiddish), which then had its seat in Vilna.191 The destiny of that man is a mystery to me without any visible cause; a cleft existed between the real personality and the impression he created. Even today I am told that he was a hypocrite who put a hat on his head when he took the floor at a Mizrachi gathering.192 But I happened to be an eyewitness to this at the Sixth Congress, and I remember what Pasmanik said then: “If you demand of me that I should express in this way my feeling of respect toward your meeting—I shall put on my hat; but if you see in it a respect for religion, it is better that I withdraw.” The meeting answered him unanimously, “No, no, we do not demand that.” Then he covered his head, not as a “hypocrite” but as a polite person, and I would have acted the same way.193

The fable about his tendency to change his views frivolously as well as to win the applause of the crowd is also a lie. On the contrary, in my memory Pasmanik remains a fighter against the current tide. Even in Helsingfors he was one of those few who expressed grave doubts regarding the value of the new line. He particularly opposed the belief in “minorities”—the dream that something like an alliance would form among us and the Ukrainians, Latvians, Tatars, and the rest of them against the dominant people.194 He argued that they all hate Jews, the majority people as well as the minorities, but that the best of them all were especially the Russians. It is well known that he persisted in this belief until his death, and for its sake, he fled the Zionist camp and died in cold and bitter solitude.195

Regarding the flaw of superficiality, perhaps it is true; yet it was not his fault but rather a cause of suffering. All his life he read and studied a great deal. I do not know a scholar like him in that Zionist generation, with the exceptions of Ber Borochov and Avram Idel’son. But the talent for expressing knowledge in terms understandable to the masses is the rarest of all gifts. Only a few can do this in such a way that audiences can understand him and at the same time not make his science sound cheap and shallow. He did not succeed, and in general I would not consider him a great talent. But without a doubt he enriched the doctrine of Zionism with many ideas that took root, and he was among the first who taught us to study the economic and social physiognomy of the galut.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.