Marina Mogilner Sacrificial postcoloniality: Russian contexts of the anti-imperial nationalism of Vladimir Jabotinsky

If contingencies in his life had transpired in a slightly different manner: if a tribe had turned up in Africa that had buried its black ruler just yesterday; or a gang of smugglers had formed in the city of Odessa seventy years ago; or a party had emerged in the Lithuanian underground, it didn’t matter which – he could have, without rhyme or reason, suddenly become their leader in an instant; or even forever …¹³⁰

In Jabotinsky’s words, Serezha died “technically.” The husband and father of Serezha’s two lovers (mother and daughter), who also happened to be a Jew, caught the three of them in bed in a hotel room, and splashed acid in Serezha’s face. The attorney who defended the man in court offered one explanation for what happened − assimilation. The same explanation worked for Lika, who became a terrorist and an agent provocateur, and Torik, the most reasonable and educated among the Milgroms, who decided to get baptized.

As Jabotinsky made clear, the only alternative to physical or spiritual death was to “return” into the Jewish national body. This was a very rational conclusion, and a convincing explanation for Jabotinsky’s own choice in 1903. However, his narrative in The Five is saturated with such sincere emotions, such love and admiration for the old Odessa and all five futile, useless, lost, brilliant, funny, and free Milgroms, that the very naturalness and predetermination of this choice becomes questionable.

The Five was published in 1936, but the evolving and still controversial sustained narrative of Jewish transition that structures the novel had been articulated by Jabotinsky three decades earlier, very soon after his conversion to Zionism. This narrative was developed in newspaper feuilletons published parallel to Jabotinsky’s polemical political texts of the 1910s discussed above, written in explicitly racialized and provocative language. We can briefly outline the genesis of The Five narrative in a series of texts penned by Jabotinsky at that time.

On January 15, 1903, the Odessa News published Jabotinsky’s regular column (under his penname Altalena) next to an article by another author, about the Odessa schoolteacher Milgrom.¹³¹ This name was not particularly Jewish-sounding (it can be taken for a German name, and was in fact of German origin) or famously Odessian,¹³² and the actual teacher in the article, a graduate of the Zhitomir rabbinical seminary, had little in common with the Milgrom father from The Five. But for some reason this name stuck in Jabotinsky’s memory, or he repeatedly returned to his publications of 1903.

Early in the same 1903, even before departing for the Basel Zionist Congress and before penning his Italian “Jewish” stories, Jabotinsky had written the words that thirty-three years later he repeated in The Five as a nostalgic farewell to the beloved Odessa that now ceased to be his “real motherland”:

I was born and raised in Odessa. The place where we are born is not always our motherland. My genuine motherland is not on these shores, but I have always loved Odessa very much and even when I leave her, I will never stop loving her.¹³³

“I’m indifferent only to Russia,” wrote Jabotinsky in The Five, “I’m not really “attached” to any country; at one time I was in love with Rome, and it lasted a long time, but even that passed. Odessa’s a different matter: it hasn’t ever passed and it won’t.¹³⁴

In 1903, for the first time, Jabotinsky complained that a young neurasthenic, libertine man without roots and goals dominated modern (Russian) literature.¹³⁵ Stanislawski would justly place this particular complaint into the larger context of “the collapse of the cultural and quasi-political aspirations of the entire aestheticist [symbolist, decadent − MM] generation,” which he offered as the main explanation for Jabotinsky’s radical reorientation toward a “meaningful” nationalist life-program.¹³⁶ Indeed, in 1903 Jabotinsky suggested that a new literary hero, a youth of action, had to replace the old one. Serezha in The Five obviously embodied the old libertine, decadent, and uprooted type, however, no new hero was replacing him in the novel about decline and degradation. Writing in the 1930s, Jabotinsky already knew perfectly well how the new type of hero (and specifically, the Jewish hero) had to look: like his Beytar nationalist militant youth. The fact that there is no such a hero in The Five suggests that its plot and its characters had been essentially developed soon after 1903, and belonged there.

Michael Weisskopf found the prototypes of the young Milgroms in Jabotinsky’s 1910 play Chuzhbina that was mentioned earlier. According to Weisskopf, “comrade Rachel” predated Lika from The Five, the thief Yashka was Serezha’s prototype, while a nice-looking and flirtatious Nina was the earlier version of Marusya.¹³⁷ I would more cautiously say that these were not direct prototypes, but the types and themes through which Jabotinsky emotionally and intellectually expressed the trauma of his own radical transition. “Serezha” in particular inhabited many of his texts in those years, while Serezha’s main theme − “why is it forbidden?” – permeated many of Jabotinsky’s writings. The “why is it forbidden?” ethical dilemma reflected Serezha’s personal rootlessness, but even more so − the fin-de-siècle relativization and destabilization of moral and ethical norms in general, and the values of the imperial cosmopolitan intelligentsia discursive community, in particular.

One of Jabotinsky’s 1913 newspaper columns, “An Ordinary Occurrence,” already contained a short summary of the lawyer’s monologue from The Five:

“But why is it forbidden?” Let me assure you that no power of agitation can be compared to this question in its devastating impact. From time immemorial the moral equilibrium of humanity has rested on the fact that we hold certain axioms: some closed doors bear the inscription “Forbidden.” Simply “forbidden,” with no explanation; these axioms stand firm doors are locked… But if only once you pose the question: “But why is it forbidden?” – these axioms come crashing down. …there’s no more “forbidden” and everything becomes “permitted.” Not only the rules of conventional morality, such as “don’t steal” or “don’t lie,” but even the most instinctive, most innate (as in this matter) reactions of human nature – shame, physical squeamishness, the voice of blood – everything dissolves into dust.¹³⁸

“Why is it forbidden?” wrote Jabotinsky in 1913, “and you, confused, suddenly understand that, in essence, you do not have an answer. For there are things that cannot be proved.”¹³⁹ To him, these were the things that lay beyond moral and ethics, they were transmitted on the level of national instincts, they were endemic to the collective healthy national organism.

In “An Ordinary Occurrence,” Jabotinsky recalled how in 1907 in Odessa a young man, “once my protégé,” approached him with a plan: he would write an letter of extortion to some banker, and if the banker would not give him the money, he would shoot the banker.

I became outraged, agitated, I started talking him out of this, but he cut me short with the question:

− “Why is it forbidden? Prove it!”¹⁴⁰

This story later became one of the central episodes in The Five centered on Serezha. The only difference between the 1913 and 1936 versions was that Serezha sent his friends to the banker to demand the money from him, and that the banker in the novel was himself Jewish and a good friend of Milgrom’s family. When confronted by the narrator about this episode, Serezha responded with the notorious “Why is it forbidden?”¹⁴¹

Jabotinsky’s 1913 column was written with indignation and contempt for those who did not know “why was it forbidden?” who were empty inside, lonely, and lost for the national cause. In the 1930s, he spoke about them with compassion, sadness, and love. The themes, the images, the story itself evidently came from the 1910s, but his general mood had changed or, rather, he had found the language to express his ambivalent feelings. Now Jabotinsky was not rejecting his imperial hybrid past, but viewed it as a necessary sacrifice for the postimperial rebirth of the nation. Victims of assimilation paved the way to the new generation of self-conscious Jews who reunited with their racial self. They had to complete their mission by actually securing “the old new home” for the nation. The Milgroms’ graves were important milestones on the way toward this rejuvenation.

Torik had said, “Disintegration.” Maybe he’s even right; the lawyer defending Rovensky also talked about disintegration, but he added: periods of decline are sometimes the most fascinating. Who knows: perhaps not only fascinating but even sublime in their own way? Of course, I’m in the camp that struggles against disintegration; I don’t want neighbors; I want all people living on their own islands; but – who knows? One historical truth has already been well demonstrated: one has to pass through disintegration in order to achieve regeneration.¹⁴²

It seems that in The Five Jabotinsky finally reconciled the two parts of his life and, possibly, two parts of his self. But not only that: he incorporated the imperial epoch of Jewish modernity – with its main themes of assimilation, hybridity, cultural dependence on hegemonic discourses, and the absence of any specific Jewish subjectivity − into the postcolonial vision of the heroic and integral Jewish nation.

The Five had no place for the traditional “Jewish masses,” who in the official Zionist narrative were the main objects of exploitation and anti-Semitic politics, and who had been degenerating in the Diaspora. Unlike the picturesque Milgroms, these gray Jewish masses had always preserved their Jewishness, their pure blood, and their potential for the future nation. The Five confirmed what the earlier Russian texts by Jabotinsky suggested: that his deepest concern was not about these Jewish masses, but about distinctly modern urban Jews such as the Milgroms and himself, whose sacrifice on the altar of nationalism was indeed immense. Their colossal self-sacrifice was needed to enable Jewish national “recovery” in the postimperial epoch.

In the last paragraph of The Five Jabotinsky dreams about settling “peoples on islands” (“Of course, I’m in the camp that struggles against disintegration; I don’t want neighbors; I want all people living on their own islands”) – a romantic postimperial utopian rendition of his principle of national individualism. The author of The Five was already living in the postimperial world. The collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, as well as Jabotinsky’s experience in rapidly nationalizing Poland or in Palestine, where the British exposed the worse aspects of the camouflaged colonial politics, and the Arab–Jewish confrontation intensified, confirmed his deep belief that the road toward “recovery” should lead through disintegration. The island utopia may thus seem to be the most extreme expression of this motto.

However, from the vantage point of The Five − a novel about the disintegration of modern empires (the metaphorical multifaceted “Odessas”) − the appearance of the “national island” on the ruins of the former mainland was not so much a moment of postcolonial triumph as it was a social catastrophe and personal tragedy, a sacrifice on the altar of the future nation. Culture was sacrificed to nature (“race”), cosmopolitism − to “national individualism,” hybridity − to purity, irresponsible yet wonderful freedom − to the grim determinism of race, and seductions of glamorous megalopolises – to self-isolation on small national islands. Jabotinsky’s sacrificial postcoloniality dwelled on “race” as the strongest positivist explanation and impersonal, objective justification of the painful self-reductionism that he and many intellectuals like him had agreed to endure.

1 Vladimir Zhabotinskii, “Pismo ob avtonomizme,” Evreiskaia zhizn’ no. 6 (1904): 116.

2 Omri Ronen, “Chuzheliubie,” Zvezda no. 3 (2007).

3 Altalena, “Vskolz’: O natsionalizme,” Odesskie Novosti no. 5874 (January 30, 1903): 4.

4 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. P. 11

5 Peter C. Perdue, “Erasing the Empire, Re-racing the Nation. Racialism and Culturalism in Imperial China,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, Oxford: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), pp. 141-169.

6 Consider such an unusual parallel as the famous 1903 ball in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (February 11 and 13), where all the participants – the upper tier of the imperial aristocracy and bureaucracy – wore “ethnic Russian” costumes from the Muscovite era. Fashioning themselves in pre-imperial costumes, participants attending the ball symbolized the radically postimperial claim for the ethnically Russian nature of the regime. On the ball, see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 11.

7 Perdue, “Erasing the Empire,” p. 145.

8 Jabotinsky’s story of self-reinvention if often presented as a unique case – however it is not completely so. Consider the story of another Russian Zionist, Chanan Goldberg, who became one of the founders of the Minsk Zionist radical group Ha-poel Ha-haluts (The Working Pioneer). Upon graduating from the Minsk Jewish gymnasium in 1912, he made contacts with some local Zionist leaders and only then went from reading exclusively Russian classics (including Lermontov and Pushkin) to becoming acquainted with the nationalist-oriented Russian Jewish writer Sh. Frug and reading Bialik in Russian and Yiddish translations. Only during World War I did he begin to study Hebrew and check out Hebrew books from the Minsk Central Library. He attended meetings organized by Dov Ber Malkin, a war refugee from the Minsk Province, who spoke about the Yiddish literature and Zionism, and who always carried three books with him, one in Russian, one in Yiddish, and one in Hebrew. See Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews. The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 23-24.

9 The analysis most sensitive to Jabotinsky in his Russian context in regard to his upbringing, his family background, linguistic situation, and aesthetic preferences is offered in Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle. Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001), esp. pp. 121-127.

10 Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin-de-Siècle, pp. 116-149.

11 In this sense he was quite a typical representative of the third and second generation of Jewish urban bourgeoisie residing outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement: entrepreneurs and free professions. In these families, Jewish languages, education, and religion had been reduced to a minimum. On the social analysis of this milieu (on the basis of questionnaires distributed among Jewish students in the early twentieth century), see A. E. Ivanov, Evreiskoe studenchestvo v Rossiiskoi imperii nachala XX veka. Kakim ono bylo? Opyt sotsiokul'turnogo portretirovaniia (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2007), pp. 77-164.

12 Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin-de-Siecle, pp. 175-176. Equally questionable seems to be the suggestion by Michael Weisskopf that Jabotinsky (like many of his contemporaries) just paid “tribute, although not too significant, to popular racial theories and the theme of ‘purity of blood,’” and “was not consistent or even quite serious in his ‘racism.’” See Mikhail Vaiskopf, “Sion i Dalila. Sionizm, natsionalizm i kosmopolitizm v literaturnom tvorchestve Zhabotinskogo,” Rossiiskii sionizm: istoriia i kul'tura (Moscow: Dom evreiskoi knigi, 2002), pp. 236-237.

13 The original was J. M. Judt, Żydzi jako rasa fizyczna. Analiza z dziedziny antropologii. Z 24 rysunkami, mapa i tablicami w tekscie (Warsaw, 1902); Judt, Die Juden als Rasse (Berlin, 1903).

14 I call this theory “revisionist” only in regard to the Zionist anthropology of Jews. Otherwise the scientific debates about Jewish racial origins exposed many different opinions. For example, the well-established German race scholar Felix von Luschan also did not consider modern Jews as belonging to the Semitic race. The Jewish racial type, according to Luschan, had been formed in the process of mixing of the Semitic race with blond Amorites and ancient Hittites, who caused Jewish brachycephaly and the specific shape of their noses. Felix von Luschan, “Die anthropologische Stellung der Juden,“ Correspondenzblatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 23 (1892): 94-102. An American physical anthropologist Maurice Fishberg, author of The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1911) did not consider Jews to be a race at all, and so on.

15 Zeev Zhabotinsky, Samson (Berlin: Slovo, 1927).

16 Zeev Zhabotinsky, “Evrei i araby s tochki zrenia fonetiki (Iz boshiury “Evreiskoe proiznoshenie” 1930,” in Josef Nedava, Vekhi Zhizni. Zeev Zhabotinskii. Izbrannye stat’i i rechi, pp. 219-220.

17 Ibid., p. 219.

18 ^ Ibid., p. 221.

19 I. M. Judt, “Evrei kak fizicheskaia rasa (Antropologicheskoe issledovanie),” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 1 (1904): 125-149; 2 (1904): 120-145; 3 (1904): 95-128; 4 (1904): 151-177; 5 (1904): 132-150.

20 Vladimir Zhabotinsky, “Pis’mo ob avtonomizme,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 6 (1904): 116.

21 Ibid., p. 117.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 For the biography of Jabotinsky, including his pre-Zionist and early Zionist periods, see Joseph B. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman: The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story (New York: Yoseloff, 1956); Idem, Fighter and Prophet: The Last Years (New York: Yoseloff, 1961). Schechtman was Jabotinsky’s comrade-in-arms and wrote his biography as hagiography; Shmuel Katz, Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky. 2 vols. (New York, 1996). In Russian: Josef Nedava, “Vekhi Zhizni. Zeev Zhabotinsky,” in Nedava, Vekhi Zhizni. Zeev Zhabotinskii. Izbrannye Stat’i i Rechi (Jerusalem-Moscow; Gesharim, 1991), 1-100. On the revisionist period, see Jacob Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948 (London: F. Cass, 1988).

25 Jabotinsky was born on October 18, 1880, in Odessa. His father, Evgeny Zhabotinsky, was originally from Novorossiia. He worked as a commercial agent for a Russian sea trade company. He was not an observant Jew and did not speak Yiddish. Jabotinsky’s mother, Eva Zak, grew up in a well-to-do family in Berdichev. She knew Yiddish, but she was assimilated and culturally oriented toward German and Russian languages and literatures. Although Evgeny’s death in 1886 left the family in a difficult financial situation, Eva sent both of her children (Vladimir had a sister) first to a Russian elementary school, and later to the best secondary educational establishment in Odessa – the Richelieu gymnasium. Volodya never attended Heder and their home language was Russian.

26 Altalena, “Vskol’z’,” Odesskie Novosti, no. 5883 (February 9, 1903): 3-4.

27 Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, 157.

28 Altalena, “Vskol’z’. Apokrif,” Odesskie Novosti, no. 5937 (April 6, 1903): 7.

29 Altalena, “Vskol’z’: О natsionalizme,” Odesskie Novosti, no. 5874 (January 30, 1903): 4.

30 Altalena, “ Vskol’z’,” Odesskie Novosti, no. 5883 (February 9, 1903): 3-4.

31 Vladimir Zhabotinsky, “Sionizm i Palestina,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 2 (1904): 205.

32 Vladimir Zhabotinsky, “Pis’mo ob avtonomizme,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 6 (1904): 118.

33 Altalena, “Vskol’z’,” Odesskie Novosti, no. 5991 (June 7, 1903): 4.

34 Вл. Жаботинский, “Вне очереди,” Одесские Новости № 8398. 21 апреля (4 мая) 1911. С. 2.

35 Владимир Жаботинский. Самсон Назорей. Москва: Текст, 2006. С. 118.

36 Цитаты даются по: Владимир Жаботинский. Самсон Назорей. Москва: Текст, 2006. С. 9.

37 Там же. С. 39.

38 Там же.

39 Вл. Жаботинский. Чужбина. Комедия в пяти действиях. Санкт-Петербург: Типография Ц. Крайз, 1910. 240 с. This play was republished in 1922 in Berlin: Вл. Жаботинский. Чужбина. Комедия в пяти действиях. Берлин: Зальцман, 1922. Later it was translated into Hebrew and published as Nekhar in a special volume without a number in Jabotinsky’s collected works (Ketavim, 18 vols. Jerusalem: Eri Zhabotinski, 1947-1959).

40 Владимир Жаботинский. Письмо об автономизме // Еврейская жазнь. 1904. № 6. С. 118.

41 Там же. С. 119.

42 Там же. С. 122.

43 Вл. Жаботинский, “Сионизм и Турция (Накануне IX Сионистского конгресса),” Одесские Новости № 7990, 12 (25) декабря 1909, с. 4. Jabotinsky claimed that the Ottoman empire’s transition to a Nationalitatenstaat model was an “indisputable inevitability” and only a matter of time.

44 Владимир Ж., “Наброски без заглавия: VIII. Роль оппозиции в III Думе,” Одесские Новости № 7351, 11 (24) октября 1907, с. 2.

45 “No one would ever seriously require that England give up Egypt only because 11 million Arabs live in Egypt and only 22,000 Brits, wrote Jabotinsky in 1916. And in Southern Africa there are 4 million “blacks” and 1 million “whites” – yet whites retain the power. In India there are 20 million Hindus (four times more than Englishmen in England), but the English, who number only about 100,000, are in power there. Algeria has 4.5 million Arabs and 500,000 French, yet power is in the hands of the minority. It seems that only Jews are required to be super-ethical….” Jabotinsky justified the right of minorities to govern the colonies by the fact that they represented large metropolitan nations that were numerically compatible with colonized nations. He suggested applying the same rule to Jews: “Erez Israel should be given to all the Jewish people. This people numbers 11 or 12 million or, in fact, twenty times more than the 600,000 Arabs living in Erez Israel today.” Зеев Жаботинский. Сионизм и моральное право (1916) // И. Недава (Ред). Зеев Жаботинский. Избранны статьи и речи. С. 11-134, здесь С. 129-130.

46 Владимир Жаботинский. Письма об автономизме. II. С. 85-87.

47 Влад. Жаботинский, “Из базельских впечатлений (От нашего корреспондента),”