[...] for it is not by strength that man prevails (Samuel I 2:9)

Force, and its use, is no stranger to the Torah. The Pentateuch and several of the Books of the Prophets (Joshua, Judges) teem with violent images. But far from glorifying war, rabbinic Judaism—the Jewish tradition as we know it—took great pains to identify obedience to God, and not military prowess, as the principal factor in the victories mentioned in the Bible. All that changed in the nineteenth century, however, when Russian Jewish secular nationalists began embracing the bloody past of the people of Israel as a means to ensure a safer future.

Codified Pacifism

According to Jewish tradition, out of exile, two figures created a Judaism that was at once personal and cosmopolitan. The first is Yohanan Ben Zakkai, a Torah scholar who escaped the Roman-besieged Jerusalem by hiding in a coffin. His emphasis on Torah study replaced the Jews’ focus on the struggle for political independence.

The second is Judas the Prince (135–219 C.E.), revered as the redactor of the Mishna. A signal aspect of the life of Judas the Prince, as preserved in the Talmud, was his friendship, even his intimacy, with Antoninus, the Roman Emperor of the day.

Both Yohanan Ben Zakkai and Judas the Prince embodied a conciliatory attitude toward any occupying power. They began the interpretive path that led future rabbis to understand the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish Diaspora as divine punishment for transgressions committed by the Jews, including armed resistance against the Romans. “If the warriors had heeded the rabbis, the Temple would still be standing.”

Instead of violence, the rabbinic tradition praised humility before adversity. The rabbis often pointed to the biblical injunction against using iron, the instrument of murder par excellence, to hew the stones for the Temple (I Kings 6:7), to illustrate that a truly spiritual attitude required pacifism. 

Certainly, rabbinic pacifism was questioned during the Diaspora. In a work of religious polemic, the Spanish poet and scholar Judas Halevi (1080–c. 1141) presents a dialogue in which, in response to the rabbi who praises the Jews for their pacifism, the King of the Khazars responds with a touch of cynicism: “Such would be the case had you freely chosen humility: but you were so constrained. And should you gain hegemony, you too would kill.”  However, Halevi’s voice was not the mainstream voice of European Jews—until much closer to our own day.

Frustration and Violence in Russia

Judaism’s pacifist tradition first began changing in nineteenth-century Russia. In 1861, the liberal reforms of Alexander II gave every appearance of leading the Jews in Russia to emancipation. But when a terrorist bomb killed the czar in 1881, the period of liberalism came to an end and a wave of pogroms swept across Russia.

While other Jewish communities the world over remained faithful to the tradition of nonviolence and contemplated no armed action against the populations amongst which they lived, that tradition came under increasing attack in Russia, as ever-greater numbers of Jews discovered the allure of political violence. Russian Jews flocked to radical political parties.

The pogroms of the late nineteenth century deepened the insecurity of the Jewish populations of the Russian Empire. In contrast to Jewish reactions during the pogroms of the seventeenth century, which had been far crueller and more violent, for a growing number of secularizing Jews, the suffering they encountered at the end of the “century of progress” had lost all religious significance. Twentieth-century Jews who had broken with the Torah reacted in an entirely different way. Rather than scrutinizing their own behavior and intensifying their penitence while they fled the violence, they asserted their pride and called for resistance. It was a radical departure from tradition.


Emergence of Zionism

Zionism used to be multifaceted: it included, among others, Ahad Ha’am who saw Zion as a cultural beacon and Martin Buber who advocated an Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. However, the varieties of Zionism that won out—and continue to dominate Israel’s public life—were inspired by exclusive varieties of European nationalism and articulated mostly by Jews from Russia. This kind of Zionism would seek to transform the meek traditionalist Jew into a brawny, assertive Hebrew. The radicals proclaimed it necessary to straighten the spine of the Jew, long curved before his oppressors and long bent beneath the weight of the volumes of the Talmud. Implicit in this process of liberation was an increased reliance on the use of force. Nihilism and contempt for life, common among Russia’s revolutionaries, generated an upsurge of terrorism whose specter haunts the world to this day.

Zionism emerged from a climate of shame, of insulted dignity. Even though the Torah, both written and oral, repeatedly cautions Jews against personal or collective pride, it was precisely in these traits that Zionists sought respect, which they defined in European terms: a country, an army, political independence. What gave the Zionist movement its extraordinary vigor was not the suffering of pogrom victims, but the humiliation of the rejected supplicants, of those whose hopes for integration into Russian society the pogroms had shattered.

It was Haim Nahman Bialik, a Russian writer who later became as Israel’s leading poet, who stoked the fires of revenge. In a poem written following the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, he castigated the survivors, heaping shame upon their heads and calling upon them to revolt not only against their tormentors, but also against Judaism. Bialik lashed out at the men who hid in stinking holes while their non-Jewish neighbors raped their wives and daughters. He mocked the tradition that attributed all adversity to shortcomings in the behavior of the Jews: “let fists fly like stones against the heavens and against the heavenly throne.”

Joseph Hayyim Brenner, another Russian , writer, and like Bialik the son of pious Jewish parents, also rebelled against the Jewish tradition, unreservedly demanding a secular Jewish identity. One of the most reknown literary voices of the second Aliyah ans well as being one of  the first members of the Histadrut , Brenner radically transformed the best-known verse of the Jewish prayer book “Hear, O Israel, God is your Lord, God is one!” into “Hear, O Israel! Not an eye for an eye. Two eyes for one eye, all their teeth for every humiliation!”

Honor, pride, the thirst for power and revenge: these were the new motives that swept into Jewish consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century. The shift in outlook that took place in the late nineteenth century radically modified the meaning of Jewish history in the eyes of the youth, who thirsted after a specifically Jewish activism. The secular version of Jewish history had eliminated the privileged relationship between God and his people, and made the Jews the victims of historical injustice. This vision stimulated a powerful impulse to action. Several of the founders of armed Jewish units, both in Russia and in Palestine, also recognized the importance of the use of force as a way of wrenching the Jew from his Judaic past. Hatred of traditional Judaism has been an important dimension of the Zionist movement.

Russian Zionism

The Russian dimension of Zionism cannot be overestimated. Despite the almost total prohibition of emigration from the Soviet Union since the early 1920s, more than 70 percent of the members of the Israeli parliament in the 1960s were Russian-born, with another 13 percent born in Palestine/Israel of Russian parents. The emergence of the Jewish elites of Russian origin contributed to the shift, between the two wars, of Jewish public opinion in the United States in favor of Zionism. The Russian aspect of Zionism stands revealed in its concepts, its methods, and the support it drew from the most powerful section of the Diaspora, the United States.

Israeli right-wing parties draw much of their support from voters of Russian origin. Moledet, the now defunct right-wing nationalist party, used to attract Russian immigrants with the words “For Our Jewish Fatherland”, a variation of the World War II slogan, “For Our Soviet Fatherland”. The spectacular success in the 2006 elections of Israel Beitenu, a new party that inherited much of Moledet’s ideology, is almost entirely due to “the Russian vote”. In fact, its title (meaning “Our Home Israel”) is a variation of “Our Home Russia,” a right-center party that supported the government in Moscow in the late 1990s. Israel Beitenu is a secular party that overtly proclaims a program that many observers, in Israel and elsewhere, consider fascist. In her support for deportation of the Palestinians, a respected Russian Israeli journalist affirms that without the historical experience of the Russian Jews, the Israelis will remain unable to attain their historical destiny. Israelis of Russian origin must then guide the nation, and purify it of its many illusions. In her view, the State of Israel is the advance guard of the Jewish people, itself threatened by total extermination in the world of the 21st century. This aggressive stance wins admirers in Russian nationalist circles, which lament that the Russian will to struggle has survived only in Israel, and primarily among Israelis of Russian origin. Russian speakers in Israel number nearly a million, and their unabashedly exclusive secular nationalism may revive the militant Zionism of the country’s founders that used to appear outmoded and even abhorrent to many of their Israeli-born descendants still dominant among Israel’s elites. The Russian dimension of the Zionist enterprise shows signs of a remarkable comeback.

Joseph Trumpeldor , a veteran of the Russo-Japanese war who went on the found the first Jewish military organization the Jewish Legion (also called the Zionist Mule Corps) with Ze’ev Jabotinsky  and He Halutz, the pioneering Zionist youth organization is the incarnation of romantic heroism in Revisionist circles.. Killed at the battle of Tel Hai in the northern Galillee,Trumpeldor apparently managed to utter the last words: “. Never mind, it is good to die for our country. ” Trumpeldor was to receive his own official memorial day on the 11th of Adar, the day when he was killed at Tel Hai.

Trumpeldor, who had been decorated by the czar for his bravery in battle, inspired Zionist youth throughout the Russian Empire., In 1923, Jabotinsky set up a Zionist organization that took the name Brit Yosef Trumpeldor (the Josef Trumpeldor Alliance). Its acronym, Betar, harkened back to Bar Kokhba’s last stand. The organization quickly became a Zionist educational institution with a strong military component. Betar shock units drew stern opposition from many Jews of Palestine, who insulted the participants in a military parade organized by Jabotinksy in Tel Aviv in 1928. The spectators spat upon them, calling them “Militarists! Generals!” Albert Einstein was among the Jewish humanists who denounced the Betar youth movement in 1935, described it as being “as much of a danger to our youth as Hitlerism is to German youth.” Even a veteran Zionist and an old admirer of Jabotinsky, Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise expressed his concern about what he called “fascist tendencies in Revisionism.” He concluded one of his letters to Jabotinsky by stating that “A fascist and undemocratic Jewish State in Palestine would to me be an abomination to be destroyed, not an ideal to be cherished.”

Most traditional Orthodox rabbis rejected Zionism, accusing it of turning a Torah-based identity into a national one, centered on the land and the language. They were theologically bound to reject military action altogether. Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, believed that “the Torah in no way permits the loss of one Jewish life for the sake of the entire Zionist state. Even in a nation of tzaddikim, righteous people, there is no authorization in our era to subject Jews to war…. It is clear as day that the Torah obligates us to make every effort to mediate for peace and avoid war. These evil people, the Zionists, do the opposite of the Torah view and quarrel with the nations constantly.” This may be another reason why most Haredi Jews do not serve in the Israeli army to this day.

A Sharp Break

While the early Zionist settlers had projected onto Palestinian reality the images of bygone Russia—the Arab threat was likened to the murderous shadow of the pogroms—their actions were like those of all settler groups in a foreign territory: they took up arms to defend their settlements. The arrival of masses of European Jews following World War II and the Zionist interpretation of the Shoah created a cultural fusion of immense power: a self-image of the just victim. An expression frequently heard in Israel is ein berera (“there is no choice”) which often means that the State of Israel is the only place for the Jews, and that there is no other choice but to use force to maintain its Zionist nature.

The millennia-long pacifist and moralizing tradition of Judaism became eroded under the impact of the Palestinian question. Each succeeding generation was less ambiguous than the one before it about the use of armed force: “You can’t build a state wearing white gloves” wrote Nathan Alterman, a leading Israeli poet born in Imperial Russia.

While most traditional rabbis deplored the militarism of secular Zionists, it found strong support among the National-Religious in the wake of the conquest of biblical territories in 1967. The mystical teachings of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), a Russian rabbi whom the British would appoint as first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, were reinterpreted many years after his death by his son to create a potent brand of religious militancy. Rabbi Yitzhak Blau, who teaches at a yeshiva in the West Bank, has demonstrated how Judaic sources have been deformed to yield warlike teachings and to transform the possession of the Land into the supreme good. He notices that the National-Religious, like the secular Zionists, glorify concepts foreign to Jewish tradition, such as “national honor” or “national pride.” “It would be quite an irony,” concedes Blau, “to discover that a virulent critic of Judaism, Friedrich Nietzsche, indirectly influenced the religious Jewish community.”

Two thousand years of Jewish tradition looked at Masada, the site of a mass suicide of Jewish  patriots, and saw tragedy.  Influenced by Russian Jewish romantics,  many Zionists looked at the same history and found inspiration in what a former Israeli ambassador to Paris called “the dizzying pretension that they could build a bridge as long as exile itself, between the heroes of Masada and the soldiers of the IDF.” Today, this is particularly true of religious Zionism, which calls itself a forward-looking movement but always has its head over its shoulder, looking for a mythical  martial past that the Jewish tradition had long since moved beyond.

The televised images from the West Bank of ostensibly pious Jews with machine guns would lead almost anyone to conclude that Judaism inspires militancy, a conclusion that may have consequences for the Jews all over the world. This is why it is important to remember that rather than reflect the culmination of Jewish history, Zionism constitutes a revolutionary break with Jewish continuity.