JABOTINSKY IS MY EVERLASTING HERO WHO CONVINCED MY FATHER AND MOTHER TO LEAVE EUROPE IN 1932 AND SETTLE IN BOLIVIA WHERE MY “KID”BROTHER AND I WERE BORN AND THUS RESCUED FROM THE HOLOCAUST. HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL, A PROPHET, A WRITER AND A GIANT ZIONIST LEADER . I LIKE AND ADMIRE HALKIN’S BOOK BUT FOR THE FULLEST UNDERSTANDING OF JABOTINSKY, SHMUEL KATZ’S BIOGRAPHY “LONE WOLF” IS THE BEST.
When speaking of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), Menachem Begin habitually referred to him by the traditional rabbinical honorific of rabi v’mori, “my master and mentor.” And yet Begin was in some ways, as Daniel Gordis writes in his recently published biography, “the most Jewish prime minister that Israel has ever had,” while Jabotinsky, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries and not a few historians of our own time, was the “least Jewish” Zionist leader of his age. Did Begin deliberately overlook this in honoring the man whose follower he was as a young Polish Zionist in the 1930s? Did he misunderstand Jabotinsky? Or did he understand him better than others did?
Jabotinsky, as I observe in my own newly published biography, was not the product of the assimilated or even semi-assimilated Jewish home that he is commonly thought to have been. His widowed mother (his father died when he was a small boy) kept a kosher kitchen, regularly lit Sabbath candles, spoke Yiddish far better than Russian, and saw to it that her son studied Hebrew and had bar-mitzvah lessons. This is not what is generally thought of as assimilation, even if Jabotinsky rarely attended synagogue as a boy and had little familiarity with the world of Jewish religious ritual that Begin was thoroughly at home in.
Nor would anyone have thought of it as assimilation had Jabotinsky grown up in Central or Western Europe, where real assimilation was widespread, rather than in the Czarist empire, where it was not. Yet the Eastern Europe he grew up in was that of cosmopolitan, sophisticated Odessa, the least East-European-like city ruled by the Czar, and, Jewishly speaking, the distance between him and Begin might be said to have been no greater, if also no less, than the distance between late-19th- and early-20th-century Odessa and Begin’s native town of Brest-Litovsk, the Jewish Brisk, in the 1920s and ’30s.
In fact, this has been said, and the first time it was said, as far as I know, was as long ago as 1950. To understand the context it was said in, moreover, we need go back still further, to September 1938. It was then that the third world convention of Betar, the Zionist youth movement founded by Jabotinsky and affiliated with his Revisionist party, was held in Warsaw.