Calling his idea Synthetic Zionism, Idel’son advocated a reevaluation of the Galut, asking whether participation in the political life of host societies should be encouraged.47 Idel’son argued that Diaspora life was far from merely a wasteland. At a minimum, it offered educational opportunities and preparation for life in Palestine.
Idel’son’s style of argumentation was paradoxical. He started with an antinomy—for example, that Marxism denied the reality of nationalism. Then he claimed that Marxism was wrong because nationalism was a powerful force that energized capitalism. Capitalism, however, competed with nationalism and sought the assimilation of minority nations because a single unified nation-state provided the most effective means of producing and consuming products and services. Assimilation was therefore inevitable. Concretely, the Jews of Russia would ultimately be forced to integrate due to economic pressures. For Jews, therefore, the only solution was emigration to Palestine, where Jews would compose the hegemonic culture to which others would need to assimilate.48 Paradoxically, in Idel’son’s view, Jews in Russia must fight to promote Jewish interests, all the while knowing that efforts to retain Jewish difference in the Diaspora were doomed to failure.49
Jabotinsky described Idel’son’s position this way:
Our ideal consisted in preserving only what is alive in Judaism, the energy that at one time was transferred into our workshops; i.e., they shook the dust of the Diaspora from their feet. That [ideal] is still true. But now we bend down and pick up from the ground the clumps of this ‘dust’ and try to analyze them. We immediately see that it is full of valuable organic ingredients that turn out to be productive when used properly. Let us analyze the ghetto. A terrible institution that has poisoned us physically and morally—but at its base is found the healthy principle of estrangement, and it is worth cultivating this principle [albeit] in a different form. At the same time, take assimilation: an indisputable illness, moral gangrene—but it put into our hands the whole cultural arsenal of modernity without which we would not even be able to dream of any building. Take the Jew’s cowardliness and physical passivity, his response to a pogrom, “the dark cellar.” It is shameful and an invitation to other pogromists, but in certain conditions it is precisely the very best method for a weak minority’s self-defense.50
While Jabotinsky promoted the conclusion that one needed to empty the Galut and move the Jewish people to Palestine to create a Jewish majority there, the other parts of Idel’son’s program appealed to him too. Jabotinsky was strongly tethered to the Galut and well prepared to engage in Russian politics with his expert knowledge of Russian language and culture. In fact, this was a vital point because Jabotinsky was weak in Jewish subjects—Hebrew and Jewish ritual practice. However, his knowledge of Western culture gave him “the arsenal” with which to dream of liberation. Jabotinsky began to espouse Synthetic Zionism and engagement with political life in the Diaspora.
Idel’son played a vital role in Jabotinsky’s career as an ideological lodestar and mentor. Everyone who met Idel’son acknowledged his brilliance. Jabotinsky lauded Idel’son as a rare genius.
I am sure that it is no exaggeration if I say that to describe the value of Idel’son the word “talent” is inadequate—that man stood on the border of “genius.” “Acid all-corroding brain”—[Osip] Gruzenberg once said to me speaking of Idel’son, and he was right. But that was merely one face of a multifaceted crystal. His “acidity” consumed only the shells; into the kernels he knew to inject vivifying magic fluids. The curse of his destiny, the fate of a pauper—as were most of the members of our circle—or perhaps also, and to a certain extent, the self-neglect originating in the same “acidness,” prevented him from explicating his ideas in the form of a definite treatise. . . . But to us youngsters, even without his “works” his company was like a university.51
In early 1905 the Revolution erupted, and Jabotinsky, like many others, got caught up in the political wave. In “Sketches without a Title,” Jabotinsky wrote:
But when we grow old, and the question is raised for us by the next generation—how will we justify ourselves and on what will we rely? Our time is not like that of our fathers. A somnolent quiet enveloped them, while we are surrounded by noise and rumbling: something is falling apart, something is being built, thousands of guides seek thousands of new paths, new banners are flashing in the air and new words are rattling—“the ice is coming,” thundering, striking, breaking into pieces everything that succumbs to pressure. Whoever has been fated to live in this roar of life and nevertheless lives to old age, what will he say on Passover night with empty hands to both his children in response to their questioning and justified “Ma”? [“What?”]52
At this time Jabotinsky called on young men and women to devote three years to service in Palestine, coining for the first time the name, “Monism,” which he defined as the obligation of a Zionist to devote all one’s strength and energy exclusively to the Zionist project.53 Jabotinsky compared this commitment with army service. “This is military duty. For many centuries the Jewish people did not have their own soldiers; now the time has come for them. He who becomes a soldier in times of war, if he loves his homeland, he will not ask questions about whether he will be well fed and warm during the campaign. We are in wartime too, and let our warriors be ready for heavy work and for hunger and cold.”54 One can hear the voice of the future recruiter for the Jewish Legion here. Regarding the comment that the Jewish people did not have soldiers, it is essential to note that Jews were not only enlisted in the Russian army but were overrepresented at this time.55
Jabotinsky’s early articles in Evreiskaia Zhizn’ showed the influence of Menachem Ussishkin, who emphasized total sacrifice for the sake of practical achievements in Palestine. Ussishkin was an important model since he was the leader of the practical camp, a builder of institutions in Odessa who effectively organized people and money.56 In 1905, Ussishkin published “Our Program,” a manifesto that outlined his solution to the crisis of Zionism. Ussishkin called for synthesis, intense movement on all fronts—practical, theoretical, and diplomatic. He pleaded for the fulfillment of the Basel program, including the resurrection of Hebrew as a living language, diplomacy with the Sultan and the European powers, and the purchase of tracts of land in Palestine to house the growing Jewish population. His main innovation, however, was the formulation of a “Jewish University Society of Workmen” (Weltarbeitergenossenschaft). He called on young men to devote three years of their lives to the cultivation of land in Palestine. A group of volunteers, “unmarried young men, physically and mentally sound, must be formed. It should be the duty of every member of this society to go to Palestine for three years, in order to perform his military duty to the Jewish people, not with musket and sword, but with plow and sickle. These thousands of young people will be obliged to present themselves in the colonies, in order to offer their services as laborers at the same wages that Arabs receive.”57
Ussishkin’s goal was to instill a “bond between the Jews of Palestine and the Jews of the lands of the exile [so that it] will cease to be a paper one (prayers, books, periodicals), and . . . become a living one.”58 He maintained that this experience would cultivate a new prophet, a new Herzl,
whose appearance our people has awaited for thousands of years. Neither the unemancipated nor the spiritual Ghetto of the lands of the exile will rear him, but the free spirit of the mountains of Judea and Galilee. He will open unto us the gates of our home not from without, but from within. He will unite in himself the courage and might of old Bar Kochba with the spirit and the charm of our contemporary Herzl. Boldly and proudly will he plant in the sight of the whole world the blue and white banner of liberated Israel upon Mount Zion.59
By promoting similar practical efforts to Judaize Palestine, Jabotinsky borrowed from Ussishkin. Jabotinsky’s relationship to Ussishkin went beyond a shared love for active settlement of the land. In fact, Jabotinsky worked as a kind of apprentice, helping Ussishkin conduct his extensive schedule of meetings and serving