In Story of My Life Jabotinsky continued to strain to provide tangible antecedents for his future as a Zionist leader. He focused his efforts on a speech he made in 1898 in Bern, when he was a university student. No transcript survives; all we have by way of documentation are Jabotinsky’s impressions of the reactions of the audience, which consisted of Jewish socialists.
But I remember that discussion well, because I gave the first speech of my life then, and it was a “Zionist” speech. I spoke in Russian, and the gist of it was as follows: I do not know whether I am a socialist—I didn’t know that doctrine well enough—but I am a Zionist, no doubt about that, because the situation of the Jewish people is very bad. Their neighbors hate them, and the neighbors are right: in the end the Jews in the Diaspora are bound to experience a general Bartholomew’s Night, and their only salvation is mass immigration to Eretz Yisrael.6
No evidence can be found that Jabotinsky made such a speech, so it is naturally difficult to ascribe significance to it. It is noteworthy that for the next few years, Jabotinsky apparently made no effort to acquaint himself with Zionism. These were important years for the movement, when Theodor Herzl promoted his book, The Jewish State, and annual Zionist congresses were convened for the first time, starting in 1897. During these years, debates broke out between Herzl and the Russian Zionists over political Zionism and Hibbat Tsion’s preference for infiltration into Palestine: Should Jews try to reclaim land in Palestine now, even without a charter from the Sultan?7 In 1898, Jabotinsky lived in Rome, a little over nine hundred kilometers from Basel. Had he felt the urge, he could have attended the Zionist congresses. Jabotinsky’s first attendance was registered in 1903. But, as he notes when describing his life in Rome at the time, he was occupied with other matters: socialism, anarchism, democracy—anything but specifically Jewish problems. In 1902, a congress of Russian Zionists was held in Minsk. Already back in Odessa, Jabotinsky did not attend and did not comment on it.
This was the time, one should recall, when many Jews in Russia embraced russification in the hope that they could find a place in Russian society and a respectable livelihood for themselves even if the government imposed legal disabilities on them. There was no fear at this time of Russian nationalism. In fact, Russian culture was seen as reflecting universal values. Some people denied the idea that Jews composed a separate nation because Jews had no land to call their own and no common language uniting all of them, and their future appeared linked with the majority populations among whom they lived. The only realistic option was integration into the majority society and patience.8 Therefore Jews could either emigrate (usually to the United States) or acculturate and fight for improvements in their status. Progress, almost a substitute for religion in Europe’s nineteenth century, was viewed as inevitable; reason could be thwarted, delayed, ignored, but it would ultimately succeed and bring with it equality for Jews. Few knew of, understood, or accepted Zionism.
We can learn about Jabotinsky’s pre-Zionist attitudes from his writings in 1903, when he discussed the earlier years of 1898–1900. For example, although the majority of the people he knew in Rome were Jews, they had neglected to acknowledge the fact. He writes, “But during these three years I never recognized any Roman Jews, because they hid their Jewishness and avoided any mention of their ethnicity. During these three years I literally did not encounter the word ebreo a single time, either in print or in conversation, although I know now that the articles that I read were often written by Jews, and that there were Jews among the gentlemen with whom I discussed matters.”9
Jabotinsky’s recasting of his Italian period as connected with his Jewish identity seems exaggerated. In 1897, he went to Bern and then to Rome without any particular plan, and in neither city, it seems, did he seek out other Jews. His readings at this time were disparate: action novels, symbolist dramas, and works on socialism and Russian politics, among others. Nowhere in his writings of the time does he indicate an interest in Jewish religious texts or Yiddish fiction, although he grew up in the city where Mendele Mocher Sforim, Moses Leib Lilienblum, Ahad-Ha’am, and many others wrote their classic works. Thus, Jabotinsky could be said to embody cosmopolitanism; his Jews did not forget who they were, but they imagined that, outside of government oppression, being a Jew did not greatly matter.
In Story of My Life, Jabotinsky casts his transformation into a Zionist as a reclamation of identity. He argues that Italy’s Jews debated questions of universal significance while their own Jewish identity remained invisible. “And nonetheless, if there is no antisemitism, there is ‘something,’ some kind of indestructible tiny seed—not of evil or hate, but of discord, frigidity, and alienation—and this tiny seed, like the pea under the mattress, despite its size, does not let one rest comfortably and peacefully.”10 A fascinating coda to this acknowledgement of the vague presence of Jewish identity is that Jabotinsky describes his high-school Russian friends in the same way: Jews who discuss everything under the sun but never consciously recognize their Jewish identity.
It is nevertheless my duty to acknowledge that the spirit of antisemitism was almost entirely absent from these government schools: perhaps because in those days public opinion generally was dormant in Russia, left-wing as well as right; that is why the entire period up to the last years of the nineteenth century is referred to in Russian as “Bezvremennye”—a faceless epoch. We Jewish students suffered no persecution on the part of either the teachers or our classmates. The most astonishing thing about it was that, all this notwithstanding, we always kept apart from our Christian environment. There were about ten Jews in our class; we sat together, and if we met in a private house to play or to read or just to chat, all this was always and strictly among ourselves. At the same time several of us also had friends in the Russian camp. For example, I was bound by faithful friendship to Vsevolod Lebedintsev, a very fine fellow, whose name will appear in the course of this story. I visited him many times at his home, and he also came to mine, but it never occurred to me to introduce him to our separate circle, and neither did he introduce me to his group; I do not even know if he had a group. Stranger still was the fact that even inside our Jewish circle there was no Jewish spirit. When we read together, it was foreign literature, and discussions were concerned with Nietzsche and moral problems, morals in general or sexual morals—not the fate of Jewry, not even the Jewish situation in Russia, which was bothering every one of us.11
Although Jabotinsky apparently gave little thought to his Jewish identity, nonetheless he projects his alienation from the Russian environment. As much as they tried, he and his schoolmates were not “cosmopolitans”; something like russified Jews is more appropriate. However, during the 1890s, Jews in Russia fell into a feeling of false security. There had not been pogroms since 1882, and although quotas for Jews in Russian schools and universities had been imposed in 1887, and Jewish economic life had become significantly worse for many, for Odessa’s Jews, life was predictable, and for wealthy Jews, there were still ways to avoid restrictions. To be sure, Jews were the objects of official discrimination, but life was not easy for others either.
In 1897, Jabotinsky went to Bern, Switzerland, for a few months and then traveled on to Rome, Italy, where he stayed three years. Although his motives are not entirely clear, adventure, experience, culture, and education played a role in his decision.12 In the final years of the nineteenth century, Jabotinsky habitually published his reports from Italy in Odessa’s local press. He was also a budding playwright. However, as he describes it, he was unable to get his literary work published, and therefore he complained to the doyen of Russian literature, Vladimir Korolenko, in the hope of receiving help. Korolenko and other leading writers received hundreds of letters a year from provincial writers seeking advice and publishing opportunities. Here is a passage from Jabotinsky’s letter, dated 1898:
But here in Odessa, not only am I unable to get my story published, I did not even try—I cannot even find a competent person who would agree to read it and give me his opinion. Meanwhile, forgive me my overconfidence, but I cannot help but see in it a modicum of originality. . . . But, at least, having received