LITMIR.BIZ

      For the intellectual historian, this project has opened many paths: Russia with its great literary tradition, the 1905 Revolution, and its period of democratic experimentation (1907–1916), Zionism and Jewish politics, the Russian emigration, and then the explosive historical contexts of the first half of the twentieth century (World War I, the interwar period, and then World War II). It seemed to me that no one yet had been able to bring all these dimensions together properly or find the right emphasis.

      This book’s genre is intellectual biography. It traces the development of Jabotinsky’s Zionism in the context of his ideological, personal, and political experiences. In the history of Zionist thought, I view Jabotinsky as representing the end of one phase of Zionism and the beginning of another. He comes to the movement at the close of the age of theoretical Zionism, which had its origins in the Russian Empire and produced such inspired thinkers as Leon Pinsker, Ahad-Ha’am, and Micah Yosef Berdichevsky. In the next period, Jabotinsky joined Yehiel Chlenov, Avram Idel’son, Menachem Ussishkin, and others who dealt with practical politics in Russia. He began organizing Zionist groups, publishing literature about Zionism, running for a Duma seat, and participating in various political conferences.

      What I have not done in this book is recount Jabotinsky’s thoughts and actions as they evolved day by day. Two biographies, one by Joseph Schechtman and the other by Shmuel Katz, do exactly that.⁷ Instead, I provide arguments and evidence to explain the arc of Jabotinsky’s development. Therefore, although the facts of his life matter, this book is not strictly speaking a biography. Ideas and contexts take precedence; I include details about his family, but sparingly, and only when they are relevant to his ideas.

      In terms of sources, this book draws heavily on Jabotinsky’s large Russian-language oeuvre, which, though once thought to be lost, is now available.⁸ Similarly, I have immersed myself in Russian-language publications by and about Zionism in Russia. In this context one may mention the Russian-language Zionist newspaper Rassvet.⁹ There are also large archival holdings in the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, as well as many sources on Jabotinsky in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and English. Another deep well of materials is the extensive secondary scholarship on Jewish politics in Russia, especially scholarship that has appeared since the opening of Soviet archives.

      My project relies on Michael Stanislawski’s earlier book, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle. Professor Stanislawski shows that Jabotinsky knew little about nationalism, much less Zionism, until he was nearly twenty years old. But Professor Stanislawski left it to others to figure out Jabotinsky’s development once he did embrace Zionism. That has been my task, and it drew my attention to a body of rare and unused sources about Russian Zionism and Zionists. Those sources have fueled this book.

      Disagreements among historians are common and perhaps inevitable. Although Michael Stanislawski’s insights are important—that Jabotinsky’s autobiography diverged from the historical facts, that his Jewish education occurred belatedly, and that he was influenced by the fin de siècle culture that he encountered in Rome—they should not be overestimated.¹⁰ If we are interested in Jabotinsky primarily because of his Zionist ideas and activities, we need to focus on the history of Zionism in Russia and Russian politics and culture at the time when he participated in the Zionist movement. The cosmopolitan culture that influenced him before he joined the movement is of secondary significance. However, we should pay attention to Stanislawski’s insight that in his autobiographical writings, Jabotinsky mixed true events with myths.¹¹ It cannot be doubted that Jabotinsky had a penchant for exaggeration. For these reasons, I use his autobiography with caution. However, rather than reject Jabotinsky’s fabrications, I analyze them as part of his political strategy, and I locate Jabotinsky within narratives that are larger and more complex than his sympathizers would allow. His stories are useful in helping to piece together a composite understanding of Jabotinsky against the backdrop of twentieth-century events.

      For many years, ideology and tendentiousness characterized scholarship on Jabotinsky and Revisionism.¹² Recently, however, a number of serious scholars of Zionism and Jewish history have attempted to go beyond the polemics of popular political history (Labor versus Revisionism) and take seriously Jabotinsky’s complicated position in the Russian ferment. Avi Bareli and Pinhas Ginossar have assembled a fine book of essays, In the Eye of the Storm (2004). Leonid Katsis and Elena Tolstaya have also published a collection of essays on the Russian Jabotinsky (2013), while Dimitry Shumsky, a professor of Zionism at the Hebrew University, has written a good deal about Jabotinsky’s theories of national autonomy.¹³ In his latest book, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (2018), Shumsky argues in favor of a tradition of Jewish autonomism, which endorsed sharing Palestine with its Arab inhabitants. Jabotinsky’s contradictory pronouncements, especially about the relevance of political autonomy for minorities, can be compiled to show his respect for tolerance and giving full rights to the Arabs in Palestine.¹⁴

      Svetlana

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