Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy 9780804785006

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Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture ed i ted by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy Jess Olson

stan f ord u n iversit y press stanf o rd, calif o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Olson, Jess, author. Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish modernity : architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and orthodoxy / Jess Olson. pages cm. — (Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-7873-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Birnbaum, Nathan, 1864–1937. 2. Zionists—Austria—Biography. 3. Yiddishists— Austria—Biography. 4. Orthodox Judaism—Europe—History. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. ds151.b5o44 2013 320.54095694092—dc23 [b] 2012020624 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

To my beloved wife, Kara, with deepest love and gratitude

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Introduction

ix xi xv 1

1. Discovering the Nation: Nathan Birnbaum and Early Viennese Jewish Nationalism, 1882–90

17

2. New Conflicts, New Directions: Birnbaum’s New Nationalist Course and the Arrival of Herzl

67

3. Rupture and Renaissance: The Jewish Renaissance Movement and the Ahad Ha’am Affair

118

4. The Eastward Gaze: The 1907 Elections and the Yiddish Language Conference

154

5. The Origins of an Orthodox Ideologue: World War I and the Turn to Religion

209

6. At Home in the Fold: Birnbaum, the Agudath Israel, and Orthodox Jewish Politics 7. The Final Ascent: Der Aufstieg, Der Ruf, and Roads Not Taken in Interwar Orthodoxy Epilogue: Another Teshuvah Notes Bibliography Index

255 294 313 323 363 375

Illustrations

Menachem Mendel Birnbaum

18

Asher Zalke Korngut

19

Cover, first issue of Megillah

29

Mathias Acher, 1901

121

Cartoon from Der Yidisher Gazlan, 26 August 1910

156

Nathan Birnbaum and Chaim Zhitlovsky, Czernowitz, 1908

182

Nathan Birnbaum, “Der Ba’al Teshuva,” 1918

210

Agudath Israel delegation to New York, 1921

279

Acknowledgments

This project began more than ten years ago and succeeded in no small part due to a fortuitous bit of luck, a key tip from Brad Sabin-Hill, currently the curator of the Kiev Judaica Collection at George Washington University. From him, I learned that two of the grandchildren of ­Nathan Birnbaum resided in Toronto. Thus, I stumbled upon the archive that would turn out to have a far greater impact on my life than I could have imagined. I would like to thank the following for their help, and all errors in this book are mine alone. Without a doubt this book would have been impossible without the materials of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive. But even more, the Birnbaum family’s hospitality and friendship allowed this project to succeed. Eleazar Birnbaum, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto Department of Near and Middle Eastern Languages and Civilizations, has given me comments on my work that have been consistently illuminating. Jacob Birnbaum of Washington Heights spent hours sharing his knowledge and stories of the ­Birnbaum family history, and his wife, Freda, has attended every lecture I have ever given on the Birnbaum legacy in the greater New York area. Finally, David and Jytte Birnbaum of Toronto have opened their door again and again to me to share the impossibly rich collection that they have cared for with unparalleled passion and depth of knowledge, and David has provided many very helpful comments on the manuscript at every stage. Beyond that, they have taken me into their home, given me innumerable cups of tea and coffee, delicious meals, and hours of conversation that I have relished every time I’ve been to Toronto. I offer them my heartfelt thanks.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many colleagues, friends, and teachers who have provided valuable support and feedback as I wrestled with the book, including Aron Rodrigue, Arnold Eisen, Norman Naimark, ­Gabriella Safran, and Charlotte Fonrobert. My friends and colleagues Elissa ­Bemporad, Mia Sarah Bruch, Kenneth Moss, Cecile Kuznitz, Holly Case, Julia Cohen, and Andrew Koss have offered comments in different venues. Zachary Baker gave me hours of his time and expertise at each step in researching this project, as did Heidi Lerner. As I have seen this book through multiple drafts, many colleagues have read parts and provided me with extremely valuable insight. Sarah Abrevaya Stein has read every chapter and has always been tremendously generous with her time and perspective. Michael Silber, Hillel Kieval, David Rechter, Gershon Bacon, Tony Michels, Martin Jaffee, Shalom Carmy, and Joshua Karlip have given parts of the manuscript their time and attention and provided me with judicious comments. The late Jonathan Frankel gave me his time and comments early on, helping me to grasp the larger importance of Birnbaum’s legacy. I am grateful to Stefanie Agar for her sharp reading and helpful observations. At Yeshiva University, where I am privileged to work with some of the finest scholars of Jewish studies anywhere, I have benefited from discussions on aspects of the project with my colleagues, including David Berger, Jeffrey Gurock, Daniel Rynhold, Rachel Mesch, Debra ­Kaplan, and Schmuel Schneider, who shared with me his own work on ­Czernowitz. I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Steven Fine, whose door has been open to me from the moment I stepped onto the YU campus. Rabbi Yosef Blau and Rabbi Bernard Rosensweig have shared their encyclopedic knowledge and incisive observations about the early days of the Agudah, and Joseph Friedensohn, editor of Dos Yidishe Vort, was kind enough to invite me to his home to discuss Birnbaum’s legacy in the Orthodox world. I received great feedback on elements of this book from numerous presentations and conferences, most notably the conferences held in Toronto, organized by Kalman Weiser and Joshua Fogel, and in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, organized by Wolf Moskovich, Leonid Finberg, and Michael Chlenow, in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference. I am also grateful to my many outstanding students at Yeshiva, in particular, Shimshon Ayzenberg and Jackie Rosensweig, who

Acknowledgments

have read and commented upon chapters of this book with impressive probity. In addition, my talented student and research assistant Yehuda Bernstein provided me with exceptional assistance in combing through the Yizkor books of Galicia. Aside from the Birnbaum Family Archive, I have benefited from visits to the YIVO and Leo Baeck Archives at the Center for Jewish History, the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, the Archives Department of the National Library of Israel, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. While writing and researching portions of this book, I was generously supported by the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Fellowship in Jewish Studies, the National Foundation of Jewish Studies, the Hazel D. Cole Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, and the Yad Hanadiv/ Beracha Foundation Fellowship in Israel. I am grateful to the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation for their generous assistance in the publication of this book. I also thank Norris Pope, Sarah Crane Newman, and Carolyn Brown at Stanford University Press for their guidance through the completion of this project. I thank my mother, Paula; my father, Joseph; and my sister, Sara, for many years of support and love. I am also grateful to Susan and Carl Wulfestieg for their interest in my work and for always making me feel like a member of the family. To my mentor and colleague Steven Zipperstein I give my most sincere thanks for the years of support and hours of discussions, meetings, and phone conversations that went into this book. He has never wavered in his belief in the importance and quality of this project, and I am profoundly grateful. Finally, to my wife, Kara, and my children, Toby and Beruria: Regardless of how much I struggled with this project, I have found happiness and solace in the wonderful home we have built together. Kara’s constant support and encouragement have made all the difference for the last fifteen years, and it is to her that this book is dedicated with love and deep gratitude.

xiii

Note on Transliteration

In Nathan Birnbaum’s life, fraught with so many identities expressed in different languages, transliteration is complex. Generally I have adhered to the rules of standard Romanization for the original language of translation, the YIVO guidelines for Yiddish, and the Academy of the Hebrew Language guidelines for Hebrew. For phrases and names that have a commonly used English equivalent, I have used the standard English spelling (Zion and Agudath Israel rather than Tsiyon and ­Agudas Yisroel). For geographical names, I have supplied the most standard spelling in Yiddish and, where appropriate, the names in German, Polish, Ukrainian, or Romanian. Exceptional cases (such as “Oylim”) have been noted.

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Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity

Introduction

I first encountered the name Nathan Birnbaum as a twenty-four-yearold student at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton, an agrestic English village a few miles north of the city of Oxford. I was enrolled in a class on Yiddish linguistics and had been assigned an essay by linguist Joshua Fishman from his book devoted to Birnbaum. Sitting with my classmates around a seminar table in an ancient wood-paneled room, part of the Jacobean manor that houses the center, we learned of the unusual decision made by this Germanspeaking cultural Zionist to embrace Yiddish as the foundation for a national renaissance midway through his life. In this unlikely setting in which to encounter an unlikely man, something about Birnbaum’s embrace of Yiddish piqued my interest. It was strange that a Zionist would be involved in a project that sought to bolster the cultural reputation of Yiddish, a language many of his colleagues dismissed as a demeaning badge of exile. After class I asked the professor what he knew about Nathan Birnbaum, and although I have forgotten the precise response, a few of the words stuck with me. As he put it, Birnbaum was indeed one of the first Zionists, he had organized the 1908 Czernowitz Yiddish conference (the topic of discussion in our seminar that day), and then he “founded the Agudas Yisroel.” That last bit caught my attention. Founded the Agudath Israel? I was incredulous. Of course I knew the Agudah; the first widely successful Orthodox political party, it was (so far as I understood) anti-Zionist— indeed, it had been founded in large part in explicit opposition to Zion­ ism. I thought the professor was mistaken; in my mind, no category existed at that time that would have made such a career feasible. Perhaps there was some other Agudath Israel; a rather generic name (Union of

1

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Introduction

Israel), it could conceivably have been the name of some other organization lost among the dozens of Jewish political groups that appeared and vanished in pre-Holocaust Europe. But if it was the Agudah that he was talking about, it wasn’t the accuracy of the statement that sparked my skepticism but the transformation that, if true, such a change represented. In my mind, identities in the history of Jewish politics were fixed. Once individuals had made their mark in one area, there they remained. They may disappear, or their envisioned utopia may or may not come to pass (almost always the latter); they may survive their deaths remembered as important figures or be forgotten as insignificant ones, but, if anything, they were consistent. What had not occurred to me then but seems so obvious now was how commonplace my attitude was. In fact, it is the default assumption of much biography and intellectual history. As writers and ­readers, we are interested in movement toward a goal. We like stories of people we know in the process of assuming their final, familiar form that makes them worthy of scholarly attention to begin with. If what my professor had said was true, Birnbaum was a marked challenge to this tendency. And what became clear to me after only a quick glance through Birnbaum’s few traces in the historiography of Jewish politics was that my professor was only partially incorrect. In fact, aside from a small detail (Birnbaum didn’t “found” the Agudah, but he did play an important role in its early executive) my professor was wrong only in that he understated both the profundity of Birnbaum’s transformations and the mark he had made upon each group in which he made his home. He was a legitimate founder of Zionism (and the man who literally coined the name of the movement—“Zionism”) some thirteen years before Theodor Herzl appeared as a Jewish nationalist; president of the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference; a major presence, ultimately, in the Agudath Israel, the first viable international Orthodox political organization. Each change was more surprising than the last, not the least because in each one, remarkably, Birnbaum’s conversion was followed axiomatically by his being welcomed to a leadership role with little difficulty. The more I learned about Birnbaum, the more fascinated I became. The next year, I turned to Birnbaum with more attention. I was especially captivated by his last, most mysterious period, which few who had

Introduction

written about Birnbaum discussed in any depth: his turn to politicized, conservative religious Orthodoxy.1 This change was his most radical transformation. Several aspects of this turn in Birnbaum’s life attracted my interest, but the most compelling was my desire to understand the process that led to his decision to become religious, or a ba’al teshuva in Orthodox vernacular. By doing so, Birnbaum made an impossibly rare and daring decision for the early twentieth century. While religiosity is always a complex measure of identity—usually the categories blithely thrown about (religious, secular, Orthodox, traditional, and so forth) are weak shorthand for an innumerable variety of beliefs and practices— there is no question that the breadth of Birnbaum’s transformation was shockingly wide for its time and place. To a Jewish nationalist in the years before the destruction of European Jewry and the creation of the State of Israel, and even more as a committed fin de siècle rationalist, religious belief was no innocuous personal choice. From the perspective of many Jewish nationalists, the religion in which most had been steeped was at the very least an irrelevant distraction from the pressing needs of the Jewish people. Usually, though, it was viewed far more severely as a delusion that prolonged injustice within the Jewish community and blinded Jews to imminent threats to their survival. From the religious side, Jewish nationalism was considered no less than a competing form of core Jewish identity. Zionism was judged to be particularly pernicious: usurping the holiness of the Land of Israel to build a secular Jewish nation-state was, for many, heresy in its most egregious form. Birnbaum’s turn to Orthodoxy, then, represented more than simply a religious awakening (although it was that, too). It was a fundamental change in the intellectual orientation that had directed his entire adult life. Despite this fraught intellectual climate, and for reasons no one had bothered to seriously explain, Birnbaum opted for this dramatic change. I wanted to understand, as much as could be done, why he made this decision. And even more compelling was that Birnbaum’s story was more than an unusual tale of one man’s spiritual quest, no matter how interesting it was. Within about a year of it becoming publicly known that he had become religious, Nathan Birnbaum was recruited into one of the most important political organizations in the Orthodox world, the Agudath Israel. Not just recruited, I would learn, but thrust quite enthusiastically into the spotlight by the movement’s

3

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Introduction

leaders, his name recognition used as a tool for building the young organization, the story of his teshuva touted as a vindication of the eternal relevance of Orthodoxy and Torah, in particular against the Zionism from which he had come. What began as a seminar paper quickly turned into a much larger project. I discovered that the embrace of Orthodoxy was but one of several significant transformations in a remarkably productive and dynamic life. More to the point, I discovered early that Nathan Birnbaum lived his full life in absolutes. As a precocious law student of seventeen, he committed himself to an ideology—Jewish nationalism—that guaranteed him pariah status among most of his classmates. Although a simple idea and one now taken largely for granted, that the Jewish people should consider themselves a national group and make their demands based upon that identity, in the Vienna of 1882, capital of a still absolutist Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was deeply suspect. At the very least it appeared brazenly ungrateful; most Jews of Birnbaum’s milieu considered themselves lucky, the recipients of largesse in the form of rights granted by Emperor Franz Josef almost unheard of in eastern and central European Jewish history. A decade and a half later, convinced that the vainglorious Theodor Herzl would destroy the Zionist movement, Birnbaum willingly sacrificed the influence he had garnered in the movement by leaving it. And when he turned in his last decades to religion, having opened his eyes (as he described it) just as surely and fully as he had to Jewish nationalism in his youth, he saw his notion through to its logical end: that this nation was uniquely chosen by virtue of its divine mission. In acknowledging that the Jews were bearers of this truth by virtue of their observance of divine command, he felt he had little choice. Unfortunately, this remarkable life has proved to be of limited interest to Jewish historians. To the extent that he has been remembered in the broader academic literature, it is as a marginal figure, a difficult man, a minor contributor to modern Jewish history. A classic example of his reputation is offered by biographer Ernst Pawel. In Pawel’s estimation, Birnbaum was little more than a purveyor of “venomous anti-Zionism and ultra-Orthodoxy” who, among a “little band of uncommonly contentious and opinionated individuals,” was “hot-tempered” and “the most volatile and aggressive.”2 Of course, Birnbaum is hardly the only

Introduction

person in the querulous world of Jewish history whose contribution to the European Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been underestimated. But others whose luster has required polish, such as Ahad Ha’am, Moses Hess, or Leopold Zunz, have all had their defenders who have appropriately amplified their voices to ensure their continued legacies. But Nathan Birnbaum has had few such defenders. Precious few have assigned the appropriate significance to the massive volume of articles, essays, and manifestos produced by Birnbaum (which dwarfed those of Ahad Ha’am or Herzl in terms of the length of time they span, the subjects discussed, and the readership they garnered). It could be argued that Birnbaum’s contribution was simply not significant or original enough to justify documenting in detail, despite its volume. But this reading does not take into account the fact that his contemporaries perceived him as one of the central creative forces in the embryonic development of at least three major manifestations of Jewish political life in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Zionism, autonomous Jewish nationalism, and Orthodox political organization. In the early years of his career, he was considered one of the founders not just of Zionism but of multiple forms of Jewish nationalism. As a journalist and essayist, known widely as the incisive, sometimes abrasive, but always uncompromising Mathias Acher, he was read widely and contributed to a staggering number of Jewish periodicals in central Europe—several of which, like the first Jewish nationalist periodical in the German language, Selbst-Emancipation, he founded and edited himself.3 He was sought out as a public figure across Europe and as an authority on Jewish national and cultural matters, his name featured in the popular “Jewish folksong evenings” from Vienna and Berlin to Prague and Krakow; he appeared as an invited lecturer throughout the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires and as far afield as New York’s Lower East Side. His name alone was famous enough that, in 1907, it could draw crowds of thousands in cities and towns across Galicia as he traveled the region, making campaign whistle-stops in his fight for a seat in the Austrian Reichsrat. When, at the age of fifty, he abandoned secular nationalism for religious Orthodoxy, his fame preceded him. After a very short period of full religious observance, he was ushered into the upper echelons of the most powerful Orthodox po-

5

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Introduction

litical party in Europe, the Agudath Israel. Because of his fame, he was thrust onto the stage as an organizer and public relations figure for the fledgling movement, traveling across Europe and even to North America. Throughout his life he was read, respected, admired, sometimes disliked, but almost always present in the Jewish public eye and mind. The broad details of his life aside, there exist also any number of testimonies by friends and associates, both those who loved and despised him, who knew him intimately and distantly, that reveal again and again his presence. Let us consider just a sampling. Josef Maisl, an early follower, wrote of him: “In the chain that went from [Moses] Hess through [Leon] Pinsker through Herzl, Nathan Birnbaum created one of the most important links.”4 Berthold Feiwel, an important figure in early Zionist culture and politics, described the impression Birnbaum made on him as a young man: “I remember distinctly what his form and his effect for us was. . . . He was the first. And when the movement for national rebirth became a reality for the first time, it is impossible to forget, because he forged the path . . . and earned the thanks of his people; although he has revised and renewed his decisions constantly to be true to himself, it is he, Nathan Birnbaum, [whose] name remains nothing less than our symbol and lodestar.”5 Theodor Herzl, entirely ignorant of Birnbaum and his thirteen years’ worth of Zionist writing that came before Der Judenstaat, found to his frustration that he had no choice but to appease, and then try to co-opt, Birnbaum and his supporters in order to succeed in creating a mass Zionist movement. But as powerful as the reactions were to Birnbaum from those in the inner circles of Jewish nationalism, more compelling perhaps are those of figures on its fringes but who are remembered on a far wider stage. Franz Kafka, whose sparse meditations on Judaism have become far more prized in the popular imagination, compared Birnbaum’s nationalist ideals favorably to the “tepid” thoughts on Jewish peoplehood of Martin Buber.6 No less a canonic figure of Jewish intellectual history than Franz Rosenzweig, for whom Birnbaum’s turn to religiosity resonated and was an inspiration for his own, regarded him as “the living exponent of Jewish intellectual history.”7 But after his death in 1937, Birnbaum largely disappeared from historical memory. On the rare occasion that he is noted over the last fifty years of academic Jewish historiography, it is usually superficially and

Introduction

carelessly.8 His role in early Zionism is usually mentioned in passing, only in brief reference to his conflict with Herzl or in accounting the history of the word “Zionism.” His leadership in the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz, then but one of many of Birnbaum’s experiments, draws for the most part only the parochial interest of Yiddishists and linguists. The years after 1908 are hardly written of at all; indeed, it is fair to say that his last two decades, which he regarded as the apotheosis of his life’s work, are completely absent from modern Jewish historiography. In his time a dynamic and powerful figure on the Jewish nationalist scene, after his death he quickly faded, the significance of his lifetime of work neglected. If there is any trend in Birnbaum’s mark on the historical record, it is that his is a cautionary tale. Those histories that discuss Birnbaum often cite the fact that he seemed to change his mind, as though his commitment to more than one idea during his life tainted and cheapened his contribution to any. First he was a Zionist, then a quasi-socialist nationalist, finally an Orthodox anti-Zionist and antisocialist; first an advocate of Hebrew and a Jewish state in Palestine, then of Yiddish and Jewish autonomy in eastern Europe, before discarding both to create a metaphysical nation of believers. With so many intellectual twists and turns, it is not surprising that his legacy is difficult to pin down. But this explanation does not account for the degree of erasure his legacy has suffered. On the surface, Birnbaum seemed to exhibit little consistency in his ideology; however, he was far from the only Jewish political thinker of his time plagued by an apparent ideological fickleness. Several of his contemporaries, none more prolific or influential in their time than he, changed their minds and allegiances yet were ultimately accorded a significant place in Jewish history. One need only consider such figures as the journalist and editor Abraham Cahan, a one-time utopian agrarian socialist and member of the Am Olam settlers, who abandoned his political position radically and openly as he made his own place on the American Jewish scene. Chaim Zhitlovsky underwent similar transformations, as did Yosef Hayim Brenner. Theodor Herzl himself, had he not undergone a conversionary shift in his thought, would likely be remembered only as a footnote in fin de siècle Viennese history, a gifted columnist but one creatively inferior to his contemporary Karl Kraus; a playwright, but one who suffered by comparison

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Introduction

with competitors for the Viennese stage Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler.9 Yet all of them are accorded more serious scrutiny and respect than Birnbaum. This is not a fate he deserves. Clearly, Birnbaum was a figure who mattered to his contemporaries. This fact alone justifies serious engagement with his work, if only to come to some understanding of the reason for both his popularity and subsequent disappearance. As for the latter question, there is one reason, not often mentioned, that accounts a great deal for his disappearance: he lost. In a pattern repeated time after time, Birnbaum was a groundbreaking leader and pioneer in how he thought about the Jewish people and nation—be it in his conception of Zionism, autonomous nationalism, the embrace of Yiddish as a modern Jewish national vernacular, even in his novel approach to religion once he embraced Ortho­doxy. Yet he too often picked the wrong approach, chose the wrong moment, offended the wrong people. Ahad Ha’am’s comment about Theodor Herzl—“fortunate in life and fortunate in death”—if inverted, perfectly describes Birnbaum.10 He was unlucky enough to embrace Zion­ism before the time was ripe in Vienna to spur a mass movement; unlucky, once it was, to rub the one person who could render him irrelevant to organized Zionism, Theodor Herzl, exactly the wrong way; unlucky to run for the Austrian Reichsrat in a district where the illegal election tactics of the Polish political machine worked. Finally, he was unlucky enough to embrace a worldview at the end of his life that, due to the course of historical events and the nature of Jewish historiography, almost guaranteed him posthumous obscurity. But as each of his choices shows, even if he was frustrated at times by his luck, it was never his main concern. Rather, his deepest preoccupation was always, as Berthold Feiwel noted, that the ideology or tactic he embraced was true to his innermost belief. This does not mean that he was uninterested in public opinion or in garnering a following. On the contrary, he cared deeply about finding the authentic reserve of a common Jewish peoplehood that, once tapped, would naturally call others to his way of thinking. And in a way, he succeeded in doing so, though not as he would have liked or even perceived. In the end, what he might have seen as his greatest failure—to ever see one of his ideas embraced by a majority of the Jewish people—reflected his greatest discovery: European Jewry in the early twentieth century had not

Introduction

one but many deep reserves, many streams of commitment and ideology, all fundamental to Jewish existence. When Rosenzweig referred to Birnbaum as the living exponent of history, he was right on more than one level. On the surface, Birnbaum not only belonged to but often led in many of the major intellectual trends of pre- and interwar European Jewry. More deeply, though, he had an innate, if unconscious, sense, an instinctive drive to seek out and explore in the deepest and most intimate way the meaning of these many trends in his voluminous writings. This quality is of unique importance to Jewish historiography. Here is a man who participated and reflected, constantly, obsessively even, on his intellectual path from his youth, who was not afraid to reexamine his beliefs, even to contradict himself. It is a rare and valuable story, all the more so for its being unconscious on his part. While the vicissitudes of Birnbaum’s life and legacy are crucial in understanding his elision from Jewish historiography, as well as the importance of ushering him back in, there is another factor contributing to his absence. This is related to his final intellectual choice: the embrace of Orthodoxy in his last decades. Every historiographic discipline has blind spots and weaknesses, and until relatively recently, modern Jewish history has shown a marked discomfort in dealing with Orthodoxy as a modern phenomenon. As Gershon Bacon, historian of ­Orthodox politics and the Agudath Israel has noted, this has shown itself in the form of reluctance by earlier generations of Jewish historians to confront seriously the “dark force” of Orthodoxy: The historiography of East European Jewry does not question the survival of traditional Jewish society into the twentieth century. Having stated this, standard historical treatments of East European Jewry proceed to focus almost exclusively on those modernist movements which aimed to overturn or modify the existing order in Jewish society. . . . Whether out of identification with the movements they describe or due to the influence of sources at their disposal, historians have tended to assimilate the views of the opponents of Orthodoxy, who viewed the traditionalists in monolithic terms as a dark force which failed to understand that its time had passed.11

Mirroring general post-Enlightenment trends, modern Jewish thought has assumed that traditional society was in an irresistible state of decline and that when it finally collapsed, so would its religious traditions.

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Introduction

Because of its political quietism and passivity, its seemingly outmoded ideology, it would eventually be swept away by the torrents of modernity to be replaced entirely by other, modern forms of Jewish identity. Carried over into the historiography of modern European Jewry, these assumptions have had a major impact on the ways that traditional Jews, a plurality, even a majority in central and eastern European Jewry before the Holocaust, have been understood. Despite their huge numbers and complex and varied cultural expressions, Orthodox and traditional Jews after the turn of the nineteenth century have been either ignored or essentialized. Not willing to or capable of accommodating themselves to modernity, nothing was left for them but to fade into obscurity. It is precisely for this reason that Nathan Birnbaum poses a difficult problem. A friend and inspiration to many of the cultural heroes of modern Jewish history, he ended his life deeply engrossed in a group considered anathema to modern Jewish intellectual life. On the surface, his story is improbable: he epitomized the dynamism, even radicalism of modernist Jewish thought, yet in the end he rejected it in favor of the group from which his intellectual peers had by and large fled. Had this journey to belief been tempered, and displayed more overtly as a process of complex philosophical evolution, it might have been considered more seriously. As it was, the incomprehensibility of Birnbaum’s case to the modernist was compounded by the form his Orthodox Jewish praxis took. It found its most public expression in the Agudath Israel, a political movement seen as the model of everything negative about traditional Jewish life in Europe from a modernist perspective. It was an organization that aimed from its inception to undermine exactly the secular Jewish nationalism for which Birnbaum was most loyally remembered. In the interwar period, the Agudah lobbied vigorously to impede the progress of Zionism everywhere, from Poland to Palestine. It eschewed the overt activism considered more “honorable” among the revolutionary-minded modernists and embraced behind-the-scenes negotiation, reminiscent of traditional shdatlanut. It took every opportunity in the political realm to block the growth of non-Orthodox institutions and initiatives in Europe and Palestine and transgressed and disparaged all the advances into modernity that secular Jewish ideology felt it had made. While the motives of the Agudah were sincere and deserve to be considered on their own merits, it is not difficult to under­

Introduction

stand how Birnbaum’s movement into the Agudah was more than a mere change of political convictions in the eyes of secular Jewish nationalists. It was a complete betrayal of them. But as Jewish history itself has developed since the end of the Second World War, the Orthodox-secular Kulturkampf, although still extant, has taken on other forms. The stakes have changed; the Jewish historian, by and large, is less embattled and in need of defending the foundations of the discipline. This has created a new opening for the examination of groups, such as the Orthodox, that have been left out of the historiographic record. Beginning with the work of Jacob Katz, historians, including Israel Bartal, Immanuel Etkes, Gershon Bacon, Shaul Stampfer, David Assaf, Marc Shapiro, and Michael Silber, have begun to produce a broad and vital historiography of Orthodoxy and traditional Jewry since the turn of the nineteenth century. Particularly in the Israeli academy, Orthodoxy in all its facets has become a field of sustained inquiry. Etkes’s work on the Gaon of Vilna and the traditional roots of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Stampfer’s work on the history of the yeshiva world and its origins in Lithuania, and Bacon’s work on the development of the Agudath Israel have all exerted influence on widening the scope of modern Jewish cultural and intellectual history to include serious consideration of the Orthodox. Due to this new trend of interest, Jewish historiography has moved toward a more sustained assessment of Orthodoxy. Historians have begun the task of excavating its culture and understanding it on a broad and detailed scale. It is no longer enough to dismiss figures who chose a worldview that was perceived to run against the grain of Jewish history; increasingly, they must instead be woven into the fabric of the larger Jewish experience. Liberated from the bias of past Jewish historiography, historians are better able to deal with the complexities of a figure like Birnbaum and more fairly examine all periods of his life, opening up a renewed consideration of his Orthodoxy as a modern intellectual choice in its own right. Upon close examination, Birnbaum’s turn to religious belief can easily be viewed in continuity with the rest of his thought. This is not an entirely novel point: Steven Aschheim, in his study of German and eastern European Jewish cultural relations, points out that Birnbaum’s turn to Orthodoxy can convincingly be viewed as the “logical conclusion” of a lifetime of fascination with eastern European Jew-

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ish “authenticity.”12 Birnbaum certainly took his decision seriously and considered it deeply. His transformation was no whim but a highly cerebral and serious act thought out over several years. In his own description, increasingly dissatisfied with the “materialism” of his ideology, he began to search for answers. “I was attached by only a thread to disbelief, that last thread of the materialistic web of rationality I had woven around my soul. But that thread itself was unbelievably strong. . . . I just did not have the certainty of God. . . . Thus years passed until the day came—I do not remember anymore which day it was—that the thread was rent, as if by itself, and I knew God.”13 In his own mind religious belief was the consummation of several long-held preoccupations: the search for authenticity in eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jewry; the desire for a foundation, a transcendent idea upon which to peg the essence of Jewish identity; and the political base from which to launch a grand organization of world Jewry. In turn, the gravity with which his Orthodox belief was taken by figures within Orthodoxy is even greater evidence of its significance. After a mere year and a half Birnbaum was brought into the Agudah and given a visible and instrumental role in the spread of its institutions in eastern Europe. Once Birnbaum entered Orthodoxy, he was a minor tour de force; many well-grounded and savvy Orthodox figures, rabbis, and lay leaders sought immediately to engage him and use him as a symbol of the religious renaissance possible among secular Jews. His writings on Orthodoxy were as important to his new constituency as those on nationalism had been to his old. As such, contrary to the old assumption of Jewish historiography, it is Birnbaum’s turn to Orthodoxy, his embrace of religious belief as one in a string of quintessentially modern ideologies, that makes him even more interesting. The magnitude of the loss that Birnbaum’s elision from Jewish historiography has meant thus becomes clearer. But there are still other factors that make his story a crucial addition to it. One is the result of yet another accident of history: the survival of nearly all of Birnbaum’s papers. Although his story would be important regardless, its significance is compounded by the fact that we have in him an amalgamation of documentary evidence greater, perhaps, than that of any other figure of his milieu. Unlike many—most—whose legacies were wiped out by the disaster of the Second World War, Birnbaum’s entire written

Introduction

life has been preserved by his descendants. Squirreled away in the basement of an unassuming suburban home in Toronto is virtually every scrap of paper relevant to Nathan Birnbaum’s life, every letter he received, every draft of every speech he made or essay he published, along with the publications themselves, and scores of photographs of him and his family taken during his life. Birnbaum’s eldest son, Solomon Asher, who, like his father, adopted Orthodoxy as an adult during the First World War, was an academic and careful custodian of his father’s legacy. When Nathan and his wife moved to Scheveningen in 1933, Solomon Asher and his family moved to London; when his father died in 1937, he secured and protected his father’s library and all of his papers. Thus was this unique collection of materials preserved. After an ocean crossing when the family relocated to Toronto in the 1960s, the materials, collected along with Solomon’s own papers into the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive, found quiet repose and have been only lightly used by scholars until now. The depth and importance of this archive cannot easily be exaggerated. Aside from complete editions of most of the newspapers Birnbaum was involved in editing and to which he contributed, there are shelves of files that contain as complete a set of articles about Birnbaum written during his life and after as possible (and Nathan Birnbaum’s grandson David, who maintains the archive, continues to add materials when they appear). The file cabinets of letters, numbering in the tens of thousands, contain missives from figures ranging from Theodor Herzl to Franz Rosenzweig to S. Y. Agnon to Ahad Ha’am—among dozens of other correspondents whose writings are of equal importance. Thousands upon thousands of pages of brown newsprint, oblong and covered with Birnbaum’s unmistakable script, sit carefully filed away in boxes, documenting draft upon draft of every­ thing Birnbaum wrote, untouched for decades. Scribblings, poems, personal notes, even the typescript of three one-act plays, inflected with fin de siècle expressionist artifice and Ibsenian melodrama, no doubt written in a quiet moment after his young sons were put to bed late at night in Birnbaum’s Leopoldstadt flat, are all collected together in one remarkable home. Without the generosity of access to the materials provided by the Birnbaum family and their time in answering my questions, which continue to this day, in particular from David and his wife, Jytte, this book could not have been written.

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This same wealth of material and richness of Birnbaum’s life experience give understanding his intellectual life an even deeper importance. It is not limited to Birnbaum alone but is the product of the genre of the intellectual biography. In the introduction to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey describes the biography as a little bucket “which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen” from the sea of historical information, which can be “carefully and curiously” examined in order to discover historical truth in the modern age. In the modern age, with its overwhelming amalgamation of information impossible for any historian to understand comprehensibly, it falls to the historian to adopt “a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places, he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined.”14 While Strachey underestimates the possibilities of historical scholarship, his observation remains useful. The study of a discrete subject, particularly of an individual, remains an unparalleled aperture into the fabric of history. Plutarch’s portraits give us insight, even with their flaws, that cannot be garnered from the narratives of Herodotus and Thucydides; in the modern era, Boswell weaves a tapestry of unparalleled color and detail, so much so that the fame of his study of Samuel Johnson has surpassed that of its subject in popular and academic interest. In the twentieth-century proliferation of biography, the genre has proved again and again its instrumentality in understanding the course of history. Today, as historians have largely eschewed the grand synthesis of their predecessors with a preference for microscopic detail, be it the history of a given small group, a city, an object, or an idea, the individual has remained the standard entrée to an intimate portrait of an epoch. And the reason for its success and perseverance as a method of history is, exactly as Strachey writes, its usefulness in casting an oblique light into history’s corners, revealing details otherwise obscured. As much as this is true about biography in general, it is all the more the case with the study of those marginalized by history, where a figure such as Birnbaum in particular becomes a crucial subject of historical investigation. As his case shows, the saga of such a figure is seldom happy. Those whom history remembers as its central actors pass easily into immortality; though the nature of their significance in the world is discussed and analyzed, it is always taken for granted. To their lives

Introduction

and legacy scholars devote volumes; even the most insignificant residue they leave behind receives intense scrutiny. As Andrew Delbanco in a biography of Herman Melville notes with some amusement, the stature of Melville is such that even an obscure photograph of the author on Staten Island provokes pages of discussion and debate—even though the picture likely does not depict Melville at all. If, as Strachey asserts, the individual life can cast light into the forgotten corners of history, so much more does the marginal occluded figure, who leaves little of his own shadow over historiography. This figure provides a nuance in his illumination that principal actors cannot duplicate, detailed relief that has the potential of changing the interpretation of events radically. In some cases, especially those in which it is not the contemporary importance of the figure that is in question but the individual’s place as it has filtered through a sometimes flawed historical record, this potential is huge. In Jewish historiography, the searchlight of biography has a long and distinguished past. In this discipline, the individual life story has proved to be a tool of understanding that lends significant texture to almost all its periods. Yet it has been singularly lacking in the academic study of Orthodox Jewry, and it is here, arguably, that it may make a great contribution. And as true as this is for the study of individual Orthodox figures in general, so much more so is it the case with a liminal figure such as Birnbaum. For Nathan Birnbaum, the light of his intellectual biography is particularly bright. His life intersected with and had an impact upon many important figures and events, but its trace has been lost due to the forgetfulness of historians. Even more astonishing, his whole life’s history, both in his own words and in the words of his friends and contacts, is preserved in one comprehensive and accessible archive. The reasons for many of the most important choices Birnbaum made in his life will forever be mysteries: why he turned to Jewish nationalism at such a young age and with such tenacity; why, at a time when he had significant support and had built a legacy over a decade in the Zionist movement, he threw it all away rather than find a means to work within the movement; why he was never able to parlay the wide respect he earned as a voice of authority and moderation within the Jewish nationalist camp into a more tangible accomplishment. And of course, the biggest why: why he turned his back on the “materialist” worldview he

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had held until middle age, replacing it with an almost messianic religious conviction, one he maintained faithfully until his death. The questions are not answerable in any sort of rational or scientific way; they are the personal debates and discussions that occur in the innermost self. It is not the job, or the right of the outsider, even the historian, to answer them; and any attempt to do so will inevitably appear cheap and tentative compared to the awesome depth of the individual life and its convictions. As interesting as these questions are, answering them is not the most important goal of a deep study of Birnbaum. Rather, his intellectual portrait will bring to the surface a constellation of ideas and images of modern Jewish history that have long been submerged. The sheer volume and completeness of the archive provide a unique level of access to the mind of a significant modern Jewish intellectual figure. Aside from the details of Birnbaum’s life themselves—who he was, what he wrote, whom he encountered—it will cast light upon why these very details made him so compelling a figure in his day. This alone is an essential function, for it will enable us to understand the motives of his contemporaries as well as his own. Additionally, by uncovering and analyzing the details of his later life, hitherto ignored, we can lend to Birnbaum’s story understanding of a little-understood, yet increasingly important, phenomenon: the embrace of traditional, Orthodox religious philosophies and categories as one possible choice for a modern intellectual. Finally, and most important, his story provides a uniquely powerful account of depths of not one but many of the central intellectual trends of modern Jewish culture and politics. If inconsistent on the surface, this was the one deep consistency of his intellectual life that makes him uniquely valuable to Jewish historiography: a commitment to pursuing with all his means his deepest sense of personal authenticity, regardless of where it took him.

O n e  Discovering the Nation Nathan Birnbaum and Early Viennese Jewish Nationalism, 1882–90

Nathan Nahum Birnbaum was born in Vienna on 16 May 1864 to ­Menachem Mendel Birnbaum and Miriam Birnbaum, née Seelenfreund. Preserved reverentially in thick photo albums in the Family Archive in Toronto are the faintest traces of the world of the families of Nathan and his wife, Rosa Korngut, all members of the same generation of immigrants. An 1868 photograph of Menachem Mendel shows a young man with close-cropped hair and the high-collared shirt, tie, vest, and jacket of a striving young Viennese merchant. Pasted on another page is a picture of Nathan’s father-in-law, Asher Zalke Korngut, a young, thin man in a rekl, a long, identifiably Jewish outer garment, and a dark skullcap. Together, the two pictures tell a story of the complex society into which Nathan was born. In the early 1860s, there would have been many Jews in Vienna that looked and dressed as both men did. Just over a decade after the revolutions and civil war of 1848–49 and the loosening of restrictions on Jewish settlement in Vienna, many had left the small towns and villages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to seek their fortunes in its increasingly cosmopolitan urban centers. It is doubtful they would have attracted much notice, particularly in the heavily Jewish 2nd District, Leopoldstadt. Here they were two among many immigrants and strivers whose numbers swelled the Jewish population of the city for the last half of the nineteenth century until the end of the empire itself. These photographs are commonplace, but in their banality they portray a defining journey that affected hundreds of thousands of Jews in nineteenth-century east-central Europe. For Menachem Mendel and Asher Zalke, at one end were the provincial towns of Galicia, the most economically depressed, ethnically divided, politically retrograde, and religiously traditional region in the empire. On the other was the cos-

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mopolitan center of Vienna in the process of transformation from a sleepy and conservative capital to a center of the scientific, cultural, and political avant-garde. This movement was the defining transition in the lives of both men, definitively forming their exterior experience, the interior of which we know little. Neither the fathers nor their children would negotiate this passage from the Galician provinces to Vienna easily. Menachem Mendel, his small family barely established in Vienna, died when Nathan was eleven. Nathan, who had been placed on the track of social ascendance for Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Leopoldstadt Gymna-

Menachem Mendel Birnbaum (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

Discovering the Nation

sium, portal to the Viennese university system, would spend most of his life repudiating that same society in ever more radical ways. When Menachem Mendel died, he left Nathan a small inheritance that a few years later the teenage university student would use to found the first Jewish nationalist newspaper in central Europe—a rejection of the path of bourgeois integration upon which he had been placed. It was an unconscious act of rebellion that would, decades later, lead Birnbaum back to an identity defined by an idealized version of the very place his father had left behind. The last images of Nathan Birnbaum show him, after a lifetime of intellectual travail and wandering, resembling both his father

Asher Zalke Korngut (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

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and father-in-law. In all later images we find him wearing a dark suit of modern European respectability and perched atop his stately, graying head, a broad black yarmulke, to him an explicit symbol of his rejection of this very modernism. Nathan Birnbaum was a prolific writer, but little of his massive bibliography was devoted to contemplating his life, and even less his youth or family. The small trace of reflection we do find is an account published in a short autobiography for a 1924 celebratory volume in honor of his sixtieth birthday. It is the most detailed account of the lives of either of his parents. “My father, Menachem Mendel Birnbaum, may he rest in peace, was from Ropshitz (Galicia) and came on his mother’s side from a Hasidic family, close associates of the old Ropshitzer rebbe (his merit be upon us). He, however, was no Hasid; on the contrary, he was a bit of a maskil, but still very much a Jew.”1 Birnbaum’s sketch of his father was an idealization even in 1924: he was a young believer, from a family of some importance due to its proximity to the local Hasidic rebbe in the religious world of the traditional shtetl. Tied to the conservative world of his town, he was nonetheless enticed by the wide world advertised by the Haskalah, yet remained—“still very much a Jew.” Unlike the unfortunate author, this passage suggests, Menachem Mendel was rooted in a reality his son was unwittingly denied, with the result that, like many of his contemporaries, Nathan had to struggle to be “very much a Jew.” He writes of his mother in the same nostalgic vein. “My mother, Miriam (may she rest in peace), was born in Hungary, in a region that . . . today [1924] has been absorbed by Czechoslovakia [Carpathian Rus]. She was an orphan, and as a young girl of ten she came to Galicia to live with a brother who had settled there earlier as a religious judge [dayan] in ­Tarnow. There she married my father. She was the daughter of the Kasho­ver Rav, Rabbi Shlomo Shmuel Seelenfreund, a grandson of the Shemen Rokeah, a sixth-generation descendant of the Shakh. . . . Her family was very ­mitnagdic.”2 While the facts of this account are no doubt true, Birnbaum’s emphasis on his mother’s lineage and her mitnagdic affinities highlight her authentic ties to the world of her ancestors—ties that Nathan himself felt he could not take for granted.3 But it is the narrative of his parents’ life, not their lineage, that is the most interesting element of Birnbaum’s account. Written later in life, after an epic intellectual journey, his words are a charged reimagining of

Discovering the Nation

the inner life of his parents. He uses terms that reflect an acute awareness of his audience’s sensibilities—maskil, mitnagdic. While Birnbaum’s father may well have had an interest in nonreligious intellectual pursuits— indeed, his choice to set his son on a German-Viennese (non-Jewish) educational track indicates as much, as certainly there were other options—it is unlikely that this was as defining a feature of his identity as Birnbaum suggests. Nor was the intellectual bearing of his mother’s family or his father’s familial association with the Ropshitz Hasidic dynasty likely as consciously central to his parents’ self-perception. But in 1924, in his new identity as “the Ba’al Teshuva,” as he is still reverentially remembered in some circles, this terminology was familiar and easily consumed by his Orthodox reading public. It held meaning disengaged from the historical but was very useful to him as he sought legitimacy in the eyes of the Orthodox world he had entered late in life. The reality of Miriam and Menachem Mendel’s lives and aspirations was more prosaic than Birnbaum’s description. Their hometowns of Ropshitz and Tarnow, located about fifty miles apart, were two of dozens of small to midsize towns that dotted the countryside of Austrian Galicia, northeastern Hungary, and Bukovina, home to a combination of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, with Jews often the majority of the town population. Although changing in the nineteenth century like all of central Europe, these towns retained a significant residue of the traditional social makeup that had existed for centuries. Miriam was the daughter of a rabbinic and socially important family, raised by a brother who, as a rabbinic judge, was part of the institutional religious structure of the town. As an orphan she was dependent upon her brother’s resources and reputation to find her a match (arranged marriages, especially among rabbinic families, were not unusual). Interestingly, despite an illustrious rabbinic lineage, she does not marry into a rabbinic family but a small-scale mercantile one. This may tell us about Menachem Mendel: he received a traditional education and was intellectually curious (suggested by the term maskil Birnbaum uses); however, he was not a member of the rabbinic elite. Although we have no record, the match could as likely have been the product of personal choice as arrangement; but at the very least we may assume that Menachem Mendel was suitably a part of the traditional world (and thus no maskil in the sense it would come to be understood in the Orthodox world) to satisfy the bride’s family.4

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The search for economic sustenance led Menachem Mendel and his bride to migrate from the Galician provinces to Vienna, probably around 1860, as did an increasing number of Jews from the region in the late nineteenth century. Nathan, born soon after, described his early life as succinctly as he does his parents: “My parents immigrated to ­Vienna, and I was born there on the tenth day of Iyar, 5624. I was given a Jewish and a German name: the Jewish name ‘Nachum’ after my father’s father, and the German ‘Nathan’ (a reference to the play Nathan the Wise by Lessing).”5 In spite of the synthesis his father may have hoped for in naming his son after Gotthold Lessing’s most famous literary character, Birnbaum recalls his alienation from Viennese Jewish culture beginning early. “I was educated in German schools. After four levels of elementary school, I went on to Gymnasium. There is no doubt that German culture had a profound impact on me. Only I was in no way disposed to consider myself a German despite the fact that one would be unable to find a single Jewish youth in Vienna who didn’t consider himself a German.”6 Such sophisticated ideas about cultural homelessness placed in the mind of a young boy by his sixty-year-old self may invite skepticism. He was, after all, one of many of his generation who went through the same process of acculturation at a young age; many, if not most, went on to identify deeply with Austrian-German culture and made it their own in a variety of ways.7 But clearly some aspect of his identity as a first-generation Viennese Jew unsettled Birnbaum deeply at an early age. He himself pinpoints the coalescence of his feelings to a revelation that occurred while he was an adolescent in Gymnasium: “I myself was uneasy when I saw Jews acting so completely German, without following the thought through any further for the time being. It was [only] in the fourth or fifth form of Gymnasium (1879 or 1880) that I was struck as though by lightning with a thought during a conversation with a friend, which I put this way: ‘Really, we should recognize ourselves as a Jewish nation, but of course that’s not possible.’ ”8 Written in 1933, these words reflect decades of involvement in Jewish nationalism and, like his earlier comments, should not necessarily be accepted uncritically. Yet the tension he describes, his feeling of unease with schoolmates he regarded as aping German culture and mannerisms, persisted in his young mind.

Discovering the Nation

Whether or not at the age of fourteen or fifteen he had already formulated a nationalist solution as he claims, one can readily accept that Nathan Birnbaum’s early life experience had made him pessimistic about his society. His parents had chosen to live in a cosmopolitan city that differed radically from the mores and pace of life of the provinces from which they came. Like many Jewish immigrant families from ­Galicia, there was probably a mixture of German and Yiddish spoken in the home. Although not particularly poor for their place and time (young Nathan was left with an inheritance of fifteen hundred gulden), neither were they wealthy; but with Menachem Mendel’s passing in 1875, the family was left without its head and sole provider. The urban surroundings that the young Birnbaum encountered in the imperial capital may also have been a source of anxiety. The 1860s was undoubtedly a decade of great optimism, not the least because Jews had been granted full legal emancipation with the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867. But at the same time, the dark clouds of simmering antiSemitic resentment were beginning to gather and would soon resolve themselves into a persistent feature of Viennese social and political life, targeting with the most viciousness immigrants exactly like Birnbaum’s parents. Birnbaum as a young child was thus confronted with several destabilizing elements. His inability to find solace in the normal quest for a comfortable middle-class life likely played a significant role in his youthful alienation. The result of this discomfort for Birnbaum was an intense preoccupation with the study of Jewish subjects from the moment he entered the Vienna University. He quickly lost his doubts about the potential for a Jewish national awakening. “Of course, the resignation I felt . . . soon fell by the wayside. I began to look at the Jews as a particular people, with a unique history and a unique, territory-based future, and undertook to enlist my acquaintances to my worldview. . . . [I] began . . . to learn from the Hebrew Bible that my father (may he rest in peace) had taught me from as a youth; I took an instructor in Talmud and read Jewish, especially Hebrew newspapers. Through them I became apprised of the Jewish-national movement in eastern Europe.”9 As a young university student, Birnbaum found a few others who shared his discomfort with the German culture that his Gymnasium schoolmates imbibed so readily, and he shaped his alienation into proto-Jewish nationalism.

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Birnbaum attributed the impulse to deepen his Jewish learning to an internal drive, but this was only part of his motivation. Also crucial was his relationship with two men he met in his first months at university, Moritz Schnirer and Reuben Bierer. Schnirer and Bierer were both medical students in the university and shared a similar background. Each was born outside Vienna and came to the city as an adult: Schnirer was from Bucharest, and the forty-six-year-old Bierer was a surgeon from Lemberg who had come to Vienna with his family to become certified as a medical doctor. Like Birnbaum, both shared a deep dislike for what they perceived as the mass denial by Viennese Jews of their core identity. “[Birnbaum] felt a deep shame over the worthless obtrusiveness of Viennese Jews and most of the Jewish students,” Schnirer wrote, “and he realized that, under the veneer of liberalism and freedom festered spiritual enslavement, self-deception, and self-negation.”10 Although Schnirer and Bierer met first, Schnirer quickly brought the trio together by introducing Birnbaum, who, he recalled, was an “exceptionally intelligent, earnest young man filled with a glowing love for Judaism.”11 The three became close associates and formed an informal Jewish studies reading group; Bierer, himself seasoned by affiliation with the Hovevi Zion in Lemberg, assumed a sort of leadership role over their studies and developed a basic curriculum.12 Schnirer wrote of himself later in life, “Bierer, despite being overworked . . . seeing these two young students without direction, without the means or the experience sufficient for such a great undertaking, came up with a fantastic program. They first began to immerse themselves in Hebrew literature and the writings of Peretz Smolenskin.”13

The Creation of Kadimah The informal reading group that Bierer, Schnirer, and Birnbaum formed quickly evolved. Adding student members such as Bialystok native ­Israel Niemcowicz, the group attracted the attention of Hebrew writer Peretz Smolenskin, whose enthusiasm for the group’s program led him to advise the students as they developed their nationalist curriculum.14 By the winter of 1883, and with the addition of a few new members, the society grew into a formal organization and sought of-

Discovering the Nation

ficial recognition. It was in deciding on a name for their group that Peretz Smolenskin made his biggest contribution to its history (chronically ill, Smolenskin died not long after the group’s founding).15 As Schnirer recalled later, “For weeks on end discussion [of the name] went on to no satisfactory conclusion. . . . The name should be Hebrew and at the same time be easy to pronounce for circles of assimilated Jews; it should sound good phonetically and should allude as much as possible to the program. Smolenskin arrived at the happy solution. His poetic genius is to thank for the name ‘Kadimah,’ with its double meaning ‘forward’ and ‘eastward’ a synthesis of the forward thinking and the Zionist idea.”16 Once a name was chosen, its members, including Birnbaum, Bierer, Schnirer, Niemcowicz, Adolf Klein, Isidor Imeles, Leo Schwartz, Ignaz Nadel, Kleomenes Kaplan, Emil Blumenfeld, and Moritz Springer, met in Bierer’s apartment on Kleinen Schiffgasse in Leopoldstadt.17 As Schnirer recalled, “Bierer, the oldest of the circle, gave an address in which the entire wealth of this modest man’s soul was laid open, making an indelible impression on every participant,” and the language of Kadimah’s charter was formulated with the following goals: (1) resistance to assimilation, (2) recognition of the Jewish nation, and (3) furthering the colonization of Palestine as the means of constructing a Jewish community.18 Moritz Schnirer was named first president, and Peretz Smolenskin and Leo Pinsker were made honorary members.19 A few months later, on 23 March 1883, by decree of the ­Vienna municipal government number Z. 11.212, Kadimah was officially incorporated, its aims “the cultivation of literature and study of Judaism excluding any political orientation.”20 In May 1883 the group made itself public to the Vienna University community through posters placed throughout the university and the Hochschule (technical college), with text prepared by Birnbaum and Schnirer: Stammesgenossen! In the eighteen centuries since the Jewish people have lost their independence, there has been an unceasing process whose result has been the decline of Jewry. In these endeavors our enemies have aided the suffering of our people far too much. Indifference inside Jewry has also helped the outside enemy achieve their goal. . . . We must actively confront this indifference. . . . [Kadimah’s] goal is to raise and cultivate the

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spiritual well-being of our people. This can only be learned from the rich treasure of Jewish literature and . . . the unending wellspring of Jewish history, which can serve as the most useful and fruitful instruction for the future of the Jewish people. To achieve these goals, the young society demands the moral and material support of all who still have a Jewish heart beating in their breast.21

They were not warmly received. “The answer to [the posters] was a flood of furious indignation and abuse—from Jews,” Schnirer wrote.22 Birnbaum also recalled: “I remember with a certain satisfaction the gossip that was spread about us. Fingers were pointed at us. Hot-tempered people were indignant about our ‘grotesque’ notion. When our announcement appeared in the university and the technical college, printed in two languages, Hebrew and German, the last bit of restraint disappeared and posters were ripped from well-meaning hands.”23 But this response was not unexpected. Part of Kadimah’s strategy was to provoke, not so much Gentiles (indifference to non-Jews was a proud affectation of the movement) but other Jews, and they stridently transgressed taboos to jar their classmates out of complacency with assimilation. Although within two decades more prominent figures would find themselves similarly despairing of the future of Jews in European society, in 1883 such outspoken assertions were still the purview of eccentrics. But tactics aside, the formation of Kadimah was at its root a search to replace the values of Viennese Jewish society, as Birnbaum and the ­others saw them, with something radically new. This obsession did not arise out of a vacuum but from a number of factors the young Birnbaum, consciously or not, encountered in his youth in Vienna. His words and those of the other Kadimah members point clearly to the importance of their experiences as Jewish immigrants and children of immigrants to post-1867 Vienna. Despite his later lament to the contrary, Birnbaum and the other Kadimah founders were “very much Jews,” as were the Jewish students who tore the leaflets from their hands. In fact, Birnbaum was born into a milieu in Vienna that was as uniquely and intensely “Jewish” as that which his parents left behind in Tarnow and Ropshitz. Regardless of how exceptional the timing of the path he chose, and the desire he had throughout his life to view his own experience as unique and novel, Birnbaum was reacting as a youth well integrated into the Viennese Jew-

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ish world. It is in the particularities of this context that the patterns of Birnbaum’s feelings toward Viennese Jewry, German culture, and issues of nationalism are brought into their greatest relief. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the lifting of restrictions on Jewish settlement in 1848 and reaffirmed by the general emancipation of Austro-Hungarian Jews in 1867, Vienna experienced a massive growth in its Jewish population. During Birnbaum’s early childhood in the late 1860s, Jewish migration into Vienna increased the size of the community as much as 46 percent a year, a trend that continued for the rest of the nineteenth century.24 By 1914, the Jewish population of the city was about two hundred thousand Jews, or nearly 9 percent of a total population of approximately 2.1 million.25 Despite their varied origins (the Czech lands, Hungary, and Galicia), they shared reasons for immigrating to the capital different from those of non-Jewish immigrants, whose numbers were also significant during this time. The legal and civic emancipation of Austro-Hungarian Jews and end of residence restrictions, intensifying anti-Semitism in smaller towns (especially in Galicia), and declining economic opportunity were key factors in Jewish movement to large urban centers like Vienna.26 Unlike other immigrants, Jews moved to Vienna permanently; also unlike non-Jewish immigrants, who were mostly male laborers looking for factory work, Jews moved to Vienna as intact families. Finally, Jews were drawn to the cultural atmosphere of Vienna.27 It was one of the great cities of the German-speaking world, the locus of an intellectual culture highly esteemed by Jews throughout eastern Europe. Jews also identified Vienna with the liberalism, and emancipation, that had emanated from the Austro-Hungarian capital. Upon arrival in Vienna, Jews were also set apart by their patterns of settlement and occupation. The vast majority of Viennese Jews lived in three neighborhoods: Leopoldstadt (2nd District), Alsergrund (9th District), and the Inner City (1st District), with Leopoldstadt their main destination.28 Once in these neighborhoods, Jews tended not to leave them; regardless of the degree of their economic improvement, Jews were also unusually uniform in their choice of professions. As Marsha Rozenblit points out, the primary occupation of Jewish immigrants leaving Galicia, Hungary, and the Czech lands for Vienna was petty trade. As they, and particularly their children, integrated into the

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Viennese economy, they gradually came to fill a distinct niche as whitecollar workers such as clerks, managers, and salesmen. Although they were also well represented (and commonly remembered in the popular imagination) in the liberal professions such as law and medicine, and the upper echelons of commerce, banking, and industry, Viennese Jews were actually most concentrated in midlevel, white-collar positions, to the extent that such jobs became popularly known as “Jewish” positions.29 As immigrants from primarily urban areas, Jews were better prepared than most groups with the skills required to enter such positions, such as literacy and German proficiency, or acquired these skills more quickly. They also prepared their children for these professions through the German-language education system, an efficient vehicle of acculturation into Viennese society. It is true that the necessity of economic survival and the promises of success, along with the adoption of German-Austrian social mores, caused many Jews and their children to curtail significantly the religious observance and cultural trappings of their parents and grandparents. Despite acculturation, they remained a largely separate and identifiable minority in Vienna. In becoming German-speaking Viennese Jews, these immigrants in effect made their Viennese culture Jewish. Birnbaum and the other Kadimah founders, when they announced their rebellion against “assimilation” and argued for an intense Jewish identity, were really arguing for the replacement of one modern form of Jewish identity, that of the German-speaking, upwardly mobile participants in the German cultural life of the AustroHungarian capital, with another. What this new identity was had not really been determined by the Kadimah members when they founded their group. But, led in no small part by Birnbaum’s contribution, within a few years they came to define it with greater precision.

The Lighter Side of National Angst: Kadimah and Megillah The ambiguity of the relationship Birnbaum and the other Kadimah members shared with Viennese Jewish-German culture is illustrated by a fascinating collection of documents, Megillah, the first “official” Kadimah publication. This small newsletter, its seven issues averaging around ten handwritten pages each, is possibly the first Jewish nationalist periodical

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Cover, first issue of Megillah (poem by Moritz Schnirer) (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

produced in central Europe. It first appeared on 24 March 1883, just as Kadimah itself was receiving its charter from the Austrian government to become a formal organization, and ended on 15 October 1884. From beginning to end a student affair, Megillah was both earnest and irreverent, and its authors reveled in their outsider perspective with bit-

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ing satire. The title hints at its less-than-serious intent; appearing just before Purim, a Jewish holiday of ritualized frivolity, it refers to the Book of Esther (Megilat Ester). Its opening issue even included a “Purim shpil,” a satirical short play, From the Persian Parliament, that mocks contemporary anti-Semites in the Austrian Reichsrat by placing them in ancient Persia debating the destruction of Jewry.30 Megillah as a whole was a sort of extended (often morbid) Purim shpil, satire directed toward mocking assimilation-minded Viennese Jews and famous anti-Semites alike. Its appearance was modest and homemade. It was written by hand and carbon-copied in blue; the first issues had individual pieces in the handwriting of their authors, but by the end all were in Birnbaum’s hand. The same masthead adorned every issue, the title written in broad, sweeping letters, the words “Academischen Verein ‘Kadimah’” beneath. Megillah was not entirely a parody. It also contained examples of short prose, but the centerpiece of its serious literary content was poetry, and in its pages Birnbaum, Schnirer, and others produced some of the first Jewish nationalist poetry in a western European language. Many issues began with a lengthy poem, and the inaugural issue contained two, one by Schnirer, the other by Birnbaum, particularly fine representations of the newsletter’s poetic content. They appear under Schnirer’s and Birnbaum’s (Germanized) Hebrew names (Moshe ben Tobias and Nahum ben Menachem). The first, Schnirer’s poem “Juden­würde,” is an anthem that copies closely Friedrich Schiller’s “Männerwürde.” Seemingly intended to be the first anthem of Kadimah, the reader is instructed to sing it to the tune of “O alten Fürsorgherrlichkeit.” “I am a Jew, and who is more? . . . / I belong to the ancient people / The Israelite people / The people, who can say together . . . / only through ‘Kadimah,’ / May the people see / that our Jewry has life / and will not retreat!”31 Birnbaum’s poem, possibly his first published work, followed “Judenwürde” and was thematically similar; it was also influenced by Schiller. The ode imagines a great gathering in misty gray rain—the Jewish people freed and on their own land. The legion of Jews have come to receive a venerable ambassador of the nations of the world with song and rejoicing, “in foreign dress and adornments.” He announces in the “hoary language of the Jews” that he has come to welcome them to the family of nations. “This people, the Jews, had long stood . . . / before the deepest chasm,” Birnbaum writes. But now, before the “morning, potent with

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questions . . . / The call of freedom rings / joyously from the mouths / of fresh youth’s longing / For news of joyous salvation.” With the delegate and his tidings of freedom and liberation, the narrator relates that “we see as proof, no, / as reward for our suffering . . . / Free is the Jewish people, free! / Their homeland they have won / having seized it from the circles / of the free nations!”32 Of course, the two poems are similarly overwrought imitations of German romantic poetry. They use a wholly German idiom, imitating Schiller explicitly (in Schnirer’s case) and implicitly (Birnbaum evokes  Schiller’s even more famous “Ode to Joy”), and reveal in the process the degree to which this was the culture with which both were most familiar. Although they were involved in learning (or relearning) Hebrew, Jewish history, and the other accoutrements of the Jewish national culture they hoped to build, and were reproachful of the “aping” of European culture they saw in their contemporaries, it was in this same cultural framework that they imagined their ideal world. German was the literary language to which they had the most exposure, and the masterpieces of its poetic tradition were drilled into them from a young age. More to the point, neither was likely yet adequately fluent in writing Hebrew to produce such work. Despite their intense criticism of their “Germanized” classmates, Schnirer and Birnbaum show in these poems that they were no less a product of a Jewish-German linguistic milieu, dependent on its idioms to express their deepest selves. The structure of the newsletter varied little from issue to issue. The introductory piece was usually a poem along Jewish nationalist themes (aside from the two just mentioned, Birnbaum write an ode on the Hebrew language and a historical elegy on the themes of the Purim story for the anniversary issue) or a very short essay, such as a satirical pagelong tribute to Kadimah and Megillah Birnbaum wrote on the first anniversary of the society’s and the newsletter’s founding. Next came a small collection of “Depechen” (dispatches), mock short news items, usually humorous comments on Jewish society or prominent anti-­Semites. One dispatch from Vienna notes that “Reichs deputy Ritter von Schönerer [prominent anti-Semitic politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer] has become a member of the ‘Wiener Israelit.’ ”33 Another lauds a (fictional) lecture given by French anti-Semite Ernst Renan ­before the Kadimah Society. After the Depechen section usually followed another

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regular feature, a joke dialogue between two “assimilated” Viennese Jews named Kelbel and Felbel, a sort of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee whose dialect humor uses exaggerated, even grotesque “Jewish” malapropisms and syntax: K: You! I was in th’ opera on th’ third bank yesterday. F: I was in d’ Burg by the fourth post! K: Yeah? And now you have to go? F: Not for nothin’! I am always busy. K: With what? F: A flea bit me, and because of that I had to scratched [sic]. K: And? For me it was the same problem! F: Now I say to myself: it must be the same flea!34

Aside from the regular features, Megillah included a variety of short items on various subjects, mostly dedicated to mocking either Viennese anti-Semites or “assimilationist” Jews. The Purim scene mentioned previously is an excellent example. Dated “Susa, the 13th of Adar 470” and written in the style of Reichsrat protocols, it records an imaginary speech by Haman, the murderous antagonist of the Purim story who bears a striking resemblance to one of Kadimah’s favorite targets, the anti-Semitic Reichsrat deputy Georg Ritter von Schönerer. The following was put before the government today: “In consideration of that which the Jews, through their recognition of a religious book that attacks precisely the origins of the legends of Ormuzd and ­Ahriman, in consideration of the means by which they through their cheating and stock market swindling have made the people dependent upon them (applause from right and then from the left), in consideration of the fact they are a foreign element in the Aryan union of peoples (surges from the left), it is necessary that the Jews own up and receive the consequences, that their money be blotted out as well as their town.”35

In another issue, a “Letter from the Public” is printed, signed by Schö­ ne­rer himself (probably Birnbaum), protesting unfair attacks from Kadi­mah and protesting that he even had a Jewish friend named Wenzel. Even the minutiae of the newsletter are dedicated to satire. On the final page of each issue is a mock advertisement page with ads, including a ticket to a “demonstration of hysteria” at the hospital presented by Professor August Brown, an offer to sell “the contents of my suitcase

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for thirty gulden,” and an announcement, for no apparent reason, that “the cheapest and sturdiest boots belong to the editors of Megillah!” And then the personal ads: “I am to be moved from my post in Lemberg to be stationed in Vienna, so I am seeking someone who needs to return to the land of his ancestors and wants to exchange a brand-new Polish character for his German one. Naturally this individual must be a Jew, whose length of nose exceeds that of the Christian customs officer. Very grateful for this exchange.” And finally, each end page carries the credits for the newsletter’s production, including the editors and printers—which change with every issue. The Purim issues are edited in one instance by Haman; another, by Ahashverosh (the king of Persia in the Purim story). In another issue, the editor is Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, and in still another, Schönerer. Macabre humor aside, Megillah’s early date makes it the first known specimen of the writing and editorial work of Nathan Birnbaum. It also offers a snapshot of the young Kadimah members in the formative year of the organization. Very often, these early nationalists appeared (and presented themselves) as grave, serious, and fully formed in their ideological convictions. It is often forgotten that these young men were, above all, young, and also partial to the timeless frivolity of young university students. These seven short newsletters, Kadimah’s first foray into public letters, show Birnbaum, Schnirer, and the others before their more serious personae emerged in the pages of Selbst-Emancipation. It shows them experimenting, formulating their ideas about Jewish peoplehood and their relationship with Viennese Jewish society. It reflects the deepening of their own Jewish national Bildung, their increasing familiarity with the reservoir of Jewish history and literature. It shows their keen interest in the politics and society of the day and their desire to rambunctiously throw themselves into the midst of it. Interestingly, all of these facets of Megillah—its use of belles lettres and satire as a medium of nationalist thought, and above all its identity as a Jewish nationalist, anti-establishment organ—reflect the influence of the early mentor of Kadimah, Peretz Smolenskin. As much as ­Megillah is a unique product of Birnbaum, Schnirer, and the others, it is a tribute to Smolenskin’s inspiration to the group and hints at how indispensable he was to early Viennese Jewish nationalism in general, and the evolution of Nathan Birnbaum’s thought in particular.

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Smolenskin’s presence in Vienna of the early 1880s had a deep impact on the fledgling nationalists.36 Coming from the Russian Empire, he was the product of a different background than most other immigrants to Vienna. He represented a type much more likely to be encountered on the streets of Odessa than Vienna: the Russian maskilturned-­nationalist. He was born into the traditional Jewish society in Montyrshchina, Moghilev Province, in 1842, and although he received a traditional education, he discovered Russian language and literature as a yeshiva student in Shklov. Smolenskin soon left behind his religious education and turned to the world of secular letters, moving to the center of the modern Russian Jewish world, Odessa, during the early flowering of its Russian Jewish intelligentsia.37 Not long after, in 1868, Smolenskin settled in Vienna and established Ha-Shahar (The dawn), a periodical dedicated to the revival of Hebrew as the linguistic medium of Jewish national culture. His bona fides as a Russian Jewish intellectual, a physical link with the “east” and Russian Jewry, and a man of letters was unique in Viennese Jewry. Noted figures of the Viennese Jewish establishment, including Chief Rabbi Adolph Jellinek and I. H. Weiss of the Vienna Rabbinical Academy, were Smolenskin’s patrons and assisted in funding Ha-Shahar. 38 Through his fiction and essays published in its pages, Smolenskin helped develop Hebrew as a modern idiom that could articulate a foundation for Jewish nationalism. But he was more than this to the early Kadimah founders; as Schnirer describes, he was a mentor as well: “Despite the nearly uninterrupted strain of his situation . . . he placed his wealth of experience and personal reputation within the Jewish circles of Vienna at the disposal of our young friends. His intelligence and knowledge of human nature instructed them in the correct way [to proceed] and spared them many a failure.”39 Smolenskin’s enthusiasm for the young men’s efforts was matched by his conviction that the creation of a strong national identity was essential for the survival of the Jewish people, a central principle of Kadimah’s project. In fact, the very events that played a large role in stimulating the emergence of a national consciousness among Kadimah founders like Birnbaum triggered Smolenskin’s own turn to overt nationalism.40 A frustrated maskil, he had lived through the high expectations of Jewish entry into European society and seen them, in Russia in particular, devolve into violence, first in the 1871 pogrom in Odessa and later the

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1881–82 pogroms throughout Russian Ukraine. His personal response, which permeated his writings in Ha-Shahar, was skepticism that Jews could either achieve equality in European nations or realize any profit from the sacrifices demanded by assimilation. This seemed especially pertinent as he watched the deterioration of Jewish life in the Russian Empire, which confirmed to him that for whatever promises assimilation offered, the root of the Jewish-Gentile relationship remained unchanged from the worst moments of Jewish history. “Do not believe what is spoken in the era of the knowledge and love of man, do not listen to the words of those who glorify this time as a time of human justice and honest opinion; it is a lie! For at the time of the crusaders and the blood-soaked government of Isabella in Spain, murderers aspired to blood vengeance and so it is in this time.”41 Furthermore, his experiences among both eastern and western European Jewry led Smolenskin to conclude that the project of the Jewish Enlightenment had decayed from that of the well-meaning improvement of the Jews as a collective to their national suicide for the sake of assimilation. The collective self-esteem of Europe’s Jews had subsequently collapsed, and the only hope for its future was to reconstruct the Jewish people as a national group on the model of European nationalism. “Let us be like all other nations, unashamed of the rock from which we were hewn, like the rest in holding dear our language and the glory of our people. It is not a disgrace for us to believe that our exile will come once to an end.”42 While the main goal of the Jewish nationalist in the present was to mend the national fabric torn by physical misery and destruction in the east, and spiritual and cultural degeneration in the west, the near future held the greater objective of reestablishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. “It is time to act! . . . Turkey will give us the land of our inheritance, because in what manner are we inferior to Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and other small nations which yesterday were formed on Turkish soil? . . . And if you will object ‘they live on their land,’ you can answer, ‘We will see what belongs to us, not with the sword and the spear, but with money. . . . Because we are not like other nations therefore we shall not be redeemed with the redemption of nations.”43 These ideas were his intellectual legacy to Kadimah. His distrust of assimilation and enthusiasm for Jewish nationhood gave voice to the frustrations of the Kadimah founders, who were alienated by Viennese

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Jewish culture. Although drawn from Smolenskin’s own experience as a young man from a traditional Russian Jewish milieu, the experiences he had undergone as a “wanderer on life’s paths” (the title of his autobiographical novel) had led him to conclusions about the present and future of the Jewish people that resonated with the ideals of Kadimah and the young Nathan Birnbaum. The often darkly comical literary approach to nationalist thought in Megillah was an explicit reflection of Smolenskin’s literary temperament. The pronounced irreverence toward Viennese society and the Jewish assimilation of bourgeois Viennese values reflected the core of anger and frustration in Smolenskin’s thought. Beyond this, Smolenskin was valuable to Birnbaum and his colleagues as a stand-in for their own experience. Ironically, although the young Kadimah founders had no doubt experienced the dark side of Jewish life in Vienna, their lives did not obviously justify the deep disdain they felt toward their contemporaries. All were, in fact, beneficiaries of the advances offered by Jewish emancipation; they were members of a prestigious Austrian university and could look forward to lives of bourgeois comfort in their professions. The relative freedom of the liberal empire even allowed them to found a society like Kadimah. The presence of the likes of Schönerer and other purveyors of ugly anti-Semitism was no doubt a cause for anxiety, yet few other Jewish students, all affected by the rise of anti-Semitism in Vienna, went to the lengths of rejecting Viennese—and European—society entirely. Smolenskin, on the other hand, was a veteran of the cultural struggle of Jews in two different empires. His background perhaps justified his alienation, and the members of Kadimah absorbed it. In addition to a reading society, committed to furthering knowledge of Jewish literature and history, Kadimah took as a pillar of its mission recognition of the Jews as a nation and advancing Jewish colonization in Palestine. While these ideas were not unheard of at the time of Kadimah’s establishment (some, including Niemcowicz, were committed to both before Kadimah), Smolenskin had advanced precisely the form of nationalism that became Kadimah’s hallmark for a decade or longer. Although in the end Megillah never overcame its amateur origins, it signified the beginning of Birnbaum’s lifelong preoccupation with Jewish nationalist journalism. Even while producing Megillah, he had turned toward more serious subjects and idioms, most important, the manifesto

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Die Assimilationssucht, which launched him even more into the public eye. In the meantime, Kadimah continued to grow under Birnbaum’s leadership after 1883. Functioning like most nineteenth-century European university societies, it tried to attract membership through activities such as meetings, public lectures and debates, and a reading room stocked with Judaica and Jewish nationalist literature on the Judenplatz, creating “an assembly place for all like-minded,” as Birnbaum described it.44 Like other university societies and fraternities, Kadimah held festival celebrations, banquets, and even ritualized beer-drinking sessions (Kneipen), the most famous (or notorious) hallmark of the central European fraternity.45 In the beginning, the group had a marked eastern European character; as Birnbaum observed, “The majority of the students [in the founding committee] were from Galicia; some from Russia and Romania. This eastern exclusivity was no accident but was based on the fact that the young people from the east had recently come from a place with living Jewish folklife, where the movement toward self-emancipation already existed.”46 Although this interpretation is clearly colored by his later ideology, Birnbaum’s explanation for the appeal of the group to students of eastern European origin is credible. Birnbaum’s goal as the sole nativeborn Viennese of the Kadimah founders became to spread its message among these very “German cultural circles.” In a climate of rising antiSemitism in Vienna of the 1880s, this goal was accomplished over time, and the group gradually lost its eastern European character—and as it did so, adopted more of the trappings of a German fraternity, such as dueling, albeit after the founding generation had moved on.47 By the end of 1884, under Birnbaum’s presidency, the society had grown to fifty-eight members.48 It had an efficient fund-raising scheme, and its library had grown to 970 volumes in German, Hebrew, and other languages, as well as subscriptions to Jewish and Hebrew periodicals.49 Its influence and presence in the young world of Jewish nationalism became considerable.

A New Leader By the mid-1880s, Nathan Birnbaum was a leader of Kadimah and instrumental in shaping Viennese Jewish nationalism in its embryonic stage. At age twenty, Birnbaum stepped forward as the young public face of

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Kadimah when he assumed the presidency and published as “a student of Jewish nationalism” a pamphlet entitled Die Assimilationssucht: Ein Worte an die sogenannten Deutschen, Slaven, Magyaren etc. mosaischer Confession, von einem Studenten jüdischer Nationalität (Assimilation mania: A word to the so-called Germans, Slavs, Magyars, etc., of Mosaic faith, by a student of the Jewish nation). Although written at the same time that Birnbaum and Schnirer were dabbling with Megillah, the two works are worlds apart. If the earlier newsletter showed Birnbaum as an undergraduate wit, Die Assimilationssucht, a sharp and articulate polemic, revealed him as a strident and serious nationalist. Although only the first of volumes of political essays that Birnbaum would produce over his life, Die Assimilationssucht has unique importance. It was his first serious contribution to the germinating public discourse on Jewish nationalism and became the pamphlet by which he was recognized and known (many would remember it as the first truly central European Zionist publication). It also outlines succinctly most of the themes that would preoccupy Birnbaum for the whole of his early Zionist period. With Die Assimilationssucht he emerged from obscurity into the public eye and became the public pen of Viennese Zionism for a decade. Die Assimilationssucht is part of the broad genre of nineteenth-­ century political manifestos; its obvious influence is Leo Pinsker’s Auto­ emancipation published two years earlier. Like other pamphlets of its kind, its language is succinct and inflammatory, presented in a straightforward fashion with an air of intellectual rigor despite its brevity. Its central theme is to expose the disasters wreaked upon the Jewish nation by assimilation. The entrance of Jews into European society, Birnbaum argues, had been held up for a century as the ideal means of Jewish social progress and betterment in western Europe. Far from helping Jews, though, its admission price of assimilation had gone a long way toward destroying the Jewish people entirely. It had done this by divorcing individuals from the nation, the core element of their existence as a people. The essay opens with a general theory of the behavior of nations. Every nation throughout history possesses two fundamental natural inclinations. “The historical development of a given people is certainly realized through the power and means of the mixture of two motivations: love of their own particular traits [Eigentumlichkeit], and an interest in

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those of foreigners [Fremdartigkeit].”50 Like an organism, a nation may be healthy or sick, and its health depends on both traits being combined in the correct proportion. Imbalance in either direction leads the nation to illness. If it becomes too infatuated with its own peculiarities, a nation succumbs to chauvinism and fails to appreciate the valuable accomplishments of other nations and use them for its own improvement. The result is cultural regression and a dangerous impulse to destroy those different, regardless of their benefit to society as a whole. But when the nation drifts too far in the other direction and, blinded by its attraction to the strange, becomes intoxicated with the values and accomplishments of other nations to the detriment of its own, the result is assimilation and cultural suicide.51 The nation and its culture will die, its members condemned to a ghostlike existence, never truly accepted into the society with which they have become fatally enamored.52 Throughout history, nations have periodically descended from health to illness. Never had a national group shown a stronger tendency toward unhealthy infatuation with other nations—and a desire to emulate them—than the Jews. To Birnbaum, it is a “specifically Jewish affliction . . . a variety of illness that no other people carries more, and the most acute example that can be found.”53 This was the tragic situation of modern Jewry: intoxication with western European culture and belief in its superiority and their own inferiority had led the Jews on a futile quest for assimilation. This degrading search was not new but had been a recurrent feature of Jewish history, most clearly illustrated by the rise of Hellenism in ancient Israel. “The first immersion . . . in this illness was during the time of the Greeks in the form of Hellenism. . . . What the ­Hellenists were in ancient times, these are [today] the Mosaic Germans, Slavs, and Magyars; the latter are nothing other than a new manifestation of the former.”54 Like Hellenizing Jews of ancient times, who sought to embrace the aesthetics, culture, and ultimately philosophy and beliefs of the Greek subjugators of ancient Israel, the modern-day assimilationists wished to transform European Jews from their peculiar folkways and beliefs into cultured Germans, Slavs, and Hungarians.55 Yet their efforts reveal their sad ignorance of their history and reflect a deep misjudgment of their people. “If those who stride forth on the path of assimilation were a little more familiar with the history of their own

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people, they would see from the example of Hellenism what the future of Germanization, Slavization, and Magyarization holds.”56 Like the Hellenizers, the assimilationists of Birnbaum’s day believed in abandoning Jewish culture and advocated that other Jews do the same. Yet history was not kind to the Hellenizers. “History has taught that the Jews will tolerate [such assimilation] up to a certain point, but once there is any energetic attempt at a [national] dissolution, they will cry out, ‘Up to here and no further!’ ”57 The pressures for assimilation must be constantly fed by the reiteration of inferiority, and the demand for Jews to seek conformity with an alien nation depends upon their finding grave fault with their own. This neurosis is the “origin of all the suffering that has been brought forth by the quest for assimilation and must be checked.”58 Years of cultural self-loathing will eventually breed a reaction against it, as was seen in the uprising of the Hasmoneans, or Maccabees, against the Hellenizers in ancient Israel. It is worth noting that the paradigm of Hellenistic Jewry first displayed here quickly became a mainstay in Birnbaum’s early writing. In particular the story of the defeat of Jewish Hellenizers by the “nationalist” Hasmoneans (filtered, of course, through the prism of nineteenthcentury nationalism) resonated strongly for him. He wrote several articles and lectures throughout his career, frequently on the anniversary of the Hasmonean victory celebrated in the holiday of Hanukkah, a major holiday on the calendar of the young nationalists. He was certainly not alone in this interest; several nationalist societies, some of which have survived to the present day (such as the Maccabee youth athletic organization), took this period of Jewish history as their inspiration. For his part, Birnbaum frequently identified personally with Matityahu (Mathias), the father of Judah Maccabee—not the least when he chose as his most famous pseudonym “Mathias Acher” (Another Mathias) in the early 1890s. Interestingly, it is not only as a Kadimah member or even a Zionist that Birnbaum identified with Matityahu. As Birnbaum’s relationship with Jewish nationalism became more complex and fraught, leading him to fall first outside the mainstream of the Zionist movement (which was precisely when he began using the pen name “Mathias Acher”) and finally outside secular Jewish nationalism altogether, the image of Mathias remained. Whether as the embodiment of the original nationalist fighter or as a religious leader seeking to purge

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Judaism of the impurities of secularism, Matityahu and the Maccabees consistently reflected to Birnbaum his situation vis-à-vis Judaism. The meaning of the Maccabees was not specifically Zionist for Birnbaum; rather, they stood for the defense of truth against overwhelming odds. Unlike their eastern European counterparts, whose life in the bosom of pure (to Birnbaum’s eyes) Jewish life and folkways enabled them to identify with any number of Jewish historical figures (such as Ahad Ha’am’s group, the Bnei Moshe), Birnbaum and his fellow Viennese (and Budapest and Prague) Jews had been torn from their people and were forced to find a model that reflected their struggle to reestablish their roots. The Maccabees, lonely, outnumbered, and embattled, but ultimately victorious in vanquishing their own “assimilationists,” were ideal for the role. Thus, in the eyes of the author of Die Assimilationssucht, assimilation and its Jewish advocates posed a direct threat to the survival of the Jewish people. They were guilty, even if innocently at first, of letting their fascination with European culture overpower loyalty to their own. More damningly, under the guise of “emancipation” and “improvement” of their brethren, they dragged others down with them. And even as the dysfunction of the assimilationist project became more and more obvious, its deluded advocates foolishly expected their ­protégés and those they emulated to laud their efforts. The reward for their efforts, however, had not been what they expected. “This impulse to self-improvement was followed by the belief that through their emancipation the people would be grateful and in their gratitude they would be accepted [by the majority culture]; this thankfulness has been repaid with anti-Semitism.”59 Birnbaum’s assertion that Jews bore responsibility for the anti-Semitism they suffered, another theme that recurs repeatedly in his work, appears for the first time here. Led by assimilationists and into a misguided quest to ape a foreign culture, the Jewish people had unwittingly tapped a dark reserve of malevolence in the majority culture, bred by the natural disdain of the strong nation for the weak. “We [nationalists] ourselves could pass over in silence the inferiority of the assimilationists; however, the anti-Semites will not. They draw conclusions from the ringleaders of this quest for assimilation and make the error that our entire people is degenerate, groveling, pushy—in a word, they conclude the inferiority of our race. This is the

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task of the assimilationists, which we pay the price for with the scorn and hatred [of the Gentiles].”60 Demoralized, misled, and attacked (unnecessarily), Jews were victims of powerful forces, nothing less than the deepest reserves of organic, natural hatred. To confront this perilous situation, the Jewish people must invert the values of the assimilationists and conquer the assumption that Jewish progress and development meant abandoning the Jewish nation. “Rather than assimilation, nationalization; instead of dissolution, enlightenment; instead of the plea for moral betterment, the grappling for it. If one could excuse those who embarked on this errant course at the beginning of the epoch of assimilation, the [current] delusion of those who still plead to this day for raising the Jews through [the cultures] of other peoples is inconceivable.”61 Most of all, Birnbaum declares, “The peculiar situation of the Jews as a nation without national consciousness must cease!”62 Yet how this is to be accomplished is a question only vaguely answered in Die Assimilationssucht. Unlike other early Jewish nationalist pamphlets such as Pinsker’s Autoemancipation and later ­Herzl’s The Jewish State, Birnbaum’s is less interested in advancing a concrete program. He assumes that the basic conception of what defines the nation is self-evident and widely accepted. In line with nationalist theorists going back to Fichte and Herder, Birnbaum assumes a basic identity between language, culture, territory, and national being. His task instead is to convince those Jews who may potentially be swayed because of their dissatisfaction with assimilation but who were ignorant of the national potential in Judaism that under the rubrics applied to others, Jews were no less a nation than the Germans or French. Of course, given those standards, Birnbaum realized his argument required clarification. Language was perhaps the easiest dart that could be thrown at Birnbaum’s claims (after all, Yiddish was not yet widely considered a “true” language, and modern Hebrew was not yet widely spoken). To this claim he posits that even though it is true that Hebrew’s “current position and current [rate of] expansion . . . [into] a full national language seems quite small,” this would change naturally when “a territorial concentration” was achieved. “A Hebrew-populated Judea will produce a Hebrew spoken by Jews.”63 Thus, Birnbaum’s answer to the question of how Jews could be considered a nation was to turn to the potential that could be unlocked only by a homeland, that is, turning to basic

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nineteenth-century nationalist theory. Language and land are inextricably linked; in order to see Hebrew become the living national language of the Jews, one had to see the nation itself rebuilt, ultimately in its historical homeland in Palestine. That this would happen, and with popular approval, Birnbaum had no doubt; indeed, the seeds had already been sown for a popular movement. “The way is clear, then, by which the Jews should strike forth if they wish to open the ghetto gates. [Today] nearly a hundred thousand Jews have turned to the new light, already the first colonies have been founded and flourish on the ground of Palestine, and the numbers of national societies and national newspapers increase from day to day. Indeed, a collective national will is tangible, one realized through popular action of the masses.” 64 Birnbaum’s program in Die Assimilationssucht was simple: it was the duty of the nationalist to participate in this burgeoning (if greatly exaggerated by Birnbaum) activity and to publicly challenge the delusion among Jews that any other way was possible. The influence of Smolenskin on Birnbaum’s pamphlet is palpable. Like Smolenskin, Birnbaum linked the survival of Jewry tightly to its maintenance of a unique national identity and asserted that the sacrifice of language and “antiquated” notions such as the historical national essence of the Jewish people was a suicide pact for Judaism. No reward was sufficient to compensate for this act, least of all the reluctant acceptance of the Gentile nations of a decrepit and broken people into their midst. To both the only choice was to decline the false offer of assimilation and embrace with renewed vigor their national being. In the short term this meant a return to the language and history of the Jewish nation; in the long term, a return to their historical homeland in Palestine. Yet Smolenskin was not the only presence behind Die Assimilationssucht. In several key instances, the pamphlet charts directions that were either only vaguely present in or absent altogether from Smolenskin’s thought. It is in these instances, just as important to the message of the pamphlet, that Birnbaum reveals another important influence, that of Leon Pinsker, a central figure of the Russian Hovevi Zion and publisher of the groundbreaking call to arms on behalf of Jewish nationalism, Auto­emancipation. Pinsker was a leading Odessa physician whose personal story of accomplishment in Russian society seemed to speak glowingly for the possibilities offered by integration. He spoke and wrote in Russian as his primary language, and his life in Odessa seemed

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to represent the integrationist ideal: a member of the Russian middle class, he neither despised nor downplayed his Jewish origins. He was prominent in the liberal Jewish institutions of Odessa, including the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews (Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia Mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii, or OPE), the elite Jewish organization of the Russian Empire that advocated the advancement of Russian Jewry through education in Russian and integration into Russian society.65 Pinsker had been present in Odessa during the anti-Jewish disturbances of 1871; however, not until the pogroms of 1881 following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II did his attitude toward the possibilities of Jewish integration into Russian—or European—society darken considerably. Nearly overnight, Pinsker abandoned his faith that Jews could ever become equal partners in Gentile society. All of the optimism that he had displayed, both in his success as a Russian-speaking Jewish physician and as a proponent of the cultural enlightenment of Russian Jewry, evaporated. The result of this radical reorientation in Pinsker’s worldview was a short pamphlet, Autoemancipation (1882), published anonymously in German, which immediately became one of the most important documents of early Zionism. It was an emphatic statement of his disillusionment. As with Die Assimilationssucht, Autoemancipation begins with an overview of the history of nations. Over the two millennia of the Jewish Diaspora, humanity had progressed organically toward the nation as its basic form of social organization. For the most part, national structures were positive, allowing relations between groups to achieve equilibrium, if not peace, based upon mutual strength, the source of which was national character, with which they kept each other in check. Only the Jewish nation among all original, proto-national groups had failed to progress to this state because of the peculiarities of its situation. The oppression by Gentiles, coupled with exile from their homeland, had left the Jews stateless though still possessing all the attributes of a nation. Being unable, and in modern times unwilling, to embrace their national attributes had left the Jews an unnatural entity (Pinsker, a doctor, uses explicitly organic terms). They had become a living corpse among the Gentile nations and, as such, had inspired loathing from them that had metastasized into a full-blown pathology, Judeophobia. “Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary and as a disease transmitted

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for two thousand years, it is incurable.”66 Although the Jews’ return to the Jewish nation and their final separation from the Gentile nations was the only possible response to this history, the cultural leaders of the Jews and elite liberal Gentiles had wrongfully embraced a false antidote, emancipation. This was a catastrophic error. “To the Jews . . . [the non-Jew] will say: ‘You are foolish, because you stand there nonplussed and expect of human nature something which it has never produced—humanity. You are also contemptible, because you have no real self-estimation and no national self-respect.”67 Thus, Jews can never expect help out of their situation while dispersed among non-Jews. They must take the initiative themselves to rise from their situation. “We must first extricate ourselves from the old yoke, and rise manfully to our full height. We must first of all desire to help ourselves then the help of others will follow.”68 In the final barrage of demands at the end of his pamphlet, Pinsker lists the necessary steps for the future of the Jewish nation, steps that served as the blueprint for Birnbaum and Kadimah. In his strident prose, “Let ‘now or never’ be our watchword. Woe to our descendants, woe to the memory of our Jewish contemporaries, if we let this moment pass by!” Emancipation was a failure, integration a delusion. “The only solution is the creation of a Jewish nationality, a nation living upon its own soil,” with which Jews could “return to the ranks of the nations by the acquisition of a Jewish homeland.” To those who take up the task, he exhorts that “the lack of national self-respect and self-confidence of political initiative and unity are the enemies of our national renaissance.” Like Birnbaum’s essay, Pinsker’s is short on practical details. That “the national regeneration of the Jews must be initiated by a congress of Jewish notables” is his primary strategy.69 The similarities between the two pamphlets show clearly Pinsker’s influence on the young Birnbaum. Both the model of the development of nationalism Pinsker applies and, more important, the organic analysis of the idea of the nation were central to Birnbaum’s approach and would remain so. The apocalyptic tone of Pinsker’s pamphlet, the sense in his words that the crisis of Jewish history had reached its breaking point and action was required immediately, stoked Birnbaum’s furious commitment to his nationalist work. Pinsker’s words were a call to arms that he and his Kadimah colleagues heeded; while Smolenskin’s presence provided them with a rich fuel to power their enthusiasm,

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it was Pinsker who provided the spark that set their organization in motion. The timing alone of the organization of Kadimah is proof of this; although Birnbaum, Schnirer, and Bierer all professed their attraction to a national Jewish identity before 1882, Pinsker’s pamphlet galvanized their movement. And the Kadimah members were explicit about his influence. Pinsker, along with Smolenskin, was made an honorary member in the founding charter of Kadimah—even though, unlike Smolenskin, he had never met nor was he yet aware of the small organization—an indication of his central place in the movement’s pantheon.70 But the greatest homage to Pinsker came a short time later, in 1884, with the publication of the initial issue of Birnbaum’s most important literary effort to date, the nationalist newspaper Selbst-­ Emancipation, its title an explicit reference to Pinsker’s manifesto.71 Although Birnbaum’s quickly growing bibliography soon exceeded the influence of both Smolenskin and Pinsker, nearly all his writing as a Zionist was firmly rooted in the soil they prepared. The first issue of Selbst-Emancipation appeared on 1 February 1885, and the new nationalist newspaper became Birnbaum’s primary literary outlet for most of his early career. A far cry from the amateurish ­Megillah, it was a professional newspaper, a three-quarter-sized broadsheet in German gothic print that announced itself as “the newspaper for the national, social and political interests of the Jewish people [Stamm].” Beneath the masthead, an excerpt from a well-known statement by Rabbi Hillel from Ethics of the Fathers [Pirkei Avot], “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?,” captured the strident tone of national selfsufficiency that the journal espoused.72 Each issue was approximately twelve pages, with the back page devoted to advertisements. All contained short news summaries of interest to the Jewish nationalist community, samples of belles lettres, poetry, and fiction, including lengthy serialized pieces, usually on a nationalist theme—a common practice in newspapers of the day (including Smolenskin’s Ha-Shahar). After the tenth issue, Birnbaum introduced a regular serialization of Peretz Smolenskin’s short fiction translated into German. Most issues featured a small selection of games: word searches and other semantic amusements testing the reader’s knowledge of Jewish history and literature. But Birnbaum’s overriding presence defined Selbst-Emancipation. Aside from editing the paper and publishing transcripts of lectures he

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had given or attended and essays on Jewish history, his most important contribution was the opening essay he wrote for nearly every issue. At first, Birnbaum published each of these essays under his given name. In the seventeenth issue, a new name appears in the lead column: Nahum Nathan Agassi, Birnbaum’s first pseudonym, an amalgam of his German and Hebrew name and the Hebrew translation of his last name (pear tree). Birnbaum used the pseudonym to create another persona for himself within the pages of the newspaper, a common practice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals, particularly Jewish periodicals. In Selbst-Emancipation, Nahum Nathan Agassi became the newspaper’s strident polemical voice, while those articles that retained the byline “Nathan Birnbaum” became measured and rational, almost academic. Where Nathan Nahum Agassi would publish fiery articles attacking public figures, especially of the Viennese Jewish establishment, Nathan Birnbaum would compose erudite accounts of incidents in Jewish history. It is not likely that the pseudonym was intended to obscure the author’s identity, and it is probable that the readers of SelbstEmancipation knew that the two were one and the same person. When Birnbaum occasionally chose generic pseudonyms, such as “Benzion,” it is possible he intended to disguise himself in these cases.73 The collection of Birnbaum and Agassi essays represents a remarkable achievement for the young writer, to say nothing of the work that went into producing the newspaper itself. They record the development of Birnbaum’s early Zionist ideology and the aims of Kadimah in detail and chart his emergence as the voice of Kadimah and Viennese Jewish nationalism. The purpose of the paper was to advance the goals laid out by Kadimah and Smolenskin, to deepen and expand the national consciousness of Viennese Jewry. It aimed to create a Jewish nationalist public sphere, expanded beyond the walls of the small Kadimah Society reading room into the cafés and public spaces of Vienna and central Europe. It also sought to educate nascent Jewish nationalists, to reach out to those Jews who lacked the linguistic and cultural resources to encounter national Jewish culture in its native forms, such as available Hebrew journals and publications, but who sympathized with the idea of Jewish nationalism. Along with a ready-made set of nationalist goals and attitudes, it offered an introduction to modern Hebrew cultural figures such as Smolenskin through German translation, raising awareness

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of modern Hebrew and Jewish national culture. Its dismissive attitude toward the Viennese Jewish establishment was not aimed at winning converts from among the “assimilationists” but at rallying those who shared the Kadimah members’ alienation from them. Birnbaum and other contributors took pride in their status as critical outsiders and cultivated a radical tone in the newspaper designed to reflect the radical solution that Jewish nationalism offered. This intention was trumpeted from the very first page of the first issue. Fellow Jews! The life force that dwells in the body of the Jewish people is unchanging. Neither the hate-filled leaders of the wildest race baiters who labor from the outside for our downfall nor the worm of “national ennui” that devours us from within will strand us or cause the stubborn nature of our eternal people to shudder! . . . There are still Jewish men who believe in the fulfillment of the national hopes of Israel and wish to exert themselves to assist in this great work of salvation. Only the aspirations of these comrades, so driven and so steadfast, do [we] assist and encourage; those who feel themselves misdirected by the wishy-washy phrase “triumph of assimilation,” who wish to back the right horse, and to persuade all Jews that “national self-assistance” alone can and must be the watchword of our resolution; this is the mission set forth in these pages.74

To accomplish these aims, Birnbaum used the pages of Selbst-­ Emancipation to give an unflinching nationalist view of the state in which Viennese Jewry, and the Diaspora in general, found itself. The Jews were beset by two formidable enemies: anti-Semitism and assimilationism. These were intimately related, symbiotically feeding off one another; the self-loathing that produced the desire to assimilate—“assimilation mania”—was the result of unrelenting denigration by the anti-Semites. But each undermined the Jewish spirit in its own way. Anti-Semitism wore down the nation by magnifying and exaggerating its actual deficiencies and inventing others—and then demanding that the Jews overcome them to be treated with even basic humanity. “No person, no people is without deficiencies,” Birnbaum writes in “Our Faults.” “The earth is not a place where the purity of the angels can exist, and there is no light on it without its shadows.” As a collective of human beings, the Jewish nation had the same moral deficiencies as any other. But attending to the atti-

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tudes of the majority of non-Jews made Jewish deficiencies seem all the worse. “Certainly if we listen to three-quarters of the civilized world—if we are permitted to refer to this three-quarters with the sonorous name ‘anti-Semites’ . . . our dark souls [are] the deposit of all the evil and baseness under the sun, there is not a good hair on our heads.”75 These malignancies, according to anti-Semites, are the immutable characteristics of the Jewish race and can never be sufficiently overcome. This created an inescapable paradox: Jews must improve themselves to raise their situation, but, according to the anti-Semites, their flaws are terminal. And worst of all, this had come to be uncritically accepted by the Jews themselves. “Against such crushing arguments, unfortunately no response [is] advanced; our tongues must remain cleaved to our palates and our hearts must believe. . . . And we must also believe, if these three-quarters of the civilized world have discovered the reason for the darkness of our blackened souls, that it is through their authority that [we strive for] . . . our betterment—Oh wait, pardon me, we aren’t improvable!” The first goal of the Jewish nationalist, then, is to loudly call attention to this paradox. For Birnbaum, this begins with asking a few simple questions: “Are all our deficiencies really based in our race? Is the stuff from which we are created really so base, so dirty and filthy? Or are the origins of our deficiencies actually dependent on where one looks? Could it be true that a Moses, a Hillel, a Maimonides, a Spinoza is stamped from the same mold?”76 Obviously not. In fact, the anti-Semites have, through an act of transcendental envy, inverted both the significance of racial characteristics and their historic value. “It is not only unjust that the deficiencies of the Jews are sought specifically in their inferior race but it is to be contended on the contrary, that the smallest of these causes are attributable to this, and . . . that at any other point in history, these [characteristics] might appear as virtues. . . . This three-quarters of the civilized world must be reminded of this when they go to condemn us to death for our moral qualities.”77 Although external enemies are a threat to the Jewish people, most dangerous are the internal ones: Jewish advocates of assimilation. This subject was a favorite focus for Birnbaum; as Selbst-Emancipation matured, his need to expose and attack the “assimilationists,” or the Jews of the “Mosaic persuasion,” became almost obsessive. He confronted this amorphous group from a number of different directions. He attacked

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individual members of the imperial Jewish establishment whom he perceived as being particularly hostile to Jewish national interests—figures such as Emil Byk, a prominent Galician politician from Lemberg, being favorite targets. Byk, a complex figure in his multifaceted negotiations of identity and politics in the post-1867 period, was a founder of the Shomer Israel Society, which sought to organize the Jews of Galicia as a unified, liberal political voice. Throughout his long career, which stretched into the first decade of the twentieth century, he experimented with different political allegiances and finally settled in the 1870s as head of the Lemberg Jewish community and representative in the Reichs­ rat, on a pro-Polanization stance, which he advocated until his death in 1906. That he would attract the ire of more radical nationalists like Birnbaum in his success in establishing a Jewish coalition at the highest levels of Austro-Hungarian politics is not surprising, for he carried a level of exposure and gravity that early nationalists could only dream of. Also making him an obvious target was Byk’s staunch opposition to Jewish nationalism—that is, once its presence rose to a level that could attract his attention.78 In “Where Is Utopia?” Birnbaum responded ­acidly to Byk’s dismissal of Jewish nationalism as utopian. “One could find that which Herr Dr. Byk considers ‘utopian’ far more in his own camp. The belief that a people that has existed for four thousand years through the inner unity of religion can die as a people and continue to live with simply the stamp of a religious association; to believe that national confluence can take place without intermingling of blood; that the instinct of European peoples would not find this unnatural confluence most unwelcome, is this not even more a utopia, not more a fantasy?”79 Regardless of the complexity or rationale behind Byk’s attitude toward questions of nationality, language, and religion, he was just another symbol of assimilationist folly to Birnbaum. A Germanophile, then Polanophile, living in the heartland of the Jewish nation, he deluded himself into believing in the good of Jewish acceptance into Gentile society despite all evidence to the contrary. He thereby dismantled the sole means by which the Jewish people could survive, through fostering its transcendent peoplehood, instead replacing it with the empty vessel of a denationalized religious affiliation. “There really is no more elaborate flower in the realm of ‘utopia’ than the desire to believe that the Mosaic religion could have any further existence outside the

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Jewish people. . . . One must first let the Mosaic religion fall in order to make the Jewish people dwindle from the purity of peoplehood. Dr. Byk, whose is a utopia?”80 Taking on assimilationists of every stripe throughout the empire, among them many of the prominent Jewish citizens of Vienna, was a tactic that bolstered Birnbaum’s reputation among his readers and in Jewish nationalist circles and enhanced the radical credentials of his paper and himself. Another important strategy Birnbaum employed against assimilationism was to call into question its lexicon. Certain catchphrases, such as “Jews of the Mosaic faith,” “mission of the Jews,” and “light unto the nations,” had long been near-sacred concepts among liberal and ­assimilation-oriented Jewish thinkers and leaders. They were employed as a means of portraying the Jewish religion and its people sympathetically to non-Jews, of combating negative images of Jews as selfish, cliquish, and hostile to outsiders. In Birnbaum’s view, though, they were assimilationist doublespeak that attempted to denationalize the Jewish people and deprive them of the sole source of their cohesion, while at the same time evoking a false image of happy Jewish integration into majority society. Consider, for example, Birnbaum’s parsing of the phrase “of the Mosaic faith.” As the tart subtitle of Die Assimilationssucht shows—A Word to the So-Called Germans, Slavs, Magyars, etc., of the Mosaic Faith—Birnbaum’s distaste for the term was particularly strong and figured prominently in his attack on assimilationist language. Central European reformers had advocated the term since nearly the inception of the modernization movement in Judaism at the beginning of the nineteenth century; it was intended to show that Jews, like Protestant and Catholic Christians, viewed their faith as a private matter that did not impact their ability to be good citizens. To Birnbaum, use of the adjective “Mosaic” sullied the name of the greatest lawgiver—and national figure—in Jewish history, Moses. “The Mosaic law was the foundation of the Jewish state; more than that, it was the condition of its existence. Moses thus presented it to us, not simply as the founder of our religion but as the man who established our peoplehood; thus Moses is not only our first and greatest prophet; he is also our first and greatest national hero.” The appropriation of his name to describe those whom Birnbaum regards as Moses’s opposites (even if Birnbaum’s thoroughly nationalist reading of Moses is easily as creative as that of

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his opponents), those who seek to undermine the centrality of Jewish national identity as well as Jewish law, is absurd. “And the name Moses is indeed abused, when [one] attempts to designate with it those who intend to destroy our people. They oppose the ‘Mosaic teacher’ against the ‘Jewish people’—and how far one is removed through this process from the intentions of Moses!”81 Even more galling to Birnbaum were those words used that undermined the concept of Jewish nationality, in particular the idea of  the “mission” of the Jewish people. The root of the idea drew from the Jewish prophetic tradition to assert a universalist and open foundation of the Jewish religion. The Jews were a “light unto the nations,” having been granted the divine legislation of the Torah, and their dispersal among the nations was the ordained means of spreading the transcendent Judaic conception of ethics. It was a powerful apology for the purposefulness, even superiority of, the Diaspora and was particularly well suited to the agendas of those who advocated both religious reform and cultural integration. It reversed the traditional view of the exile as divine punishment exacted on Israel for its sins and made the Diaspora a sign of Jewish election, which was fortuitously facilitated by Jewish integration into the nations of the world. To Birnbaum this argument was but a bankrupt rationalization for assimilation with a long and disastrous history. “The ‘mission’ of the Jewish tribe is a word by which much mischief has and will be pursued. The idea has become a bludgeon for our professional assimilationists, with which they believe they express their entire foggy, muddle-headed ideology. . . . ‘Mission,’ ‘widening of the idea of God,’ ‘civilizing the nations,’ ‘bringing about the brotherhood of man,’ and so on, are all glimmering baubles . . . [that disguise] assimilationist goals . . . and as we will illustrate for all, Judaism has as many ‘missions’ as it has ‘missionaries,’ each of which has its own fatal history.”82 As with other words in the assimilationist dictionary, the concept of “mission” is a dangerous malignancy, further dissolving the national ties and eroding the national memory of the Jewish people. “The ‘mission’ of Judaism only illuminates with false light and only shows the necessity of its dissolution; however, it will stubbornly silence the very cultural work that is the true moral and spiritual heritage [of the Jews], [as well as] their distinctive historical situation and racial attributes, and thus quash the national idea . . . of Zion.”83

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Through this kind of steady attack on the ideals of assimilation, Birnbaum created a common measure for Jewish nationalists to identify the enemies of the national project. At the same time, he sought to build in place of the “false light” of assimilation a new edifice of Jewish national identity. As with his attacks on assimilation, Birnbaum applied a variety of strategies in fleshing out the structure of the new Jewish nationalism. Tearing down the advocates of assimilation, Birnbaum replaced them with a Jewish nationalist pantheon whose contribution to the Jewish people could serve as models for his audience. The first of these were Peretz Smolenskin and Leo Pinsker, both of whom appeared regularly in Birnbaum’s writing. Smolenskin’s death just before the appearance of the second issue of the journal provided an ideal occasion for a lengthy paean to the first fallen hero of Viennese Jewish nationalism. “The Jewish national movement in its modern form has lost a creator, one of its most energetic representatives. Peretz Smolenskin passed from life on the evening of the first and second of February of this year in Meran. When we call him the creator of the modern Jewish national movement, we do so with complete justification, for he was in fact the first . . . to bring Jewish national ideas to the fore, and in his striving for national unity has realized the dawn of a new day for his people.”84 It was not only Smolenskin’s position as a central figure in the revival of Hebrew but his personal attitude toward Judaism and, more important, the state of the Jews in Vienna that Birnbaum emphasized for the readers of Selbst-Emancipation. “Smolenskin’s Judaism was not some specious platitude, brushed up with the veneer of the ‘Berlin Enlightenment’—as the dead end of the assimilationists meant it—nor the weak, insecure moonshadow Judaism of the ‘only Mosaics.’ With the weapon of biting irony he took on the . . . ­chimeras of the peculiar dreamers who would cast aside their Jewish tribal affiliations like a worn garment; in the sweetest turn of a phrase he painted a different picture of national Jewry and left the reader with an idea of the bliss of the future of Israel.”85 Smolenskin’s optimism, his bona fides as one who lived through and rejected the falsehoods of the “Berlin ­Haskalah,” and his steadfast passion for the national future of Israel were traits Birnbaum identified with and wished to accentuate, regardless of how central they were to Smolenskin himself. Birnbaum sought to create national heroes of Smolenskin, and later Pinsker; his portraits

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were hagiographies in which what mattered most was how each embodied the ideals of Kadimah. The canon of nationalist heroes was soon broadened in Selbst-­ Emancipation’s pages. Birnbaum drew on historical figures as well as less obvious contemporaries. Along with the national lawgiver Moses, the Maccabees again make an appearance, one of many in the literature of Jewish nationalism. In a series of two articles culled from a speech given to the Kadimah Society around Hanukkah of 1885, Birnbaum describes the exploits of Judah Maccabee and, with particular affection, of his father, Mathias. “Judah had in his father an illuminating example after which to model himself. Old Mathias bewailed endlessly to his sons the trials of their nation, the undermining of their beliefs; he declared death better than such a life and dressed his family in mourning garments—it is precisely this last gesture, so insignificant in and of itself, that demonstrated more than anything the patriotic agony that consumed him.”86 It is easy to understand Birnbaum’s fondness for Mathias given this description and the deep intellectual kinship that led him to adopt the name as his most famous pseudonym years later. About Judah himself Birnbaum also derives important lessons of character for the present-day Jewish nationalist. “Judah Maccabee was the one who . . . [embodied] the ideal of self-sufficiency [Selbsthilfe]—self-sufficiency in the noblest sense of the word, [meaning] auto-emancipation, so very necessary for the Jewish people today. He strode forward with this principle in opposition to the core of obscurantist Hasidim. . . . He strode forward in opposition to the indifference [of the Hellenists].”87 To drive home his point, Birnbaum draws the explicit parallels to his own time: “[Judah Maccabee] is, sadly, recognized by all too few of our people, and sadly to even fewer does he appear as an illuminating model. On the one hand is the modern form of Hasidism, an overwrought sanctimoniousness rather than [true] religiosity; on the other, the modern embodiment of the Hellenists, the assimilationists, and the assimilated.”88 Another interesting addition to Birnbaum’s pantheon was a contemporary figure, Sir Moses Montefiore.89 In the summer of 1885, Birnbaum devoted an entire front page of Selbst-Emancipation, complete with a black band across the masthead, to memorialize Montefiore’s death. Interestingly, while Birnbaum lauds Montefiore for the many financial contributions he made over his life to support Jews in Palestine

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(the Jerusalem colonies of Mishkenot Sha’ananim and Yemin Moshe, with its landmark windmill, being his most familiar projects), the article primarily delineates the traits that made him (in Birnbaum’s view) a proto-Jewish nationalist. “All the beautiful and noble traits of the Jewish character, all the bright qualities of the Hebrew tribe inherited through their connection to the chosen people, were embodied in Moses Montefiore. He was a true son of Israel and grasped that no other people honored more the splendid notion that love for humanity and national feeling need not be in opposition. . . . Moses Montefiore did not let his passionate national sympathies turn into blind hatred toward people of other groups; nor did he allow his all-encompassing love for humanity to turn him to indifference toward his own people.”90 In other words, he embodied the golden mean of love for nation and respect for others Birnbaum described in Die Assimilationssucht. Like others of his pantheon, Montefiore was included to be instructive to Birnbaum’s readership, to give German-speaking Jews sympathetic to Jewish nationalism a paradigm to emulate. Nationalist pedagogy was pursued in the pages of Selbst-­Emancipation in other ways as well. Birnbaum used its pages to develop theories of nationalism he first laid out in Die Assimilationssucht to instruct his readers in the meaning of concepts such as nation, race, and peoplehood. He analyzed the predominance of nationalism as the future of human social organization, the role of race in forming group identity, and the centrality of both to the future of the Jewish people. Finally, he theorized about the prerequisites of creating an integral Jewish national identity moving forward through language, literature, and education. Because of the catastrophic success of assimilation in implanting a deep aversion to the idea of Jews as a national group, Birnbaum assumed his readership to be completely uninformed about the larger importance of nationalism. So dear was the delusion of successful assimilation to Viennese Jews that they were caught unprepared for the persistence and increasing virulence of anti-Semitism and thus lacked the tools necessary to combat it. By maintaining this intentional mass ignorance, Jewry had placed itself in a dangerous position and had been left behind as other nations gravitated toward more intensive nationalism:. “All of Europe has come to learn of the striking revolution of the powerful idea, carried with burning enthusiasm by its messengers: the triumph

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of the idea of the nation . . . [that] has penetrated all people on its road to victory,” Birnbaum wrote in 1885. “Only one persists in its stubborn opposition, one people who would benefit from it more than any other: the Jews.”91 They had misread the direction of human development at their own peril. Birnbaum believed emerging nationalism to be the logical progression of society toward its most elemental, and natural, form of organization. That the Jews mistook the central components of nationalism, that is, a deep racial and cultural affinity, for its more superficial and imitable manifestations, such as culture, was their greatest folly. It was impossible for a Jew, no matter how perfect his German (or Czech or Hungarian), to belong to one of these groups on an intrinsic level. “A people’s understanding [of itself] and its particular characteristics can be clarified through nothing other than natural history,” Birnbaum asserts. With a glib reference to (converted Christian) Benjamin Disraeli, he continues, “ ‘Race is everything’ says our great fellow tribe member Lord Beaconsfield. In the particularity of one’s race is the particularity of one’s people. It is in racial difference that national diversity is founded.”92 It is only through understanding race and its role in culture that one can understand a people, not the other way around, as culture is merely the reflection of the shared organic group sentiments. “[It is] by dint of r­ acial opposition that the Germans or Slavs think and feel differently than the Jew; it is in these oppositions that enlightenment is to be sought: that the Germans created the Niebelungenlied; the Jews, the Bible. How completely and utterly laughable is the notion that the intrinsic particularities of the Germans would be revealed by the Niebelungenlied, the particularities of the Jews by the Bible. Would we not call this a senseless confusion of cause and effect?”93

The National Core: Race and Nation in Birnbaum’s Early Writing This focus on race was the cornerstone of his early nationalism, and it remained a central element of his thought for decades. Although other elements of his early Zionism mutated or fell away altogether, Birnbaum was convinced that racial characteristics defined group affinities

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and were collectively no less than the mechanism by which nations coalesced. They were the one immutable aspect of human differentiation, and attempts to consciously contravene them—most obviously through assimilating into a foreign nation—were an affront to nature, an obstacle to human development, and doomed to failure. The tenacity with which Birnbaum clung to race as the definitive source of human characteristics is his major innovation in his early Zionism.94 While some core notion of intrinsic difference had always lain at the core of nationalism, neither Smolenskin nor Pinsker, Birnbaum’s two major influences, had focused as specifically on racial theory to explain national difference. Although Birnbaum offers only cursory consideration of the interaction of race and nation building—although he would return to them later and in much greater detail, in the 1896 essay Die jüdische Moderne—he nevertheless employs racialist terminology consistently and early in his writing. In the 1880s, it sufficed for Birnbaum to point out the depth of racial characteristics and their manifestation in national attributes, the first and most important being language. Like Smolenskin, Birnbaum accepted the key component of romantic nationalism that language was more than a tool of communication; it was a transcendent repository of a nation’s essential being. “What is language other than the product of a people’s unique spirit and feeling? The characteristics of race determine the characteristics of thought and sympathies of a people, and these then create the characteristics of language.”95 This is not to suggest that nation could not exist without language, for both nation and language were rooted in the immutable element of identity, race. “It is not because the German people speak German that they are German, for if the German language was forgotten, they would nevertheless remain [entrenched] in their racial peculiarity. . . . If we apply this example to the Jews . . . Jews remain Jews, [even those who have] forgotten Hebrew and jargon [Yiddish] through external pressures and dwell in another language, for the simple reason that their racial peculiarities persist to the present day.”96 But even if it is not necessary for the survival of a people, denial and suppression of national language, a characteristic so essential to a group’s identity, the means by which it can authentically articulate its spirit, cannot occur without crippling results. The result can only be, as Birnbaum believes the history of assimilation has shown, a group that is neither here nor there (a “ghost nation” in ­Pinsker’s

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terms); it is in the pitiable position of neither being accepted by other national groups nor having the tools to advance its own national aims. Acquisition of language is a key step to rectifying this situation. “Yes, were knowledge of Hebrew restored, ­Israel would be a thousand times more enviable, nearer to its salvation.”97 Interestingly, the physical manifestation of Jewish national salvation through creating a Jewish nation in Palestine played a minor role in the first incarnation of Selbst-Emancipation. Birnbaum devotes little column space to detailing plans of resettlement, political negotiations, or advocating collective migration to Palestine by his devoted readers; nor does he go to great efforts to call for mass action or agitation. More important at that stage was to raise basic awareness of the need for a Jewish national movement. At that time it was not at all self-evident to most Viennese Jews that adopting a nationalist ideology was a solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. Birnbaum thus focused during these early years on motivating his small readership to take into its own hands the task of national self-education. He recognized that without a clear sense of the role national identity played in securing the future of the Jewish people, talk about the practical work of establishing a state was premature. In “How Much Longer?” Birnbaum underscores his self-­perception as being primarily a propagandist and educator spreading the basic ideas of Jewish nationalism, especially through beating the drum of the degraded situation of Diaspora Jewry and its solution in national self-sufficiency. The role that the Jewish tribe plays in our day is the role of a lackey, and so long as it wishes to continue playing this role, it can and will be nothing other than a pitiful caricature of the great ancient Hebrew people. Faced with this sad state of affairs, it thus falls to all who have eyes to gaze upon our disgrace, and ask the question: “How much longer?” The answer to this question is not so difficult to find as one would perhaps believe; rather it is quite simple: “So long as we want it!” It is in ourselves, and nowhere else, that the power lies to turn our servitude into freedom, to rise from the depth of our degradation into the heights of a respected existence.98

Selbst-Emancipation ceased publication after about a year and a half, not a bad showing among small-scale central European periodicals. An offshoot of the newspaper, Serubabel, was published for a short time in

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Berlin, and although Birnbaum contributed to it, his role in that paper was much smaller. In 1890, Birnbaum received backing to restart SelbstEmancipation under his full editorial control as a biweekly publication (although as “head editor” [Chefredaktor], he now shared the masthead with “publisher” Siegmund Elkan). Why the newspaper’s publication was interrupted is unclear. One obvious explanation is a lack of funding. As Birnbaum himself would later write to ­Theodor Herzl, the main financial source used to found the newspaper had been Birnbaum’s modest fifteen hundred–gulden inheritance from his father, which he likely depleted quickly. As with most periodicals of its type, Selbst-Emancipation would have been expected, after its initial appearance, to garner enough subscriptions to sustain itself. But printing and distributing a newspaper, even one with so small a circulation as Selbst-Emancipation, cost money, and though we lack a clear sense of the extent of its readership, covering costs was probably a persistent issue. The newspaper may also have been the victim of the demands of family life on the young Birnbaum. In his short autobiography, “An Account of My Life,” Birnbaum writes: “In the beginning of 5648 [1888], I received my doctorate in law at Vienna University, and afterward I began to work in a legal office. In the summer of 5650 [1890], I was married to my wife, Rosa (from the Korngut family, Galician Jews in Vienna). . . . I did not like legal work and after four years I left the profession and devoted myself full time to writing and [activist] work.” 99 The years 1886–90 were eventful for Birnbaum: he completed his law degree, began legal practice, and married Rosa Korngut, his companion for the remainder of her life (she died just a few years before her husband, in 1934). The couple’s first son, Solomon (Shlomo) Asher, was born in 1891, followed by two others, Menachem and Uriel. It was one thing for Birnbaum to devote all of his time and resources to a cause like Jewish nationalism when he was a single university student; it was quite another when he had mouths to feed. The family’s financial situation was precarious enough that Rosa became a secretary to contribute to the family income, and the young Birnbaum made an attempt to support them as a lawyer, which explains both his reduced participation in Serubabel and the folding of Selbst-Emancipation. Although he gave up his legal career a short time later to devote all his time to Jewish nationalism, earning a scant living through his publications, he seems

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to at least have attempted to set aside the passion of his student years and with it his leading role in the movement’s first formal publication. This changed after 1890, when Selbst-Emancipation began its second life, again under Birnbaum’s editorial control, back in Vienna. The paper picked up as if there had been no break in publication; besides a slight change to the masthead (a new, more modern font for the title; a different subtitle—now the newspaper was the Organ of Jewish Nationalism; and a new Leopoldstadt address, Grosse Schiffgasse no. 28), its layout and form remained the same. It even continued numerically where the old had left off, starting with volume 3, number 1, in April 1890. This was just as Birnbaum wanted it: to him it was not a break from the first version, as he asserts in a short introduction at the beginning of the first new volume. “After a several-year pause we continue, in every sense newly empowered—particularly through the assistance of most of the editorial staff of Serubabel, published in the interim in Berlin. Our purpose and method remain the same. It is the welfare of our people, and their national rebirth is the way to achieve it. We will turn to it with dignity and with decorum, but also with decisiveness.”100 Birnbaum continued his tireless reportage on news of interest to the Jewish nationalist movement, his dedication to promoting Hebrew belles lettres and other essays like occasional historical sketches in its pages, and most visibly his anchoring opening essay. The same goal of educating a new generation of nationalists remained the paper’s primary objective. But for all its continuity, there was a subtle change in the tone of the renewed Selbst-Emancipation. A metonym for this change was a new word that became Nathan Birnbaum’s best-known contribution to the popular history of Jewish nationalism: “Zionism.” Beginning with the first issue of the new edition, Birnbaum began to consciously use an adjective of his own invention, zionistische, and a short time later the noun Zionismus as the default designation for Jewish nationalism.101 Coining the term was perhaps a small thing in Birnbaum’s mind, one of the many neologisms and turns of phrase sprinkled liberally throughout his writings. But it illustrates the influence of Birnbaum’s writing over the growing coterie of Jewish nationalists that it quickly became the name for the movement as a whole, until alternative forms of Jewish nationalism developed that were not based on Jewish settlement in Palestine. The term symbolized

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a new addition to the journal’s previous mission of education, a more aggressive call to organization and agitation. Birnbaum had become convinced over the four-year hiatus of his groundbreaking periodical that a critical mass of support had been reached, and the time had come to embrace the tools of agitation and mass politics. This new audaciousness was apparent from Birnbaum’s very first essay in the new series, “The Honor and Welfare of Our People.” The essay begins with a reiteration of the dangers of anti-Semitism and assimilation familiar to his readers. He repeats his belief that assimilation was impossible and dangerous because it confused cultural characteristics that can be adapted with their true, racial basis, which was immutable. But now, perhaps because of his sense that the deterioration of Jewish life in Europe had continued unabated, Birnbaum concluded that the time was ripe for more direct action. To him the most obvious sign that the time was ripe was the measured success of Zionist settlement in Palestine. “So many skeptics who laughed at the ‘Palestinians’ [as advocates of Zionist settlement in Ottoman Palestine were called] and their ‘chimeras’ at first have in merely a few years turned and become warm friends of the colonization idea—simply through the power of its success. It is worth hoping that the realization of the feasibility of the Zionist idea will widen its circles ever more. . . . Israel will indeed finally be determined to be in the right, which is where true progress is to be sought.”102 Birnbaum’s optimism here is both palpable and perplexing. It reflects his excitement at the rejuvenation of his own pet project and the continuation of his career as a leading voice of Zionism. But at the same time it also overlooks the dismal state of the small Jewish colonies in Palestine and exaggerates to an absurd degree, if not inventing outright, a sea change in support for them. Yet overwrought claims about the success of Zionist colonization were the norm in Birnbaum’s circles. Indeed, the shatteringly critical essay by Ahad Ha’am, “The Truth from the Land of Israel,” which appeared in 1891, was devastating in its revelations of the tenuous state of the Zionist project in Palestine largely because of the overly optimistic views of Birnbaum and others. Nevertheless, given the ominous growth of anti-Semitism in Vienna during the 1880s and early 1890s, he likely did perceive some increased interest in Zionism. His words are, however, prescient; he demonstrates here an uncanny sensitivity to trends in Jewish society that he would dem-

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onstrate again and again in his career. For it was not merely optimism that led him to assume such a triumphant tone; although in 1890 Zionism was still a struggling ideology, by the end of the decade it would emerge as a significant force on the Jewish political scene. A shift in Birnbaum’s political sophistication is another important change in the new Selbst-Emancipation. In the early essays, Birnbaum’s thought on political theory was circumscribed and vague. A youthful disenchantment with establishment Viennese liberalism, which he identified with the Viennese Jewish elite, was the only really consistent theme in his political views. But his rejection was not based on the idea of liberalism as a general political principle; rather, it was his belief that Austrian liberalism had become no more than an enabling ideology for assimilation, a disingenuous worldview that made promises to unwitting Jews that it could not keep. The liberal establishment, realizing that it was entering a steady descent, cynically manipulated the historic oppression of the Jewish people and their desperate desire for acceptance to help prop up its decrepit institutions, and then left Jews in the lurch when the forces of change lashed out against them. For all his vitriol toward liberalism, Birnbaum never spoke one way or another about its nobler aspects, such as the ideals of an elective democracy, equal rights, and free markets. In spite of their political content, strangely, one cannot determine from his early essays what he actually thought about abstract politics or political theory. With the second incarnation of Selbst-Emancipation Birnbaum began to develop his ideas about these issues. He formulated a novel political worldview, which he would later elaborate into a full-fledged political philosophy of “racial materialism,” but which in the early 1890s was an exercise in unifying two seemingly disparate political ideologies, socialism and nationalism. He reveals that, far from being as radical in his belief about political theory as he was in Jewish nationalism, in regard to the nature of the state and politics, he most resembled a moderate socialist.103 The goal of Jewish nationalism became less amorphous: the realization of the Jewish state was to see with it the creation of a true system of social justice. “Every son of his people is of equal worth to every other and has the same claim to the achievements of the nation, [and to the extent that this is] not realized, neither is it authentic nationalism but rather small-minded racist darkness.”104 Fascinatingly, and

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without any obvious consciousness of the irony given his earlier essays, Birnbaum adopts a version of the “mission of the Jews” rhetoric. “[The idea of equality] is by no means new; it is the essence of Judaism. The greatest prophets of the Israelite people delineated in misty antiquity in their own splendid way the unity of peoplehood and mankind in the double-image of the messianic ideal. Zion’s golden future and the whole of humanity’s final resolution rose together as one for the great seers of the Jewish past.”105 Birnbaum believed his to be an innovative position from both a nationalist and a socialist perspective, yet he was prepared to answer critics from both sides. On the one hand, nationalists who downplayed the value of social justice were nothing but chauvinists. On the other, the “socialist-ultras” would never be able to see beyond their utopias to realize that only within the context of the nation could individuals be assured of receiving their full rights. The embrace of socialist internationalism by some Jews was no more than another form of assimilation, a denial of national being and an attempt at “inorganic” insertion into European society. “We must not forget the solution of the social question and the victory of democratic principles as we build toward our final goal . . . [nor] that the solution of social questions [is impossible] through our inorganic insertion in the national inventions of Europe. . . . [Rather] we must gather all our spiritual and physical power to make our necessary demands for independent operation in the national-social relationship.”106 The interplay between the nation and the social good became an essential part of Birnbaum’s Zionist thought—as well as one of the most misunderstood. His use of the terms “socialism” and “materialism” led superficial readers to conclude that he had become an internationalist— the very type he explicitly derides in passages such as the previous one. The most conspicuous figure to make this mistake was Theodor Herzl, who wrote off Birnbaum as a “socialist” explicitly as early as their first meeting in 1896. In reality, Birnbaum was following an intellectual path with an important pedigree. It was closely related to the philosophy of an early socialist, then proto-Zionist Moses Hess, whose “Rome and Jerusalem” Birnbaum had become acquainted with at the time.107 While Hess never rose to the same level of influence over Birnbaum’s thought as Smolenskin and Pinsker, his belief that human progress toward social equality could be accomplished only through Jewish national self-

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actualization attracted Birnbaum during the 1890s. Indeed, well after Birnbaum had parted ways with organized Zionism, this idea would drive much of the leftist camp within more mature Zionism, eventually becoming a core element of prestate and Israeli identity.108 The most pronounced characteristic distinguishing Birnbaum’s writing in the new Selbst-Emancipation from the old, however, was a call for a new strategy for the Jewish national movement. His aim now was to lead the transition of Zionism from a small-time club of enthusiasts to a true mass political movement. Where in his earlier writings as a member and president of Kadimah, Birnbaum had written with relatively modest goals in mind for his movement—cultivating a basic national consciousness among assimilated Viennese Jews—after 1890 his ambitions widened considerably. Although continuing to labor toward national edification, he also looked increasingly toward the concerns facing the wider Jewish nation, especially eastern European Jewry. It was this last element, intensified interest in the “Ostjuden” and their economic plight, that became a prominent fixture in the renewed SelbstEmancipation. Poverty and social unrest in these areas were bad and getting worse, punctuated by occasional outbursts of anti-Semitic violence. Like many of his Zionist contemporaries, Birnbaum drew the conclusion that mass immigration to a Jewish commonwealth was the only solution. “This suffering can be mitigated only by a one-way ticket of immigration from eastern Europe, with which the immigrant embarks upon a truly long-term deliverance. . . . [And] there is one and only one ideal land to which this way leads: to Palestine, where a new, strong Jewish agricultural lifestyle can emerge!”109 Of course, calls for mass immigration to Palestine and of economic regeneration, ideally through turning Jews from trade to agriculture, were not new. What was new for Birnbaum were both the intensity of his new attention to it and his belief that Viennese Zionism needed to be reoriented to address the needs of eastern European Jews. It marks Birnbaum’s first attempt to broaden Jewish nationalism beyond university-centered Kadimah and to stake a claim for Vienna being a center of Jewish nationalism in Europe. The earlier themes of the psychic, social, and national illness plaguing the Jewish people in exile were joined or even displaced in Birnbaum’s new rhetoric by a critique of liberalism, a call for economic reorientation of the Jewish people, and the urgency for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Discovering the Nation

“For the illness of the Jewish people there is but one cure: the return to its own nationality in the territorial, social, physical, and spiritual sense. It is this method alone [that has been] overlooked or rejected by our tribe members dwelling in exile, and [in particular] by the liberal party [posing] as the messiah of the Jews. . . . The idea of colonizing the holy land with Jewish farmers is an elemental social undertaking that will be constructed through the beginning of the national and physical rebirth of Israel.”110 With this goal in mind, Birnbaum’s essays open up other new themes not present in his earlier writings. One of these is the “dual loyalty” accusation, a perennial issue confronting Jewish nationalists. Long present, albeit in slightly different form, in accusations lodged against Jews in exile—that Jewish religious and clan loyalties rendered any loyalty to the state as suspect—it stood to reason that adding a new, national loyalty to this mix would only intensify the problem, leading to even greater persecution of innocent Jews. But, Birnbaum argues, the true impact will be just the opposite. “It is obvious,” he writes, “that the Zionist program outlined here does not commit the disservice to patriotism that is often expected. The love for Zion will be combined with the purest love of one’s birthplace. Indeed, the realization of a Palestine ideal can only strengthen the patriotism of those remaining in exile: with the loss in power and meaning of Jew hatred resulting from the realization of the Zionist ideal in all respects, the bitterness that now so often creeps and seeps into the patriotism of the Jews will weaken.”111 The most important new element of Birnbaum’s Zionism, however, is a robust call for the formation of a Zionist political party and mass agitation for its goals. In an essay that he and others would regard as seminal in the progress toward an organized Zionist movement, Birnbaum writes in “The New Course” that Jewish nationalism must begin to reorient itself and transcend its present state as a movement of literary societies and intellectual clubs to become a mass political movement. “The New Course” begins with a critique of his Russian counterparts, the members of the various Hovevei Zion associations. The small Zionist societies of Russia had largely followed a strategy of “practical” Zionism; that is, they confined their activities to support of the small colonies in Zionism rather than through mass organization and political pressure. They did this even though they had had much higher num-

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bers and much greater depth of support in Russian Jewish society than in central Europe. However, their quietist approach neither strengthened nor widened Zionism in Russia; on the contrary, it caused a net loss in numbers supporting the movement. Young, disenfranchised, angry Jews had turned from the Zionists to other revolutionary movements, perceiving weakness in the lack of Zionist agitation. It thus fell to the Austrian Jewish nationalists to take on the mantle and assume leadership in transforming Zionism into a mass movement. “­Agitation! This is the magic word that will open the hearts of our fellows. If we in Austria agitate, we will thus certainly bring about an end.”112 In Birnbaum’s estimation the nature of Zionism had changed by 1890. In the years since the young members of Kadimah first met to establish their society, the movement in central Europe had matured to become a “new course” in Jewish history, a force with the potential to bring the Jewish world to its side and its demands to the streets, to create a true mass movement. “Zionism . . . already represents a new course in Judaism. Now is the time for the inner workings of Zionism to follow this new course: to strive for its goals through constructing a great Zionist party for the people’s edification and the people’s instruction. For this work we call on all our fellow idealists [Gesinnungsgenossen] outside and inside Russia.”113 The call to mass organization was a major turning point in Birnbaum’s thought. It demanded a new form of Zionism, altering both its philosophy and young institutions. It was also a personal statement that symbolized Birnbaum’s full commitment to a life’s course he embarked upon as a teenager. At the time, abandoning his law practice and devoting himself entirely to Zionism seemed an obvious decision. By the middle of the 1890s, he was the preeminent Zionist figure in Vienna and had laid the rhetorical groundwork for the emergence of a mass political party of Jewish nationalists. But the unexpected arrival of a new figure on the Jewish nationalist stage, a popular feuilletonist hitherto unknown among Zionist circles, Theodor Herzl, would impact Birnbaum’s place in the movement in a way none could have predicted.

Two  New Conflicts, New Directions Birnbaum’s New Nationalist Course and the Arrival of Herzl

At the end of the 1880s, Nathan Birnbaum’s position as a central figure in Viennese Zionism seemed unassailable. As a founder of the Kadi­ mah Society he had a sterling nationalist reputation and was familiar internationally to readers of the Jewish nationalist press through his newspaper Selbst-Emancipation. He had even coined the name by which Palestine-centered Jewish nationalism was increasingly becoming identified, “Zion­ism.” Selbst-Emancipation itself, despite ceasing publication between 1886 and 1890, resumed in 1890 and continued to be the main Zionist publication in Vienna. Birnbaum’s stature was such that it was he who introduced to the German-speaking public the work of another Zionist luminary, Ahad Ha’am, when the first issue of the journal ­Ha-Shiloah emerged (as well as being invited to contribute to its pages in later issues).1 Birnbaum’s own journal survived well into the 1890s with the new title Jüdische Volkszeitung. Birnbaum had also established himself as a leader and inspiration to the growing number of adherents to the Jewish national movement throughout central Europe. Through his connections to cells of various Zionist groups—among them the Bulgarian Hovevei Zion under the leadership of fellow Kadimah founder Reuben Bierer, the various Maccabee societies, and a number of others throughout central Europe— Birnbaum was well apprised of and wrote frequently on the issues facing the movement as a whole. His circle of associates represented a who’s who of early Zionist figures, including Moshe Schalit, Bierer, Moritz Schnirer, and Max Landau. He was a prized speaker at the numerous Hanukkah and Passover Feieren (festive evenings) that dotted the Jewish nationalist calendar. His stature was such that even after his defection

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from Zionism and well into the 1900s, Birnbaum and his Zion­ist ideals continued to inspire various factions within the movement. By 1890, Birnbaum had clearly defined the key points of his view of Zionism and in so doing completed the intellectual contribution that he would make to the movement. He had expanded on the core ideas of the two dominant voices in his early development as a nationalist, ­Peretz Smolenskin and Leo Pinsker, and fleshed out nearly a full program of Zionism that he described in his essays throughout the 1890s.2 Having read Pinsker’s Autoemancipation as a teenager, he accepted that there was an incurable strain of anti-Semitism in European culture and that the only solution that would preserve the Jewish people was the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. But in addition to advocating physical relocation, Birnbaum argued for a cultural regeneration. The Jewish people, he believed, had lost a living tie to their authentic national culture because of the dual malevolent forces of failed assimilation and clerical inertia, whether they abandoned it willingly for the salon or the baptismal font or blindly surrendered it to the meek defeatism of ossified religious dogma. Or, as in the case of his favorite polemical target, the Viennese communal establishment he regularly criticized, both at once. To Birnbaum, the main goal of Jewish nationalism was to restore a lost authentic Jewish culture. It would not resemble the western European Jewish world, nor the world of traditional Orthodoxy, but would be a modern rebirth of the national identity of pre-exilic Israel— or more precisely, the world of state, national culture, and language that Birnbaum and others imagined it to have been. In this orientation, Birnbaum’s attitude was generally shared by most early Zionists, from the circle around the Odessa Hovevei Zion to the various small nationalist clubs and societies that could be found in many central European towns and cities. Hebrew was to be the national language of the Jews, replete with its own rich literature and artistic production. Jews would once again live in and cultivate the land of Israel as a productive and primarily agrarian people, in tune with the rhythms of the Jewish calendar (in a civic, not religious sense), and replace with a national identity the creaking and dusty Judaism of the exile. The task of educating the Jewish people in exile, of giving them the knowledge of history, language, and culture and especially the requisite political consciousness required

New Conflicts, New Directions

to create a Jewish nation-state, was as important as seeking the means to establish an actual state, if not more so. Of course, neither Birnbaum nor others dedicated to this approach were uninterested or uninvolved in pursuing a sovereign Jewish state, but for him it was and remained the more distant goal. Like the Hovevei Zion, the primarily Russian expression of the same broad national renewal movement, Birnbaum was enthusiastic about the development on the ground in the Palestinian yishuv conditions favorable to furthering nationalist goals. But like some factions within the Odessa Hovevei Zion, most famously represented by Ahad Ha’am and his secretive B’nei Moshe group, Birnbaum was far more interested in the construction of a Jewish national culture than in the practical concerns, many of them insurmountable in the short term, of settlement activity in Ottoman Palestine.3 This was reiterated again and again in Birnbaum’s publications, from the very earliest handwritten manuscripts in Megillah, well into the 1890s, and his contributions to the new standard among Zionist publications, Theodor Herzl’s Die Welt. His view, shared by others, would become a cornerstone of Zionism, even as it was moderated to seize on the opportunity of statehood advocated by Herzl and others. Between 1890 and 1896, Birnbaum’s publications revealed a subtle yet significant shift in his interests and ideals. It was not an immediate break—indeed, some articles that seemed to advocate a sudden change of course appeared simultaneously with more familiar views. But a deviation from what were solidifying into the central goals of the Zionist movement gradually coalesced in his writings. Turning from the issues of land, Hebrew language, and anti-Semitism, Birnbaum widened his spectrum of interests. He began to advocate activism not to achieve a distant goal but rather to secure a present state of safety and rights of the Jewish people. As the 1890s progressed, Birnbaum became increasingly preoccupied with the severe physical crisis faced by European Jewry in addition to the spiritual-national one that had previously been his focus. Since the Russian anti-Jewish riots of the early 1880s that had spurred him and others to action, to the periodic emergence of blood libel accusations, Jewish life in all corners of Europe seemed increasingly unstable in his view. In Birnbaum’s estimation, the advance of liberalism, long the vehicle upon which Jews had placed their expectations for future engagement with European society, had been halted and

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seemed unlikely to progress further. This left Jews throughout Europe, from the liberal states of the west to the Russian Empire, in a dire situation with few options. A new sense of urgency thus underscored Birnbaum’s thought in the 1890s. While he continued his activities in the Zionist movement, his opinion of what was to be done to relieve the struggles of European Jewry began to diverge from an emerging and increasingly inflexible Zionist line. As time went on, he became preoccupied with theoretical models not previously applied to Zionism, in particular a socialist-tinged folkism. He experimented with a new type of nationalist party identity, the Jewish People’s Party (Jüdische Volkspartei), which he defined as a pragmatic, ecumenical approach to Jewish politics based on a common sense of Jewish national identity rather than political doctrine. Although to him these new interests did not mean abandonment of Zionism, not everyone saw it this way. Regardless of the subtleties of his developing thought in the 1890s, everything changed in the middle of the decade with the appearance of Theodor Herzl. While no single factor led Birnbaum to ultimately turn his back on Zionism, the sudden and explosive growth of the movement under Herzl’s leadership and Birnbaum’s inability to find a place within it certainly played a significant role. The shift in his interests over the course of the 1890s, coupled with the rigidifying platform of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), meant that Birnbaum would not remain in Herzl’s movement for long. It is thus essential to understand the impact of Herzl’s sudden appearance on Birnbaum and the Jewish nationalist community as a whole to understand Birnbaum’s evolving relationship with and alienation from Zionism.

Birnbaum and Herzl The year 1896 was a watershed in the parochial world of Jewish nationalism. Once cocooned in small reading clubs, salons, and semisecret societies, or focused on fund-raising for struggling Zionist communities in Ottoman Palestine, with Herzl’s appearance the movement suddenly burst into public view. To the early Zionists, this change came from nowhere. Although many, especially in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, probably had some knowledge of Herzl through the columns he wrote

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as a popular feuilletonist in the highly regarded Neue Freie Presse, he never showed publicly the slightest interest in the obscure nationalist movement. After his pamphlet appeared, however, this did not matter. With complete indifference to the preexisting world of Jewish nationalism or its pieties and squabbles, Herzl appeared, asserted his ownership of the movement, began his crusade of diplomacy with world leaders, and organized the First Zionist Congress—all between February 1896 and August 1897. The sheer velocity with which he transformed the Zionist scene, totally reconstructing the fifteen-year-old movement in his image and to suit his vision, left the old Zionist guard reeling. Above all, Herzl’s appearance signified an ultimatum to all those who had preceded him, including Birnbaum: either join with his movement—a movement whose accomplishments seemed on their face (and thanks in no small part to Herzl’s genius at self-presentation) to dwarf in a year what the staid Zionist societies had done in ten—or fall by the wayside. Herzl himself made this choice clear as he succeeded in recasting the entire movement. For the small cadre of Zionist leaders who had previously felt unconstrained in shaping the ideals of the movement, there was uncertainty about how to cope with the sudden challenge. The tension between Herzl and Birnbaum appeared early in their relationship—even before they had met. Despite the rancor that would eventually sabotage any possibility of their working together, what is most noticeable to the outside observer is how similar the two were.4 They were nearly the same age, and both were children of migrants to the large urban centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—Herzl’s father, Jakob, to Budapest and the Birnbaums to Vienna. Both had almost identical educations (the Gymnasium, gateway to an elite university education), and both were law students and received their degrees from Vienna University (Herzl completed his in 1884, the same year in which the young law student Birnbaum and his colleagues formed Kadimah). Both made their living as writers and journalists and had cultivated reading publics: Herzl had a wide popular audience as a columnist; Birnbaum, more narrowly known to the readers of his self-edited papers and journals. As playwrights and poets, both were drawn to the belles lettres.5 Of course, deeper differences lurked beneath the surface. Herzl’s father used his business prowess to rise to head a major Budapest banking firm and marry into the city’s Jewish elite; Birnbaum’s mother and

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father remained among the modest Jewish middle class in ­Vienna’s Leopoldstadt. Although too much could be made of these social distinctions, the interactions between the two men show an awareness of their relative status at play. Herzl was a wealthy, well-dressed, and well-connected journalist with an aristocratic detachment prized in ­Viennese society. He barely hid his disdain for the poorer, straightspoken Birnbaum, who made no secret either of his desperate financial circumstances or his belief that he was entitled to far more than he had received. Birnbaum would never cease to resent the success of Herzl, whom he regarded as a dilettante, as opposed to himself, who had truly sacrificed his life and happiness for the Jewish national movement. Some have speculated that this social difference was a key element in the conflict between the two men; despite all else, the two had remarkably similar backgrounds. It is just as likely that the similarities in their experiences and temperaments made both men Zionists and at the same time formed the basis of their alienation and mutual dislike.6 Both were products of fin de siècle Vienna and experienced acutely the alienation produced by the deflation of the liberal promise and, it seemed, liberalism itself, as individuals like Georg Ritter von Schönerer and, more impressively, Karl Lueger harnessed anti-Semitism as a powerful political tool.7 They both experienced the frustrations and anxiety of living as Jews in Vienna, the neurotic city described so aptly by authors such as Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, and Karl Kraus. Unhappily, they also shared personality traits that made cooperation difficult. Each felt he had earned propriety over Zionism, each was ambitious and saw himself as a potentially epochal leader of the Jewish people, and neither could tolerate much dissension or criticism from others. Birnbaum was deeply resentful of the ease with which his rival dominated the Jewish national movement even as Herzl callously disregarded all those upon whose shoulders he (for the most part unknowingly) stood. And despite his practiced indifference to the air of dilettantism that he could not efface in some people’s eyes, Herzl resented the condescension to which he was subject from the old Zionist guard, including Birnbaum. Adding to this the general organizational strife, petty disputes, and frequent misunderstandings present in any political movement, especially those as revolutionary as Zionism, it is not a surprise that the two would be unable to share the same rostrum for very long.

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They were not personally acquainted before February 1896. Birnbaum may well have known Herzl either through his work in the Neue Freie Presse or his keen interest in the theater, but Herzl claimed never to have heard of Birnbaum. This changed with the publication of Der Judenstaat in February 1896. The booklet’s existence was first revealed in a summary that appeared in the Jewish Chronicle on 17 January, its translation printed in the Oesterreichische Wochenschrift a few weeks later. It was released as a booklet about 14 February. Reaction to the pamphlet in Vienna was “swift and sardonic.”8 Among the notices was a review by Birnbaum published on 22 February in Die Zeit. This article is Birnbaum’s first discussion of Herzl in print and is a useful indicator of his early views. Despite a tone of condescension that underscores Birnbaum’s review, Birnbaum took Der Judenstaat seriously—much more so than either the elite mainstream press (including the chagrined editors of Neue Freie Presse) or much of the Zionist and Jewish press.9 In the opening of his review, Birnbaum noted that Herzl’s work is already “interesting,” in that “the author calls himself a ‘Zionist’ in the most resolute meaning of the young word”; and Birnbaum observed circumspectly that “this alone would justify the general interest [it has received].” Its main importance lies in the fact that now, it would seem, “Zionism is taken to be a modern movement.”10 To Birnbaum, the famous new convert to the cause of Zionism was a hopeful sign—perhaps his and his colleagues’ efforts were beginning to yield fruit and the movement was achieving more mainstream respect. While there is a patronizing air in these words, Birnbaum nevertheless welcomed Herzl to take his place in the development of the movement, a sign of the movement’s maturation. But some of Herzl’s comments, particularly those dismissive of previous Zionist efforts (to the extent he discusses them at all), he could not let pass. As his review continued, Birnbaum’s tone became more critical. “Up to now [Herzl claims], Zionists have proceeded either under the cloak of their latest goal toward the ‘false principle of the gradual infiltration of Jews’ disregarding [the fact] that ‘normalization [of immigration] leads to a moment where the government, feeling the pressure of a menacing nationalism, obstructs a wider influx of Jews.’ Or [they have undertaken] a national-political, and . . . national-religious campaign, [based

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on] bringing the Zionist ideal to the people, or a combination of both methods,” Birnbaum related, clearly piqued by the reference to his own work. “But what such a Zionist—aware, for the most part, of his general lack of influence—hazards delicately with gentle suggestion,” Birnbaum sourly observed, “Dr. Herzl [now] has the courage and the candor to speak forth clearly and simply. ‘Immigration has only one meaning: it is the foundation of our certain sovereignty.’ And he unfolds his plan around this foundation of the Jewish state.”11 About Herzl’s concrete proposals Birnbaum was unenthusiastic. He devoted a substantial part of the article to detailing Herzl’s program as laid out in Der Judenstaat, summarizing the functions of the Jewish Company, the Society of the Jews, and the various plans for a scientifically based, social utopia under the finest leaders of the Jewish people. In the end, however, Birnbaum homes in on Herzl’s words that he found most outrageous, for they touched on the subject closest to his heart: the issue of Jewish cultural regeneration, which Herzl summarily dismisses. “Then it will . . . become clear,” he writes, “whether Dr. ­Herzl’s opinion on the matter—‘this return-to-old-culture stuff, which many Zion­ ists want, is foolish,’ or ‘we are a modern people, and want to be the most modern’—has any hope of vindication. Much will depend upon the establishment of the ‘Society of Jews,’ which Dr. Herzl is prepared to convene in London. In any case, the author of Judenstaat is entitled to take credit [for the fact] that the Zionist movement is to be dissuaded indirectly from a national day-to-day politics, to which it must always be left to react.”12 Birnbaum’s strained comments on ­Herzl’s opinion of the “return-to-old-culture stuff ” would not be lost on those acquainted with his writing. This facile dismissal by a man so disengaged from the Zionist world of Birnbaum’s life’s work and his most deeply held opinions offended him. Although Herzl professed not to know Birnbaum, he could not have picked a better way to provoke him. Birnbaum did not rush to attack Herzl, perhaps reflecting how little Birnbaum considered him a threat. Instead, he took it upon himself to educate him. In the opening to the correspondence between the two men, Birnbaum thanked Herzl for the copy of Der Judenstaat that he had sent (seemingly after Birnbaum’s review was published) and sent him in turn one of his own pamphlets, The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in Its Own Land. That the pamphlet was intended as a primer

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for Herzl is suggested by the accompanying note, which stated that “the author today has an entirely different worldview and thus he is no longer able to endorse the entire contents of his writing. In any case, he remains, so far as his goals are concerned, a Zionist with his whole heart.”13 In other words, Birnbaum was more interested in tutoring Herzl than speaking to him as an equal. (Birnbaum’s enticing reference to his evolving opinions about Zionism is not developed.) However presumptuous his intentions, Birnbaum did seem willing both to engage in a dialogue with Herzl and to provide him with guidance in negotiating the labyrinth of Jewish politics. This suggests that he saw at least some potential in Herzl as a force in Zionism. Even if he was only a useful measure of the presence that Jewish nationalism had in the minds of Viennese laypeople, Herzl had a public presence few Zionists had; most of them, like Birnbaum, existed publicly only insofar as they were known among other Jewish nationalists. But his tone—particularly the need he felt to underscore his continued commitment to Zionism—indicates that he took Herzl’s interest in Zionism seriously. The flood of interest that accompanied the publication of Judenstaat did not subside quickly. Several articles, letters, and commentaries appeared, offering a spectrum of different opinions on the pamphlet. As the weeks passed, Herzl became a sensation among Jewish nationalists. Soon after Birnbaum’s review appeared in Die Zeit, in the same letter in which he included a copy of National Rebirth of the Jewish People, he pressed Herzl for a face-to-face meeting. Herzl, in the meantime, became acquainted with Zionism’s leading figures, including Birnbaum. With an archness that was perhaps the result of his increasing familiarity with local Zionist personalities and a measure of disdain for their parochialism, he was initially reluctant to meet Birnbaum; citing a lack of time, he noncommittally wrote that he hoped they would have a chance to meet in the future.14 Birnbaum persisted, and Herzl capitulated and agreed to meet on 3 March at Herzl’s apartment. This meeting was the impetus for the first entry from Herzl’s diary that mentions Birnbaum. It shows that Birnbaum particularly irritated Herzl, a reaction doubtless intensified by his earlier pedagogic mailing (and he may well have also read Birnbaum’s review of Judenstaat, although he does not say so).

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Herzl’s diary entry was explicit about his feelings toward Birnbaum after their first meeting. This single entry in a document that has had a great influence on the way that many within the movement have been cast in the history of Zionism has been particularly damaging to Birnbaum. From the beginning, Herzl portrayed him as a liability to Zion­ism, little more than an egotistical, money-grubbing blowhard, constantly trying to put Herzl in his place and demanding that Herzl defer to him as his predecessor. In fact, the entry shows that Herzl’s opinion of Birnbaum was shaped early and changed very little, as the themes he presents for the first time are a refrain for the entire period of their interaction: Birnbaum is unmistakably jealous of me. What the baser sort of Jews put into vulgar or sneering language, namely that I am out for personal advantage, is what I catch in the intimations of this cultivated gentleman. The predicted rancor, within and without, is already there. I judge Birnbaum to be an envious, vain and obstinate man. I hear that he had already turned away from Zionism and gone over to Socialism when my appearance led him back again to Zion.15

To these charges others would eventually be added: that Birnbaum was involved in Zionism only for financial gain, that he claimed to be the “founder” of Zionism, and that he conspired with others to topple ­Herzl’s leadership. But it was the dual claim that Birnbaum had abandoned Zionism and embraced socialism that remained Herzl’s most consistent and damaging accusation. What Herzl meant by “socialism” and why Birnbaum’s interest in socialist ideas were antithetical to Zionism is never made clear. It is likely little more than a superficial label, but the deeper implication was that Birnbaum had forfeited any claim to represent a voice within Zionism. The more serious subtext to Herzl’s accusation was that Birnbaum’s involvement with Zionism after Herzl’s appearance was no more than opportunism, motivated by his poverty. Interestingly, Herzl projects onto Birnbaum the charge of opportunism of which he himself would be a target. His conclusion from their first meeting was that Birnbaum was basically dishonest, an obstructionist, wanting only to cash in on his years of service to Zionism, even if he had been earnest at one time. Worst of all, in his pettiness he was blind to

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the noble cause of Zion (or Herzl’s vision of it, which in his mind was equated with loyalty to Herzl himself) and thus could not be trusted. Although Herzl’s diary is an indispensable source, in this case it has been the primary cause of a persistent misreading of Birnbaum’s activity during the 1890s. In fact, Birnbaum had not abandoned Zionism nor had he strayed from his intense Jewish nationalist convictions.16 Certainly, his vision of Zionism was at odds with Herzl’s. Herzl never hid his disinterest in the so-called cultural aspects of Jewish nationalism dear to Birnbaum, at least until he laid out his own different image of the future state in the novel Altneuland; but at this early phase, he felt there was little effort to spare for such frivolous concerns. All Zionist energy was needed to negotiate, create institutions, and raise funds to allow for the mass movement of Jews as soon as possible to a state of their own. Even if there were resources for concerns like molding a Jewish national identity beyond the basic belief in the necessity of a Jewish state, Herzl had little regard for fantastic ideas such as creating a Hebrew-speaking new Jewish nation ex nihilo. Birnbaum was not alone in questioning Herzl’s priorities, as most Zionists at the time shared a vision of Jewish national rebirth much closer to Birnbaum’s than to Herzl’s. Although Birnbaum would leave Herzl’s movement, most of his colleagues would choose to remain inside it and within a decade see their efforts rewarded when their ideas were given a prominent place in the movement’s platform. But in the spring of 1896, the initial meeting of the old vanguard of Viennese Zionism and its future in the form of Herzl fared badly. The only firsthand reflection on the meeting, Herzl’s diary entry, portrays it as an unmitigated failure. At best, the four participants completely misread each other; at worst, Birnbaum and his colleagues confirmed Herzl’s belief that Jewish nationalism as such did not exist without him in any meaningful way. The meeting jeopardized a mutual partnership (or even mutual respect) between Herzl and Vienna’s established Jewish nationalist camp. Herzl’s rather self-serving impression was that what had preceded his arrival was tiny and listless, without direction or cohesion. It was a narrative that conformed to his sense that he had “created” the idea of the Jewish state on his own initiative. Regardless of his prejudice, Birnbaum and the others appear to have done little to disabuse Herzl of his pretension by approaching him with a united front.

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There must have been some sense that the meeting was positive, if not to Herzl, then to Birnbaum and the others, for Birnbaum was confident enough afterward to take a shockingly bold and disastrous step in their relationship. Only a day after their meeting, Birnbaum sent Herzl a letter that not only cemented Herzl’s feeling that Birnbaum was a worthless partner in Zionism but also confirmed Herzl’s suspicion that Birnbaum had no real interest in the movement other than as a way out of his desperate financial situation. On 4 March Birnbaum wrote: I have long had the desire, through both my inclination and ability, to intervene in new ways in the [Zionist party’s] drive—but for a long time I have ceased to do so, partly because of the leaden paralysis and disorganization within the Zionist camp, partly because of personal circumstances. The latter situation is unfortunately still very much at hand, and it is for relief that I turn to you with these words. . . . I am quite concerned that you will misconstrue this letter, but I point this out only because I know that there is no philistine or inconsequential person before me. . . . I come to you to ask for help, help that for you, I believe, would not cause significant exertion. . . . Briefly: I have had the misfortune to recognize the truth of Zionism—from which you have remained shielded—already by my sixteenth year. I have given my entire passionate personality to these ideals and have thus shut myself out of any other career in which I could have succeeded with my talents. I have pressed myself into a dark, obscure corner of literature—with the result being a constant degeneration of my financial situation. Dear honored doctor! I have endured such distressing times, the horrors of which I cannot begin to express to you clearly. Only through a pitiful secretarial post and constant indebtedness am I able to hold back the flood, and I stew along with my wife, mother, and children. . . . I am at wits’ end, and only because I have finally confronted these circumstances, and after a long struggle with myself, have I decided to turn to you. You have the influence, consideration, and power to help me. I beg you affectionately, send your advice! Although our acquaintance is still young, I believe that there is a bond woven between us that makes it acceptable for me to ask of you: save me from certain destruction, and preserve with me Zionism! . . . Should you not, however, act upon my request, I ask you to please show your kind discretion—also about Zionism—and be certain that I will as well—and I will maintain and continue to fulfill my duty as a Zionist.17

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A sympathetic reader of this letter could not help being moved by the degree of desperation that would lead Birnbaum to write it. Little of the letter is an exaggeration, neither Birnbaum’s assertions of his centrality to the movement nor the details of the hardships he had endured for its sake. Indeed, the sympathetic reader might read the letter as it was: the reluctant debasement of a very proud and capable man for the sake of his survival. Birnbaum, as his life’s work had shown, had been willing to sacrifice all for the cause he had passionately embraced, and now he was at the end of his rope. Unfortunately, Herzl was not a sympathetic reader. If Birnbaum believed that Herzl would be moved by how poorly he had been rewarded by his sacrifice for Zionism or that he shared Birnbaum’s sense of rapport as equals and allies, he was mistaken on both accounts. The letter disgusted Herzl and, more damagingly, confirmed to him that whatever Zionist movement did exist prior to his appearance was bereft of responsible leadership. His diary recounts the incident in passing, without surprise, as if he expected little else—noting only that he loaned Birnbaum twenty gulden, a notation he makes only to prevent Birnbaum from later manufacturing an accusation of tightfistedness to use as ammunition against him.18 But he did not express his disgust to Birnbaum, who took the loan as an expression of sympathy for his plight. Emboldened, Birnbaum pressed for even more assistance. “My situation has worsened still further. . . . If I cannot pay [back an overdue loan], my good name and every other possibility for my existence will be destroyed.” His pleas grew even more personal, going so far as to make assertions about Herzl’s own financial wherewithal. “What is this sum against the many thousands that you will bring in from your press organization or paper next week?” Once again, Birnbaum falls back on his service to the cause. “Please bear in mind: who has served this cause more than I, who from the beginning of his life’s path as a Zionist sacrificed the little inheritance of his father [about fifteen hundred florins]? Who of the miserable hundred or so fellow fighters has served more and come to such shame as I . . . dedicating my health, my career, my existence in labor for a state-based rebirth of the Jewish people? . . . I have no other hope than you.”19 There is no clear indication whether Herzl continued to loan Birnbaum money.

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Herzl did reply to Birnbaum in a letter a few days later and surprisingly raised the possibility of creating a salaried position within the new Zionist movement for Birnbaum. “I have spoken with Mr. Wolfssohn from Cologne, that we may with the help of Zion [the Berlin Zionist periodical], etc., create a paid post of Secretary of the Zionist Movement for you. Mr. Wolfssohn is speaking today with Dr. Schnirer, and these gentlemen will do what is necessary to bring this into being, and by so doing, help you until you can find a situation on your own.”20 What motivated this charitable letter, in such stark contrast to Herzl’s private thoughts? Although he clung tenaciously to the idea afterward, Birnbaum had not (at least in his correspondence) requested a salaried position within the Zionist movement; it appears to have been Herzl’s idea. Herzl, it seems, had even made preliminary inquiries before writing to Birnbaum. By making the offer, Herzl demonstrated his political savvy. Placating Birnbaum with a modest salary within the movement was a sensible way of dealing with him. Despite Birnbaum’s uncouth letters, Herzl had probably learned that Birnbaum did not exaggerate his commitment to Zionism or his sacrifices, and paying him to continue his work within the movement could be strategically useful. He would also have learned that Birnbaum’s colleagues were quite loyal to their “lodestar.” In fact, Herzl would have had much to gain by keeping Birnbaum in the movement, and this was perhaps part of his thinking. As a newcomer, Herzl was bedeviled (as he himself knew) by accusations of dilettantism. Birnbaum had the Zionist bona fides Herzl lacked; thus, to have Birnbaum’s support for his efforts could help bolster his stature in the movement. At the same time, making Birnbaum financially beholden to the movement and to himself, Herzl may have thought that he could exert some control over him, neutralizing him as a potential rival. Whatever the motivation for the idea of creating for Birnbaum a paid position within the movement, it was a choice that Herzl would regret. For the time being, the position of secretary general came to naught; instead, Birnbaum was brought to Berlin to work on the new journal of the Berlin Hovevei Zion, Zion, which Herzl eyed as a potential organ for his movement.21 Birnbaum relocated for a second time with his family to Berlin in the summer of 1896. This provided temporary financial relief, and Birnbaum soon began to assert his independence from Herzl. In Berlin, he was not alone; although Zionists there supported

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Herzl on the whole, seeing in him both a vehicle for rapid growth of Zionism as well as a dynamic public figure, they did not hesitate to object when Herzl’s policies conflicted too much with their aims—to his intense frustration. The friction between Herzl and Birnbaum began not long after the latter’s move to Berlin. Birnbaum fired the opening salvo by criticizing Herzl’s direct diplomatic approach, particularly his ill-advised trip to Istanbul. A controversial decision, Herzl’s attempt to negotiate as the self-­ appointed representative of Zionism with the Ottoman sultan Abdül­ hamid was a failure.22 Not only was he denied an audience with the sultan but by making open assertions about a future Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine, Herzl arguably endangered the small Zionist settlements that had already been established.23 Disregarding the early Zionist practice of subtle infiltration into Palestine, the slow building up of colonies that at least attempted not to exacerbate fears in the Sublime Porte of both another nascent nationalities problem and ethnic instability in Palestine, Herzl ham-fistedly confirmed them. This had the immediate result of raising the profile of the struggling colonies as well as provoking more pronounced assertions of the sultan’s opposition to organized European Jewish settlement in Palestine. Birnbaum used the fallout from Herzl’s Ottoman trip to show he was not owned by anyone—least of all Herzl. The exchange began with a complaint from Herzl that Birnbaum had not been effectively representing him to the Berlin Zionists. Birnbaum replied distractedly, citing lack of time and resources to advance Herzl’s cause, but in a subtle dig revealed the true motives for dragging his feet: resentment of Herzl’s unilateral activity. “[Due to] my situation, which has occupied all of my time, I have had not an hour to do this until today. For the same reason I have been unable to complete any ‘probe work,’ and thus until now I have not been able to make use of your suggestions. . . . I would be very obliged to you, if you would occasionally give me some information regarding your actions.”24 Herzl, sensitive to the implication of this last sentence, took umbrage at the accusation he was acting dictatorially, as well as questioning Birnbaum’s grasp of German verbs: “One makes [begeht] a mistake; one does not commit [verbricht] one.” The tone of Herzl’s letter does not improve. “Perhaps I have made mistakes . . . [however,] they were not anything for which you should answer me in such a hateful tone. I will answer no

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more about them.” With this curt dismissal, Herzl goes on to emphasize the low regard in which he holds other Zionists. “Do not forget that I must do everything by myself. These platonic declarations of agreement don’t help me or anyone at all.” It is not his desire to work on his own, but those upon whom he depends are inept. If in Berlin or anywhere else there were or are Zionists who believe that I have ever acted like a dictator, [then] they do not know that I stated explicitly in Paris and London that I would undertake the leadership of this mission if I received a guarantee that they would carry out the things initiated by me verbally in Constantinople—with unhoped for luck. Because this did not happen, I must naturally go forth alone, and not because of my own desire. Once I have begun, I shall not leave no matter how great the disappointment and thanklessness and misery.25

Birnbaum had probably surmised the consequences of crossing Herzl. Yet he stood firm and refused to be intimidated. “The reception of your letter of the 17th of this month, I must candidly acknowledge, did not frighten me.” He had, he believed, a better sense of the pulse of the Zionist rank and file: “I hear voices that do not reach your ears. What I predicted to you has come true: to the last one, Zionists in all countries have become hostile to you. The Zionist newspapers hound you, and they all level the same charge: that you, through your behavior, have made the colonies of Palestine vulnerable.” Hardly an inaccurate assessment, but Birnbaum went further, pushing Herzl to own up to his errors: “I would want little for myself were I to see the smallest acknowledgment of certain mistakes that you have made [­verbrachten] up till now.” And finally, speaking on behalf of “all Zionists,” he warns, “I’ll only indicate that I—and I am correct when I speak for all Zionists, whether they accept you or not—[believe] your secrecy in this undertaking does not come cheaply.”26 In this letter Birnbaum attempted to take on the role of the “real” voice of the Zionist street that Herzl ignored at his peril. Yet at the same time his words are defensive and reflect his struggle to maintain relevance in a movement that was increasingly forgetful of the contributions he had made. The decision to cross Herzl did indeed have dire consequences. Herzl would not forget the advantage Birnbaum took of his weakened position among Zionists after the Istanbul trip. Nor did Birnbaum give him much reason to trust

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his motives as the First Zionist Congress approached. He continued to test the boundaries of Herzl’s leadership. Herzl, for his part, marginalized and even embarrassed Birnbaum when he could, taking every opportunity to remind Birnbaum of his place. The year 1897, pivotal in the history of Zionism, was a tipping point for Birnbaum, revealing to him the limit of his future within Herzl’s movement. By the spring of that year, Herzl’s failures in the direct “diplomatic” approach had led him to assent to a general congress of Zionists.27 As the arrangements for a congress progressed in February and March, the initial decision to hold the conference in Munich raised the visibility and leverage of the Berlin Zionists, in particular David Wolffsohn, Max Bodenheimer, Willy Bambus, and Birnbaum.28 In a preliminary meeting in Vienna around 10 March, a committee including Bambus, Yehoshua Thon, and Birnbaum met with Herzl. As ­Herzl’s diary records, this meeting afforded him yet another opportunity to undercut Birnbaum, this time as punishment for showing independent and unauthorized initiative. This time the conflict was caused by Birnbaum’s request that Herzl support a plan to run for election to the Austrian Reichsrat on a Jewish nationalist platform. The idea of opening a new front in Jewish nationalism through the ballot box was one that Birnbaum had been contemplating for some time—at least since 1894, the year he published an article advancing a Jewish People’s Party. The meeting demonstrated Birnbaum’s revitalized sense of self-esteem among the Berlin Zionists since he was removed from Herzl’s immediate presence in Vienna. After reeling from his sudden loss of influence, Birnbaum was once again finding his feet and attempting to strike out on his own and pursue his own ideas. Herzl put a quick end to Birnbaum’s efforts. Herzl’s deep hostility to Birnbaum, beyond his dislike for Birnbaum’s idea, was on clear display in his diary: Birnbaum was more self-assured and inwardly more hostile to me than ever. He wanted my financial and moral support for his candidacy in the election district of Sereth-Suczawa-Radautz, a candidacy that had been offered me as well, which I refused and he undertook at the last moment. Considering the late date—there is only one week to the election—I denied him my support, because an unsuccessful attempt could compromise the mystical prestige of our movement in Galicia [sic]. He

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will never forgive me for this, no. Incidentally, just for the sake of being elected he wanted to make personal compromises with the socialist politicians, Social Democrats, and others, and run as a representative of a Jewish People’s Party (which does not even exist).29

While no record exists of Birnbaum’s response, presumably Herzl’s sense of Birnbaum’s outrage was accurate. Herzl’s palpable satisfaction in denying Birnbaum suggests he got the reaction he sought. He was at least disingenuous in rejecting Birnbaum’s proposal. Herzl was not an implacable opponent of such early Gegenwartsarbeit; a month earlier he embraced the idea of backing a Zionist candidate for the Reichsrat and, along with Moritz Schnirer and Oser Kokesch, actively supported two Reichsrat candidates, Leon Kellner and Abraham Salz (although he did demur from running for office himself). His refusal to support Birnbaum, justified based on electoral realities, was more the result of his dislike of Birnbaum’s independent action. His charge that Birnbaum chose to run only at the last minute and in a district in which he claims to have been asked to run is unfounded—in fact, we have no confirmation of how long Birnbaum had been actively pursuing election.30 Moreover, the reiteration of Herzl’s accusations about a conversion to socialism and a defection from Zionism (for the sake of a Jewish People’s Party) make his motives even more suspicious.31 But Birnbaum was not finished. As the spring of 1897 progressed, Herzl discovered the Berlin Zionists increasingly intractable to his demands and requests—due in no small part to Birnbaum’s status among them. A month after the Vienna meeting, Herzl’s diary recounts the “perfidy” of Willy Bambus (once believed to be his strongest and ablest ally among the German Zionists), who had sent a response to the congress announcement released in the Jewish press calling into question the full commitment of German Zionists to the project. “His purpose is clear,” Herzl writes; “he wants to make me appear a braggart, to undermine the congress. . . . Bambus gives the pretext that the Munich Jews are beside themselves and are protesting against holding the congress in ­Munich.”32 Herzl’s skepticism of Bambus’s motives was misplaced; in fact, the German Jewish establishment was opposed to a Jewish nationalist congress being held in Germany. Nevertheless, his suspicions of jealousy and treachery—“perhaps it is only plain envy on the part of the Berliners who

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are afraid that I shall get all the leadership in my hands”—once again centered on his belief that his authority was under attack. Seizing on this moment of weakness, Birnbaum did attack and sought to expose once and for all Herzl’s intent to control Zionism with an iron fist. In “On the Munich Congress,” Birnbaum pounced on Herzl’s sudden announcement that a key procedural element of the Munich congress was to be abandoned. The original plan, hatched in a meeting in Vienna, was that there would be two committees in the congress: the first an “internal” one composed of Zionist party members who would settle technical and procedural issues; the second an “external” one composed of the rank and file that would open the proceedings to the wider Zionist public. Birnbaum accused Herzl of under­mining the democratic nature of this arrangement by executive fiat, asserting a much broader power for the executive committee by giving it the power to appoint the full leadership of the movement. “Now Dr. Herzl . . . has either not grasped the deeper meaning of this two-part separation . . . or else he has simply been slain by his unfortunate temperament. Whatever it is, he has irreparably damaged by means of his announcement [the principle that] Zionists would be nominated by [all] Zionists . . . in a style indistinguishable from a dry business announcement.” His initial alarm at an attack on the egalitarianism of the conference satisfied, Birnbaum goes on in an ominous tone. “I no longer know how far Dr. Herzl’s love for these theatrics goes. . . . I would truly not shed a tear if [this congress] died. . . . [It would be better] than the deep pain I would feel if certain gloomy prophecies about the congress being perceived as a horrendous fiasco were fulfilled.”33 Again taking on the role of the movement’s populist, Birnbaum believed that Herzl’s action was an attempt to steal the Zionist movement from “the people” in favor of elites (or an elite—presumably Herzl himself) who would stifle popular action. That Herzl would adopt this position, in Birnbaum’s opinion, was a betrayal not only of his own claims to leadership of Jewish nationalism but of the entire Jewish people. “The people,” Birnbaum proclaimed, “is everything.” Pragmatic elitists could never capture the enthusiasm or the zeal of the people with their “half-man” tactics.34 Zionism had to be, above all, grass roots, the “ ‘pragmatic’ and romantic joined to create a true movement” to check its becoming “a plaything in the hands of chance, a serious matter for

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the general public entrusted to some investor.” And in a final swipe at Herzl’s recent conversion to Zionism, “Rather than subject it to the caprice of a segment of Jewish cultural philistines, [let it be given over] to the will of the people.”35 When the congress convened on 29–31 August in Basel rather than Munich, the smoldering enmity between the two men burst into public conflict. While much of Birnbaum’s behavior had irritated Herzl, an attempt by some of Birnbaum’s supporters to force a paid position for Birnbaum onto the congress floor for debate was to Herzl Birnbaum’s most telling treachery. To him it confirmed once and for all that base motives alone had guided Birnbaum’s Zionist involvement. In Herzl’s words, Another critical moment—when the Birnbaum scandal occurred. This Birnbaum, who had deserted Zionism for Socialism three years before I appeared on the scene, poses obtrusively as my “predecessor.” In his brazen begging-letters, which he wrote me and others, he sets himself up as the discoverer and founder of Zionism, because he has written a pamphlet like many another since Pinsker (whom, after all, I had not read either). He now had a few young people make the proposal that the ­secretary-general of the Actions Committee be elected directly and paid by the Congress. And this creature, who at the first National Assembly of the Jews has no other thought but to get himself voted a stipend, has the nerve to compare himself to me. And as in his schnorring letters, here, too, the audacity along with his begging. The secretary-general, as trusted representative of the Congress, is supposed to counter-­ balance the other twenty-two members of the Actions Committee! I declared that I could not imagine how under such circumstances anyone would accept a seat on that committee. The motion fell through ignominiously. It was the only discordant note at the Congress.36

This entry is pure Herzl: the dramatic unfolding of events worthy of a feuilleton in the Neue Freie Presse, his hyperbole (“the only discordant note”), emphasis on his unappreciated self-sacrifice for the movement, and blitheness about his ignorance of the body of Zionist literature that had preceded him (even Pinsker). Of these qualities it is his telling comment that Birnbaum, a “creature,” has the nerve to compare himself to

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Herzl that characterizes best his relationship not only with Birnbaum but also with all those who would claim some precedence or ownership of the Zionist movement not delegated by Herzl himself. To wit: Nothing had really happened before he arrived; a few scribblers had copied one another’s ideas but lacked the vision to do what he, Herzl, was doing at this momentous conference. That one of the basest of them, one who had “merely written a pamphlet like many another,” would not be caught up in the ecstasy of the moment was simply intolerable. And worse, the same malcontent who would sully this sublime moment was not even sincere in his beliefs. Although Herzl’s perspective on the event is invaluable, it is not the only record of the conflict between the two at the Basel congress. One account, Proceedings of the Zionist Congress published in the Jewish Chronicle, gives another perspective on Birnbaum’s role. The enthusiasm of the anonymous journalist-author of the account captures the alternating enthusiasm and tedium that characterized the congress. Rapturous at the rousing opening speeches of Herzl, the author describes with increasing irritation the many late starts and endless procedural discussions. Birnbaum appears at two points in these proceedings. The first is as part of a slate of “special reports” that rounded out the first day of the conference.37 “Dr. Birnbaum seems to be a man high in favor with the Zionists,” the author continues, revealing his obliviousness of Birnbaum’s identity, “for they gave him a splendid welcome; and it must be acknowledged that his paper was an able composition of high literary value; but it merely dealt with the fringe of the question,” that is, the goals of the congress itself.38 In the paragraph summary of Birnbaum’s remarks, the author describes a familiar discussion of the central role of culture and settlement in Palestine to the Zionist cause, long a mainstay of Birnbaum’s work.39 The “Birnbaum scandal” described in Herzl’s diary occurred on the third day of the conference, 31 August, during the investiture of the Executive Committee. Contrary to Herzl’s recollection, it was not the first or only contentious moment in the conference. The day before, Fabius Schach, a close associate of Bodenheimer and Wolffsohn (from the same circle of German Zionists with whom Birnbaum had been working closely), stormed out of the conference over dissatisfaction with the wording of the Basel Program.40 Another “discordant note” occurred at

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the very outset of the third day, when an unidentified “Russian member, speaking most volubly in Hebrew, attacked the German and Austrian elements in the Congress” over the failure to use Hebrew as the official language of the meetings.41 Clearly, the storm clouds gathered intensity as the day progressed and without a doubt revolved around Birnbaum’s legacy and what, if any, would be his future role in the institutions that would guide the Zionist movement. The conflict must have been raucous; even the anonymous compiler of the Proceedings, forgetting the other conflicts, describes the clash as “the first jarring note. Human passions were let loose, and scenes were enacted that tended to weaken the excellent impression which the earlier proceedings had created.” The purpose of the session was to announce the composition of the Executive Committee. When its members were announced, including Moritz Schnirer, Koglech (possibly Oser Kokesch), Josef Meyer Kremenzky, and Nathan Birnbaum, “the name of Dr. Birnbaum, who has done so much for the Zionist cause, was received with tremendous applause.” But immediately after the announcement and vote, “the list having been adopted, Dr. Birnbaum rose and declined to accept the election.”42 After Birnbaum’s announcement, another unnamed member “jumped up” to announce that he had heard Dr. Birnbaum had been forced to decline the nomination. A melee ensued. Other members called out for the name of the person who had done it, and the accuser replied that he could not say, but he had “been informed the pressure came from an influential quarter.”43 Members drew what seemed to have been the intended conclusion: the “influential quarter” was Herzl and his close allies. Herzl quickly went on the defensive and insisted that none of the central committees—the Executive and the Committee on Organization—had put pressure on Birnbaum to withdraw.44 This set the stage for an exchange that, given the increasing friction that we have seen, must have pushed Herzl to apoplexy. The Proceedings author certainly sensed it, noting that “fuel was added to the flames, and the incident assumed a still more personal character.” Dr. A. Munz, delegate from Vienna, announced that although he understood the importance of Herzl and his work in coordinating the congress, without Birnbaum, “neither Herzl as a Zionist, nor the Congress, would have been possible.” He then insinuated that Birnbaum’s attempted exclusion was a petty attack on his social class, that “because Dr. Birnbaum was a

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comparatively poor man,” he was being pushed out. Only Max Nordau, “in whose favor Dr. Herzl had temporarily withdrawn, in order not to exert any influence on Dr. Malz’s liberty of speech,” could restore order. Or almost: Two delegates parried with Malz. One, Dr. Loewe from Palestine, declared Birnbaum had voluntarily retired; and the second, Dr. Steiner, “threw oil on the waters” by saying that Birnbaum was ineligible according to the bylaws passed earlier, as he did not live in Vienna. In a parenthetical insertion, the author of the Proceedings explains that, according to Steiner, Birnbaum was included despite his residential ineligibility “in deference to the request of the majority of the Congress, who, on being informed that their favorite was ineligible, declared he would move from Berlin to Vienna.”45 The account of the controversy in the Proceedings ends here, shedding no light on its resolution. Herzl had no doubt that the entire scene was a setup, even an attempted coup to seize control of the movement and planned in minute detail by Birnbaum. Even from the occluded (but independent) report of the Proceedings, this is an understandable conclusion. The timing of the protest, the initiative that Birnbaum seems to take in resigning from the committee after the election has occurred rather than withdrawing beforehand, even the boisterous applause at his name being read on the list of committee members—all suggested a calculated performance. But Herzl’s accusations do not take into account the feeling that Birnbaum was being denied his due. Herzl may not have cared that he stood on the shoulders of others, but some—the majority, if Steiner’s previous words are to be taken at face value—did care and also cared about Birnbaum’s fate. Herzl would not cease being chafed by the accusation that followed him to the end: despite what his charisma and force of will had accomplished for the movement, his vanity and ingratitude to those he followed would diminish his legitimacy and potentially undo whatever he had accomplished. Whether or not the events of 31 August were the “only discordant note” of the First Zionist Congress, Birnbaum was cognizant of ­Herzl’s anger. After the congress adjourned, Birnbaum tried to control the damage and at the same time push his case forward. He pressed the issue by apologizing for the disruption, distancing himself from its actors, and, again, appealing to Herzl’s charity. In a letter of 7 September 1897, Birnbaum professed innocence and loyalty: “[Even] before the well-known

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events of the congress occurred, which further intensified our continued mutual misunderstanding, I sought to declare my loyalty to you and your intentions.” As far as the revolt on the floor of the congress, “I wish to assure you . . . that I in no way instigated it and strongly disapprove and condemn it. . . . Judge them [the actors] leniently. The gentlemen did not act with the intention of treading on you or undermining the congress but rather out of a deep commitment to my cause.” They acted not out of disrespect to Herzl but out of concern for Birnbaum—“that there could never be any end to my suffering led them to disrupt [the congress] with such an inappropriate act.”46 But that did not absolve Herzl for his failure to take seriously either Birnbaum’s clout in the movement or his difficult circumstances. “If you consider these facts, dear esteemed doctor, you would judge the incident more mildly. You would also thereby have found the key to the mystery of our—how shall I put it?—alienation. It is nothing but my tragic situation, which stands like an evil demon between you and other men on one side, and me on the other.” Once again, Birnbaum resorted to personal detail to win Herzl over. “The humiliating way that I must provide for the larger part of my sustenance reduces my social status and calls forth a feeling of constant oppression from within me and destroys my impartiality.” His situation was “atrocious,” so bad that Herzl, if he had any pity, not only would understand Birnbaum’s actions but also would “leave no stone unturned, and certainly not deny any sustenance for one like me [whose] situation [is] a tragedy the depths of which you will hopefully never know.” If anything, he protests, he has even downplayed his situation and “perhaps become too taciturn from my shame, too abstract in speaking of my suffering.” And, undermining to a degree his claim of innocence in influencing the revolt, “I cannot bear it any more. Neither can I be patient for the commitments of the party [to be fulfilled]. Now is the time for me, who has bled for Zionism, to receive commitment and compensation. The general secretariat offers the best means to this.” It is the only way, he concludes, to save both himself and the movement: “If you arrive at the decision that I hope for, you will soon be persuaded that one can work together with me, that I am not the trouble-maker I have been made out to be.”47 Birnbaum sensed how dire things were in his relationship with Herzl and thought that by throwing himself at Herzl’s feet, he could

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mitigate the damage and accomplish his goal. Once again, Herzl was not impressed. In his diary he writes that Birnbaum had mobilized all of his supporters, “playing all his cards” in support of his being appointed secretary general. He repeats yet again the charge that Birnbaum had already abandoned Zionism “for three years, having gone over to Socialism,” and mocks Birnbaum’s role in the early years of the movement: “Despite this he had spread around Basel that without Birnbaum, Herzl and the Basel Congress would not have been possible. Great applause!”48 In the end, despite his dramatic resignation from the committee, Birnbaum triumphed and was awarded the post of secretary general of the Actions Committee. It was his last victory as a Zionist. Ironically, Birnbaum’s influence within the Zionist movement declined rapidly after his appointment to the Actions Committee. Herzl’s diary reveals the contempt in which he held the group, in large part because of Birnbaum, despite its intended role as the central organizational committee of the Zionist movement. Referring to it as the “inaction committee,” he jabs at Birnbaum personally: “Dr. Birnbaum, the ‘general-secretary,’ has as his only general secretion to date a document which guarantees him employment for one year and against which he wants to rent furniture.”49 He makes clear his unwillingness to treat the committee as an institution with any power to check him, even while offering a (rare) compliment to one of its members: “My good Schnirer, who is certainly as honest as the day is long . . . demanded as the most important thing an ‘agenda’ for the Actions Committee. But behind this guilelessness there may be the wish to interfere with me.”50 Herzl also accused Birnbaum of using the committee to plot against him, a pretext for ignoring the Actions Committee altogether. On 12 March 1898, Herzl wrote: “I never bring up my plans and actions in the meetings [of the Actions Committee], because Birnbaum is taking the minutes as secretary-general—and ‘gathering material’ for his future indiscretions.” Birnbaum, he complained, is a “typical enemy” who cannot be eliminated from the committee because he “threatens he will starve,” who will “bring disgrace to the movement yet.”51 By April 1898, Herzl had abandoned the pretense of working with the Actions Committee altogether. “Birnbaum quietly incites against me at the university, acts the part of Columbus and martyr of Zionism, while I am Amerigo Vespucci and the usurper. . . . The committee is an unservice-

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able instrument. Only indiscretions are committed. No one is able to help; for various reasons they are in no position to do so.”52 While the very accusations Herzl lodges against Birnbaum suggest his far deeper conflicts with the movement and are hardly reducible to one individual, it is Birnbaum’s pretensions as a “martyr of Zionism” and his unwillingness to grant Herzl carte blanche to act unilaterally on behalf of Zionism that form Herzl’s pretext for disavowing the Actions Committee. By the end of 1898 and Birnbaum’s tenure as secretary general of the Actions Committee, Birnbaum had removed himself from Herzl’s sights with his own gradual withdrawal from the World Zionist Organization. Although he did not formally resign from the committee until 1899, Birnbaum’s work with it had largely ceased. Herzl himself signals his awareness that he had triumphed over Birnbaum in 1899, when he writes an unusually friendly letter inquiring whether Birnbaum would continue submitting material to Die Welt. Birnbaum, preserving his pride to the extent that he was still able, declined.53 Whether he retained the support of his followers who had pushed the congress to appoint him to the secretariat is irrelevant, for by then he had lost all affection for the movement, as well as all intellectual interest.

Galut, Galicia, and Gattungscultur: Toward Pragmatic Nationalism Many factors contributed to Birnbaum’s failed relationship with Herzl. Conflicts of personality, timing, oversensitivity, and political machinations created a poisoned atmosphere where little common ground could likely ever exist. But what can be lost in the drama of the dispute was that their feud had a solid ideological basis. The two men had very different ideas about the goals of Jewish nationalism. That neither had the perspective to accurately diagnose the nature or depth of these differences is unfortunate. Among other things, it might have led to their finding a unified platform for differences of opinion that far transcended the two men. The fact is that no matter how completely Birnbaum’s and Herzl’s visions differed, both were located well within the broader discourse about Zionism that would persist within the movement and challenge it for decades. Although Herzl shot wide

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of the mark in his dismissal of Birnbaum as a “socialist,” he did sense the surface ripples of a deeper shift in Birnbaum’s nationalist ideology. Even if Birnbaum had not abandoned the basic principles of Jewish nationalism he had always articulated, he had both begun to question the forms that Jewish national identity would take and offer different strategies for the movement to follow. The Herzl-Birnbaum controversy, aside from illuminating a major moment of drama in the formative history of Zionism, thus also offers a useful portal into Birnbaum’s evolving thought. Before 1894, Birnbaum’s writing had revolved around a concrete collection of issues. He reiterated them frequently, most famously in his tract The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in Its Own Land, the same text he had sent to Herzl at the beginning of their relationship and that brought him to the attention of many young Zionists.54 It recounted the negative themes of the plague of anti-Semitism, the willful blindness of the “assimilationists” at the failure of their endeavor, and the impotence of Jewish leadership, particularly religious leaders, in their attempts to act in their people’s best interest. To address these problems, he advocated creating a strong Jewish national movement that fostered a deep national identity in exile, with the ultimate goal of returning the nation to its ancestral homeland in Palestine. He spelled out the content of this identity as late as 1894 in an essay entitled “What Is to Be Done?” It included the study of Hebrew: “We must create an atmosphere in which the national purpose can flourish. This atmosphere can emerge only through the spirit of its own language. . . . Therefore, bring the Hebrew language once more to a place of honor in your midst!” Next was the study of Jewish history: “As with the Hebrew language, so should you spread awareness of Jewish history. From the long neglected history of the joys and tribulations of our people will our children gain the correct understanding . . . that there is only one way for us, and the aim for redemption beckons, the way of self-sufficiency.” Finally, the economic and moral revival of the Jewish people would be completed through agricultural-based settlement in Palestine: “Which land should we choose for these endeavors? The answer rings out: ‘There is none other than Palestine.’ Palestine is our tribal land, and the call for our hearts emanates from there; Palestine is the land of our national traditions and only there is it worthwhile [to expose] the

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colonial groups to the trials they must undergo as they change from petty merchants to farmers.”55 These goals were the basis not just of Birnbaum’s Zionism but of early Zionist thought generally. By the mid-1890s, the influence of Smolenskin and Pinsker had receded as a new cadre of figures pulled Birnbaum’s thought in new directions. He began to distance himself from what he called a “romantic” solution to the Jewish problem envisioned by early Zionists (including himself), with its evocations of spirit and renewal through return to an ancestral land. As a student and young Zionist journalist, he had fused aesthetic, political, and philosophical conceptions of peoplehood into an all-embracing Zionism. Now, the more mature Birnbaum began to eschew and distrust these “adolescent” (to use his term) ideals. In their place grew a model of Jewish nationalism in which the various categories of activism, theory, and culture were more differentiated. He embraced a more mechanized and scientific conception of people- and nationhood based heavily on a novel theory of racialist determinism. The features that made the Jews a people became, in Birnbaum’s mind, fixed not as spiritual affinities but as immutable biological traits. Always an undercurrent to his thought, concern with identifying the fundamental nature of the Jewish people and its difference from non-Jews became his particular focus. This formed the starting point for an evolving model of peoplehood articulated over the 1890s, culminating in the most important essay he wrote during this period, The Jewish Moderne (Die jüdische Moderne). Birnbaum’s shifting attitude toward Jewish nationalism can be detected as early as 1894. It began with a concern that disunity within the Jewish world had rendered the national movement simply another faction, another flavor of Jewish identity added to an overseasoned stew, rather than a rallying point whose self-evident logic would push aside all others. To confront this problem, he was drawn to the solution offered by a broader, more ecumenical and pragmatic approach to nationalism. In Birnbaum’s opinion, it could occur only once European Jewry recognized that all factions, be they religious, political, or geographical (i.e., “western” versus “eastern” Jewries), shared the same threat and would, eventually, face the same fate. This idea appeared surreptitiously at first in “What Is to Be Done?,” where Birnbaum decried the focus on denominational disagreement in Jewish public discourse. “Stop this

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reformation and counterreformation!” he implored readers in 1894. “Stop this useless polemic, which treats the destiny of our people as a plaything. Judaism in exile is afflicted with a preoccupation for ‘reforming’; however, in order to break our exile, it is much more important to make ‘nonreforming’ into a collective principle. . . . All aboard! No one is superfluous; everyone is needed in the struggle for the moral and material welfare of the Jewish people.”56 The “reformers” and “counterreformers,” although appearing to refer to religious conflict, are rather a metonym for the senseless disunity rampant in the Jewish world that put petty parochial conflicts front and center while ignoring a basic existential threat. These arguments needed to be put aside, Birnbaum argued, and replaced with a neutral platform of national unity. Rather than define and exclude based upon fine ideological differences, Birnbaum would increasingly embrace even those elements that had been antithetical to Zionism in pursuit of the greater cause of Jewish nationalism. The inconvenient details could be negotiated later. This idea was not unique to Birnbaum, nor was he the first to argue that the success of Jewish nationalism required Jews to set aside specific party or factional loyalties. Throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire in particular, where electoral politics had long been in play, the idea of creating a political consensus to represent Jewish interests out of multiple constituencies had been a persistent, if Sisyphean, task. Indeed, some of the most important figures in Jewish nationalism practiced flexibility on aspects of ideology; Herzl certainly did, and as Jewish nationalism evolved in the ensuing years, those who opted for a pragmatic approach were often the most successful. In Birnbaum’s case, ecumenicalism was closely linked to developments in Vienna in the early 1890s, especially the entrenchment of central European anti-Semitism. Of course, like many among the first generation of Zionists, Birnbaum began his nationalist career in large part as a reaction to anti-Semitism. Before the 1890s, it had been possible for apologists to insist that the popular and official anti-Semitism of Russia was one thing, and liberal Vienna something else altogether. The final decade of the nineteenth century changed this as far as Birnbaum was concerned, as events in Vienna and across the Austro-Hungarian Empire seemed to him to indicate his most dire prophecies were being realized. Increasingly, he no longer needed to look as far as Russia to

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see public, even governmental-level anti-Semitism reemerging. The factors that had fanned the anti-Semitic sentiments of Viennese Christians in the previous decade intensified. Nativism and German-oriented Volkism, nearly always infused with a strain of anti-Semitism, rose in popularity as other nationalities across the Austro-Hungarian Empire threatened its integrity. Jewish success in playing a visible role in urban life, especially in the liberal professions, and increased immigration of less fortunate Jews into Vienna raised the ire of increasingly emboldened anti-Semites and their rank-and-file supporters. It did not help that Jewish immigrants often exhibited characteristics that compounded the negative perceptions already held by Viennese anti-Semites. They came increasingly to Vienna from Galicia, an economically undeveloped and culturally traditional region of the empire, often from smaller towns in the depressed countryside.57 Whereas Jewish immigrants from previous decades often came to the capital after having attained a certain level of economic success to seek greater opportunities, Jews immigrating after 1890 were more often driven by poverty and anti-Semitism. In 1893, a Catholic convention in Krakow instigated a boycott of Jewish business throughout Galicia that lasted until the First World War; this was but one contribution to the general feeling of discomfort on the part of Galician Jews during this period that motivated many to leave.58 These Jews by and large came to the city with little money, spoke Yiddish, and crowded into one or two poor areas of Vienna to seek cheap housing and employment opportunities. The consequences of these trends became tangible as the 1890s progressed. Poorer Jews became a more visible presence in the city, embarrassing the bourgeois Jewish establishment, overwhelming Jewish welfare institutions, and raising the general profile of Jews in the city. The more alarming result was their effect on the non-Jewish electorate. Through the 1880s, anti-Semitism, a perennial social factor and mind-set among the Viennese, was more muted and considered somewhat uncouth in polite society. The dominance of liberal elites since the midnineteenth century in Viennese society and politics held sway under the monarch Franz Josef, and with it a general status quo of equal rights for Jews and other minorities. But by the 1890s, the popularity of liberalism and its representation in government had eroded to the point that anti-Semitism could be deployed as a viable political tool. The most

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famous result of this strategy was the success of the Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei) under the leadership of Karl Lueger, a larger-than-life political figure in fin de siècle Vienna.59 Although not as obviously a doctrinaire anti-Semite like other political figures of the time such as Georg Ritter von Schönerer (anti-Semitism was but one of many aspects of his political strategy), Lueger was wildly popular and without doubt successfully exploited the economic fears and popular anti-Semitism of Catholic working- and middle-class Viennese voters. The Christian Social Party started its rise in the late 1880s and began a long period of power and influence when it captured the majority of the municipal council in 1895. In 1895, Lueger was to take the post of mayor of Vienna but finally took office only in 1897, after a prolonged refusal by Emperor Franz Josef to confirm his election, a gesture often interpreted as one of the last gasps of liberal gentility.60 These features of 1890s civic politics increased pessimism among those who had seen in the modern capital the possibility of financial, social, and political progress and confirmed the opinions of those who had doubted it. One extreme example of the former could be seen in Theodor Herzl himself: arriving in Vienna as a young man, rising socially and professionally as a successful assimilated Jew, he grew so disaffected with his surroundings that he became a leader of a movement that sought to escape them as soon as possible. For those like Birnbaum who had always been pessimistic, the turn of events of the 1890s elicited a less dramatic, although still tangible, response. With his watchful eye, Birnbaum observed the victory of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party in the 1895 elections and reflected on its implications for liberalism, Jewish nationalism, and the Viennese Jewish masses in his article “On the Vienna Municipal Elections”: “The victory of anti-Semitism in Vienna is truly colossal and can be captured in these words: the collective citizenry of Vienna—the small, middle, and great—with few exceptions, has now become intimately acquainted with anti-Semitism.”61 Both the anti-Semitic and the liberal press responded predictably: “The Viennese anti-Semitic press has accordingly broken out in cries of jubilation. Above all the Deutsche Zeitung pronounces: ‘Cry, Israel, Jerusalem has fallen!’ . . . [And the liberal press,] yes, the liberal daily press! That is the forum of the loudest laments of Viennese Israel . . . as they call upon, for the millionth time, the [strengthening of] the city laws

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for confessional and national civil rights.”62 To Birnbaum, the lamentations of the liberal press (which he unreflectively identifies as Jewish) and their inadequate demand for more protective laws completely misconstrued the meaning of the election: the end of liberalism and a new, dangerous corner turned for Jewish Vienna. They could neither comprehend that liberalism had received its death blow from Lueger nor undertake the needed radical reconsideration of the idée fixe of Jewish politics in Vienna and reject once and for all that “the destiny of the Jews depends upon the destiny of the liberals.” The election also showed, most disquietingly, that liberals no longer offered protection for Jewish interests. In fact, Birnbaum predicted, Jews would ultimately be left holding the bag after liberalism’s collapse, as it “crumbl[ed] more from year to year because the people no longer believe in the old idealism—and the party itself honestly no longer does either—but the Jewish followers remain true.”63 These circumstances, Birnbaum hoped, would awaken the Jewish masses to the impotence of their leaders. “When the scales fall from the eyes,” he asks, “where will they turn?” The overwhelmingly marginalized majority of the Jewish population of Vienna, Birnbaum speculated, could embrace the Social Democrats, the young but emergent far-left party that shared the Christian Social Party’s antipathy to liberalism. Yet this solution, Birnbaum predicted, would ultimately be found wanting. For all the aspects of Social Democracy that might seem to make it a haven for Jewish interests, there were ominous trends. It espoused internationalism yet could be easily drawn to chauvinism; it was, above all, a worker’s movement, proletarian in its aims and its membership, and one with little interest in the plight of poor Jews whom they considered largely nonproletarian. This, Birnbaum believed, would leave the Jewish masses hungry for an ideology that offered a better solution. For the elite bourgeois Jews of Vienna Birnbaum held out little hope, nor did he have high expectations for the larger portion of the middle-class intelligentsia already tainted by assimilation. But “those left behind will, with the exception of a relatively small group of ‘intellectuals’ that have grown out of their class and broken away from their people entirely . . . [ultimately] pro­ gress to Jewish national awareness.”64 The victory of the anti-Semites was really a tragedy only for the liberal Jewish elite. For all other Jews capable of recognizing it, the “shattering” of the “great Jews” of Vienna

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represented the end of the domination of liberalism’s delusions. Liberalism’s demise was nothing more than “a link in the chain” of events leading, albeit through a time of darkness, to a true age of happiness. True, Birnbaum writes, the anti-Semites “may rejoice and call out triumphantly, ‘Cry, Israel, Jerusalem has fallen!’ [Although] we do not rejoice at all now, we will greet this so-called setback of Jewish advancement in Vienna with the call, ‘Rejoice, world, better days beckon!’ and ‘Rejoice, Israel, Jerusalem is in sight!’ ”65 This mordant joy at the failure of liberalism in Vienna concealed a more sober attitude. Birnbaum’s antiliberal and nationalist inclinations had always been a response to a sense of threat, but the victory of antiSemitism in Vienna made the threat immediate and tangible. Whereas once critics of Jewish nationalism had been able to point to the progress of Viennese Jews to discredit them, the victory of the Christian Social Party, even if one judged it an aberration, was impossible to ignore. Even though Birnbaum was pleased at his vindication, he was alarmed at the signs unfolding in Vienna and across central and eastern Europe. These required a more aggressive and broader approach by Jewish nationalists. The opening essay of Birnbaum’s new periodical, Jüdische Volkszeitung, illustrates both his sense of crisis and the need for a new nationalist response. Indeed, the title of the paper itself (really a relaunch of Selbst-Emancipation), first published in 1896, signified his turn toward a broader conception of Jewish nationalism. Although still Zionist, the paper now called broadly upon the Jewish people to confront the mounting threats through nationalism. “Everyone knows what the term ‘crisis’ means,” Birnbaum began in “Our Motto,” the first essay of his new paper. “When the body of an ill person faces a struggle between life and death and it is uncertain which will triumph, one speaks of crisis. . . . In the life of the nation, crises linger longer, and as for the Jewish nation, which is an exceptional example, its crisis has persisted for two thousand years.”66 Birnbaum unequivocally laid the blame for the crisis on the Jewish community itself. Its unfortunate choice of selfdefeating assimilation instead of self-affirming nationalism had denied Jews the ability to accurately perceive, let alone confront, the immense danger they faced. And hopes for the prospects of quick change were bleak. “[Even as] we Jews must contemplate the proper time for a return [to the nation], the spirit of thoughtlessness in our midst grows

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ever more powerful by the day. . . . Seized by a base but currently fashionable materialistic impulse, convulsed by factional struggles, soaked through by so-called assimilation—Israel cannot find the power to attend to its own needs.”67 But with his belief that all Jews, regardless of their attitude toward nationalism, would eventually have no choice but to prepare to fight for the very survival of the Jewish people, so does he spread blame beyond his old assimilationist foes. His self-involved fellow Jewish nationalists were also incapable of effecting the radical change that circumstances demanded. Success for nationalism now meant more than simply countering assimilation; it meant saving the Jewish people, period. The rebranding of Selbst-Emancipation as Jüdische Volkszeitung also marked the beginning of Birnbaum’s interest in another group that would play a central role in his future writing and ideology: the Ostjuden, Yiddish-speaking Jews of the Russian and eastern Austro-Hungarian Empire. Eastern European Jewry had always played a central role in the development of Jewish nationalism.68 The plight of these victims of the worst poverty and most severe anti-Semitism provided the impetus for national movements in both eastern and central Europe. But like most of his fellow nationalists, Birnbaum had shown little interest in the cultural, social, or political life of eastern Jewry in his early writings. A set of negative associations almost universally held in central European Jewish society was a dominant and unexamined attitude. When they were discussed, the culture, language, and inner life of eastern Jewry were seldom considered seriously. Birnbaum, the son of two Galician Jewish migrants, shared this common sentiment with the elite Hebraists and antitraditionalists of the Russian Empire and the cosmopolitan and integrated Jews of central E ­ urope. But in the early 1890s, his attitude began to change. Before the mid-1890s, eastern European Jewry did not figure significantly in Birnbaum’s writing. Few articles in Selbst-Emancipation dealt with them directly, and when they do appear, eastern European Jews usually form an undifferentiated mass, important primarily as a symbol of Jewish suffering. In “The Case of the Jews of Russia,” Birnbaum writes at length of their desperate situation, but while he castigates assimilated Jews for turning their back on their eastern brethren, he objectifies them in his own way nonetheless. These victims of “an unending, pitiful fate,” facing “horrors presumed long-dead,” had finally suffered

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on a grand enough scale to raise the attention of the assimilated Jewish world: “Is there a Jewish heart in the whole world that does not take note and quiver with pain at the news of horror from Russia, of the ruin visited upon our brothers?”69 The German-language Jewish press, in Birnbaum’s judgment usually callously inattentive, had finally taken notice. “The old habits acquired with assimilation, all that foolish hatred toward ‘Russian’ Jews—all has been wiped away by the suffering in this current catastrophe.” While applauding the long overdue attention, Birnbaum cannot resist throwing a dart: that it took such an extreme situation to merit the attention of the cosmopolitan press (which “gives details on the lives and affairs of Jews of the east only begrudgingly”) was likely because its contributors were “alarmed at the idea that the Russians could be similar to them.”70 But as the essay continues, Birnbaum’s response blithely reveals his own ambivalence. “A great Russian poet has written a well-known work, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ This question must be asked in the face of such horrific news. Unfortunately, it is difficult to answer. There are already more than enough suggestions, all of them more or less impracticable.”71 They may well not be savable, Birnbaum concludes. But their suffering will not be for nothing, for in their sacrifice the necessity of a national awakening will be even more undeniable.72 Like many of his milieu, Birnbaum was sympathetic toward eastern European Jewry, outraged at their fate, but ultimately viewed them through the lens of his agenda. They were a warning case and a reminder that the pain and suffering of the exile was never too far off, but they were never agents in their own right. Also absent in Birnbaum’s early work is any notion of eastern Jewry as a vibrant cultural force, except insofar as it had served as the ground from which nationalists (who had mostly rejected their eastern surroundings) had arisen. The rare instance where Birnbaum does engage with some aspect of this culture, as in “Jewish Jargon,” an early essay on Yiddish (known as “jargon” both derisively and popularly), he is uniformly negative. Noting a small but growing interest in Yiddish rather than Hebrew as a potential national language of the Jewish people, Birnbaum rejected it out of hand. “What is jargon? It is an image of Israel in exile. . . . Language of the ghetto! These words best characterize Jewish German. . . . This mishmash is not an appropriate language of a people, not the least for the language of a people that wishes to

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climb up from two thousand years of exile to the heights of national independence and its previous greatness.”73 Going further, anyone who might speculate that Yiddish could be a national language “is not really a nationalist Jew, for he lacks the alpha and the omega of the Jewish national conviction, and that is the recognition of the necessity of the moral rebirth of Israel.”74 An attitude shared by many in his milieu, both nationalist and not, Birnbaum’s dislike of Yiddish went beyond the practical or aesthetic. To him it is no less than the living symbol of moral degeneracy wrought by exile on the Jewish people. As the 1890s progressed, however, Birnbaum gradually reassessed his views toward eastern European Jewry. By 1892, he began to take note of political events in the eastern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including a report on a strike of Jewish textile workers in Kolomea in eastern Galicia.75 From this early blip of interest, within two years the events, culture, and political activity of eastern Jewry became a major preoccupation of his writing in Jüdische Volkszeitung. Eventually this attention would evolve into a full-blown identification with the Ostjuden, but at this point his interest was limited to the framework of Jewish nationalism. He was awakened to the untapped potential of eastern Jewry as a ready-made political force and became convinced that ideological planks of early Zionism, be they commitment to Hebrew, the presence of a “correct” idea of nationalism, eventually even rigid commitment to settlement in Palestine, were negotiable as national priorities. Birnbaum’s new attitude toward the Ostjuden was based in part on the same new reaction to anti-Semitism discussed earlier. In his early writings Birnbaum, like many others, regarded anti-Semitism in the east and west as functionally distinct. In the east, it was an existential threat caused by a backward regime, culture, and economy that could be effectively reduced only through drastic reform of the government and the economic situation of its Jews. Western anti-Semitism, however, was an aberration, spread by poorly bred hooligans, on the one hand, and retrograde aristocratic boors, on the other, both of which could be effectively challenged within the framework of an open and integral legal and legislative apparatus. As the 1890s progressed, Birnbaum concluded that the two phenomena were inseparable. As anti-Semitic violence in the east drove more Jewish victims west, the anti-Semitism of the west increased in kind. While certainly not Birnbaum’s realization

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alone, he began in the early 1890s to focus increasingly on the unity of Jewish suffering and the need for a unified response. “In the face of the indiscriminate torment of seven million of our brethren that we can comprehend in view of our minor troubles, we think only about ourselves, who number less than two million,” Birnbaum observed in 1892.76 The increase of anti-Semitism even in the most advanced cities in Europe was an important barometer, but to focus on it alone was dangerously myopic. Jewish victimization in Vienna and Berlin could not be understood or confronted in a vacuum, for it was inextricably linked with the increasing hopelessness and devastation faced by Jews in the east. “We should finally learn to understand with the present and increasing visibility of these seven million of our brethren as they immigrate back and forth that all our social and economic lives are threatened together, and we run the risk of reaching an unprecedented deluge of modern Jewish suffering.”77 It was essential to recognize that antiSemitism could not be uprooted from the mentality of any European, be it that of the Ukrainian peasant, the Polish landlord, the German worker, or even the Viennese parliamentarian. Emphasis on shared victimization was only the first step in Birnbaum’s turn east. Next was his deepening interest in the possibility of a nationalist awakening in the more traditionalist communities of ­Galicia.78 Political activity among Galician Jews had been present for some time, especially after 1867 in the larger cities. As the end of the century approached, the distinctive character of Galician Jewish politics attracted the attention of Jewish nationalists like Birnbaum. By the 1880s, Galician Jewish political groups, both modernized Jews (such as Emil Byk and the Shomer Israel) and the Orthodox (such as the Makhzikey ha-Das), favored cooperation with Polish hegemony.79 Birnbaum believed, not without reason, that expressions of Jewish national identity that threatened Polish hegemony in the region had been met with hostility and been suppressed by the region’s two major ethnic groups, the Poles and the Ukrainians (Ruthenians). But the ­Galician Jewish masses, sandwiched between these two groups, could hold a considerable amount of power as a wedge group if awakened to a national identity, a fact largely ignored by powerful interests in both Galicia and Vienna. “When one understands the situation of the approximately seven hundred thousand Galician Jews as opposed to the other resident groups

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of this territory—about three million Poles and two and a half million Ruthenians—then one sees even more clearly how they are conceived of through the lens of the Austrian Empire.”80 Thus, the Jews of Galicia were at an important crossroads from a Jewish nationalist perspective. Although Poles claimed Jews nominally in order to justify their status as the dominant nationality in Galicia, they did not pursue assimilation of Jews to a Polish identity in a systematic way and, indeed, were often hostile to the idea.81 As Birnbaum recognized, Polish elites at the highest levels of the Austrian imperial government wanted to keep Jews “politically aloof and thus neutral, and at the same time discourage attempts at assimilation into Polish society. . . . There are none [among the Poles] in Galicia who do not know these facts, and even fewer who would not wish it so. . . . They thus do nothing [to encourage] the assimilation of Jews—an intolerable thought to their noble brains.”82 But as both the Poles and Birnbaum knew, “the Galician Jews have their unique language, wear their own characteristic clothing, govern their mutual social relations through singular ideas and sentiments, compose an independent people’s prose, indeed even operate an independent theater.”83 In other words, they possessed nearly all of the prerequisite cultural attributes of a nation—save political awareness. Politically aloof and culturally separate, the Jews of Galicia at first glance seemed to serve Polish aims ideally. But, as Birnbaum noticed, this cynical manipulation was short-sighted; Galician Jewish nationalism, a small but growing force among Galician Jews, would be well positioned to take advantage of this situation. “This is what Jewish politics [in Galicia] brings with it: on the one hand, it . . . would make rapprochement with the Poles impossible, and, on the other, it would prepare large-scale Jewish industry, mercantilism, and cultural pillars to mount a full opposition, especially against the ‘Poles of the Mosaic confession.’ ” 84 Beyond forming a ripe political constituency for organized (and Vienna-based) Zionism, the Galician movement offered a paradigm for Jewish nationalist organizations from which even Vienna could learn, the most important being its “democratic” character. “The great progress of the Zionist cause in Galicia . . . is due in no small part to the democratic character of the movement there. This example must be emulated in the western part of the monarchy, specifically in Vienna if we want fresh green sprouts here.”85 Although still convinced that

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Zion­ism would be led by the more politically sophisticated nationalists of Vienna and Berlin, Birnbaum recognized something important at work in Galician nationalism. Birnbaum’s interest in the political awakening of Galician Jewry led him to think even beyond Zionism, especially in articulating what exactly the ideal forms of culture, language, and even the ultimate goals of Jewish nationalism would be that appealed across different communities. In “A Jewish People’s Party,” from 1894, Birnbaum argued for a substantially different model of Jewish nationalism than what would soon emerge with Herzl’s ascendance. Like many, he argued that Zionism needed to transition toward a mass, international movement and transcend its situation as a loose collection of Zionist clubs to move forward. Herzl, and many other Zionists, would come forward to argue that the top priority should be the practical goal of speedy settlement and establishment of a Jewish state, but Birnbaum was skeptical about the opinion of world Jewry would ever embrace the considerable task of creating a modern state out of nothing. His own troubled experience with Zionism may have played a role in this attitude. For more than a decade, Birnbaum had been struggling to draw adherents to a movement that lacked a unified plan for organization, let alone for mass settlement in Palestine. He had watched the plodding attempts at Zionist settlement in Ottoman Palestine and had endured consistent skepticism and criticism from the outside and disunity within. His disillusionment with the movement to which he had sacrificed so much of his energy and happiness is explicit in his early letters to Herzl. But contrary to Herzl’s later accusation that Birnbaum was leaving the movement behind, he was actually looking for a way to reinvent it. Birnbaum put forward one proposal for this reinvention in “A Jewish People’s Party,” where he called for a Jewish national party that was not based on loyalty to a single goal or rigid ideology but on a broad conception of the Jews as a national entity regardless of the particulars. To Birnbaum, a more expansive definition of Jewish nationalism could address the failure of Zionists to convert a large number of Jews to the cause. “As everyone knows,” Birnbaum wrote, “we Zionists have a sense that for the Jews . . . the golden age has not yet come. We have no illusions; we do not believe in a sudden change in human nature; we know from experience that the victory that we have helped to fight

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for together has eluded us.” The movement had been a disappointment to Birnbaum and other young idealists, and the time had come to put their youthful expectations behind them, recognize the truth, and plan for the future. Their principal failure lay in the expectation that the (to them) inexorable logic of the nationalist solution, coupled with their agitation and sheer will, would be enough to win over a majority of Jews. Clearly this had not happened. In the meantime the situation had grown ever more grim, and Zionists had failed in their response. What should have been an ideal moment to persuade the Jewish world of the Zionist solution by helping to alleviate the plight of millions of Russian Jews and fight the spread of anti-Semitic political forces everywhere had been missed entirely. “All we have cared is that we are Zionists; all we care is that we will create a state for our people in which it can live its own life, independent of the goodwill of strangers.” Although a laudable goal, it was inadequate in the short term. “We must not forget that our purpose will not be realized tomorrow; indeed, our goal is far greater, for it is a fact that the greater portion of our people will remain behind in Europe, and whether we want to or not, we must take a position on the European question.”86 This basic question, which would divide Zionists in all camps for decades to come, reflects a foundational reconsideration of Zionist priorities on Birnbaum’s part. It was, in fact, an early statement of a position known as Gegenwartsarbeit—literally, “work in the present.” The question was whether Zionists should devote scarce resources to support Jewish nationalist activities in the Diaspora (­Gegenwart, or “present” work, for instance, in seeking political office in national parliaments, as Birnbaum proposed) or to remain neutral in Diaspora politics, dedicating all resources to building an independent Jewish state (a position called “Palästinaarbeit,” work for Palestine). Although not realizing it at the time, Birnbaum was staking out a position very early, even before Zionism itself was organized enough to form around one strategy, let alone two, that would be a central point of debate even after the establishment of the State of Israel. At the root of this was Birnbaum’s realization of the troubling moral dilemma central to the growth of the movement. Diverting attention from the ultimate goal might dilute Zionist efforts, thereby pushing the goal of a Jewish commonwealth off further. But they ignored the day-to-day situation of European Jewry at their peril. The cruel calculus of suffering had made

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its way to Birnbaum’s argument: he understood that more suffering for Jews in Europe could vindicate further the cause of Zionism, and he chose to reject this position outright. Of course, Birnbaum recognized the objections to an overly broad agenda in dealing with Diaspora Jewry, especially in how it would affect the perceptions of rank-and-file Zionists, and he anticipated an accusation that would be lodged against him not long after. “There may be some doubt [among more doctrinaire Zionists] about us and which side we are on. A secure and deluded enemy that stands before defeat is often preferable to an insecure and new friend that joins before victory.” Although it was tempting to retain ideological purity instead of practical action, this was the wrong course. That cooperation with political groups to address the suffering of European Jewry in the near term could result in the dilution of Zionist ideology was an obvious objection—in fact, it is the subtext of Herzl’s accusation that Birnbaum had “gone over to Socialism.” But in the end these complaints will be answered by a larger success: the preservation of the physical body of Jewry and the winning of their allegiance to Zionism. “We will have, in the meantime, diligently striven for our ultimate party line and also built up the rest of the nation; then we will have done for it all that remains to be done. We will have preserved it for the time being and for its ultimate welfare.”87 The ideal way of preserving the safety of European Jewry was to focus on the underlying principle of Zionism, which to Birnbaum was the general welfare of the Jewish nation. Zionism had failed to cultivate the national sensibility of the majority of Jews because its ideology required too much—Jewish statehood, cultural renewal, a new language, a new society—while doing little to address the present crisis. This had alienated potential converts to Jewish nationalism in the west and east. In the west, little need was felt for replacement of the rich German, French, or English culture that assimilation-minded Jews had adopted, despite its anti-Semitic underbelly. In the east, a rich Jewish culture and a deep sense of Jewish identity made the embrace of a new Hebraist culture seem a pointless gesture for all but a few aesthetes. Indeed, for many, perhaps the majority of traditionally religious Jews, it was a tainted and dangerously “modern” preoccupation. What was needed to advance Jewish nationalism everywhere was a political

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model flexible enough to speak to each situation. The other political systems that claimed to offer relief of Jewish suffering, especially liberalism, had already been shown wanting: “Liberalism is a foundering principle, both according to the old reactionary view, into which it recedes, and according to the new ideas of freedom, before which it fades. If we persist in it, so will we find ourselves.”88 Jewish nationalists must learn from the inflexibility and failure to adapt to a dynamic reality and act accordingly. This did not mean that Birnbaum advocated abandoning the major pillar of Zionism—Zion itself. The Jewish People’s Party, while reaching out to the broadest number of adherents with a mandate for inclusiveness, would maintain at its heart a commitment to eventual Jewish statehood. “‘Zion’ must remain the ultimate, the highest purpose of the party. [However] what we can attain before ‘Zion’ for the good of our people we must fight for and join with the [other] oppressed against our common oppressor.” Zionism must not remain merely a rigid, materialist ideology but rather become a worldview that could tolerate many variations. It had to become the pluralist vision that it truly was, and the rest would follow naturally. “Zionism [after all],” he wrote, “represents a Jewish-oriented political organization, a liberal economic Manchesterian perspective, [as well as], finally, the welcoming of religious opinion held as a private matter. [We must] lastly resist [opposition to religion] with an eye toward the final aim that, in the end, Zionism itself will be the basis of communal religious belief.”89 Even the most intractable internal issue of Zionism, its relationship to religion and especially to traditionalists who associated it with apostasy and modernism, could be overcome through setting differences aside in the short term. In the long term, once nationalism had triumphed and Jews no longer faced a threat to their very survival, these issues would be resolved organically, of their own accord. “A Jewish People’s Party” brings into sharp focus a collection of vague assertions and suggestions that Birnbaum had made in print for much of the early 1890s. Zionism and Jewish national identity were truths whose inevitability would become clearer only with the passage of time. But in the short term, those already awakened to it needed to act to preserve the Jewish people who had yet to grasp their situation. They needed to facilitate awakening through practical, broad-based action and allegiances,

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even if it meant setting aside rigid ideology. Herein lay the most important development of Birnbaum’s thought up to the arrival of Herzl. By describing Zionism as an inevitable truth, Birnbaum had appropriated a belief, akin to socialism, that scientifically verifiable and inexorable forces shaped all human affairs and relationships. Like Marx and Engels’s concept of the evolution of political consciousness in the proletariat, Birnbaum prophesied inevitable infiltration of a Zionist consciousness among all Jews, parallel to the national consciousness that had taken hold among other central European peoples. While this would deeply influence his approach to politics for the next decade, at this point it formed the subject of his second major tract, The Jewish Moderne, in which he presented his definitive statement on race, nation, and human history.

The Jewish Moderne The ambiguously titled Jewish Moderne originated in a speech delivered to the Kadimah Society in early 1896 (around the time Birnbaum first met Herzl). In this, his most important essay of the period, he mapped out an entire theory of Jewish peoplehood and the foundations of Jewish nationalism. Like other ideological models he had adopted, those expressed in the essay did not originate with him, but his thoughts in Jewish Moderne do represent a creative and influential interpretation. The essay also reflects Birnbaum’s sharpest break with his previous Zionist beliefs, and although its roots in such essays as “The Jewish People’s Party” are discernible, it provides the first ruminations on themes that would shape his political and cultural activities for the next decade. Published under the pseudonym Mathias Acher, it is part historical survey, part philosophical argument, and part statement of policy and political action for the future of Jewish nationalism. The essay, intended to be a groundbreaking statement, was exceedingly long (one can only imagine the length of the evening in which it was delivered as a lecture), much longer than any of his works to date. Much of it recapitulated familiar positions such as the failure of Jewish assimilation, the necessity of Jewish national autonomy in some form, and the bankruptcy of liberalism. But in the midst of this familiar critique, signs of Birnbaum’s evolving thought emerge.

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The first comes out of Birnbaum’s revised analysis of assimilation, located within a new historical dynamic. Those who still had faith in the possibility of a Jewish identity that could be molded to fit another national group were misguided in two senses, both related to their understanding (or lack of understanding) of history. They seemed unaware of the sorry results of all historical attempts at assimilation. “What the present theory of assimilation is concerned with,” Birnbaum writes, “is well known to a succession of aborted searches for assimilation throughout Jewish history. No Jewish attempts at assimilation, be they in Babylon, Persia, Greece, or Spain, had succeeded. These movements all ended with the same result: those who stayed aloof from assimilation survived unscathed, and the assimilationist movements themselves met their own destruction.”90 Nineteenth-century cases concerning German and French Jews differed only in their particulars. Like their predecessors, in seeking to dissolve the differences between themselves and their non-Jewish countrymen, French and German Jews did not succeed in accomplishing, or even properly comprehending, what was actually demanded by their neighbors, that is, a national assimilation. Instead, they had achieved a more general, cosmopolitan—and superficial—integration. “If we compare these so-called assimilated Jews with their surroundings, we find that their perspectives and their attitudes are circumscribed within a familiar set of ideas and notions, which are shared in common with all European people of culture; however, when it comes to the specifics of national singularity, it is completely deficient.”91 This, Birnbaum argues, was no assimilation at all. What was the cause of this persistent misreading of their situation? To Birnbaum, it was attributable to a fatal misunderstanding of national development. Nationalism, Birnbaum believed, was not the product of the liberal nineteenth century, as was often assumed. On the contrary, it was ancient, immutable, and ultimately it was the deepest motivating factor in human social evolution. Jewish assimilationists had staked their identity on belief in a different foundation of human nature: an Enlightenment notion that at its core, human identity and society were based on a shared, neutral humanity that transcended all differences. Birnbaum posited, however, that the basic mode of human interaction was racial, and later national, differentiation. In the essay’s most original turn, one that places it squarely among the family of other devel-

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oping racialist historical models of the fin de siècle period, Birnbaum introduced his broad theory of history, which he termed “racial materialism.” Like many of his contemporaries, Birnbaum found Marxist materialism—particularly as it dispensed with the idea of external, transcendent forces as the engines of history—to be indisputably compelling. But as insightful as he believed the Marxist demystification of history to be, Birnbaum felt that Marx, Engels, and their followers had erred in identifying the engine of history as economics and class conflict. In fact, Birnbaum suggested, savoring the irony, economics—a singularly Jewish obsession when thinking about the situation of the Jewish people—was a distracting obsession that Marx, his followers, and Jewish assimilationists of all political stripes shared.92 Economics and class struggle, Birnbaum countered, were merely abstractions that masked the real motivating force of historical change— humanity itself. “Why, precisely,” he writes, “should the economic structure of society—itself an abstraction—be accorded the honor of being figured as the stuff of history? The stuff of human history can only be humanity itself. It is through humanity that the chain of history from the original cosmic fog through to day-to-day events, is connected—and the unity of history is attained through it.” It is only through its human expression that the historical event attains significance and comes into being. And the most basic form of human expression as it has been enacted out in historical time is a dialectic composed of “race-unity” (­Gattungseinheit) and group differentiation. “The historical event comes into being through human nature, in part as a result of racial unity, in part through the differentiation of man. From these flow economic, racial, and national history. Both are manifold in one another, and their common work is history. Everyday historical materialism, especially as it is known in Social Democratic Party writings, ignores this simple factor. But then again, for Social Democratic propaganda, wishing is the father of all thought.”93 While his straw man model of Marxism is difficult to ignore (Marxists never denied the human origins of economic life), Birnbaum’s point nevertheless offers an interesting twist. In place of class conflict, he elevates the role of national and racial identity and, at the same time, belies the claim that he is a socialist. More significant is his dissection of the concept of nationalism. The nation precedes all in influencing the development of human history—or rather its atomic

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component of the nation, racial differentiation. “The firm foundation of nationality is always and above all race, as well as its means of development and refinement; it is through racial culture that nationality [develops]. Nationality has nothing to do with the state and even less to do with language. The state is originally a creation of economic power, a product of men as a means of differentiation.”94 The state is a temporal creation; only the nation and its racial building block are transcendent. Birnbaum’s focus on race, while jarring to contemporaries, was a familiar element of fin de siècle political and social theory. By the end of the nineteenth century, theories about the centrality of race to human history and evolutionary development and academic fields such as anthropology, sociology, and political theory had become commonplace.95 In fact, seeking the building block of national differentiation in race was an early and obvious product of the entrenchment of nationalism over the course of the nineteenth century. After 1860, the intersection of this quest with an often overreaching enthusiasm for new scientific theories—particularly Darwinian evolution—as well as quasi- and pseudoscientific concepts such as phrenology and theosophy, meant the central role of race in human identity and destiny was largely taken for granted. Vienna, the capital of a contentious multinational empire, was certainly fertile soil for racialist theory, but it was not alone. Even the liberal France of the Third Republic was home to some of the most prominent voices of the new racialism, theorists from Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82) and Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), pioneers in the marriage of revanchist and ersatz noblesse oblige to biological racial superiority, to sensationalist journalist Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), famous for his contribution to the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair.96 In the 1890s, Vienna itself was home to at least two central figures in racialist theory whom Birnbaum analyzed in print, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) and Otto Weininger (1880–1903). To Chamberlain, whose epic Foundations of the 19th Century was completed in 1899, the whole of human history was building to a final conflict between races, the “pure” Aryans (the Germanic race, who were the late form of the ancient Greco-Roman world) and Jewry, the mongrel antithesis of racial purity and light.97 Chamberlain, who married into the family of (then deceased) composer Richard Wagner and with their assent established himself as the ideologue of Bayreuth, was eventually

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seen as a prophet of far-right racial politics in Germany. Otto Weininger was a far more complex person and thinker. Only a teenager in the 1890s, he completed his major work, Sex and Character, in Vienna in 1903 at the age of twenty-three, shortly before taking his own life in the house where Beethoven, to him the apotheosis of race and culture, had died. Weininger, who was born into a Jewish family, precociously constructed an entire philosophical, sociological and psychological system to describe human history based upon racial and gender categories. Using a similar schema as Chamberlain (among others), Weininger located the two extremes of human development: the male/Aryan at the high end, and female/Jewish at the other. To the male/Aryan extreme he attributed qualities of creativity, dynamism, power, and intellectual complexity; to the other extreme, lack of a capacity for higher thought, indecision, and weakness.98 Although a far better tool for insight into the psyche of Weininger himself than a tool for social or psychological research, Weininger’s book was a sensation and a runaway best seller, going through several editions in the two decades following its publication.99 Major cultural figures, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Freud, Kafka, and Karl Kraus, took Weininger’s voice quite seriously.100 Like many of his contemporaries, Birnbaum believed race played a decisive role in the development of human history. Indeed, the issue of racial difference was not far removed from most late nineteenth-­century theorists of nationalism, including most nonreligious early Zionists, although seldom is it addressed as bluntly in the Zionist context as in The Jewish Moderne.101 Birnbaum, well aware of the uncomfortable associations that racialist theory would have in his work, took special pains to analyze and differentiate his thought from that of Weininger and Chamberlain specifically.102 In fact, regardless of the superficial resonance with the ideas of such figures, Birnbaum’s conception of race in The Jewish Moderne is decidedly benign. Although it is the determining factor in human differentiation, and one that individuals have little power to change, race to Birnbaum is never conceived of in the same fantastical and bizarrely speculative terms as those of some of his contemporaries. Nor does he seek to bring in the other key component of nineteenth-century racialism: Darwin. National—that is racial—culture is not a competitive advantage bestowed by nature on one group and not another. As in other points, here Birnbaum shows much more so-

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phistication and clarity than other racialists, whose distorted pseudoDarwinism often condemns them to an absurd paradox: The “superior” racial culture is usually, in the polemics of racists, the one under siege and in danger of extinction at the hands of “inferior” ones, whose very inferiority should have condemned them to disappearance. The position of such racialists, which Birnbaum calls “chauvinism,” is a false and ludicrous one, but it represents a danger to all: “From this comes national awareness as it is usually understood in Europe, and with it all the sins that have been committed [in its name] in this [Austrian] empire. . . . [But] between the recognition of these historical factors and chauvinism lies a wide chasm. Chauvinism has no scientific basis.”103 But nationalism untainted by chauvinism was the natural and healthy result of an integrated racial identity. Jews, like all other peoples, could achieve their full historical being only through their national existence. Conversely, the denial of national being—particularly evident in attempts at assimilation, the misguided attempt to enter another nation—was ultimately responsible for the state of suffering and danger for the Jewish people, as it would be for any other national group in the same position. In rhetoric that reflects the continued influence of Pinsker, Birnbaum argued that it is a central trait of national entities to engage with their like and to negate and destroy that which challenges their hegemony. The Jews, in failing to embrace their essential being, had brought upon themselves the hatred and destructive fury of other nations. But this did not have to be the case; as Birnbaum writes, “I do not believe in some eternal national hatred myself, at least not in terms of racial culture.”104 It is due only to the peculiar situation of the Jews in Europe; the rise of European nationalism has tended to turn on Jews as an obvious target: “Where Jews have been found, they have been found in too great a number to be left alone in the crowd, and too small a number to command respect—and have thus left themselves in the most dangerous persecuted state of powerlessness. This powerlessness is the foundation of the inevitability of the national friction between Jews and non-Jews and lends Jew hatred its particular potency.”105 Birnbaum believed that the solution to this problem had already shown itself to be the Jews’ embrace of their national destiny and identity. Thus, work to facilitate it should be continued with the full focus of Jews taking their rightful place among the other nations of the world,

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proud of their culture, history, and language and eschewing chauvinism and jingoism. Embracing nationhood, the Jews would realize a twofold profit: the self-esteem of the Jewish people would be elevated, and as a consequence they would transcend their persecution as a powerless and nationless quasi-entity, eventually ending their dependence on other nations. Birnbaum was convinced that it was now, on the eve of the new century, that offered the optimal historical moment for this to occur: “The Jews possess at this moment all that would be required of a state in order for it to come into being and succeed; they have a unified nation; they have at their disposal a full measure of physical, economic, and spiritual power; they also possess more now in the political sense than they have before.”106 Indeed, in Birnbaum’s most controversial new position in terms of Zionist priorities, this transformation did not even depend on a Jewish land, the founding of which would naturally follow. “The reclamation of the land itself is a relatively easy, even automatic undertaking; whether it is fulfilled now with economic weapons, or, as in our case, with our modern weapons of spirit and capital, both are nothing other than the potent accumulation of another century of earthly and heavenly labor.”107 As he would increasingly do, Birnbaum relegated the acquisition of a land for the Jewish nation to a secondary priority. It would occur axiomatically, of that he had no doubt, as the natural conclusion of a nation’s coming into its own full being. But to make it the sole focus of Jewish nationalism was to misunderstand the process or function of national development. This would become Birnbaum’s most trenchant critique to date of Jewish national organizations and would lead him to make a startling distinction between “Zionism” and “Jewish nationalism.” For a little more than a decade, the small, more or less organized groups that accepted the necessity of a Jewish national awakening had been interchangeably called “Zionists” and “Jewish nationalists.” But the conflation of these terms was a mistake. It was toward the new Zionists, who, in Birnbaum’s view, placed the establishment of a Jewish nationstate above other national priorities, that he addressed his critique as a Jewish nationalist. The movement had become a misdirected romantic ideology that, although based on a sound foundation, emphasized an unworkable structure. In their obsession with territory, Zionists reflexively accepted that the existence of a Jewish state alone would solve

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the Jewish problem. Returning to his critique of Marxist materialism, he said that they had made the error of siding with Engels in the belief that only status as “masters of their own house” would liberate them from their troubled history.108 They had, as a result, removed the human center from their consideration of the material of history, turning the land and quest for a state itself into an idol that, like all others, would prove empty.109 Birnbaum contended that Jewish nationalists must first strengthen the nation and let the land take care of itself. This, the “Israel goes before Zion” ideology (the title of a later article articulating a similar line), would become a motto for Birnbaum after his final departure from Zionism. Interestingly, one of the most serious threats to this aim, Birnbaum argues, was the co-optation of Jewish nationalism by party politics, to which Zionism was particularly susceptible. It may seem counterintuitive that Birnbaum would express this sentiment at a time when he was actively courting Herzl in the hope of helping establish a new Zionist party. But when one considers the way in which he approaches Herzl—in an attempt to guide him toward a broader view of Jewish nationalism than simple negotiations for land—it is fairly congruous. The descent into party politics, Birnbaum argued, was a strong temptation for the Jewish nationalists. After all, “the German nationalists are a party; the irredentists are a party; why shouldn’t Jewish nationalists also be a party? Why not? Because [the Jewish nation] is contrary to every assumption of a party.”110 For true Jewish nationalists, entanglement with the world of party politics had no national, political, or social value. It merely served to undermine the creation of an integral national being in exchange for the very chauvinism and jingoism that had tortured the Jewish people for so long.111 Furthermore, to reduce nationalism, a core element of human identity, to one party or another was to create an artificial unit that had no meaning in the context of Jewish national being: “Nationality is so reflexive an aspect of the people that it makes no sense to have a movement in which this obvious state of affairs is made explicit.”112 With this ambiguity about the future of Jewish nationalism as an organized movement, written at the turning point of Zionism from a parochial collection of idealists into a mass movement, Birnbaum concluded The Jewish Moderne. In retrospect, perhaps Birnbaum never

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would have lasted in any case in the large-scale, mass Zionist movement coalescing around Herzl. His position was equivocal, complex, and not easily adapted to party organization. Though his ideas may have cast the likelihood of a role in Herzl’s movement in doubt, using its organs, including Zion and Die Welt, he began helping to lay the groundwork for a new movement within the larger Zionist camp to which he would become a central figure, the “Jewish renaissance movement.” Regardless, Birnbaum was far from silent after his seeming occlusion; his drift from the World Zionist Organization and its goals was a prelude to some of his most interesting activity and meditation on the nature and form of Jewish nationalism. This included, in the near term, the further articulation of a renewed focus within Zionism. In the long term, the ideas Birnbaum explored in the 1890s laid the foundation for his transition to electoral politics and Yiddish language–based cultural nationalism.

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In 1899, Birnbaum left his position as secretary general of the Political Action Committee of the World Zionist Organization and ended his formal relationship with Herzl’s movement.1 This break occurred at a decisive moment in the formative years of early Zionism and was one explicit indication of a shift in the movement that had started with ­Herzl’s appearance, rapid rise, and successful co-optation of what formal apparatus the movement claimed in central and eastern Europe. Once Herzl put his stamp on it, almost everything that happened in Zionism afterward bore his mark, and this was achieved in no small part by the withdrawal of any effective dissonant voices from the conversation. With remarkable unanimity, the world of Austro-Hungarian and German Zionism (and, to a significant degree, Russian as well) had pivoted from whatever particular vision of the Jewish nation they had advocated to one based axiomatically upon Herzl’s premises. Younger Zionists who entered the movement in the late 1890s did not recognize or experience a Zionism that was not cast fundamentally in Herzl’s image (or at least what they imagined his image to be), whether or not they agreed with the specifics of his ideas. Even the opposition that did arise under the emerging leadership of Martin Buber, Leo Motzkin, or Chaim Weizmann and others affiliated with the “Democratic Fraction,” most famous for their outspoken opposition in the Sixth Zionist Congress to Theodor Herzl’s presentation of the Uganda proposal, were a deeply loyal opposition. Despite their critique of specific issues, even one as fundamental to Zionism as the proposed displacement of the future Jewish state from Ottoman Palestine to eastern Africa, they ultimately remained loyal to Herzl as an individual, or at least as a figurehead for their movement’s aspirations.2 While those voices that rejected Herzl’s

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leadership outright, which included most famously the sage of the Odessa Hovevei Zion, Ahad Ha’am (pseudonym for Asher Ginsberg), as well as Birnbaum, tried to grasp what drastically diminished ground they could within the movement, in the end they were left largely to ineffectual sniping from the sidelines. Whether seen as the result of a conflict in which the two men had equal blame or (more often) of Birnbaum’s bitterness at being marginalized because of his conflict with Herzl, Birnbaum’s departure from the movement has usually been understood in personal terms.3 Clearly his frustration at being eclipsed by Herzl played a role.4 It is understandable that Birnbaum might have believed Herzl’s success, with his resources and charm to spare, represented a triumph of style over substance. And as the Herzl-Birnbaum letters make clear, Herzl made little effort to salve the wounded egos he left in his wake or assuage the frustration of any of his predecessors—particularly that of a local rival like Birnbaum. Personality clashes account for only part of the story, and a lesser one at that. On a deeper level, Birnbaum’s thinking about Zionism and Jewish nationalism had already begun a steady transformation in the years before Herzl appeared, such that by 1897 there was a deep divergence between his ideas and those that would form the practical and theoretical basis of Herzl’s movement.5 But his shift away from Zionism was not the lonely departure of an isolated malcontent. In fact, it occurred in the context of a larger movement within the Jewish nationalist camp, one in which Birnbaum was squarely located, if not revered as an inspirational figure. While Birnbaum was perhaps at one extreme in his decision to break entirely with the organized movement, he was not nearly so far afield as it might seem. This group of nationalist writers, artist, and thinkers is usually understood as part of the larger Zionist movement, yet their attitude toward questions of Jewish nationalist culture and the priorities of the Zionist movement deeply resonated with Birnbaum’s position. That this is often missed is perhaps due to Birnbaum’s initial attempt to work with the new reality of Herzl’s charismatic presence and has led to an exaggerated emphasis on the depth of the break, while at the same time making it easier to attribute his departure to a flawed temperament. Birnbaum, like most of his colleagues, recognized the newcomer’s potential as an asset to the movement. He sensed as well as anyone that Herzl’s arrival represented a tectonic shift. Initially, despite

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theoretical differences, he was willing to fall in line to a certain extent, if only because the institutional apparatus Herzl envisioned dangled the prospect of steady employment that Birnbaum so desperately needed. In short, he could recognize a winner and was not opposed to working with Herzl, if begrudgingly, provided that Herzl acknowledged in some way his ideas and presence. As it turned out, this was too much to ask. Herzl was captivated by his own vision and unshakable belief that if he was not the first Zionist, he was the first one who mattered and was not inclined to compromise. Although he was a skillful politician, his inability or unwillingness to either delegate or relinquish much of his power or vision was one of his most potentially dangerous flaws. Even though by 1903 this deafness to the opinions not only of his opponents but even of those who meant well began to wreak havoc on the movement, he was dead within a year and at a moment that seemed divinely ordained to preserve his larger-than-life status. “Fortunate in life and fortunate in death” was the accurate, if sour, assessment of Ahad Ha’am.6 Doubtless Birnbaum would have agreed. As the months passed, and especially after the Basel conference was widely judged by Zionists as Herzl’s triumph, it became clear that Birnbaum’s days in the movement were numbered. Although appointed secretary general of what was intended to be a central committee of the new Zionist organization, Birnbaum found he had little influence, as Herzl simply ignored the committee and directed the movement as he saw fit. Within a short time, Birnbaum recognized this and withdrew entirely. Frustrated at every turn by a superior politician, in the end Birnbaum gave up trying and struck out on his own. In doing so, he liberated himself from the constraints of a party whose central goals and strategies were increasingly at odds with his own. Released from the party apparatus and its frustrations, having little to lose in terms of direct influence within Zionism, he could explore even more deeply the ideas he had begun developing before Herzl’s arrival and seek new avenues for their engagement and propagation. Arguably, his reputation was even burnished in the eyes of his approving readership by the steadfastness with which he maintained his convictions. His major essays of the period—such as “The National Rebirth of the Jewish Nation,” “The Zionist Movement,” and The Jewish Moderne, had already reached the status of minor classics among the new genera-

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tion of Zionists. “[In] 1893, [Birnbaum] published a little brochure, ‘The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in Its Own Land,’ ” wrote Martin Buber in a 1904 essay, unselfconsciously placing Birnbaum at the very center of the Zionist movement in its early years. “The Zionist milieu came to being, disjointedly and not yet complete, but full of promise.” But, Buber asserted, Birnbaum had changed: “It must be emphasized that here I am describing the Birnbaum of that time, not the later figure, now well known by his singular pseudonym, Mathias

Mathias Acher, 1901 (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

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Acher, out of whom has grown, in ‘Jewish Moderne’ and [other] later work, toward the process of bringing to fruition what Moses Hess had begun: the synthesis of the national and the socialist idea in Judaism, and who has thus traveled ever farther from political Zionism.”7 What Buber did not seem to recognize is that he was really describing the same Birnbaum, writing in different veins during a fruitful period of intellectual experimentation. Buber accurately sensed that although he still held on to the shared core of Zionist ideas of a national Jewish identity and the importance of political organization, Birnbaum was testing the limits that organized Zionism placed on Jewish national activity. Birnbaum may well have felt that he had not left Zionism but that the Zionist movement had compromised its most important mission and wandered off in a direction he could not follow. But in the end he did stretch the meaning of Zionism beyond its capacities and then dispensed with it altogether. Convinced that the Zionist organization under Herzl suffered from serious flaws, Birnbaum thus sought to articulate after the turn of the century an alternative model of Jewish nationalism that he believed could garner massive popular support. Seldom holding his tongue even while within the Zionist party, he was now unconstrained in vigorously defending his view of Jewish nationalism. As the months passed and Birnbaum’s energy to publish, speak, and travel continued unabated, he entered step by step into an entirely new phase of his intellectual life. This change began as the result of a refined critique of Herzlian Zionism, and with it a turn away from the pragmatic politicking within the movement to the more familiar ground of grassroots organizing, political journalism, and ideological experimentation. Drawing back slightly in the months after his break with the World Zionist Organization, Birnbaum returned to the stage of public debate about the meaning of Zionism in 1902 and participated in the controversy surrounding the publication of Herzl’s utopian novel, Altneuland. While in the midst of this Kulturkampf, the “Ahad Ha’am affair,” Birnbaum carved out an important space for himself as an advocate, participant, and as is shown by Buber’s words quoted earlier, inspiration for a loosely constructed cultural project called, after an essay by the young Martin Buber, the “Jewish Renaissance Movement.”

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The Jewish Renaissance Movement As with many ideas that sprouted from the verdant fields of Jewish thought nourished by the associations, newspapers, and societies of turn-of-the-century Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Jewish renaissance movement was really a movement in name only. More a brief confluence of like-minded individual actors, most of whom (like Birnbaum) had their own agendas, goals, and interests, the Jewish renaissance served as a rubric to find common cause for interests expressed more concretely in other forms. For some, including Martin Buber, Chaim Weizmann, Davis Trietsch, Leo Winz, and Berthold Feiwel, it was turned to political ends as they formed the Democratic Fraction within the WZO, as well as the Jung Juda, the Young Jewish Movement, and even energizing formal political/cultural societies such as the Bar Kochba Society of Prague.8 Some, like E. M. Lilien and Boris Schatz, would translate their nationalism and prodigious talent into a full-blown artistic and design movement, culminating in the Bezalel Academy, the first center of Jewish art and design, which opened in Jerusalem in 1906.9 For Birnbaum, affiliation with the Jewish renaissance—as much an inspiration to it as a participant—was a definitive step away from Zionism and toward the embrace of nonterritorial Jewish autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bid for political office on that platform, and finally the embrace of Yiddish language and culture.10 For a few years at the beginning of the twentieth century, Birnbaum and others of the Jewish renaissance circle shared a broad common platform. It was based in a belief that Jewish nationalism was the most potent form of modern Jewish identity, whether as part of a specific political program (like Zionism) or as expressed in a search for “authentic” Jewish cultural life. The specific content of this identity was a question that elicited different answers, although among the figures associated with the renaissance circle a few common trends did emerge. In any case, such a nationalist identity was still, even as late as the period in question (1901– 6), an avant-garde ideology. Adding to its outré aspect was the dominant form that the nationalism of the renaissance circle took: a belief in the role of art and aesthetics as a definitive tool of identity formation, if not the most important one. Beyond party politics, beyond the often emergent and hard pragmatism of much of Zion­ist politics before them,

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and as symbolized most by the mechanics of the WZO itself, the figures of the renaissance circle located the core of Jewish politics as being just one part of a bold cultural and aesthetic becoming. Although new in its intent and form—crafting a specifically Jewish national aesthetic—the renaissance circle worked in an idiom that resonated with their audience, primarily German-speaking Jews of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.11 In another unique development, their efforts were paired with a sophisticated sense of the value of the media in presenting their ideas and aesthetic to a broad public. Most were frequent contributors to the burgeoning Jewish nationalist public sphere. Publications, the most important being Ost und West and two ventures spearheaded by Martin Buber, the Jüdische Verlag created with Berthold Feiwel and the journal Der Jude (first organized with Chaim Weizmann), laid out and elaborated upon several themes at the center of their envisioned future Jewish culture and nation. As much as Herzl had ushered the idea of political Zionism from obscurity into the Jewish mainstream, individuals in the Jewish renaissance circle gave the idea a cultural and aesthetic form that would become a staple of middle-class Jewish parlors across Europe. This union of an aesthetic vision and embrace of “new” media—especially the subscription-based, advertiser-supported, illustrated magazine—exemplified the creative output of the Jewish renaissance circle. The use of the periodical per se was of course not new in Jewish political and institutional life; the subscription journal and newspaper had long been the intellectual life’s blood of Jewish movements since at least Sulamith in the first decade of the nineteenth century. What made the Jewish renaissance circle’s approach unique were the style and content of their small but influential number of periodicals, the use of advertising and marketing that supported the magazine, and the readership it garnered. All of these features characterized the Berlin journal Ost und West, the most successful and long-lived public voice of the circle; it surpassed even the central organ of the Zionist movement, Die Welt, in terms of the number and diversity of notable contributors to its pages—and the number of subscribers it attracted.12 Established in 1901 by Leo Winz, the highly stylized (among others, the journal served as the most important platform for launching the career of E. M. Lilien, whose Jewish-themed Jugendstil images defined the journal’s aesthetic), richly illustrated magazine was dedicated to bring-

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ing a new and vibrant vision of an ethnic Jewish identity to a broad German-speaking Jewish readership. According to the circulation numbers as collected and extrapolated upon by David Brenner in his history of the journal, it was remarkably successful in its goal of reaching deeply into the homes, libraries, cafés, and reading rooms of Jews throughout the German-speaking world.13 As an independent undertaking, Ost und West was unencumbered with the role of serving as an official organ for a political movement. Thus, its editors were able to tolerate a wide number of viewpoints. Indeed, two of the central figures in the production of the journal—Leo Winz, prominent public relations figure and the journal’s founder, and ­Binyamin Segel, one of its chief editors—could not have been further apart on the Jewish nationalist spectrum.14 Winz was a committed Zionist; Segel, a nonterritorial nationalist unaffiliated with Zionism—yet both collaborated in conceiving and executing the journal in its early years. Over the twenty-three years of its publication (1901–23), the journal’s contributors, either directly writing for the journal or appearing there in translation, represent a who’s who of figures in the Jewish cultural world, covering almost every conceivable genre, medium, and subject relevant to Jewish history, literature, and culture. Authors who seldom appeared in the pages of Die Welt for a variety of reasons appear frequently in Ost und West, as do figures who contributed frequently to both. While keeping its tone accessible to the tastes of its middle-class Jewish subscribers, Ost und West also projected a vision of Jewish culture that challenged the models of Jewish integration that, in the minds of its editors and contributors, characterized German-speaking Jewry. Ost und West’s contributors were fascinated with a sort of ethnic Jewry and idealized the “authentic” worldview, languages, and culture of the Jews of eastern Europe, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond. Page after page of the magazine was dedicated to translations of leading writers in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, to quasi-ethnographic studies of different Jewish communities throughout the world, and to in-depth expositions of Jewish artists (and non-Jewish artists who engaged with Jewish themes). Politically, the journal showed a predilection toward Zionism, although this could be attributed to the fact that Zionism was then the dominant—if only—organized Jewish nationalist party. Its essays frequently dealt with issues of interest to those who were already

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drawn into the ins and outs of Zionist politics. Its columns, feuilletons, and news items were primarily concerned with the philosophical and political concerns of Jewish nationalism, and its short news items (literary and book notes, press digests, and Aphorismen, short news items) catered for the most part to these interests. The inaugural essay of Ost und West was “Jewish Renaissance,” written by twenty-three-year-old Martin Buber. A rising star among the young Zionists, Buber represented a new mood in the movement: culturally complex, intellectually and politically sophisticated, conversant equally in Jewish texts, European literature, and philosophy. His charisma, even at such a young age, was commanding, and with the Jewish renaissance circle as his first star turn, Buber would assume with surprising swiftness his place as one of the most imposing figures in modern Jewish thought. In “Jewish Renaissance,” Buber developed a set of themes that defined much of his thought well into the First World War; indeed, he would revise the essay repeatedly in the first years of the twentieth century, publishing it in at least three different versions. It was in this essay and its subsequent revisions that Buber laid out the aims of the new movement.15 From its bold title and uncompromising demands both cerebral and utopian, but at the same time projecting practicality and grounding in a nascent Jewish future, “Jewish Renaissance” picks up the challenge laid out by Birnbaum in his work over the previous decade. “By [Jewish renaissance] we understand the peculiar and basically inexplicable phenomenon of the progressive rejuvenation of the Jewish people in language, custom and art,” Buber writes. We justifiably call it ‘renaissance’ because it resembles—in the transfer of human fate to national fate—the great period that we call Renaissance above all others, because it is a rebirth, a renewal of the entire human being like this Renaissance, and not a return to old ideas and life forms; [it is] the path from semi-being to being, from indolence to productivity, from the dialectical petrifaction of scholasticism to a broad and soulful perception of nature, from medieval asceticism to a warm, flowing feeling of life, from the constraints of narrow-minded communities to the freedom of the personality, the way from a volcanic, but formless cultural potential to a harmonious, beautifully formed cultural product.16

This conception of the rebirth of Jewish culture shares a particular under­standing of the Renaissance present in several national move-

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ments of the nineteenth century, and in particular German nationalism. As Buber scholar Asher Biemann has observed, the essay draws heavily on a conception of renaissance first developed in the work of Jacob Burckhardt. The seminal work of this University of Basel historian, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, was and remains a major influence in how the Renaissance has been conceptualized by historians; after its publication in 1860, it had a powerful effect on European thinkers and cultural critics—most famously on Burckhardt’s fellow Basel University faculty member Friedrich Nietzsche. In his own application of the Burckhardtian model of renaissance to Jewish national rebirth, Buber replicated his deeply romantic understanding of cultural renaissance as the utilization of old forms for the sake of new cultural construction.17 For Burckhardt, the Renaissance marked the most profound intellectual shift in postclassical European history in its impact on the development of the state, culture, and individual. In its wake the state emerged as a rationalized expression of professionalized political power. The individual, Burckhardt famously opined, came into its own after the anonymity of the Middle Ages; for the first time in European history, the human individual began to conceive of himself or herself as separate from the corporate categories of religion, town, clan, and the like.18 As modern national identities began to emerge, it was culture, in Burckhardt’s description, “the sum of all that has spontaneously arisen for the advancement of material life and as an expression of spiritual and moral life . . . the realm of the variable, free, not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority,” that became the definitive arena of progress in the Renaissance.19 As emerging national cultures in Europe rediscovered the classical world and its aesthetic forms, their art, literature, history, and other products of a society were invigorated with a new spirit. As Buber understood it, as in Italy and Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the awakening Jewish nation of the early twentieth century was experiencing a similar epochal transformation. Just as the Italian and German Renaissance emerged in Burckhardt’s narrative through the Reformation as a revolutionary change from the obscurantism of the medieval period, so too did the new Jewish renaissance burst forth as the fruit of the deeply spiritual enthusiasm of Hasidism and the reformative ten-

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dencies of the Haskalah. Like other national groups, the Jewish people had reached the moment of modern maturity, its unique historical development growing out of the groundwork laid, after a long period of “the tyranny of the Law,” in the eighteenth century by the emergence of Hasidism and Haskalah. Buber likewise echoed Burckhardt’s view of culture as the definitive expression of human identity and aspiration. Like the Italian rediscovery of and dynamic elaboration on classical forms, Buber insisted that the Jewish renaissance was not a return to an older form of Jewish identity but rather the creation of a dynamic new one.20 “The Jewish renaissance does not mean a return, but a rebirth of the whole human being: a rebirth that evolved very slowly, very gradually,” Buber writes, in a distinct homage to Burckhardt, “from the days of the Haskalah and of Hasidim to our time and will continue to evolve. Slowly and gradually a new type of Jew will develop.”21 And what was to be the substance of this new Jewish worldview? Michael Brenner, who has documented in detail the concept of cultural renaissance as it developed among German Jews through the Weimar period, observes that its trappings were conceived as being deeply concerned with aesthetics. “The resurrection, Buber emphasized, was possible only by combining Jewish traditions with the modern sense of aesthetics. . . . Buber’s call for renewal reflected the fin-de-siecle Zeitgeist, which regarded the beginning of a new century as the awakening of a modern age, the Moderne.”22 Brenner draws a direct line between Buber’s aesthetic interests and the emergent school of Jewish art nouveau, the so-called Judenstil, typified by the illustrations of E. M. Lilien.23 In Buber’s essay, however, the form of the aesthetic is left ambiguous. More explicit is the source from which the cultural renaissance would flow, and that is in no small part from the Jewish communities of the “east.” It was from the folk culture—and even more important, the awakening national culture—of Yiddish-speaking Jewry in the Russian and eastern Austro-Hungarian Empires that counted Buber, who came of age in Lemberg, the Jewish capital of Galicia, as one of its sons. “[Eastern Jewry’s] strongest expression became the Jewish movement, which is sometimes also mistakenly called the national Jewish movement.” Mistakenly, he argues, because even though the movement is “national in content,” its “form is supranational.” And in a Nietzschean

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flourish, Buber continues, “If we wish to conceive the people of the Renaissance in the form of an organism . . . the national idea is its selfconsciousness, and the national movement its will to power.”24 One final debt to Burckhardt can be found in Buber’s model of the Jewish renaissance: his inscription of national identity within culture rather than politics and the state. “For Burckhardt,” observes one biographer, “the foundation for our sense of political community or collective identity lies not in our association as members of an historical nation-state, but rather in our sharing of a common culture.”25 Buber’s early adherence to this premise resulted in an equivocal attitude toward practical Zionism; in his view the end goal of the Jewish renaissance movement was not necessarily bound up with the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Conversely, just because a state was established in Palestine by Jews would not make it de facto Zionist by the standards of the renaissance movement. “If the Jewish movement sees the most favorable conditions or the necessary precondition for the accomplishment of its goal in the creation of a new Jewish community in the Land of Israel, and if it endeavors to create such, we call it Zionism. . . . On the other hand, we will have to consider all views and actions that reject the regeneration of Judaism and wish to find a home for Jews merely to alleviate their plight, not as Zionist, but as humanitarian under­takings.”26 Buber alludes to a hierarchy of allegiances for those truly concerned with the cultural rebirth of the Jewish people: culture first, the people’s consciousness second, and a territorial state decidedly third. If the state becomes necessary for the protection of Jewish lives, the renaissance movement would support it on humanitarian grounds. But only a state dedicated to acting as a useful vehicle for the achievement of rebirth could be called a “Zionist” state; better, one may extrapolate, no state at all than an ill-conceived nation-state with no sense of its role as the crucible of national identity. At the same time, as Buber asserted, the movement should be ready to support an emergency territorial entity for the sake of preserving Jewish lives. These three themes—belief in the potential for a radical reconsideration of Jewish cultural identity; the elemental role of the aesthetic, especially as developed by the Jews of the “east” as a vehicle of this rebirth; and a qualified and complex attitude toward the practical questions of Zionism and territorialism—are the cornerstones of Buber’s

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manifesto and form the closest thing to a coherent statement of the movement’s ideals and goals. They also offer a useful metric for understanding the simultaneous meditations on the same themes—and in the same publications—by Nathan Birnbaum, who, as Buber himself acknowledged, was both a contributor and a formative influence as the movement took shape. The first reference to the Jewish renaissance movement in Birnbaum’s work appeared in an essay published in Ost und West in 1902, “Some Thoughts on Anti-Semitism.”27 But it was a later article, “Jewish Renaissance Movement” (1902), that was a sustained meditation on the idea. As his thoughts about the movement unfold, it becomes clear the degree to which the provenance of much of Buber’s meditation on the term was located in Birnbaum’s work of the early and mid1890s. At the same time, even though Birnbaum after the turn of the century shared the overall goals of the movement—its commitment to Jewish national identity and to the centrality of art and aesthetics in its construction—he highlighted in “Jewish Renaissance Movement” his differences with Buber’s model. The article opened with a description of what he understood the movement and its relationship to Zionism to be. Like Buber, he considered the movement to be in close conversation with Zionism but independent of it and not reducible to the party apparatus. “These words [Jewish renaissance] have become linked . . . with [Zionism]; however, I would say that they are more like a simple exercise of the intellectual Zionist opposition, which posits that ‘Zionism’ is not to be understood as simply the party but rather the grand spiritual movement behind the party. To describe this movement, the word ‘Zionism’ is at the very least too weak and too narrow for me.”28 This revealing observation—that Zionism is too weak and narrow to contain Birnbaum’s developing thought—is the most candid acknowledgment of his intellectual drift from the movement. It also points to the role he still viewed himself as playing in it. In a theme that would be repeated and developed in numerous statements over the ensuing years, he displays complex feelings about the developing camp of cultural Zion­ism. He agreed with many of the foundational principles that were advocated by this party and laid out by Buber. It was, after all, an approach for which he had been an early and vocal advocate. He remained convinced that the foundation of any Jewish national movement must

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be a strong, uniquely Jewish culture and thus still shared a great deal intellectually with a core constituency of the Zionist movement, even if he had distanced himself from its formal apparatus. Nonetheless, he now believed that a fatal flaw pervaded all Zionist thought, even that of the cultural Zionists: it limited itself to one rigidly pessimistic reading of the entire Jewish experience in the Diaspora. It succumbed to a reductionist notion that Jewish history in exile was little more than a bleak process of cultural degeneration and decay. It insisted that the only future of the Jewish people lay in the erasure of European Jewish culture and the erection of a new, Zionist Jewish culture along with the new Zionist nation-state. This troubled Birnbaum. As his own experience had shown, rigid commitment to a Zionist state as the sole solution to the problems facing European Jewry led advocates of cultural renewal to sacrifice in the short term their agenda for the sake of the surest path to political success—which meant throwing in their lot with Herzl’s party—just as he himself had done briefly. On this point, it would seem he was in agreement with Buber. As bothersome to Birnbaum, though, was Buber’s, and the Jewish renaissance group’s, overly exclusive conception of what was considered “authentic” Jewish culture. Oddly, just as Birnbaum endeavored to rethink his concept of exactly what a renewed Jewish culture would look like, he highlighted both the natural affinity of his work for a publication like Ost und West and his growing difference with the developing cultural Zionist camp. So long as certain Zionists dominant in the “cultural” camp accepted some variation of the modern Hebraist model of culture as the exclusive one worth cultivating and believed that Jewish national consciousness was synonymous with Zionism, they would always be diluted by the superficialities of Herzl’s movement. This was a serious challenge to the cultural hegemony of the Hebraists within Zionism that few recognized at the time. Birnbaum was in fact in the process of stepping outside the cultural model with which he had been intimately engaged and discovering its assumptions deeply flawed. While his opening to “Jewish Renaissance Movement” casts him as an ally with cultural Zionism, in fact he was offering a far more radical critique of it than even the so-called political Zionists themselves. As Birnbaum continued to articulate his vision of the Jewish renaissance, he sharpened his critique. He challenged Buber’s Burckhardtian-

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Nietzschean model by questioning the romantic implications of the idea of renaissance. To him the term denoted a necessarily practical cultural and political strategy, not a dreamy spiritual ideal. “Renaissance, like rebirth, is a mystical word that plays a great role in various religious systems,” Birnbaum writes. “But we have already known for some time—even without Houston Stewart Chamberlain—that ‘renaissance’ is really no rebirth; that there is, in reality, no such thing as rebirth, neither in nature nor in history. . . . What is dead cannot live again and needs no rebirth.”29 This materialist reclamation of the term “renaissance,” while it may seem a small detail, is a marked break with his Zionist past and shows clear affinity with the path he had laid out in Jewish Moderne. It rejects out of hand much of what he had advocated as a young Zionist, namely, any reclamation or reconstruction of the mythologized Hebrew past. Birnbaum had come to regard such romanticism as adolescent and believed it had to be discarded in order for Jewish nationalism to move forward. “Actually” Birnbaum argues to the contrary, “[the Jewish renaissance] is in no way a rebirth. . . . That which has died in Judaism . . . such as, for example, theocracy or its Asiatic qualities, and above all its old-Hebraic character in its entirety—will never be reborn.” Practical cultural models, such as language and national being, however, were not dead notions to be resurrected but living, if latent, aspects of Jewish national being that needed only to be awakened from dormancy. “But that which still lives within it, its urge to shape its own language, to give expression to its spirit, its compulsion for an ingathering into one space, above all . . . [its] national essence—all this it can experience, and it can also experience that new power that will be born in it, like a young chick as it matures into a youthful songbird.”30 On a basic level, this description was consistent with both his own long-held attitudes toward nationalism and cultural development, and with Buber’s view described previously. As in all his Zionist writings, Birnbaum asserted that the problems faced by the Jewish people could be overcome only through strengthening the bonds of the nation, recognizing and embracing the unique elements of peoplehood that drew Jews across the Diaspora together. To be sure, he still maintained his belief in the basic need for the classic components of national identity, such as a common language, a shared aesthetic, appreciation of a common historical heritage, a shared national destiny, and

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nationalist education. These were the necessary preconditions for the success of the Jewish nation. “These known, realistic national factors in the cultivation of language and an artistic cultural spirit can function only under the rubric of group cohesion, which leads to the irresistible inclination [for a people] to gather itself together in space.”31 A closer look reveals important differences between the core elements of culture as Birnbaum understood them and those of Buber. Birnbaum dismissed out of hand certain “dead” elements of the historical Jewish people—in particular the “old Hebraic character”—a marked departure from the early Zionist cult of the ancient Jewish commonwealth once so integral to Birnbaum’s thought. Implicit in this assertion lay a critique of Buber that would continue to trouble Birnbaum and that he would develop more fully after Buber’s famous turn toward engagement with Hasidism.32 Birnbaum increasingly regarded the quest to reinvigorate ancient modes—whether they were physical tropes in the form of artistic motifs, philosophical adaptation of prophetic ideals, or the linguistic affectation of and fidelity to Hebrew (for the most part among intellectuals writing in German or speaking Russian)—as flawed attempts to invest an imagined past with authenticity. This view was a sharp challenge to groups such as Hebraists, whose entire project was predicated on their assertion that they represented a return to the genuine Jewish national language. Inevitably, they tried too hard to paper over the inconsistencies between what Jewish nationalism advocated and what it in fact was and must be: a national movement born of the historical experience of the Jewish people in the Diaspora. Birnbaum’s view, in contrast, held that focus on the correct attributes of the nation—above all the living elements of its national being—rendered the critique of artifice launched toward Zionism moot. To Birnbaum the Jews were already a nation, whether or not Zionists liked how it looked. Thus, a critique lay at the heart of Birnbaum’s conception of renaissance: Zionism had faltered in its unwillingness to either adopt a more nuanced attitude toward the cultural products of the Diaspora or recognize the potential of Diaspora culture as a means of strengthening Jewish nationalism. It was a willful and cherished blindness—based more on passion than reason—as Birnbaum would call it, a “Diaspora doctrine.” This tendency viewed all aspects of the Diaspora, including its cultural products, as essentially worthless. Once himself dismissive

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of Diaspora culture, whether it was what he saw as the assimilationists’ aping of non-Jews or the deformities of unreconstructed traditional culture among eastern European Jews, Birnbaum had changed his opinion about the possibilities offered by a strong Jewish culture in the Diaspora. He was particularly enthusiastic about the potential offered by Yiddish-speaking, eastern European Jewry as the raw material for national growth, even as a strong nationalist model in its own right. Yet he was under no illusion that this notion would be acceptable to Zionists. Despite the promising signs of latent nationalism shown by some Jews in the Diaspora, “the very image and spirit of national indignity of the Diaspora will, perhaps, be granted to me in order more properly to refute me. Well, I can’t help it. I have long ceased to regard the word ‘diaspora’ with the old, pious fright; I submit to it only as much as my common sense and my Jewish cultural sensibility demand.”33 But even were he to accept the premises of anti-Diaspora nationalists that the state of exile was irreconcilable with a robust national identity, it still did not justify the wholesale rejection of Diaspora Jewish culture. “Even if I were still to acknowledge the absolute Diaspora, I fail to see how the spirit of the Diaspora negates the living reality and the developmental potential of the Yiddish language, or how this prevents it from being charged with a non-exilic spirit even in an eventual post-­Diaspora era.”34 So governed were the Zionists by their “old pious fright” of Diaspora that they could not even recognize their predicament. They were held captive by their belief in absolutes: there was only “absolute” Diaspora (in Birnbaum’s terminology) or national being. One was the irredeemable locus of all negative development of Jewish history, from the dysfunctional relationship between Jews and non-Jews to deformities of Jewish existence such as their concentration in the petty trades, their religious obscurantism, even their “deformed” Yiddish language. The other was, so the Zionists claimed, the catchall antidote. Against the “absolute Diaspora” posited by the Zionists, Birnbaum advocated a more complex view. The Diaspora was not a place of undifferentiated violence and destruction, nor was it devoid of a viable, and valuable, Jewish culture. Conditions differed from place to place; although in some places Jews experienced violence and repression, in others they flourished. Indeed, some of the places of the greatest repression had also witnessed the greatest levels of cultural accomplishment.

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And while many disparate segments of Diaspora Jewry did not have any national consciousness, in some areas there was a great potential for national unity even outside a Jewish state. Among eastern European communities, the Jewries of the Russian Empire, of Galicia and Bukovina, and parts of Hungary and Romania, the separation of the Jewish communities from their Gentile neighbors had kept intact institutions, cultural characteristics, and language. Birnbaum saw these cultural accoutrements as laden with possibility for Jewish nationalism, and only the irrational prejudice of the Zionists prevented them from realizing the same. This was particularly the case with the Yiddish language, which for the first time became a serious preoccupation for Birnbaum. Around the time of his final disaffection with organized Zionism, Birnbaum had developed a keen interest in Yiddish. Although he was a child of Yiddish-speaking parents and raised in both a home and community where the language was commonly spoken, it was his encounter with Yiddish as a cultural world of its own, replete with its own modern literature, that piqued his interest, in particular the burst of creativity in Yiddish literature and theater of the late 1890s and early 1900s. Pursuing his long-held aesthetic interests, he became a supporter of the growth of Yiddish theater in Vienna, which, as in other cities, was popular entertainment for many newly arrived Jewish residents. He wrote articles on Yiddish literature and theater during this period, was involved in a number of Yiddish “cultural evenings,” and even translated several works, including selected stories of Y. L. Peretz, from Yiddish to German.35 This interest was not limited to Birnbaum alone; indeed, several of the Jewish renaissance circle contributed to the translation of Yiddish literature into German, and Ost und West in particular was an important forum for their work.36 Birnbaum’s interest in Yiddish literary culture soon expanded into a broader consideration of the language’s role in Jewish nationalism. A great blunder on the part of cultural Zionism, Birnbaum increasingly felt, was that with few exceptions its leaders did not consider anything but Hebrew to be a legitimate Jewish national language. Yiddish, still widely referred to derogatorily as jargon, was viewed by many political and cultural camps, from Zionists to integrationists, as no language at all. It was a dialect of the oppressed, of exile, and its replacement with

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Hebrew was regarded as an important goal in the construction of national culture. But, as Birnbaum and others observed, the replacement of a centuries-old vernacular with a newly constructed and modernized Hebrew was a considerable task. While mastery of modern Hebrew may have seemed a reasonable task for the cultural elite, Birnbaum became increasingly skeptical that such a massive program was a reasonable expectation for the nation as a whole. Despite (or perhaps because of) his having been an advocate of Hebrew for much of his adult life, co-editor of an introductory Hebrew grammar, and disciple of Peretz Smolenskin, Birnbaum now viewed the Hebrew enterprise as one with limited prospects. This was especially the case if one had a more charitable view toward Yiddish, as Birnbaum did. Once one rejected the stigma of Yiddish as a galut language, its advantages as a medium of national renaissance became obvious. As the vernacular of an absolute majority of the Jewish populations of at least two continents (Europe and North America), Yiddish had a “living reality” that could not be simply negated by nationalist ideology. And once one accepted that it was indeed a language and not a zhargon, one was forced to acknowledge that it was also a distinctly and uniquely Jewish language. Although he was coming around to this position with greater and greater conviction, and consistent with his belief in the importance of ecumenicalism with regard to national issues, Birnbaum did not yet advocate Yiddish at the expense of Hebrew. He neither suggested that Hebraists should abandon Hebrew for Yiddish, nor that Hebrew had no place in modern Jewish culture. In his view it was a mistake to question the need for Hebrew, to take the polar opposite view that the ancient language had no place in cultural renaissance. In fact, Hebrew did serve as a viable language of modern Jewish culture, albeit among a small minority. To argue that they should surrender to Yiddish, Birnbaum asserted, was to mix a constructive with a negative impulse. “It is justified insofar as it disputes the monopoly of a language on the basis of its fulfillment of cultural needs, but it errs in that it makes the unconscious choice of language much too dependent on grounds of expediency and excessively underrates the tenacity of the minority who use [it] as a second language.”37 Both languages were important to the Jewish nation, and both should be embraced to serve their appropriate functions. Advocating an “artificial” Hebraization of

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the Jewish world made no sense; neither did denying the historical and national importance of Hebrew for the sake of expediency.38 The final area Birnbaum explored as part of his engagement with the Jewish renaissance was political organization. Like Buber, he recognized the important relationship between renaissance and political action, but he differed in his view of the form it should take. Buber emphasized renaissance as an independent force separate not only from the organized Zionist party but from any organized political group. As shown earlier, he believed it should maintain its independence to give it the flexibility to bestow or withhold its support based upon fidelity to the aims of the renaissance. Birnbaum approached the question differently. Rather than seek one party that would best represent the interests of a strongly connected Jewish renaissance clique, Birnbaum, perhaps envisioning the group as a loose coalition of many different political convictions, returned to a model he had advocated in his 1894 essay “A Jewish People’s Party.” Here Birnbaum had endorsed the idea that the best vehicle for Jewish culture within nationalist politics might not be one bound to an exclusive vision but rather one that accepted many different models united under a broad rubric. The goal of a Jewish national party, as he saw it, was to bring in as many Jewish nationalists as possible rather than endorse an exclusive party ideology. In “The Jewish Renaissance Movement,” he continued in this direction and suggested that this union could even be achieved with multiple parties, who shared more commonalities than differences, united under a consistent nationalist goal. “Mind you: parties, not party,” Birnbaum emphasized. “The Jewish renaissance movement will not be embodied in merely one party but rather in more, past, present, and future.” Only this would bring about the ideal renaissance: a fully integrated Jewish cultural being that transcended parties. “This is the first step toward realizing the possibility of a reality outside of parties. Only one whose life is filled with so much fanaticism for unity that he disavows the possibility and correctness of different organizations corresponding to the views of the different sides of the Jewish renaissance movement will fail to realize that diversity of life is the future.”39 Although this movement was useful as an interim tool in building the strength of Jewish nationalism, Birnbaum felt that the greatest chances for success belonged to a movement that embraced diverse approaches

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with Jewish national identity as the cornerstone. Absolute ideological unity was not only shortsighted (an implicit critique of Herzl’s Zionism) but also destructive. At stake was the very survival of the Jewish Volk, as the infighting and disunity it provoked—the interminable conflicts over who, or what ideology, was in or out—stifled any positive development. In fact, Birnbaum posited, even the idea of the party as a tool of Jewish nationalism was at best a necessary evil. Even better, he believed, would be an organic union of the Jewish Volk, freely associating out of an elective affinity of national cultural interest. “Free people . . . who do not allow themselves to be bound to one marching route are better, a thousand times better, than any party,” he mused.40 The very best so-called ghetto-poet, who writes for his poor, wretched public . . . the best Jewish worker’s organization, which teaches its members to better recognize modern economic conditions, the best Jewish theater, which portrays the spirit of the Jewish people, the best realistic colonization plan—all are a thousand times more valuable for the future, for the “rebirth” of the Jewish people, than all the programs and all the actions that all Jewish nationalist parties could accomplish put together.41

In the meantime a necessary tool for realizing this ideal was the nationalist political party. A mixture of flexibility, optimism, and popularism, Birnbaum’s outline of the Jewish renaissance project was a continuation and expansion of his work before the arrival of Herzl. At the same time, he offered an alternative, although concordant, voice to accompany Buber’s more famous manifesto of the Jewish renaissance movement. With this position, the standard of flexibility and inclusion in the formation of the Jewish nation became the centerpiece of Birnbaum’s writings in the first years of the twentieth century.

The Ahad Ha’am Affair Birnbaum’s engagement with the Jewish renaissance circle culminated with his involvement in a conflict that erupted after the publication of Herzl’s utopian novel about the future Jewish state, Altneuland. The controversy stirred by the novel’s publication in 1902 pitted two of the most important figures in Zionism, Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am,

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as opponents in a struggle for the soul of the Zionist movement. In the midst of vitriolic broadsides between the two camps of supporters that rattled Zionism for nearly a year, Birnbaum recognized an opportunity to present a new voice, one that articulated the very themes about which he had published in Ost und West as a viable possibility for reform of the Jewish nationalist movement. Perhaps due to his established bona fides as an early and widely respected Jewish nationalist, Birnbaum felt confident that his changed views would strike a chord with European Jewry. As he took up his pen in defense of Ahad Ha’am, Birnbaum further honed his idea of the Jewish renaissance movement and appeared to be preparing the ground for using it as the organizing principle for a new model of Jewish nationalism. Although in the end his role in the “Ahad Ha’am affair” did not result in the desired shift he advocated, it nevertheless serves as a vivid illustration of his thought in this transitional period. Herzl’s novel, more a political-utopian tract, outlined (around a thin plot) a vision of the Jewish state that would exist if his grand vision for Zionism was realized. Although he clearly strove for aesthetic quality in its presentation, the novel largely fails as a piece of literature.42 Using a utopian conceit dated even in Herzl’s time (the plot borrowed liberally from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, published fifteen years earlier), Altneuland follows two travelers, one a disenchanted Viennese Jewish lawyer with a strong resemblance to Herzl himself, the other an eccentric and profane German aristocrat, as they encounter Ottoman Palestine first in 1903 and again twenty years later. In the first encounter they find the land decrepit, undeveloped save for a few colonies of dedicated Jewish pioneers, the landscape barren, the cities Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem dirty and decayed, clearly the product of Herzl’s impressions of his own earlier journey. Returning two decades later, the travelers find a utopia of Jewish creativity and industry, a paradigm of modernity in all areas from industry to infrastructure, cultural accomplishment to interethnic and interfaith tolerance. Old-New Land had become a place in which Jews, freed of the economic, intellectual, and spiritual poison of the Diaspora, were able to come into their own as a modern people and create a liberal, democratic, vaguely socialist society, European in its culture and outlook. In an extended section the twenty-year history of Old-New Land is narrated by one of its founders (another of Herzl’s

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doppelgangers) as a remarkable story of wise investment, international cooperation, and, last but not least, the enthusiastic ingathering of most of the world’s Jewry. Although today’s readers, squinting, may well be able to discern the reflection of Herzl’s imagination in the State of Israel that did emerge (in about three times the amount of time Herzl allotted), to many of his contemporaries it was a fantasy that would have been laughable were it not penned by the one man in whom they had placed such profound expectations. The controversy over the novel really began not with the release of the book itself but with a scathing review penned by Ahad Ha’am. Like Birnbaum, Ahad Ha’am was one of the disaffected, a member of the early and influential generation of Zionists that preceded Herzl who had not found a place in the new order the movement represented. Although the book may have been somewhat embarrassing in its optimism (however, the inspiration it provided for decades of rank-and-file Zionists, especially after Nahum Sokolow’s translation into Hebrew under the title Tel Aviv, is undeniable), the book spurred an incensed response from Ahad Ha’am far out of proportion to its content. Not just a simple reaction to the novel, it was the eruption of an ideological conflict within the Zionist movement that transcended the novel’s content and that had long been simmering. Even to figures in the Zion­ist movement sympathetic to Herzl and supportive of his leadership, Altneu­land was a problematic book. For critics like Ahad Ha’am, though, it was a travesty, a dystopia that displaced hard-fought efforts to cultivate a deep Jewish national culture with crude mimicry of modern European culture. At the very least, it was a distraction, an invitation to disunity and discord at a crucially trying moment in Jewish and Zionist history; at worst, it was dangerous in its optimism, elevating expectations of what Zionism could accomplish far beyond what was remotely possible. (One cannot help noticing the irony: the very Zionists who criticized Herzl’s novel as fantasy were, by their own standards as applied to Herzl, perhaps the more unrealistic in their own expectations of Zionism—and seemingly able to unite only to attack the most successful organizing presence Zionism had known.) In retrospect, it is not surprising that reaction to the book was so overwrought. Herzl’s well-documented insensitivity to the importance of cultural questions, as well as his naïve (and arrogant) expectation

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that his words would always be received in the best light, only fueled the fire. Altneuland also appeared at a fraught historical moment. Not long after the book’s release, Russian Bessarabia exploded into antiJewish violence in the Kishniev pogroms. Herzl’s increasingly desperate negotiations with foreign leaders had still failed to secure any land of refuge for Jews fleeing violence. No plan he had devised in any case could have met the desperate need for rescue facing the Jewish victims of the collapse of order in southeastern Ukraine. In Ottoman Palestine, early Zionist settlements struggled to survive in the face of poor organization and hostility, both internal and external. The Zionist movement itself, suffering the growing pains of a young mass movement, was beginning to experience internal fissures over issues like political strategy and culture that would worsen precipitously in the following months. It is thus not surprising that Herzl’s words, wherever they appeared (and certainly in such a grandiose form as Altneuland), would be taken very seriously.43 With the release of Altneuland it seemed that Herzl’s uncanny gift for self-presentation had failed him at a crucial time. Ahad Ha’am’s review appeared in the Hebrew journal Ha-Shiloah in late 1902, although it achieved much wider circulation when it appeared in German translation in Ost und West in April 1903. “At long last, we know,” Ahad Ha’am began bitingly, the answer to the Jewish question offered political Zionism.44 With this beginning, the lengthy review went on to attack Herzl at every turn. It drew out at length the folly of many of his (admittedly) far-fetched speculations on how a Jewish state in Palestine would rise from a provincial backwater to become a center of technology, art, culture, and human brotherhood in a mere twenty years. The bulk of Ahad Ha’am’s critique was directed at the impracticality of Herzl’s vision; Old-New Land was an unconscionable miscasting of reality. Ahad Ha’am knew, as a hovev Zion (lover of Zion) involved in overseeing actual settlements in Palestine for years, that settlement in Palestine in any form was a perilous and delicate undertaking. Herzl’s book, like his ill-fated trip to Istanbul in 1896, represented an unfathomable lack of comprehension about what Zionist infiltration into Ottoman Palestine meant and offered no answers to the questions raised by the scope of mass migration it prophesied. In fact, the most likely outcome, Ahad Ha’am asserted, was that immigration to Palestine would occur as it always had: slowly, by a tiny minority, with most

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Jews left behind to carry on dealing with the “Jewish question” as they always had. In any case, the predicated settlement upon which the wonders of Altneuland depend could never happen. But it was the way the book dealt with issues of Jewish nationalist culture that most offended Ahad Ha’am. The book was, he asserted, no more than a reflection of the sole shred of Jewish identity that Herzl and other “political” Zionists had left: their sensitivity to anti-Semitism. It was basically just another prescription for defending an emphatically un-Jewish conception of Jewish honor that had no chance of succeeding. The capstone of this critique centered on the culture of Herzl’s Old-New Land. In terms that are at times offensive to modern eyes, Ahad Ha’am hurled abuse on the new Jewish national culture that was to be its bedrock. Altneuland, he wrote, was “not Jewish”; it was nothing but “a monkey’s imitation without any integral national character; reeking of the spirit of the ‘slavery of freedom,’ a daughter of [European] exile.”45 Whether they were pleased with the book or not, Herzl’s supporters responded to the review with outrage. Although it should not have been surprising to anyone familiar with Ahad Ha’am’s undisguised disdain for Herzl and his movement (Ahad Ha’am himself expressed genuine shock at the response, noting that it was hardly the worst he had said about Herzl), the review nevertheless was perceived as an unprecedented insult requiring a heavy-handed response.46 Max Nordau took up Herzl’s standard and met Ahad Ha’am’s precise, if cruel, critical excavations with a sledgehammer. Not content in responding just to Ahad Ha’am’s critique of the book, Nordau attacked his entire Zionist outlook. Published in Die Welt, Nordau’s response stopped at nothing, even going so far as to personally insult Ahad Ha’am with words carrying unmistakably anti-Semitic inflection. Distilling the essence of Ahad Ha’am’s opposition to Herzl to a lack of respect for “tolerance” in founding a Jewish state, he wrote, “Ahad Ha’am does not want tolerance. Aliens should be slaughtered, or at best chased out as they once were in Sodom and Gomorrah. The idea of tolerance disgusts him. Well, what disgusts us is to have a crippled, hunchbacked victim of intolerance, the despised slave of intolerant, knout-wielding pogromchiks, speak of tolerance in this manner.”47 About Ahad Ha’am’s contribution to Zionism and Jewish culture, Nordau admitted only that he wrote a “passably good Hebrew” but failed to put it to any

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useful purpose.48 In Nordau’s final summation, Ahad Ha’am belonged to the “worst enemies of Zionism,” worse than the most committed assimilationist or darkest Orthodox zealot, who perverted the ideals of Herzlian Zionism by creating a false category—“political” Zionism— and heaping all of his benighted, feigned disgust on the group whose efforts, Nordau underscored, he neither understood nor recognized as the greatest hope for Zionism.49 Nordau’s comments elicited a general response of outrage from Jewish nationalists and Zionists across geographical and ideological lines. Martin Buber appealed directly to Herzl to intercede, wondering whether such vitriol was useful for the Zionist movement, but Herzl refused to participate directly in the controversy (although it seems likely he knowingly set Nordau on Ahad Ha’am).50 An open letter was soon circulated, signed by Buber, Feiwel, Weizmann, and others, that lauded Ahad Ha’am as a “fearless man of truth in thought and deed,” a “genuine and perfect Jew who, long before the advent of political Zionism, appeared as the most radical combatant on behalf of the national movement” (hyperbole, it seems, not being solely the domain of Ahad Ha’am’s detractors).51 Nor were the opponents of Ahad Ha’am content to stand by, and the culture warriors within the Zionist movement quickly dug in to their respective trenches in a division that shaped the movement for years. Only the more dramatic crisis provoked by the Uganda proposal at the Sixth Congress of 1903 and Herzl’s death a year later ended the affair.52 It is not surprising that, as a contretemps that lasted several months and ensnared nearly every major figure in the Zionist movement, the Ahad Ha’am affair would draw in Nathan Birnbaum as well. Yet on the whole his engagement was marked by noteworthy restraint. The cutting polemicist Mathias Acher, remarkably, took pains to distance himself from the polemical tone that engulfed the affair from the start. At first, he proclaimed his satisfaction at being an “observer” (as he called himself in an article appearing at this time in Ost und West, “‘Solutions’ to the Jewish Question”) of the internal strife of his estranged colleagues.53 Birnbaum and Ahad Ha’am were not close; despite many similarities in their respective nationalist outlooks, they met only once, in Basel in 1897. Although Birnbaum contributed a few translated pieces to Ha-Shiloah while Ahad Ha’am was editor, their brief and cordial cor-

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respondence revolved entirely around publishing issues.54 Rather than defend Ahad Ha’am personally, then, Birnbaum’s involvement with the affair was as a commentator, a person of interest and importance to Jewish nationalist public opinion. Remaining aloof, Birnbaum weighed in on the debate in measured tones in his own open letter to protest Nordau’s comments and to add his voice to the rally in support of Ahad Ha’am. The content, while mirroring that of the letter circulated by Martin Buber, Berthold Feiwel, and the others, was subtly different. Open Letter to Ahad Ha’am: The outrageously violent assault of Max Nordau provoked by your criticism of Altneuland has filled us with pain and deep indignation, and we regard it as our honor-bound duty to answer this added ill will with an open expression of our sincere sympathy and admiration for you. How could we not publicize these feelings for a man who has appeared to us as a spiritual representative of our people in the east, for a man who has given voice to our national consciousness, to our national heritage, in a constant spiritual struggle, the modern form of our greatest struggle, the most vigorous, outspoken, and full of character? . . . Of those who have awakened and nourished our hopes . . . we see you, honored sir, before all. We would have nothing and no one for a national movement if you had not undertaken the quiet yet ceaseless work for your fellows. With great disbelief we have before us the facts of this assault, and we are compelled to loudly declaim our deepest respect for you. Far from seeing you as the “worst enemy” of our national movement, we recognize in you the most intrepid fighter for our cause and the best friend of our people!55

Birnbaum repeated the other letter’s high estimation of Ahad Ha’am’s contribution to Jewish nationalism and testified to Ahad Ha’am’s important contribution to the Jewish nation. That doing so meant once again highlighting the cultural philistinism of the Herzl camp was an added bonus. Yet unlike the effusive accolades of the other letter, Birnbaum writes as an equal, a fellow champion of the Jewish people—and fellow victim of the insolent insults of upstarts. This attitude of equality with Ahad Ha’am, the implicit sentiment that he was the western counterpart to the eastern sage of Russian Zionism, came through even more clearly as Birnbaum’s participation in the

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affair deepened. It was precisely this high estimation of his own place in the Jewish national debate that led him to hone his developing ideas for a new Jewish national movement. Although he began simply by responding to the Ahad Ha’am affair, Birnbaum augmented his thoughts on Ahad Ha’am’s nationalism to serve as a platform to conceptualize his own new position. In a 1902 lecture, “Ahad Ha’am: A Thinker and Fighter for the Jewish Renaissance,” Birnbaum began as if to present yet another contribution to the defense of Ahad Ha’am from Nordau’s attacks: “Max Nordau has swamped Ahad Ha’am with invective, marked him. . . . I am determined therefore to bring forward, through a short presentation of the thought and work of Ahad Ha’am, all of the evidence for the scrutiny of western Jews.”56 But what emerged went far beyond a simple presentation of evidence, evolving instead into a detailed analysis of the entire body of Ahad Ha’am’s writing on Jewish nationalism and Zionism. The lecture opened with the familiar themes of the spiritual estrangement of western Jewry from their more authentic eastern brethren; but here instead of attack and criticism, Birnbaum assumed the role of an impartial expert and guide for his uninformed western audience, who, he believed, had come to hear him “with the best of intentions.” Because, as Ahad Ha’am himself noted in his epigraph to his collection of essays, in the words of Montesquieu, “There are certain truths for which persuasion does not suffice, but which must be felt.” Birnbaum realized that it would be a difficult task to explain to western Jews, who came from an entirely different “spiritual homeland” than Ahad Ha’am, his “spiritual and moral personality.” But, ever the optimist, he believed that although western Jewry was “estranged from the Jewish soul,” it was also possible that through a thorough explanation of Ahad Ha’am’s work, he might be able to foster “something like an understanding between one human spiritual home and another.”57 One of the most striking aspects of this passage is that in spite of a dose of condescension, Birnbaum had tangibly muted his critical attitude toward western Jewry. He was careful not to suggest that western Jewry surrender itself or negate its identity, to somehow “unassimilate” and become identical with eastern Jewry. Instead, he pointedly referred to it, perhaps for the first time, as one among other “spiritual homes” of Judaism, suggesting that it was possible even for western Jewry to be reconciled with the “soul” of the Jewish people and come

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to its own as a rich culture. These words indicate the resonance of Birnbaum’s evolving view with a core idea of the Jewish renaissance movement, that a healthy national ethos must acknowledge multiple routes toward a robust Jewish nationalist identity. As his lecture developed, it became clear that he also read this idea into Ahad Ha’am as well, who becomes an unconscious, albeit brilliant, explicator of Birnbaum’s own Jewish renaissance philosophy. There is a certain willful overreading at work in this interpretation of Ahad Ha’am; in fact, the sort of ideological ecumenicalism Birnbaum describes had very little to do with the Russian Hebraist’s political philosophy. Nevertheless, Birnbaum stretched himself to argue that, in fact, they were similar in the sense that like him, Ahad Ha’am placed himself among the ideologically pure vanguard who sought to protect the fragile bloom of the Jewish national spirit from all camps that might co-opt it for their own pragmatic purposes. He fought vigorously against those who denied the need for (or even existence of) the Jewish national spirit. At the same time, he carried the vanguard of wisdom in the face of “youths” like Micha Josef ­Berdyczewski, who had cut his teeth on Ahad Ha’am’s ideals and writings but now, in a Zionist family romance, had turned on his intellectual father and sought to use the medium of the revitalized Hebrew language to lead Jewish society toward a Nietzschean, nihilistic “revaluation” of Jewish values.58 In Birnbaum’s reading, Ahad Ha’am was the bastion of a deep, reasoned, and authentic Jewish national spirit holding fast against the philistines of Herzlian Zionism and the enfants terribles who lacked the experience or prudence to pick their battles carefully. Much like, Birnbaum believed, he himself had become. But even more important, Birnbaum felt, Ahad Ha’am also knew when it was time to fight, especially in defending the dilution of the Jewish national spirit through the hasty, superficial, and premature maneuverings of the “political” Zionists. His essays theorizing the necessary elements for the Jewish national spirit to succeed had been “in the open” for more than a decade and “made political Zionism . . . unnecessary.”59 And he had done more than merely theorize; he had worked tirelessly to create and nurture those institutions he felt were essential to his goals, as symbolized by his part in the founding of the Hebrew publishing concern Achiasaf, and his part in the redaction of the first Hebrew-language encyclopedia of Judaism. But the thinker’s

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true greatness, to Birnbaum, lay in his unique combination of thought and deed. Ahad Ha’am was not simply a “thinker; rather, as the opposition already has a sense, he is a man of action. That is to say, he is not simply a thinker, but a fighter, a spiritual fighter.” The conflict he provoked was not gratuitous; it was a calculated and necessary eruption that arose from his ruthless wisdom and honesty, which led him to struggle against both himself and others. “Against himself, meaning against his own ideas and ideals, so that he never allowed himself to succumb to a tyranny of the spirit. Against the masses—those that love exactly this tyrannical ideal, because they cherish their vital idealism” and would allow him to indulge in the natural, “evil inclination” of absolute leadership (once again, it is not hard to discern Herzl’s image between the lines of Birnbaum’s comments).60 According to Birnbaum, Ahad Ha’am’s struggle against his ideological yetser ha-ra, his darker inclination, the source of so much misunderstanding and animus that had unjustly been directed against him, was not for the masses to understand (a position to which Ahad Ha’am likely would have assented). Nor could the common observer readily understand that his personal struggle was for their benefit and their own best interest. “Clearly, as he struggles with his inner conflict, so does his courageous personality struggle with the outside.” He did battle with the most basic and cherished false virtue of the political Zionists: their call for unity at all costs. “He announces . . . that he fights less against the so-called external enemy as against the united camp. He is in good company with this. The prophets of all peoples act thus, and must not act otherwise—even if the small-minded philistines do not understand and accuse him of betrayal, two-facedness, opposed to the spirit of unity, and other silly things.” He will never be fully understood or appreciated for the leader that he truly is except in retrospect, for he “is not a leader in the commonly understood sense, nor does he wish, nor will he ever be such a leader. . . . [He is] a man who struggles on the highest pinnacle—alone and without vanity!”61 It is just this kind of individual that is necessary for the future of the Jewish renaissance movement. “Do not believe, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that a movement like the Jewish renaissance can do without a thinker of the stature of Ahad Ha’am!”62 Even though Birnbaum went to great (perhaps exaggerated) lengths to highlight the views they shared, he also confronted their differences

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and did not hesitate to criticize. In another essay, “The Jewish Movement,” Birnbaum wrote in greater detail on the conflict between Ahad Ha’am and Herzl. But in place of further discussion of the Ahad Ha’am affair itself, Birnbaum looked to its roots in the ideology of both Ahad Ha’am and Herzl, seeking to illuminate the underlying causes of the conflict between the two men and their followers. Surprisingly, although he was far from coming around to Herzl’s side, Birnbaum questioned Ahad Ha’am’s critique of Herzl’s earlier essay Der Judenstaat, in particular the priorities he posited for the Jewish national movement. He was correct, Birnbaum asserted, “when he assigns Der Judenstaat the status of a project whose development is long and full of drawbacks and therefore believes that its foundation should not be considered until . . . the suffering of the Jews is spoken of.”63 In other words, Ahad Ha’am’s priorities were reasonable when he elevated the physical improvement of the conditions of Jews living in the present above fantastic plans for the future. But Birnbaum felt that behind this noble goal lay a dubious motivation. Rather than act only for the best interests of Jewry, Ahad Ha’am made his compassion and national feeling subservient to Hebraism and Palestinism. Presenting for the first time in its entirety the category of “exile [ galut] doctrine” and its failures, Birnbaum audaciously dismantled Ahad Ha’am’s basic understanding of the roots of Jewish nationalism. Shockingly, he did so by equating it with none other than Herzl’s Der Judenstaat. Birnbaum argued that the two shared a common, flawed thread of reasoning: an absolute concept of exile against which all identity of Judaism was measured. In the end, he argued, both Ahad Ha’am and Herzl argue only for a negative Jewish cultural identity. This position, Birnbaum wrote, shared by the symbols of the two opposing poles of Zionism, was fundamentally incorrect. In his exploration of this position and his opposition to it, Birnbaum describes in his most explicit terms his emerging political ideology. His first step was clarification of the idea of exile. “The so-called exile,” he writes, “is not a fixed and undifferentiated entity in opposition to all laws of [Jewish national] development but rather a historical process with different temporal and geographical stages.” This was true, he maintained, in moments of national catastrophe and trial such as the recent Kishniev pogroms, which must not be used as an excuse to reduce all exile to a

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unidimensional pageant of suffering. “In spite of Kishniev—as much as our blood is appropriately brought to boil by it—the fact remains that there are countries with more and less ‘exile.’ . . . The terrible slowness with which exile recedes and the persistent setbacks must not dissuade us. They are the inevitable result of development.”64 The exile, in other words, is not an undifferentiated state of material suffering and spiritual destitution, as the Zionist would have it. It is much more complicated to Birnbaum; it is a state of Jewish being that is manifold and various, far from the monochromatic view offered by the Zionists. Most important, it is not at all the eternal situation of suffering for Jews in many areas; as the advancement of society and civilization in general occurs, Birnbaum suggested, the traumas and setbacks of exile would be destined to diminish, if slowly. In fact, even given the negative aspects of exile—primarily a devastating sense of powerlessness—Jews had emerged with an enriched and strengthened culture. As time passed, this fundamental negative would likely even disappear entirely, as Jews came to their own political consciousness and began to demand their rights as an integral national entity in exile and Palestine. Once Birnbaum highlighted the fundamental flaw in all notions of Zionism, he turned the Zionist argument against itself and began to argue for the importance of exile as a crucial element in the formation of Jewish culture. “Aside from this [the inevitable relaxation of the conditions of exile described previously], the exile is nothing less than indispensable to the Jewish renaissance movement.” To attack the situation of the vast majority of world Jewry, indeed, the definitive physical and spiritual identity of the Jews for their history since the Roman Empire as an absolute and irredeemable catastrophe, its cultural fruits as nothing but the malignancies of suffering, was a grave mistake. It meant above all to surrender any agency on the part of Jews themselves in the creation of their rich heritage, consigning it instead to their enemies. “It was and is the greatest error, which I have myself at times put forward; but I wish to do so no longer,” Birnbaum asserted. “[And] to consign the reality of Jewish peoplehood to the agenda of the antiSemites is no less an error—Ahad Ha’am commits it—than to assign to this people inflexible marching orders, to decide for them that there is only one correct goal toward which they should move.” Fear itself, Birnbaum claimed, was what prevented Ahad Ha’am and other Zion-

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ists from recognizing the potential of the culture of Jews in exile, but it was an irrational fear, a fear more likely the product of his ingrained prejudices than objective reflection. “There is no reason to fear, like Ahad Ha’am, the different faces of the new Jewry. Perhaps there will be a vigorous Jewry that manifests itself in different forms. If there were to be two Jewish nations bestowed upon us, we say, what is the harm?”65 To allow for only one monolithic vision of Jewish cultural history was, in fact, to continue the cycle of anxiety and destruction, for it is this failure of differentiation, of thinking only in absolutes, that has blinded the Jewish people from its own cultural and spiritual potential—both in exile or in a national home. This critique was a particularly sharp one to direct at Ahad Ha’am; as Birnbaum was well aware, and as noted earlier, the accusation that a given vision of the Zionist redemption was nothing more than a continuation of exile in a new place had been lobbed not long before—by Ahad Ha’am in his critique of Altneuland. Birnbaum did not argue that the basic precept of Zionism, the creation of an autonomous Jewish nation-state, was unnecessary or unwarranted. Indeed, in his view some sort of territorial concentration was one important possibility in fostering a Jewish renaissance, but it was not the only, or the best or most expedient, means of doing so. “Obviously, territorial concentration is an ideal medium through which a cultural mass and repose may be conceived,” he acknowledged, yet so long as it was a nonnegotiable position by Zionists that this state be created far away from the majority of world Jewry, “this basic necessity will not be realized. And what does it matter if this portion [who remain in exile]—which itself would be the long-term result of creating some cultural center in the future—were to ripen into a vigorous and highly developed exile culture?” Were the Jews who remained in exile to embrace the culture of their integral nation, it would not only improve the lot of the Jews but it would also “enrich the world” with its creativity and vibrancy. By all means, settlement in Palestine was a boon, even a necessity for the Jewish people, and the creation of a Jewish state (not, to be clear, the nation) was appropriate nowhere but there. However, the motivation for creating such a state must be clear. The creation of a Jewish spiritual center would not be guaranteed by immigration en masse to Palestine, even if it were possible. At best, it was a place to found and broadcast Jewish “singularity” imprinted through the “rustic character

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of [Palestine’s] settlement.”66 But this was only one piece of the larger Jewish cultural renaissance; to rely on it alone invited catastrophe. What was needed in addition was the simultaneous strengthening of exile culture and nationalism. Birnbaum once again teases out of Ahad Ha’am’s own words some evidence that he, too, gives this notion some credence. “Ahad Ha’am himself stresses more and more—and any realistic person would stress it that much more—that outside of Jewish cultural work, public relief work for the Jews is most pressing,” Birnbaum noted. “Even [Ahad Ha’am] himself cannot . . . divide ‘exile’ and ‘Zion’ into absolute, unchanging truths.”67 Birnbaum makes an interesting, if somewhat disingenuous, point here. Obviously, Jewish leaders of every stripe, from political Zionists to cultural Zionists, even anti-Zionists from wealthy philanthropists to socialists, recognized the need to relieve Jewish suffering as quickly as possible, particularly in Russia. This essay, after all, was written just after the Kishniev pogroms had shocked the world with unrestrained violence against Russian Jews, and photos of murdered Jews and reports of atrocities printed in newspapers from Berlin to Paris to New York made the violence an international spectacle. As one of the principal voices of Jewish nationalism, Ahad Ha’am certainly would have assented to the pressing need for aid. But Birnbaum, rather than place Ahad Ha’am’s comments in the context of this latest disaster, read argumentatively that Ahad Ha’am had come to realize the essential value of exile on even a cultural level. Pressing forward, Birnbaum suggested that in fact, Ahad Ha’am’s “lapse” was the first sign that he was coming around to an essential truth about Zionism: that it itself was ultimately dependent on exile culture. He pounced on what he sensed as a moment of inelegance and incongruity in Ahad Ha’am’s usually scrupulous writing, which he felt revealed Ahad Ha’am’s own awareness of the absurdity of his absolute position. “It is also for this reason that his casual suggestions over the question of welfare are inserted so poorly and utterly inorganically in his system. . . . One even questions for a minute his Zionism. How foolish!” No, the issue with Ahad Ha’am’s slip is not that he was a questionable Zionist but rather that he could no longer hide his own sense of the incongruity of an absolute Zionist position. “There are no more consequential Zionists than Ahad Ha’am. He is one with his entire soul, and therein lies the insufficiency of his otherwise profound instruction for the Jewish renaissance.”

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The lesson is that no single pillar of national culture was necessary, but rather each expression, whether based upon Palestinian or exiled Jewish national culture, was required to preserve Jewish life and cultivate a strong national future. “We need neither his nor any other ‘Zionism.’ Or do we need more? What is needed is a system of welfare and cultural work . . . a system that is not affixed to the fruitless exile doctrine but rather attends realistically to the prevailing power, that considers the prevailing differences, in order to jump-start the Jews as a cultural individuality and as a society.”68 Once again, Ahad Ha’am’s voice becomes an unconscious confirmation of Birnbaum’s notion of Jewish renaissance. Although himself seemingly unaware of the true implications of his words, at least in Birnbaum’s reading, he becomes a lesson for Birnbaum’s readers. In fact, there is a cruel logic to Birnbaum’s assessment of Ahad Ha’am, however forced his exegesis. Birnbaum correctly perceived a troubling contradiction in maintaining the absolute transcendent reality of exile versus Zion and at the same time calling for material aid for the exile. It is a paradox with which Ahad Ha’am struggled deeply, and perhaps never resolved. In pointing it out, Birnbaum honors Ahad Ha’am above other, coarser Zionists who would crudely read the Kishniev destruction as a dark boon to their movement and nods graciously to the fact that he did not succumb to the cold “tyranny” of his ideals. Even if he overextended the meaning of Ahad Ha’am’s words and feelings on the subject, he demonstrated a sensitivity to the complexities of the Zionexile dichotomy, and in doing so lends credence to his position. Birnbaum’s involvement in the Ahad Ha’am–Nordau–Herzl affair proved an ideal moment for him to articulate a Jewish nationalism that was a concrete alternative to Zionism. The dramatic schism in the movement gave Birnbaum an opportunity and a platform upon which to assert himself outside the parameters that had defined his political and intellectual life up to that point. In place of what he regarded as the reductivist reasoning of the Zionist movement, one that had long enticed him, he posited a more nuanced understanding of the cultural and political factors at work in Jewish nationalism. As he disparaged the false doctrinaire “unity” of Zionists of all camps, based as it was on demands for monolithic allegiance to one or another vision of Jewish nationalism, Birnbaum offered another in its place, based on a wider,

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more ecumenical, and in some ways amorphous vision of a Jewish national movement. Along with a loose coalition of prominent figures in Jewish cultural production, some affiliated formally with Zionism, some not, Birnbaum drew upon the inclusivity offered by multiple expressions of national culture and identity as explored by the circle of the Jewish renaissance movement. Even though members of the circle shared a common view that acknowledged the need for deep Jewish cultural identity, replete with all aspects of national culture (a language, a literary and artistic pantheon, political parties and organizations), they nevertheless allowed for multiple expressions of this nationalism. In this way Birnbaum was able to assist in pointing the way toward a large nationalist tent, one that acknowledged the value of both Hebrew and Yiddish, Zion and exile. Even if, in the end, it did not become the permanent home of Jewish national identity—most of the figures affiliated with the Jewish renaissance, Birnbaum included, soon moved on to other projects—its bold ideals played a decisive role in sculpting the landscape that questions of culture and identity, aesthetics and politics, would take in the nationalist world. It was with this ideal in mind that Birnbaum embarked, starting in 1905, on the two very public affirmations of his thought: his bid for the 1907 Austrian Reichsrat as a representative from Galicia, and his instrumental role in the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference.

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Fou r  The Eastward Gaze The 1907 Elections and the Yiddish Language Conference The train stood in the railyard as the travelers on board peered out of the windows and two or three people ran by hurriedly, swallowed by a cloud of steam emerging from the engine. The campaign tarried a bit before it departed, and we stood to pay our respects to our candidate, Doctor David Davidson, as he went on his way. Our candidate, Doctor David Davidson, who was not elected, was returning to his home, his city, and we young Zionists stood there as if at a funeral. How we loved him and his lectures; how we adored his very countenance as well his speeches, which even in Yiddish were moving oratory. He even went to the synagogue on Shabbat before the election. To hell with those who complained loudly that he did it for show to capture the hearts of the sons of Israel so that they would vote for him, just because he sat in Vienna for all those years and never went to pray in shul. It never occurred to them that he did it out of love. . . . There are such things as Doktors in the world who wrote books to honor Torah and the Commandments even though they did not fulfill the commandments in the Torah. It was not the action that counted but the illumination of their authentic Jewishness. —S. Y. Agnon, “With Our Young and With Our Old”

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In 1907, the young Zionist and aspiring writer-journalist Shmuel Tchatchkes observed with a keen eye the reception of Nathan Birnbaum in the eastern Galician town of Buczacz.1 Birnbaum was there as a candidate on a whistle-stop as he campaigned as one of twenty Jewish nationalists spread across electoral districts in Galicia and Bukovina competing for a seat in the lower house of the Austrian Reichsrat. Some time later the same writer, by then well on his way to becoming a Nobel Prize winner and the definitive voice of Hebrew literature for a generation under the more familiar name S. Y. Agnon, described the aftermath of the election and the departure of David Davidson (a.k.a. Nathan Birnbaum) in

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the words just quoted, part of a novella detailing life and politics among young Zionists in Galicia, With Our Young and With Our Old. Agnon’s description of Birnbaum as David Davidson creates a power­ ful image (along with a wry wink at Birnbaum’s attempts to cultivate an image of authenticity) captured in the diaphanous style typical of his descriptions of Galicia. Like a photograph taken of Birnbaum during the same visit to Buczacz in which Agnon first encountered him surrounded by a throng of townspeople, it underscores the fame that seemed to precede Birnbaum as he turned directly to the masses of Galicia as a potent political force. In dwelling on the power of his written and spoken words, indeed his very visage, Agnon highlights a charismatic force at work that transcended the party politics of the previous decade that had buffeted Birnbaum. Here, the affection and seriousness with which Birnbaum attended to and energized eastern Jewry was accepted and often returned with enthusiasm. The inspirational details of his journey from Viennese Doktor (in Agnon’s Buczacz, a positive and negative shorthand for western worldliness and cultivation and, by implication, distance from Jewishness or yiddishkayt) to devoted servant and political brawler for the hardscrabble townspeople of places like Buczacz, Tłumacz, ­Sniatyn, and Tarnów evoked a fascination that, although met with skepticism by some, seemed to stir deep and genuine excitement among many. By 1904, Nathan Birnbaum had fundamentally redefined—and refined—his thinking on the basic questions of Jewish nationalism. Largely resulting from a collaboration with the Jewish renaissance circle and culminating with his thoughtful meditation on the Ahad Ha’am affair, he pursued a project he had begun the moment he withdrew from active participation in Herzl’s Zionist movement. It was characterized by a turn away from the parochial factionalism of Zionism, a preoccupation with the basic questions of Jewish national priorities, which led him to reject many of the categories that had defined the national project up to that point. Although the debates with which he engaged—such as the Ahad Ha’am affair—were largely Zionist ones, he was clearly staking out new directions in nationalism well beyond organized Zionist politics. By then Jewish nationalism had experienced its most profound shock to date with the death of Theodor Herzl in 1904. It would take a few years for the full impact of his sudden absence to become clear, but

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Cartoon from Der Yidisher Gazlan, 26 August 1910: “In the Jewish Culture Wagon,” showing Ahad Ha’am and Nathan Birnbaum as representatives of Yiddish and Hebrew. Caption: “Jew: Is this what we have to put up with? In any case, can’t you just go forward? But no, you just sit there like klezmorim with whips in your hands.” (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

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the Kultur­kampf that had roiled Zionism at the turn of the century was forever changed, ultimately to be concluded to the advantage of the Palestine-oriented, Hebraist “cultural” camp. With Herzl gone, it would not have been surprising had Birnbaum sought to reengage with the Zionist fold. A well-timed return might well have worked to his advantage, giving him a central voice as the movement progressed; as we have seen, many in the ascendant camp not only admired him but sympathized with his grievances toward Herzl and his allies. In fact, he did the opposite. Except for limited cooperation with a predominantly Zionist Jewish nationalist allegiance in the elections of 1907, he widened his critique of it. He had finally left the work of building a Jewish homeland in Palestine to others, focusing instead on Jewish nation building in Europe—especially in the liberalizing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Over the next few years, including most of the second half of the decade, Birnbaum took part in two closely linked efforts based upon this new direction. The first was an attempt to put into action the ecumenical nationalist Jewish People’s Party model, which he had advocated for a decade, by joining other Jewish nationalists in seeking election to public office. The second attempted to redefine Jewish cultural renewal through the vehicle of the Yiddish language when he served as president of the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz. Both of these endeavors were rooted in the same impulse. Having spent a great deal of time, energy, and ink and having invested a great deal of his own reputation extolling the national potential of Yiddishspeaking, eastern European Jewry, Birnbaum concluded that the time had come to put his theory into action. He sought to engage directly with what he believed to be the life’s blood of the Jewish Volk embodied by the largely Yiddish-speaking Jews of the eastern Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although not turning his back entirely on Zionism as one expression of national awakening, he was increasingly convinced that its significant obstacles meant it would attract only the support of a small group. For the larger, especially Yiddish-speaking, masses, a different path to national consciousness had to be found. In this view, Birnbaum was part of a growing trend. Although beginning in the early 1890s, around the same time Birnbaum was first theorizing different models of national organization, a number of new expressions or variations on Jewish nationalism and Zionism emerged, each trying to find the cor-

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rect formula that would capture the attention and support of what was still regarded as a largely politically naïve eastern European Jewry.2 Both Birnbaum’s campaign in the 1907 Reichsrat election and his efforts to assemble a unified cultural movement based upon the Yiddish language were part of this larger trend. If in the end their results were dubious, it should not obscure the fact that these efforts met with widespread support and garnered significant attention.

The Election of 1907 Featuring universal manhood suffrage for the first time, the 1907 Austrian Reichsrat election was a pivotal event in the political history of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. To appreciate its importance requires some background on the Reichsrat itself. Containing the sole elected body within the federal government in the non-Hungarian lands of the Dual Monarchy (Austria, the Czech lands, Galicia, Bukovina, and part of the Balkan possessions), the Reichsrat had grown in importance from its modest origins as a small imperial advisory council made up of nobles to become the single institutional expression of popular will in a political system still largely defined by imperial authoritarianism. Founded in 1851 in the wake of the 1848–49 revolutions, it grew to become a bicameral parliament composed of an upper house (Herren­ haus, House of Peers) and a lower house (Abegordnetenhaus, or House of Deputies) in 1860.3 Over the ensuing decades, the franchise and the power (at least in theory) of the body grew, first by replacing appointed regional diets with direct elections, culminating in 1907 with the introduction of universal manhood suffrage.4 Although on the surface groundbreaking, this moment in the electoral history of the Dual Monarchy had a mixed impact. The overall practical effect of the change in places like Galicia was mitigated by the lingering control of elite groups over the mechanisms of public office, both in terms of their presence at the center of power in Vienna and their nearly unshakable control over the electoral process in their home region.5 Still, symbolically the reform held great significance, especially among national minorities that would come to play a pivotal role for the rest of the empire’s history. A major factor since before the revolu-

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tions of 1848, the tensions resulting from rising nationalist sentiment were the direct cause of the most dramatic restructuring of the empire with the Compromise [Ausgleich] of 1867, which resulted in full autonomy for Hungary (including present-day Hungary, Slovakia, and a significant portion of Romania) and similar status for Galicia.6 In every region rising nationally conscious groups such as Czechs, Germans, Poles, and Ruthenians drew competing conclusions from the concessions granted the Poles and Hungarians. To those groups who already enjoyed significant hegemony, the Ausgleich affirmed their secure future and increased power; for emerging nationalities, it was perceived as a sign of the empire’s fundamental weakness and signified an opportunity to seek redress for their own grievances with the imperial system. The issues dearest to emerging nationalities differed from one group to another, but all hinged on a very basic demand: national recognition. Philosophically, this meant Vienna’s acceptance that a given linguistic, religious, or ethnic identity was one that deserved recognition as a “national” entity: support for everything from the teaching of national languages in schools to allocation of imperial funding for national cultural centers and institutions, even near autonomy. Some disgruntled and radical groups even agitated for the dissolution of the empire altogether. Slowly, Vienna’s acceptance that emerging national groups needed to be engaged or manipulated became basic imperial policy, in itself a considerable turnabout. It meant abandoning an ideal that dated back to the expansion of the empire in the eighteenth century of a state built upon unified linguistic (German) and cultural identity. After the revolutions of 1848, which in the Habsburg Empire featured a bloody attempt at secession by the Kingdom of Hungary, it became clearer that the empire could not effectively function as an ersatz Germanic state; it was much more practical to accede to, and even support, a limited degree of national autonomy for selected ethnic groups. By so doing, Vienna could hope to co-opt moderate nationalists in every group, giving them some stake in the continued survival of a multiethnic state. In words attributed to Prime Minister Eduard Taafe (1833–95), “The secret of government in Austria consists in keeping all national groups in a state of well-tempered dissatisfaction.”7 In order to benefit from the state’s designs, an ethnic group needed first to be recognized as a nationality and then to successfully assert its

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right to cultural hegemony—or at least a critical mass to support its cultural institutions—in its national region. How this happened could be complicated, and generally speaking it was the struggle of subaltern or unrecognized ethnic groups (Ruthenians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Jews, among others) to assert legitimacy from under the shadow of the dominant groups (Germans, Hungarians, and Poles) that defined the nationalities’ struggle in the empire. The determinant factor in who played which role was history: those groups that had enjoyed traditional hegemony in a given region had easier access to imperial support, putting them in the strongest position to support imperial integrity in exchange for free rein over the cultural politics in their regions. Thus, a shift to widened suffrage, which might upset this hegemony, could have dramatic effects. After the Cisleithanian Empire separated its domestic politics and parliamentary jurisdiction in 1867, little would change for groups left in the empire that occupied areas with a clear majority, such as western Galicia, lower Austria, or the Italian regions. But in areas of mixed ethnicity the change could be very disruptive. Not coincidentally, it was in these regions that the elections of 1907 were most contentious, as dominant groups attempted to stave off just this disruption. Any number of results, from an actual shift in representation, to ethnic conflict and violence, to electoral fraud, and finally to active intervention by authorities on the regional or federal level were seen in ethnically heterogeneous areas such as Bohemia/Moravia and parts of Galicia. The eastern regions of Austrian Galicia were particularly intense battlegrounds, and it was here that the eastern strategy advocated by Birnbaum and others was put to the test.8 Since the sixteenth century, Galicia, which included territory stretching roughly from Krakow in the west, following to the north the spine of the Carpathian Mountains southeast to the Russian border, had been the heartland of a unique Polish feudal institution, the latifundia system, which had shaped the identities and relationships of the region’s three main groups: Poles, Ukrainians (or Ruthenians), and Jews.9 At the socioeconomic top were the Poles, Polish speaking and Catholic, represented by a small group (often fewer than twenty families) of magnate nobility who controlled the vast share of wealth in the region. Although a majority in western Galicia, the Polish population in the east was, at around 41 percent, nearly identical to that of the other major group, the Ukrainians. After Galicia and Silesia were

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absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the partitions of the Polish Commonwealth in 1772 and 1795, the authority of these magnates was largely preserved, as they successfully asserted to Vienna that they represented the dominant linguistic and cultural group in the region and, as the traditional holders of power, had the means at their disposal to administer the district in an orderly fashion.10 Thus, control over the ethnic politics of Galicia, reinforced with Vienna’s assent, remained in the hands of many of the same magnate families whose names dominate the history of Poland—the Czartoryskis, Zamoyskis, Raziwiłłs, ­Potockis, and Lubomirskis—as they became the powerbrokers in regional politics.11 No other ethnic group in the region could claim that level of presence on the imperial stage, and after 1867 the region achieved near autonomy under the supervision of the Polish elites. The other two groups, Ukrainians and Jews, endured a fraught relationship with the Poles and each other. The Ukrainians, around 42 percent of the population of Austrian Galicia, differed from the Poles in religion (largely Eastern Orthodox or Uniate rather than Roman Catholic), language (Ukrainian rather than Polish), and cultural heritage. Most important, they represented the lion’s share of the agricultural workforce in the agrarian region and had accordingly been concentrated in the lowest socioeconomic stratum of the feudal latifundia system.12 The final group of the Austrian Galician ethno-religious triad was the Jews. The density of the Jewish population of Galicia-Bukovina was among the highest in the entire Diaspora. Overall, Jews of the region represented around 11 percent of the total population, but in towns and cities, reflecting the historical role of Jews in the regional economy, the total was often much higher—often reaching a plurality, in some towns a majority.13 Originally settling throughout Galicia during the expansion of Polish magnate power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Jews had acted as the primary arendators, or leaseholders, on the Polish estates. Thus, the defining feature of Jewish economic and political life in the region often depended on negotiating the sometimes explosive fault lines between Polish authority and Ukrainian labor. By 1900, centuries of social malaise and political insecurity had galvanized both Ukrainian and Jewish national identity just as Polish power was eroding. We have already seen the growth of Jewish national consciousness in its Zionist form, among others. By the time of the

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Reichsrat elections of 1907, a Ukrainian nationalist renaissance in Galicia and Bukovina was also in full swing, including cultural clubs, literary and theatrical societies, trade and agricultural unions, and Ukrainian-­ language education.14 Although a somewhat late-blooming phenomenon, the growth of Ukrainian national consciousness was, by 1907, a force poised to have a major impact on the political structure of parts of Galicia and Bukovina. Both Jews and Ukrainians faced a similar uphill battle for national recognition and its privileges. If Ukrainians struggled for recognition because their claims to possess a unique national culture lacked legitimacy, Jewish nationalists struggled for want of a territory they could claim as a national homeland and a historically precarious position, located between two much larger ethnic groups. Added to this was a further complication: since the early 1870s, to the extent that Jews had become politicized, they had utilized two avenues of political engagement, a Polish alliance and a German alliance, both at loggerheads and neither of which was palatable to Jewish nationalists.15 It was into this dynamic that Nathan Birnbaum made his first and only foray into electoral politics. Having achieved a high level of public exposure over his many years as a political activist and journalist, and particularly in the last decade as his fascination with eastern European Jewish culture had deepened, Birnbaum joined a loose coalition of Jewish nationalists who stood for election in 1907, as part of a new Jewish National Party.16 Although each of the members of this coalition had his own political and pragmatic reasons for joining, Birnbaum’s in particular resonated strongly with the Jewish People’s Party he had envisioned as early as 1894. On the one hand, it was a decidedly Gegenwartsarbeit-style approach, which advocated the use of Jewish nationalism as a unifying ideology bent on accomplishing real electoral goals in existing political structures rather than subordinating them to more distant ones (such as a Jewish state in Palestine). Simultaneously, the Jewish National Party was pragmatic in terms of its requirements for participation under its auspices, something for which Birnbaum had also argued at length.17 Although ostensibly Zionist, the political leanings of the coalition’s candidates in the election were eclectic. Some, like Adolph Stand from Brody, were committed Zionists; others, such as Czernowitz’s Benno Straucher, were a more flexible combination of Zionist and local political grandee; and still others, like Birnbaum, were

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not Zionists at all. This ideological ecumenicalism, based more on pragmatic alliance and a basic commitment to a politicized Jewish national identity, was a position Birnbaum had long advocated. In eastern Galicia and Bukovina, regions with precarious ethnic compositions, the coalition nominated candidates in some twenty districts.18 This coalition pursued a surprising strategy: an alliance between their already diverse group and the segments of the Ukrainian national movement, an approach Birnbaum enthusiastically supported.19 The theory behind the alliance was straightforward: Jewish nationalists understood that only in Galicia-Bukovina could they muster the necessary bloc of votes in certain districts to challenge the entrenched political machine. But simple demographics required a creative approach to deal with an obvious imbalance.20 If, however, Jews could enter as a bloc into a coalition with one of the competing larger groups, Poles or Ukrainians (each of whom constituted around 40 percent of the population in eastern Galicia), another possibility presented itself, especially after 1907: to use the new suffrage system as a means to make Jews the kingmakers of the region and coordinate their support with the ethnic group most likely to support the Jewish agenda and nationalist aspirations.21 Indeed, the Jewish nationalist coalition was not the only Jewish political group to triangulate ethnic politics; for the most part, though, Jews who entered the political arena sought (and frequently received) support from the Polish establishment when it was useful, which further complicated the challenge faced by Jewish nationalists, who found themselves countering not just Polish but sometimes Jewish opposition as well. Although this was not the first attempt by some Jewish political aspirants to forge an alliance based upon aligned Ukrainian and Jewish political interests, the degree of organization and coordination between the groups in 1907 made it a singular event. Birnbaum, for his part, stood as the Jewish National Party candidate for Reichsrat deputy [Reichsratabgeorbneter] in Galicia, representing a swath of heavily Jewish areas, including the cities of Buczacz, Sniatyn, Tłumacz, Cygany, Boroszczow, Salescyki, and Tarnowitza-polna. ­Stefan Moysa-Rosochacki (1853–1920) of the Polish Conservative Party had represented the district before the dissolution of the curia system. In the preliminary election, Birnbaum and Moysa were joined in a threeway race with Ukrainian Social Democrat Roman Iarosevytch. After the

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initial election, Iarosevytch and Birnbaum agreed that Birnbaum would run as the sole opposition candidate and the Ukrainian Social Democrats would support him in the runoff election.22 In the months before the election, both the Jewish National Party and the Ukrainian Social Democrats launched a coordinated effort to reach Jewish and Ukrainian voters (election posters for Birnbaum in Ukrainian and Yiddish testify to this allegiance).23 Birnbaum’s selection as the choice for both Jews and Ukrainian nationalists is easily explained. As mentioned, a precedent existed for an arrangement between Jewish and Ukrainian candidates that would put forward Jewish candidates in more urbanized areas.24 It also appears that Birnbaum received more votes in the preliminary election. It is conceivable that he was also chosen to alleviate the concerns of Jewish voters, who might balk at supporting a Ukrainian candidate. Even though Birnbaum and other Jewish nationalists had embraced the idea for some time and had made strenuous efforts to convince potential Jewish voters through the press, it was a radical approach. The history of Jewish politics had been marked by a vertical alliance in the region in an attempt to guarantee the safety of the Jewish community through support of the politically dominant group. Attempting to join with another subaltern group against the Poles, particularly one stereotyped by many Jews as having ingrained anti-Semitism and boorishness, was a difficult horizontal alliance to sell.25 And many Jews had generally supported the Polish status quo, a fact that had allowed Poles wide latitude in claiming a mandate for their power in the region; thus, the decision by Ukrainians to support a Jewish candidate who shared many of their views on national identity in order to secure Jewish votes was an intelligent political choice.26 Indeed, both during and after the election, Jews in particular were targeted with threatening and inflammatory attacks in the Polish press for their “betrayal.” According to the numbers following the initial vote, the combination of votes for Birnbaum and those for Iarosevytch, it was a strategy that should have succeeded; the protest complaint filed by Birnbaum after the election indicates that they had four thousand votes to the Polish candidate’s three thousand.27 The combination of Jewish and Ukrainian nationalists seemed poised to ­seriously threaten local Polish political domination. This fact was not lost on the Polish establishment. As soon as the first primary showed that Birnbaum and Iarosevytch had the potential to

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defeat Moysa, they endeavored to dampen Jewish and Ukrainian voter turnout. Jews, particularly vulnerable, were targeted in coordinated boycotts, intimidation, and even violence. In the end, Birnbaum lost to Moysa, but in this he was more the rule than the exception among Jewish National Party candidates. Aside from Straucher and Stand, only two other Jewish nationalists were elected, Arthur Mahler and Heinrich Gabel. Ukrainians, on the other hand, showed much better results, winning in twenty-seven of the twenty-eight districts in which they competed.28 In aggregate, the results showed that Poles had good reason to be concerned about maintaining their hegemony in eastern Galicia, and Birnbaum was unlucky enough to run in a district where their organized intimidation and illegal election practices succeeded. The election was almost certainly fraudulent. In a lengthy protest filed shortly after the election and published in a four-page supplement to his own weekly newspaper, Neue Zeitung, Birnbaum documented electoral corruption that reached from the lowest local election officials all the way to the Galician viceroy, Andrzej Potocki (who was assassinated a year later by a Ukrainian university student, Myroslav Sichyns’kyi, a result of the public outrage at the 1907 election results).29 The document reveals in minute detail the level of pressure and coercion the Poles employed in an attempt to control the poll results. This protest is worth examining closely, as it offers an unusually detailed snapshot of early twentieth-century electoral practices in an emerging democratic society. Even discounting the testimonies of victims of government abuse and coercion, Birnbaum asserted, the shift in numbers alone told the story. “After the first ballot, Dr. Birnbaum and the Ruthenian Dr. Roman Iarosevytch together tallied over four thousand votes to the three thousand for the Polish Conservative candidate Stefan Moysa,” Birnbaum complained. “[However,] in the final ballot, the candidate of the combined opposition parties, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, suddenly received barely two-fifths of the votes. From one thousand votes more to fourteen hundred votes less! Why this massive shift? The idea that the Ruthenians . . . moved to vote en masse for Stefan Moysa is unacceptable.”30 The fraud became the stuff of legend; Agnon portrays the fraud with bitter humor in With Our Young and With Our Old: “Even though our candidate was not elected, his failure was no failure. . . . Our opponents used tactics the likes of which were unheard of in any land

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in the world. . . . Even the names of the dead were found written on the ballots for their candidate. When he heard this was happening, Itzik Mondspiel strolled over to the polling station and said, ‘I came to welcome back my father, peace be upon him, who seems to have come over from the afterlife!’”31 A similar story of unknown provenance tells that kohanim, Jews who could trace their lineage to the ancient priesthood and thus were required to maintain ritual purity—including no contact with corpses—were told they should avoid the polls because they were likely to encounter dead bodies trying to vote for Moysa.32 Humorous stories of ballot box stuffing aside, statements of Jewish voters in Birnbaum’s protest detail the depths of electoral fraudulence. From his active supporters and campaigners, to Jewish communal leaders, but especially to local Jewish merchants and residents of Buczacz, Tłumacz, and the other towns in the district, few were immune from a systematic assault on those suspected of voting against the incumbent. Although Birnbaum’s complaint documents primarily violations of Jewish voting rights, similar efforts were made to suppress the Ukrainian vote.33 The intimidation and fraud differed from place to place, and the methods employed ranged from simple harassment to economic and physical attacks. At many voting stations, voters were met by so-called honor guards, in reality vigilante gangs stationed at polling places to intimidate voters for Birnbaum by requiring them to show their registration cards and taking names upon entry.34 Witnesses attested to the fact that even Potocki traveled by rail throughout the district on election day, meeting with local officials to coordinate a strategy of voter suppression and issuing explicit instructions that Moysa was to win the election.35 This order was taken by many officials as carte blanche to use all tools at their disposal to either suppress Jewish and Ukrainian voter turnout or force potential voters for Birnbaum to change their votes, as is shown by the richly documented case of the mayor of Tłumacz, Dr. Anton Hovurka. Hovurka’s name is sprinkled liberally throughout the protest document; in a district full of electoral corruption, his personal fiefdom of Tłumacz was one of the worst. He received his marching orders directly from representatives of Viceroy Potocki and employed various means of fraud, including “honor guards.” He used the municipal bureaucracy to close Jewish businesses and condemn Jewish homes before and on election day and to audit and tax Jews in particular, singling

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out indigent Jewish peddlers and small merchants for tax assessment when they indicated that they had or intended to vote for Birnbaum. The case of one family bakery provides a shocking illustration. Early on the morning of 20 April, the local police were sent to the bakery of Gershon Silber and Jehiel Hönigsberg “and declared, under the authority of the mayor Dr. Anton Hovurka, that the bakery was to be closed and sealed.” The two immediately went to see the rabbi of the community, Isaac Ziff, who had apparently been informed that this and other closures were to take place and told them that they were required to report to the mayor’s office, in order to “pledge their votes to Stefan Moysa.”36 Not wanting to lose his sole means of support, the hapless Jehiel Hönigsberg went to see Hovurka “and implored him to reopen their bakery. ‘That will be fine,’ Hovurka replied, and then decreed, ‘When you go around and campaign and bring in at least one hundred votes for Stefan Moysa, I will open your bakery.’ ”37 Hönigsberg tried to comply with this demand, sought out twenty-seven voters who told him they would vote for Moysa, and brought the list to Hovurka, who promptly crossed off several names, commenting that “these are not patriots and won’t vote for us.” He must go and look harder, and once he had one hundred reliable names, the bakery would be opened. At this point, Hönigsberg and Silber appealed to a well-placed member of the Jewish community with some influence on Hovurka. They were told then that if by four o’clock they brought together all of the people they could find who would swear before Hovurka that they would vote for Moysa, the bakery would be opened. Hönigsberg and Silber brought eight others, including several of their male relatives, with registration cards in hand to the mayor’s office, where they committed their votes to Moysa. Thereafter, the bakery was opened; however, it was subject to repeated closure and harassment until after Moysa’s 17 May victory.38 Birnbaum’s protest, a typescript more than sixty pages in length, documents numerous similar abuses and asserts boldly (and obviously) that such an election could hardly be called free. It was signed by dozens of witnesses, many of whose stories and testimonies were included in the text.39 In spite of this, Jewish and Ukrainian nationalist candidates made headway in gaining office. The corruption of the electoral process across the Austro-Hungarian Empire was an issue beyond Birnbaum’s district and in few places was this more the case than in Galicia

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and Bukovina, the former regions of the Polish Empire. Even if the Poles, having established their primacy in the politics of the region long before 1907, by and large preserved their control over regional politics, the tactics they employed in at least some of the most sensitive districts indicate an awareness that the new nationalist groups, both Jewish and Ukrainian, represented a real threat to their hegemony. But win or lose, the election’s importance for charting Birnbaum’s career transcended the results at the ballot box, and understanding its role in his intellectual development is illuminating. The origins of his involvement in the elections were coterminus with, indeed were one expression of, the Jewish renaissance movement. Since the early 1890s, he had insisted that a strong nationalist Jewish presence on the national political scene, even in the absence of an autonomous Jewish state, was imperative. Yet much of what he had experienced as a Zionist had made him question its fundamental goals and tactics. He had been dissatisfied with the progress made in creating out of whole cloth a national identity along the lines advocated by cultural Zionists and been alienated and marginalized by Herzl and other advocates of the “political” approach. At the same time, he followed closely the gradual political awakening of eastern European Jews, particularly the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Galicia and Bukovina. Of course, the cultural Zionist pillars of Hebrew and settlement in Palestine, as well as support for Herzl, were by far the strongest expressions of nascent Jewish nationalism in these regions, but it was a fairly small minority who actively identified as Jewish nationalists. As a young Zionist, Birnbaum had assumed the majority of nonnationalist Jews to be politically naïve, at best raw material for Zionism in the future. In reality, as Birnbaum gradually discovered, this majority was and had been engaged in political activity and organization on many levels, as he reveals in his report on a strike by Yiddish-speaking, largely traditionalist Jewish textile workers in Kolomea.40 This activity differed from the Zionist model and provoked Birnbaum’s intense interest because it suggested a pragmatism and authenticity that he had not previously recognized. It worked on the local level for concrete goals (amelioration of working conditions for Jewish workers, protection against violent anti-Semitism, and the preservation of a Jewish identity and way of life). Even more noteworthy, this nascent political consciousness emerged from a mass of Jews who were for all intents and purposes culturally autonomous and unassimilated.

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Birnbaum’s awareness of these factors dawned precisely as he began to distance himself from what he referred to as a geographical “separationist” doctrine of Zionism. Increasingly, he saw local national minority politics, especially in the Austrian Empire, as an attractive means of accomplishing the more authentic and practical goals of Jewish nationalism. He had long favored the ballot box as a nationalist tool over lobbying among national leaders and Jewish philanthropists; we have seen that as early as 1896, Birnbaum had advocated the idea of running Jewish nationalist candidates for the Reichsrat as a useful strategy for Zionism. He was not alone; even Herzl had flirted with the idea of local political engagement in addition to lobbying for a Jewish commonwealth. By the first few years of the twentieth century, Birnbaum had come to embrace the idea of election as a primary strategy for himself personally and found others with similar attitudes. This coincided with an acute increase in his interest in the possibilities offered by eastern European Jewish culture as a platform from which to launch his cultural renaissance. By 1906, Birnbaum was convinced that the Jewish renaissance movement would be led from eastern Europe, not Berlin. As he developed his ideas in writing over the period immediately before the 1907 election, Birnbaum focused on building the foundation for a political form of the Jewish renaissance movement in Galicia. This entailed the strengthening of “exile culture,” advancing the idea of Jews as one among the numerous national minorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who deserved recognition of their unique language, culture, and administration of their own affairs through some form of officially recognized autonomy within the empire. At the same time, he sought a practical strategy for achieving concrete goals—such as the election of Jewish nationalist deputies to the Austrian parliament—that would foster this recognition. The idea of Jewish national autonomy in Austro-Hungary was a fairly recent addition to the marketplace of Jewish political theories at the turn of the twentieth century. It was also an optimistic bet on the future of Jewry in Europe when compared to Zionism and international socialism in that it imagined that an integral Jewish life had a future in east-central Europe. At the same time, it was similar to both in that it rejected a central ideal of liberalism: that all peoples, regardless of the history of conflict and oppression, can be integrated; or, in other words, that for Jews assimilation was synonymous with progress. Like

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Zionism, it was also a bold approach to stemming Jewish victimization, articulated in the strongest terms: Jews must take what is theirs by the right of their national being and demand their place among the nations in which they live. When the idea is put in these terms, it is no surprise that Birnbaum, who insisted for his entire career that liberalism was finished as far as Jews were concerned, would move easily from one form of its absolute rejection to another. He was not alone in this idealism; indeed, calls for Jewish autonomy had already been circulating when Birnbaum began publishing on the topic with theorists such as Simon Dubnow in the Russian Empire, another prominent Jewish luminary whose thought at times was remarkably parallel to Birnbaum’s and who published his own conception of autonomism in 1901.41 For his part, Birnbaum began writing on the topic of autonomy in several articles over the last half of 1905 into 1906. Publishing in several venues, including one Viennese German-language Ukrainian newspaper (Ruthenische Revue), two Yiddish papers (Der Yud and Yidishes Vokhenblat), as well as Ost und West, Birnbaum described at length his conception of Jewish autonomy. As he revisited the history of Jewish nationalist groups in “Jüdische Autonomie,” Birnbaum noted that although many groups dedicated to national rebirth had arisen, they had failed because of overextension. In devoting so much of their energy to create a positive Jewish consciousness, many of them had burnt out and lost their way because they lacked a single, accomplishable goal. Their coming and going, however, was natural, a part of the “necessary background activity” in building a nation. Now a “new, great hope” has arisen; “the idea known as national autonomy has brought forth in Austria the preoccupation of the spirit of the times.”42 At long last, Birnbaum reported, the spirit of national autonomy had made an impression on the Jewish street and was ready to take its place at the head of the national effort. “When national rights for all Austrian peoples are established, why not for the Jews as well, who need it most? This question, until now put forth only by individuals in isolated circles, is now suddenly heard from all sides. It has been thrown out by the Jewish side (Straucher) and by the Ruthenian side (Romanczuk). . . . A committee, constituted of members of different Jewish parties and groups, composed of personalities that have long distinguished themselves in service to the goals of the Jewish people, have set out with tentative steps.”43

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One could not deny, Birnbaum conceded, that the idea of autonomy would rankle the sensibilities of many western Jews, as had its cousin Zionism. To them, especially the assimilationists, it would be just another affront to liberalism and unity and provide more ammunition to anti-Semites. This is another variation on an old theme in Birnbaum’s thought: western Jews, deluded by assimilation, had lost their ability to recognize that the peril of their situation was equal to, if not worse than, that of eastern Jews. “In the west, national autonomy finds its hardest task. A Jewish community [unified with] a national language is lacking here. . . . [And] not only is language lacking, so is the organizational power that is accomplished through cultural enhancement and creativity.” Lacking these crucial cultural and organization elements, the embrace of national autonomy based on a foundation of common national attributes would prove difficult for even enthusiastic western Jews who had left them behind more than a generation earlier. “If it is to succeed now, a renewed campaign for the soul [Volksseele] of the western Jew must arise to [create] or at least replace through socialization” their missing national identity.44 Although bearing some resemblance to strains in Zionist thought—the replacement of one core identity with a new, nationalist one—it differed in that it held out more hope for those he had dismissed as hopeless a few years earlier: western, assimilated Jews. No longer did he dismiss the possibility of a Jewish Volksseele being cultivated in the west. It is also notable that he does not require the specific cultural accoutrements of eastern Jewry for this to occur. Birnbaum’s interest in the Yiddish language has often been taken to mean that he was committed to its acquisition as a prerequisite for national existence, as with Hebrew in his Zionist days, but this is not the case. It was a useful tool, certainly, and it made the effort for autonomy much easier and comprehensible to eastern Jewry, but the lack of Yiddish did not preclude other means of national cohesion. Indeed, as Birnbaum indicated later in the essay, autonomy itself could be crafted to suit this function. Once western Jewry recognized itself as an integral part of the nation, with its own interests best represented by others of the nation, the natural energy and creativity of the Jewish Volk would follow. Obviously, the challenge was different when it came to eastern Jewry. Even though they lacked the political awareness to push in the short term for autonomy in Birnbaum’s estimation, eastern Jewry retained

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many of the institutional structures of what was once a broad and comprehensive communal autonomy and, even more important, shared a culture and language that separated them from other groups. “For the eastern [Jews] Jewish autonomy serves the same creative function. For that reason it will require much less mediation than in the west. And besides, there it comes with a much wider cultural basis through language.” Because of its depth of proto-national culture as signified by the Yiddish language, the conditions for autonomy were already present in the east. The task of autonomist organizers was merely to organize and tap this folk energy and raise political awareness that with autonomy, eastern Jewry would realize “an assured, vibrant future, and they will live for its ever richer, brighter, and more splendid development.” This, in turn, would release an untapped reservoir of Jewish national creativity and power that would be brought into play, bringing about “a present, in which eight million Jews take part,” not only in the Austro-Hungarian Empire but beyond, including “all of Russian Jewry, for whom the question of autonomy will indeed be thrown open before long.” In his mind, Birnbaum and his fellow autonomists had finally realized the means for a true Jewish national renaissance, one that transcended the borders dividing the Jewish people and brought with it an authentic, actionable solution to the Jewish question. “All in all, with the idea of national autonomy a new, happier star for the Jewish people has appeared.”45 Birnbaum’s enthusiasm for national autonomy is both understandable and confounding. Being built around the concept of a nationalist Jewish identity, it harmonized with his earlier positions. But after decades of pessimism about the future of Jews in a non-Jewish state and an unshakable conviction that Jews without an autonomous national territory would never receive the respect of other nations, Birnbaum’s sudden belief in extraterritorial nationalism is surprising. Coming at a time that included a steadily deteriorating situation for Jews in the neighboring Russian Empire, including the Kishniev pogroms in 1903 and even more widespread anti-Jewish violence after 1905, the turn is even more perplexing. Strategically, Birnbaum’s approach was uncharacteristically moderate. In spite of his reputation as a firebrand, at exactly the time many Jews were despairing of the possibility of ever having a political voice in the Russian Empire (as the collapse of democratic reform in 1905 and with it the hope of real political enfranchisement of Jews in the Russian Empire

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seemed to indicate), potentially increasing receptivity to more radical visions for the resolution of the Jewish situation, Birnbaum urged turning to the ballot in the Austrian Empire. Instead of advocating more definitive separation from existing political structures, he called upon Jews to actively engage with them. And arguably, in the tradition of older forms of Jewish political activity, Birnbaum in a sense sought to align Jewish nationalists with an ascendant center of power—a potential but still nonexistent “vertical alliance” with Ukrainians. Birnbaum was thus reacting against two dynamics. Whatever its advantages in the political landscape of 1907, the Jewish National Party coalition and its Ukrainian strategy undoubtedly courted risks for a precariously situated minority.46 Dangerous or not, this new approach that rejected the poles of revolution and accommodation with entrenched power offered its own compelling logic. First, it was an attractive counter to the dominant model of Jewish political engagement in Galicia, which to Birnbaum resembled nothing so much as the old model of shtadlanut, Jews insinuating themselves into political positions through appealing to Polish or German hegemony. Additionally, the historical experience of the ­Ruthenians resonated, Birnbaum felt, with that of the Jews, both of whom had experienced the bitterness of being a fellow subaltern group in Galicia. “Of all European people,” Birnbaum wrote in the Ruthe­nische Revue in 1905, “the Ukrainians alone have suffered the same degree of world-historical deceit [as the Jews].”47 Culturally repressed, politically dispossessed, the Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovina had suffered from the same powerlessness as the Jews. Even more to the point, they faced the same threat of cultural extinction through assimilation, like the Jews facing their destruction as a culturally viable people in the face of Polish hegemony.48Also, in an argument whose dark undertones Birnbaum did not explicitly acknowledge, Ukrainian nationalists opposed efforts of assimilation into their group, which he charitably attributed to their sensitivity as victims themselves of a constant onslaught of Polanization. “The Ruthenians, as well as perhaps the majority of the Jews who live in their midst, do not desire assimilation,” he explained. “In a recent meeting of the Ukrainian Democratic Party, Jews were described, along with Russians and the Poles, as one of those ‘nationalities living upon Ukrainian territory’ who desire the same rights to satisfy their ‘national, cultural, political and economic requirements.’”49 In theory, the

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Ukrainians offered an ideal orientation toward Jewish society from a nationalist perspective. They neither expected nor wanted Jewish assimilation into Ukrainian culture; rather, at least according to the sources Birnbaum selected, they respected the need of national minorities to live in their own culture in peace with other autonomous groups. The unaddressed and ominous implication of whether these national minorities should, in the Ukrainian mind, be allowed to live in “Ukrainian territory” did not figure into Birnbaum’s writing. Ideas of harmonious mutual autonomy aside, it was straightforward realpolitik that was the primary basis for Birnbaum and others in the Jewish nationalist coalition to argue for an accord with the Ukrainians. “Of all the words that have become popular nowadays, the term ‘realpolitik’ stands at the top,” Birnbaum observed in an article entitled “Jews and Ruthenians.”50 Although political pragmatism was often derided as an impulse devoid of principle, to Birnbaum idealism in politics had begun to lose its popular appeal, and he was not alone. While some who clung to idealism in politics would not wish to “sacrifice the certainty of their ideals . . . for a day’s reward,” others had realized that “there surely lies a healthy kernel [in] an aversion to eternal . . . methods.”51 It was time, Birnbaum believed, for the Jewish nation to seize this moment. Despite their “extraordinary situation” as an “absolute minority,” inserting realpolitik into Galician politics offered them a unique opportunity to exploit their potential to affect the balance of power across the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The task of Jewish nationalists was to determine which group offered the best odds for Jewish advancement. Birnbaum presented reasons for why that choice should be the Ukrainians in Galicia and Bukovina. “The Jews should find accord with the Ruthenians. And, thanks to the efforts of [Reichsrat] deputy Dr. Straucher, the beginnings of such an accord exist; but it is merely a beginning against which Jewish circles have raised their voices time and again. But to what end? . . . We must not give up our favorable position of being courted from all sides.”52 In the end, even the common cultural causes or any idea of a shared historical experience of the Jews and Ukrainians was irrelevant. “As practitioners of realpolitik, we have no need whatsoever to answer the question of whether the Ruthenians come out to greet us from their homes with friendly or unfriendly feelings.” What was important was only that the two groups

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be able to endure each other enough to recognize their common goals. “It is certainly well known that nations that cannot endure each other, that indeed appear to be incompatibly opposite in their natures, have endured each other for many decades.” So it was with the Jews and the Ukrainians, a “relatively young, rugged people” whose anti-Jewish sentiments, after all, were more likely just an expression of their youthful nationalism. One need not like or idealize one’s allies, just tolerate them enough to use them for one’s own interests. National autonomy and a realpolitik alliance with Ukrainians were the two pillars that Birnbaum cited explicitly as he joined the Jewish national coalition in 1907. Taken together, they were his most concrete attempt to put the agenda of the Jewish renaissance movement into a tangible form. Both were the evolution of two themes that had characterized Birnbaum’s thought even before his departure from Zionism: the need to organize and strengthen the idea of the Jews as a nation in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world and to use political means to achieve real progress for Jewish autonomy. Although in practical terms it was a failure for him, it is remarkable how close Birnbaum came to succeeding in this endeavor. While it is impossible to say whether a cleaner election would have resulted in Birnbaum’s election to office, there is reason to believe that he had made some headway in furthering his aims as a participant in the Jewish national alliance, if only in the short term. Interestingly, Birnbaum did not follow this election with further action in electoral politics. After the election, the Jewish National Party dissolved, its raison d’être lapsed.53 For Birnbaum himself, the election was the culmination of his belief in the viability of broad-tent Jewish nationalism as an alternative to Herzlian Zionism. In running for office, Birnbaum did not identify himself as a Zionist; however, he shared enough common ground to caucus with others who did. The members of the nationalist coalition had run together, had pursued a common strategy, and there is concrete evidence that their losses were less a function of their alliance than forces beyond their control. Even if his theory had been vindicated, the outcome was failure to be elected to the Reichs­rat. Although it is interesting to speculate what his career trajectory might have been had he won the election, with his loss, perhaps because of the very completeness of it, Birnbaum closed a chapter on his life’s expectations. While he never abandoned the conviction that he

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personally represented, on some fundamental level, a prophetic voice in Jewish politics, he seemed now to accept that his role would never resolve itself in the sphere of public office or institutional politics. Even more significantly, his long and tumultuous affair with Zionism, indeed, a love that emerged at the very moment of his own precocious political birth, ended completely. Unlike his previous break with Herzl’s party in 1899, he would never again look to its auspices for allies. The reason Birnbaum did not do this is to be found in a sudden turn to another, more intangible intellectual pursuit: his growing preoccupation with identifying, finally, the essence of authentic Jewish identity. After his defeat at the polls, Birnbaum disengaged from his long-held belief in mass political organization as the ideal medium for the expression of his ideas. In its place, he began to seek a deep cultural expression to give voice to his aspirations for European Jewry through a sustained reconsideration of the unique nature of Jewish peoplehood. By no means the first time he had done this—certainly, cultural concerns were a vital thread running through all his work—it now assumed a much greater role in his activity. It was, indeed, nearly a complete inversion of his earlier approach, turning his gaze from outward to inward. Birnbaum now placed at the center of his attention an interior discussion that had preoccupied him from his teenage years when, as a young Gymnasium student, he first began to ask the question of why, on a fundamental level, he could not identify with his schoolmates and their aspirations to normal, bourgeois Viennese society.

The First Yiddish Language Conference, 1908 An interest in Yiddish and folk culture of eastern European Jewry had been central to Birnbaum’s work since at least 1900 and had lurked in the periphery of his thoughts even before that. But it was the encounter with Galician Jewry in the lead-up to the 1907 election that ignited an intense conviction that it was the language and identity of these Jews, his potential constituents, that offered a model for organic, integrated identity. The encounter left Birnbaum with a new perspective that did more than confirm his intuition about the importance of eastern Jewry; it led him to rethink his own encounter with this world.

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Rather than be a mediator or interpreter of the world for his western colleagues, Birnbaum increasingly identified directly with them: within a year of the election, he had changed his residence from Vienna to Czernowitz, Bukovina; his language of epistolary communication with his most intimate associates (especially his son, Solomon), and even of publication, to Yiddish. He had become a conscious member of this community. The lead-up to the First Yiddish Language Conference in 1908 and the event itself chart the extent of his recalibration from external agitation to internal contemplation. The idea for a conference to raise awareness of Yiddish as a Jewish national language was hatched, planned, and executed between the months of January and September 1908. Given the personalities involved and the distances that its participants and planners traversed to assemble under its auspices, this was a remarkably short period of time. It was a truly intercontinental conference, involving participants from both North America and Europe; at the time, moving from the northeastern United States to the eastern Austro-Hungarian Empire required several days of ocean voyage and rail travel. For those participants traveling back and forth across international borders within Europe—especially participants traveling from the Russian Empire—the trip was also not easy. Nevertheless, at the end of August and early September 1908, delegates, several journalists for Jewish newspapers in multiple languages, interested observers, and members of different Jewish political and cultural societies—most prominently the folkist Jüdische Kultur group, responsible for much of the logistical support for the conference—converged on the city of Czernowitz, the capital of Austro-Hungarian Bukovina, for a week to convene the first and only Yiddish Language Conference. The origin of the conference was itself a voyage. Not long after his Reichsrat election defeat, Birnbaum decided to expand his lecture circuit and to tap the other significant population of Yiddish-speaking Jews: the huge and growing community of Jewish immigrants in New York. The purpose of his tour was to raise awareness of Jewish autonomist nationalism among American Jews, with the hope of garnering financial and moral support for his efforts in Austria-Hungary. Birnbaum was not alone in seeking to widen his view to include the burgeoning and vibrant Jewish world in North America. As historians of Jewish politics Jonathan Frankel and, more recently, Tony Michels have shown,

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the goal of gaining the attention of hundreds of thousands of Yiddishspeaking Jews, concentrated in an almost unimaginably compact area— the few square miles of the Lower East Side of Manhattan—had been a strategy for Jewish politicians on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1890s.54 In the growing marketplace of Jewish political ideology, and especially for advocates of an extraterritorial Jewish national identity, a massive Jewish community with all its national attributes intact (including language, strong collective cultural identity, and increasing political consciousness) was low-hanging fruit. That this community was located in a country known for its freedom of expression and assembly (unlike the Russian Empire, and to an extent the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires as well), which, at least in the minds of both immigrants and those who remained behind, was a land of wealth, opportunity, and thus potential funding, made the possibility of success well worth the strenuous transatlantic voyage for figures like Birnbaum. Birnbaum was welcomed to New York in the first days of 1908 with some fanfare.55 Postcards he sent to his family as he traveled around the northeastern United States show him alternately as an emissary, an observer of local culture and customs (to the intense excitement of the young Solomon Birnbaum and his brothers), and tourist. One article in the Vienna Jüdische Zeitung even reported with precise detail that Birnbaum was received by President Theodore Roosevelt in the Oval Office, a meeting arranged by New York congressman Henry Goldfogle.56 It was in his role as a public speaker, though, that he garnered crucial attention in the American Jewish press. A speech given by Birnbaum at Webster Hall, then (as now) a prominent entertainment complex in east Greenwich Village, received significant attention. Arranged and sponsored by the Galician-Bukovinian Jewish Verband, the lecture was “a most inspiring spectacle,” according to the American Hebrew: “Seldom has a Jewish notable been honored so enthusiastically by the various factions of New York Jewry. The large hall was crowded to its utmost capacity and on the platform sat most of the prominent Jewish journalists and playwrights, representatives of the Zionists, the Socialists, the Socialist nationalists, people who welcomed the guest as individuals and people who spoke in the name of all the Jews in America.”57 The list of figures who appeared on the dais for this event with Birnbaum included a remarkable cross-section of Jewish political leadership and

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i­ndicates the vibrancy and variety of Jewish politics in the early twentieth century, as well as the unity that the often contentious individuals could show on occasion. Included was Bernard Semel, president of the Galician-Bukovinian Verband, who formally greeted Birnbaum and acted as the master of the evening’s ceremonies (“let the anti-Semites be proud of their Luegers; we shall be proud of our Birnbaum and we hope to be victorious in the end”). Prominent members of the Lower East Side’s roiling Jewish political scene were present, including union leader Joseph Barondess and Yiddish nationalist Chaim Zhitlovsky. The Yiddish artistic community was also well represented by dramatists, including Jacob Pfeffer, David Pinski, and, remarkably, Jacob Gordin, a giant of the Yiddish stage. Even the American Zionists, then just one, relatively minor, faction among many Jewish political groups, was represented by one of its most prominent figures, Judah Magnes, who “in a powerful speech, greeted Dr. Birnbaum in the name of American Zion­ists. He spoke of Birnbaum’s work for the first Zionist congress and said that although Dr. Birnbaum was no longer actively connected with the Zionist movement, he felt that he was still a Zionist.”58 When Birnbaum rose to applause that lasted “five minutes,” he spoke at some length on the potential of Jewish national identity in America. He had been sent, he felt, as a “mshuloch” (messenger) to determine “whether a limb of the Jewish body is decaying there or whether this limb is preparing itself to strengthen and infuse new power into the body and soul of the Jewish nation. . . . It is his duty, in delivering his message, to say that the hopes of the Jewish people for the development of the Jewish masses rest upon the Jews of America.”59 As he spoke, according to the report, Birnbaum emphasized themes long familiar to his readers and followers. The Jews of the west, victims of assimilation, had lost the link to their national being. The Jews of the east, having “familiarized themselves with the nationalist ideas of the new times . . . would no longer give up their national culture for th[e] freedom [of emancipation]. On the contrary, the national spiritual wealth of eastern Judaism is growing from day to day . . . and one of [its] most precious treasures is the ‘Yiddish’ language.”60 This last point Birnbaum dwelt upon extensively. Yiddish was, he asserted again, nothing less than the repository for the future of a vibrant Jewish nation in Europe and (although he does not seem to have emphasized this explicitly) in America as well.

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Unfortunately, it was on the point of Yiddish that Birnbaum discovered the gap between his expectations and his audience’s opinions. In Birnbaum’s own recollection, published twenty years later, he noted laconically that “in the lectures that I had held in America . . . the main point I had underscored was the importance and necessity of the Yiddish language as a foundation of the Jewish people. American Jews were then scarcely interested and felt that there was no need to undertake such a program, and this was soon made clear to me.”61 Birnbaum found that American Jews did not meet the message of national culture with great enthusiasm, especially one based upon Yiddish. In fact, the very attributes that made them seem attractive as a potential audience—the freedom and opportunity afforded them by a liberal state with comparatively little anti-Semitism—also made them less receptive to nationalism. Birnbaum also lacked a strong institutional base from which to launch his initiatives and had not articulated a clear sense of what he wished to accomplish with American Jewish support. And at least some of the American Jewish press confirmed his sense that his mission had misfired.62 In the same issue of the American Hebrew in which the description of his Webster Hall speech appeared, an editorial criticized his focus on Yiddish. “Dr. Birnbaum has an exceptional knowledge of the Jewish situation throughout the world and any statement of his is bound to be based on a very wide acquaintance of the aspirations and needs of the Jews in those parts of Europe where they are obliged to lead the Jewish life,” the author wrote. “Yet it is difficult to understand how he could put himself on record as regarding Yiddish as the language which the Jews should nowadays cultivate. . . . If he implies that Yiddish-speaking Jews should encourage their children to continue using the language or that other Jews should adopt in any way Yiddish as a language and as a means of expressing their Jewish aspirations, we regard his advice as in every way ill-advised.”63 While the opinion of the editorialist published in an English-­ language paper should be weighed carefully, it is nonetheless revealing. It illuminates an attitude toward Yiddish that at least held sway over upwardly mobile, integration-minded segments of the community, where Yiddish was seen as an impediment to Jewish integration into a culture that offered nearly limitless possibility for inclusion and material success for perhaps the first time in modern Jewish history. Indeed, given the

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depth of pull that this impulse had across American Jewry, the American Hebrew editorial is generous—at least it did not deny that Yiddish is a legitimate language, just that it was a poor hook upon which to hang Jewish culture-building projects. More personally, the passage and the paper in which it appeared highlight Birnbaum’s strategic miscalculation—a noteworthy moment in his career as a Yiddishist. The editorial appeared in an English-language publication—this in a context where the overwhelming majority of the Jews that Birnbaum hoped to reach would speak Yiddish as their first, and in many cases only, language. Remarkably, despite the array of personalities who turned out to hear Birnbaum, the Yiddish press coverage was conspicuously sparse. Birnbaum himself was circumspect when he speculated on the reason his remarks failed to reach his target audience. “[Many of] the papers made fun of me,” he recalls, “and the truth is I gave them an opportunity to do so, having delivered my lectures in German.”64 Although no articles “made fun of ” or more than noted his use of German, the fact that he did speak German undermined his point and may have resulted in its being ignored (at the same time, it is worth noting that the American Hebrew report makes specific note of his “picturesque Yiddish”).65 In fact, this very issue comes up in a remarkable source that makes its debut appearance during this trip—letters between Nathan Birnbaum and his sixteen-year-old son, Solomon. In a letter dated 14 January 1908, Solomon notes the crux of Birnbaum’s dilemma in continuing to use German as his rhetorical language. “That you must speak in German is certainly better for your party,” he writes in the Yiddish that, as a budding linguist, he was just learning to use fluently himself, “but for your principles?”66 With this simple question, Solomon may have struck a chord with Birnbaum. For the rest of this period until Solomon changed back to German during his deployment in the First World War, the correspondence between Nathan and his son is written exclusively in Yiddish. This transition in intimate communication between father and son seems likewise to be a turning point in Birnbaum’s public presentation. Starting after his major lecture in New York, Birnbaum turned increasingly to use of Yiddish as his language of self-presentation and discourse. Although his attempts to raise support (and funding) for his cause were, according to his own report, a failure, the trip to New York led to

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Nathan Birnbaum and Chaim Zhitlovsky, Czernowitz 1908 (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

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Birnbaum’s propitious meeting with a circle of Jewish nationalists, including David Pinski and Chaim Zhitlovsky. The latter may have been particularly receptive to Birnbaum’s message; Zhitlovsky had been engaged for some time in New York on a parallel campaign for Jewish national and cultural assertiveness and renewal based on a foundation of Yiddish. Arriving in 1904, Zhitlovsky had gone from being a relative unknown to a figure of note on the Lower East Side political stage.67 As Michels details, Zhitlovsky’s vision for a Jewish socialist future was founded upon a belief in the strong potential for a transference of a European model of Jewish autonomy to the Yiddish-speaking Jews of New York.68 Like Birnbaum, he believed in the permanence of nationalism as a fundamental human category but that recognition of this, and building upon it, could lead to progressive development if channeled appropriately, especially through socialism, and that the core of Jewish identity was in fact a national one.69 Similarly resonant with Birnbaum’s view was Zhitlovsky’s sense of the ideal vehicle for actualizing Jewish national identity: the Yiddish language. “What distinguished Zhitlovsky from his contemporaries in, say, the Zionist movement,” Michels observes, “was his insistence on the Yiddish language as the instrument of Jewish national revival.”70 Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky thus shared much in common, from their opinions regarding Jewish nationalism and the importance of the Yiddish language to their intellectual perambulations, even their temperaments.71 They also shared a keen interest in socialism as a powerful model for the future of world politics, although by the time they met, this had diminished as a major factor in Birnbaum’s political ideology. By the end of Birnbaum’s New York journey, Birnbaum, Zhitlovsky, and a handful of others had hatched the idea for a large-scale event that they hoped would challenge the dominance of Hebrew language–­ centered Zionism, the First Yiddish Language Conference. According to the Russian-Jewish émigré playwright David Pinski, the notion of the conference came about informally, almost spontaneously, in his own living room: “The idea for the Czernowitz conference and the first call for it came from my house. Once, on a Sunday in the spring of 1908, a meeting was held in my house with Dr. Birnbaum, Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky, the publisher [Alexander] Evalenko, and me.”72

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Soon after this meeting, a circular was distributed in Yiddish newspapers throughout Europe and the United States announcing the convening of a “conference for the sake of the Yiddish language” in Czernowitz. The date was not specified, but the conference was scheduled for the late summer of 1908. The authors of the circular noted enthusiastically the great leaps in Yiddish literature and cultural consciousness in recent years, the mass dissemination of Yiddish newspapers and journals, the profusion of Yiddish popular and high culture, and the explosion of interest in the Yiddish theater. Yiddish, it seemed, was on the cusp of realizing its place as a mature national language. Yet, even as it continued to grow, “Yiddish still lacked one thing that other languages possess. They are not allowed to run around wild in the world of languages and attract to themselves all kinds of illnesses and deformities and perhaps even death. They are cherished like a dear child.” But Yiddish, the workaday vernacular of the Jews, was not seen in the same way. “Thousands of Yiddish words are borrowed from German, Russian, and English totally unnecessarily. The living laws of language that are born and develop with it in the mouths of the nation are not recorded. . . . Everyone writes it in their own way, and a Yiddish orthography, which should be standard for everyone and to which all should be required to adhere, has yet to be established.”73 Lack of a standard orthography, rules of usage, and vocabulary stood in the way of Yiddish being recognized and respected as a world language and contributed to the low status of the language even among its own speakers. In order to overcome this, to instill into Yiddish the nobility and pride that it deserved, “one must create a leash or fence, a way of cherishing our dear mother tongue, so that it does not run so free as it has in the past, as a wild thing, that it does not become torn and tattered.”74 All who were concerned with the future of Yiddish, all who “occupy themselves with it, be they writers or poets, be they its speakers, any who have a pure love for it” had a duty “[to] speak together and find the means to ensure that it be used in an authoritative way, and all submit to it.”75 To facilitate this, the proposed conference on the Yiddish language would take up linguistic issues, including standardizing Yiddish orthography, grammar, and lexicography; and cultural issues, including Jewish youth and Yiddish, the Yiddish press, theater and actors, and support of Yiddish writers. Most important, the conference sought to advance recognition of Yiddish as a modern, functional language.

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In addition to a circular distributed to the Jewish press, the authors sent advance copies to a number of important Yiddish cultural figures, requesting that they publicly sign on to the conference to show wide support for its efforts. One of the more amusing responses was from celebrated Yiddish writer Y. L. Peretz, who responded both equivocally and condescendingly. The conference intrigued him, but the pamphlet put him off. “Of course I am interested in the conference, but as for being signatory to your announcement, there is no way that I could.” Why? Unlike Americans, he wrote, European Jews do not believe in lengthy announcements. Further, it was so poorly written (in his opinion), so full of detestable American-Yiddish malapropisms and idioms, in short, so grob (boorish), that he would never put his name on it, glibly retorting, “At least the announcement should have some style.” He would attend but not sign.76 In the end, there were five signatories to the announcement—Birnbaum, Jacob Gordin, Evalenko, Pinski, and Zhitlovsky. Of these, the only one who attended the conference other than Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky, the two European signers, and the future president and vice president of the conference, was David Pinski. The conference was held in the late summer of 1908 in Czernowitz, near the border of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires (present-day Chernivtsi in Ukraine). While both practical and symbolic considerations led to the selection of Czernowitz, the choice would turn out to be a mixed blessing for the organizers. Located in what is usually considered an epicenter of Yiddish language, the traditional Jewish heartland of Bukovina might superficially seem to have been an ideal location for a conference that sought to affirm the value of these oftderided attributes. That it was located in the relatively liberal Austrian Empire was an advantage; that Czernowitz was a short journey from the Russian Empire and the rest of the center of Ukrainian Jewry of the east was also a bonus. Its location may well have made it more accessible to would-be attendees from the authoritarian neighbor to the east. But the explicit reason given for choosing Czernowitz can be found in the remarks made by Y. L. Peretz in his keynote address. Czerno­witz, he asserted, was a city that embodied the spirit of the conference. “The best place for our assembly is Bukovina, and particularly its capital, Czerno­witz,” Peretz mused. “Here, where different nationalities live together in their different languages, it is easier for our word to go forth.

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We stroll in the evening streets, and from different windows the tones of different languages waft out, creating a true folk music. We wish to have our own window, our own unique motif in this folk symphony.”77 If the aim of the conference was to highlight Yiddish as a national language as its speakers entered the family of nations, Czernowitz seemed ideal: a city of many languages and nationalities living in relative harmony and stability, each group respecting (in theory) the others’ claims to national rights. The presence in the city of several “national houses,” political and cultural centers that served to promote the culture and interests of their constituencies, including a Ukrainian, German, Romanian, and Jewish house, would seem to support Peretz’s contention. Its very skyline seemed to enhance this perspective; it was a city famous for its numerous churches, all dedicated to different faiths, including multiple Russian Orthodox churches, an Armenian bishopric, a Catholic parish, a Uniate cathedral, and (as the Baedecker’s guide of the period emphasizes) a Jewish synagogue designed by the fashionable Polish architect Julian Zacharie­wicz that was among the architectural attractions of the city.78 Unfortunately, Peretz’s idyllic description of Czernowitz as a happy home for the conference missed the mark considerably. Perhaps correct about the province of Bukovina in general as an ideal location for the foundation of a modern Yiddish cultural movement (although as the heartland of numerous stringently traditional Jewish communities, even this might be an overstatement—the region contained some of the largest Hasidic communities in eastern Europe, including the Vizhnitz and, just a short distance north of Czernowitz, Sadagura dynasties), the city of Czernowitz would prove to be something else altogether.79 The organizers of the conference, Birnbaum among them, were correct that the city was a major center of Jewish national dynamism. Among the many districts with a significant Jewish population throughout eastern and central Europe, Czernowitz must be considered one of the great success stories from a Jewish cultural and nationalist perspective. Its population, a plurality of which was Jewish (some 32 percent according to the 1910 Austrian census), had built a unified Jewish national movement and mobilized it to create a strong base of power in local politics.80 Between the 1890s and the First World War, Jews were deeply enmeshed in municipal politics. Led by Benno Straucher (one of the four winners in the 1907 Reichsrat election), a colorful and charismatic Jewish politician, Jewish

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participation in local government from the level of municipal council members to the mayor, all the way up to the representative of the region (Benno Straucher himself) in the Reichsrat, Jews profoundly shaped the political geography. Indeed, in Czernowitz the notion that Jews were denied their “motif ” in the local “folk symphony” was almost laughable; the Jews themselves were instrumental in defining local politics and culture. The mistake of the conference organizers was thus not one of finding a place with a strong foundation of Jews acting within modern political constructs from which to “send forth their message.” Rather, it was in not recognizing what kind of Jewish national culture dominated Czerno­witz. As they would find, it was one ambivalent, if not decidedly hostile, to the principal aims of the Yiddish conference. The Jewish community of Czernowitz, although diverse, was dominated by a Germanspeaking, bourgeois elite. For the most part, they had imbibed deeply the imperial ideal of Austrian-German culture, allegiance to Vienna, and a strong Viennese cultural aesthetic. At the same time, as a single ethnic group among four others with significant numbers in the city (including Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, and Germans), the Jews of Czernowitz cultivated a strong national identity.81 Statistics from the period emphasize the unique nature of the Jewish community. When polled according to religion, the population of the city was revealed to contain 23.7 percent “Greek Orthodox” (that is, Ukrainian), 27 percent Roman Catholic (Poles and possibly Germans), and 32.8 percent “Israelites,” along with a handful of other confessions (Protestants, Armenians, Lippowans).82 The statistic of language preference is also revealing. In the same period, 17.9 percent of the citizens of Czernowitz indicated “Ruthenian” as their language of daily use (15,254), 17.4 percent indicated Polish (14,893), and a massive 45 percent indicated German (41,360).83 When these statistics are compared and anecdotal evidence added, it is clear that most Jews in Czernowitz who were polled indicated German as their primary language. Even if, as has often been pointed out, one cannot rely entirely upon these statistics in determining the daily language of the Jews of Czernowitz because Yiddish was not a choice on the census, one may nevertheless cautiously assert that a significant number of the “Israelites” spoke German as their daily language. This contention is certainly supported by the public culture of Czer­nowitz. Baedecker’s guide, as noted earlier, made special note of

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the ­Czernowitz synagogue, at the time an ornate (and modern) neo-­ Moorish structure designed by noted Polish architect Julian Zachariewicz.84 This synagogue, led for forty years of growth by Rabbi Doctor Lazar Igel, succeeded by his assistant rabbi Josef Rosenfeld, observed a modestly reformed practice analogous to the minhag Wien and was the crown jewel of the Jewish community of the city—but not the only one. Completed in 1878, its construction marked the beginning of a period of robust building and development in the city in which Jews played a major role in designing the public face of Czernowitz. Several major public buildings were erected during this period, including the Town Hall and an ornate theater square, replete with the magnificent Schiller­ theater (now the Chernivtsi Music and Drama Theater) designed by the elite Viennese architectural firm Fellner and Helmer.85 Other structures featured the work of such architects as Otto Wagner, one of the definitive architects of fin de siècle Vienna, which adorn the modern squares of the city to this day, their facades decorated with Jugendstil murals and neoclassical friezes. All of these structures, built during the turn of the century, were projects undertaken while Jews dominated the municipal council of the city. Indeed, one need look only at the street names of prewar Czernowitz to detect the influence of Jews on the urban landscape as well as to gain a sense of their cultural identification. Streets named after prominent Jews include Heinegasse, Theodor Herzlplatz, and Franzosgasse (after popular Jewish writer Karl Emil Franzos); those named after Jewish landmarks include Bethausgasse, Synagogengasse, Templegasse, and Friedhoffgasse; and several named after local Jewish notables include Dr. Benno Strauchergasse.86 The Czernowitz community had Benno Straucher to thank for what became the other major structure in the city that was dedicated explicitly to the Jewish community, the Jewish National House. Completed in August 1908, the building was an ornate beaux arts structure, immediately to the right of the Schillertheater, a statement of the pride and urbanity of the Czernowitz Jewish community. Unlike the significantly more staid and functional Ukrainian National House or the kitschy neogothic German National House, the Jewish structure was designed to reflect a refined, modern imperial sensibility, with four massive atlantes, giant nude male statues manneristically posed as if supporting the weight of the four-story structure.87 The building was something of a

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personal statement by Straucher of his larger-than-life stature as a politician and community leader of Czernowitz Jews, symbolized by the large bust of him that dominated the building’s foyer until the Soviet period. Although no sustained biography of Straucher has been written, the shadow he cast as a master of the city’s politics can be sensed quite clearly in the anecdotal history of the city. According to Hermann Sternberg, Straucher was “a master at controlling the masses” with an “unparalleled desire for power.” His importance, Sternberg asserts, lay in accomplishing the “recognition of the Jewish people as a political force in a period that the Jews of the land were followers of a powerless German liberalism.”88 Although he identified himself as a Zionist, it was a very pragmatic posture, and he used the mass appeal of Zionism as one of many levers he manipulated to maintain an extraordinary public career. In Sternberg’s analysis, “Dr. Straucher recognized that the nationalist content of Zionism would take the wind out of his sails and he therefore fought the Zionist organization in which he saw a competitor that would endanger his power. Occasionally in a gathering he would sanctimoniously take a piece of paper out of his vest to prove that he had ‘purchased a shekel,’ that is, he was a Zionist, but this fooled no one.”89 Whether Sternberg’s sour assessment of Straucher’s Zionism is on the mark or not, his description portrays a master politician, committed to the cause of collective Jewish political action.90 That he was a representative figure of the community is testified to by the unwavering public support he received that kept him in office steadily from 1897 through the First World War and into the interwar period, almost to his death in 1940. Despite his affiliation with Birnbaum as a fellow traveler on the Jewish National Party ticket just a year earlier, he was by no means well disposed toward the Yiddish Language Conference.

The Conference Convenes The conference in its time was generally considered a failure, although this opinion has received a fair amount of revision by scholars of modern Yiddish literature and culture over the twentieth century.91 It was so rife with division that it could not accomplish even the most modest goals it set out for itself. Jewish public opinion greeted the announce-

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ment of the conference with rejoicing in some circles, indifference in others, and ridicule in still others. But in the end the conference intended to initiate another worldwide Jewish national movement that would rival Zionism collapsed under its own expectations and had very little practical impact after its delegates went home. As a result of the enigmatic legacy of the conference, there has been little historical analysis of how it was initially conceived by its founders and key players, particularly Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky. Because it failed to leave a significant impact on the larger European Jewish cultural and political scene, it has become an event noted only by enthusiasts of Yiddish culture with little attention to the underlying motives behind its organization. This is not entirely the fault of those who have investigated the conference and written about it; indeed, the evidence that the conference should be read primarily as a cultural event, divorced from the political reality of its setting and the political orientation and beliefs of its organizers and participants, is implicit even in the announcement that called it into being as well as the collective memory of those who participated and for whom the conference was most important. Yet a closer reading of the words of these same participants reveals that the conference was far more than an expression of unity and an assertion of the cultural value of the Yiddish language. In the eyes of its two principal organizers it was a political event, tied closely to the events of the time and the beliefs of its participants. Although conceived in New York, the conference was from beginning to end a European affair. The issues it tackled, such as the cultural prestige of the Yiddish language, were of little interest to American Jewry, and the nationalist subtext was irrelevant. The goals of both Zhitlovsky and Birnbaum in their initial conception of the conference were described by each years later in Max Weinreich’s volume compiled in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the conference. The book contains one short essay by Birnbaum and a letter by Zhitlovsky, in which each describes his meeting in New York and the origins of the idea of the conference. Birnbaum’s short essay, “Then and Now,” was penned in 1928 specifically in response to Weinreich’s call for the memoirs of conference participants.92 Although written twenty years after the fact, as well as after the most jarring shift in his convictions from secular nationalism to religious Orthodoxy, the document reveals Birnbaum’s

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excitement at having an opportunity to tell his side of the story. As a detailed statement of his reflections on the divisions and accomplishments of the conference, it is worth citing at length. While in New York, having seen his message of Yiddish nationalism greeted with indifference by American Jews, Birnbaum writes that he felt that something must be done, some greater achievement for Yiddish, a kind of manifesto of its existence as a language and its linguistic rights. And as I had found many others—well-known people—who agreed with my position on this, in the end we arrived at the decision to call for a Yiddish language conference, at which all of these issues that touched upon the interests of the Yiddish language and those who wrote in Yiddish would be discussed. . . . The conference excited the Jewish world. It was no small thing: the best-known Yiddish writers and poets came, [Y. L.] Peretz, [Scholem] Asch, [Zalmen] Reyzen, Zhitlovsky, [Hirsh Dovid] Nomberg, and others. Mendele [Moykher Sforim—Sholem Abramovitsh] and Sholem Aleichem sent their hearty greetings. Correspondents from many different periodicals came, especially from the papers opposed to the conference. And these correspondents immediately began to write articles and dispatches, none of them constrained by the truth. For example, at the conference there was a large discussion as to whether Yiddish should be proclaimed the national [Jewish] language, or a national language, and those who were in favor of saying only that it was a national language won out. In the press, however, it was reported that the conference had proclaimed Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish people and that it had succumbed to the attacks of the fanatical Yiddishists. Or another fact: For the entire conference I was one who stood the least for strident words and was the most opposed to any sort of radicalism, trying to remain neutral. Even “a national language” was not very important to me. But the papers would have the world believe that I myself agitated in the sharpest language for “the national language” and that I seemed among the most ferocious haters of loshn koydesh [Hebrew]. In reality, it was the well-known Bundist ­Ester [Frumkin] who placed herself in the most radical position, and during the entire conference there was a constant battle between her and me. And the other attendees of the conference, for the most part, sided with her or with me. The press also reported with great sarcasm that I didn’t give the opening speech for the conference by heart but rather read it from a piece of paper and that, furthermore, I spoke

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entirely in German. They meant by that to invalidate the entire conference. But what of it? Who did not understand that the power and the correctness of my Yiddish does not change anything that I said; [I], a lone Jew, born and raised in western Europe, who had only learned to speak the language later in life, and who during the time of the conference was not yet able to speak it? . . . When the attendees to the conference had departed, they had probably been sure that they would meet once again at a second conference. Only they did not meet, as is known, but it is not superfluous to mention the fact. The first conference had already done enough. It strengthened the energy of all who held the Yiddish language dear. It performed a meaningful service for Yiddish.93

Birnbaum’s account twenty years after the fact is a candid reflection on the conference, but it is, as all such memoirs, imprecise. His defensiveness about the fluency of his Yiddish is difficult to understand; there is ample evidence, including in his own correspondence with his family, that he had a fairly high mastery of the language. It is likewise not clear how the actual planning of the proceedings developed. Birnbaum had already settled in Czernowitz by the late spring of 1908 and was active in laying the groundwork on-site. But in an article published later in the Russian-language Jewish newspaper Rasvet, M. Lazarson, who was also present at the meeting in New York, assigns the lion’s share of the idea to Zhitlovsky: “The last of the tribune of theoreticians of this movement appeared and the organizer of the meeting, Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky. He quietly began to outline his theory of the necessity of zhargon for the national existence of the Jewish nation.” He describes the degree to which Zhitlovsky spoke the same ideological language as Birnbaum. “If the new culture of our people is not very high, it is the fault of the lack of a language. Philosophy is the mind; poetics, the heart; and the language one can compare to the blood of a body. If the body lacks blood, it suffers from anemia. . . . Even assimilation theories, deep thoughts, and not merely agitation brochures should be written in Yiddish.”94 Birnbaum’s recollection of the conflict that roiled the conference also conforms to the existing record, and his obvious bitterness toward the Bundist Ester Frumkin for obstructing the conference is, as we shall see, justified. The records also show that Birnbaum was, as he contended, a consistent voice of moderation—when he could actually make himself heard. He

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also suffered undue castigation afterward for his prominence in the organization of the conference and was erroneously assigned statements and beliefs by the anticonference press that followed. But most important is the first section of the essay, where Birnbaum reveals the origins for the conference as a whole: exile-nationalism based in Yiddish. Only a few months after his defeat in the Reichsrat elections of 1907 and unfazed by the setback, Birnbaum continued to campaign for a non-Zionist, Jewish national autonomist organization that would unite Jews across Europe, even across the Atlantic. It is in this that the roots of the conference lay: Birnbaum’s decade-old search for a deeply rooted, authentic, and organic basis for his political worldview—perhaps even a cultural nationalist organization along the lines of the Jewish People’s Party. That Birnbaum had the goal of creating an institution to confront the hegemony of Zionism over Jewish nationalism in mind is supported by Chaim Zhitlovsky’s own recollection. “In his public appearance [in New York] that winter,” Zhitlovsky recalled, Dr. Birnbaum sharply and heatedly attacked the domination of the Zionists. The Zionists had entirely forgotten the Jewish people, he exhorted. Palestine had become an idol for them, which they had set up for themselves instead of the living nation. Should, God forbid, Palestine disappear—say, through a volcanic catastrophe—then the Zionists will have lost their sole connection with Jewish life and struggles. But we were a living nation. With Eretz Yisrael or without Eretz Yisrael, we must carry our struggle for the establishment of our nation on the Earth, wherever we dwelled.95

According to Zhitlovsky, Birnbaum’s presence in the Jewish political world and his conviction that an organized, non-Zionist cultural and political organization was needed were central to the conference. But his emphasis on the nationalist origins of Birnbaum’s interest in Yiddish is most revealing, as it places front and center the issue of Zionism. Birnbaum wanted to confront what he believed to be a Zionist effort to cynically manipulate politically unsophisticated eastern European Jews to support Zionism against their own interests. Possibly this accusation resulted from Birnbaum’s recent encounter with the Jewish National Party in Galicia, although it seems out of sync with the position of the Jewish National Party itself, whose realpolitik approach would theoreti-

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cally have had room for Yiddish. But it is possible that Birnbaum felt any party so clearly oriented toward a Zionist position in leadership could not honestly adhere to the ecumenicalism he advocated. Zhitlovsky himself was vague about the specific kind of action that Birnbaum called for; a conference of the Yiddish language was not even mentioned. Judging from Zhitlovsky’s words, it is conceivable that Birnbaum harbored hopes for the creation of an organized, Yiddishspeaking autonomist political party. Although Birnbaum’s own recollection, shaped more in retrospect by what the conference came to signify, focuses on the cultural aspect and significance of the conference, he himself notes that he was in New York for the sake of raising awareness of the importance of non-Zionist, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nationalism. In fact, Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky agreed on several points as they assembled the conference. It was to be centered on improving the cultural prestige of Yiddish through a public affirmation of its centrality to the Jewish people. In reality, the many goals set out in the conference announcement—seemingly technical issues of lexicon, usage, and the like—were incidental details. What was important was the assertion, by as many significant cultural figures and as publicly as possible, that Yiddish was a modern, authentic expression of a unique and integral Jewish nation. Nor was this the end goal for either man; rather, it was to nurture and grow a non-Zionist, non-Palestine-oriented but politically sophisticated Jewish Volk, which drew its strength from a culturally unified center in east-central Europe. While both certainly did care about Yiddish qua Yiddish, it was but another detail in a larger program; so long as it was an organic Jewish language, one spoken as a vernacular by a great number of Jews that had developed as a part of the unique experience of the Jewish people, any Jewish language could have the potential for this status as a rallying point of Diaspora nationalism. Yiddish, as the language spoken by the overwhelming majority of European Jews, was primarily a practical choice. This was in fact the central goal of the conference to Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky right up to Birnbaum’s introductory address. After significant advertising and discussion in the Jewish press, the conference got off to a bumpy start on 30 August 1908. The Yiddish press showed a spectrum of interest and even enthusiasm, from a tentative “wait-andsee” posture to outright exuberance. Barzel (Shimon Ayzenshtat) was

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among the most enthusiastic, calling the opening of the conference the “long wished-for day, of which we had long thought and dreamt.”96 An unnamed reporter in Unzer Leben declared, “Whoever considers the facts of the Yiddish conference in Czernowitz must come to the conclusion that it is a happy event in our lives. . . . Any activity is a sign of life, and this conference is certainly a sign of a cultural revival.”97 While numerous accounts expressed at least tentative enthusiasm about the conference, expected (and some unexpected) sources expressed derision and disdain. Hillel Zeitlin noted dyspeptically that the conference “left me cold.”98 The Zionists were mixed in their opinions; voices sounded a tone of bemusement and detachment. However, a studied public indifference dominated: “This assembly in Bukovina has no overall relevance to the Jewish community,” wrote H. Harris (Achaz) in the American Zionist periodical Ha’am. “It is nothing more and nothing less than a demonstration of what the times have called forth, for the sake of their [the writers’] private aggrandizement. But I see no sin at all in that, God forbid; every person, be he a salesman or a writer, must be clear about bettering his position—and so I salute you, Yiddish writers.”99 The American Jewish press expressed a considerable amount of ire, even in its Yiddish-language organs—presumably the European thrust of what was supposed to be a conference of concern to international Jewry antagonized a number of American Yiddish writers. The events on the ground inspired similarly conflicting reactions from those attending and observing. Barzel described the bustling excitement in the conference headquarters with breathless prose: Arriving here . . . on the 21st of August, I found the preparations in full swing. The young members of the Viennese academic society “Yiddish Culture,” with the assistance of both local university Yiddish conference attendees “Hashmonai” and “Emunah,” and delegates from the Poalei Zion had arranged among themselves an organizational committee, which worked under the leadership of Dr. Birnbaum (Mat. Acher), who had settled in Czernowitz and is the principal organizer of the conference. No one had yet come from Russia and America. Letters [of greeting to the conference] arrived in great numbers, and the first of the guests were awaited each day. The majority appeared to be young people; almost all of the older attendees had committed to come out of pure

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incidental reasons and printed writings of their complete solidarity and sympathy for the conference. The office was open daily. There was a great deal of work: there were registration and preparation of the delegates’ tickets. Upon approaching the great building of the “Israelite Folk School” on the corner of University Street and Heine Street, one saw a sign in great Yiddish letters: “Office of the Conference for the Yiddish Language.” There was a great deal of awareness in the city as a whole of the conference in its midst, and there was a great deal written about it in the press. The majority looked positively upon the conference and awaited the arrival of the Yiddish writers with impatience.100

Unfortunately, the conference preparations, for all the excitement and enthusiasm they elicited in Barzel, were not flawless. An organizational disaster struck on the very eve of the opening sessions. The Jewish National House, completed just weeks before the conference, had been the intended venue for the conference. When the organizers arrived to prepare the site, they found themselves locked out; the building had been closed to them under the pretext that it was not ready for occupancy. It is not entirely clear from surviving evidence who was responsible for this obvious rebuff. According to some reports, Straucher, while not above working with any group that could offer him political leverage, was offended both by the substance of the conference and by the failure of its organizers to pay him proper respect and saw to it that the National House was closed.101 Another account portrays Straucher as sympathetic to the conference, even (mistakenly) implying that he was an organizer, whose considerable clout could not stem the anti-Yiddish attitude of the community.102 Regardless of the cause, the organizers found themselves scrambling to find a new venue at the eleventh hour and ultimately secured two venues at which to hold the panels. The first, close to the theater plaza, was the Philharmonic Hall. More interestingly, several of the conference sessions occurred a few blocks to the east of the theater plaza at the Ukrainian National House, another example of the unexpected bedfellows that Austro-Hungarian politics could produce. While there is little documentation on the actual negotiations, it is reasonable to speculate that the previous year’s strategy of interethnic cooperation between the two groups, although not earning Birnbaum a seat in the Reichsrat,

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had yielded some fruit. Despite this logistical setback, however, the organizers and the volunteers of the Yiddish Culture Society created an atmosphere of excitement. The evenings supplemented the serious discussions of the days with Yiddish cultural programs and concerts; even as the conference was collapsing in discord, an elaborate banquet arranged by the Yiddish Culture Society feted the conference attendees. The conference drew a wide variety of delegates from a spectrum of political affiliations from all over the Yiddish-speaking Jewish world. There were more than sixty official delegates, the majority from Galicia and Bukovina, as well as the Viennese student organization Jüdische Kultur (who played a major role in the logistical preparations for the conference); thirteen delegates from the Russian Empire that included some of the most well-known names to attend the conference, particularly Peretz, Nomberg, and Sholem Asch; and a number of journalists representing Jewish newspapers from across Europe and the United States.103 The Bund, led by Ester, was a significant and disciplined faction. Members of the Poalei Zion, Marxist Zionists informally led by Lazar Khazanovitsh, also maintained tight unity, although as Khazanovitsh asserted pointedly, they were attending only as individuals with no specific instructions from the larger organization.104 It was not quite the case that the press was uniformly prepared to condemn the conference, as Birnbaum later asserted; in fact, a number of the correspondents attended as outright supporters (such as Barzel).105 But as early as the first formal preconference session, which was intended to establish the procedural guidelines and agenda, a disagreement about the official stance of the conference toward Hebrew gave an inkling of conflict to come. The question of Hebrew was one of three central issues that would continually dog the conference, along with the status of Yiddish as a national language and the event’s long-term goals. At the heart of the Hebrew controversy was whether the conference should confront the obvious issue of the relationship of Yiddish to Hebrew as a national language. Did the conference intend to assert the preeminence of Yiddish above Hebrew (as some did), as on some kind of equal level with Hebrew but serving a different purpose, or, as a tiny minority who attended the conference mostly to disrupt it asserted, simply a zhargon useful only as a bridge bringing more Jews to use Hebrew? Nomberg’s opinion was that the issue needed to be addressed directly with a statement regard-

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ing Hebrew, preferably one of respect and sympathy.106 Peretz, who brought considerable weight to his position as the “celebrity” delegate, believed that to broach the topic of Hebrew in the conference would doom it to failure because engaging in theoretical questions would hinder the practical work for Yiddish he believed to be the conference’s true purpose.107 Eventually it was decided that the conference would avoid dealing with Hebrew—although this position, like many of the planned positions of the conference, would crumble once the meetings began. When the conference convened, Birnbaum gave the opening address. By the end of his address, what control he and Zhitlovsky had over the conference effectively ended. As Zhitlovsky noted, again in his 1928 letter, “Dr. Birnbaum’s control over the conference lasted only until it convened. Extreme disagreements in its overall plans, for which the conference was only the first tiny step, occurred soon after the opening, at which it elected its president. It soon left it behind of its own accord. The not very easy task of leading the conference fell upon the shoulders of its vice president, the writer of these lines.”108 However, it is useful to examine Birnbaum’s words in the opening address, to understand at the very least how he hoped the conference would unfold. The speech itself was the subject of some controversy in the days and months that followed, as Birnbaum was accused of giving the talk in Yiddish while not actually having any fluency in that language, reading the speech transliterated into Latin characters. According to Gershon Bader, writing for the New York Yidishes Tageblatt, “As Birnbaum did not speak any Yiddish, he read out his speech from a paper, which had the words transliterated into German characters, and the impression was not a good one; in spite of that, the speech was applauded.”109 However, even Bader’s account is not representative; Barzel noted in Rasvet that Birnbaum “read his first speech in Yiddish fluently from a piece of paper. The appearance: pure Yiddish, it was somewhat pedantic and businesslike in style; he read his speech in the Galician dialect.”110 Although garish and patronizing to some, Birnbaum’s speech was admirable to others who, at the very least, appreciated the effort of a German-speaking Jew—particularly one of Birnbaum’s celebrity—to speak in Yiddish. The speech itself is particularly interesting in that it offers a candid glimpse of Birnbaum’s motives in taking up the cause of Yiddish, as well as the role he saw the conference playing in the larger scheme. He began

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with an answer to the conference’s opponents, observing that although it was derided by many, all new paths and ideas have their detractors, but often the pathbreakers themselves have the last laugh. He briefly outlined the history of consciousness about the language question in Jewish nationalist thought, noting that Yiddish had never been seen as a vehicle of the emerging Jewish nation. He spoke with the authority of his personal experience: “As the Jewish intelligentsia became nationalized, it certainly did not look upon the Yiddish language with much favor. . . . They considered it only a kind of irksome thing that one must suffer but that one must not under any circumstances take any pride in.” Of course, this was an attitude that Birnbaum himself had overcome. “It never even occurred to them that a national intellectual must not only be dedicated with his whole heart and will to his people but must first and foremost live among them; he must breathe in the same cultural atmosphere, and his spiritual life must grow from the soul of the people [ folksneshoma] and must let one’s self once again be turned toward a kind of native power.” Even more, to miss the importance of a communion with the “people’s soul” in the name of nationalism effectively doomed it from the start, as “speaking a language different from that in which the people think and feel, lament and rejoice, cry and laugh, is to abandon one’s people and turn the innermost self to a wasteland, friendless and without a guide, condemned to go alone into the chaotic world a wanderer, lost from one’s home and people.”111 One cannot help reading this as a candid statement of Birnbaum’s own experience. He knew well, and in his early writings agreed with, the attitude of Jewish nationalists toward Yiddish, but now experience had led him to a new conclusion about the role of language in the national enterprise. Rather than reject Yiddish as a stain of exile, an impediment to cultivating the new national Jew, he had embraced the seal of organic authenticity that could be granted by the people only in their native language. One had to accept and love the nation as it was in its most authentic expression, not deride it and arrogantly demand the embrace of a new one. As much as adopting the language of another people would end in assimilation and abrogation of the Jewish nation, seeking to create a living language from a dead one such as Hebrew, regardless of the ancient importance of the language to the Jewish people, would always lack authenticity. It would remain, in Peretz’s formulation, a “mechanical” rather than organic construct.

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Finally, Birnbaum continued, the Jewish people had proceeded beyond the first baby steps of national consciousness and begun to recognize the value of authentic connection with the people through Yiddish. “Quietly and gracefully [Yiddish] went its own way, a sure way, which would ultimately unite the new times with an old nation.” A new day had come in the world of the Jewish nation and required a new—or rather, an old—medium in which to communicate its needs and mark its unique identity. “The new times needed it so that the ordinary world would open its eyes, see and understand the world at large. And the old nation, awakening from a long slumber and like one yearning for a greater task, could by no means dispense with the Yiddish language.” As this became more obvious, gradually a new intelligentsia grew that looked upon Yiddish with different eyes than their predecessors, even the nationalist intelligentsia. [They recognized that] here lay the soul of our people, the heart of our people, the life of our people. Why do we cry that we lack a concern for our honor? Where else would we find it if we live our entire lives ashamed? If we believe the Hottentots’ genius more than our own and take every poor prattle for a language while our own language, which has carried our spirits, hearts, humor, joy, and sorrow for centuries we consider a mishmash, a jargon? How should a people with such a degraded view of itself have a concept of its own honor, its national sovereignty? Let us take the shameful garments off our mother language . . . so that our people will again be beautiful and illuminated with honor!112

Restoring the honor of Yiddish was the best route to doing the same for the Jewish nation. Echoing comments he wrote earlier during the Ahad Ha’am affair, Birnbaum asserted that to succumb to the pessimistic judgment of the Hebraists and the assimilationists about the culture of eastern European Jewry was to doom the Jewish nation to a self-fulfilling prophecy and admit that the Jews were not fit to be a nation, that they were the same degenerate and despised people that the anti-Semites would have them be. Birnbaum’s embrace of Yiddish shines a harsh light on a central conceit of the Hebraist camp: accepting their belief that Jewish culture must be remade meant rejecting the possibility that anything of value existed in the nation as it was. It internalized the very assumptions of antiSemites or assimilationists. To Birnbaum, the only real opponents of the

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conference were those who closed their minds to a multiplicity of possibilities for no good reason and were restricted to dogmatic certainty. “We certainly do not want to be snagged; nor will we be concerned with the attacks of our fanatical opponents; they cannot do anything to us. Honorable opponents who engage us with decorum [derekh-erets] will certainly be answered with decorum. But the main point remains: we must work, work a great deal, work well, work quietly.”113 Sadly, the flexibility and opposition to fierce, dogmatic ideology under­scored by Birnbaum’s opening remarks terminally undermined his control over the conference. Zhitlovsky’s description quoted earlier was exactly right: Birnbaum lost all control over the conference as soon as he stepped down from the podium. Aside from the sin of moderation, little of Birnbaum’s powerlessness (and, indeed, although Zhitlovsky does not say it explicitly, he had as little control over the conference proceedings as Birnbaum) was his fault. Weinreich is damning of both Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky, as well as the rest of the leadership; in his estimation the failure of the conference resulted from poor planning and poor execution.114 This evaluation, though, is itself far too simplistic. In fact, the conference was probably as well organized as any event of its kind; it was planned for months, received ample publicity, and secured the participation of some of the leading figures in its purview. The agenda as planned was coherent and organized, with sessions clearly delineated and replete with important speakers on each subject. In fact, in one of the few sessions that followed the planned agenda, Matthias (Matisyahu) Mieses offered an academic paper on Yiddish philology that laid the groundwork for the modern field of Yiddish linguistics.115 Rather, the dissolution of the conference and the loss of control by its leadership were the function of the conflict between two ideological camps that simply could not be controlled, although their conflict might have been foreseen. Once released, these two competing visions for meaning of the conference, of the future of Yiddish and Jewish nationalism, could not be contained, and every session after the third session (seven of ten) devolved quickly into outright verbal warfare between their advocates. Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky lost control ultimately because neither faction represented their intent or beliefs. Zhitlovsky, watching the torrent of factionalism overtake the conference, as chair of most of the sessions, would opt to choose a side; Birnbaum simply withdrew into the background.

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What ultimately undid the conference, in spite of all intentions, was the refusal of one faction to allow the conference to proceed along the lines of the planned agenda. For the most part, participants shared an expectation that the conference would ultimately endorse a wide spectrum of cultural activities and initiatives and hoped that the meetings in Czernowitz would begin this process—that is, the very type of discussion Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky had envisioned. But a minority of the participants, perhaps best described as “minimalists,” demonstrated tight discipline, unity, and clarity of purpose. At the conference opening, this faction was composed solely of members of the Bund (the socialist Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite Poylin, un Rusland) led by Ester; by the end, it had expanded to include members of the Poalei Zion, who backed all initiatives put forth by Ester and the Bund as a bloc.116 Although this faction was not uniform, it was bound together less by a positive position on the conference’s goals than a shared opposition to most of them. Reading Weinreich’s published account, one gets the sense that their participation was little more than a cynical ploy from the beginning, designed to disrupt as much as possible any headway by the “bourgeois” nationalists who had planned the conference. Regardless of their original intent, in the end they were able to find in their rejectionist stance more common ground and a more resilient position than the other participants, who mostly did not know what hit them. Unlike their opponents, they were determined to use whatever power and coercion they could muster, from disrupting sessions and other events at the conference (Ester even theatrically stormed out of the conference banquet put on by Jüdische Kultur, claiming that it turned away working-class delegates), to browbeating opponents late into the night to push through their resolutions. It was in the third session that Ester made her move into the spotlight and along with the rest of the Bund-affiliated delegates never really relinquished it. In this session, Peretz opened with a discussion of the “organizational” issues of the conference and the institutions it would initiate after its conclusion. Laying out his practical position in the clearest terms, Peretz posited a list of goals, all of which centered around a focus on cultural initiatives, enhancement of the esteem of Yiddish as an expression of Jewish culture, education, and the professional study of Yiddish, excluding theoretical issues such as language

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status and politics.117 At the conclusion of Peretz’s remarks, the Zionist Hayzler jarringly asserted that there should be no Yiddish cultural organization, that efforts on the Jewish cultural front should be oriented toward strengthening Hebrew, and that the conference was nothing but an attempt to destroy Zionism.118 Ester then seized upon the ensuing disorder and announced that the Bund was opposed to any organization along the lines Peretz proposed. His thinking, she claimed, represented a bourgeois utopian position that ignored class distinction and inhibited the development of class consciousness among the proletariat. Peretz, in her opinion, was naïve if he believed that the Bund would ever partake of such an arrangement, even if it promised the cultural autonomy for which they strove.119 In her later remarks on the conference, Ester explained the position of the Bund. As a Marxist-socialist party, it came to the conference on the defensive. The conference was organized, in their view, by interests that were inimical to those of the Yiddish-speaking Jewish proletariat, and it was their objective to prevent these views from making any headway. Peretz’s speech gave a perfect opening for Ester to enter the fray, as it confirmed to her the intent of the conference leadership to create a hegemonic, antiproletarian organization. Her position began with a litany of objections to Peretz’s proposals. To begin with, his assumption that there was, or could be, a unified Yiddish culture imposed from above was impossible. “All social groups spread culture according to their worldviews, according to their political and social interests. The culture that is spread by the chauvinist nationalist is often not the same as the culture that is spread by the proletarian; the same things that are cultural treasures to the first are to the proletariat often nothing other than the treasures of the bourgeoisie.”120 As such, any efforts on the part of the conference to assert for itself a role regulating the spread of culture was tainted and potentially oppressive. In addition, contrary to Peretz’s protestations, the goal was inherently political. “This organization is establishing political goals for itself—struggle and propaganda for equal language rights. Equal rights for language can be understood differently depending on its combination with this or that political program. Propaganda can be developed in a dozen different ways.”121 Thus, any work toward disseminating cultural propaganda was dependent on local political, social, and economic circumstances and could not be controlled by the organization.

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Thus, the conference organization must be entirely neutral—a practically impossible task. “The creation of an organization must have a purely informative character,” Ester asserted. “[It] may not take part in any creative work, nor any political position; it cannot found any schools, and so on. Its publishing activity should be confined to purely informative publications, such as statistics, bibliographies, etc. Different societies and facilities should receive no direction from a bureau, neither for their cultural nor their political activities.”122 This was the essence of the minimalist, defensive position of the Bund: the conference could not possibly assert for itself the role its organizers and others like Peretz demanded. Taking her argument to its logical conclusion, Ester moved (and would continue to repeat for the remainder of the sessions, all of which devolved into debates of these issues) that the conference undertake no further activities as laid out in the agenda; rather, it should be occupied only with planning these offices of limited purview and the next conference. Soon after this position was laid out, the other Marxist group present in significant numbers, the Poalei Zion, came over to the side of the Bund. The two parties shared a great deal in common in this setting. Like the Bund, the Poalei Zion saw its role in the conference as protecting the cultural interests of the Jewish proletariat. Thus, they agreed with Ester’s basic premise that the conference’s scope and that of any organization created from it must be strictly limited. Unlike the Bund, who held a positive position vis-à-vis the Yiddish language itself, for the Poalei Zion, issues of Yiddish language were of limited interest. Indeed, the entire subject of Yiddish—especially the Yiddish-Hebrew controversy—was a moot point. Unlike non-Marxist Zionists, the members of the Poalei Zion were not unbendingly committed to Hebrew, nor were they committed to Yiddish or any other language. Rather, in the words of Lazar Khazanovitsh, “Our standpoint . . . was the following: Just as the Jews find themselves in a process of development in terms of economic relations, it is impossible to establish today whether this or that language will be the future language of the entire Jewish people.” That is not to argue that they believed that having a mutually understandable language among world Jewry was unimportant: “We are firmly convinced [that] the Jews of different countries who speak different languages must adopt one language in order to understand one another. In a land with a unified national economy there must also exist a cultural and linguistic

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unity, a language adopted by the entire nation, be it Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, or some other.” But it emphatically did not have to be either Yiddish or Hebrew: “We protest with all our power against the opinion that the three million Jews who do not speak Yiddish are lost to us. None of us has any right to state: ‘La nation, c’est moi.’”123 The Poalei Zion viewed the economic interests of the Jewish working class as paramount, and what language would become the vernacular of the realized Marxist-Jewish state was left an open question that would be decided only by the course of history—and certainly not by one conference. However different Ester and Khazanovitsh may have been in the details, their common belief that they must protect the proletariat from the conference program dictated their relationship. Shortly after Ester’s dramatic entry into the debate, Khazanovitsh wrote later, he and his fellow Poalei Zionists joined with the Bund to create a unified faction. With this, the Marxists had sufficient numbers to dominate the conference and push their demands for fundamental changes in the agenda. By the end of the fifth session, all discussion for the remainder of the conference simply recycled these same issues: the status of Yiddish as a national language of the Jewish people, and the exact nature of the mandate that the conference could claim for itself. The Bundist–Poalei Zionist faction was opposed to any categorical statements or any further cultural or political action that the conference might take. Ester advocated simply that the remainder of the time left be dedicated to setting a date for the next conference and establishing an information office with no power to engage in any educational, cultural, or political activity. Ester’s opponents generally wished to have a wider mandate for the conference and to follow the conference agenda as originally planned. But the disorganization and paralysis of all other groups and individuals in the face of the unified Bund–Poalei Zion ensured that nothing along those lines was accomplished. Ultimately, all they could insist upon was that the conference issue some statement that presented a position, as much to save face in the eyes of the Jewish world observing the conference as to accomplish something substantive. The statement that was passed late in the final evening of the conference was brief and anemic. It, along with one other letter, was the only official conference release. Although the conference announced that Yiddish was “a national Jewish language,” none of this made it into the official conference announcement. “The conference for the Yiddish lan-

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guage has ended, and now that work that the conference has instructed us to do has begun,” the release reported. We hope that all who consider themselves . . . part of our Jewish people, regardless of party or class they belong to, will understand that what we endeavored to do here was not undertaken for partisan reasons, not to anger this person or the other, but only for the sake of the living soul of our people. We ask all Jews to help us in our work. In particular we ask all cultural societies and institutions that work in the Yiddish language and that recognize Yiddish as a national language of the Jewish people, such as arts and culture societies, schools . . . theater groups, libraries, writer’s groups, academic societies that regard Yiddish as their mother tongue, etc., to join with us and send us at least 5 crowns, 6 marks, 1 shilling, or 1 dollar, so that they receive the right to send representatives to the second conference. We also ask that you nominate several dedicated committee members for the different cities who shall 1. give us new information about the situation of Yiddish in their locations; 2. refer all societies and unions of the aforementioned places; 3. found societies and unions; 4. bring in hundreds of members who shall send yearly 1 crown, 1 mark, 1.2 francs, 40 kopeks, 1 shilling, or 20 cents for the conference. Jews! Come together for this important work, which must be undertaken now, so that the Jewish people, which has accomplished so much in its ancient culture, may continue its development, and not be sunk in the sea of peoples.124

Shortly afterward, still floating on the quickly shrinking enthusiasm that was left for the project, a traveling symposium of Yiddish writers, including Peretz, Asch, Nomberg, and Rayzen, toured Galicia and Bukovina to raise awareness of the conference and the bureau. It was a failure; it lasted only a short time, marked by embarrassing confrontations that were promptly reported in a hostile press. 125 As for the press itself, each report saw in the conference confirmation of their earlier assumptions. First were the major players, particularly Ester and Khazano­vitsh, who once again outmaneuvered everyone else and swiftly put into print justification of their role in the conference. Those

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on the other side were left on the defensive to protest powerlessly the Bund’s version of events and the bad press that accompanied the writers’ tour. To the Zionist press, the conference was a laughable shambles, the worthy child of zhargon itself. Again, Hillel Zeitlin added his withering commentary: “The ‘Conference for the Yiddish Language’ in Czernowitz has ended with exactly what it started with: absolutely nothing. And this is no surprise: the ancients long ago said that out of nothing, nothing will come.”126 After the other delegates had left, Birnbaum remained behind with his family, absent his son Solomon, who was completing his studies in Vienna. Along with a colleague, Alexander Kohut, he cofounded a small publishing house and book and stationery store in Czernowitz, perhaps the clearest sign that he intended to remain indefinitely in ­Bukovina. In the end, Birnbaum and his family remained in Czernowitz until 1910, at which point his business closed, and the family relocated once more to the German Empire after Birnbaum and his wife undertook a severalweek speaking tour of western Russia. Some of the postconference debate, although there was little, played out in Birnbaum’s final effort on behalf of the project, the short-lived periodical Dr. Birnboyms Vokhenblat. In the absence of a strong statement on behalf of advancing Jewish nationalism and the Yiddish language, Birnbaum took it upon himself to do the work through a self-published periodical in Czernowitz, one of only two Yiddish periodicals in circulation in prewar Czernowitz. He hoped, it seems, to be able to exert control over the conference narrative that had eluded him during the conference itself. The Vokhenblat lasted only six issues and principally ran statements about the conference—such as the announcement cited previously—which attempted to lend it legitimacy as the organ of the conference itself. It also ran some of the debates between the two factions and a handful of stories about the state of Yiddish culture, but it died out along with the interest of the wider Jewish world in the conference. Its demise marked the nadir of Birnbaum’s life as a Jewish nationalist. He had, to this point, sacrificed every opportunity he had to establish a legacy of leadership for himself: first by disavowing the Zionist movement; then by losing his bid for the Reichsrat; and finally by watching the Yiddish conference, from which he expected so much, disintegrate into hapless factionalism and cynical manipulation. In this

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case as in the others, the fault was only partly his own; as important was his timing and the choices he made for outlets for his ideas, which were often uncannily visionary. In the end Birnbaum’s efforts in Czernowitz yielded little, as a result of largely the same factors that led to the dubious outcome of the conference itself. Problems faced by its organizers from the beginning, combined with the failure of the conference to tackle the logistics of postconference organization, meant that whatever momentum to be had coming out of the conference was quickly lost. And as the most prominent conference official still in Czernowitz after its close, Birnbaum experienced with painful immediacy the entrenched apathy and outright opposition to its meaning and goals. The attitude in relation to language and identity was not significantly shifted locally as a result of the conference.127 The debate regarding the status of Yiddish and its relationship to Jewish national identity in multiethnic Bukovina did not abate and even intensified with the onset of the First World War. Constant throughout was the presence of Benno Straucher, whose significance as a local political persona only grew, and with it the unique type of German-language Jewish nationalism he represented.128 Only when the First World War, followed by the instability of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war, made Czernowitz (by then Romanian Cernăuţi) an attractive haven for Jewish refugees fleeing the new Soviet Union did Yiddish effectively challenge German as the predominant language of public culture in the city. Salomon Kassner, a local journalist and amateur historian of Czerno­ witz Jewry, when writing of the conference in the (German-language) Czernowitzer Tageblat, articulated perhaps the keenest insight into Birnbaum’s work: “Dr. Nathan Birnbaum . . . has begun a new course in Jewry. If one were to ask him his mandate, he would freely tell you it is the Jewish masses. . . . I will not begin to doubt the purity of his intentions nor question his honor. But he is one of those unfortunate people who place their best strengths in the wrong place.”129

Fi v e  The Origins of an Orthodox Ideologue World War I and the Turn to Religion Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a “transformation.” These alterations are the completest of the ways in which the self may be divided. —William James, “Conversion,” The Varieties of Religious Experience

In 1917, a strange little booklet appeared in Yiddish and Hebrew, aimed at the large population of the “Torah-true” or Orthodox Jews in eastern and central Europe.1 Fewer than twenty pages long, its brevity belied the expansiveness of its themes. It was at once prophetic and couched in mysticism, both deeply conservative and utopian, even apocalyptic. Entitled, obscurely, Divrei ha-oylim (Words of the ascenders), the booklet read as an impassioned insider’s indictment of the world of religious Jewry.2 Judged simply as a piece of Jewish religious literature, the pamphlet was not entirely unusual. Dramatic calls to arms excoriating the decadence of the faithful are a well-worn genre, in Judaism as in all Western religions. In its more parochial discussion of the causes of Jewish religious malaise, it was in the company of literature that dated back a century and more, and its tone of alarm and theme of cultural conflict had been a mainstay of polemical literature in the Orthodox homiletics for decades. Though in its details one finds a novel mystical eschatology and symbolism and a fascinating model of Orthodox agrarian communalism as the cure for the malaise of world Jewry, Words of the Ascenders was part of a small but growing body of internal social critique within the traditionalist centers of central and eastern European Jewry. On an even broader scale, it represented another literary reaction to the violence and instability resulting from a continentwide conflict, an early

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Nathan Birnbaum, “Der Ba’al Teshuva,” 1918 (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

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contribution to the explosion of a postwar European literature marked by violence, irrationalism, displacement, loss, and earnest desire for secular or divine redemption. A self-consciously traditional tract, the pamphlet was of a piece with the wider interwar philosophical and literary world. What made the work unique, not only to its intended audience but especially to wider Jewish intellectual circles, was that its author was Nathan Birnbaum. The transformation represented by this pamphlet was startling, even in a career marked by intellectual flexibility and openness to ideological experimentation. It seemed to appear out of nowhere; although rumors had been circulating in the few years preceding its release that Birnbaum had undergone some kind of conversion, that he had started to “keep Shabbos,” shorthand for the adoption of religious observance, few of Birnbaum’s nationalist colleagues could have been prepared for the apocalyptic voice, prophetic scope, and most of all the deep religious sentiment that characterized the pamphlet. The pamphlet, and Birnbaum’s religious conversion, had been suddenly transformed from an eyebrow-raising rumor to a very serious (at least on Birnbaum’s part) parlay at claiming a new mantle, a new constituency, and a new, totalized vision for the future of the Jewish people. To some of his former associates, the plan outlined by Words of the Ascenders was a sign that Birnbaum had finally slipped from a vague penchant for novel intellectual positions into bizarre obscurantism. At least in part, this change retrospectively cast a shadow on his earlier work, as though all the gradations and nuances of his thought were at root only the reflection of a mercurial, unstable temperament. That sudden conversions to religious enthusiasm among the central European Jewish intelligentsia were not unheard of at the time did not add much gravity to Birnbaum’s new cause. In Prague a tightknit circle of Jewish intellectuals including Franz Kafka and Max Brod had watched with piqued curiosity as one of their own, Jiři Langer, wandered east to Galicia and “went native,” returning to Prague transformed into a Belz Hasid.3 Jacob Israël de Haan, an Amsterdam lawyer and poet who cut a figure in local literary circles, underground gay life, and leftist politics, transformed himself into an antagonist on be-

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half of Torah-true Jewry against Zionist efforts in Mandate Palestine.4 Both of these examples only confirmed the opinion of those who believed Birnbaum’s embrace of religion tainted his substantial body of work. Langer’s major work, Seven Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries, has never been treated as anything more than an exotic, if psychologically interesting, curiosity.5 Although de Haan was viewed as dangerous enough in Mandate Palestine to be murdered by a Haganah assassin, today his legacy is largely known only to the most extreme fringe of religious anti-Zionist Jews. But the common and dour appraisal that Birnbaum’s religious conversion was a discrediting misstep was not the only one. A few of Birnbaum’s older associates, including Martin Buber, and more recent ones, such as Franz Rosenzweig, responded more thoughtfully. The latter, introduced to Birnbaum only after his emergence in Orthodox array, regarded his transformation as deserving serious consideration. In a letter describing his first meeting with Birnbaum in 1918—a series of conversations in a café in Vienna that he described as “a dream”— Rosenzweig expressed fascination not just at Birnbaum’s past nationalist celebrity but also at what he regarded as his astounding intellectual daring. In these cryptic comments to his mother, Rosenzweig wrote that two weeks after meeting with Birnbaum, “The Star came to me” [ fiel mir der Stern ein]—a tantalizing and hitherto unexplored hint about the origins of his monumental work The Star of Redemption.6 Just a few years later, having become the central personality in the Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, Rosenzweig invited Birnbaum to the Lehrhaus to lecture on his religious philosophy. One senses that the young and brilliant Rosenzweig, himself grappling with similar questions of faith and identity that had motivated Birnbaum’s conversion, admired the resolution that had driven Birnbaum to live out the pious implications of his religious turn. Like other proto-existentialist ­heroes of the interwar European intelligentsia, Birnbaum had shown ­Kierkegaardian resolve and played out his new part to its intellectual and physical conclusion.7 But whether judged as a loss of reason, a bold statement, or as it would soon become in Orthodox circles, a vindication of religious belief and observance of the commandments, Birnbaum’s embrace of religious Orthodoxy was a change that required, and requires, explication.

The Origins of an Orthodox Ideologue

Birnbaum’s Teshuva: The Autobiography of a Religious Awakening Between the Yiddish Language Conference and the onset of the First World War, Birnbaum’s presence on the nationalist political and cultural stage declined significantly. Until 1911 in Czernowitz, he watched his fortunes decline professionally and economically. He oversaw the short-lived publication Dr. Birnboyms Vokhenblat; intended to be the first legacy of the conference, it instead shared the conference’s fate and was quickly forgotten by the Jewish cultural world.8 Personal documents, including a mostly indecipherable and brief diary, discuss his involvement with a printing house and bookstore that failed by 1910. A cache of family letters, especially those exchanged between Birnbaum and his oldest son, Solomon, sheds some further light on the family’s circumstances. They tell a familiar story: inadequate means, unfulfilled promises of payment for freelance writing projects, illness. Occasionally a familiar name (Buber, Shalit, Bierer) serves as a reminder that the circles in which he once moved continued to revolve without him.9 They show Nathan and Rosa, after shuttering their business in Czernowitz, seeking once again a congenial place for their household. After a speaking tour that brought them to Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, and other destinations in the Russian Empire, a short time in Munich and a bit longer in Berlin, they settled once more in Vienna. Birnbaum continued to try to make a living from his freelance writing, mostly for the nonpartisan Ost und West, and a couple of essays in more short-lived periodicals such as Peretz Mordechai Kaufman’s Die Freistatt. But by then, so much had changed. The growth of Zionism as the dominant expression of Jewish nationalism was not seriously challenged. Other ideas in which Birnbaum felt a keen interest but that had fallen by the wayside, such as the Jewish People’s Party, continued to develop in different directions, such as Simon Dubnow’s Jewish Folks­ party, as well as an on-again, off-again Jewish nationalist coalition in Austro-Hungarian politics. Birnbaum played no role as a leader comparable to that in past years and seemed condemned to greater and greater irrelevance. He had expended whatever capital his prestige as an early Jewish nationalist had earned him, and frozen out of any leadership po-

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sition in any political or cultural movement, he continued to live in the material and intellectual turmoil that had characterized most of his life. In collecting and self-publishing Ausgewählte Schriften, a two-volume edition of his nationalist writings in 1910, Birnbaum seemed only to confirm what must have been an obvious observation: his best years were past, his contribution to Jewish thought and politics complete. Even if his writing during these years displayed no less enthusiasm than before, driven by a consistent clarity of purpose and commitment to his mission of advancing the cause of eastern European Jewry, behind the facade of the faithful and strident nationalist Birnbaum was likely in a state of despair. With neither money nor prospects of a stable income, his return to Vienna must have felt like a bitter homecoming. According to his own recollections, this period of intellectual drifting and listlessness ended abruptly around 1912. In a 1924 autobiographical essay, “An Account of My Life,” Birnbaum wrote, “In Russia, during a discussion in Petersburg . . . it suddenly became clear to me that I must speak out and give testimony before the Eternal. And I began, in a heated speech, to say all that was in my heart and that I had carried in my heart, but that up to that time had seemed but a distant beaconing. I understood then, for the first time, that I had a great new mission.”10 Thus does Birnbaum describe his spiritual awakening. No doubt a scene as shocking to the audience as to the speaker, Birnbaum’s public confession of faith would seem to signify the first steps in his formal adoption of Orthodox Judaism. By the middle of the First World War he had become fully observant and was on the cusp of attaining a significant position in the burgeoning Orthodox political world. It is hard to establish the exact cause of this transition; very likely there were many factors at work. To Birnbaum, it was a reasoned and logical conclusion to the direction his thought had been headed for years. Although his writings show that this was more than the after-the-fact justification it may seem, Birnbaum came to his newfound faith after a period of intense emotional stress. Always open to unusual approaches to defining his life’s purpose, religious belief and praxis offered him something on many levels that he did not find elsewhere. While religion has offered many, from Saint Augustine to Leo Tolstoy, an emotional reprieve from the suffering and tumult of the life of the mind, for them it was not restricted to this. Neither was it for Birnbaum.

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Unfortunately, aside from Birnbaum’s recollection written more than a decade later, we lack direct testimony of his dramatic awakening to his faith in Saint Petersburg and thus are not really privy to this most important moment in Birnbaum’s life. Articles by and about Birnbaum from the period, which document in detail most of his public appearances, make no mention of his revelation; as odd as it may seem, this unexpected announcement, made by the well-known Mathias Acher, passed without public comment. In a letter to Solomon he does report that he and Rosa were traveling to Saint Petersburg as part of a larger slate of public appearances in the Russian Empire but makes no mention of his conversionary moment. But this lack of direct historical testimony is really just part of a larger occlusion of detail about what must have been a stark and profound change in his personal identity, if not in the most fundamental aspects of his daily life. His own autobiographical assertions about his movement to Orthodoxy obscure as much as they illuminate. But, as William James was neither the first nor the last to observe, such is the nature of religious conversion. On the one hand, the profundity of change, especially in retrospect, is a powerful motivation to create a teleological narrative. On the other, the often indescribable and emotional aspect of such change renders rational or clear explanation an impossible task. Not that Birnbaum did not try, and as he described in retrospect the transformation that occurred around his fiftieth birthday, we are allowed access, however refracted, to his inner life. In fact, Birnbaum wrote two texts that describe in some detail his turn to religion. One is the aforementioned sections of “An Account” written in 1924; the other, a longer, fuller pamphlet, From Freethinker to Believer, published in 1919 by the Agudath Israel Youth Organization press.11 Interestingly, the two texts differ in their descriptions of the process of his turn to religion. Local factors partially explain the discrepancy; there was a significant difference in Birnbaum’s position within Orthodox organizations, in particular the Agudath Israel, in 1919 and in 1924. Attempting to rationally explain the divergences, to find some kind of logical explanation for these contrasting conversion narratives, is not the most fruitful way to approach the texts. But through investigating the intersections and divergences in their narratives, we are able to glimpse the meaning religion came to occupy in Birnbaum’s thought and his daily life. We

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are able to discover at least obliquely what happened to Birnbaum as he became, in the words of his friend and confidante Tuvia Horowitz, a shtiler ba’al teshuva, a quiet returnee to Orthodox Judaism.12 In “An Account,” Birnbaum builds a compelling narrative of his turn to Orthodoxy, detailing the specific moments in his life where he became aware of what he perceived to be the divine presence of God in the world, culminating in the embrace of his religious mission. Here he dates this awareness very early, as far back as his 1908 trip to the United States: After my journey to America I started to have doubts about the materialistic worldview in which I had believed for so long. But the first true religious feelings, the first sensation of the Master of the Universe, were awoken in me as I was traveling across the ocean. I did not know what to make of it, and afterward it had the semblance of a dream. But doubts about materialism remained and filled me until I had completely abandoned it. I began to understand the centrality of religion in the world; I recognized that it is the axis upon which all of human history turned. [By then] I was already familiar with the eternal and living core of religion; only I still tarried somewhat, until the blessed moment came and revealed itself to me in all its majesty.13

Birnbaum’s first, formative moment of realization, according to this version, happened in a most dramatic fashion as he was confronted with the awesome natural majesty of the ocean. A classic conversionary trope, his initial gestalt was followed by a period of uncertainty, where he was not even sure whether he had had the experience or not, but the damage had been done. His faith in “materialism” and his fundamental disbelief in the spiritual were shaken and crumbled over the years that followed, leading up to a dramatic moment in 1912 when, in the company of his peers, he triumphantly announced the truth of God and the recognition of God’s demand to reorient his life’s mission. It is a powerful story and one that, with some variation, has become the favorite within the ultra-Orthodox world in which Birnbaum is regularly remembered.14 In Birnbaum’s earlier conversionary narrative, Freethinker, this dramatic narrative is missing, and Birnbaum’s description of his turn to religious belief is more nuanced. According to his own account, this

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longer text was written to answer the questions that had persisted in certain corners of the religious world as to why he had become Orthodox. For him to really answer, he writes, he had to start not with his turn to Orthodoxy but with his turn to materialism. Before he was a Jewish nationalist, he had been a child in a much more innocent and pious setting. “I was born, thank God, to eastern European Jewish parents in western surroundings. I grew up in an environment of Jewish belief and practice; however, my milieu was really more nearly like the intensive, living yiddishkayt [Jewishness] one encounters among the majority of Jews in the east today. As a child I was surrounded by Jewish belief and practice, and I received it willingly.”15 His recollection of an atmosphere of organic Jewish identity reminiscent of many descriptions by children of immigrants is an idyllic portrait of a time before his fall from authentic and integrated identity. Likewise was his turn away from Jewish practice like other narratives: although at first gradual, it is punctuated in the end by a sudden challenge to his belief and teenage rebellion. Specifically, in his recollection, the spark came in the form of a book on natural philosophy. “Here in non-Jewish environs,” he writes, my entire transformation occurred quietly, without any excitement, in rituals no longer observed. I felt no obligation to give an accounting about the fundamental questions, though. I remained steadfast in my deepest convictions and my belief in God and wasn’t, if I remember correctly, a great opponent of ritual. However, a stronger revolution came when, sometime between my 16th and 17th year, I encountered a certain type of literature, one of those inevitable little books, “Power and Matter.” What the culture of my surroundings had not given me, a certain natural philosophy succeeded in doing. I had the feeling that the scales had fallen from my eyes. The world was suddenly comprehensible to me: it was there, and that was it. Life came from some sort of original procreation and existed through further propagation. Soul and spirit were simply functions, if you will, the organizers of matter. Philosophy was useless talk, to say nothing of religion.16

In other narratives of faith lost, a familiar story among eastern and central European Jewish intellectuals, this awakening often led to nihilism, to a political commitment, anarchy, or some other radical philosophy. In many cases, it meant rejection of Judaism altogether, at least until external forces such as anti-Semitism led the wayward back to their

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people. But Birnbaum came to a different conclusion. “This materialistmonist turn in my convictions would have, in retrospect, probably led in earlier days to an anarchist-revolutionary ideology, if not for another force, which I was soon conscious of, that exercised some restraint. This other thing was the awareness that by the end of the seventies of the previous century for a young western Jew of eastern origins, that assimilation was a deplorable error and that Jews must be made cognizant of this fact.”17 As important as these internal realizations were, he acknowledges that an external force may also have had an impact: the growing popularity of nationalism. “Also playing a part—more consciously than unconsciously—was the foundation of nationalism and a somewhat romantic, and perhaps, in retrospect, instinctive satisfaction at remaining somewhat close to my childhood sphere of belief.”18 Losing the shelter that the home, with its religious belief and organic identity, had provided him, Birnbaum found a surrogate in the form of modern nationalism. To the older Birnbaum, his life in retrospect was a search for a home he had lost. Unlike that contained in the more polished “Account,” the description in Freethinker is less formulaic and lacks the teleological undercurrent of the other essay. Rather than point to a driving impulse and sense of mission from the beginning of his mature intellectual thought, he describes uncertainty and confusion. His wrestling with the psychological dissonance of home and the outside world is a theme that also appears in “An Account,” but there it is presented as absolute statements rather than tentative introspection. In Freethinker, he is not convinced of the absolute truth of his beliefs, nor does he write of a depth of conviction that made Jewish nationalism his sole salvation from uncertainty. On the contrary, a turn to Jewish nationalism is but one of many possibilities he could have chosen, and not even the most obvious one. Rather, he was drawn toward nationalism because it could potentially replace what he lost as he left his childhood home and its comforting beliefs; it was, as he himself notes, partially a romantic, even nostalgic, attachment. At the same time, he was a product of the friction of his surroundings. In an environment of increasing chauvinist nationalism, much of it directed against people like the young Jewish Gymnasium student, responding in kind with a nationalism could appear an obvious choice. To put it differently, Birnbaum’s choice as described in Free-

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thinker is a rational one rather than the ephemeral “call” of Jewishness he describes in “An Account.” Consciousness of how contingent his decision was, that it was one among a multitude of choices available, is a theme that continues in Freethinker. As his life went on, with the various twists and turns that we have described, Birnbaum’s thinking about not just Jewish nationalism and peoplehood but very basic philosophical questions steadily evolved. His commitment to Jewish nationalism had grown from the seeds of materialist doubt he experienced as a teenager. Nationalism was a secondary phenomenon, the most appealing choice in expressing his identity in a world of doubt coupled with surroundings in which he was rejected because of his Jewish origins. After decades of belief in this equation, he began slowly to drift away from it. At first, this doubt took the form of rejecting his religious belief. “The great discovery came to me that my materialist superstitions and anxiety about all contacts with the religious sphere [were shaken] by the most violent and decisive utterance of spirit, [an awareness of] the Author of the greatest cultural work of the people and mankind, who oversaw the whole massive cultural apparatus.”19 He concluded that these “materialist superstitions,” rather than being based in rationality, were the most irrational. His first response was a sort of denial and reversion to a skeptical and general deism. “I felt a revulsion within myself about succumbing to a cheap materially based religious awakening [and was not willing] to rest this sublime religious system upon fetish, totem, and taboo and all those other pretty little things it brought along with it. [Thus] I bowed myself before the gods’ heaven of the ancient Greeks, while at the same time feeling myself repelled from it by some kind of indescribable estrangement.”20 In turning to a vague and “rational” spiritualism, Birnbaum recognized that he was experiencing a complete collapse of his materialist philosophy: “I was now not only turning away from all materialism but returning to a familiar sense of spiritualism. This feeling was nothing more than unadorned philosophical affirmation of the spirit of the creator in the world . . . an acceptance of the powerful religious current in mankind from its deepest depths.” But now his awareness of this “current” took specific form: “a flood of a Jewish knowledge of God, a subjective initial rupture of suppressed religious enthusiasm, the daybreak of a soul’s being at home after the long . . . desolation of its

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estrangement.”21 For some time he asked himself questions about the reality of materialism and the role of a creator, not finding much solace in his search: “I found no answer for a long time. . . . I was attached by only a thread to disbelief, that last thread of the materialistic web of rationality I had woven around my soul. But that thread itself was unbelievably strong. . . . I just did not have the certainty of God.”22 Eventually, however, his uncertainty came to an end; like his narrative in “An Account,” it happened suddenly. “Thus, years passed until the day came—I do not remember anymore which day it was—that the thread was rent as if on its own, and I knew God. . . . I comprehended that all of the self-invented objections I had held about him and his being were but proofs of his inaccessibility, and did not cast doubt on his existence. . . . Now all was clear to me: my story of suffering over the years was but a single, great announcement of the All-Powerful before his entry into my consciousness.”23 This moment of enlightenment, similar in both renditions, here lacks the details that make “An Account” the more polished, digestible narrative, such as the ship and the dramatic speech in Saint Petersburg. These details perhaps sprang from an understandable desire to weave a coherent narrative of his conversion. They also make for a much more contained and succinct story line, a form suitable to the context of the Yoyvelbukh. Yet here again the more ambiguous, earlier account has a stronger tone of authenticity and gives the reader a greater sense that Birnbaum’s turn was truly based in an intense period of internal debate and turmoil rather than solely a moment of conversionary inspiration. Birnbaum’s awakening was soon followed by a nearly total inversion of his conception of the Jewish people. No longer thinking out of a naturalist, materialist framework, he felt free to consider the nature of the Jewish people from a religious one. “Then if there was a God—and this was now a certainty to me—and if it was true that the Jewish people, against all of the circumstances that had disposed of other peoples, against all of the obtrusiveness of sense . . . had first recognized God— and this was indeed true—then there could be no doubt that God had another purpose for it, that they had been chosen for the special mission and purpose, to pioneer his recognition in the world.”24 But as firm as his new conviction was and regardless of the liberation it might have provided, the change was not easy. Indeed, the loss required by his dra-

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matic change in worldview exacted a very dear cost. “I will not lie to you and say that it was not a struggle for me to come to this realization. . . . When one has wrapped up one’s whole growth for decades with elastic personal morals and has been absorbed thoroughly in his devotion to materialism, one cannot simply take off all of the European habits and inclinations that the good sense and strong will of Judaism opposes like clothes tried on for a couple of hours.”25 His transition from philosophical materialist and skeptic into a believer, abandoning a worldview he had honed for the majority of his active intellectual life, was a difficult one. It took time, effort, and eventually the helping hand of one who had spent his entire life within the faith to make his change complete. The differences between the two accounts of his turn to Orthodoxy, or what would come to be referred to in the Orthodox camp as Birnbaum’s teshuva, are in the end not drastic. They exist mainly in tone: the dramatic narrative of “An Account” versus the introspection of Freethinker. But there is one very substantive difference between the accounts. Unlike in “Account,” Birnbaum’s account of his teshuva in Freethinker contains an allusion to its existential nature: it was a choice Birnbaum made as a modern Jewish intellectual. He embraced Orthodoxy not as a means to escape the contentious political and philosophical questions that he had struggled with his entire life but to answer them once and for all. As the 1919 essay makes clear, Birnbaum did not perceive his turn to Orthodoxy as one fundamentally at odds with the life he had lived up to that point, at least insofar as it was yet another “Jewish” solution to the same problems. He conceived of his life’s work not as a jumbled series of conversions from one worldview to another. Rather, he saw each period, each affiliation, as one further step of discovery, of ascertaining a transcendent foundation for his understanding of the nature of the Jewish people and, by extension, his own identity.

Tuvia Horowitz: Friendship and the Flowering of Birnbaum’s Belief Interesting though they are, Birnbaum’s memoirs take us only so far in understanding the process of his teshuva. Much is still absent, especially the practical details of his transition. The adoption of Orthodox Juda-

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ism by a secular Jew or convert is intellectually complex, a physically and materially costly undertaking that requires dramatic restructuring of the most basic aspects of day-to-day life. The prospective ba’al ­teshuva must take on the full observance of the commandments, including dietary requirements (kashrut), observance of the Sabbath, and innumerable other observances in order to be fully accepted into the Orthodox community. Even the acceptance of the full complement of religious observance does not complete the process; it is essential that the ba’al teshuva enter into the Orthodox community both figuratively and literally. In fact, it is this last practical aspect of Orthodox religious awakening that is the most intangible and difficult. In addition to the basic details of what to do and how, it requires learning, as if a child, a full slate of cultural signs and norms often intentionally obscure to outsiders. And in a period such as that of Birnbaum’s transition, marked by a hemorrhaging of the ranks of believers to the secular world with very little movement in the opposite direction, the materials available to guide the penitent were few. Those halachic tracts and guides that were present, the various compendia of Jewish law and practice produced during the period, were for the most part written in technical rabbinical Hebrew. Even when translated, usually only into Yiddish, they preserved this idiom and presumed a high degree of received religious knowledge; they were designed to answer practical questions for one already steeped in traditional observance and texts rather than to inform the uninitiated. To succeed as an outsider coming in, one needed a human guide and mentor, someone within the fold who could serve as an exemplar of both ideal and everyday religious life, including not just liturgical aspects of how to pray and observe Shabbat and the festivals but also what and how to eat, how to dress, indeed details as obscure as how to wash one’s body and tie one’s shoes, especially in the Hasidic community toward which Birnbaum gravitated. The net result of this, by design, is that penitents are no longer able to be a part of the secular or non-Jewish world as they once had been. The would-be observant Jew must undertake this change willingly and unreservedly. Thus, to fully grasp the nature of Birnbaum’s belief, it is necessary to understand his physical transformation as much as his intellectual one. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Birnbaum’s published writings are silent about these details. It would be too much to expect that as

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he was undergoing the process himself, he would have the time or the inclination to step back and observe in a detached way what he was experiencing. He may well have been unaware of how the overall magnitude of his change appeared to the outside observer and felt no need to describe it. He may also have been embarrassed to admit the amount that he had to learn (or relearn) about the faith from which he was not even a generation removed, which he knew intimately as a child. Given his early experience and his linguistic aptitude—he was clearly fluent in Yiddish and likely accomplished enough in Hebrew to be able to utilize the available halachic literature—the practical transition may have been easier for him than one who came to Orthodoxy with little background. He was even the scion of two families of moderate significance in the Galician Jewish towns from which they had come. Even with these advantages, Birnbaum still needed a guide to socialization, if not introduction into the living Orthodox world—and that was something very different from what his childhood home would have provided. Where the published writings on this issue are silent, another source offers important insight: a remarkable correspondence Birnbaum carried on with Tuvia Horowitz, a young Galician rabbi whom he met in late 1915. This correspondence chronicles the day-to-day lives of both Birnbaum and Horowitz, their reaction to the events that caught them up during and after the war, and the relationship that developed between them. It provides a fascinating glimpse of a secular outsider as he entered the Orthodox community and ultimately its political world. Although limited principally to letters Horowitz sent to Birnbaum (Birnbaum’s letters were most likely lost when Horowitz and his family were murdered in the Holocaust), what remains of the correspondence is vivid. It is marked by intimacy and breadth of subject matter, casting nuanced light onto Horowitz’s personal life (would that we had more of Birnbaum’s reaction). They are also an invaluable window into the most occluded and tumultuous years of Birnbaum’s life. To one seeking the roots of Birnbaum’s turn to Orthodoxy, the first encounter with Horowitz might come in an essay adjacent to Birnbaum’s “An Account,” in the volume issued in honor of the latter’s ­sixtieth birthday. There, Rabbi Tuvia Horowitz, an executive in the ­Agudath ­Israel’s highly successful girls’ school system Bays Yaakov, described his first meeting with Birnbaum in a short piece, “On the Threshold of Two

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Worlds.” Unlike all the other articles in the volume, for the most part homiletics on Birnbaum’s life and his importance to the religious world, it is strikingly personal. He describes a moment in his own youth, in the midst of the First World War, his first journey to Vienna. Horowitz had arrived in the winter of 1915 to encounter a city at war, temporary home to thousands of Jewish refugees from the battle zones of Galicia and Bukovina. Possibly in Vienna on business for his uncle, the Vizhnitzer rebbe, who may well have had many followers among the refugees Horowitz encountered, he had snuck away to undertake a much more personal errand. Arriving on Zirkusgasse in the heart of Leopoldstadt, past its terminus near the Donaukanal, which featured then (as now) a small park amid the apartment blocks, Horowitz encountered “the epicenter in which the entire living tragedy unfolded.” Crowded in the park were “those displaced from the Russian invasion . . . their hopeless eyes yearning for a few coins to buy a little piece of black bread” to feed their families. Dispirited and depressed, Horowitz “averted [his] eyes so as not to look in the faces of those impoverished that [he] knew, so that they would not be further debased.”26 Horowitz’s destination that day was 33 Zirkusgasse, the office of the Jewish War Archives, a publication under the auspices of the World Zion­ist Organization that documented the impact of the war on Jewish communities in central and eastern Europe. It was here, he had learned, that Nathan Birnbaum had taken a position as an editor. But as Horo­ witz makes clear as he describes his passage through this panoply of suffering, his journey was no less than a pilgrimage. Alerted, somehow, to the existence of a former Zionist who had turned to religion, he made a journey that had the trappings of a supplicant visiting an occluded holy man. “I sought an earnest word of comfort and of hope. I had heard that Birnbaum, the former Acher, had quietly become a ba’al teshuva and that, in spite of the suffering and stress of being a father whose sons were all in the army . . . carried around with him a plan for the regeneration of the Jewish people on a foundation of faith and Torah.” Upon entering the office, he discovered not the prophet he sought but instead a dishearteningly prosaic office scene, complete with clerks amused at the sight of his Hasidic garb. “I walked without formality past the flamboyant and obnoxious German [Jews] with their silly faces that smirked upon seeing me in my long coat, beard, and side-

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curls. ‘You’re here for Birnbaum, I presume?’ one of the group asked me mockingly.” But Horowitz was not unprepared for this reception. “I understood then what I had heard earlier, that the workers in the Zionist office tormented him, laughed at him, and whispered to each other: ‘Birnbaum has gone crazy in his old age. He doesn’t write on Shabbos—he wants to make this place a beys-medresh!’ ” Finally, in the depths of the office, past the ignorant gatekeepers placed, Horowitz intimates, to test his faith in the holy man he sought, he found Birnbaum. Struck nearly dumb, he made his introduction: “I didn’t have enough courage to say, ‘I came to you to hear an honorable word in this world of filth and lies. I want to know about your teshuva.’ For that I was still too young, and the appearance of the name ‘Birnbaum’ on the window of the office had taken away my last bit of courage.”27 Although cast as a near-mythic pilgrim’s progress, the recollections of an older man recalling a formative moment of his life, the portrait of both himself and of Birnbaum that Horowitz paints in this touching piece tells us a great deal about both men at that moment. Horowitz, a young rabbi from the small city of Groysvardayn in the northeastern Hungarian crownlands, in Vienna for unknown reasons, sought solace from the pitiful sight of the Jewish refugees displaced by the war through the story of a new ba’al teshuva—and not just any, but the “former Acher.”28 That Horowitz focused on Birnbaum’s nom de plume is important. It highlights the surrealism of the meeting from Horowitz’s perspective; he, a young and pious Hasid, seeking out a man in the offices that housed the Zionist epitome of heresy, for religious inspiration. It is clear from his description that Horowitz had some awareness of Birnbaum before he met him. But in the deeply anti-Zionist Hasidic world from which Horowitz came, little more would have been known about Birnbaum, the secular Zionist Acher, than that he was a dangerous and heterodox figure, to the extent that he would have been known at all. In these few words of description, Birnbaum emerges as a very different figure than he has appeared before. Of course, the most familiar element is present: Horowitz describes him as a man who is obsessively preoccupied with the deep questions of Jewish identity and survival despite pressing issues of life and death—specifically of his three sons in the Austrian army. It is remarkable that, as little as Horowitz probably knew about Birnbaum, he was aware of a “plan for the regeneration of

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the Jewish people on the foundation of faith and Torah.” His work in this regard was a beacon to the young Horowitz, who was drawn to him almost irrationally and in spite of his distance both by geography and by dint of background. And far from the respected and dignified intellectual he may have expected, he found a vulnerable office clerk, a worried father, the butt of jokes from colleagues. Yet when Birnbaum spoke, he bantered familiarly with Horowitz and put the young man at ease, so much so that he felt comfortable enough to make a provocative request: that Birnbaum not only explain the nature of his newfound faith but defend it in the light of a past deeply enmeshed in the heresy of Zionism and replete with a published record of ideas abhorrent to many in the world from which Horowitz came. Birnbaum’s response surpassed even his exalted expectations: “Against these foolish writings,” Birnbaum responded, “I can only answer that I was young and impudent and that I had no egoistic motive.” Then, as if to put to rest the deepest question that Horowitz’s words implied, he stated gravely, “I have not become religious because of peoplehood; on the contrary, only now that I have become religious do I have the correct idea about the Jewish people.” With these words, the birth of their friendship was sealed. “We became very close after that first meeting.”29 But, Horowitz recalls in 1924, a kernel of doubt remained: “Upon returning home I, as a religious man, still could not believe that ‘Acher’ could actually be a real believer. . . . I sent him a letter with ten questions that posed the contents of the 13 principles [of faith according to Maimonides], [to discern] whether he would display repentance befitting a believer.” Once again, he was not disappointed. “Birnbaum answered my questions like every thinking believer, only with a bit more brilliance.” And in a final, touching note, Horowitz relates that “in the first letter Birnbaum gave a foretaste [of his thought] that through me he would be able to come nearer to religious Judaism, and he wrote: ‘Perhaps God sent me to you so that I should realize my plan with your help and come into the circle that I must enter and to go on the path I feel I must go.’ ”30 Although casting himself as a supplicant, albeit one with sufficient wisdom to recognize Birnbaum’s holiness before anyone else, Horowitz’s essay reveals the degree to which he was a catalyst in ending Birnbaum’s isolation and easing his entrance into the Orthodox world.

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Although written more than eight years after the meeting took place, this essay touches on all the central themes that emerge in the ­Birnbaum-Horowitz correspondence. When the two men met in Vienna, both were in deep turmoil. Horowitz, a twenty-two-year-old bachelor living in Groysvardayn with his uncle by marriage, the rebbe, or spiritual leader, of the Vizhnitzer Hasidic community and his family, was a young man yearning for more than the narrow range of careers that his life’s preparation offered him.31 While he points to war malaise as the cause of his spiritual disquiet in “On the Threshold,” and letters to Birnbaum indicate a great deal of concern for the state of Jewish existence in the midst of the war, far more frequent among his complaints are frustration and unhappiness at his life in Groysvardayn. Although located for much of the war in the medium-sized city, the court of the rebbe Israel Hagar (known popularly after the title of one of his books as the “Ahavas ­Yisroel”) was actually from the Bukovinian town of Vyzhnytzia (­Vizhnitz/Wiznitz). Only a short distance from the cosmopolitan capital Czernowitz, the town was very distant culturally; before the First World War, it was an enclave of religious traditionalism centered almost entirely on the court of the Vizhnitzer rebbe and his Hasidim.32 Although displaced from the security and insularity of the town that had been its home since the beginning of the dynasty with Rebbe Israel Hagar’s grandfather, the world of Tuvia Horowitz in the Vizhnitz court-in-exile in Groysvardayn was extremely isolated. As a Vizhnitzer Hasid, a nephew by marriage and member of the rebbe’s household, Horowitz lived at the center of this world, and in his letters to Birnbaum he describes his intellectual isolation from this obvious source of community. He identifies few friends besides his uncle, his cousins (he acts as a tutor for two of them, Rukhele and Devoyrele), and some other men in the community, all of whom are marked by a common thread of eccentricity: a moderate engagement with the worldly political and intellectual currents running through European Jewish society. He describes his circle to Birnbaum in mid-1917: “My crowded little community stands now as Devoyrele and Rukhele, who are truly like sisters to me; . . . Fesler, a Galician refugee, a very intelligent lawyer . . . is not as religious as I would like (he is a Zionist and a bit of a maskil, only he already believes and is on the way back!); Shapiro, the son of a Bukovina rabbi; Motorirt . . . ; [and] Rat, a reli-

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gious Zionist youth (Moshe Rat’s brother). Imagine the high degree of honor I have earned in this tight circle because of your name.”33 While in no way theologically or socially removed from the world that revolved around an assumed traditionalism (except perhaps Fesler), this small cell was nonetheless mildly transgressive, made so by its interest in the still mysterious project proposed by Nathan Birnbaum. Horowitz’s impatience with his surroundings is further illustrated by an account he gives of his conflict with some of his uncle’s followers in Groysvardayn. These unnamed men appear more than once in the correspondence as critics and opponents, complaining about the religious permissiveness of his friends and ideas.34 As unhappy as he had been previously, a turn for the worse occurs when Horowitz expresses his desire to escape his seemingly inevitable future. In a surprisingly personal letter, Horowitz relates in detail his preoccupations: “Yesterday there was discussion between the Hasidim and my uncle, in which they told him that . . . I have become corrupted and [that they] have discovered I support myself by teaching my cousins Devoyrele and Rukhele subjects like Hebrew and Jewish history. One [of them] claimed that I am corrupting their children. The other testified that I had a picture of a Jewish doctor who goes about bare-headed, which he mistook to be of Dr. Herzl (he meant your picture).” Despite his frustration, Horowitz was not entirely without quarter; his illustrious uncle did protect him somewhat. “My uncle, who knows me better than these Hasidim do, told me all this with a smile . . . and I said that I really strive to make those children Jewish who are already a little affected by the enlightened world. . . . I have still farther to go to plant yiddishkeit in all places where I know it has gone out. . . . My uncle is satisfied.” But even his uncle’s protection does not stop the whispers. “The Hasidim, however, [continue to] persecute me a bit secretly. They look at me but don’t stand near me. The . . . sense [one gets] from these Hasidim is that it is as though I were no longer convinced of faith and become taken a bit with the maskilim, and [since] I am tainted with maskilic opinions, I do not seem so kosher. Perhaps they are correct?”35 Letters like this that describe the provincialism and lack of intellectual freedom of life in Groysvardayn were clearly an outlet for Horowitz’s frustrations. At the same time, his detailed, if sad, accounts of the difficulties encountered on Birnbaum’s behalf were useful intelligence for Birnbaum. Because the attacks Horowitz was ex-

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periencing might seem to an outsider like Birnbaum to be arcane in the extreme, they shed light on the importance of a delicate touch in reaching this new audience. They show, among other things, that in Horowitz’s environment, teaching more advanced texts and even Hebrew to women carried a taint of impropriety; teaching Jewish history to boys or girls carried a slight hint of heresy, as it was viewed as too close to intellectual endeavors that were constantly suspected of undermining traditional belief, or what Horowitz describes vaguely as “maskilic opinions.” Importantly, and to even Horowitz’s dismay, the accusations are made without any regard to their truth and do not end despite the tacit support of the rebbe himself. To Horowitz, the lack of reception even on the most local level was a sobering sign indeed, and Birnbaum likely was able to learn a great deal from these descriptions. Undeterred, Horowitz went on in his letters to outline his own ideas about how to transform Orthodoxy, beginning with his position and that of his peers. In spite of some opprobrium from his closest community, Horowitz pressed forward both with his small cell of collaborators and in his correspondence with Birnbaum. Most important, he began to test the idea that would ultimately be the fruit of the two men’s collaboration, the Oylim movement. “I am writing today to my friend Poritz [of] a plan that occurred to me as the groundwork for the ‘Oylim.’ . . . We should begin to work on a program of an association of all religious intellectuals. . . . [Young] rabbis have no certainty of making a living unless they take a job where they are dependent on uneducated householders. [But] with united strength, we free youths not yet dependent on the community will be in a stronger position [so that] the laypeople will . . . not have any authority over a rabbi.”36 Horo­ witz’s ambivalence about his destiny as a communal rabbi in the constricted milieu of small-town Galicia is clear, as is his discontent with the prospect of very soon being dependent for life on the “uneducated householders” (am-ha’aretsn balebatim). At the very least, Horowitz’s frustration plants the seeds in Birnbaum’s mind of a cause, a line of attack by which he could engage with Orthodoxy not just as a new penitent but as a potential leader. These glimpses of Horowitz’s situation also provide insight into the tumultuous inner life of the man he encountered on the cold winter day in 1915. After decades at the center of Jewish nationalism, the Birnbaum

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of Horowitz’s description was much diminished, his once considerable influence clearly on the wane. At the same time, sparks of what lay ahead, of new possibilities in the world he had entered out of his new religious convictions, were becoming visible. As Horowitz’s awareness of “the former Acher” shows, his name remained familiar to many, even beyond nationalist and cultural circles. But these sparks needed to be shielded and carefully nurtured; to the vast majority of religious Jews in Europe that knew of him, he was still an outsider, a freethinker, a heretic. His past notoriety, even though it would eventually become the basis for his embrace by the most powerful interwar Orthodox political organization, the Agudath Israel, was then still a liability. No longer taken seriously among his old colleagues who saw his transformation as bizarre, he was viewed with suspicion by the world he sought to enter. And his personal circumstances were similarly tenuous: for the first time in his adult life, Birnbaum had no platform from which he could articulate his evolving ideology to a wider public. He had no newspaper and few speaking opportunities; at the Jewish War Archive he was reduced to overseeing a publication that catalogued the slow, bloody destruction of the eastern European Jewish communities he had come to love.37 His three sons, Solomon, Menachem, and Uriel, had been inducted into the Austrian army; Solomon and Uriel would be seriously wounded in combat. In spite of his personal circumstances (or perhaps because of them) Birnbaum was well on the way toward integrating his newfound religious belief into day-to-day practice when he met Horowitz in 1915. Horowitz’s 1924 essay hints that Birnbaum had already adopted Sabbath observance, a benchmark of Orthodoxy. By the time Horowitz inquired more deeply into Birnbaum’s beliefs and intentions in 1916, a prerequisite for their continued relationship, Birnbaum had accepted an Orthodox worldview as well. In one remarkable letter, the mate to that to which Horowitz alludes in “On the Threshold,” he asks Birnbaum a series of questions testing the depth of his intellectual commitment to Orthodoxy. Although Birnbaum’s answers are lost, we can glean from the questions asked, as well as from Horowitz’s later enthusiasm, something about Birnbaum’s progress in religious thought.38 Although he would later protest that he was earnestly interrogating Birnbaum about the depth of his newfound religious belief, his ques-

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tions belie any serious skepticism. His letter begins with a suggestive quotation from the prophet Ezekiel (40:4) in which the prophet is shown by a divine figure a vision of the rebuilt Temple and its dimensions in great detail. It alludes to the themes of redemption and the real and metaphoric construction that would become the centerpiece of Birnbaum’s religious advocacy, indicating that the two had not discussed these themes in detail when they had met. “And the man said to me, son of man, behold with thy eyes, and hear with thy ears, and put thy mind to all that I show thee: for thou was brought here, in order that they might be shown to thee: declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel.”39 Unclear from the context is whether Horo­ witz intended it to refer to Birnbaum as the penitent receiving the divine ­vision or, perhaps more likely, that it was Birnbaum who was the angelic figure and Horowitz himself Ezekiel. Continuing in an only slightly more prosaic tone, Horowitz continues to thank Birnbaum for his earlier letter and expresses sadness at having to leave Vienna and no longer receive Birnbaum’s “oral Torah” (in his words, Torah sh-ba’al peh). “My soul deeply yearns . . . to know at least the essence of your new program [shita]. . . . [I hope that] you will teach me the way ‘a man should choose for himself,’ as it is written in the Torah. And there will be glory brought to Birnbaum’s deeds.”40 Despite later assertions, Horowitz had already made up his mind about Birnbaum, and his opinion was that he had discovered a man of prophetic stature. Why this is the case, why it was Birnbaum who took such a major place in firing the young man’s religious imagination, is never completely clear. As the letter continues, Horowitz does submit a questionnaire consisting of eleven questions to Birnbaum, and although he later claimed they were patterned after the thirteen Principles of Maimonides, widely held as a definitive statement of dogma in the Orthodox world (those punctilious about their morning prayer frequently recited them every day), in fact they are less about Birnbaum’s belief than about his mysterious new plan, or shita, for the future of Orthodoxy. While it is true that he does ask doctrinal questions, these questions and their answers were intended for a wider audience, not to reassure Horowitz. He asks perfunctorily how Birnbaum arrived at his new religious worldview and whether he appreciated the potential conflict between his plan that was “built on [his] investigation into

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philosophy” and the “truth of our tradition in light of the evidence of archeology.” (What Horowitz means by “archeology” is unclear; presumably, lacking any organized non-Jewish education, he was unclear of the distinction and meant the basic challenges of modern science and philosophy to belief.) He asks whether Birnbaum accepted that “our Torah, received at Mount Sinai” was given in its entirety, in its oral and written forms without addition or fault, to Moses; that is, whether the entire body of Jewish law, including written and oral Torah, was given to Moses at Mount Sinai, a basic premise of Orthodoxy. He is asked what his preferred “custom” [minhag] is, that is, whether he followed the Sephardic or Ashkenazic customs of Jewish law and liturgy, whether he followed the philosophical model of the Hasidic world or that of their opponents, the Mitnagdim, and what his awareness of Jewish mysticism and esoterica is. These questions could have been intended to test Birnbaum’s Jewish knowledge.41 But it is in the final questions that Horowitz’s intent is revealed. He asks about Birnbaum’s current relationship with Zionism and his opinions regarding “Eretz Yisrael” and “language.” Really the same question, they probe for any lingering Zionist sympathies on Birnbaum’s part. To Horowitz, the relationship of his new friend with Zionism was as weighty as the most fundamental issues of faith. As it had grown in strength and numbers over the first decade of the twentieth century, Zionism had come to be seen as an increasingly immediate threat to the traditional Jewish world and its leaders. There were two reasons for this. Philosophically, Zionism challenged the widely accepted principle that God alone, and according to his divine wisdom, could accomplish the redemption. For Jews to undertake premature activity to accomplish it—to “force the end”—was considered deeply transgressive.42 Even more threatening was the perception in the traditional world that Zionists themselves, irrespective of their attitude toward eschatology, were a force for rejection of religion, a means by which libertinism and heterodoxy could enter the Jewish people under the cover of a “Jewish” ideology. For that minority moderately receptive to it, the cultural orientation of the Zionist movement—which had increasingly embraced a totalized vision of nonreligious Jewish cultural renewal, ironically the same Jewish renaissance camp that had once attracted Birnbaum—had energized Orthodox antipathy. Birnbaum had to assure Horowitz that

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he had cut all ties with the Zionist movement. This rationale also explains the two last, most pregnant questions. Horowitz asked cryptically about the “foundation” Birnbaum hoped to build and continues by querying his belief in the Messianic redemption: “Do you believe in the Redemption? Or do you perhaps feel that someone has already arisen in our days?” This last question shows explicitly that Horo­witz sensed the possible roots of Birnbaum’s teshuva in the hope to create yet another Jewish national movement, this time from within the ­Orthodox ranks.43 Apparently recapitulating Horowitz’s earlier concerns about Birnbaum’s (secular) Zionism, this question distills the letter’s real purpose: a demand for Birnbaum to outline his new program for the Orthodox renovation of European Jewish life. It was around this “new shita,” as Horowitz would call it, that the relationship between the two men coalesced. As an ambitious but frustrated rabbinical student in 1915, when Horowitz entered the office of the Jewish War Archive, he was in search of a cause that would invest his belief with vitality and direction. As his questions indicate, the man whom he encountered in Vienna as though an occluded prophet gave him the inspiration he sought. Although in 1915 Birnbaum found himself on the outside of every group he had once led, the enthusiasm that marked his involvement in previous causes remained. In fact, Birnbaum had already started envisioning a framework that required an individual such as Horowitz in order to succeed. When they met, Horowitz was a young man who sought a cause and a leader to whom he could devote his intense but undirected enthusiasm. Birnbaum was a leader with a cause, but he lacked the practical knowledge and followers to make his theories a viable movement within the cloistered Orthodox world and sought a loyal mediator for his new message. There is, however, obviously more to the letters than their programmatic content. The remarkable intimacy of the letters allows us access as no other source does to the texture of the two men’s relationship and, by extension, to Birnbaum’s inner life during this period. Most immediately noticeable is the tone with which Horowitz addresses Birnbaum throughout, that of an intimate adviser to his commander, of a favored disciple to his teacher. It is a tone of obedience yet familiarity, of submission mixed with collegiality. Despite Horowitz’s superior traditional education, Orthodox connections, and pedigree

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(always, in this context, an important matter) due to his birth close to the center of the Orthodox world, he regarded Birnbaum almost as a prophet sent to lead him and his people into the messianic age. 44 The young Horowitz often shows uncanny sensitivity to Birnbaum’s personal conflict and insight into his struggles, but such insights are always addressed with a disciple’s deference. Yet even in their deference, they provide insight into Birnbaum’s character unmatched by any other source. “I know that you inhabit such a high region [that] I can myself scarcely [hope to] struggle up to with my small spark of a soul,” he writes in 1918. “But looking up I can certainly see and understand what you want. . . . I understand how sad it is for you that you must stay in the midst of the impure multitudes [erev rav]45 . . . in the midst of the turmoil of the world of the party mechanics.” A startling insight, relevant to Birnbaum’s entire career, Horowitz goes on to relate a conversation that further illustrates the stature Birnbaum had among the circle of followers organized around Horowitz. “Today our Rukhele made an apt remark about you: ‘The prophet cannot count on any rigor from the people. Even Jeremiah himself had little concern over that which they said about him on all sides.’ For you the way is clear—you want only [to exert] prophetic influence—that [all should be] blown around in the wind of your spirit—which should itself then materialize in life—through your flaming words.”46 A fascinating dynamic is displayed; while Horowitz consciously casts himself as the supplicant, his subtle reproof is unmistakable. But he is aware of the role he plays even as he would likely deny he has anything to offer but unconditional support to Birnbaum, with the latter’s soul inhabiting a level he could never imagine. Nor is he insincere. His comparison of Birnbaum to the prophet Jeremiah, and later in the same letter to Moses himself, reflects the selfless promotion that Horowitz would undertake on Birnbaum’s behalf for the rest of his life. Birnbaum, wisely, also trusted Horowitz deeply; not only must he have asked his young friend the personal questions that would have spurred this letter but he also seems to have taken such comments as a matter of course with Horowitz. Horowitz was a devoted lieutenant who frequently reiterated his faith in the ideas of his leader, despite his inability to comprehend their depths with his “small spark of a soul,” but also willing, when warranted, to gently speak the truth as he saw it.

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The sincerity of Horowitz’s letter is further bolstered by the candor with which he reveals a surprising amount about himself and his surroundings. It is an indulgence born of Horowitz’s exuberance at feeling himself a confidant of the great man, of having Birnbaum’s ear as a trusted adviser. We have already seen the detail with which he describes the conflicts he has with a faction of Hasidim in Groysvardayn. He also does not hesitate to go into some detail about conflict with his parents regarding his bachelor status and his reluctance to accept a post as a rabbi of a small town in eastern Hungary, as is expected of one in his position.47 He writes Birnbaum of his personal relationships, his financial status, his health and numerous visits to the spas of Bohemia himself and with his uncle’s entourage.48 He describes to Birnbaum his first impressions of his fiancée when he is engaged in 1918, as well as their brief courtship in Budapest. When they are finally married, he describes in some detail the wedding itself.49 Perhaps nothing reveals his affection for Birnbaum more than a few short lines he writes upon receiving a photograph Birnbaum sent him (probably the same picture that the Hasidim in Groysvardayn mistook for an image of Herzl): “I received your picture. I thank you with my whole heart. To me it is [an object] of great importance, and it gives life to my spirit that I am able to look upon your face.”50 We cannot know for sure Birnbaum’s reaction to this openness without his side of the correspondence. It appears that he maintained a slight degree of aloofness and distance, an acknowledgment of their mutual stature, which may have been a conscious choice by both. From Birnbaum’s side, as the older, more politically sophisticated man, it was important that he maintain some air of authority. At the same time, extrapolating from other, more complete correspondences, Birnbaum often tempered his distance from his admirers with palpable warmth and personal concern, especially in later life. This may well have encouraged Horowitz to write with candor about his more intimate thoughts and experiences. Most telling of the consciousness with which both, especially Horowitz, cultivated a master/disciple relationship is a touching detail early in the correspondence. Horowitz, enraptured but cautious for Birnbaum’s sake about the rapport the two men had achieved, once again gently corrects him in late 1916, apparently in reference to an earlier letter. He insists that his elder refer to him only with the infor-

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mal Yiddish pronoun du, not out of intimacy but to acknowledge their respective stations. “One thing I ask you, that you say ‘du’ to me, and not ‘ir’[;]a teacher must not refer to his student with ‘ir.’”51 But directly related to the intimacy of the two men’s relationship was one of the most important themes that recurs throughout the correspondence: messianism. As we have already seen, Horowitz likened Birnbaum at various times to prophets, including Moses, the paradigmatic leader of Israel. We have already seen the provocative quotation from Ezekiel, written even before Horowitz had a definitive sense of the level of Birnbaum’s religiosity, which in context certainly alludes to an eschatological vision. What, exactly, was the depth of Horowitz’s hopes in his friend and teacher? One would be on shaky ground to suggest that Horowitz viewed Birnbaum as a messianic figure, given the depth of suspicion in the Orthodox world toward messianic pretenders. However, as a Hasid, Horowitz may not have shared the reflexive suspicion of any and all murmurings of messianism typical of non-Hasidic Orthodoxy. Members of Hasidism, a movement whose origins in the eighteenth century centered on ecstatic worship and a strong belief in the power of the individual personality, usually played out in the figure of the rebbe or tsadik, were often more open to extreme interpretations of events and behavior than non-Hasidim. As the behavior of at least two groups shows, belief among Hasidim in the imminent arrival of the Messiah has an intensity that can be bewildering to outsiders. For example, so strong was the belief of the Breslov Hasidim, followers of the early nineteenth-century Nahman of Breslov, that their leader was the harbinger of the messianic age that he was never succeeded after his death as is customary among other Hasidic groups; they preferred instead to erect an elaborate cult of personality around him to sustain the movement.52 Today many Hasidim of the ChabadLubavitch movement, followers of the late rebbe Menacham Mendel Schneerson, believe so firmly that their rebbe was or is the Messiah that his death in 1993 has thrown the movement—one of the most visible Jewish groups of any denomination—into a state of deep internal turmoil.53 The idea, then, that Horowitz, a product of the same broad branch of Orthodoxy, scion of some of the most important personalities in its history, might harbor messianic expectations in the unique decision of a famous secular Jewish leader (and, at least according to

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family tradition, a descendant of King David) embracing Orthodoxy— Hasidism no less—cannot be dismissed out of hand. At the very least, he saw Birnbaum as a unique case, whose teshuva had implications that transcended his own life and affected the Jewish world as a whole. A remarkable letter of 1916 also offers a tantalizing hint that the question of messianic promise was never far from either’s mind. In a lengthy passage that seems to be in response to a query from Birnbaum, but that also may well have been part of a much larger conversation, Horowitz explicates in detail one of the central Talmudic passages discussing the arrival of the Messiah. “Let me just relate to you the [primary] source about the messianic period—that is, the Gemara in Sanhedrin page 98a,” Horowitz writes. Reciting the passage, he writes, “R. Alexandri said: R. Yehoshua ben Levi noted a contradiction: On the one hand it is written ‘in its time,’ but on the other hand it is written ‘I will hasten it.’ If the Jews are deserving, ‘I will hasten it.’ If they are not deserving, ‘in its time.’” This much is the whole section about the issue, after it states from the same R. Alexandri: “R. Yehoshua ben Levi noted a contradiction: It is written: ‘And behold! With the clouds of heaven, one like a man came’; but it is also written: ‘A humble man, riding on a donkey.’ If the Jews are deserving, the messiah will come ‘with the clouds of heaven’; if they are not deserving, he will come ‘as a humble man, riding on a donkey.’” There is no other opinion. And this is the entire explanation from the verse; it is a well-known thing; every learned person thinks thus. But despite this, in [a] deeper sense there is not such a strong contradiction between your words and this section. Because you do not believe, as you have said, [that] “in the right time” is the time that is established by God for the last deadline, like the simple explanation in the Gemara. [Rather] you think that “the right time” is . . . when you yourself alone work to realize it. . . . This I believe myself.54

Here both the concerns Birnbaum probably felt with the religious implications of the movement he hoped to establish are revealed, as well as the degree to which he relied upon Horowitz to supply him with sound theological information. Although we do not know the question that prompted Horowitz’s citation, it seems that Birnbaum was troubled by the possibility that active pursuit of the messianic age, a key theme in his emerging religious thought, was potentially in opposition to the

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simple reading of a key Talmudic passage that deals with the subject. He relies on Horowitz’s expertise to clarify the text and to alleviate his concern. This Horowitz does, confirming that the text does not reject the power of an individual to attempt to stimulate the redemption through his own action. The power Birnbaum grants to Horowitz as an interpreter of religious thought indicates the trust that Birnbaum placed in the knowledge and opinions of his young friend. At the same time, it may offer a hint of the expectations of the younger man. Irrespective of messianic overtones, Horowitz’s belief in his own importance as a mediator introducing Birnbaum to his world was neither misplaced nor imagined. Birnbaum had a real need for someone like Horowitz. A comparison of Birnbaum’s arrival in Orthodox politics with other instances where he had modulated his approach to questions of Jewish nationalism and identity illustrates why. In each instance, Birnbaum faced an identical set of accusations that he was a dilettante, an opportunist, or at least that he was not to be taken entirely seriously. It is with the same voice that Herzl called him a socialist, with which his departure was judged a rejection of Zionism in general. Perhaps most embarrassingly, it was this voice that dogged him during his embrace of Yiddish and autonomism. The demonstrated seriousness of his commitment to each group, his exhaustive campaigning in his writing, and activism for each cause did not spare him accusations that he was fickle, if not mercurial. In the case of Yiddish in particular, he was excoriated by his opponents within and outside the movement, based on overstated accusations that he lacked requisite knowledge of Yiddish to give an opening speech at the conference devoted to its preservation.55 When he left Czernowitz in 1910 and distanced himself from the movement, his reputation was likely even more diminished, as Horowitz’s remarks regarding the taunts of Zionist office workers indicate. But by the time he moved into Orthodoxy, Birnbaum had reckoned with his mistakes and was reluctant to publicly testify to his life’s new direction without laying some kind of groundwork with his potential constituency. Indeed, demonstrating the congruence of his thought, and thus his seriousness, as he entered the Orthodox world was a much more daunting proposition than it was to switch from one to another form of secular nationalism. Even with its expectations of lifestyle and belief and entrenched suspicion of outsiders, Birnbaum’s teshuva was compli-

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cated by his desire not just to enter the Orthodox world but to exert influence as a leader within it. His embrace of Orthodoxy contained an implicit critique as well as a belief that he held the key to its invigoration as a major force in Jewish Europe. Horowitz’s arrival at Birnbaum’s doorstep in 1915 was thus auspicious. His connections, his age, his fairly open-minded search for meaning, his intellectual restlessness—all of these traits made him an ideal assistant for Birnbaum’s transition into the Orthodox world. The change from a secular to religious lifestyle could not have been an easy one for Birnbaum, and it is apparent that Horowitz played a central role as a guide in negotiating both the practical and esoteric elements of his new observance. An indication of the degree of this influence is Birnbaum’s decision to adopt Horowitz’s own Hasidic minhag (the specific form of his religious observance)—not a light decision by any means, for the form of one’s halachic observance is usually passed down through the family and is changed only for the most compelling reasons.56 No doubt Nathan’s father, who migrated to Vienna in the early nineteenth century from Galicia, had his own minhag, aspects of which he imparted to his son; it may, in fact, have been a Hasidic one. Yet when Birnbaum became religious, he did not seek to reconstruct it nor to attribute his practices to his father but rather to Horowitz. Birnbaum drew much support from Horowitz in his personal life as well. Horowitz was constantly concerned about his friend’s welfare. Many of his letters begin with inquiries about the health of Birnbaum’s son Uriel and with prayers for his recovery.57 On several occasions, he expresses concern for Birnbaum’s financial state, indicating awareness of his economic hardships as a result of the scarcities of the war. One poignant example of Horowitz’s concern is found in a letter from May 1918: “I can no longer be silent about your material condition, and [knowing of it] it is difficult for me to have the security that I have. . . . You should nourish yourself better than you do now. . . . It is not only the body that suffers in hardship but the soul and spirit as well. Even such an idealist as the Ha-Ari z”l [Isaac Luria] said . . . ‘with good healthy flesh . . . the soul is cheered also.’ ”58 The effects of transitioning into the Orthodox world, anxiety about the ongoing war in which all of his sons were combatants, the loss of purposefulness—all must have weighed heavily upon Birnbaum. Horowitz, as a dutiful and confiden-

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tial adviser, comforted and did all he could to help in the resolution of each of these conflicts. Perhaps most important to Birnbaum was the access Horowitz offered Birnbaum into the Orthodox world. Birnbaum arguably derived an even greater advantage from the relationship by virtue of Horowitz’s birth into a family of rabbinic pedigree, close to the leader of a major Hasidic dynasty. The young Horowitz could provide invaluable connections as well as confer upon him a seal of legitimacy, a haskama for both his Orthodox credentials and his plan for Orthodoxy. Horowitz was also capable of advising Birnbaum on how best to present himself in an Orthodox milieu. For example, in 1917, preceding the publication of Words of the Ascenders, the ultimate expression of the Birnbaum-Horowitz collaboration, Birnbaum seems to have asked Horowitz whether he should publish the work under his own name or a pseudonym. Horowitz advises the former: “It is my opinion that you should simply use the same name that you are known by, that is to say, ‘Nathan.’ And the issue of naming is a small thing.”59 Though seemingly a small detail, that Birnbaum was able to ask Horowitz this question is important. Because of the latter’s youth, adoration, and self-imposed subordination, Birnbaum was able to ask of Horowitz details about practice, custom, halacha, even the best way to present himself to an Orthodox audience without fearing the embarrassment of asking someone closer to his age and status. And Horowitz, always a gentle guide, was a willing adviser.

Words of the Ascenders and God’s People: The Creation of the Oylim The final product of this relationship, the 1917 booklet Words of the Ascenders, heralded Birnbaum’s formal entrance onto the Orthodox political stage. In the booklet, Birnbaum articulated a comprehensive plan to transform Orthodoxy while Horowitz translated Birnbaum’s revolutionary ideas into an Orthodox idiom. The enthusiasm with which Horowitz committed himself to one of the most innovative (and probably suspect from a conservative Orthodox perspective) aspects of Birnbaum’s new Orthodox orientation, the Oylim (ascenders)

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movement, is fascinating. The idea for the new movement dedicated to strengthening and invigorating Orthodoxy in Europe was drawn from many sources. On the one hand, it was a religious revival, imagined as an organized vanguard of spiritually pure, committed Orthodox youth. Their proposed activities, such as religious and agricultural training with the goal of eventually creating settlements where they would live out the ideal of a separate, productive religious life, were drawn from the ideal of the Zionist pioneer [halutz]. Serving as a light to the rest of the Jewish world, secular and religious, these youth would draw others through their example to adopt the ideals of the Oylim, with its commitment to religious life, as their own. “You boast to yourselves every day that God has chosen you and given you his Torah. But has he not also asked you to be a holy people unto him? Why do you boast amongst yourselves about His choice and neglect to sanctify his request? Do you want nothing more? Are you satisfied?”60 Thus begins the first essay of the inflammatory pamphlet “Time to Act” (Et la’asot). These questions set the tone for the entire work, an abrasive attack on the passivity Birnbaum discovered at the heart of the community he had entered. Published in both Yiddish and Hebrew, “Time to Act” and its companion pieces, “Words of the Ascenders” and “Dr. Birnbaum and His New Program” (Dr. Birnboym ve-shitato ha-hadash [Hebrew] / Dr. Birnboym un zayn naye shite [Yiddish]) were supposed to be scandalous. They marked the debut of a motley partnership between an erstwhile outsider and a young man from deep within the Hasidic world who felt empowered to say things that neither was supposed to say: Birnbaum because in the eyes of the leadership of the Orthodox world, he had not yet earned the right to criticize; Horowitz because he was dependent upon its intricate codes and connections for his life and future.61 This was clearly on the minds of both when they put pen to paper, and their words glow with the prophetic ecstasy of two men who knew they were transgressing to tell a greater truth. The essay’s muscular tone was all Birnbaum, well accustomed to the strident turn of phrase; at the same time Horowitz’s knowledge of the vernacular of the yeshiva youth they wished to attract ensured that the accusations and solutions they delineated would be understood. And it was jarring; it did no less than accuse the religious establishment of placing its temporal comfort ahead of the well-being

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and future of the Jewish people, to the point of putting off the arrival of the Messiah himself, a deeply resonant accusation in the Hasidic world with which both were most intimate. “You wait every day for God, in his great love and mercy, to send you his Messiah, when really he should be sent away from you. Do you think that the gift you just sit and wait for, which you assume will be given simply because of God’s grace, will be paid out like a wage for your righteousness?” Lest the reader give the obvious answer—that is, yes, it is the grace of God that was the only element of redemption—Birnbaum continues: “Is there not only one true way to earn this wage: to rise up to the highest level of holiness that a man of flesh and blood can achieve? For you, it seems this ascension is too difficult; you want no more than to be comfortable.”62 This theological gambit was certainly daring. Contained within it is a specific premise: that bringing about the redemption was an active, not passive, process. Birnbaum and Horowitz were attacking the basic approach of most of the Torah-true world that building higher walls to preserve their religious purity from the contamination of secularism would alone bring about redemption. To them this was not just wrongheaded but ethically suspect. There is a trace of Birnbaum’s long-held suspicion of power and wealth here, which he felt was all too present in the Orthodox (especially the Hasidic) world. As shocking as these accusations seem, they reflect a calculated strategy that ensured they would be read seriously and not be easily dismissed as heretical. On the one hand, although Birnbaum and Horowitz took an unusual and risky path in publishing a pamphlet outside the structures of authority in the community (the pamphlet does not have, in either of its editions, a rabbinic imprimatur or haskamah, an indication, if not proof, of its outré nature), their argument represented a sound Orthodox theological position. In fact, Horowitz’s gloss (noted previously) on a passage in Tractate Sanhedrin shows that the question of whether activity or passivity was preferable in stimulating the redemption was an open one among believers. Even more wisely, Birnbaum and Horowitz were careful to limit their critique to the current behavior, not the fundamental principles, of their audience. In fact, like many a voice for religious revival, they argued for a return to past norms of behavior, imagined or real. Again the distinctly Hasidic tenor of the essay is of central importance;

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it reads like nothing so much as a call for the kind of fire and vivacity, centered on a belief in the imminent redemption, that was perhaps the most important element of the Hasidic revival that had burned at its brightest a century earlier. In the second and third essays of the volume, “Words of the Ascenders” and “Dr. Birnbaum and His New Program,” Birnbaum and Horowitz offer their remedy. “Words of the Ascenders,” the heart of the pamphlet, is a succinct manifesto, generously annotated with explanatory notes and citations from traditional sources that establish theological bona fides and make the case for the permissibility of the Oylim movement. Again, the text is Birnbaum’s, heavily edited by Horo­witz, who supplied the many notes and citations.63 They make no bones about their revolutionary intent or their sense of divine mandate. “The Holy One Blessed be he has chosen the Jews, given them his Torah, called upon them to be a holy people unto him, and in the time to come he will send his Messiah for them, to redeem them from exile, eradicate violence and falsehood from the world, and give to all men new hearts.” Nothing less is at stake than the very redemption of the Jewish people in real time. “In his great grace [God] can send him any day, but he will surely send him to reward the Jews for their deeds on the day they will have raised themselves to the highest level of devotion to the Written and Oral Torah, and to the highest level of holiness that men can achieve.”64 Again an implicit critique of the establishment: the leadership of the Orthodox world has been deficient and ineffective and lost sight of the greatest imperative in the Jewish world, that is, hastening the redemption. The concept of kedushah, or holiness, forms the centerpiece of Birnbaum and Horowitz’s elaboration on the role of the Oylim. In its usual sense, kedushah refers to a special status granted by God to the Jews as his chosen people. Even though it is given freely, it is not a passive state but a status that Jews must strive to maintain through the performance of positive mitzvot (commandments) and observance of negative ones. In Birnbaum and Horowitz’s usage, the term takes on even greater significance. In “Words of the Ascenders,” Birnbaum supplements the concept, drawing from an embellishment of the idea of kedushah present in certain strains of Jewish mysticism, especially that of Lurianic Kabbalah as distilled through Hasidic sources. Birnbaum and Horowitz imagine

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a very basic mystical hierarchy to be scaled by the prospective Oyleh, composed of three levels corresponding to discrete attributes (sefirot) of the Godhead in the Tree of Life (Eyts Hayyim), the iconographic schema in the method of Kabbalistic study devised in large part by Isaac Luria (1534–72) that forms the basis of modern Jewish mysticism. Birnbaum posits that there are three levels of holiness through which Jews must ascend, knowledge (da’at), mercy (rachamim), and splendor (tiferet). In the first level, knowledge, Jews will “recognize God, be ecstatic in him, and be overcome by him.” In the second, mercy, the prospective Oylim will become “recipients of God’s attribute of mercy and pity on his creatures.” Finally, ascending to the level of splendor, they “borrow their portion of God’s splendor and become enveloped by it.”65 Although what Birnbaum and Horowitz construct from the idea of kedushah is novel, it is strongly resonant with other cosmological geographies in the Hasidic world, the most famous being that of the Chabad movement that also employs specific sefirot in its cosmological method, evident in the name of the movement itself, derived from the acronym chachmah, binah, and da’at (wisdom, understanding, knowledge). But it is impossible, Birnbaum maintains, for Jews to ascend the ladder and reach the level of holiness necessary to bring about the coming of the Messiah through their acts as individuals, isolated and subject to the distractions of everyday life. To solve the problem, Birnbaum proposes creating a small coterie of initiates, an elite vanguard of “ascenders” that will make manifest the spiritual progression of the Oylim. Although the Oylim would be separate from the world at large, they would be involved in discrete projects within the community where they could effect the most change. They would “assist in matters of service of the creator, especially in the training of leaders in the synagogue, study-houses, and other holy places.” They would also be engaged in charity work, further sanctifying their project by “distributing splendor among the people by means of objects [and] clothing . . . [by] guard[ing] the various needs of the Jews, to . . . organize the work of charity within the community.” At the same time they would work to construct their own, self-sufficient Oylim colonies by “guarding and organizing the business, the work, and the occupations of the Oylim” with the goal of “occupying [themselves] with the matters of the Oylim colonies in the land of Israel.” But at the core of

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the Oylim’s service was creating a model of religious purity for emulation. “Not with our words alone but with our lives and our deeds will we come to our brothers and sisters, and we will demand of them their lives and their deeds. And we are confident in our hope that they will come to us more and more until the entire assembly of Israel will be one single union of Oylim . . . one single union of the Torah-true, striving for justice and holiness and committed to bringing the Messiah.” The Oylim manifesto closes with the messianic words of Isaiah: “And it shall be in the last days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established at the head of the mountains, and all of the nations shall flow unto it.”66 In addition to the resonance with mystical, especially Hasidic, theological cosmology and eschatology from which the Oylim concept was drawn, the practical Oylim movement bore resemblance to other revival efforts in the Orthodox world. In advancing an ideal of group action, separation, and colonization by Oylim to create model communities, the group reflects the approach of a number of different utopian experiments in the Jewish world, especially in the early, religiously motivated Hibbat Zion models.67 Perhaps most analogous was the Musar movement associated with Israel Salanter.68 By the turn of the twentieth century, this movement had made significant inroads in eastern European Orthodoxy, especially in the world of the non-Hasidic yeshivas, although its presence—marked especially by the often overtly disruptive behavior of its initiates—was becoming a constant feature of traditional life. Like the Oylim as described by Birnbaum, the Musar movement was originally a collection of loosely organized cells of initiates drawn to the revivalist message of Israel Salanter. Like the Oylim, the creation of Musar cells was the first step in a larger process that was intended, and succeeded to a remarkable degree, to reorient the entire Torah-true world to its mission through infiltration of communities, especially of the yeshivas of Lithuania, by musarniks, youths passionately committed to the model of belief and practice advocated by Salanter. The final essay, “Dr. Birnbaum and His New Program,” attributed to “one of the Oylim” but clearly Horowitz’s work, is a paean to Birnbaum and his plan for the Oylim.69 Much of the essay (nearly as long as the other two combined) is devoted to recapitulating the themes of the previous two, including excoriation of the state of Orthodoxy and

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its leadership, the seriousness of the times, and the need for a revival to bring about the redemption. But in fact Horowitz’s main goal is to give his own imprimatur as a young man of impeccable pedigree who had never deviated from the Torah or left the Orthodox fold: “In order to stamp out all doubts, I will give a short summary here of that which I have learned about [Birnbaum’s] personality and about his new shita.”70 Aware of the suspicion that Birnbaum’s history might raise in the minds of others within the Orthodox camp, he goes to great lengths to extol the sincerity and depth of Birnbaum’s teshuva. He stresses that Birnbaum does not attempt to bring any innovation beyond the boundaries of strict Orthodoxy; he does not come bearing any kind of “new Torah”; to him the authentic form of Judaism is eastern European Orthodoxy; and he identifies himself as a Hasid.71 But most important, he reiterates that Birnbaum “is not a Zionist [but] deeply loves the Land of Israel, and his hopes are inseparable from the Land. He is not a Hebraist [but] loves our holy language profoundly. He is not a Yiddishist [but] loves Yiddish with his entire Jewish heart.”72 With this epigraph, Horowitz ends the “Words of the Ascenders,” and with it the two launched the Oylim with a manifesto of a new force in Orthodoxy. Although the most interesting product of Birnbaum’s initial foray into the Orthodox world, “Words of the Ascenders” was not the only, nor even the best known, of his writings during this transitional period. More familiar was God’s People, the essay that played the largest role in bringing Birnbaum fully to the attention of the leadership of the Agudath Israel. The essay would eventually be read as his definitive statement as an Orthodox thinker, eclipsing a surprisingly broad and subtle oeuvre completed over the next two decades. The epistolary record shows that the essay was, like “Words of the Ascenders,” the fruit of a Birnbaum-Horowitz collaboration, although since it was written in German (a language in which Horowitz had limited fluency), the latter’s editorial voice was limited mostly to thematic suggestions, and his input was less important. Unlike the earlier work, which was directed to Orthodox insiders and posited a new and novel approach to Orthodox organization, God’s People was directed outward. Its voice was familiar to Birnbaum’s older readers and colleagues, but as the first broad public exposition of this fundamentally new direction in his thought it was his first appearance to the wider world in his new Orthodox guise. As

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such, it may be read as the third of a set of essays that mark the phases of Birnbaum’s intellectual career, beginning with Die Assimilationssucht and continuing with Die jüdische Moderne. Like these, it was intended to be a think piece, a meditation on the state of Jewish identity, but from a new perch. Like both of its predecessors, its method is historical analysis and a broad interpretation of the role of the Jewish people in history, albeit with a conclusion far removed from that of the others. But the essay also marks certain trends in Birnbaum’s thought coming full circle, completing a line of thought that began with Assimilationssucht. Like the other essays, God’s People is largely a manifesto with some philosophical accoutrements. It begins with a short description of Birnbaum’s turn to religiosity, one much less involved than in Freethinker or “An Account.” Like them, however, it roots his transformation in the conclusion that the essence of national identity, even accompanied by a deep encounter with its “life and spirit,” was lacking a transcendent center. As in his other descriptions, a combination of growing belief in the intense role of religion in the depths of Jewish cultural life and a sudden, unexpected conversionary experience led him to adopt Orthodoxy. “I did not seek God, as people put it very nicely but hypocritically,” he writes. “I did not have to find Him. He suddenly announced Himself to me and entered into my consciousness.”73 The bulk of the essay, however, is an analysis of the Jewish people’s development in modernity through the prism of religion. According to Birnbaum, beginning with the Renaissance a malevolent force had dictated the course of world history beyond the Jewish people— “paganism,” by which he means secular humanism and enlightenment. Like a disease, the life- and belief-denying force of this paganism, rooted in the conviction that the material world was the only real one, had infected the foundation of European society. But the Jewish people, safely ensconced behind seemingly impregnable walls of tradition, had long been able to resist its influence. “We were like men in a well-protected port, looking out upon a storm-swept sea. With astonished eyes we watched the battle raging abroad, but in no small part because of our Jewish faith we remained in our safe haven, alone with our holy, eternal mysteries. God had chosen us, and we Him.”74 However, this happy isolation was not to last, and with the advent of modern times, pagan society set its eyes on breaching the protective walls: “Our enemy sensed

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that there was a pagan germ within the Jewish heart, too, and he tried to use it for his purposes. This shrewd plot was called ‘the emancipation of the Jews.’ . . . Jews no longer felt that there was an Eternal God guiding our world; they threw away the ancient heritage with which God Himself had endowed them; and they became the most fanatic heralds and agents of the pagan rebellion.”75 Suddenly enriched with the false enticements this new paganism offered, many Jews left religion in droves, becoming the most vocal advocates of the very forces that were tearing the Jewish world apart. Not surprisingly, there is an overt antimodernism and archconservativism that pervades Birnbaum’s discussion of the pagans of Europe—or rather, he argues that with the abandonment of God, regardless of any positive technical progress, the Jewish nation has been fatally compromised. They have . . . made this Golem the terrible taskmaster of modern man: they make people believe that the meaning of life—and true progress— is found in the throbbing of machines, the humming of wires, the frenzied hurry of the subways, the impertinence of skyscrapers, the noise of the stock exchange, the skyrocketing of statistics, and the chatter of newspapers. Thus the inner life of man, all its endeavors, have been paralyzed—the very heart of man has been turned into a machine.76

It is bad enough for the Gentiles to have adopted this worldview, but that the Jews would come to embrace it with even more fervency and conviction, outdoing the Gentiles in their absolute internalization of it, is an abomination to Birnbaum. The Jews had “exchanged belief for the teachings of the pagan revels” and done so in many and varied ways. “There are a few who dive into the whirlpool of chauvinistic excitement; and others who are the most superficial talkers, the most misled fools, the noisiest barkers at the world carnival of political ideas.” Worst of all, Birnbaum argues, rehatching the theme of the misapplication of the “Jewish mission” concept, “they have done their best to turn the prophets’ ideal of the brotherhood of the nations into a dry heathen cosmopolitanism; and of socialism, the outflow of the Jewish teachings of justice, they have helped make the most powerful war engine of militant paganism.”77 Most fascinating is that, despite the new addition of antimodernist conservatism, God’s People is remarkably similar to earlier essays, espe-

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cially Die Assimilationssucht. Where the early essay had posited the negation of Jewish existence in Birnbaum’s concept of “assimilation,” God’s People locates it in the Jewish appetite for paganism, all the while maintaining an almost identical narrative of Jewish self-destruction and model for redemption. In their thirst for this new paganism, Birnbaum continues, Jews had forgotten that their basic guide for all matters had remained unchanged since the beginning of the Jewish people: the Torah. “The discipline of the Law turned the potentialities of the Jew into active virtues that put his vices into the shadow. . . . The young heathens in modern Jewry, in surrendering to the pagan revolt, have squandered the superior wisdom, the life-pervading love, the well-founded beauty of their inheritance, in exchange for the emptiness, the illusions, the fashionableness of those whom they ape.”78 Jews, in the mind of the middle-aged Birnbaum, as in his youth, still had an uncanny tendency to “ape.” Only now, the infectious agent was a religious, not a nationalist, worldview. As God’s People shows, this was not the only inversion in Birnbaum’s thought. Even more surprising is his revision of the deep affection he had developed over decades for eastern European Jewry as a repository of authenticity: in the new schema, it is the very qualities that drew him to their ranks—namely, their effortless adaption of a nationalist identity—that makes them the most dangerous. “I respect the great Hebrew and Yiddish writers. . . . But . . . the nationalists of the eastern European brand are even more dangerous than their more assimilated western friends, because of their closer contact and greater influence upon the Yiddish-speaking religious masses.” Not only is the potential for the pollutant of nationalism more immediate coming from a Yiddish-speaking agent, but the masses, lacking the inoculation that exposure to these ideas had given Jews in the west, were far more susceptible. “I notice the same unhappy aberrations spreading among them which I spoke of before—all the more crude and repulsive because their Eastern European devotees are quite new to them.”79 Although Birnbaum was long insistent on the cultural and national superiority of eastern Jewry, the same hint of condescension that enabled his idealization of them—despite his wide experience with eastern Jews, he was still grounded in a view of the “masses” of eastern Jews as existing in a state of innocence—allowed him now to turn the old equation on its head. Eastern Jews, with

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their close attachment to the living attributes of the folk, had become the greater danger because of the bona fides they were able to bring to bear—their depth of knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish, their separation from non-Jewish society—even more than assimilated Jews, who lacked the tools to lead those who remained religious astray.80 In spite of his well-meant condescension (or perhaps as an extension of it), Birnbaum had deep faith in the ability of “Jewish Jews” to counter the onslaught of “pagan” Jewry, regardless of its form. In language directly out of the Words of the Ascenders, he speaks glowingly of the “splendid garb” of the Orthodox, which conveys eloquently the essence of their “modesty, dignity, and piety,” the traits that insulate them, the precious remnant, from the taint of secularism and materialism. Any complaints that may be brought against them, he argues, they can answer; their record of upright piety and peace challenges any that the secular world may present. “Their ancient and firm faith in God,” he writes, “their spiritual naturalness, their harmonious and disciplined way of life, their unique and unshakeable peacefulness can best the tyranny of the machine, with its propaganda slogans, and the mood of egotist aggression that has spread throughout the modern world.”81 The Orthodox are the ideal manifestation of God’s chosen people. In his view they need not be defended in their choice of life or in their conviction that it is the right one, as, he implies, any right-thinking person would agree. But as much as the Orthodox may hold their heads high amid the rest of humanity, Birnbaum does not excuse them from adhering to their own standards. As in Words of the Ascenders, he does not allow his generous image of the ideal Orthodox life stop him from turning his sights on the real state of Orthodox morality. In spite of its relative purity and holiness, Orthodoxy has failed with respect to the transcendental goals by which it is truly judged. “If judgment were rendered against us by [our own] transgressions . . . by the sad state of disrespect, the social and economic weakness into which we have fallen . . . [or] by the entire sad drama of continuous desertion from our colors, the immensity of our guilt, the guilt of the pious Jews, would thus be revealed.” The state of Orthodoxy was such that those who had the most responsibility to preserve their sacred situation had done the most to compromise it; their act of setting themselves apart had made their flaws all the more

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obvious. “It would seem as though God had never commanded us to be a ‘saintly people,’ or as if He had withdrawn that mission at some point. . . . We have, to be sure, stayed within our own sphere of life, the ‘four cubits of Law,’ but we have not risen in it. . . . Instead, we let ourselves sink lower and lower.”82 Although required to differentiate and purify themselves, religious Jews themselves had been infected by the taint of modernity, manifested as self-involvement and selfish concern only for their own well-being at the expense of elevating others. Birnbaum’s call in God’s People was to reverse this before it was too late and Orthodoxy lost the ability to exercise the considerable power it still had to “climb higher and higher, by virtue of our divine inheritance. It is not the will of God that we should be satisfied with a splendid isolation dedicated to the observance of the Law . . . [but that] our isolation, safeguarded by the Law, be used by us for God’s purposes.”83 As with the Ascenders essays, Birnbaum’s attention at the end of God’s People turns inevitably to eschatology and redemption, to his mind the deeper goal of all Orthodox activism. The Jewish role in the world is not simply to maintain the boundaries of piety and separation; it is also active. It is the striving to bring, through acts of piety and increased fervor among the believers, the advent of the Messiah. Reiterating the argument of Words of the Ascenders, Birnbaum asserts that religious Jewry had misapprehended its role in bringing about redemption. Within certain limits, he claims, Torah-true Jews had a unique power to stimulate the redemption, but they had, to this point, accepted a nihilistic passivity in the face of knowledge that they would be redeemed only by divine decree. Even in the face of the incontrovertible record of physical and spiritual destruction that had been visited upon the Jewish people in the modern age, they had failed to perform the requisite introspection and undertake activity that could lead to their redemption—selfcriticism and active, zealous fulfillment of Torah law. “The blessing of salvation will not come unmerited, it must be gained by human endeavor. But it is through hard labor against the pain of sin, the struggle with it, and the longing to overcome it that the towering heights of virtue are slowly climbed.”84 It follows that the only ones capable of bringing about the messianic age were those in whose capacities it lay to attain spiritual perfection, those most capable of overcoming sin and perfecting themselves spiritually—that is, those who had proven their

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fidelity to the Torah and its precepts. But a new focus is also discernible: Torah-observant Jews not only had an obligation to their fellow Jews but to mankind as a whole, a view that would cause friction as Birnbaum moved further within the Orthodox world. “There has been one people capable of marching at the head of the nations in this hard struggle. Its selection does not mean the rejection of other peoples. They can enter into the mercy of God by serving Him in other forms, with other symbols: the granting of the divine Law to the Jews is only the means of pointing out, to them all, the royal road that leads to the messianic goal.” Although granting some place to others outside the Jewish people (perhaps he was concerned about non-Jewish readers, as the essay appeared first in German), ultimately it is only Torah-true Jews who will move humanity forward, provided they take up their responsibilities. “[Until now, the Orthodox] have become blind to Israel’s splendid destiny: to advance observance of the Law, [and] through it the spread of holiness and the coming of the Messiah. . . . The strength of the Jewish spirit among the Eastern Jewish masses holds out the hope that Jewry may even now, just now, embark upon its greatest spiritual moment.”85 Concluding, Birnbaum ties together several themes that had captivated him even before his turn to religion. The eschatological focus, a redeemed future shaped around the destiny of the Jewish people, even a fixation on the potential, this time religious, of the eastern European Jewish Volk, all find their expression here. In fact, so much of what Birnbaum wrote in God’s People shows continuity with themes that had preoccupied him his entire career even if, like he himself, they appear now in the guise of piety. There is, of course, his obsession with pinpointing the role of the Jewish people in world history, in seeking a transcendent understanding of their eschatological role, and in particular finding just the right recipe for authenticity that would help them realize it. The structural resonance of these essays with earlier works also illuminates Birnbaum’s evolving sense of Jewry’s historical role. Throughout his career, he had sought to define the core causes of modern Jewry’s dysfunction, whether it be a “heathen” influence, the “Greek” influence, or the “pagan” influence. Early on, of course, he found it in the fool’s bargain of assimilation (which he never really abandoned); later, in the inability of various Jewish groups, particularly political groups, to find common ground and work together to

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foster and nurture Jewish national life. Now he located it in the modern human condition itself, in the loss of God at the hands of rationalism, progress, and technology. But the common theme remained: a belief in the unique, salvific role of the Jewish people in world history. In a form of the modern-day mission ideal that once again connected him with the earliest Jewish nationalists, in particular Moses Hess, Birnbaum assigned a central role to the Jews in the unfolding of world history. As a nation, only they could show other nations how to realize their full potential; as a folk, they were uniquely able to display a truly realized, nonchauvinist cultural being. Finally, as a religious nation, only they could embody and exhibit the paragon of pure belief and moral behavior capable of literally bringing about salvation for all. And the thread that linked all of these, in Birnbaum’s mind, was the belief that he had a unique role to play in bringing about each of these realities. Although it might be tempting to consider him an egotist of high order, he nevertheless was a selfless one; throughout each period of his life he sought especially to bring about amelioration of the existential suffering of his people and, perhaps, to find a home for himself. After the publication of The Words of the Ascenders and God’s People, the intensity of the interaction between Horowitz and Birnbaum waned somewhat, though they remained in close touch. In 1919, with the beginning of significant Orthodox political engagement with a secular state in the new Polish republic, Birnbaum had arrived in the Orthodox world, in no small part thanks to Horowitz, and he ascended quickly within a new experiment in Orthodox political activity, the most successful one to date, the Agudath Israel. This had the immediate effect of ending the Oylim as an independent Orthodox entity before it had really started, although, as we will see, it returned not long after. In the short term, parts of the plan laid down by Birnbaum and Horowitz could be discerned in the new trappings of Agudah programs, suggesting that the idea of the Oylim was co-opted by the Agudah along with Birnbaum himself. Horowitz also found a home inside the organization, at least in part through the intervention of Birnbaum himself; letters in 1919 and 1920 show Horowitz imploring Birnbaum to find him some function in the Agudah. In the 1920s, Horowitz was active as an organizer and fund-raiser for the fledgling Beys Yaakov education system, and after a few years of activism and a great deal of travel (includ-

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ing two years in New York) he finally acceded to the demands of his responsibilities as a father, husband, and rabbi and accepted a post as rabbi of Sanok in Galicia. Even as the two parted ways, to some degree The Words of the Ascenders and, to a lesser extent, God’s People stand as monuments to their friendship. They are also invaluable introductions into the next fertile period of Birnbaum’s life, his creativity and sheer will that had marked his lifelong engagement with Jewish politics and culture unabated. Soon he would become a famous presence within the Agudah, a movement that would garner the allegiance of a multitude of Jews in Poland and would inspire Orthodox Jews worldwide. Thirteen years after the two celebratory volumes were published to honor Birnbaum on his sixtieth birthday, Birnbaum would remain influential in Orthodox Jewish political life in Europe. His relationship with Horowitz represented a new beginning for Birnbaum, providing him with crucial tools, theological as well as practical, that he would draw upon with great success for the remainder of this life.

S i x  At Home in the Fold Birnbaum, the Agudath Israel, and Orthodox Jewish Politics Birnbaum is more an artist than a thinker and politician. This is perhaps the key to his personality and his unusual career. For him more than anything impressions and experiences are the most important. Deepest within him there resides a bit of the prophet, which neither can nor will abide by circumstances, which neither can nor will abide by any compromise. For that reason he has always had fanatical followers as well as bitter opponents. . . . Whether or not he had to become Orthodox, I will not speculate, but one thing is certain: the Orthodox need him. He represents for them fresh blood, a spiritual resuscitation. I worry, though, that the Orthodox only understand the external Birnbaum, the man who prays with a minyan and lays tefillin, but not the deeper intellect and emotion that percolate in his truest soul. —Leon Chassanowitch (Lazar Khazanovitsh), “Nathan Birnbaum,” Di Tsayt, 25 May 1921

In May 1921, Nathan Birnbaum once again arrived in New York, aboard the Danish steamer Frederik VIII, his first time in the United States since 1908. Although he had undergone a dramatic change in his political affiliation and personal identity since then, this trip resonated in many ways with his first. Like that of his previous visit, the purpose of Birnbaum’s tour through New York, Boston, and Philadelphia was to raise awareness and funds for a larger European political project un­familiar to most American Jews. He arrived with the hope that his celebrity and convictions would spark, if not an awakening among American Jews, at least an interest in a new political project that would seem counterintuitive to many of them. And once again, Birnbaum’s arrival was widely noted and commented upon by the American Jewish press, both Yiddish and English. The obvious difference between the Birnbaum of 1908 and of 1921 could not pass unnoticed, and this subject, more than any other aspect of the Agudah delegation’s mission, drew the overwhelmingly nega-

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tive attention of commentators. Whereas on his first voyage Birnbaum had been received as a nationalist hero, a fighter for Jewish political rights, even if his message was neither clearly understood nor widely supported, his reception now was altogether different. The arrival of the delegation was trumpeted by a publicity campaign of telegrams and press releases that advertised the goals of the Agudah, emphasizing the inspirational story of Birnbaum’s turn to Orthodoxy.1 But in the days surrounding their high-profile programs (including a formal evening at Cooper Union featuring renowned cantor Yossele Rosenblatt as musical entertainment), for every bit of positive or neutral coverage several items ran that disparaged the delegation and its aims.2 In a mirror image of the delegation’s promotion of Birnbaum as vindication of Orthodoxy’s vitality, the Yiddish and English press singled out his new religiosity as an incomprehensible betrayal of once-heroic nationalist credentials. Leaders on the American Jewish journalistic and literary scene, including Nachum Syrkin, Hillel Rogoff, and Shmuel Niger, published lengthy reflections on Birnbaum and the delegation, with attitudes that ranged from bemusement to bewilderment to outright disgust at the transformation of their erstwhile comrade-in-arms.3 The attitude of the American Jewish press offers a useful window through which to observe the causes of Birnbaum’s disappearance from the historical record. The themes it highlights, which often explain his “conversion” as either a cynical ploy or the act of a sadly deluded romantic, would quickly become the received wisdom concerning his later years and, for many, account for his irrelevance. But among the negative responses could be found perceptive observations such as the previous words of Lazar Khazanovitsh. Khazanovitsh had once before crossed paths with Birnbaum—in 1908 as the informal leader of the Poalei Zion faction at the 1908 Czernowitz conference. Encountering Birnbaum again, he observed a subterranean dissonance between Birnbaum’s new convictions and the goals of the Agudah, even if it had not quite metastasized into a full-blown conflict. Birnbaum had never been, as Khazanovitsh instinctively recognized, the type of person who simply joined movements; he was no mitloyfer, no follower. Echoing the religious term used by Tuvia Horowitz (who, as we shall see, sensed the same tension in Birnbaum’s engagement with the Agudah), Khazanovitsh calls him a prophet capable of inspiring in those around him the deepest

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loyalty—and antipathy. But Khazanovitsh’s insight went further. Aside from the prophet, it was his “true nature” as an artist, as a man acting out of prerational impulse, aesthetically formed to reflect a deeper truth about the world around him, that drew Khazanovitsh’s attention. He saw that there was a revolutionary core to Birnbaum’s religiosity that would never likely find a happy home in an organization like the Agudah, a political party dedicated to the preservation and conservation of a worldview that differed from Birnbaum’s in kind and form. A sign of this dissonance surfaced at an evening event that was certainly not on the Agudah’s itinerary of stops at synagogues and other Orthodox venues. In late June, Birnbaum accepted an invitation to take part in a meeting of the Y. L. Peretz Writers’ Society in the Lower East Side Café Europa. He cut an eccentric figure: “In a corner sat Dr. Birnbaum. Everyone ate; he didn’t. When he drank a glass of water, he made a bracha [blessing].”4 But the same observer who made these comments, the Forverts’s Hillel Rogoff, observed with sincerity (if also mild incredulity) that, despite his appearance, Birnbaum spoke like a “a cultured man—like a modern, educated man. . . . [He said], ‘The true artist is a deep believer. He creates out of the divine, and he who doesn’t have the fire of faith in his heart cannot be godly and cannot create eternal art.’ ”5 Importantly, Rogoff noticed, this was something new in talking about modern Jewish literature, and it was a particularly unusual way to speak about Peretz. As Rogoff explained, the indebtedness of transcendent art to the divine was not new; many modern European literary movements had strains that drew upon the “mind-set of the Middle Ages” (in his estimation the locus of Birnbaum’s idea) for inspiration. “But for Jewish writers this is a surprise. Among them there has never been such a movement, and they had never dreamt of the possibility of such a stream in their literature.”6 Despite his anticlerical bias, Rogoff touched on an important aspect of Birnbaum’s transformation. Though it was expressed in a form he regarded as retrograde, there was paradoxically something new about it; in Birnbaum’s return to “medieval” forms, he was recasting them for a modern audience’s consumption, a fair description of not just Birnbaum’s project but that of the Agudah and associated movements as well. And like Khazanovitsh, Rogoff recognized the tension that came from Birnbaum’s high expectations. He believed his ideas would be as

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revolutionary within the Orthodox world as his strident nationalism had been in his university days among the liberal bourgeois students in Vienna. But this was to expect a great deal from his new identity, especially since it was further weighted by the hope that he would find in the world of eastern European Orthodoxy openness to his message that was lacking in other quarters. He felt he had found a reserve of wouldbe followers who had the potential to find his transcendent message, complete with its metaphysical undertones, as not only unthreatening but relatable and compelling. As he would soon discover, the cadre of young, enthusiastic supporters like Horowitz that would be drawn to him were not representative of either the leadership or the rank and file of the Agudah. Although many of them would find a place in the Agudah’s more experimental and activist wings—such as the Beys ­Yaakov women’s school system, the Agudath Israel Youth (Tseirey ­Agudas Yisroel or Agudas Jisroel Jugendorganisation), and the Agudath ­Israel Workers (Poyale Agudas Yisroel) union, their ranks were not to be found among the upper leadership of the organization and certainly not among the central locus of intellectual authority, the Council of Torah Sages (Moetses Gedoyle ha-Toyre). To observers both inside and outside the Agudah camp, in turn, Birnbaum would ultimately prove difficult to categorize or control, a particularly vexing problem for the Agudah leadership. But as he moved from their orbit, he slowly came into his own as a religious thinker with a unique perspective about the implications of belief on questions that had long preoccupied him. As these ideas evolved, they proved compelling not only to a selection of his older associates but also to new ones from various camps across the world of Jewish ideas. Just as he did in the Café Europa, Birnbaum would eventually find himself among familiar company as he took a place, in addition to other activities, among the pantheon of interwar Jewish intellectuals as a lecturer at the Frankfurt Freie Jüdisches Lehrhaus. It was in this context, as one voice among several who shared in common a perception of the Jewish world—and the European world—as a world that had to be engaged with an ever more radical response, that Birnbaum found his final home. Before this moment of differentiation, though, Birnbaum succeeded to an impressive degree in finding a place within the largest and most successful expression of Orthodox political activism, the Agudath Israel,

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in large part the fruit of his relationship with Tuvia Horowitz. Although his fame garnered over a lifetime as a public presence in Jewish politics certainly played a role in attracting the attention of the young movement’s leadership, it was his propitious friendship with Horowitz that was key to entering the Orthodox world. Aside from his connections, devotion, and willingness to act as guide for Birnbaum as he moved into Orthodox belief and practice, Horowitz embodied a new dynamic in Orthodoxy. Like an increasing number of his fellow young rabbis and Orthodox youth, Horowitz represented a proactive force rising out of the yeshivas and Hasidic courts of Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania. Faced with the hemorrhaging of Orthodox influence and numbers to war and competing ideologies such as Zionism, these young men and women sought to use the tools of modernity to preserve tradition. The enthusiasm of these Orthodox activists was powerful, especially when harnessed to some form of political organization. Although Birnbaum and Horowitz had begun to outline one possible form of such an organization in the religious-utopian manifesto Words of the Ascenders, they and their project soon attracted the attention of the Agudah, and both were soon taken under its wings. Established just a few years earlier in 1912, the Agudah had achieved remarkable growth during the war years.7 Its first organizers succeeded in the considerable task of securing the support of key figures in the Orthodox world. These individuals, who wielded immense influence over the ­Orthodox population, were ultimately convinced that the Agudah, and political activism in general, was necessary as a means of defending ­Orthodox interests to preserve traditional Jewish society. Individuals such as Rabbi Abraham Mordechai Alter (also known as the Imre Emes), the rebbe of the Gerer Hasidim, the spiritual leader of a major Hasidic sect in central Europe; Rabbi Yisrael Meir Ha-Kohen of Radun (known as the Hafetz Hayyim), a figure of towering importance among non-Hasidic Jews throughout Europe; and Rabbi Hayyim Ozer Grodzienski, among other religious luminaries, lent their support to the party and gave it essential legitimacy in the eyes of many eastern European Jews. Although the Oylim would not succeed as the dominant model of Orthodox political organization, Birnbaum’s entry into the Orthodox political world was exceptionally well timed. In the Agudah he encountered a group of significant size just beginning to assert itself within the

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growing Jewish political marketplace. For Birnbaum, it was a familiar situation: early in its formation the Agudah, and Orthodox politics in general, was a movement new and strange to its potential constituents, even if it was supported by major luminaries. As at other times in Birnbaum’s political career, it was a scenario in which his skills as a writer, speaker, and generally public presence worked to his advantage. He also entered this world at a time when there were many receptive to the things that he, an enthusiastic new ba’al teshuva, had to say, a fact that comes through clearly in his letters exchanged with Horowitz. Despite their remarkable contents, there is nothing in them quite so astonishing as Horowitz’s abject adoration for a man who, not five years before, had not been religious; one who was, even more damningly, widely viewed as a founder of Zionism, an ideology anathema to Torah-true Judaism.8 Certainly part of the reason for this admiration was the intellectual gravity and earnestness with which Birnbaum approached his newfound faith, but this was only part of the attraction for Horowitz or the Agudah. Due to his lengthy engagement with Yiddish-speaking Jewry, aided by his residence for a few years in Bukovina, Birnbaum was well known as a dynamic activist and speaker across the lands of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, enough so that a person like Horowitz knew to seek him out.9 He also possessed a personality that, as attested to by many across the spectrum of Jewish politics and ideas, could be deeply inspirational. No longer relevant to Jewish nationalism, Birnbaum had found a new, receptive audience for his unique magnetism.

“Preserving the Core” East and West: Travels with the Agudah Birnbaum attracted the attention of the Agudah leadership in 1918. Within a year, he was playing a large enough part in its executive planning that in one of the first major conferences before the ­Kenesiyah Gedolah of 1923, he was named general secretary of the Central Committee.10 But what was the Agudath Israel that Birnbaum joined? Founded in the Silesian city of Katowitz in 1912, the Agudah had grown by the end of the war to a political and cultural force that would seem an ideal template for the kind of religious activism Birnbaum envisioned.

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Its founders were drawn from three groups who had, like him, arrived at the conclusion that the radical step of founding a modern political party had become a necessity for the future survival of Orthodoxy. They included members of the German neoorthodox; a collection of politically minded traditionalist rabbis from the Russian Empire; and former members of Mizrahi, the Orthodox Zionist faction. The first of these groups, the neoorthodox associated with Frankfurt rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and the political organization Freie Vereinigung für die Interessen des orthodoxen Judentums, had through necessity developed a complex relationship with modern German culture while maintaining strict adherence to Orthodox practice and belief.11 Central was the philosophy of Torah im derekh erets, by which they meant the embrace of modern education for children and engagement with German society, along with traditional religious studies based on an Orthodox Jewish foundation. They advocated a rapport with the best aspects of German culture and sought to maintain the vigor of Orthodoxy by driving a wedge between themselves and the rest of the German Jewish community, particularly the very successful Reform movement. Threatened by domination by modernizing elements of local Jewish communities to which membership was compulsory under secular law, Hirsch and his followers adopted a radically modern solution in order to preserve Orthodoxy in Germany after the unification of the German Empire in 1871: successfully appealing to the government for the right to secede from the official Jewish community, an act that had profound implications for the official Jewish kehilot (community).12 In addition to splitting up the nominally unified corporate bodies and depriving them of needed financial assistance from the separatists, the neoorthodox effectively ended the last vestiges of hegemony by the traditional unit of Jewish social structure, the kehilla. The watchword for the neoorthodox was “preserving the core.” This meant protecting the core institutions of the Orthodox community, such as Jewish education and supervision of kosher meat, that had an impact on their daily life and were under attack by modernizers, the rallying point for Orthodox organization in the face of the threat of reformers or government interference. The threats to these basic elements of a ­Torah-observant life, in their minds, had become so serious as to override traditional indifference or discomfort with involvement

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in non-Jewish politics. Although considered by some traditionalists to be an overreaction, others, including those groups that would contribute delegates to the Agudah conference in 1912, accepted it as a necessary step in the face of an ominous future. Unlike the neoorthodox, who coalesced around their sense of marginalization by the success of reformers in Germany, the other founders of the Agudah came from overwhelmingly traditional communities in Russian Europe. There, the absolutist and largely anti-Semitic government had significantly retarded a culture of political activism or assimilation among traditional communities, as did a much higher level of traditionalism and its accompanying infrastructure. In spite of these factors, proto-political Orthodox organizations were not entirely absent, especially in the wake of political unrest and revolution in 1905. Even before the turn of the century, individuals such as Israel Salanter and the first rebbe of the Gerer Hasidic dynasty, Isaac Meyer Alter, had pursued proto-political activities, primarily based on an acute sense of the threat posed by Jewish and government modernizers.13 But none of these achieved much in the way of formal political organization or activism. Perhaps the first de facto Orthodox political party was organized in Austrian Galicia because of its more liberal political culture, the Makhzikey ha-Das Society in the 1870s.14 In Russia, the years following the 1905 revolution, which for the first time brought the possibility of elected office in the empire, led to the establishment of the organization Kenesset Yisrael under Hayyim Ozer Grodzienski (Grodzienksi would also be among Agudah’s founders in 1912).15 While achieving limited success (especially the Makhzikey ha-Das), for the most part these organizations lacked a coherent, integral political ideology, either being too centered on local issues (Makhzikey ha-Das) or lacking sufficient popular support (Kenesset Yisrael). It was the Agudath Israel that would finally realize the potential and articulate an integral political-religious ideology, described by historian of the Agudah Gershon Bacon as “an overarching, ‘ecumenical’ Orthodox identity.”16 In no small part it was the last source of the Agudah’s founders, defectors from the religious Zionist Mizrahi Party, that provided the political sophistication necessary for an international mass political movement. Mizrahi was the most organized early Orthodox engagement with the World Zionist Organization, and through its tumultuous relationship

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with Zionism, its members understood better than most the need for a powerful statement by the Orthodox world on the political stage. For most of its existence as part of Zionism, Mizrahi walked a tightrope between limited support of Zionist goals and the consensus of religious permissibility. In spite of their best efforts, they aroused considerable suspicion from mainstream traditional leadership.17 The leader of Mizrahi, Isaac Jacob Reines, headed off such criticism by objecting strongly to secular cultural Zionists and their claim that Zionism could replace religion as the core of Jewish identity. He drew a distinction between this and his own view that Zionism offered a valuable option to rescue Jews in both physical and spiritual danger. In truth, his attitude was at the very least ambiguous to both secularists and traditionalists. This was particularly the case in regard to the place of Palestine in Jewish national aspirations. As a member of the proto-Zionist Hovevei Zion and associate of its other famous rabbinic personage, Shmuel Mohilever, Reines clearly recognized the religious dimension of Palestinophile nationalism. Indeed, the name of the movement itself, Mizrahi, had dual meaning: both the Hebrew word meaning “eastward,” an explicit reference to Israel; and a contraction of merkaz ruhani, or “spiritual center.”18 But he was also known to be flexible with regard to the geographic options Zionism should consider for a Jewish state and, unlike many eastern European delegates to the controversial Sixth Zionist Congress, did not vote against the Uganda proposal.19 In the end, though, Mizrahi faced significant hurdles in attracting a following among eastern European Orthodox Jews for reasons that transcended the particulars of its platform. Orthodox ambivalence— or outright hostility—hinted at a deeper suspicion of ideologically driven political organization. At the very least, it required a compromise of principles—particularly when having to deal with nonreligious Jewish parties—that threatened the unequivocal stance against any model of Jewish identity that did not have at its heart Torah and tradition. As Zionism gained ground at the turn of the century, its promises of Jewish unity did exert some pull in segments of the traditional world, even as others became more entrenched in their opposition. On the ground in towns and cities throughout Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia, a wide spectrum of opinions existed regarding Zionism, with many who would have regarded themselves traditional or Torah-true Jews receptive to it, even as others were hostile. As for organized par-

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ties, Mizrahi participated in the WZO for several congresses, but for much of the traditional Jewish leadership, Zionism was simply too dangerous, another force of corrosive secularization and anticlericalism. Indeed, they had good reason for this attitude: many Zionists were unapologetic that their goal was no less than the replacement of a religious identity with a national one. But for those who advocated a more moderate vision of national renewal (a diminishing number as time went on), there was potential for detente. Theodor Herzl himself, who strove to prevent cultural and religious questions from interfering with the practical work of negotiations, created a neutral space where religious Zionists could reasonably justify some involvement with the movement.20 With Herzl’s death, the brief opening in the WZO for Orthodox Jews to support it began to close. By the Tenth Zionist Congress in 1911, the WZO endorsed the establishment of Zionist educational institutions and programs in the Diaspora, marginalized the few Orthodox supporters who remained, and drove the rest into the Orthodox camp hostile to the entire enterprise. Absent some major change in the status quo, the idea of politicized Orthodoxy remained an alien notion to most of the potential constituency. The Agudah in 1912, although it showed organizational potential, still could not claim anything like a representative voice, and the movement did not grow significantly at first. But a drastic change did come, probably sooner than the earlier organizers expected, with the descent of the entire continent into unprecedented violence and instability in the First World War. It did not hurt the Agudah’s cause that most of the conflict on the Eastern Front was fought in the heartland of already hard-hit Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Jewry. This provided an ideal opening for Agudah organizers, led by the Frankfurt-based neoorthodox leadership. Following the German army deep into the Polish areas of the Russian Empire, Pinchas Cohn and Emmanuel Carlebach traveled into the centers of traditional Orthodoxy in Poland. There, as they assisted in providing aid to the communities, they organized effectively on behalf of the Agudah among the still significantly apolitical communities.21 After a few key organizational victories and the formal establishment of the Polish Agudah (initially named the Agudat Ha-Ortodoksim, the “Orthodox Union”) in 1916 with support from prominent rabbinic personalities, it quickly became a formidable political force.22

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It was this dynamic new organization that Birnbaum encountered at war’s end. The attraction was obvious for both sides. To the Agudah leadership, the firebrand rhetoric of the author of the Words of the Ascenders, the call of a sincere penitent imploring believers to realize their true mission as the authentic voice of European Jewry, must have been inspiring. He provided the Agudah with something the fledgling movement needed: a politically sophisticated thinker who could help advertise a grand sense of purpose to a wide audience. Still in the process of finding and defining itself, on the defensive not only against figures outside Orthodoxy but also in relation to a wide divergence of opinion within the Orthodox world itself, the Agudah could benefit from the kind of bold expression for which Birnbaum was known.23 To Birnbaum, the prospect of a truly international political party that took the fight for the Jewish soul to all corners of the globe was deeply appealing, as was the fact that it counted among its leadership and backers some of the most important voices in the Orthodox world. Birnbaum appeared publicly under the Agudah standard by early 1919. He would ultimately play several roles in the party, including agitator for the newly formed Agudath Israel Youth and member of the Agudah’s committee on Jewish immigration.24 But reflecting the fluid nature of the young organization, his place was not clearly defined. Once in the Agudah, however, he resumed the itinerant advocacy that shaped most of his adult life. Traveling from Vienna to Paris, Lithuania, London, and New York, Birnbaum kept a rigorous travel and speaking schedule. As he traveled, he kept in close contact with his new associates; these dispatches, together with his (largely unpublished) speeches and published articles during the 1919–22 period, provide a vivid sense of Birnbaum’s experiences as a new Agudah activist and the challenges he and the organization faced as it moved into the interwar period. The first flurry of activity Birnbaum undertook with the Agudah was in public relations, part of a full-fledged publicity effort covering several issues on the organization’s agenda. Reflecting the variety of uses for Birnbaum’s familiar public image, many of his early Agudah speeches were testimonials about his journey to religious observance. More revealing and substantive were several that dealt with the Agudah’s advocacy on behalf of Jewish refugees and immigrants displaced by the war. It is in this context that one of the most controversial aspects of the

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Agudah’s early activism emerged: its challenge of the WZO’s claim to represent the interest of Jews in the new Mandate Palestine. Although the Agudah was, strictly speaking, an anti-Zionist organization, the designation should not be confused with the more extreme Orthodox opposition to organized Jewish settlement absent the messianic redemption (such as that made famous by the Satmar Hasidim, the ­Naturei Karta, and others). In fact, as Birnbaum’s lectures show, the Agudah had a complex relationship with the question of Jewish settlement in Palestine. While deeply opposed to the politics and culture of the Zion­ist movement, and even more to its claims to representing Jewish opinion on the ground, the Agudah was ambivalent and even at times positive toward Palestine as a place of settlement for Jewish immigrants and refugees. One of its most coherent early positions was to assert in whatever venue it could, including the Paris Peace Conference then arbitrating the structure of global politics after the war, that it was traditional Jewry embodied by the Agudah, and not the Zionist movement, that voiced the interests of the Jewish people in Europe and the Yishuv. “The Peace Conference is at the gate!” began one such address in Birnbaum’s unpublished papers. “The program of the new order includes the [freedom of] self-determination of nations. The Zion­ists call out in the name of the Jewish people of Palestine. [But] non-­Zionist Torah Jewry also belongs to the Jewish people! If we wish to avoid being pushed aside, we must come together . . . united with a common purpose to claim the leadership of the Jewish people before the world forum.”25 Birnbaum’s speeches from the time of the Peace Conference reveal that when the Agudah took in Birnbaum, it took in the Oylim with him. The themes of the various letters, memos, and speeches of this period are indistinguishable in sentiment from that of Words of the ­Ascenders. They share the tone of outrage at the complacency of Orthodoxy in the face of crisis and the conviction that the solution lay in organizing a vanguard of ideologically committed Orthodox youth. But most interesting is his elaboration on the plan introduced in Words of the Ascenders to build up Orthodox strength and esteem through a synthesis of Torah and agricultural settlement. A call to organize Orthodox youth, the letter of 20 November turns to the role of the young vanguard—the very constituents that might have made up the Oylim. As interesting is the proposed site of this renewal: Palestine. “Our

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youth must make their will known,” he asserts, that the struggle for the future of the Jewish people in its ancestral homeland would not be surrendered lightly.26 With surprising directness, Birnbaum lays out the plan for the structure of a counter-Zionist Jewish infrastructure in Palestine. Of course, Torah would be preeminent: “Our wish remains first and foremost to maintain Torah studies in their old, pure form.” Beyond this, in language that could well have been written by the Birnbaum of decades before, he argues that “we wish to pursue more practical work on behalf of Palestine . . . [to] direct the youth to undertake the great work of its settlement. . . . We wish, more than before, to learn the Hebrew language, to study Jewish history and literature, so as to instill in our youth a love and understanding for our people.”27 Of course, the Diaspora is not absent from his comments, but it is an almost perfunctory presence: “In Germany, we call for cultural autonomy and the establishment of an education system for our aims.” Clearly his passion lies in the potential for renewal through Torah-true settlement in Palestine. Indeed, in Birnbaum’s opinion the stakes could not be higher, as ceding Palestine to Zionism was tantamount to surrendering to the forces of modernism and secular nationalism. “If we stand aside, we lose the Land of Israel, and with it the majority of the Jewish people. . . . Zionism would become the sole representative of Jewish interests [and thus the] sole arbitrator of Jewish rights. We would lose the eastern Jews, who will have only one political choice shoved before their faces, which speaks against their interest and tramples over their Jewish sensibilities.”28 Of course, these comments reflect political savvy as much as ideological commitment. Birnbaum shrewdly argues that the symbolism of Zionists reconstituting some form of organized Jewish autonomy in Palestine would prove devastating to Orthodoxy. But pragmatism is not Birnbaum’s sole motivation. In a remarkable passage, Birnbaum makes explicit an occluded strand in Orthodox attitudes toward the idea of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine: that it would mean, among other things, the fulfillment of a Torah ideal. “Precisely because we are Torah Jews, because it is in the Land of Israel that we will see the fulfillment of our Torah ideals, because [there] we will come to our own, we must state it clearly and frankly. Precisely because we will fight nonreligious nationalism with all our power, we must create a real religious

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nationalism in the land. Palestine must not be given to the Zionist organization; it must be given to the Jewish people.”29 These passages reveal most strongly that as the Paris Peace Conference convened in early 1919, the Agudah felt a palpable urgency to organize and assert itself in the face of Zionism. This led it to make, both through Birnbaum and others, surprising statements about its aims. It is not at all shocking that an Orthodox party would argue that the traditional population centers of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed, the “old yishuv,” deeply traditional communities dating back centuries, were more representative of Jewish Palestine as Zionist colonies. But the Agudah’s claims did not stop there; as Birnbaum’s words show, at least some segments of the movement saw the potential for new Orthodox settlement in Palestine as another means of destabilizing Zionist claims and advancing eschatological ones. The intersection of this approach with the unrealized Oylim is clear. As with Birnbaum and Horowitz’s text, Birnbaum’s letters and statements on behalf of the Agudath Israel Youth show no hesitancy in asserting that the young generation of Orthodox Jews should be regarded as an essential voice in the decisions made by the leadership. It also hints at the embrace of a new political dynamic in European Orthodoxy, sanctioned at the highest levels. As informative as these speeches are, it is once again a personal relationship that provides the best insight into Birnbaum’s Agudah activities. In this case, it was with the man who acted as his most important, high-level liaison in the movement, Jacob Rosenheim (1870–1965). Rosenheim, as an iconic figure in the establishment and growth of the Agudah,30 was given the formal title Moreynu, “Our Teacher,” in a declaration signed by several of the most important members of the Second Kenesiyah Gedolah in 1929.31 His organizational skill and deep connection to the neoorthodox community of Frankfurt made him a legendary figure in the movement’s history. He was by profession a financier and community leader and thus represented an ideal of German neoorthodoxy; urbane and cultured, he was widely respected and remembered as a man of impeccable piety and organizational acumen. As such, he was in a unique position to recognize the possibilities Birnbaum offered as a public relations figure.32 Although there were many individuals Birnbaum met and impressed as he moved upward in the movement, Rosenheim was Birnbaum’s most important link to the movement.33

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Aside from his work detailed previously, Birnbaum’s activity with the Agudah was punctuated by long periods of travel and grassroots organizing on its behalf, which Rosenheim was instrumental in arranging and overseeing. The first of these was based on a plan for an Agudah mission of propaganda and organization in Lithuania beginning in the autumn of 1919. Strengthening the Agudah in Lithuania was of great importance to the young movement. Birnbaum’s papers indicate that the party had made less headway in organizing the communities of Lithuania than in Poland, despite a lengthy wartime German occupation.34 What party apparatus that did exist before Birnbaum’s arrival he portrays as rudimentary, composed of small local cells—some aware of the Agudah, some not. In certain locations, as Birnbaum’s letters reflect, key figures in the local rabbinic leadership were ambivalent, at times even hostile toward the movement. But as Rosenheim observed, the relative stability of the region allowed an entry point to test the attraction of the Agudah. Although at first reluctant to send Birnbaum away from his duties in Switzerland (“our entire purpose is too much at stake”), Rosenheim recognized the clear importance of the region: “Lithuania is for the moment (and for who knows how long) the only country in the east in which Jews have a certain freedom of movement and where social convulsions are not so dangerous as to curtail normal Jewish life. We would be negligent if we did not use this moment in that land . . . to propagandize; and it is generally believed that your personality in particular would make an enduring impression upon the youth there.”35 Birnbaum was so enthusiastic about this project that he pushed Rosenheim for permission from the Central Committee to begin work. “I will not leave Lithuania,” Birnbaum grandly announced to the Yiddish press in advance of his trip, “until I have made all Lithuanian Jews religious!”36 Rosenheim, counseling patience, took up the issue: “The issue [of your traveling to Lithuania] will once again be taken up straightaway after the return of Mr. Guggenheim and Mr. [Wolf] Jacobson, [as well as] Mr. Heinrich Eisemann by a full sitting of the Central Committee. I obviously cannot call this meeting alone. . . . I can only put in front of them once more the extraordinary urgency of this trip and the great detriment it would be to overlook your participation.”37 Birnbaum’s trip was approved a short time later, and he traveled to Lithuania in the autumn of 1919, all the while filing reports with Rosen-

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heim to the Agudah’s Central Committee in Zurich. These reports offer a surprisingly candid account of Birnbaum’s activities, including his evaluations of key contacts among communal leaders, primarily in Kovno and Ponevezh, and detail the strategies of a leading Agudah activist. As the letters unfold, a fascinating story emerges of the complexity of raising political consciousness among a deeply traditional religious community. Myriad difficulties, from the lack of cooperation among rabbinic figures, the difficulties in explaining the importance of Orthodox political activism, the tension with already existing political structures—especially Zion­ism—are all recurring issues in Birnbaum’s reports from Lithuania. In one lengthy filing with the Central Committee, Birnbaum described in detail both the facts on the ground and the mechanics of grassroots organization in the immediate aftermath of the war. “If one were to assess the true mind-set of the masses without considering their awareness . . . of the need to do something to support traditional Jewry . . . it would seem that the communities here are doing much better than ours in the west,” Birnbaum reported upon arriving in Kaunas (Kovno).38 But, he observed with exasperation, the reality was very different. Organization in Lithuania was much more complicated than he expected. On the one hand, the idea of political action among the youth, even those who “embraced Jewish life,” was a “major undertaking. . . . Compared to the Zionist influence, [Orthodox political action] is insignificant.” Local Zionists had anticipated the Agudah’s arrival and weakened it by attacking the party directly even before Birnbaum had arrived: “It is very true that free-thinking, left-Zionist slander has made an impact—[claiming] that the ‘black’ seek control of the society to make it ‘black.’” At the same time, the Agudah faced an uphill battle in spreading consciousness of its mission. What little Agudah apparatus was in place lacked even basic structure and organization, and political sophistication was low. “There is a poor awareness or consciousness of [Zionism’s] danger and the necessity of meeting it with action. The Agudah here is [merely] a shadow and could ultimately . . . become just another small society fulfilling local religious goals; besides that, it does nothing. Membership dues are not collected. The members exist only on paper.”39 Not at all cowed by being a newcomer to the Agudah, Birnbaum bluntly sized up the situation. “The cause of this malady is basically the lack of manpower. . . . But if we only had able and willing peo-

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ple, this . . . would be easily overcome.” Interestingly, the most coherent group that offered an alternative to the “Zionist infection” was a “Youth of Israel [Tseirey Yisrael] . . . that has developed independent of the ­Agudah.” But with this promising lead, Birnbaum lamented, “I have thus far made only the smallest progress, although some of its members have been very helpful in clarifying to all the importance of the ­Agudah.” But it is the work ahead that Birnbaum lays the most emphasis upon in his dispatch. “I have set a program of my activities in Lithuania: creation of a large Agudath I. group in Kovno, and a national Agudah center that would coordinate local groups in the region.” To raise political awareness, lectures delivered by Birnbaum were coordinated by local Agudah functionary Nahman Rachmilewitz. Last but not least, the inveterate journalist Birnbaum insisted, “We consider founding a newspaper to be an absolute necessity; I must say I don’t see how we can manage without it. The Zionists have a local newspaper.” But Birnbaum did not consider himself as the right person to oversee these efforts; in his view, his strength lay in strategic planning, not implementation: “I cannot consider . . . remaining for an extended time in Lithuania. . . . Here only an unmarried young man who considers Lithuania his home should be considered, at least for the time being.”40 Direct and candid in his assessment of Agudah prospects in Lithuania, he is no less blunt in his reports on personalities—including both local figures and members of the international Agudah itself and some of its prominent organizers. He is quick to point out those he regards as allies to the Agudah project and to attack those he considers obstacles. “Of all my co-workers there, I would choose without hesitation Mr. Sherenchewsky, a young man of character and ability,” he writes. “Dr. Rachmilewitz is a good Orthodox man, a capable representative and occasionally provides useful connections. . . . But he has no idea what Agudath Israel means, and it has not been made clear to him why it is necessary. . . . He seems somewhat closer to the Mizrahi than us, although he does not belong to them, either.” About his own colleagues, among them central figures in the Agudah, he is equally candid. His candid impressions seem to have been solicited by Rosenheim. “Dr. [Josef] Carlebach and Dr. Halberstadt have so far not been here, and I can thus not [comment upon] what they have done in particular for the Agudah.” He found Leo Deutschländer and his wife to be

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“very helpful and are essential to my endeavors,” but about a certain Shapiro, “I must remark—the plea for your discretion is obviously unnecessary—that he has declared that for his part he is on no one’s side and that we are very misled if we believe to have him, the Lithuanian Orthodox, or the Lithuanian Agudath Israel in hand.”41 The purview of Birnbaum’s authority and activity in Lithuania was broad. He was at once a propagandist and an organizer on the local level, a liaison between the international movement and its local branches, and an informant for the Central Committee on the state of the Jewish masses on the ground concerning the reliability of key contacts on the local scene and even of the activities of other Agudah operatives, as indicated by his mention of Doctors Carlebach and Halberstadt. Rosenheim was encouraged by Birnbaum’s audacious plan for Agudah organization in Lithuania, although he often invoked caution about the time and resources such efforts would require. “Naturally,” he wrote, “the most important task for us will be to gradually win the Youth of Israel over to our side so that they will no longer shun the Agudah but work in common cause with us. Concerning the program you have developed, I am entirely in agreement, but if we do not wish to deceive ourselves from the beginning, we should not expect it to be realized as quickly as you expect.”42 While tempering Birnbaum’s expectations, Rosenheim encouraged him with concrete suggestions for where he should next visit and what opportunities he might find in organizing there, dropping insider information to Birnbaum from places as exotic as the therapeutic baths. “Before the holidays I visited the chairman of the local group in Ponevezh, Mr. Wolpe, while he was in Bad Nauheim to take the cure,” he writes in 1919. “The rabbi of Ponevezh, Mr. Kahnmann [sic], who previously had been no follower of the Agudath Israel, has realized the great necessity of founding a group there.” He provided Birnbaum with useful intelligence on institutions, activities, and personalities, guiding him on the most useful issues to investigate on his visits. “Do not overlook Ponevezh. It is particularly interesting in terms of educational reform.” In this instance, Rosenheim’s report to Birnbaum contained an unusual critique of his colleague, Josef Carlebach, one of the architects of the Agudah’s expansion during the war. “Gymnasia after the style that Dr. Carlebach and Wilkowiechke have founded in Kovno do not exist among the Orthodox there. There is a general

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opinion that only children who have not succeeded in their religious studies would attend such a Gymnasium. . . . It is my belief that it is an obligation of the Agudath Israel, in particular the German Orthodox, to take charge of the funding and to set out our objectives for the Lithuanian educational situation, not bend to the founding of a Carlebach school by default.”43 Most interesting is the familiarity and freedom with which Rosenheim addresses Birnbaum. Later in the same letter, he even asks Birnbaum to explore the workability of his model on the frontiers of the Agudah organization with Carlebach and another leader of Agudah educational reform, the head of the Beys Yaakov organization, Leo Deutschländer. Clearly Birnbaum was held in some esteem by Rosenheim as a colleague and liaison. In other dispatches, Birnbaum’s observations concern the familiar themes of the difficulties of activism and personalities he thought would be of use to the Agudah’s efforts.44 He was trusted by Rosenheim as a valued networker and was even employed to negotiate with potentially sensitive contacts.45 Returning from Lithuania at the end of 1919, Birnbaum was soon traveling again, this time with an Agudah delegation to London.46 This trip, different from his organizing in Lithuania in its strategic rather than tactical aims, reflects yet another side of Birnbaum’s Agudah activities. In Lithuania, Birnbaum had found a niche that suited his temperament and interests well. He was given a fair amount of autonomy by the Agudah leadership and charged with stirring interest and enthusiasm for the movement. He had wide discretion, not only to do his own work but to report on the efforts of others to the Central Committee. But the London delegation was altogether different. Here, in the company of important figures within the Agudah, Birnbaum’s role was diminished; the scant documentation records little more than his presence. The most important artifact, an English transcript of a meeting between the delegation consisting of Chief Rabbi Weber of Slovakia, Rabbi Dr. Pinchas Kohn, Rabbi Leo Jung, Dr. Isaac Breuer, Dr. Isaac Landau, Dr. W. Schiffen, and Sir John Evelyn Shuckburgh, the undersecretary of state for the colonies, indicates that the group was an important collection of Agudah figures. As the transcript reveals, the purpose of the meeting was to make a muscular power play, inserting the Agudah directly into the politics of Mandate Palestine. Clearly the group was sailing against the wind; Rabbi Jung, the main spokesman

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of the group, was forced to begin his remarks with an overly demonstrative assertion of the Agudah’s representativeness—a clear indication that the British colonial administration knew little of the group: “I have been asked to speak on behalf of the Agudas Israel,” Jung announced, “which . . . is a world union of Orthodox Jewry comprising the majority of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, having branches in 18 different countries.” Jung’s remarks then turn immediately to the business of the delegation: an overt attack on the World Zionist Organization’s hegemony in Palestine. “The draft of the Mandate,” Jung began, “calls upon the whole Jewish people to co-operate in the upbuilding of Palestine at the same time it recognizes the Z.O. [Zionist Organization] as the Jewish Agency[,] the authoritative body representing Jewry in all Palestine work. . . . This is obviously done on the assumption that the Z.O. enjoys the full confidence of all sections of the Jewish People and is therefore most likely to [effect] the participation in all Palestine efforts of the whole Jewish people.” But, Jung argues, this is a major, if inadvertent (on the Mandate authority’s part), misreading of Jewish sensibilities, demographics, and history: The bulk of Jewry live in Eastern Europe. They are intensely conscious of the historical past. The Jewish people to them is the people of the Jewish religion, the people of the Bible. Palestine is the land in which they hope to realize the ideals of life as taught [in] the Jewish religion. On the soil of the Holy Land they desire to work out their own salvation in a quiet life of peaceful work living up to the Traditions of their fathers. Because they know that the spiritual basis of Zionism is a nationalism religiously indifferent and therefore incompatible with Jewish Tradition, these Jewish masses have not joined the Zionist movement. Nor have [they] joined the [Mizrahi] (the conservative [faction] of the Z.O.) because by so doing they will allow that the Jewish Religion which to them is the paramount issue in all Jewish [affairs] be reduced to a mere party matter depending on the changing majorities of Jews united within the folds on this religiously indifferent nationalism.47

A familiar theme, according to Jung the Agudah had no objection to a “Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine” but only to its control by the nonreligious Zionists (among which he included Mizrahi, not even mentioning the party’s religious orientation): “We are of course very happy at the possibility of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, but

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what the ­Agudah and the millions of Orthodox Jews behind it yearn for is not flag waving, not a political triumph, but the opportunity of living in accordance with the law of our God in the spirit of the Torah.” This, Jung asserts, is within the power of the Mandate authority to realize. “The only thing that stands between the religious masses and their energetic co-operation in Palestinian efforts is the fact that their religious scruples do not allow them to participate in Palestine work as long as the safeguarding of the Jewish religion is not clearly, consistently and practically assured.”48 This meeting, “marked by great friendliness and earnestness,” brought into focus once again the complex attitude of the Agudah toward Palestine. Jung’s tantalizing affirmation of a “Jewish commonwealth” in Palestine was not the main point for the Agudah; rather, as the comments obliquely reveal, its eyes were on competing with Zionists for support of the Jewish populations of eastern Europe. As they would do effectively through the tool of parliamentary manipulation in Poland, the Agudah sought to drive a wedge between the Zionist organization and its potential base. By convincing the British that the Zionist organization did not represent the interests of a majority of Jews, the Agudah could deflate the credibility of the Zionists among the millions of Jews in the process of political awakening. But it succeeded almost immediately in its primary aim, publicity. Several Yiddish newspapers, in Europe and the United States, carried an Agudah press release immediately after the meeting, boasting that “we have traveled as representatives of the Agudath Israel to deliver to the ­English government, as the Mandate government over Palestine, a memorandum . . . that declares that the Palestine Mandate, established with the assistance of the ‘Jewish Agency,’ with the Zionist World Organization as its agent, should be changed so that the Orthodox Jewish organization instead of Zionists shall assist in the building of Palestine.”49 It is possible that Birnbaum, the unnoticed fellow traveler, penned this release (which reflected, at the very least, wishful thinking on the Agudah’s part about the success of the meeting). He otherwise played little public role in the meeting. Presumably such marginality in a meeting of great importance, on an international stage he had not ascended before, was a frustrating experience. Perhaps more than anything it made clear that in the Agudah, unlike in other organizations where he had

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been seen as a pioneer and leader, he was expected to recognize and accept his place. That is not to say that the place the Agudah had in mind for Birnbaum required him to withdraw completely from the spotlight. A year later Birnbaum set out on yet another international delegation, this time to the United States. Here Birnbaum played a more central role; in fact, in much of the publicity for the various events, he was often the main attraction. The discussions and planning for the American delegation had been in the works for some time before the actual voyage, and Birnbaum, accompanied by his wife, Rosa, arrived in America in the summer of 1921. Once again, Rosenheim was active in planning the logistics, including giving Birnbaum a central role. Initially, two delegations were to be sent, but the plan was ultimately dropped.50 In the end only one group, led by R. Meier Hildesheimer (or as Rosenheim called him, the “America commissar”), departed Copenhagen in May 1921.51 In the lead-up to the trip, correspondence between Birnbaum and Rosenheim showed that the American delegation was of considerable importance both to the Agudah and to Birnbaum personally. In one letter, Rosenheim hinted at the main purpose of the trip—fund-­ raising—and underscored the financial problems that plagued the Agudah and the pressures on Birnbaum as a paid activist. Over the course of Birnbaum’s career, little had changed in regard to supporting his household. From his early days as a Zionist he had devoted all his energies to journalism and activism, and his time with the Agudah was no exception. But also as in the early days of Zionism, few participants in the Agudah relied on the party for their livelihood. Just as Birnbaum was probably one of the earliest “professional” Zionists, so too was he one of the few paid Agudists. Almost all others had vocations independent of the movement. Rosenheim was originally a financier, and many others were similarly businessmen and professionals. The rabbis among them held (or would eventually hold) rabbinic posts or other clerical and educational professions. But the Agudah was Birnbaum’s profession. And, as was hardly new, it was a precarious living. “A discussion of your personal role in the voyage has not yet occurred,” Rosenheim wrote on 2 March. “I will obviously be considering your part. It is hoped that the American delegation at the very least will result in the Agudath Israel being able to secure your budget for the next year.” And

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then, a sober warning: “Should this not be the case, the consequences will be quite severe. . . . I feel obliged to make it clear in advance that I see no possibility of allowing certain of our contractual conditions to continue. I note this because you yourself . . . informed me that your obligations as a head of household require action; it is precisely for this reason that a small bit of illusion has been allowed to remain. I hope, as stated earlier, that the delegation to America will bring us out of the woods.”52 Like all organizations of its type, the Agudah worked on a tight budget. That the delegation to America intended in part to be a fund-raising mission differentiated it from the other two in which Birnbaum had participated. For the first time in their relationship, it would seem, Rosenheim was placing on Birnbaum’s own shoulders the task of raising funds to support his work within the organization. The documentation of the American delegation also sheds light on another central relationship in Birnbaum’s life: his evolving friendship with Tuvia Horowitz. Still in close touch, Horowitz used his relationship with Birnbaum to try to secure a position within Agudah, and the American delegation offered an excellent opportunity. In a series of letters early in the planning for the trip, Horowitz repeatedly appealed to Birnbaum to appoint him to the delegation. Writing in German, obviously a challenge for him (the letter is rife with malapropisms, misspellings, and grammatical errors), Horowitz pulls out all the stops in his final plea to be added to the delegation. From imploring that Birnbaum help in his personal advancement (“a short visit to America is the single best way for me to make my future as a self-sufficient, independent man, to make some money for myself ”), to robust claims about his usefulness as the nephew of the Vizhnitser rebbe in bringing members into the Agudah (“[My uncle’s group] has at least twenty thousand members in America; I need not [even] investigate [but simply] go in our kloyzim and take names. . . . At least two thousand reliable paying members I guarantee I could create with God’s help in America”), Horowitz leaves no stone unturned to convince his friend. In this endeavor, he also pulls a surprising card from his sleeve: the Oylim. “[This trip] is necessary for both me and for the Agudah. Also for the Oylim; [it] would be the best way to finance all the Oylim colonies in Palestine.”53 To be clear, no Oylim colonies existed at this point, in Palestine or elsewhere, but it is an intriguing reference nonetheless. At the very least it offers evidence

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that neither Birnbaum nor Horowitz (nor, one can assume, any of the other young activists inspired by Birnbaum and drawn in by Horowitz) had abandoned the Oylim. Indeed, it may put an altogether different spin on Birnbaum’s relationship with the Agudah; rather than a supplicant seeking acceptance and legitimacy within the larger organization, Birnbaum may well have been using the organization, to the extent he could, to achieve his own ends. But the end of the letter is a testament to their endearingly intimate relationship: “I eagerly await your answer. I write in such ‘Yiddish-German’ and so have disturbed my beautiful little daughter, who cries now. . . . You will excuse me. I write now only extraordinary nonsense.” The stakes of the Agudah delegation to America were high for both Birnbaum and the organization at large. Reflecting this was Birnbaum’s presence in the delegation. Rather than keep to the background as he did in London, Birnbaum spoke on the Agudah’s behalf, playing to a base of support he hoped would remember him from his visit to New York some fifteen years earlier.54 When Birnbaum traveled to New York in 1908, he was received as a hero by several Galician communal and political organizations of the Lower East Side and preceded by his reputation as a fighter for the rights of Galician Jews as they sought national rights in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was lovingly received as an honorary galitsyaner, a native son. Traveling now as a religious Jew, Birnbaum continued to appeal to many of the same listeners. His bearded visage, now grayed, was the very image of piety—certainly an attractive image to the “modern” and nostalgic Americans. His Yiddish remained a testimony that he was “one of them.” At the same time, the company with which he traveled as a member of an esteemed, dynamic new organization of religious Jews, combined with his German education and bearing, gave him bona fides with religious Jews of the uptown stripe as well. Although, as we have seen, the delegation did not necessarily appeal to the mood of most of those who shaped American Jewish public opinion—especially the New York Yiddish press—they received a warm welcome when they spoke before Orthodox audiences. The Agudah delegation included Yosef Lev, Meir Dan Plotzky, Asher Lemel Spitzer, and Meier Hildesheimer, son of prominent German neoorthodox leader ­Esriel Hildesheimer. All of them except Birnbaum were rabbis, but it was Birnbaum whose appearance often received top billing.

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Agudath Israel delegation to New York, 1921. Clockwise from left rear: Meier Hildesheimer, Yosef Lev, Birnbaum, Meir Dan Plotzky, Asher Lemel Spitzer (Courtesy of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Family Archive)

Birnbaum appeared at several venues, most of the time with the full complement of the delegation (such as the previously mentioned evening at Cooper Union), but he was also invited as a solo speaker in several instances. When he appeared alone, his remarks were usually devoted to describing his turn to Orthodoxy. But when he spoke as part of the larger delegation, his speeches reveal much about the mission of the Agudah and his role in it. One manuscript of a speech given in New York, preserved in the Birnbaum Family Archive, is a useful illustration. The Agudah’s purpose, Birnbaum began, was to be a catalyst to bring together America’s religious Jews. Isolated from both worldwide Orthodox Jewry and each other, Torah-true Jews in America required an organization like the Agudah, which could link the worldwide Orthodox community together under the great rabbis of the Council of Torah Sages. “The arrival of this delegation means

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the beginning of a new period in the life of the Orthodox in the United States, up to now isolated, with no link to the God-fearing [ yiraim] and the deeply religious [haredim] in other lands, a hundred thousand religious Jews in America, God protect them, split into different small groups and lacking the power to recognize and guard the interests of religious Jewry.”55 The lecture addressed several other Agudah talking points. “The Agudath Israel wishes to answer all questions swarming constantly around modern life in the spirit of the Holy Torah. What does this mean?” Birnbaum asked. “Take the issue of education, of raising the younger generation. . . . The Agudah says, ‘The beginning of wisdom is fear of God’ [reshit hokhmah yirat Hashem]—education of the young generation must occur only in the spirit of our Holy Torah. No other platform can replace it; only in the spirit of the Holy Torah can one be a Jew, in all its laws and commandments.”56 On the issue of the economic impact of Shabbat observance—in the 1920s a serious issue for American Jews—Birnbaum offers hope for religious Jews who sought fair labor conditions: “For Jews [to have] a livelihood for which one must violate Shabbat, for which one must violate many of the commandments of our Holy Torah, is unacceptable. This is what the Agudath Israel [believes], [and it offers] an economic program enacted through the spirit of the Torah. Yes, a livelihood—but without the desecration of Shabbat or any other thing which is against the commandments of the Torah.”57 Although concern for the fate of the individual Jewish worker, compelled for the sake of feeding his family to abandon the observance of the Sabbath, was always a central tenet of the ­Agudah, this speech places it at the center of what was nearly a manifesto of the ­Agudah organization. The party Birnbaum portrays was thus more than a force for Orthodox unity, more than a means of harnessing the voice of the Orthodox masses and directing it; it was a force for social justice and equality based on the Torah. It is even, the author asserts, a force that seeks to eliminate the historical sources of the economic and religious repression of Jews through such tools as the ownership of property. Once again, themes of central importance to Birnbaum’s entire life of activism—in this instance social equality realized through assertion of peoplehood—had found a new religious form. “Thanks to the work of the Agudath Israel the Orthodox Jews in eastern Europe have over-

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turned the control of the landlords and have become the only house owners in the Jewish street. . . . Thanks to the work of the Agudah, they ‘speak [his] testimonies before kings and are not ashamed.’”58 Once again, Birnbaum’s speech also turns to the Agudah’s position regarding Palestine. Elaborating on the themes of the London presentation, Birnbaum discusses the Agudah’s preference for a particular settlement of the land: one that is predicated on the priority of Torah. “The Land of Israel,” Birnbaum writes, “is the Holy Land for all Jews, and no portion of the Jewish people has the right to lay a special claim to it. . . . Three times a day the observant Jew mentions in his prayers Zion and Jerusalem and prays for their restoration. The recently concluded world war has destroyed all work in the Land of Israel. But even as the world once again recovers, the Agudah has already undertaken the work [of rebuilding].” Birnbaum again underscores that Jewish settlement was not anathema to the Agudah’s position but elaborates on the fact of religious Jewish immigration. Orthodox Jews had the most compelling reasons to immigrate to Palestine, but it must be the correct form of immigration. Settling the land for the sake of creating another secular state with no place for Torah, simply so that Jews may enter the community of nations, was unacceptable. But a land settled by Jews for the sake of living a religious life, establishing centers of Jewish learning, and expanding religiosity regardless of sovereignty was ideal. “The Agudah and its program have remained consistent: ‘Settle the Land of Israel in holy purity.’ . . . The Land of Israel must not simply become a land of Jews; it must be a Jewish land, a land that carries the seal of the Holy Torah, the seal of the Holy One, blessed be he. . . . The Agudah strives to bring to the Land of Israel more observant Jews, to create a religious center, to maintain and strengthen its religious atmosphere.”59

Discontent in the New Home: Drifting from the Agudah The platform offered by the Agudah seemed to dovetail well with Birnbaum’s own brand of religious activism. Committed to addressing the intensifying economic and political strife of European Jewry, of seizing upon the opportunity of the creation of representative democracies across central and eastern Europe and a favorable administration in

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Mandate Palestine to rally religious Jews to political action grounded in the Torah, the new party resonated with Birnbaum’s new conception of Jewish peoplehood. But around 1922, just as suddenly as he entered the nerve center of the empowered new movement, he began to move away from it. There was no obvious critical event that precipitated his separation, no sudden explosion or pivotal conflict like the public struggle with Herzl in the late 1890s. Indeed, until the end of his life Birnbaum maintained cordial relations with Rosenheim and other Agudah operatives. He occasionally submitted articles to Agudist publications, such as the Yiddish Beys Yaakov Zhurnal and Dos Yidish Vort, although his own publishing endeavors toward the end of his life took up the majority of his time. The story of his conversion to Orthodoxy was and has remained a source of inspiration in the Orthodox world, especially within Agudah circles.60 Likewise, the leadership of the Agudah publicly did not cast aspersions on Birnbaum’s post-Agudah thought or publicly seek to dissuade young Orthodox enthusiasts from affiliating with him. In short, although Birnbaum ceased to act as an individual on behalf of the Agudah and its agenda after a certain point, the intellectual convictions that brought him into the Agudah did not vary. Not unlike his later affiliation with the Zionist figures of the Jewish renaissance even after he had ceased to play an active role in the WZO, once it became clear to him that the Agudah had ceased to be useful for the development of his own project, he left it to strike out on his own while maintaining a connection, however attenuated, with the more established party. When exactly Birnbaum arrived at his decision is not clear. After the journey to America, he did not participate in another Agudah delegation, nor did he return to Lithuania to continue developing the groundwork he had helped to establish. His health was not good; no doubt the extensive travel he undertook in 1919–21 had an impact on him, as did his nomadic lifestyle. He and Rosa moved between Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg, ultimately taking up residence for the last four years of Birnbaum’s life in the Dutch spa town of Scheveningen. It is plausible that, as foretold by Rosenheim before the trip to America, the delegation was not able to raise enough money to support him as a full-time activist. But this is unsatisfying, if only because it does not explain the degree of his separation from the Agudah; not only did he

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leave the executive ranks of the party but he also removed himself from membership altogether. Once more, however, Birnbaum’s correspondence with Rosenheim and Horowitz sheds light on possible reasons for Birnbaum’s distancing himself from the Agudah leadership. Birnbaum first expressed outright misgivings about his work with the Agudah to Horowitz not long after his mission to Lithuania. One letter in particular, from spring of 1920, addresses his frustrations with surprising candor. Just as before, the same touching intimacy is displayed as Horowitz continues to counsel Birnbaum on his health, circumstances, and family life. He even offers his advice upon hearing that Birnbaum’s free-willed son Uriel had become too involved with a Gentile woman. “At any rate,” Horowitz writes, “you should not trouble yourself too much about it. It is well known that parents today cannot understand their children, and children will do whatever they want.”61 In March 1920 (17 Adar 5680), Horowitz sent a particularly involved letter detailing his and Birnbaum’s Agudah activities. In it he offered observations about internal Orthodox politics, including a discussion of the Mizrahi movement and the Gerer Hasidim and offering Birnbaum advice on upcoming lectures. Especially interesting, though, are Horowitz’s opening lines, “The truth be told . . . it has not [seemed] that you are too pleased with your work for the Agudah, nor are you able to do all in the Agudah leadership that you would like; and because I know the nature of different types of Orthodox Jews, and I know that in the west they are much stuffier than in the east; we Hasidim breathe a little freer air. . . . I have not been able to understand for my part why you are so concerned with the Agudah; your influence will not be cultivated [through it].”62 Birnbaum had clearly expressed some of his frustration with hurdles he encountered within the Agudah structure. Horowitz’s analysis of the cultural dissonance that he believes is at the heart of Birnbaum’s unhappiness—a stereotypically starched-shirt German Jewish Agudah leadership—is amusing and says a lot about Birnbaum’s success at internalizing and projecting a Hasidic mien. But this lighthearted response also hints at Birnbaum’s deeper anxiety: fear of lack of acceptance. Birnbaum felt at home among eastern European Jews like Horowitz, and their close relationship certainly eased this passage. No doubt Birnbaum’s relative obscurity among the Hasidim and other Orthodox of eastern Europe was also helpful. He had established

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a public presence in Czernowitz during the years he resided there, even achieving enough recognition within the Orthodox camp to enable a person such as Horowitz to follow his intellectual progress. But his relatively brief time in Bukovina, even taking into account his writing in eastern publications, his bid for the Reichsrat, and his efforts on behalf of Yiddishism and Jewish nationalism, did not equal or replicate his investment in German-language, “western” intellectual discourse. More to the point, although Birnbaum felt he had established a rapport with the Hasidim of Galicia and Bukovina, it was the German Orthodox who knew him and his contentious intellectual history the best. Given that Birnbaum may well have opined on every conceivable issue of interest to central European Jewry at one point or another in his career and the relatively small number of public outlets for the journalist who published the vast majority of his work in the Jewish press, the German Orthodox community was well aware of Birnbaum’s pre-­Orthodox opinions. As his engagements with German Orthodox figures like Rosenheim indicate, he continued to privilege the opinion of his western peers. Despite his embrace of Yiddish, his earnest affection for the folkways, lifestyle, and religion of eastern European Jewry, including his passionate commitment to a Hasidic-inspired Orthodoxy, Birnbaum remained a member of the German Jewish cultural world and continued to measure himself against the yardstick of its religious figures. Individuals like Rosenheim, and especially the rabbinic leadership such as Meier Hildesheimer, Isaac Breuer, and Leo Jung, represented to Birnbaum the intellectual center of the Agudah. Because of his conspicuous record before his turn to Orthodoxy, full acceptance may not have been possible. No matter the depth of his commitment to his Orthodox beliefs, nor the insistence with which he repudiated his earlier thought, there would always be an aura of suspicion surrounding Birnbaum; certainly that was enough to disqualify him from the centers of power and leadership within the Agudah. To the Hasidic rank and file of Poland, Birnbaum was an exotic curiosity whose embrace of Yiddish and frumkayt (religiosity) could even serve as a point of pride—that even a daytsher, a gebildeter yid, a cultured, German Jew, could find his place in “true” yiddishkayt. To the Germans, however, he was no stranger but a recent convert from a worldview they knew only too well, for they had been on the defensive against it for decades.

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It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment Birnbaum changed his feelings toward the Agudah. As with his correspondence with Horowitz, Birnbaum’s letters from Rosenheim continued at much the same rate as at the height of Birnbaum’s Agudah work; yet over time, particularly beginning in the late 1920s, their frequency dropped off until, by the early and mid-1930s, they become increasingly irregular, while the correspondence with an entirely new cadre of individuals, all unknown to Birnbaum before 1924, greatly expanded. However, an unexpected document, an unsigned, typewritten draft of a letter does provide a partial answer: It is not true that I have fallen out with the Agudath Israel, nor that I have ceased to maintain my relationship with it; likewise it is not true that I made this break known in a lecture I delivered in Vienna a short time ago. It is true that I have not been a paid employee of the ­Agudath Israel for half a year now, nor indeed an active member, and that I did give a speech in front of your Vienna youth group. And it is also true that in my lecture—the only one I have given in seven months—I did not generally make mention of my relationship with the Agudah. It is not true that I proposed the foundation of an organization in which the believers of all religions unite to create a united front of religious Jews, Muslims, and Christians to defend themselves against ever-increasing atheism in the world. It is true that I made general comments warning believing Jews against dependence on Jewish “freethinkers.” . . . As for founding an organization on the basis of the solidarity of religious interests with regard to atheists, there was not a word in the speech. It is not true that I have declared that I feel more connected to a religious Catholic than to a Jewish apikores [apostate]. I have generally not spoken of my personal feelings with regard to apikorsim in comparison with religious non-Jews.63

There is very little context within which to locate this mysterious document. Its tone suggests that it was written in response to a printed piece about a lecture that Birnbaum delivered in the spring of 1922. It is dated 1 May 1922, indicating that Birnbaum had been out of the ­Agudah—not just as a paid employee but as a member—since shortly after his return from America in the autumn of 1921. Rosenheim’s concern about Birnbaum’s future employment with the Agudah, it would seem, was realized.

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More puzzling, though, is why with the end of his employment in the Agudah Birnbaum’s membership ended as well. The letter makes clear that he had ceased to find common cause with the organization and indicates that more than money concerns led to his departure. Few in the Agudah were actually its paid employees; Birnbaum, lacking funding, could likely have found support elsewhere and remained a member. The letter is obviously written in a defensive posture. It suggests Birnbaum had been accused of arguing for an ecumenical front of “Orthodox” Jews, Christians, and Muslims against the spread of atheism, and it is implied that this position led to his estrangement from the Agudah. Who has made this claim is not clear, but it seems to have been issued from a non-Orthodox Jewish camp, likely about a speech made to a non-Orthodox youth group. Despite his protestations—or because of them—Birnbaum was at least treading on very contentious ground with respect to the official position of the Agudah. Although it would not be surprising to find the Agudah officially cooperating with non-Jewish political groups for the sake of some advantage of advancement of the situation of Orthodox Jews (as indeed happened during the Agudah’s presence in the Polish Sejm), it would be very unlikely that the Agudah would publicly call for intellectual cooperation with nonJews, particularly religious non-Jews. It is also unlikely that the ­Agudah would support anything like an affinity for religious non-Jews over secular Jews. Even if such a position were considered pragmatically, the shock waves that it would likely send through the constituency would preclude it from ever happening. While Birnbaum makes clear that he did not make these pronouncements, his protest indicates a strain of noncompliance with the Agudah party line that had drawn attention. And it was not the only one. Even more contentious than the mysterious lecture referred to in the letter was Birnbaum’s involvement with the Frankfurt Freie Jüdisches Lehr­haus. Established by Franz Rosenzweig with the support of Martin Buber in 1920, the Lehrhaus was one of the most-storied incubators of Jewish intellectual life in Weimar Germany. Under its auspices, a staggering number of luminaries in Jewish thought were brought together in an adult education curriculum that offered everything from short lecture series to multisession seminars. Aside from Rosenzweig and Buber, who were regular contributors (although Rosenzweig’s deterio-

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rating health soon precluded his more active involvement), participants included Gershom Scholem, Erich Fromm, S. Y. Agnon, Siegfried Kracauer, Bertha Pappenheim, and Leo Strauss.64 Listed among these distinguished participants was Nathan Birnbaum, who spoke before it in late 1923.65 We have already encountered Rosenzweig’s fascination with Birnbaum. Combined with their mutual relationship with Buber, it is not entirely surprising that Birnbaum would be invited to participate in the Lehrhaus. In November 1923, Birnbaum presented a lecture (or possibly a series of lectures) entitled “Being and Essentiality” (Wesen und Wesentlichkeit). In a letter to Buber, Rosenzweig briefly referred to the upcoming talk’s title: “[Birnbaum] could explain it to you better: form in Judaism. I’ll write him [a subtitle for the talk] or you can.”66 A few months after the lecture, an article based upon it appeared in the Orthodox journal Jeschurun, “Being and Essentiality—Form in Judaism.”67 The article’s themes show it to have been an extension of the elements discussed in Words of the Ascenders and resembled remarks Birnbaum had given in several public venues. One particular theme that had fascinated him since his turn to religion, while present in other writings, receives particular attention in this essay: the importance of outward form, aesthetics, and appearance as symbols of religious peoplehood. One element that had played a central role in Birnbaum’s conception of Orthodoxy was the coherence and transcendental significance of physical manifestations of Orthodoxy—including prayer and ritual, but even more important, external accoutrements like dress, gesture, and comportment. In the absence of the integral and autonomous Jewish community and its ancient structures that were hard-wired to maintain holiness and separation, the distinguishing form of the Orthodox individual assured the survival of the “holy people” (am kodesh). “[Form] is the act of [giving] mystical corporeality to the idea itself; it makes the idea more complete; it renders the innermost truth and inconceivable idea comprehensible to men,” he wrote.68 Not particularly unique or new within the Orthodox world, the ideas explored in “Being and Essentiality” resonated with a spectrum of different ideas, including Samson Raphael Hirsch’s meditations on Jewish symbols.69 Even more directly, Birnbaum’s notions of Jewish particularity manifested through consciously different

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clothing, behavior, and language resonated with the more extreme Orthodox model of shalem.70 This ideal, articulated in the midst of Jewish denominational battles in the 1850s and 1860s in central Europe by the more extreme Orthodox antagonists, posited that seemingly minor markers of Jewish differentiation—especially Jewish names, the Yiddish language, and traditional dress (shem, lashon, malbush— shalem)—were commandments of the first order of importance. The most extreme expression of this attitude held that compromising on any of these three elements was a grave violation that placed one beyond the pale of Judaism. Whether Birnbaum’s remarks were more novel to the largely nonOrthodox Lehrhaus audience, it is the fact that he delivered them at all that made the talk remarkable. Perceptive commentators such as Hillel Rogoff and Lazar Khazanovitsh had noted at the height of Birnbaum’s work with the Agudah a subtle dissonance between the man and the party. Rosenzweig also noted it a bit later, just before Birnbaum’s Lehr­ haus presentation, asking Buber rhetorically, “As for Birnbaum, the question is whether he is so much an Agudist” that he would not mind lecturing under the same roof as nonreligious intellectuals.71 Clearly he was not. But there was one voice that made clear the feelings of the Agudah camp toward Birnbaum’s participation in the Lehrhaus: Jacob Rosenheim. Despite no longer being active in the Agudah executive, a charged exchange in 1923 reveals that Birnbaum still looked to the Agudah for some degree of legitimization, and it was over the subject of the Lehrhaus that Birnbaum succeeded in pushing the boundary beyond what the Agudah could tolerate. It may well have marked the definitive point at which not just Birnbaum’s formal relationship with the Agudah had ended but his belief in its further intellectual value to him as well. Without question the Lehrhaus presented a distinct, even personal challenge to Rosenheim and other German Agudists; it was yet another expression of non-Orthodox Jewish identity against which the neoorthodox community had been fighting for decades, and in its own backyard. It largely went without saying that any affiliation with it was unacceptable, including agreeing to speak under its auspices. Whether or not Birnbaum was aware of this (and it is hard to believe he would not have been), Rosenheim took a hard line with Birnbaum in a letter striking in its combination of strained politeness and icy condescension.

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“The following remarks I ask you to regard as completely private and written in the spirit of friendship,” Rosenheim begins: Here in Frankfurt there are a number of societies and ideological circles, among which the Freie Jüdisches Lehrhaus has advertised a lecture series you are to give. The Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus is without doubt full of earnest people, who on the periphery of Judaism stand for the propagation of Jewish ideas and opposition to assimilation; it thus has, without doubt, a right to exist. However, even given these certainties, it is also the case that from the cathedral of the Lehrhaus the worst heresy [apikorsus] is spouted and that the methods of this heresy can have a serious impact on all of Jewry. It is thus the general position for all in all Orthodox circles that are not of the Mizrahi, but rather of the Agudist inclination, to shun the Lehrhaus from the outset and to reject any form of cooperation with it.72

It is not hard to imagine, based on Birnbaum’s long history of impatience with group politics, how he might have received this message. At the very least, Rosenheim’s comments imply that he did not view Birnbaum from a position of equality that Birnbaum surely expected. They do reveal much about how Rosenheim, and with him the rest of the Agudah leadership, saw Birnbaum: as a subordinate and religious neophyte, requiring periodic instruction and correction to keep him on the “straight path.” This letter, however, calls to account Birnbaum’s concept of himself and his role in Jewish affairs more than his personality. Although a recent convert to a religion-centered ideal of Jewish identity, Birnbaum still saw himself as part of the ongoing discourse of Jewish thought in Europe. He was not satisfied with the circumscribed audience of the Torah-true nor with limitations being placed on his ideas or the venues in which he could express them. If anything, he viewed his Orthodoxy as being in conversation with other worldviews, not cut off from them. No doubt he saw his participation in the Lehrhaus as an indispensable part of his activities as a journalist and thinker of modern Jewry, albeit from an Orthodox perspective. Rosenzweig seemed to intuitively understand this, as did Rosenheim. For the former, it was an opportunity to open up a conversation that was for the latter a dangerous digression. And in his deepest self, it was unlikely that Birnbaum would ever accept happily a rebuke that suggested he place limits on where his thought would take him.

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But the greatest contribution to the decline in Birnbaum’s enthusiasm for the Agudah was the idea that had brought him into the Orthodox world: the Oylim movement. Though an idea that had been sidelined in the early 1920s, the creation of an Oylim organization and eventually colonies in Palestine remained Birnbaum’s central ambition. Discussion of the Oylim was a recurrent theme in the correspondence between Birnbaum and Horowitz. Birnbaum may well have joined with the Agudah as a means of moving the Oylim forward, and he even received encouragement in this regard from Rosenheim. As time passed, however, the primary concerns at the heart of the Oylim idea—such as the organization and inspiration of Orthodox youth, agitation on behalf of Orthodox workers and the financially disadvantaged—were increasingly met by other Agudah organs. The Agudath Israel Youth was active from Birnbaum’s earliest association with the Agudah. As for Birnbaum’s quest to represent the needs of the working- and lower-class Orthodox politically, this function fell within the purview of the Agudath Israel Workers, the Orthodox workers’ union that came to dominate the party in this area.73 Birnbaum thus found what were to be his key constituencies as the vanguards of the Oylim already represented within the Agudah. Rosenheim seems increasingly to have seen the Oylim as a redundancy and sought to redirect Birnbaum’s interests away from it early on. His early missions had to do with the kind of organizational and ideological work Birnbaum envisioned for the Oylim. In the correspondence between Rosenheim and Birnbaum, there is little mention of the group, nor are there any documents that detail the Agudah’s attitude toward the Oylim or Birnbaum’s plans for it. But in a letter dating from sometime after Birnbaum’s withdrawal, Rosenheim’s thoughts on the matter are made very clear. Written not to Birnbaum but to Wolf S. Jacobson, another Agudist close to Birnbaum, the letter shows the low priority Rosenheim apparently considered the Oylim movement to be, as well as his weariness with Birnbaum’s complaints. Like the letter to Birnbaum taking him to task for participation in the Lehrhaus, this letter of 30 June 1930 shows Rosenheim reaching the end of his patience. However, in this letter Rosenheim is unconstrained in expressing his irritation, clearly seeing Birnbaum as beyond his ability to influence one way or another. The context of the exchange is Birn-

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baum’s complaint, dutifully relayed to Rosenheim through their mutual friend Jacobson, that he had received no support from the Agudah for his Oylim project and that seems to accuse Rosenheim himself of duplicity—blocking Birnbaum’s work on the Oylim while at the same time poaching its ideas for Agudah initiatives. “The substance of Dr. Birnbaum’s complaint . . . is incomprehensible to me,” the irate letter begins. It takes a considerable amount of oversensitivity to be offended by my remarks or to describe it as a stab in the back. . . . Dr. Birnbaum has no right to consider the Oylim idea as though it is protected by patent. He knows exactly how friendly I have been to the idea of such a project and how painful it is for me to point out that up to now the entire idea has not taken the slightest step toward realization. The first volume of [Birnbaum’s journal, Der Aufstieg] has only confirmed my pessimistic interpretation. . . . Is it not better to tell him that a youth organization [within the] Agudath Israel has been tried, and it had a practical party apparatus behind it? Is this a crime or a stab in the back? . . . I leave it to you to relay my position through your friendly relationship with Dr. Birnbaum. I would also like to remind him that from the beginning I have been constant in my desire to bring the Oylim idea to fruition from within the Agudah youth program. If I am now questioning the practicality of this decision, Dr. Birnbaum is to thank for it.74

A familiar litany of Birnbaum’s frustrations emerges from Rosenheim’s words. Oversensitivity, perceived slights, a feeling that he had been ill used—these are all complaints he had made before in other contexts. But as excessive as Birnbaum’s accusations were (“stab in the back” seems to be a direct quotation), he was not reacting for its own sake. At the very least, Rosenheim had sought to co-opt the Oylim along with Birnbaum. Even more dubiously, it appears likely that Rosenheim had lost interest in the youth activism represented by the Oylim idea, leaving Birnbaum at loose ends. Most damaging and hurtful to Birnbaum would have been Rosenheim’s assessment of what had become Birnbaum’s latest passion: a renewed Oylim project centered around a new periodical, Der Aufstieg (The ascent). No doubt Rosenheim was looking upon the project with the cold eye of a master bureaucrat responsible for a large organization with many moving parts (and egos), so his curt reference to what had become Birnbaum’s

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major preoccupation was almost cruel, however reasonable his words may have been. In the end, Birnbaum’s withdrawal from the Agudah followed a familiar pattern. His confidence in his convictions faltered before the gritty reality of party politics. But unlike his falling out with Zionism, in Orthodoxy Birnbaum had started at a disadvantage. As a Zionist, he had had a legitimate claim to being one of its founders, but he entered the complex world of Orthodoxy as a neophyte. Although his personal story became an inspiring tool for a public relations message for the Agudah and Orthodoxy, his attempt to turn this celebrity into an authentic position of leadership in the Agudah failed. There were causes particular to Orthodox society over which Birnbaum could have no control, or may even not have recognized, that prevented this from happening. His greatest claim to admiration from this world, his ­teshuva, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gave him an almost mystical aura—witness the effect of his personality and story on Tuvia Horowitz. On the other hand, being a ba’al teshuva in this embattled period of Orthodox Jewish history, and especially having previously been a public figure in the service of Jewish secular nationalism, the bête noire of pre- and interwar Orthodoxy, was likely a taint that he could never escape. In short, Birnbaum should never have expected that he would have been able to ascend to the upper echelons of Orthodoxy, a fact he was not permitted to forget. We have seen how Rosenheim felt the need on one occasion—and probably there were others as well—to “handle” Birnbaum, to place a check on his enthusiasm and visions. Even had Birnbaum not been a ba’al teshuva, it is unlikely, absent a high level of accomplishment in Torah learning or the stature of a significant rabbinic figure, that he would ever have been able to assert the kind of authority and leadership he felt his due. Although on a practical level, the bureaucracy of the Agudah—men like Rosenheim, the Central Committee, the administrators and teachers in the Beys ­Yaakov schools, the leaders of the Agudath Israel Workers, the ­Agudath Israel Youth, the emissaries and the like, including Birnbaum himself for a time—wielded significant power in the practical operation of the Agudah, they did not “lead” in the way Birnbaum would have liked or recognized. Their function was not to inspire, act on

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a grand scale, or initiate ideological policies but rather to act within their place; they were not involved to articulate and dispense great ideas of their own but to propagate the platform of Torah as articulated by the rabbinic leadership of the Council of Torah Sages. Its members, viewed by ­Agudah followers as endowed with da’at Torah— a legitimation of authority based upon knowledge of Torah accessible only to the most elite rabbinic figures—were unimpeachable in their authority and were the only ones who could determine fundamental Agudah policy.75 From Birnbaum’s early work with the Agudah, it seems perfectly reasonable that he could have attained an important presence, perhaps even as central as that of Rosenheim himself, within the limited possibilities of the first, practical kind of leadership. But not surprisingly, this did not satisfy him, and failing to realize the presence he felt his due within the Agudah, he looked for the last few years of his life for an alternative means of achieving it.

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By the middle of 1922, scarcely three years after Birnbaum’s rapid rise in the Agudath Israel, he had pulled back significantly from its activities and policies and for the rest of his life pursued an independent line. Although he would maintain warm relations with many people within the Agudah, Birnbaum struck out in a new direction based primarily on ideas described in his first “Orthodox” pamphlet, Words of the ­Ascenders. He was involved in the publication of two independent newspapers connected to the small Oylim society, Der Aufstieg and to a lesser extent Der Ruf (The call). By the time of his death in 1937, Birnbaum had cultivated a small cadre of followers who became emissaries for the Oylim movement throughout Europe, based in Warsaw, Munich, Paris, Antwerp, and Berlin. Although dwarfed by the Agudah, these Oylim emissaries made considerable effort to organize institutions and events to win adherents through seminars and cultural evenings, even an attempt to establish a yeshiva and girls’ school in Antwerp. But sadly, the movement made little impact on the larger Jewish scene and was all but forgotten in the destruction of the Second World War.1 The Oylim and Birnbaum’s journalistic work related to it represent the final chapter in his complex legacy. Like much of his work, his efforts over the last decade of his life show an active and creative mind whose insights about Jewish culture had not dulled with age or illness and were still combined with a strongly articulated vision for its future. While the true legacy of these last years is difficult to gauge, cut off by both Birnbaum’s death in 1937 and, a few years later, the complete destruction of the world in which all his ideas had been born, they are an intriguing coda. They offer a tantalizing view of ideas that never had their chance to flower. In particular the Oylim and its founding

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text, Words of the Ascenders, and the ideals they envisioned, Torah-driven yet curiously avant-garde Orthodoxy combined with passionate political activism, became Birnbaum’s main preoccupation. In the mid-1920s, the early Oylim plan of creating a colony of like-minded Orthodox youths settling in the Land of Israel in the style of Zionist pioneers remained the theoretical centerpiece of the movement. But this goal never went beyond the realm of Birnbaum’s and Horowitz’s imaginations. As time passed, settlement as a practical goal fell by the wayside altogether, replaced with more realizable local projects. Even with a few modest successes, the Oylim faced difficult challenges about which Birnbaum was optimistic but pragmatic. Its rivals within the Agudah, such as the Agudath Israel Youth, the Agudath Israel Workers, and the Beys Yaakov movement, all better organized, better funded, and backed by the Agudah despite some tensions, made much of its work redundant. For this reason, Birnbaum never asserted central control over the small groups of independent enthusiasts in correspondence with him throughout Europe, preferring to remain an inspirational figure rather than an active manager. Indeed, far from demanding a place as the ideological founder and leader of the movement, Birnbaum went out of his way in a letter to a prospective member of the Oylim, Eliezer Schindler, to reject any leading role other than as a reluctant figurehead. But he did offer moral and literary support through his last two periodicals, Der Aufstieg and Der Ruf, published between 1930 and 1937. In the midst of the crisis faced by central European Jewry in the 1930s, to which Birnbaum was acutely sensitive, his demurral from the Oylim is understandable; he simply had too many things to worry about. In addition to other problems, he and his wife were ill with increasing regularity; Rosa died in 1934, not long after the couple’s move to Scheveningen. The deepening economic crisis faced by all of Europe, with Jews particularly hard hit in many places, and the marked rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, Poland, and other central European nations made the basic concern of Jewish survival paramount. Retreating from party politics, Birnbaum cultivated a voice of detached but sophisticated analysis not beholden to the agenda of any one group. While he certainly maintained a keen interest in the ideals of the Oylim, this too waned over time, as political events took an increasingly dire turn in the mid-1930s. As his life drew to a close, any concern he had for the

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movement was replaced by acute alarm over the danger faced by its members, and spending his last four years as an émigré from Nazi Germany himself, he did what he could to help others leave more dangerous parts of Europe. Nevertheless, Birnbaum’s contributions to these two periodicals offer the best insight into his intellectual life in his twilight years. They show that his passionate thinking and writing on the state of the Jewish world continued unabated, even with renewed vigor, despite the personal tragedies of the loss of his home and his wife and the final dispersal of his family. Birnbaum’s last decade of literary production was almost entirely contained in two short-lived newspapers, Der Aufstieg and Der Ruf.2 Although there are differences between the two, Birnbaum’s thinking as it developed around key themes is consistent in both. Like most of his life’s work, the thread that tied all his various ideological transformations together was the search for an ideal model with which the Jewish people could finally exchange the pain and indignity of exile for the self-respect of redemption. This idea, which undergirded all of his writing from his earliest days in the Kadimah Society through his political associations and alienations, was also the driving spirit behind both journals. They are also, like his earlier work, infused with a sense of impending catastrophe coupled with steadfast confidence, even optimism, that with the right approach and willingness to sacrifice for the right ideal, such disaster could be avoided. Although his preoccupation with destruction and redemption had become heavily inflected by his late religiosity, after his departure from the Agudah it was also tempered with this calm certainty. Birnbaum’s voice, especially in Der Aufstieg, which shows the greatest imprint of his influence, is that of an elder, a mature leader, not a firebrand. Resigning at last the mantle of prophet, Birnbaum resumed the more comfortable role of thinker and critic. By 1930, the year in which Aufstieg first appeared, Birnbaum’s lifelong pessimism about the future of the Jewish people in Europe was increasingly vindicated. Throughout central and eastern Europe, especially in Germany where Birnbaum had made his home in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin, unprecedented political and economic instability was entering its second decade.3 The collapse of the world financial system with the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 brought most of Europe, already dangerously unstable, to the brink

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of calamity. Especially fragile was the Weimar Republic. Nearly overthrown in its inception by violent Communist revolution, the Weimar government had scarcely been able to govern for most of its existence and by the late 1920s was plunged into a terminal crisis that ended only with its dissolution following the election of a Nazi plurality to the Reichstag. In the meantime, the desperation of all German citizens led increasingly to the embrace of ever more radical political solutions offered by both the left and the right. Both revolutionary Communism and right-wing nationalist, often anti-Semitic extremism competed for the support of the disaffected. Violent protests and demonstrations, mass unemployment, and a near collapse of law and order throughout Germany, especially in the larger cities, facilitated a public appetite for radical change and for assigning blame. For German Jews, long associated with liberalism and moderate politics, and more recently with the Social Democrats, who had been fatally linked to the Weimar Republic, existence was becoming increasingly tenuous.4 And no ascendant radical party, neither on the left nor the right, envisioned a bright future for the Jews of Germany. Observation and commentary on radicalizing European politics had a major place in Birnbaum’s late writings. Initially it was not the rise of radical anti-Semitic nationalism, an increasingly common component of even mainstream right-of-center German politics, that alarmed him most, but Communism. In his fear about the threat of a second revolution in Germany, Birnbaum’s long-held concern about the fate of Russian Jewry was combined with a new, religiously motivated cultural and political conservatism. The spread of atheism and destruction of human spirituality for both Jews and non-Jews and its replacement with soulless materialism, which Birnbaum believed to be the inevitable result of a Communist resurgence, was now his greatest fear.5 His articles on this theme included reports on the situation of Jews in Russia, the infiltration of Communism in German culture and government, reviews of works reporting on the horrors of Stalin’s Soviet Union such as Karl Kindermann’s sensationalist memoir Two Years in Moscow’s Houses of Death: The Moscow Student Trials and the Methods of the OGPU, and even a discussion of the problems posed by the creation of a Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan.6 The suppression of human rights in the Soviet Union was part of his general concern, but the regime’s attack on religion and reli-

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gious values troubled him even more: “The Russian Soviets are implicated in the murder, the cold murder of a million people. But far worse than the murder of human bodies is the mass murder of human souls, a campaign against religion that they pursue without restraint.”7 The threat to Jews specifically, in Birnbaum’s view, was acute: “The world must remember that this war is directed not only against Christianity but against religion in general, that Jewry in particular is protected as little [as] if not less than Christendom, and that the religious Jewish masses of Russia and their leaders are challenged to the extent of their means to defend against it.”8 Lacking the international support of the Christian world, Jews were left to their own devices and were disproportionately targeted for persecution.9 Even worse, only the Jews had to contend with co-religionists outside Russia who sympathized with the Soviets and journalists who apologized for their atrocities.10 But, Birnbaum warned, one did not need to look to Russia to observe the insidious effect of secularism and atheism on European culture. Its traces were already apparent if not triumphant in the German schools. “The cultural ‘Bolshevizing’ of Germany makes rapacious progress,” Birnbaum reports in “Wanton Atheists.” “Antireligious propaganda strides forth ever more audaciously. The elder Reds advise and perform their work thoroughly. The same is true of their children.” To Birnbaum, the school curriculum itself had been compromised, and Communist newspapers (Red Scholar, Red Windmill, Red Pioneer, and Red School Transmitter are some he names) attack “in the most stupid and unrefined ways (‘the fable of Dear God’) all aspects of bourgeois society, but especially religion.”11 Yet even this infection may be blamed on the Soviet Union, from which the entire movement receives its inspiration: “Of course the entire movement receives its motivation from Russia, where the incitement against religion is spurred with particular brutality from state and government agencies.” Birnbaum offers a ­vignette to make his point: “In one school, a teacher conducted a vote: Whoever believed in God was asked to raise his or her hand. Only a very few hands were raised. The teacher laughed scornfully, and the other students also began to laugh in ridicule. The pair of believing children let their hands fall. And the whole class bawled, ‘God has lost!’ ”12 Birnbaum’s alarm in response to the triumph of Bolshevism over tradition and religion may seem misdirected when Brown Shirts (among

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others) were regularly harassing Jews with physical violence. But the Weimar Germany that Birnbaum observed firsthand, where leftist paramilitary groups had come very near to aborting the infant republic, as well as the forward march of Communism in Russia and its attempts to export the revolution to central Europe, make his concern more comprehensible. He regarded the worldwide triumph of Communism as a near fait accompli, and no effort could be spared to prevent its horrors expanding beyond Russia and being visited upon the rest of Europe. The newer forms of totalitarianism incubating in the beer halls of Germany and Austria were by comparison unremarkable, just another expression of the anti-Semitic agitation against which he had struggled his entire life. While these groups could pose a threat on some level, even into the late 1920s it seemed small in comparison to Communism. Although nationalist thugs, little more than uniformed street gangs, might make life for Jews unpleasant at times, only the Soviets had seemingly eliminated Judaism as a living cultural force. Sensationalism aside, Birnbaum’s reaction to the threat of Communism and the revolutionary left had a deeper source in his critique of modernism and materialism that began with his turn to religion. And in this he was not alone. Other Weimar Jewish intellectuals, including some in the specific circles with which Birnbaum associated, shared his sense of crisis precipitated by the rise of the radical left and attacked it not from a bourgeois or liberal position but from what was in many ways an equally radical right one. Leo Strauss, whose early writings on both Jewish and political topics during the interwar period have recently come to light, typified this trend in Weimar Jewish intellectual history. A recent analysis of the young Strauss observes that he “immersed himself in currents that were simultaneously conservative and radical: combining a conservative appreciation for older structures and traditions with the revolutionary impulse to break completely from the present order of things.”13 Although Jewish intellectual radicalism of the Weimar years has usually been associated with the left (such as the Frankfurt School for Social Research), still others, including Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and even young intellectuals in the Orthodox world such as Joseph Ber Soloveitchik and Isaac Breuer, went in a very different direction. They articulated theoretical forms that at least in part sought remedies for the modern crisis in a radical return to some place of origin, be it the frame-

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work of religious tradition (Breuer and Soloveitchik) or the imagined origins of human experience and being, most famously articulated by Martin Heidegger (Strauss and Arendt).14 Birnbaum, with his unique focus on concepts such as form and aesthetics, his criticism of modern secularism, and his identification of the remedy in the radically conservative religious forms, fits neatly as an elder voice in this trend. Like its other members, Birnbaum faced a serious challenge to his intellectual critique and his physical safety with the rapid rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s.15 At first, he simply registered his awareness of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), the Nazis, as part of a general rise in official anti-Semitism. In 1930, the National Socialists warranted only passing reference in Birnbaum’s writing, concerning an attempt to ban Jewish ritual slaughter in Bavaria.16 But in the general elections of 1930, when the NSDAP increased its presence in the Reichstag enough to make it a significant bloc, he was quick to recognize the danger. “The passing of the German national elections has evoked a great disquiet in the Jewish world,” Birnbaum writes; “107 National Socialists! And with them also come the German nationalists, Conservatives, Christian-Socialists, etc., none of which are particularly friendly to the Jews. Even the State Party, previously the [Social] Democrats, has been infiltrated by anti-Semites! Even in the center one finds the same old-fashioned Jew hatred.”17 To make matters worse, it now seemed that the old refuge of parliamentary governance that tended to dilute radical parties was no longer a given. “One can no longer rely on the National Socialists being broken up through some kind of parliamentary coalition against them. Neutralizing the Jew hatred reflected in the vote of 14 September [is] now our critical situation.” For the time being, though, Birnbaum was optimistic—but only temporarily. “We may trust to a certain degree what experience has taught us, that in politics the wild is often tamed. . . . Aside from this, it is clear that order will be kept and upheld. . . . [But] when it is destroyed, we are always the direct or indirect sacrifice to the storm.”18 So what was to be done? Or, in Birnbaum’s words, “What can we do for ourselves?” His answer was striking: “Engage in politics less—its worthlessness for us has been clearly shown . . . [and instead] call to diminish the surface friction between us and others through traditional Jewish earnestness and religiosity, and live and strive for perfection.”19

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Although this response to the ominous threat of Nazism seems tepid, Birnbaum’s life of battling anti-Semitism made the Nazis appear to be just another manifestation of the same sickness. Indeed, the religiously rooted indifference reflected in this comment and his broader attitude share a genetic resemblance to his earlier reactions to anti-Semitism. A certain fatalism toward anti-Semites had always been axiomatic to his thought; Jews had little to gain from engagement with them and were seldom left with more than the option of self-help and charting a course of self-determination, whether through nationalism or religion. From this perspective, the Nazis were no more than a variation on the theme of materialism and anti-Semitism, dual forces always seeking to destroy the Jewish soul and body. They were the latest symptom of the chronic disease afflicting non-Jews; the more Jews ignored them and focused on their own well-being, the more likely they would be to survive. If anything was new, it was a deepening of this fatalism. If previously Birnbaum’s rejection of non-Jewish institutions had not been total as he sought to use the ballot box and the political party as a means of change, in the face of anti-Semitism triumphant, these tools were no longer of any use. All that remained was a call for religious introspection, for Torah-true Jews to respond by setting an example of spiritual perfection. In place of a temporal home, a land, and respect for Jews by the other nations of the world, Birnbaum’s last recourse was to religious revival. Only a return to faith and tradition held any hope for a Jewish future. Of course, the physical vessel that had preserved the spiritual dynamism of the Jewish people, the Orthodox world, was imperfect. The turn to religion was essential, but the religion still had to be made worthy of its mission, and in Birnbaum’s writings of the 1930s his wartime preoccupation with improving the state of Orthodoxy gained intensity. The critique explicit in Words of the Ascenders had returned. As the Jewish situation continued to decline, Birnbaum’s attacks on institutional Orthodoxy become ever sharper. Calling out from his position as one who had heard the teshuvah Ruf, the call to repentance, Birnbaum exhorted his comrades in the Torahtrue camp to turn to their own social and political reform. In Elul 1930 (the month of the Jewish calendar preceding the days of repentance and judgment of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur devoted to ritually awakening the desire to repent misdeeds), Birnbaum outlined in “The Great

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Sin” his accounting of the failure of the Orthodox world. “We have failed to consider the great sin of indolence with respect to the general decay of our society. Though we have erected in the recent past so many programs, none of them have effected repentance for us all; nothing has helped in the struggle against the sins of the hundred thousands.”20 In a novel turn, Birnbaum even extended the goal of spiritual renewal not just to include the Orthodox world but also to bring back those who had left the fold of traditional Judaism—both those Jews who had ceased to be religious and groups who were not widely recognized as Jews at all. We have sinned by constantly surrendering wider and wider swaths of [the people of] Israel that have fallen away from the Torah and restricted ourselves, admitting ever narrower and narrower circles into our midst. . . . In order to correct this blunder, we must create a central institute for the furtherance of Jewish belief, which will simultaneously work to re-Judaize half or entirely lost groups, such as, for example, the Marranos and the Falashas. . . . And we must also . . . create in all states with a large Jewish population local institutes for religious cultural propaganda among the secular Jews . . . and create in community circles a living example of the renewal of Jewish Godliness, charity and beauty.21

Commensurate with its greater level of holiness, the Torah-true community, in Birnbaum’s view, bore a disproportionate responsibility for other Jews. It was not enough to protect the core of the Torah-­ observant masses. Those Jews who had faltered and fallen from religious observance needed to be brought back within the fold. Not an uncommon attitude even in Birnbaum’s time, what was unusual was his insistence that even those like the Marranos and Falashas, who had long since passed from the mind of observant Jews, should also be gathered into the fold of Orthodoxy.22 Certainly, an ideal of responsibility on the part of religious Jews for the Jewish people as a whole had long existed, but in regard to institutional organization, the goal of the Orthodox more often was to preserve their status quo and prevent the loss of more of their numbers to secularism than to be concerned with outsiders, Jewish or non-Jewish—an approach exemplified by the ­Agudah. The emphasis Birnbaum placed on Orthodox Jews qua Orthodox Jews as bearing a responsibility to bring non-Orthodox Jews around to an Orthodox worldview was novel, in particular his argument for an organized institution focused on outreach to nonreligious Jews. The idea

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of such a vehicle has become familiar in today’s Orthodox Jewish community, so much so that one may speak without exaggeration of a ba’al teshuva movement supported by several different, well-funded institutions. But Birnbaum may have been among the earliest to propose such a model as a central strategy for Orthodoxy. As time passed, Birnbaum confronted those he felt were failing in their leadership of Orthodoxy, regardless of their prominence, even more stridently. In regard to the neoorthodox leadership of the ­Agudah, his critique was particularly vigorous. Isaac Breuer, grandson of Samson Raphael Hirsch and one of the young leaders of the ­Agudah’s German faction, was the target of one particularly pointed attack. That Birnbaum would take aim at Breuer is not surprising; among all the leaders in the Agudah, Breuer was perhaps the closest to Birnbaum in his ambition to spearhead a modern, radical vision of Orthodox society comparable to Birnbaum’s own.23 Unlike Birnbaum, though, he continued to work within the Agudah to push his project forward as a leader of the Agudath Israel Workers. Once again, Birnbaum was faced with the consequences of his choice to exert influence outside an established party rather than within it, and his polemic against Breuer reads as though it were informed at least in part by a need to vindicate his choice. In the essay “Eretz Israel Problems,” to which Birnbaum responded in a detailed rebuttal, Breuer argued that an Orthodox cultural revolution was possible only in the Land of Israel, as there, unlike in the exile, Jews could potentially create autonomous institutions and rebuild Jewish culture from the ground up.24 Only through a total reconstruction of Orthodoxy, Breuer argued, by tempering the role of the study hall and the yeshiva with physical and cultural activity, could Orthodoxy succeed in emerging as a leader of the Jewish people.25 At first, Birnbaum shows interest in Breuer’s bold, introspective criticism of the Agudah and Orthodox society in general and his bravery in taking a controversial position. “[These thoughts] demonstrate an uncommon courage,” Birnbaum writes. “Every one of his refined words signifies insurrection, and not on a small scale: insurrection against the ‘iron collar,’ insurrection against the passivity of everyday life of Orthodoxy, insurrection against those who oppose on a so-called Torah-basis the building up of a unique living culture, insurrection against the daily betrayal of the Torah.”26 Acknowledging sympathy for Breuer’s position, he also rec-

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ognized how his “insurrectionary” ideas might be received: “And [this] will indeed be met with a great deal of displeasure in wider Orthodox circles. Only by virtue of being the grandson of Samson ­Raphael Hirsch, a member of the Breuer family, [and his reputation] as a wellestablished voice of serious and sincere Orthodox observance protects him from severe attacks.”27 A backhanded compliment to be sure (Birnbaum, it is clearly implied, faced these attacks without the protection of family connections), it is the prelude to an eviscerating attack. His pleasantries concluded, Birnbaum then went on the offensive. Despite its advantages, Breuer’s “solution” is the product of his privilege and background, the myopic perspective of one who had never stepped outside his own community. “So long as he sits in Frankfurt and has no inclination to organize for the Land of Israel himself, he leaves unacknowledged the most disastrous inadequacy and shortsightedness of Orthodoxy and allows, like everyone else, exceptional leniency in dealing with these matters.” When one examines the particulars against the reality of real-world politics, especially in Mandate Palestine, Breuer’s is no solution at all. In fact, the local factors made Palestine even worse then Europe. “To him, this mission [of cultural rebuilding] takes place [only] in the Land of Israel, that only there can a national linguistic, economic, and political consolidation of the Jews be fully realized. [But there] this will be even more difficult than in the Diaspora.” Birnbaum does not question the earnestness of Breuer’s proposal, but to posit that Palestine would be hospitable to an Orthodox takeover in the short term was nothing short of delusional. “Where exactly does he believe the possibility exists practically for the realization of his Torah program in the Land of Israel? . . . Is this even possible on its face, given the reality of the situation—a foreign government, the Arabs? Can he actually believe that a Torah-based social program such as he describes could coexist along with Marx and Chauvin . . . [that] the Palestinian-Jewish Marxists and fascists are somehow less influential than their fellows in the west?” Breuer’s suggestion, for all its novelty, was nothing more than removing the same endangered situation from Europe and dropping it in even more dangerous Palestine. “No, whether in the Land of Israel or the lands of the exile, it is all the same. Here and there every attempt at building up of Jewish culture encounters the same opposition.” Opposition, he does not elaborate but implies, made up in significant

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part by the camp to which Breuer belongs.28 Ultimately, Breuer’s stand is a feinted attempt at boldness, for he lacks the courage to address the true cause of Jewish malaise in Europe: the failing culture of the Orthodox world, unable to take the steps necessary to realize its pivotal role. To even begin to address the problem, Birnbaum believed that one must understand its essence. Although he is able to perceive the symptoms, Breuer lacks the perspective to recognize the underlying disease: an artificial cultural orientation. Birnbaum’s words betray a sense of shock that even here, within the world of tradition and Torah that he had assumed represented the bedrock of Jewish authenticity, the same rot of cultural compromise and even assimilation had reared its head in the guise of a well-connected Frankfurt rabbi. The true source of cultural renewal, Birnbaum insists, “must not disregard the independent cultural formation of the believing masses of the east. It is here that a peculiar and unique form [of Jewish culture] has been constructed, one not substantially influenced by foreign surroundings. Here one may live not just as a Jew but as a part of the Jewish people—a people in the full sense of the word.”29 With a familiar romanticism, Birnbaum continued to believe in the near-mystical authenticity of the Ostjuden. That he would take this position in response to the writing of a German Jew, a member of an Orthodox community that prided itself no less for its self-satisfied amalgam of religion and German culture than its Orthodox stringency, is telling. Birnbaum used what trump card of authenticity he could when faced with an opponent whose elite stature he could not challenge on its own merits: his unique claim to authenticity as one deeply sympathetic to eastern Jewish culture and his connection to it. Now, replacing the exemplary eastern cultural components like language and national identity (or rather supplementing them) with religion, Birnbaum returns to another of his well-honed rhetorical tools. This is a reintroduction of the “Israel goes before Zion” argument of decades earlier, an argument for the necessity of building up an internal component of Jewish culture before external political projects. The Orthodox disinclination to consider their own deficiencies was responsible for their languishing zeal, and this would not be changed by a new location. Nor would it fulfill the acute need to build up their own spiritual reserves to be able to inspire world Jewry. “I believe inner building up is more urgent than outer. Or more precisely, the outer building up must be

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planned and executed only after the inner building is accomplished.”30 Though launched from a new position of belief, the elements of reconstruction Birnbaum envisioned were largely unchanged from his fin de siècle writing: the necessity that a full, deep conception of Jewish peoplehood be internalized, thus recapturing the “natural energy” and national vigor to overcome the “inadequacy of foreign influence.”31 The contretemps with Breuer was but one instance of Birnbaum’s late thought coming full circle to his earliest preoccupations. Also back was his deep concern for the economic plight of European Jewry. Since his report on the tallit-weavers’ strike in Kolomea in the early 1890s, Birnbaum had always displayed a strain of populism, and emphasized the responsibility of Jewish nationalism to work hand in hand with efforts for social justice and economic fairness. In the early 1930s, Birnbaum embraced this again with renewed vigor. The economic situation of Jews in eastern Europe, particularly those in more heavily traditional areas of east and central Europe, critical at the end of the First World War, had barely improved before collapsing entirely in the 1930s. Particularly hard hit was Poland, where the economic struggles affecting the rest of the world struck with disproportionate force.32 In a report on a speech given by chairman of the Warsaw ORT (Society for Handicrafts and Agriculture), Moshe Silberfarb, Birnbaum complained that a disproportionate number of Jews were involved in traditionally denigrated commercial occupations in Poland—despite being only 10 percent of the population, Jews occupied more 62 percent of jobs in commerce, and in some regions as much as 88 percent.33 For this reason, as well as because of the official anti-Semitic reaction in the form of government-backed “commerce trusts” intended to exclude Jews, their situation worsened by the day. The dangers of Jewish concentration in commerce was a theme that appeared frequently in Birnbaum’s writing; he had long considered it the cause of many of the worst problems the Jewish people faced. This time, it was a religion-based solution to a stubborn problem to which Birnbaum turned in the 1930s. In Words of the Ascenders, Birnbaum had put forth his argument that fidelity to Torah and collective removal from urban life and livelihoods would have a salvific effect on Jewish life generally, and interwar Poland seemed an obvious test case. Once again, he laid blame at the doorstep of the Orthodox leadership for the

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failure to address the structural causes of penury that disproportionately affected Torah-true Jews. In another article sharply critical of the Agudah leadership, Birnbaum reflected upon its efforts to encourage observance of Shabbat, initiated in a conference on Shabbat observance held in 1930. Although perhaps in tune with the Agudah’s message and Birnbaum’s own belief that increased religious observance would yield social and potentially economic benefits, the Agudah’s call for Sabbath observance failed to address the numerous disadvantages facing Jewish society, including the economic suffering brought on by increasing government intervention in Jewish business, and the continued economic immobility of Jews in the petty trades. “Tomorrow the ‘Friends of Shabbat’ will go forth and, with spiritual enthusiasm, begin the task that they have been assigned by the Shabbat-congress organizer,” Birnbaum writes.34 But true to form, the Agudah had failed from the outset, showing itself to be out of touch with the root of the economic problems facing its constituents. Instead of issues like Shabbat observance, the Agudah should devote itself to “at the very least providing initial and temporary assistance to the Jewish lives falling apart.” This could be accomplished, Birnbaum argued, “[by encouraging] selectivity in Jewish employment, particularly land ownership and the transformation of the Jewish settlement structure [by relieving] concentration in Jewish settlement areas, and at the same time lending a hand to the ascent of all Jews to pursue resettlement in countries where they have the capacity and authority to arrange independent administrations of those resigned to the will of God.”35 In embracing so modest a goal (regardless of its spiritual importance) at the expense of seeking solutions to the systemic problems of Jewish settlement, employment, and lack of autonomy, the Agudah was helping no one. Economic diversification was the foundation of the practical efforts Birnbaum urged to attack Jewish poverty. Specifically, it was imperative that Jews be enticed away from the urban-based, petty commercial trades that had been both their main support and the road to their ruin and instead led to embrace the virtues of agricultural professions and rural settlement. He lauds the efforts, described by Silberfarb, of Jewish assistance organizations such as the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) in the procurement of one hundred thousand dollars in aid to assist Jews seeking to enter agriculture.36 In any case, Birnbaum

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asserts, “We have no hope for reprieve in the return of the ‘better days’ we earlier enjoyed.” The old authority of the Torah and the kehilla, the model of authority idealized by the Agudah, was gone, never to return. So, Birnbaum asks, from where should the Jewish faithful “acquire the power to escape out from under the rod of suffering for our father’s beliefs and to establish the first and final ideals of Jewish truth?” Clearly, even if some autonomy did still exist, the deteriorating situation for Jews in the countries in which they had lived for a thousand years portended a bleak future. “That isolated power that some have now is cold comfort. Israel will be a chosen people when the people no longer know their chosenness—then we will see the sanctification of God’s name through the achievement of his unity. But the will of God is not enough to bring it about if this great sanctification is not achieved through the chosen people.” How the survival, unification, and thriving of the Jewish people will occur, Birnbaum argues, is “ordained by the Torah as true”; the direction that the “true leaders and counselors” will heed is “the building up of the land, which alone is of the highest significance for Jewry!”37 The key to Jewish power, to its success in overcoming the difficulties of the modern age, the basis of all Jewish eschatology, was piety, in Orthodox parlance, the sanctification of God’s name. But none of this was possible unless the Jewish people seized control of their destiny and returned to the land. So decades after his first essays called for a national renewal through the Land of Israel, Birnbaum turned to it once more, this time as the means of reinvigorating Jewish tradition through economic renewal. Like many of his contemporaries, Birnbaum had long been captivated by the lure of the pastoral over the “degenerate” urban life. This, of course, was a key component of his earliest Zionism (and Zionism in general). As much as the secular thinker Birnbaum found this idea attractive, so much more so did he as a religious thinker, where the precedent of Israel’s history as an agricultural people provided much inspiration. In “Landedness” (Verländlichung) Birnbaum extols the future ideal Jew, the religious farmer: “It is a reasonable hope that the Jewish farmer will be the foundation of his people’s history,” he writes. Indeed, the mere fact of the farmer’s connection to land de facto places him on a unique spiritual level, even absent other religious virtues. “The significance of the farmer is disconnected from the question of whether

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he sins or does not sin. It lies instead in his representation of preparation for his people’s community, in which their greatest strength slumbers still bound and constricted, until they become truly free through its release. The farmer prepares the exact antidote to the poison of intellectual degeneration.” Connected to “God and nature,” Birnbaum writes, the farmer starts with an advantage in religious life as a native master of the aesthetic forms central to religious being—he is, in other words, living an authentic life. “Every so-called aesthetic impulse is automatic, and in his instinctive knowledge he transmits the unity of the people and develops it—a Jewish farm life is necessary so that the Jewish people will once again receive the purest vision of God’s world order and revive the instinct to work within it.”38 With authenticity and aesthetics at its core, this vision is fantastically romantic and shows that the trajectory of his basic ideas was not far removed from that of his earliest essays and longings for Zion. There was little structural difference in Birnbaum’s romantic idealization of agricultural labor, whether realized in the form of the bold Zionist halutz, laying the foundation for the Jewish nation-state, or the warrior for God and Torah, shovel in hand prepared to sow God’s land. This extended to the locus of this redemptive work as well: Palestine. There is a strange confluence of interests here; like the Agudah, Birnbaum was supportive of Palestine as a safe haven, even a redemptive home for persecuted Jews in Europe, while being deeply critical of the Zionist project per se. As a critic of Zionism, Birnbaum held a similar line as the Agudah, although his more intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the movement made him more willing to take a position on specific Zion­ist factions and projects and to attack the Agudah when he judged them complicit in Zionist designs. In his writing on the situation in Palestine in the 1930s, Birnbaum frequently batters the Zionist movement and its leadership, with particular ire directed toward the rightwing Revisionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whom he does not hesitate to compare to militarists and fascists.39 His attitude toward mainstream Zionists was not much better; indeed, his opinion of them differed little from his attitude toward the Bolsheviks. He is also sharply critical of the mainstream Zionist leadership—particularly over issues involving the victims of Zionist policies. He goes beyond his usual defense of the Orthodox Jews he points to as victims of insensitive and rapacious secu-

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larists, or the poor Jews of eastern Europe for whom the possibility of immigration is a prize dangled before them by the Zionists.40 He even, remarkably, defends Palestinian Arabs, showing uncommon nuance in his awareness of the layers of conflict both between the Arabs and Jews and within Arab society itself.41 Birnbaum observed with a jaded eye in “The Real Situation” the rise of unrest and economic warfare—as well as physical violence—in early 1930s Mandate Palestine. He believed that what he regarded as the failure of Zionists to face or even acknowledge the rising unrest caused by the increase in Jewish settlement in Palestine, coupled with the general progress of the Zionist enterprise, had raised tensions to a dangerous level. In “an article in the Palestinian workernewspaper ‘Davar,’” Birnbaum writes, “it was written that Zionism has been completely oblivious for two generations to Arab reality, or—to use stronger words—it has remained entirely blind to the Arab’s existence. One could recently hear similar words, aside from this, from Professor [Albert] Einstein.”42 It should come as little surprise, Birnbaum observes, that the Arabs have decided to follow through on their threats. And now the Arabs do exactly what they said they would . . . engaging in anti-Jewish boycotts, particularly in land sale, establishing a Muslim university in Jerusalem, Jerusalem as an Islamic center, Muslim and Christian Arabs reconciling with each other, rejecting business dealings with Jews and—why not?—letting a little blood. . . . If the Zionists and their liberal and Agudist sympathizers will not allow themselves to feel this prick, in spite of their cataracts—then the Arabs will bear no guilt for it.43

Nor did Birnbaum hesitate, even when the situation of the Torahtrue communities in Palestine was under severe stress, to assign blame equally to the Zionists and the Agudah, implying that the latter were enablers of the former. Victims by necessity of the Zionist hegemony in public life in Mandate Palestine—the increasingly dangerous European situation compelled more and more Orthodox Jews to immigrate wherever possible, including Palestine—the Orthodox had become pawns in a larger game in which Birnbaum perceived the Agudah, as well as the Zionists, now took part.44 “The leaders of the Agudath Israel have acted correctly,” he wrote upon learning of a common effort being launched by both the Agudah and World Zionist Organization to alleviate the

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crisis of European Jewry through immigration to Palestine, “in that [they] will have nothing to do with anything that would lead to a limitation on its independence as an organization.”45 But Birnbaum feared this engagement could be a dangerous first step. “We will not scrutinize here whether something profitable may come from the selective repartee with the Zionists; rather, [we] will warn that the well-known effect of feverishness in acting or not acting as it decays [the Agudah’s spiritual resolve] may allow modern ‘Zion-centrism’ to take hold and infect the Orthodox Jewish masses.”46 The Agudah has allowed itself to be sidetracked by superficial goals and preoccupations. Its willingness to work with the Zionists created a moral threat, even greater than that posed by Zionism itself: the contamination of the spiritual purity of Orthodoxy. As opposed as Birnbaum was to the Zionists and Agudah’s cooperation with them, he did not object to the potential offered by Zion as the setting for his own program. In a letter to Rosenheim, Birnbaum clarifies his stance explicitly: “I am not against passion for Palestine; indeed, I positively value the Palestine enthusiasm of [even] the Zionists. What I cannot stand is Zionist enthusiasm among Agudah members” who are dishonest about their attitude toward Palestine.47 Zion was, in fact, the ultimate site for the amelioration of the ills plaguing European Jewry—as the site of the messianic redemption; indeed, it is in his writing on this issue that the full depth of Birnbaum’s eschatology comes to the fore. He argues that a Jewish presence in Palestine was both a pragmatic and necessary solution to the Jewish crisis. But unlike others who argued along similar lines (including Isaac Breuer, whom Birnbaum saw offering a compromised position), Birnbaum felt spiritual purity had to be preserved at all costs. Unlike Mizrahi and even the Agudah, Birnbaum rejected any cooperation with Zionists, whose secularism could offer no middle ground for partnership. At the same time, he took an even more extreme position than Mizrahi regarding the question of where Jewish autonomy could occur. To them, a Jewish autonomous state even outside Israel and even under Zionist auspices was an acceptable (if distasteful) model to preserve Jewish life. Rather, he adopted a view resembling the Zionist position itself: that Palestine offered a unique place for the Jewish people, and it was now a historical imperative for it to ascend to its rightful place as God’s holy nation. “Our purpose is to contribute to strict control [of law] for the sake of

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general pacification and, as quickly as possible, to allow Jewry to realize an autonomous state, and for the people of God [settled on it] to authentically acquire land and advance as far as is practicable through fielding a robust spiritual regimen.”48 Just as the model that formed the background of all his post-Agudah thought, the Oylim, borrowed from Zionism the model of cooperative agricultural settlement (but with a religious twist), so too was Birnbaum’s theory of a Jewish state a (religious) mirror image of the Zionist ideal. Without a doubt, the time was far from ripe for a Jewish spiritual renaissance in Palestine. In fact, the combined elements of the dominant secular Zionist presence, the continued violence both by and against Jews, and the continued volatility of the political situation in Palestine meant that, in effect, “the Torah is in exile today in its own land.” Birnbaum asserts that “anyone who is not deceived by slogans knows this.”49 However, given the seriousness of the Jewish situation in exile, “any option must be seriously considered.” The failures of the Zionist leadership in Mandate Palestine had been many, and they hindered the ability of the Jewish community to grow and prosper. In Birnbaum’s view, Palestine as the destination of mass Jewish immigration was “inconceivable. [There] one sits and waits from pogrom to pogrom, from one storm to the next. If the hundreds of thousands and millions would go where they would be deluded by a false sense of security and in their own means of economic support . . . they would merely move on to greater catastrophes.”50 Nevertheless, the continued danger and decline of exiled Jewry made the physical, economic, and, above all, spiritual renewal of the Jewish people necessary, and in the land of Palestine, as a spiritually rebuilt center of redeemed Israel. “When will it at last be understood? A farmer-Israel in the world is surely more ideal even to Palestinian development than a shopkeeper-Israel dispersed throughout the world.”51 This last ambivalent, even desperate statement highlights the degree to which Birnbaum, always a pessimist, recognized the narrowing options not just in his own physical and intellectual life but of the Jewish people as the crisis of the late 1930s approached.

Epilogue Another Teshuvah

Nathan Birnbaum died in Scheveningen on 2 April 1937. It was a Friday, during the last days of Passover, fittingly a time considered to be full of messianic potency in the Hasidic tradition.1 According to reports, he had been severely ill for several weeks but retained his intellectual vigor until the end.2 In his will, he bequeathed his personal archive to his oldest son, Solomon, and asked to be buried next to his beloved wife with a monument that recorded only his name “in Hebrew characters.” His last wish was that his gravestone be “neither higher nor wider and not made of any finer material nor have any more elaborate decoration than that of my wife.”3 His death was widely reported in the German and Yiddish Jewish press in obituaries written by those he knew from every point on the spectrum of his intellectual life.4 Later colleagues like Jacob Rosenheim, Wolf Jacobson, and others from the Agudah and Oylim emphasized his Heimkehr, homecoming, to Torah and tradition as a symbol of intellectual courage. “Not just a beloved friend and comrade,” Rosenheim wrote, “his fiery life, which awakened in us a self-accounting . . . was much more: a holy symbol! Like few men in the history of the Jewish spirit, Nathan Birnbaum possessed an unprecedented courage, in the face of an uncomprehending world, to bring about the full Moria journey from ‘strange gods’ to ‘God is One!’ ”5 Tuvia Horowitz, ever a loyal friend and supporter, would write regularly on Birnbaum’s life and its importance until his own murder at the hands of the Nazis in January 1943. Colleagues from his life as a nationalist firebrand in Galicia and Bukovina wrote as well, including Meyer Ebner, leader of the Czernowitz Hashmonai Society, who recalled Birnbaum’s time in Czerno­witz.6 And of course the Zionists, many alumni of the Jewish

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renaissance circle, wrote of his pathbreaking role as a cultural Zionist. Robert Weltsch, a member of the Prague Zionist circle that was a crucible of the renaissance movement, wrote, “Now he is gone from us; one of the most original and dynamic lives in our Jewish present has run its course. He was one of the few great figures of the Jewish renaissance movement that was left with us.”7 Perhaps the most touching and animated recollection of Birnbaum’s personality, at once amiable and humble yet uncompromising in his vision, was the reminiscence of Gustav Seidemann. This is how he described his first encounter with Birnbaum in the early 1890s: “It was in the summer of the year 1891. . . . I asked Dr. Birnbaum to direct me to the editor and the administration [of Selbst-Emancipation]. He directed me to his desk, pointed to the right-hand pigeon hole, and said, ‘This is the editor,’ and pointed to the left and said, ‘And here is the administration.’ ” This self-deprecation, Seidemann observed, belied Birnbaum’s broad impact on young Zionists. “Birnbaum’s life and work have frequently been neither understood nor appreciated. But we who were around in those days know what he meant for the Zionist idea, and we know that the time will come when this great man will be appreciated . . . and his name will be remembered among the great ones of Israel.” But beyond his meaning for posterity, Seidemann concluded, and despite dramatic changes that Birnbaum had undergone, “for me it is above all a friend who has died, to whom I was devoted and truly bound for some fifty years. His memory will be for a blessing.”8 By the end of his life, Nathan Birnbaum had come nearly full circle. His last years were divided between fervent personal religious belief and devotion to helping the whole Jewish nation as it entered ever more desperate straits. Although he had broken ranks with many of those colleagues who had ushered him to a prominent place in Orthodox politics, he continued to think of the physical and spiritual salvation of the Jewish people ultimately as a function of a return to traditional belief. At the same time, he pivoted once again from concerns about ideological fidelity to the pragmatic requirements of increasingly dire times. His commitment to the settlement in a Jewish homeland, first abandoned as impractical, later considered a heretical means of creating a vibrant nation, returned, becoming once more a plausible solution given the right preconditions in the face of insurmountable anti-Semitism. The

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decline of Jewish life in Europe in the 1930s brought him to the same conclusion that he had reached as a very young man, musing to his friends in Gymnasium that there was probably no future for the Jewish people in Europe. In the world of his youth, this was still a debatable and unpopular position; by his old age, it had become a brutal fact. To be sure, the motivation and concerns behind this conviction as a man in his seventies differed greatly from those he held as one of seventeen. Now, in his mind, he had found the core of Jewish peoplehood and nationality in the idea of Torah as a banner of unity that he had lacked before he adopted Orthodoxy. Nonetheless, his final thoughts were themselves a kind of teshuvah, a return to the same ultimate solution to the troubled Jewish life in exile: the Jewish ancestral homeland. The unraveling of Jewish assimilation across Europe for which the young Birnbaum had longed now drove him back to his view that only physical separation, organization in the ancestral land, added to a religious renaissance would secure a future for the Jewish people. As for the Oylim movement, it came of age at a time and place that ensured it could not succeed. Regardless of Birnbaum’s feelings about its viability, the rapid decline of the physical safety of European Jewry during the peak of the Oylim’s work in the 1930s brought the movement to an end before it realized whatever potential it had. It was never able to grow as swiftly as Birnbaum and others would have liked, and there is some indication of friction between it and similar movements. As Rosenheim’s frustrated letter to Wolf Jacobson in 1930 made clear, Birnbaum and the Oylim were determined to seek a stance independent of that of the Agudah. Aside from Rosenheim’s laying the blame on Birnbaum’s leadership, there were many other factors at play. The situation in Europe, the multiple nationalities of the Oylim emissaries that made travel increasingly difficult, a constant lack of funds, and a loose and collaborative structure all probably played their part in stunting its growth. Finally, Birnbaum himself seemed to draw back from the movement in the early 1930s. But the legacy that Birnbaum established through the essays and commentaries of the two short-lived newspapers published during the Oylim years, Der Aufstieg and Der Ruf, staked out a coherent and serious position on a number of issues of concern to European Jewry as a whole. Birnbaum’s late essays are fascinating in their originality and incisiveness, and like so much of his life’s work, they

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were prescient in their arguments. As in the past, in such projects as the Jewish People’s Party, even Zionism, Birnbaum’s thoughts on issues facing Orthodoxy and his vision for their resolution resemble patterns that began to develop at the end of his life and continued after his death. The last decade of Birnbaum’s life was as turbulent as the rest, marked by his struggle with institutional forces inside and outside his adopted community. He fought from inside the world of Torah-true Jewry, dissatisfied with the political life that the Agudah had given him, ultimately even with the Oylim movement itself. In the wider context, he remained immersed in the frightening reality of interwar central European politics as he watched each of his former intellectual homes under threat. Once a Zionist, he watched as both the Old Yishuv and the New faced increasing violence and internal strife. He watched as the idea of Jewish autonomy in Europe, coming to its most complete fruition ever in the multitude of Jewish political parties and cultural institutions in the short-lived Polish republic, disintegrated under the weight of grinding poverty and virulent, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. He saw the Soviet Union cut off a huge number of Jews from the rest of the world, either destroying or driving underground some of the most important traditional Jewish leaders and institutions. He fretted as reports of atrocities, especially against religious Jews, often committed by other Jews, emerged from the Soviet interior. Not much later, he and his family personally felt the mounting pressure of an increasingly antiSemitic Europe. Czernowitz, once Birnbaum’s home and even in the interwar period the site of a vibrant Jewish community—ironically, featuring a new flourishing Yiddish cultural life—struggled under its new Romanian administration that featured a vitriolic and organized antiSemitism rivaling that of any other country in Europe. Settling himself in Berlin in 1930, Birnbaum arrived just in time to witness firsthand the ascent of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP. Because he and his wife were both ill, they did not wait to experience the swift decline of human rights faced by German Jews through Nazi legislation and chose to live their final years in exile in Holland. What, in the end, are we to make of Birnbaum’s complicated legacy? His significance as an early Zionist has been well, if incompletely, documented. Though Birnbaum is dismissed by some casual critics, there is little question that he was a formidable force and tireless worker in

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the crucial infant years of the movement. To most scholars of Zionism, Berthold Feiwel’s reckoning of Birnbaum as “the first” among early Zionists and the “lodestar” to later ones would elicit little serious objection. But his influence beyond that point, beyond the second incarnation of Selbst-Emancipation or his ill-fated membership in the first Zionist Political Action Committee, is more contentious. It was there, of course, that the first accusations of intemperance, inconsistency, and even opportunism originated. Some of these critical observations are accurate; to the end Birnbaum was too quick to abandon allied parties (like the Agudah) when he could have effected more change through shaping internal debate. Whether accurate or not, even his critics are few in number; most with either a passing or in-depth awareness of Zion­ism and its history know precious little of him. Whatever his popularity (and he was, to belabor the point, quite famous and popular for a good portion of his life), his many more obscure, and often more interesting, contributions to Jewish intellectual and political history have been largely forgotten. Birnbaum’s role in Jewish political history, be it as a leader, an observer, or, in Steven Aschheim’s description, a “gadfly,” barely began with his Zionist work and its remarkable series of firsts. Even were one to discount everything he did and wrote in the 1880s and start with his work in the 1890s, one discovers a considerable body of important and serious material, including ideas that would germinate both in his own and his readers’ minds for decades to come. It was at this time that he began to address the question of what characterized a coherent national identity beyond the simple activity of gathering together in a sovereign state, a question that would occupy Jewish nationalists of all stripes for decades and that still roils in Israel and the Diaspora. The ideas he spun off in the period of 1890–96 show a subtle and creative mind, even a prescient one. He grappled during this period with the issue of Jewish labor and its relationship to national identity, with the paradox of cultivating a national identity predicated on a return to a Jewish state while still in exile. Very early in the history of the idea, he laid the theoretical groundwork for a political party, the Jewish People’s Party, that sought to alleviate infighting among Jewish political groups by creating a broad coalition of nationalist views, and through it unify and focus Jewish political power. The Jewish Moderne, his most significant thought piece

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of the period, articulated a philosophical understanding of human and national history through the fraught issues of race and nation to find a means of reaching mutual national understanding. Although reflecting intellectual trends that today seem archaic—notions of racialism, social thought, and economics that fell out of favor subsequently (although it is worth pondering how much they continue to retain a subterranean role in thought about nation)—the essay endorsed in no uncertain terms human equality despite ingrained difference. Unlike most comparable works, it refused to advocate the superiority of one group over another or to explain away the depth of difference, but rather exposed the reasons for national rivalry and hatred in an effort to conquer them. Or consider Birnbaum’s work between 1899, the year of his severance from Zionism, and 1910, when he returned from Czernowitz to Vienna. Here his thought was paired as in no other period with his public activity, and both offered a fresh approach to the question of Jewish nationalism with which he continued to grapple. In his attempt to win public office, he was in the forefront of a new way of thinking about Jewish political action—through the ballot box of the liberalizing Austrian Empire. Had he and a few more of the Jewish National Party coalition won (and by many accounts, Birnbaum at least should have), it could have marked a significant moment of Jewish and Ukrainian nationalist cooperation. Given the history of both groups, Birnbaum was part of an astonishing moment, whose impact on relations between national minorities, had the bid for office succeeded, might have been profound. A year later, the Yiddish Language Conference managed to gather, under one roof and for one purpose, a cross-section of Yiddish political, academic, and literary figures that has had no parallel since. Whether it succeeded or not, the conference, in many ways a concrete result of the Jewish People’s Party ideal of transideological Jewish national unity, was a unique and colorful moment in European Jewish history. Of course, the most contentious period of Birnbaum’s life was his turn to religion. It has been the mistake of many observers to dismiss this period as merely marking Birnbaum’s final passage into total irrelevance. But the activity in the early days with the Agudah, even excluding reams of articles he published during this period and their contents, shows the error of this view. Even if Birnbaum did not ultimately find intellectual satisfaction with the Agudah, he continued to

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contribute to the widening intellectual discourse of interwar central European Jewry from a position of devout faith. And like his erstwhile and younger interlocutor Isaac Breuer, his conception of the role of tradition was in service of a much wider phenomenon in interwar intellectual life. It was a statement of radical differentiation from the flow of modern culture, the insistence that in the face of the failure of the structures and institutions of liberal, bourgeois society only an extreme change offered answers. The turn to a transcendent traditionalism was of a piece with all of Birnbaum’s often extreme positions; it was both a sign of pessimism about a crisis he perceived in the modern condition and an optimistic, even utopian hope in the power of human agency to effect profound change. In the case of Orthodoxy Birnbaum’s approach was again prescient, and the importance of Orthodox society has continually been demonstrated in the postwar period. Present at the birth of two of the arguably most important ideologies of contemporary Jewish life—Zionism and politicized Orthodoxy, both of which have only become more intertwined, their relations ever more complex in the modern state of Israel and Jewish communities in the Diaspora— Birnbaum’s views offer numerous powerful, sometimes idiosyncratic, but nearly always fresh perspectives on ideas often thought to be thoroughly explored. As I hope I have demonstrated in this book, Nathan Birnbaum’s story and ideas have been neglected to the detriment of Jewish intellectual history. Whether, as Salomon Kassner noted sympathetically after the Czernowitz conference, Birnbaum was an “unfortunate figure” who placed his “best strengths in the wrong place,” or whether he placed his strengths in the place that was most right for him, indifferent as to whether they were wrong for others, is an obvious question but not the most fundamental one. More important is the question of what the specifics of his role as a Jewish intellectual during the remarkable period in which he lived were, how his contribution and its illumination of the individuals and trends that surrounded it may be understood in its wider context. He was an innovator, a creative thinker, and a man whose opinion was taken seriously by his supporters and enemies alike. And many of these supporters and enemies were the very canonic figures of Jewish history among whom Birnbaum should be rightfully placed. He was both remarkably perceptive in his observa-

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tions and critique of the many groups and ideologies that covered the spectrum of Jewish politics and thought and uncannily prophetic in his own thinking and ideology. While much work remains in following the many strains and permutations of his activities, especially the fascinating and obscure movement of the Oylim in interwar central Europe, I hope that this work has established the significance of his life and work and that his story may help to shed new light on the complex times in which he lived.

Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction 1.  Some exceptions to this include Solomon Birnbaum, “Nathan Birnbaum,” in Jung, Men of the Spirit; and Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language. 2.  Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile, 271. 3.  Birnbaum was a founder, principal editor, and contributor to no fewer than seven periodicals, including Selbst-Emancipation, its successor Jüdische Volkszeitung, Neue Zeitung, Das Volk, Dr. Birnboyms Vokhenblat, Der Aufstieg, and Der Ruf. He was a major contributor to and editor of the Berlin Zionist organ Zion, the Jewish cultural periodical Freistatt, Ost und West, Die Welt, Martin Buber’s Jude, and many other Jewish and non-Jewish periodicals. 4.  Josef Meisl, “Selbst-Emanzipation,” in Kaplan and Landau, Von Sinn des Judentums, 19–34. 5.  Berthold Feiwel, “Ein Brief,” in Kaplan and Landau, Von Sinn des Judentums, 14–15. 6.  Stach, Kafka, 66. 7.  Franz Rosenzweig to Max Landau, February 1924. Cited in Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 114. 8.  A rare exception to this can be found in Vital, The Origins of Zionism, 222. Vital writes that although Birnbaum was “difficult,” he was also “a man of independent and original cast of mind with a gift for polemical writing and a fine turn of phrase.” 9.  See Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna, 384. 10.  Cited in Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, xvii. 11.  Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 9–10. 12.  Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 116. 13.  Birnbaum, Vom Freigeist zum Gläubigen, 17–18. 14.  Strachey, Eminent Victorians, xviii.

Chapter One 1.  Nathan Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn leben” (An account of my life), in Yoyvelbukh tsum sekhstigen geburstog fun Dr. Nosn Birnboym, 9.

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Notes to Chapter 1 2.  Ibid. Shabbetai Cohen (1621–62) was called the “Shakh” after the acronym of his own gloss on the Shulhan Arukh, Siftei Kohen, an important Ashkenazi commentary on the definitive code of Jewish law. 3.  Birnbaum’s mother’s lineage was particularly distinguished, which may have eased his acceptance within the Orthodox world. Miriam Seelenfreund was the daughter of Solomon Samuel Seelenfreund, the rabbi of a small town in the Košice region of present-day Slovakia, Rasnowitz (Rozhanovce), where Miriam was born. The family relocated to Košice proper after 1840. Miriam’s mother, Malka Leah Löw, was one of five children of the prominent Hungarian rabbi and scholar Eleazar Löw (1758–1837), known as the “Shemen Rokeah” after his influential volume of responsa. Löw’s presence in collective Orthodox memory is interesting to Birnbaum’s story for another reason: he was a polemicist against Aharon Chorin’s attempts at religious reform in the eastern Habsburg Empire. But Birnbaum wrote little about his eminent ancestor, nor was he much noted in Orthodox literature about Birnbaum. One of the few references to Birnbaum’s lineage is in a late 1930s publication, Judaica, an essay by an S. Bettelheim about the descendants of the Shemen Rokeach: “It is also little known that Nathan Birnbaum, the honorable prophet in the wilderness . . . is a branch of the Shemen Rokeach’s family tree.” Bettelheim, “Die Familie des ‘Šemen Rokeach,’” 16–17. Additionally, according to the family, Miriam and Menachem Mendel Birnbaum were married in Tarnow on 30 April 1862. I am grateful to David and Jacob Birnbaum and Michael Silber of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for providing me with a critically compiled genealogy of the Birnbaum family, in addition to many other extremely useful observations about the details and significance of Birnbaum’s lineage. 4.  On the dynamic of social mores relating to marriage, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce. Although dealing with the Russian Empire, Freeze’s study discusses a Jewish society in many ways comparable to that of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. 5.  Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn leben,” 10. The play Nathan the Wise (­Nathan der Weise) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is best remembered for its title character, modeled on Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn. As Birnbaum’s comment underscores, it was a powerfully idealistic statement on his father’s part to name his firstborn son after Mendelssohn (if indirectly), the ideal embodiment of “Deutschtum” and “Judentum.” 6.  Ibid. 7.  Peter Gay aptly describes the process of Jewish acculturation in his biography of Sigmund Freud: “By the 1880s, at least half of all Viennese journalists, physicians and lawyers were Jews. Freud at Gymnasium contemplating either a legal or medical career was being perfectly conventional. That is what many young Jews in Vienna did. Demonstrating their proverbial appetite for learning, they poured into Vienna’s education institutions and, concentrated as they were in a few districts, clustered in a few schools until their classes resembled extended family clans.” Gay, Freud, 19–20. 8.  Birnbaum, “Gegen die Selbstverständlichkeit,” in Festschrift zur Feier des 100 Semesters, 28–29. 9.  Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn leben,” 11.

Notes to Chapter 1 10.  Schnirer, “Gründung der Kadimah,” 15. 11.  Ibid. 12.  Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, 349. Wistrich’s is the most thorough account of the evolution of the Kadimah Society from a nationalist reading society to a dueling fraternity and is based primarily on documents from the Central Zionist Archives. See also Schoeps, “The Vienna Kadimah,” 161. 13.  Schnirer, “Gründung der Kadimah,” 15–18. 14.  Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, 355. 15.  Birnbaum, “Gegen die Selbstverständlichkeit,” 29–30. On Smolenskin’s illness, see Burg, “Zur fünfjährigen Gründungsfeier des akademischen Vereins ‘Kadi­ mah’ in Wien,” Serubabel 5, no. 3 (1 May 1888). 16.  Schnirer, “Gründung der Kadimah,” 15–18. Cited in Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, 350. 17.  Ibid., 17. 18.  Ibid. 19.  Ibid. 20.  Ibid. 21.  Ibid., 18. The term Stammesgenossen has no parallel in English. It can crudely be rendered with the expression popular among American Jews, “member of the tribe.” There is a felicitous and humorous resonance in these two expressions, especially its ethnic (as opposed to religious) undertones. 22.  Ibid. 23.  Birnbaum, “Gegen die Selbstverständlichkeit,” 30. 24.  Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 17. 25.  Ibid., 16. 26.  Ibid., 29–31. 27.  Ibid., 18–19. 28.  Ibid., 72. 29.  Ibid., 47–70. 30.  A Purim shpil is a short play or skit, usually irreverent, written as a part of Purim festivities, the Jewish holiday celebrating Esther and Mordechai’s salvation of Persian Jewry from extermination as described in Megilat Ester. 31.  Moshe ben Tobias (Moritz Schnirer), “Jüdenwürde,” Megillah, 24 March 1883. All issues of Megillah are located in the Birnbaum Family Archive. 32.  Nahum ben Menachem (Nathan Birnbaum), “Zukunftsbild,” Megillah, 24 March 1883. Poetry formed an important part of Birnbaum’s early nationalist literary expression. Several examples in the mid-1880s under the byline “Nahum ben Menachem” appear in the Berlin Jewish nationalist periodical Serubabel. 33.  For details on the life and political ideology of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, see Carl Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio,” in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, 116–80. 34.  “Kelbel und Felbel,” Megillah, 24 March 1883. 35.  Ibid.

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Notes to Chapter 1 36.  A fascinating figure, Smolenskin has not received scholarly attention commensurate with his place in early Zionist history. A Hebraist, he was admired and supported by the head of the mainstream Jewish religious establishment in Vienna, eminent Wissenschaft scholar Adolph Jellinek. As the editor and primary contributor to his Hebrew journal Ha-Shahar, Smolenskin played a formative role in the emergence of the modern Hebrew language and literature. The presence of Smolen­skin, as a former maskil-turned-nationalist, in Vienna was crucial in the development of semiorganized Jewish nationalism. See Feiner, “Kafirato shel Smolenskin be-haskalah ve-shorshei ha-historiografia ha-yehudit ha-leumit,” 9–31, and Haskalah and History, 317–40; Barzilay, “Bein Peretz Smolenskin ve-Moshe Hess,” 57–79, and “Gilgulei musag ‘ha-haskalah’ be-haguto shel Peretz Smolenskin,” 425–36; Bar-Sela, “Mamad ha-mitzvot b’havaya ha-leumit,” 335–48. See also Ruben Brainin’s biography, Perets ben moshe smolenskin, hayav ve-safrav; and Freundlich, Peretz Smolenskin. 37.  On the Odessa Jewish intelligentsia of the period, see Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa, chap. 4. 38.  Freundlich, Peretz Smolenskin, 85. 39.  Schnirer, “Gründung der Kadimah,” 16. 40.  See Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 62–64. 41.  Smolenskin, cited in Feiner, Haskalah and History, 325. 42.  Smolenskin, introductory essay to Ha-Shahar (Vienna, 1868). Cited in Freundlich, Peretz Smolenskin, 52. 43.  Smolenskin, “Et lata’at” (Time to plant). Cited in Freundlich, Peretz Smolenskin, 55. Available at Project Ben Yehuda, http://benyehuda.org/smolenskin/. 44.  Birnbaum, “Gegen die Selbstverständlichkeit,” 31. 45.  Schoeps, “The Vienna Kadimah,” 161. 46.  Birnbaum, “Gegen die Selbstverständlichkeit,” 31. While insightful, Birnbaum’s analysis ignores the complex relationships between groups within Jewish society. Although “self-emancipation,” in Birnbaum’s terms, may have attracted eastern European Jewish students, they may also have been responding like Birnbaum to alienation from the specific dynamics of Viennese Jewry. Some groups of immigrants, in particular Galicians, tended to maintain much tighter group cohesion, forming an identifiable group within Jewish society at large. They were clustered even within “Jewish” districts of the city, often did not achieve the same economic and social success as their counterparts from Hungary and the Czech lands, and were also generally slower to embrace acculturation into German-speaking society. 47.  Ibid. 48.  Schoeps, “The Vienna Kadimah,” 158. 49.  Ibid. 50.  Birnbaum, Die Assimilationssucht, 3. 51.  Ibid., 3–4. 52.  As we will see, the metaphor of Jewish existence in the Diaspora as unnatural and “ghostlike” figures prominently in Leo Pinsker’s Autoemancipation. 53.  Birnbaum, Die Assimilationssucht, 5.

Notes to Chapter 1 54.  Ibid. 55.  For another discussion of the Maccabees as symbols in Kadimah, see Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, 361–63. 56.  Birnbaum, Die Assimilationssucht, 8. 57.  Ibid., 9. 58.  Ibid. 59.  Ibid., 7. 60.  Ibid., 9. 61.  Ibid., 11. 62.  Ibid., 12. 63.  Ibid., 15. 64.  Ibid. 65.  See Zipperstein, “Representations of Leadership,” 191–210. See also Abrahami, “Ha-hotsa’ah shel ‘autoemancipatsia’ l-Yehuda Lieb Pinsker,” 548–57; and Klausner, Sefer Pinsker. 66.  Pinsker, Autoemancipation. 67.  Ibid. 68.  Ibid. 69.  Ibid. 70.  As Wistrich notes, another honorary member was Isaak Rülf, a Lithuanian rabbi who, he maintains, exerted significant influence over Kadimah founders, although his role in Birnbaum’s thought specifically is less discernible. Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, 359. 71.  Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn leben.” 72.  Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 1 (1 February 1885). 73.  The pseudonym “Benzion” was used only once, in an article entitled “Gebt uns die Schule wieder” (Give Us Back the Schools), an attack on Emil Byk, a prominent Jewish figure in Galician politics. 74.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Precis,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 1 (1 February 1885). 75.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Unsere Mängel,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 1 (1 February 1885). 76.  Ibid. 77.  Ibid. 78.  Emil Byk was also a target of derision in the Zionist press beyond SelbstEmancipation. For example, see Die Welt, 26 November 1897, 14; 29 April 1898, 11; and 11 October 1899, 9–10. 79.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Wo ist der Utopie?,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 1 (1 February 1885). 80.  Ibid. 81.  “Moses,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 8 (18 May 1885). 82.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Unser Culturaufgabe,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 19 (2 November 1885). 83.  Ibid.

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Notes to Chapter 1 84.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Peretz Smolenskin,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 2 (16 February 1885). 85.  Ibid. 86.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Jehudah Makkabi,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 21 (2 December 1885). 87.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Jehudah Makkabi,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 22 (17 December 1885). 88.  Ibid. Note that in Birnbaum’s usage, the term “Hasidim” does not refer to those followers of the Ba’al Shem Tov. Rather, as he discusses in the article “Außere Wohlfahrt,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 14 (8 August 1885), he uses the term to describe modern Orthodox German and Austrian Jews who, in his opinion, embraced assimilation despite their rejection of Jewish religious reform. He does not differentiate them from members of other Jewish denominations, except perhaps in that they are less honest in their belief that their accommodation was superior to reformation—thus the “sanctimoniousness” he describes here. He distinguishes them from the actual Hasidim of Poland, Hungary, etc., whom he views as representative of an authentic connection to Jewish national life. 89.  For a detailed study of Sir Moses Montefiore and his relationship with Jewish settlement in Jerusalem, see Green, Moses Montefiore, 320–39. 90.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Sir Moses Montefiore ist nicht mehr,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 13 (3 August 1885). 91.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Nationaler Fortschritt,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 8 (18 May 1885). 92.  Nathan Birnbaum (Nahum Nathan Agassi), “Die Colonisation Palästinas,” Selbst-Emancipation 2, no. 2 (15 January 1886). 93.  Ibid. (emphasis added). 94.  For discussion of race and its role in fin de siècle Jewish intellectual history, including its appropriation by Jews and its place in the development of Zionism, see Efron, Defenders of the Race; and Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity. 95.  Nathan Birnbaum (Nahum Nathan Agassi), “Die Colonization Palästinas,” Selbst-Emancipation 2, no. 2 (15 January 1886). 96.  Ibid. 97.  Ibid. 98.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Wie lange noch?,” Selbst-Emancipation 2, no. 11 (6 July 1886). 99.  Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn leben.” 100.  Nathan Birnbaum, opening note, Selbst-Emancipation 3, no. 1 (1 April 1890). 101.  The first use of the adjective zionistische occurs in the article “Um Ehre und Wohlfahrt unseres Volk,” Selbst-Emancipation 1, no. 1 (1 April 1890); and the noun Zionismus appears in “Die Siele der jüdische-nationalen Bestrebung, II,” SelbstEmancipation 3, no. 4 (16 May 1890). That these are first uses of “Zionism” was confirmed by Bein, “Origin of the Term and Concept of Zionism,” 6.

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2 102.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Um Ehre und Wohlfahrt unseres Volk,” Selbst-Emancipation 3, no. 1 (1 April 1890). 103.  The socialist tendencies in Birnbaum’s thought, particularly in the 1890s, is the most thoroughly described aspect of his thought during this period. Characteristic is Wistrich in his article “The Strange Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum” in Jews of Vienna. Interestingly, the “socialism” to which Birnbaum’s writings allude closely resembles that articulated by none other than Theodor Herzl, who envisioned the Jewish state as a haven of progressive labor laws and governance. Perhaps because of Birnbaum’s own pains at differentiating himself as much as possible from Herzl, this is not often noticed. 104.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Volksthum und Weltbürgerthum,” Selbst-Emancipation 3, no. 2 (16 April 1890). 105.  Ibid. 106.  Ibid. 107.  Martin Buber explicitly connected Birnbaum and Hess around 1900. Birnbaum, he asserted, was “bringing to fruition what Moses Hess had begun: the synthesis of the national and the socialist idea in Judaism.” Interestingly, to ­Buber’s mind, this was the start of Birnbaum’s movement away from Zionism proper. Martin Buber, “Herzl und die Historie,” Ost und West 8–9 (August 1904): 583–94. On Moses Hess as proto-Zionist, see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 6–48; KoltunFromm, Moses Hess; Avineri, Moshe Hess. 108.  The literature tracing the intersection of socialism and nationalism in Israeli ideology and culture (pre- and post-1948) is extensive. Useful studies include Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs; Sternhell, Founding Myths of Israel; Shapira, Land and Power; Shafir, Land, Labor; and much of the work of Jonathan Frankel and Shlomo Avineri. 109.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Die Ziele der jüdische-nationalen Bestrebungen,” Selbst-Emancipation 3, no. 3 (1 May 1890). 110.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Wahltagsdanken,” Selbst-Emancipation 3, no. 13 (3 October 1890). 111.  Ibid. 112.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Der neue Cours,” Selbst-Emancipation 4, no. 21 (1891). 113.  Ibid.

Chapter Two Portions of this chapter previously appeared in “The Late Zionism of Nathan Birnbaum: The Herzl Controversy Reconsidered,” Association of Jewish Studies Review 31, no. 2 (2007): 241–76. © 2007, Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press. 1.  For Birnbaum’s review of Ha-Shiloah, see “‘Ha-Shiloah’—hebräische, l­iterarisch-wissenschaftliche Monatschrift,” Zion, 1 December 1896; Birnbaum’s contributions to Ahad Ha’am’s journal include a translation of “Kulturkämpfe in

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Notes to Chapter 2 alten Israel,” as well as a pair of literary articles, “Min ha-olam ha-gadol” (December 1904 and March 1905). 2.  Birnbaum’s relation to Ahad Ha’am is vague. Some have asserted that Birnbaum was an “Ahad Ha’amist,” or at least deeply influenced by him (see Schweid, “ ‘Mul sha’alot kium ha-yahadut,’” 301–19). But their thought, however similar, developed independently and simultaneously. It is not clear how deeply Birnbaum was aware of Ahad Ha’am until the late 1890s, although translations of a couple of Birnbaum’s articles appeared in Ha-Shiloah. He eventually worked on a German translation of Ahad Ha’am’s writing and vigorously defended him in the “Ahad Ha’am Affair.” 3.  For discussion of the “practical” and “cultural” Zionist conflict in the Odessa Hovevei Zion, see Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, chap. 2. 4.  They even looked similar, as illustrated by a letter from much later in Birnbaum’s life sent to him by Tuvia Horowitz, a young Hasid with whom Birnbaum carried on a lengthy correspondence. Horowitz describes being accused by Hasidim in his community of harboring Zionist sympathies because he “had a picture of a Jewish doctor who goes about bareheaded, which seems to be a picture of Dr. Herzl.” The photograph was actually of Birnbaum. 5.  Herzl’s forays into the Viennese theater are discussed at length in Ernst Pawel’s biography of Herzl, Labyrinth of Exile. Birnbaum, aside from a critic’s interest in both the mainstream and the Yiddish theater in Vienna, was also an amateur playwright and poet. 6.  See Wistrich, “Clash of Ideologies,” 220. 7.  See Schorske, “Politics in a New Key.” Although he focuses exclusively on Herzl in his discussion of Viennese Jewish nationalism, much of his discussion of the tenor of nationalist politics holds true in Birnbaum’s political career as well. 8.  Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile, 263–64. 9.  Nahum Sokolow published the bitterly mocking headline “Wonderful Rumors about the Establishment of a Jewish State Originating from the Mind of a Dr. Herzl” in Ha-Tsefirah. Herzl’s diary records the embarrassing obsessive protestations of Eduard Bacher and Moritz Benedikt, Herzl’s superiors at the Neue Freie Presse. See Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile, 263, 273. 10.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Dr. Theodor Herzl: Der Judenstaat,” Die Zeit, 22 February 1896. 11.  Ibid. 12.  Ibid. 13.  Nathan Birnbaum to Theodor Herzl, 24 February 1896. 14.  Theodor Herzl to Nathan Birnbaum, 25 February 1896. 15.  Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries, 1 March 1896. 16.  Many of Birnbaum’s major essays on Zionism were written during this time, including “Die nationale Wiedergeburt des jüdischen Volks in seinem Lande” (1893), “Die Zionistische Bewegung” (1895), “Der Zionismus” (1896), “Zionism als Cultur­ bewegung” (his address to the Basel congress in 1897), and “Zwei Vorträge über

Notes to Chapter 2 Zion­ismus” (1898). He also edited his own Zionist journal, Jüdische Volkszeitung, until its closing in 1896, and the Berlin journal Zion from 1896 to 1897, and was a regular contributor to Herzl’s own Zionist newspaper, Die Welt. 17.  Birnbaum to Herzl, 4 March 1896. 18.  Herzl, Complete Diaries, 1 March 1896. 19.  Birnbaum to Herzl, 23 April 1896. 20.  Herzl to Birnbaum, 26 April 1896. 21.  This arrangement did not come quickly enough for Birnbaum. Underscoring the disastrous state of his finances, Birnbaum sent an agitated letter complaining that he has not yet heard from Wolffsohn; and then yet another letter, on 5 May, reiterating his financial situation and begging for an immediate loan. Birnbaum to Herzl, 1 May 1896; Birnbaum to Herzl, 5 May 1896. 22.  For a description and analysis of Herzl’s voyage to Istanbul and its impact, see Vital, Origins of Zionism, 287–98. 23.  On Herzl’s visit and its impact, see N. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, 9–17. 24.  Birnbaum to Herzl, 15 October 1896. 25.  Herzl to Birnbaum, 17 October 1896. 26.  Birnbaum to Herzl, 5 November 1896. 27.  Vital, Origins of Zionism, 298–353. 28.  For details about early Berlin Zionists, see Lavsky, Before the Catastrophe, 18–32. 29.  Herzl, Complete Diaries, 10 March 1897. The region Herzl describes is in Bukovina, not Galicia. 30.  Ibid., 29 January 1897. 31.  Herzl was mostly correct in his assertions about a Jewish People’s Party; however, he reveals his ignorance of Birnbaum’s publications. As early as 1894, Birnbaum had put forth the idea of a Jewish People’s Party, but as discussed later, he conceived of it as a Zionist entity. 32.  Herzl, Complete Diaries, 24 April 1897. 33.  Birnbaum, “Zum Müncher Kongresse,” Zion, 5 May 1897. 34.  Ibid. 35.  Ibid. 36.  Herzl, Complete Diaries, 31 [sic] August 1897. 37.  Proceedings of the Zionist Congress Held at Basel, Switzerland, August 29, 30, and 31, 1897 (reprinted from The Jewish Chronicle of London), 37. The paper Birnbaum presented was eventually published under the title Zionism als Kulturbewegung. 38.  Ibid. 39.  Ibid., 37–38. 40.  Ibid., 44. According to the Proceedings, Schach objected to the term “legally assured home” in the preamble to the Basel Program; he felt, along with others, including Bodenheimer, that the term used should be “an assured home recognized by the laws of the nations [völkerrechtlich]” (43). When the congress did not take up Schach’s objection, he was silenced by Herzl and “quitted the Congress.”

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Notes to Chapter 2 41.  Ibid., 50. 42.  Ibid., 52. 43.  Ibid., 53. 44.  Ibid. 45.  Ibid. 46.  Birnbaum to Herzl, 7 September 1897. 47.  Ibid. 48.  Herzl, Complete Diaries, 9 September 1897. 49.  Ibid., 24 September 1897. 50.  Ibid. 51.  Ibid., 12 March 1898. 52.  Ibid., 11 April 1898. 53.  Herzl to Birnbaum, 15 November 1899; Birnbaum to Herzl, 20 November 1899. 54.  Martin Buber, among others, identifies the essay “National Rebirth” as an important factor in his own turn to Jewish nationalism. 55.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Was thun? 3. In wirtschaftlicher Beziehung,” Jüdische Volkszeitung, 13 March 1894. 56.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Was thun? 1. In religiöser Beziehung,” Jüdische Volks­ zeitung, 13 February 1894. 57.  Rozenblit, “Note on Galician Jewish Immigration,” 143–52. Rozenblit notes that before 1890, a significant majority of Galician Jews immigrated to Vienna from other urban centers (more than ten thousand people), but between 1890 and 1920 the numbers shifted until by 1920, a majority of Jewish immigrants came from towns with fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. See also Rozenblit’s study Jews of Vienna. 58.  Rozenblit, “Note on Galician Jewish Immigration,” 150. 59.  For a detailed discussion of the rise of the Christian Social Party and Karl Lueger, see John Boyer’s two-volume study, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna and Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna. 60.  See Schorske, “Politics in a New Key,” 133–46. 61.  Nathan Birnbaum, “ Zu den Wiener Gemeinderathswahlen,” Zion, October 1895. 62.  Ibid. 63.  Ibid. 64.  Ibid. 65.  Ibid. 66.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Unser Wahlspruch,” Jüdische Volkszeitung, 2 January 1894. 67.  Ibid. 68.  For a thorough treatment of the complex relationship between the modernized and integrated Jews of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires and their eastern counterparts, see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. 69.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Die Lage der Juden in Rußland,” Selbst-Emancipation 3, no. 10 (15 August 1890).

Notes to Chapter 2 70.  Ibid. 71.  Ibid. Birnbaum refers here, of course, to the vastly influential novel (not poem) Chto delat? by the Russian writer Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. 72.  Ibid. 73.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Der jüdische Jargon,” Selbst-Emancipation 3, no. 13 (2 November 1890). See J. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, for a translation of this essay. 74.  Ibid. 75.  Birnbaum, “Die Talisweber von Kolomea,” Selbst-Emancipation 5, nos. 16/17 (29 August 1892). 76.  Birnbaum, “Die wichtigste Frage,” Jüdisches Volkszeitung, 9 January 1894. 77.  Ibid. 78.  On pre-Herzlian Jewish politics in Galicia, see Manekin, “Taking It to the Streets,” 215–17, “Politics, Religion and National Identity,” and “Politikah ve-­ ortodoksiyah,” 447–69; Shanes, “Neither Germans nor Poles,” 191–213. See also Maniken, “Shomer Yisra’el” and “Makhzikey hadas.” 79.  On Makhzikey ha-Das, see Manekin, Tsmihat ve-gebushah shel ha-­orthodoksiyah. 80.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Die jüngste politische Partei Galiziens,” Die Zeit, 19 January 1895. This essay marks the first print appearance of Birnbaum’s famous pseudonym, Mathias Acher. Birnbaum never wrote why he chose the name, and different theories have been offered. Joshua Fishman, Robert Wistrich, and others note the use of the name “Acher,” the Hebrew term meaning “other” associated with the apostate Talmudic sage Elisha ben Abuya, whose erasure from the normative tradition was symbolized by referring to him as “Acher”; in Wistrich’s words, “Mathias Acher was the pseudonym taken by Birnbaum in 1891 at a Seder evening of the Kadimah students’ fraternity. . . . The name Mathias recalled the Hasmonean uprising against Hellenism; Acher was the Hebrew name meaning ‘a stranger’ given by the rabbis to an admired sage and heretic in the Jewish tradition, Elisha ben Avuya. . . . This combination of zealotry, idealism and heresy revealed in the choice of pen name seems appropriately to capture the psychological ambivalence behind many of Birnbaum’s ideological positions” (“The Metamorphoses of Nathan Birnbaum,” 389). Birnbaum’s descendants David, Eleazar, and Jacob Birnbaum have shared with me that according to their father, Solomon, “Acher” is the Hebrew adjective “another,” thus simply “Another Mathias.” Solomon Birnbaum’s explanation resonates with Birnbaum’s strident advocacy of Jewish national culture and his denigration of assimilation. 81.  On Jewish and Polish political identity, see Opalski and Bartal, Poles and Jews. On ethnicity and inclusiveness of non-Poles in Polish national politics, see Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate. 82.  Birnbaum, “Die jüngste politische Partei Galiziens,” Die Zeit, 19 January 1895. 83.  Ibid. 84.  Ibid.

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Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 85.  Birnbaum, “Eine jüdische Volkspartei,” Jüdische Volkszeitung, 10 July 1894. 86.  Ibid. 87.  Ibid. 88.  Ibid. 89.  Ibid. 90.  Birnbaum, Die jüdische Moderne, 3. 91.  Ibid., 4. 92.  Ibid. 93.  Ibid., 10. 94.  Ibid., 13. 95.  For detailed surveys of the development of racial theory in eighteenth–­ twentieth-century Europe, see Mosse, Towards the Final Solution; Poliakov, The Aryan Myth; and Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction. 96.  Mosse, Towards the Final Solution, 51–62. 97.  Ibid., 106. 98.  Ibid., 108–9. For detailed discussion of Weininger’s life and work, see Sengoopta, Otto Weininger. 99.  Mosse, Towards the Final Solution, 108. 100.  Sengoopta, Otto Weininger, 2. 101.  See Koltun-Fromm, Moses Hess, 75–84, for discussion of the racial component in the thought of Moses Hess, a very early theorist of Jewish nationalism. Although Birnbaum’s schema in The Jewish Moderne bears some resemblance to Hess’s, it is not as completely developed. 102.  See “Ueber Houston Stewart Chamberlain,” Die Welt, 22 and 29 November, 1901; “Etwas über Houston Stewart Chamberlain,” Ost und West 2, no. 12 (December 1902); “Weininger und das Judenthum,” Jüdische Volksblatt 5, no. 53 (27 January 1905); 7, nos. 4, 8 (24 February and 24 March 1905). 103.  Birnbaum, Die jüdische Moderne, 22–23. 104.  Ibid., 14. 105.  Ibid., 15. 106.  Ibid., 36. 107.  Ibid. 108.  Ibid., 21. 109.  Ibid., 23. 110.  Ibid., 26. 111.  Ibid. 112.  Ibid., 30.

Chapter Three 1.  The break would seem more pronounced in retrospect than it may have appeared at the time. Herzl continued to solicit Birnbaum’s contributions to Die Welt, and Birnbaum continued to publish there periodically.

Notes to Chapter 3 2.  For discussion of the centrality of the image of Herzl as a unifying symbol of Zionist culture contrary to the normal image of conflict between political and cultural Zionists, see Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry; for discussion of the porousness and flexibility of Zionist identity, see Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin-de-Siècle. David Brenner also notes the fairly smooth relations between different factions of Zionism beneath the tumultuous surface; see Marketing Identities, 178n62. 3.  See Wistrich, “The Metamorphoses of Nathan Birnbaum,” 407–13. 4.  In his memoirs, Nahum Glatzer describes broaching the Herzl controversy with the older Birnbaum. “Once [Birnbaum] asked me to come up and talk with him and the talk came to Zionism. He told me the story of his relationship with Herzl. The latter’s vanity repelled Birnbaum (or was it that he did not give due credit to Birnbaum’s pre-Herzl Zionist activity?) so that finally he left the Zionist movement. (He mentioned that he coined the term Zionist.) I was moved by the story of a man who took part in an historical process.” Glatzer, Memoirs, 79. 5.  For an interesting discussion of the role of a socialist subtext to Birnbaum’s negotiations with Herzlian Zionism, see Wistrich, “The Metamorphoses of Nathan Birnbaum.” 6.  Cited in Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, xvii. 7.  Martin Buber, “Herzl und die Historie,” Ost und West 8–9 (August 1904): 583–94. This article, a brief history of pre-Herzlian Zionism, features a full-page collage of three portraits of the central figures discussed: Pinsker, Hess, and, in the largest image in the middle, Birnbaum. 8.  On the relationships among Jewish renaissance figures, the Young Jewish Movement, and the origins of the Weimar Lehrhaus movement, see M. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture. 9.  For history of the Bezalel, see Olin, A Nation without Art; and Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, 1906–1929 (exhibition catalogue). 10.  Birnbaum was not the only member of the movement who advocated nonZionist Jewish national autonomy. Binyamin Segel, a major contributor and editor to Ost und West, shared this view, further highlighting the complexity of political identity among members of the Jewish renaissance circle. D. Brenner, Marketing Identities, 29–30. 11.  Michael Berkowitz has noted the resonance between emerging Jewish nationalist modernism and the paradigm of Bildung. See Zionist Culture, 3. On visual art in the Jewish renaissance movement, see Margaret Olin, “Martin Buber: Jewish Art as Visual Redemption,” in The Nation without Art, 99–127. 12.  Die Welt at its height had a maximum of ten thousand subscribers according to the German Jewish periodical database Compact Memory (www.compact memory.de). 13.  According to David Brenner, at its height Ost und West had from sixteen thousand to twenty-three thousand subscribers, and extrapolating to include shared subscriptions in libraries, cafés, and the like, the number could have been as much as three times that amount. Marketing Identities, 16.

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Notes to Chapter 3 14.  As a figure in the developing industry of marketing and public relations, Leo Winz would be quite recognizable to contemporary eyes as a “veteran image maker” and “savvy entrepreneur” who came to Ost und West as the head of “the oldest major German advertising firm, Haasenstein and Vogler.” Ibid., 6. 15.  The essay appeared in its first form in the January issue of Ost und West under the title “Jüdische Renaissance”; again in 1905 as one of a three-part series entitled “On the Renaissance” (the other titles were “On Politics” and “On Cultural Activity”); and then in 1916 as “Renaissance und Bewegung.” See Buber, The Martin Buber Reader, 143n1. 16.  Martin Buber, “On the [Jewish] Renaissance” (1903), in The Martin Buber Reader, 139–43. 17.  On the link between Burckhardt and Nietzsche and the impact of Burckhardt on Buber, see Biemann, “Problem of Tradition and Reform,” 58–87. The deep impact of Burckhardt’s writing on nineteenth-century historiography is well known. Burckhardt himself is linked to Jewish historiography because the elderly Burckhardt appointed as historian and editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums Ludwig Geiger, son of Abraham Geiger (1848–1919), the intellectual father of the Jewish Reform movement and a central figure in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, to be the editor of the third and all future editions of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien). 18.  “In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil . . . woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.” Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 81. 19.  Burckhardt, Reflections on History, 60 (cited in Sigurdson, “Jacob Burckhardt,” 429). 20.  See M. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 24. 21.  Buber, “On the [Jewish] Renaissance.” 22.  M. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 24. 23.  The term “Judenstil” is Michael Stanislawski’s coinage, a play on Jugendstil, the “young style,” the term denoting the German and Austrian art nouveau. See Zionism and the Fin-de-Siècle, 100. 24.  Buber, “On the [Jewish] Renaissance.” 25.  Sigurdson, “Jacob Burckhardt,” 419. 26.  Buber, “On the [Jewish] Renaissance.” Although in the coda to his essay Buber continues, “True cultural activity is also the most significant means to reach territorial goals—to win the land.”

Notes to Chapter 3 27.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Einige Gedanken über den Antisemitismus,” Ost und West 2, no. 8 (August 1902). The period 1899–1902 was one of literary experimentation for Birnbaum outside specifically Jewish organs. He was a contributor under the pseudonym Anton Skart to a cultural and political journal X-Strahlen, which bore some similarity in style and content to Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel. In addition, Birnbaum rediscovered an interest in belles lettres, composing poetry and a series of three one-act plays heavily influenced by Schnitzler and Ibsen, among other fin de siècle literature. This brief period sketches a seldom-seen image of Birnbaum among the many artists and writers in the Viennese cultural scene. 28.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Jüdische Renaissance Bewegung,” Ost und West 2, no. 9 (September 1902): 577–84. 29.  Ibid. 30.  Ibid. (emphasis added). 31.  Ibid. 32.  For discussion of Birnbaum’s response to Buber’s earlier book retelling Hasidic tales, see Galli, “Birnbaum’s Reaction,” 313–39. 33.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Hebrew and Yiddish” (translated in J. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language), 178. Original article: “Hebräish und Jüdisch,” Ost und West 2, 7 (July 1902): 457–64. 34.  Ibid. 35.  See “Die jüdisch sprechenden Juden und ihre Bühne,” Die Welt 5, no. 37 (13 September 1901); “Eine ostjüdische Volksbiene in Wien,” Ost und West 2, no. 4 (April 1902): 235–40. 36.  In the early years of publication, Ost und West included several translations of works by prominent Yiddish writers, including Y. L. Peretz, David Pinsky, Morris Rosenfeld, and Sholem Aleichem, some of them by Birnbaum. 37.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Hebrew and Yiddish,” 180. 38.  For a detailed discussion of Birnbaum’s dynamic attitude toward Jewish languages, see J. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language. 39.  Birnbaum, “Jüdische Renaissance Bewegung.” 40.  Ibid. 41.  Ibid. 42.  With characteristic melodrama, Herzl recorded as he was writing the novel, “My life now is no novel, and so the novel has become my life.” Complete Diaries, 14 March 1901. Cited in Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile, 438. 43.  For a detailed discussion of Herzl’s negotiations during this period, see Herzl, Complete Diaries, Books 11–13 (years 1896–97); Avineri, “Theodor Herzl’s Diaries as Bildungsroman”; Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile. 44.  Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg), “Altneuland,” Ha-Shiloah 10, no. 6 (Kislev 5663 / December 1902); and Ost und West 3, no. 4 (April 1903): 227–34 (Hebrew available at http://benyehuda.org/ginzberg/Gnz063.html). 45.  Cited in Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 196. 46.  Ibid., 198–99.

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Notes to Chapters 3 and 4 47.  Max Nordau, “Achad Haam über ‘Altneuland,’” Die Welt 7, no. 11 (13 March 1903). Nordau’s response to Ahad Ha’am’s review of Altneuland appeared prior to the German translation. See Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile. This line is cited in Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 197. 48.  Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 197. 49.  Ibid. 50.  See Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile. 51.  Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 197–98. 52.  It is difficult to surmise from Herzl’s diary the effect of the vitriolic response to the novel on Herzl. Despite repeated discussions of the novel from the earliest days of Herzl’s turn to Zionism, and after the brief note of April 1902 that stated, “I have finished my novel Altneuland,” he makes no substantive references to it. Perhaps his reticence on the subject reflected dismay at the response. Most historians who have discussed the “affair” do concede that he at least in part orchestrated some of the response to the negative reviews, especially that of Ahad Ha’am. 53.  “Die ‘Lösungen’ der Judenfrage,” Ost und West 2, no. 6 (June 1902): 361–70. 54.  See Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am) correspondence, Birnbaum Family Archive. 55.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Open Letter to Ahad Ha’am,” Die Zeit (1902). 56.  Birnbaum, Achad Ha’am. 57.  Ibid. 58.  Ibid. Birnbaum refers to Berdyczewski and his sympathizers as “youths,” even though Berdyczewski (1865–1921) was nearly the same age as Birnbaum. 59.  Ibid. 60.  Ibid. 61.  Ibid. 62.  Ibid. 63.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Die jüdische Bewegung,” Der Weg 1, nos. 1–2 (20 August 1903). 64.  Ibid. 65.  Ibid. 66.  Ibid. 67.  Ibid. 68.  Ibid.

Chapter Four 1.  S. Y. Agnon, “Be-na’areynu u’ve-zakineynu,” in Al kapot ha-man’ul, 215–74. That Agnon’s description at the beginning of this story features a lightly fictionalized account of Nathan Birnbaum has been noted by several observers. See Laor, “Ha-tsiyonotav shel Shay Agnon.” I am grateful to Shalom Carmy of Yeshiva University for referring me to Laor’s essay. See also Laor, Hayyei Agnon, 41–42, 134; and Fuchs, “Ironic Characterization,” 101–28. 2.  An overview of the history of Diaspora Jewish nationalist models in the

Notes to Chapter 4 ­ ustro-Hungarian Empire, including a thorough bibliography of relevant research, A can be found in Rechter, “A Nationalism of Small Things,” 87–109. 3.  For detailed descriptions of the development of the Austrian parliament, see Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy; and Kann, History of the Habsburg Empire, 326. On Austrian politics and government under the Habsburgs, see the project of the Austrian Academy of Science’s Kommission für die Geschichte der Habsburgermonarchie, Die Habsburgermonarchie, especially Rumpler and Urbanitsch, vol. 7, Verfassung und Parlamentarismus, and vol. 8, Die politische Öffentlichkeit. The 1873 reforms had a major impact on Jewish politics, laying the groundwork for the political allegiances that would be put to use in 1907. On Jewish politics in response to the 1873 reforms, see Manekin, “Politics, Religion and National Identity,” 100–119. 4.  For a detailed discussion of the 1907 electoral reform, see Jenks, Austrian Electoral Reform, 426. 5.  Ibid. 6.  See Buszko, “Consequences of Galician Autonomy,” 86–99. 7.  Kann, History of the Habsburg Empire, 427. 8.  Bukovina shared many similarities with eastern Galicia, but as a province previously (until annexed in 1776) under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire rather than Poland, it experienced a different economic and political trajectory. Ethnic relations in Bukovina were shaped by a greater diversity (including Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Russians, and Germans) and a more unpredictable politics and culture. For a comparison of Galician and Bukovinian Jewish communities, see Rechter, “Geography Is Destiny,” 325–37. 9.  For a detailed history of Jews in the latifundia system in its eighteenth-­ century heyday, see Rosman, The Lord’s Jews. 10.  On Galician figures in Reichsrat politics, see Polonsky, Jews in Russia and Poland, 113–46; Binder, Galizien in Wien. See Shanes and Petrovsky-Shtern, “An Unlikely Alliance,” 485–86, for a summary of the Polish domination over the administration and political office of Galicia. As the authors note, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Poles occupied at their peak some 90 percent of the administrative positions in Galicia. 11.  It did not hurt matters that one of their own families, the Gołuchowskis, dominated in representing the region in Vienna for the second half of the nineteenth century. See Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 418, who notes that “Gołuchowski served as Galician viceroy three times between 1849 and 1875 and as Austrian imperial minister of internal affairs between 1859 and 1861,” a position that he used to “advance the Polish cause and transform Galicia into an area in which Poles monopolized the upper echelons of the administration, and educational system, and economic life.” 12.  See ibid., 392–96, 417–35. This description is only a sketch of a complicated set of relationships between Poles and Ukrainians, dependent on geography, local politics, personalities, and historical events that could follow patterns different from what is described here. For example, as Magocsi describes in A History of Ukraine, over

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Notes to Chapter 4 the course of the early nineteenth century the Polish-Ukrainian dialogue, from the perspective of nascent Ukrainian nationalists, ran the gamut from a pro-Polish position to a “Rus’ patriot,” anti-Polish position (436–37). After 1848–49, the Polanophile position declined precipitously, to be replaced by a complex spectrum of “Rusyn” or “Ukrainian” (Ukraintsi), largely anti-Polish, national identity. Note the proportion of Ukrainians increased massively over the eastern border during the Russian Empire; there the statistics showed about 65 percent Ukrainian, 20 percent Polish, and 10 percent Jewish. See Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle,” 25–49. 13.  Polonsky, citing Himka’s “Dimensions of a Triangle,” breaks down the statistics of ethnic and national groups in Galicia by both religion and language. By religion, the region in 1910 had 3,731,569 Roman Catholics (generally Poles), 3,379,613 Greek Catholics (generally Ukrainians), and 871,895 Jews. By language, the population in 1910 was 4,672,500 Polish speakers, 3,208,092 Ukrainian speakers, and 90,114 German speakers. It is important to note that these numbers are notoriously difficult to interpret with regard to Jews because Yiddish, by far the most widely spoken language of Galician Jews, was not an option on the census; thus, language became a statistical weapon of the Poles to assert hegemony by claiming Jews as Polish speakers. For instance, the 1910 figures show a marked increase in Polish speakers (from 3,988,702 in 1900) and decrease in German speakers (from 211,752 in 1900), perhaps reflecting a more expansive attempt to claim Jews as Polish speakers. As Polonsky writes, “Yiddish was not recognized as a language in the Austrian censuses, and most Jews reported Polish as their language. The Polish administrators of the Galician census statistics also inflated the number of Polish speakers.” Jews in Russia and Poland, 115. 14.  Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 441–44. 15.  For background on the Polish-Jewish and German-Jewish alliances in Galician politics, see Polonsky, Jews in Russia and Poland, 114–38. 16.  See ibid., 138–45, for an analysis of the impact of 1907 franchise reform on Galician ethnic politics. 17.  See Everett, “Rise of Jewish National Politics,” 149–77; and Shanes and Petrovsky-Shtern, “An Unlikely Alliance,” 494. 18.  Shanes and Petrovsky-Shtern, “An Unlikely Alliance,” 499. 19.  The electoral dynamic in Galicia was a major preoccupation for Birnbaum at this time. See “Die jüdische sozialdemokratische Partei in Galizien,” Jüdische Volks­ blatt 7, no. 21 (26 May 1905); “Zhidivskii narid i zhidivsk’a mova,” Bukovina 21, nos. 66–67 (5 and 18 June 1905); “Zwei Reisebriefe aus dem jüdischen, Osten Oesterreichs,” Jüdische Volksblatt 7, nos. 30, 31 (28 July and 4 August 1905); “Die jüdische-­ nationale Bewegung,” Ruthenische Revue 3, no. 15 (August 1905); “Die galizische Frage und die galizien Juden,” Die Wage 9, no. 17 (21 April 1906); “Juden und Ruthenen,” Neue Zeit­ung 1, no. 4 (28 September 1906); “Die galizischen Raubwahlen,” Neue Zeitung 2, no. 1 (12 June 1907); “Block und Judenpunkt,” Neue Zeitung 2, no. 7 (26 July 1907); “Nationale Autonomie,” Neue Zeitung 2, nos. 8–12 (2–30 August 1907). 20.  Everett, “Rise of Jewish National Politics,” 150–51.

Notes to Chapter 4 21.  The degree of coordination in 1907 between Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists made it a singular event in the history of both groups. As Rachel Manekin documents in “Politics, Religion and National Identity,” 111–17, the idea of forging a common front between Jewish and Ukrainian nationalists dated back to an alliance in the wake of the imperial electoral reforms of 1873. Later an informal arrangement developed in which Jewish political leaders agreed to support Ukrainian candidates in rural areas in exchange for Ukrainian support of Jews in urban districts, a strategy that achieved some success. Jewish and Ukrainian political alignment ebbed and flowed up to the 1907 election itself. In the election, the idea resurfaced. By 1907, after a series of experiments and setbacks, Zionists and Jewish nationalists, organized in the Jewish National Party, made this alliance a major part of their strategy. 22.  Nathan Birnbaum, protest letter (1907) (typescript, Birnbaum Family Archive). This document survives in two forms: as a carbon copy of the original typescript held in the Birnbaum Family Archive and in published form as a supplement to Birnbaum’s self-edited newspaper, Neue Zeitung 2, no. 3 (28 June 1907), under the title “Die ‘Wahl’ des Herrn von Moysas.” 23.  Ibid. 24.  See Everett, “Rise of Jewish National Politics,” 173: “The agreement was broadly reported in the Ukrainian press, especially in Dilo. There was, however, little mention of the agreement in the Jewish publications advocating a national vote, which printed disavowals of any agreement.” See also Shanes and PetrovskyShtern, “An Unlikely Alliance,” 497. 25.  See Everett, “Rise of Jewish National Politics,” 176–77. 26.  For Jewish reactions against the Jewish-Ukrainian alliance of 1873, see Buszko, “Consequences of Galician Autonomy,” 90; and Manekin, “Politics, Religion and National Identity.” In addition, several Jewish candidates stood for election in 1907 outside the Jewish nationalist group, and some of them, including in Polish parties, won their races. 27.  Birnbaum, protest letter. 28.  Jews also won office in other, non-Jewish and non-nationalist parties, including the Social Democrat, Polish National Democrat, Jewish members of the Polish club (Conservative), and Jewish Democrat. Everett, “Rise of Jewish National Politics,” 175. 29.  Birnbaum, protest letter. On the Potocki assassination, see Magocsi, A History of the Ukraine, 448. 30.  Birnbaum, protest letter. 31.  S. Y. Agnon, “Be-na’areynu u’ve-zakineynu,” 216. 32.  David Birnbaum related this story to the author. 33.  Magocsi, A History of the Ukraine, 448. 34.  Birnbaum, protest letter. 35.  Ibid. 36.  The Tłulmacz yizkor book records that Rabbi Isaac Ziff was from a Lemberg rabbinical family and was “respected as the premier rabbi by Jews and non-

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Notes to Chapter 4 Jews alike. He spoke a Germanized Yiddish.” He eventually returned to take a rabbinic post in Lemberg. Although brief, the description suggests why he may have become an intermediary between the Hönigsbergs and the authorities. Sefer Tlumacz, xxxii. 37.  Birnbaum, protest letter. 38.  Ibid. 39.  Ibid. 40.  Birnbaum, “Die Tallisweber von Kolomea,” Selbst-Emancipation 5, nos. 16/17 (29 August 1892). 41.  See Dubnow, “Autonomism,” in Nationalism and History, 131–42. Dubnow’s discussion of Jewish autonomy is its best-known articulation. Given the resonance between Birnbaum’s (among others) and Dubnow’s models for Jewish autonomy, which developed almost simultaneously, it is surprising that there was little exchange of ideas between the two men. For another formulation of Jewish folkism and autonomism, see Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation. 42.  Birnbaum, “Jüdische Autonomie,” Ost und West 6, no. 1 (January 1906). 43.  Ibid. 44.  Ibid. 45.  Ibid. 46.  As the election progressed, the menace that the strategy courted became clearer as both the Polish and Ukrainian press sparred over the role of Jewish nationalism. See Shanes and Petrovsky-Shtern, “An Unlikely Alliance.” 47.  Birnbaum, “Die jüdische-nationale Bewegung.” 48.  Ibid. 49.  Ibid. 50.  Birnbaum, “Juden und Ruthenen.” 51.  Ibid. 52.  Ibid. 53.  Although there was an attempt to repeat the Jewish nationalist–­Ukrainian front in the 1911 elections, it was less coherent and fared poorly. Shanes and Petrov­ sky-Shtern, “An Unlikely Alliance,” 500–502. 54.  See Frankel, “The Bund” and “Chaim Zhitlovsky,” in Prophecy and Politics; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts. 55.  The Yiddish newspaper Morgn Zhurnal dispatched a reporter to meet Birnbaum for an impromptu interview on the quay as he disembarked in New York. “Di reseptshon far Dr. Birnboym,” Morgn Zhurnal, 1 January 1908. 56.  “Dr. Nathan Birnbaum bei Roosevelt,” Jüdische Zeitung 14 (3 April 1908): 8. I am grateful to the anonymous reader of this manuscript for Stanford University Press for directing me to this reference. 57.  “Enthusiastic Reception to Dr. Nathan Birnbaum,” American Hebrew, 10 January 1908. Announcements appeared in numerous other Jewish newspapers, including “Dr. Birnboym kumt haynt,” Jewish Daily News, 1 January 1908; “Dr. Nosn Birnboym: Der hayntigen onkumen fun ‘matisiyahu acher’ in amerike,” in Birn-

Notes to Chapter 4 baum Family Archive; “Di reseptshon far Dr. Birnboym”; “Dr. Birnbaum Here,” American Hebrew, 2 January 1908. 58.  “Enthusiastic Reception to Dr. Nathan Birnbaum.” This seems to be the only encounter between Magnes and Birnbaum, but as a recent biographer has documented, Magnes was active in the Berlin Jewish renaissance circle, yet there is no indication in either Birnbaum’s or Magnes’s work that the two had met before 1908. See Kotzin, Judah Magnes. The Birnbaum Family Archive contains a few short letters between Birnbaum and Magnes and his staff related to Birnbaum’s second visit to America in 1921. 59.  “Enthusiastic Reception to Dr. Nathan Birnbaum.” 60.  Ibid. 61.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Amol un atsind,” in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakhkonferents, ix–xi. This volume was published as part of the YIVO Bibliotek by Max Weinreich. In it Weinreich collected all materials he could find relating to the Yiddish Language Conference. On its twentieth anniversary in 1928, Weinreich feared that the conference was in danger of being completely forgotten; there was no published protocol of the conference, only a few documents were ever printed under its auspices, and most of the delegates had long since lost interest. When he attempted to solicit writings from the participants, he received only one response—the essay just cited from Nathan Birnbaum. Nevertheless, Weinreich managed to gather a collection of reports about the conference before, during, and after the meeting, making it the most valuable documentation of the conference. 62.  On Zhitlovsky, see Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 69–124. 63.  “Yiddish and Jewish,” American Hebrew, 10 January 1908. 64.  Birnbaum, “Amol un atsind.” 65.  “Enthusiastic Reception to Dr. Nathan Birnbaum.” 66.  Solomon Birnbaum to Nathan Birnbaum, 14 January 1908. This letter is part of an extensive correspondence between father and son that lasted until Nathan Birnbaum’s death, and it highlights the impact that the relationship would have on Birnbaum’s work. Solomon, an enthusiastic proponent of Yiddish, insisted that his father change the language of their communication exclusively to Yiddish. It suggests that Solomon had a decisive influence in Nathan Birnbaum’s approach to Yiddish language and culture as a full-fledged participant rather than a detached proponent. 67.  Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 126. 68.  Ibid., 128. 69.  Ibid., 129–30. 70.  Ibid., 132. 71.  That the two happened to be of the same mind at this point in their careers is itself remarkable, as Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky shared a penchant for frequent shifts in their intellectual convictions. During his years in the United States, interrupted briefly by his return to Europe as part of the Yiddish conference until 1914, Zhitlovsky founded and edited Dos Naye Lebn, a Yiddish cultural journal published

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Notes to Chapter 4 from 1908 to 1914. See Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 258–88; and Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 125–78. 72.  David Pinski, letter to the Jewish School Society in Czernowitz on the twentieth anniversary of the Yiddish Language Conference. Cited in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents. 73.  Announcement (Farbetung) of the Yiddish Language Conference, 1908. Reprinted in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 2–4. 74.  Ibid. 75.  Ibid. 76.  Letter from Y. L. Peretz, in Y. L. Peretz, briv un redes, 145. 77.  Y. L. Peretz, opening address, First Yiddish Language Conference, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 4–5. 78.  Baedecker, “Czernowitz,” in Baedecker’s Österreich-Ungarn, 373–74. 79.  Determining the language preference of Jews according to late Austrian censuses is complex because Yiddish is not listed among the options for language of daily use (Umgangsprache). This underscores a main contention of the Yiddish conference organizers. When polled according to language, Jewish responses were shaped by many considerations, including self-identity, local political and cultural pressure, even random choice. Yiddish-speaking Jews in one region could trend toward selecting Polish; in another, German; or some might refuse to answer. One recent analysis puts the number of Yiddish speakers in Bukovina at approximately 70 percent (Lichtblau and John, “Jewries in Galicia and Bukovina, in Lemberg and Czernowitz,” 29–66). But study of Czernowitz itself as a Jewish linguistic site has it own complexities. One widely held conception of Czernowitz as a major center of Yiddish language and culture is based at least in part on a backward projection of interwar trends. After the First World War, Czernowitz was absorbed into the newly expanded country of Romania and received a significant influx of Yiddish-speaking refugees from the Soviet Union. These Jews dramatically increased the prominence of Yiddish in the city, leading to a flowering of Yiddish culture and a vibrant press and theater. Before the interwar period only two short-lived Yiddish publications were actually produced in Czernowitz: Nathan Birnbaum’s Dr. Birnboyms Vokhenblat and Laybl Taubes’s Di Yidishe Folksfraynd. All other prewar Jewish periodicals were published in German. 80.  Statistics cited in Lichtblau and John, “Jewries in Galicia and Bukovina, in Lemberg and Czernowitz.” 81.  Or, more correctly, three others (Romanians, Ukrainians, and Poles): statistics that detail the religious practices of Czernowitz residents, when compared with the linguistic preferences, demonstrate that a considerable number, even the majority of “Germans” (German speakers), were Jews. 82.  “Die Ergebnisse der Volks- und Viehzählung vom 31. Dezember 1910,” in Herzogtume Bukowina nach den Angaben der k.k. statistischen Zentral-Kommission in Wien (Mitteilungen des statistischen Landesamtes des Herzogtums Bukowina) 17, nos. 54 f., 80 f. (1913). Cited in Lichblau and John, “Jewries in Galicia and Buko­ vina, in Lemberg and Czernowitz.”

Notes to Chapter 4 83.  Ibid. 84.  Zachariewicz’s architectural details and facade of the Czernowitz synagogue were destroyed during the Second World War, leaving only the shell intact. This was converted to a movie theater during the Soviet era and is now the Chernivtsi Kinopalats movie theater. 85.  In cities throughout the empire, Fellner and Helmer shaped the imperial architectural aesthetic to a degree unmatched by any other single firm. Other major designers with structures in Czernowitz include Zachariewicz, Josef Hlavka (designer of the Chernivtsi university), and Otto Wagner. 86.  Herman Sternberg, “On the History of the Jews of Czernowitz,” in Gold, Geschichte der Juden in der Bukowina, 27–48. 87.  The Jewish National House has been preserved intact; used for much of the Soviet period as a workers’ cultural center, the building is now designated the Chernivtsi Cultural Center. In August 2008, a small museum detailing the Jewish history of the city was opened on the ground floor on the centennial of its construction. 88.  Sternberg, “On the History of the Jews of Czernowitz.” 89.  Ibid. 90.  Sternberg’s description is not uniformly negative; the passage continues: “He allied himself with no party and let his voice be heard in the Vienna parliament in the name of the Jewish people. His championing the revision of the Hilsner trial and his fight against the ritual murder slander were unforgettable. He brought the pogrom in Russia before the court of public opinion.” Ibid. 91.  For examples, see Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish Culture, chap. 8; and numerous articles on the subject by Joshua Fishman, including “Attracting a Following to High-Culture Functions,” “The Hebraist Response to the Tshernovits Conference,” “Nathan Birnbaum’s Three ‘Rendezvous’ in Tshernovits.” 92.  Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, viii–ix. 93.  Birnbaum, “Amol un atsind,” ix. 94.  M. Lazarson, Rasvet, 28 March 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakhkonferents, 1–2. 95.  Chaim Zhitlovsky, article in Der Tog, 2 September 1928, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, xi. 96.  Barzel (Shimon Ayzenshtat), Forverts (1908), in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 40–41. 97.  Unzer Leben, 27 August 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 22–23. 98.  Hillel Zeitlin, “Folks-notisn,” Haynt, 4 September 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 36–38. 99.  H. Harris (Achaz), “Conference in Czernowitz,” Ha’am, 28 August, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 28–29. 100.  Barzel (Shimon Ayzenshtat), Razvet, 23 August 1908, in Weinreich, Di ­ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 12–13. 101.  Weinreich notes briefly: “The conference was to have opened in the Jewish

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Notes to Chapter 4 ‘National House.’ The Jewish community of Czernowitz and its leader Dr. Straucher had much earlier allowed the organizers of the conference the use of the location . . . which was to be completed on the 30th of August. The venue, however, was not finished—some say, because Straucher did not want it to be completed” (Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 67). 102.  Lichtblau and John have suggested a warm relationship between Straucher and the Yiddish conference organizers but offer no supporting citation. “With regard to the political balance of power which then prevailed in Bukovina, it was highly significant that Benno Straucher, the unchallenged dominant force within the Jewish communities of Czernowitz, was forbidden to hold this conference in the Jüdisches Haus; the participants met instead in the concert hall of the Music Society and in the Ukrainian National House.” “Jewries in Galicia and Bukovina, in Lemberg and Czernowitz.” Given Straucher’s complex political and cultural negotiations, the idea that he was a booster of the conference seems unlikely. 103.  Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 61. 104.  Lazar Khazanovitsh, Yidisher Arbeter, 10 September 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 204–10. 105.  Barzel (Sh. Ayzenshtat), Razvet, 23 August 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 12–13. 106.  Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 64. 107.  Ibid., 65. 108.  Chaim Zhitlovsky, letter (1928), in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-­ konferents, xi–xii. 109.  Gershon Bader, Yiddishes Tageblatt, 15 September 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 67. 110.  Report from Rasvet, 17 September 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 67. 111.  Nathan Birnbaum, opening address to the First Yiddish Language Conference, in Dr. Birnbaums Vokhenblat 1 (4 September 1908), 3–7. 112.  Ibid. 113.  Ibid. 114.  Weinreich, “Araynfir,” in Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, vii–viii. 115.  The full text of Mieses’s speech is preserved in Weinreich, “Matisyahu Mieses’ referat vegen der yiddisher shprakh,” in Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents, 144–95. Mieses’s pathbreaking work on Yiddish linguistics was followed with several essays on the Yiddish language, including Die Entstehungsursache der juedischen Dialekte and Die jiddische Sprache. 116.  For a detailed history of the Bund and the Poalei Zion, see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics. 117.  Peretz, “Referat vegen der organizer-frage,” in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 85–86. 118.  Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 87. 119.  Ibid., 89.

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 120.  Ester [Frumkin], “Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents,” Naye Tsayt, 4, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 90–91. 121.  Ibid. 122.  Ibid. 123.  Lazar Khazanovitsh, Der Yiddisher Arbiter, 32 (10 September 1908), in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 204–9. 124.  Announcement from the Bureau of the Yiddish Language Conference, Dr. Birnboyms Vokhenblat 5. 125.  The press, particularly the Lemberg Togblat, seemed gleeful in making ­Peretz look bad, reporting that in Kolomea he refused to sign a program for a young woman, and in Buczacz he was accused of insulting Ahad Ha’am, Brainen, and Kloyzner. 126.  Hillel Zeitlin, “Vokh-notitsen,” Haynt 196 (11 September 1908), in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 212–13. 127.  Marten-Finnis and Makus Bauer, “Jüdische Konflictkultur,” 116–42. 128.  Ibid. “1909 war Straucher der einflussreichste und mächtigste jüdische Politiker der Bukowina jenseits der etablierten Verwaltungshierarchie geworden, der durch seine aufsehenerregenden Reden im Wiener Parlament reichsweit Ansehenals Verteidiger jüdischer Rechte genoss,” 129. 129.  Solomon Kassner, Czernowitzer Tageblat, 6 September 1908, in Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents, 202–3.

Chapter Five Portions of this chapter previously appeared in “Nathan Birnbaum and Tuvia Horowitz: Friendship and the Origins of an Orthodox Ideologue,” Jewish History 17 (2003): 1–29. © 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted with permission of Springer Science + Business Media. 1.  The term “Torah-true” to describe the scrupulously Orthodox was widespread, especially in the early twentieth century; here we will use it as a shorthand term to describe a community of significant nuance and diversity, a term that all would likely agree to be an acceptable self-definition. 2.  On the term “oylim”: The pamphlet was initially published in both a Yiddish and Hebrew edition. In Yiddish, the term would normatively be transliterated as “oylim”; in Hebrew, it would be “olim.” Birnbaum most often wrote in German, using the German Jewish transliteration of the initial ayin with the vowel holam maleh as “au” (pronounced like the English “ou” as in “couch”), thus “Aulim.” In an interview, Josef Friedenson, editor of the Yiddish newspaper Dos Yidishe Vort and one of the few surviving individuals to meet Birnbaum and be acquainted with the movement, noted that the most common pronunciation of the movement among its followers was “oylim.” For this reason, I will use this spelling. 3.  For biographical details of Jiři Langer’s transformation, see the introduction by his brother František to Nine Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries. 4.  An indicator of de Haan’s complex identity is that he is vocally claimed by two

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Notes to Chapter 5 strange bedfellows: the field of Queer/LGBT Studies, where his literary production has received some attention, and by the most vocal ultra-Orthodox opponents of Zionism and the state of Israel, such as the Naturei Karta and Edah Haredit. A fascinating dramatization of de Haan’s story appears in Zweig, De Vriedt Comes Home. 5.  Langer’s attempt to apply psychoanalysis to his newfound piety led to some interesting texts noted by his contemporaries, including two articles published in Freud’s journal Imago. He also published a psychological analysis of Jewish mysticism, Die Erotik der Kabbala. 6.  Franz Rosenzweig to Mother, 7 August 1918; Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, 16 September 1923. “Did I ever tell you about the wildly romantic visit I had with him? In Vienna, 1918 . . . hopefully he was only a little disappointed [by me].—I had gotten a copy of ‘Gottes Volk,’ the ‘Oylim’ were already around, and I found a tired, resigned man and all was like a dream. Fourteen days later the Star came to me.” Rosenzweig again refers to the meeting later: “I think often about the August day [sic] in 1918, when I came to visit you in Vienna” (Rosenzweig to Birnbaum, 9 December 1923). 7.  In a postcard commemorating Birnbaum’s fiftieth birthday in 1914 featuring a Jugendstil portrait by his son Menachem, Rosenzweig’s sentiment is captured well: “Nathan Birnbaum: The Jewish soul in Jewish forms of life is Jewish power” (­Nathan Birnbaum: Jüdische Seele in jüdischen Lebensformen ist jüdische Kraft). Postcard in honor of Birnbaum’s fiftieth birthday, Birnbaum Family Archive. 8.  One of the few extant collections of this journal in the Birnbaum Family Archive reveals that although the journal had little success or circulation, it did represent Birnbaum’s late attempt to retroactively control the agenda of the conference. 9.  See especially Solomon Birnbaum to Nathan Birnbaum, 26 January 1908. 10.  Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn lebn.” 11.  Vom Freigeist zum Gläubigen. In the Orthodox world, frei implies the conscious rejection of belief and tradition and carries a taint of impertinence and offensive irreverence. 12.  Tuvia Horowitz, “Af der grenets fun tsvey velten,” in Yoyvelbukh, 36–42. The meaning of ba’al teshuva varies depending on the context. Literally a “master of repentance,” it refers to any Jew who strayed from the commandments and goes through a formal set of steps in repenting for his or her failure. In modern times, the term has come to be applied specifically to either a Jew raised in a religious household who leaves it only to return to it in later life, or one born to nonobservant parents who takes on religious observance and Orthodox belief. Today, ba’al teshuva can imply ostentatious and unsophisticated religiosity. But it is clear from Horowitz’s words that the term in Birnbaum’s case was an honorific. 13.  Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn leben,” 9–18. 14.  In several Orthodox newspapers nearly every year on the anniversary of Birnbaum’s death ( yorstayt) one can find a recounting of this story in a special essay dedicated to his memory, often with embellishments. In one essay from the 1990s, for example, the writer has Birnbaum on a later trip to America recounting tear-

Notes to Chapter 5 fully his conversionary experience to a fellow Agudist. In this account, Birnbaum goes into great detail about the exact reason that the sea led to his awareness of the divine: its deep blue reminded him of the deep blue of the heavens, which brought him to awareness of the Throne of Glory (kise ha-kavod) upon which the Almighty is seated—a near-verbatim quotation of Tractate Menahot, 43b, which describes the color of tekhelet as a shade of blue once used to dye a strand of each of the four ritual fringes (tsitsit) worn by Jewish males. 15.  Birnbaum, Vom Freigeist zum Gläubigen, 4. 16.  Ibid., 5. 17.  Ibid., 6. 18.  Ibid., 7. 19.  Ibid., 13. 20.  Ibid., 14. 21.  Ibid. 22.  Ibid., 17. 23.  Ibid., 17–18. 24.  Ibid., 19. 25.  Ibid., 20–21. 26.  Horowitz, “Af der grenets,” 36–42. 27.  Ibid. 28.  Groysvardayn was then also known as Nagyvárad in Hungarian, Grosswardein in German. It is the present-day city of Oradea in Romania. 29.  Horowitz, “Af der grenets,” 42. 30.  Ibid., 36–42. Actually, Birnbaum had left the Central Committee by 1924. 31.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, Isru hag sukkot 5678 (9 October 1917). “Today my uncle the Vizhnitzer Rebbe and his sons traveled to Vizhnits on the yortsayt of the elder Ba’al ha-tsemakh tsadik.” “Ba’al ha-tsemakh tsadik” refers to the founder of the Vizhnitz dynasty and author of the book Tsemak tsadik, Rabbi Menaham Mendel Hagar. 32.  Nistor, “Ethnographische Landkarte der Bukowina.” 33.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, Isru chag shel Pesach 5678 (5 April 1918). 34.  Ibid. 35.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 14 Sivan 5677 (4 June 1917). 36.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 21 Sivan 5677 (11 June 1917). 37.  The Jewish communities of Galicia and Bukovina were among the most devastated by warfare on the Eastern Front. See Ansky’s famous account, Hurbn Galitsye, translated as The Enemy at His Pleasure. See also Rechter, The Jews of Vienna, 199. 38.  Interestingly, this letter is written in formal Hebrew, unlike the bulk of the rest of the correspondence, which was written in Yiddish (and in rare cases, German). It may indicate that Horowitz intended the letter to be public proof of Birnbaum’s religious convictions. 39.  Horowitz to Birnbaum. Undated letter, but the signature “hag kasher v’sameah” places it around mid-April 1916. Translation: Koren Jerusalem Bible, 1997.

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Notes to Chapter 5 40.  The term shita refers both to the pattern of opinions given by one sage and a philosophical worldview or intellectual program. 41.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, undated letter. 42.  For detailed discussion of the role of eschatology in Orthodox attitudes toward Zionism, see Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism. 43.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, undated letter. 44.  Of course, Birnbaum had considerable pedigree himself, and perhaps this may explain why Horowitz projected such expectations on Birnbaum. In Horowitz’s imagination, tempered deeply with a sense of supernatural possibility, Birnbaum had all the makings of an occluded prophet, especially since his ancestry included major rabbinic figures and a tradition that linked his family to the medieval exegete Rashi and thus to King David. 45.  The term erev rav refers to the masses of people who left Egypt on the coattails of the redeemed Jewish people, cynically using the Exodus to their advantage. In some sources, they worked to undermine the holiness of the Jewish people and represent a force of fundamental impurity. 46.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 21 Iyar 5678 (3 May 1918). 47.  See especially Horowitz to Birnbaum, 2 Av 5679 (29 July 1919). 48.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 16 Sivan 5676 (17 June 1916). 49.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 27 Av 5678 (5 August 1918). 50.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 17 May 1917. 51.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 28 Iyar 5676 (31 May 1916). 52.  For a biography of Rabbi Nahman, see Green, Tormented Master. 53.  The controversy surrounding messianism and the Chabad-Lubavitch movement has received a great deal of scholarly and popular treatment. For just a few of the most recent academic texts (and there are numerous other texts in print from more parochial sources), see Berger, The Rebbe, the Messiah; Wolfson, Open Secret; Heilman and Friedman, The Rebbe. 54.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 13 Elul 5676 (11 September 1916). 55.  Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish Culture, 188. This complaint surfaced frequently throughout Birnbaum’s post-Zionist career; for example, see Abraham Koralnik, “Der Ba’al Tshuve,” Der Tog, 28 August 1921: “Insofar as he learned the language of the people, he worked it out disconnected from history, from the living language people speak every day. . . . He created a unique kind of Yiddish, some kind of Austrian targum [translation], neither Yiddish nor German . . . a Yiddish without juice, without art . . . without authenticity.” 56.  According to an unpublished and undated note written by Solomon Birnbaum, Horowitz had a large impact on the minhag Birnbaum adopted: “Chassidic youth was well represented among the many who turned to him. In fact, one of these, Tuvia (Tobias) Horowitz, a descendant of various Chassidic ‘dynasties,’ was already a contributor to the Words of the Ascenders. It was, perhaps, due to him that N. B. davened [prayed] according to the Chassidic rite and laid tefillin [phylacteries] in the Chassidic way. The prayer book he used was a present from Horowitz.”

Notes to Chapter 5 57.  Uriel Birnbaum, along with Menachem and Solomon, was a soldier in the Austrian army. He was seriously wounded about this time. 58.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 21 Iyar 5678 (3 May 1918). 59.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, Isru Hag shel Pesah 5677 (15 April 1917). 60.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Et la’asot,” in Birnbaum and Horowitz, Divrei ha-oylim, 1. 61.  The title has an interesting resonance—perhaps intentional—with the series of essays “Et lata’at” (A time to plant) written by Peretz Smolenskin, Birnbaum’s Zionist mentor in his youth . 62.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Et la’asot,” 1. 63.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 29 Shevat 5677 (21 February 1917). “My footnotes are very important because they lend your words a special vitality and a special importance that will constantly strengthen them through pasukim [verses from scripture] and gemoras [Talmudic citations].” 64.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Divrei ha-oylim,” in Birnbaum and Horowitz, Divrei ha-oylim, 8–15. 65.  Ibid., 9–12. 66.  Ibid., 14. 67.  See Jehuda Reinharz, “Zionism and Orthodoxy: A Marriage of Convenience,” and Yosef Salmon, “Zionism and Anti-Zionism in Traditional Judaism in Eastern Europe,” both essays in Almog, Reinharz, and Shapira, Zionism and Religion; and Luz, Parallels Meet. 68.  See Etkes, Rabbi Israel Salanter. On the intersection of modern methods of organization in traditional groups, see Fishman, “Musar and Modernity,” 41–64. 69.  See Tuvia Horowitz, “Birnboym’s shite,” in Yoyvelbukh, 43–51; Tuvia Horo­ witz, “Vu iz unzer tshuva-ruf?,” Beys Yaakov Zhurnal, April 1938 (Sivan 5698). 70.  “Ahad ha-oylim” (Tuvia Horowitz), “Dr. Nusn Birnboym un zayn naye shite,” in Birnbaum and Horowitz, Divrei ha-oylim, 25. 71.  Ibid. The distinction emphasized by Horowitz—that Birnbaum adopted the traditionalist eastern European mode of Orthodoxy—was done for reasons internal to prewar European Orthodoxy. Although the differences would largely be bridged in the coming years, there was some suspicion by eastern European Orthodox communities concerning the dominant German Orthodox model of neoorthodoxy. For an account of the origins of this tension, see Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy.” 72.  “Dr Nusn Birnboym un zayn naye shite,” 26. 73.  Birnbaum, Confession! [abridged English translation of Gottes Volk], 14. 74.  Ibid., 16–17. 75.  Ibid., 18. 76.  Ibid., 23. 77.  Ibid., 25. 78.  Ibid., 30. 79.  Ibid., 36.

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Notes to Chapters 5 and 6 80.  Birnbaum reiterates this concern repeatedly, for instance, in “Amol un atsind”: “Because of what I have been able [to apprehend] with my return to the Jewish Torah . . . [I observe] with deep emotion and concern that radical parties have besmirched the Yiddish language and . . . brought Yiddish itself into danger, torn from its source that it may, God forbid, . . . become only a grey shadow of itself . . . just another quasi-European quasi-language” (xi). 81.  Confession!, 41–42. 82.  Ibid., 42. 83.  Ibid., 44. 84.  Ibid., 46. 85.  Ibid., 46–47.

Chapter Six 1.  The most detailed press release by the Agudah delegation was authored by Birnbaum’s tireless supporter Tuvia Horowitz. See “Dr. Nosn Birnboym: Tsu zayn tsvayten bezukh in amerike,” Yidishes Togblat / Jewish Daily News, 29 May 1921. 2.  Fliers advertising the event at Cooper Union, along with several other events around the New York, Philadelphia, and Boston areas, can be found in the Birnbaum Family Archive. 3.  See Nachum Syrkin, “Fun vokh tsu vokh” (column), Di Tsayt, 28 May 1921; Hillel Rogoff, “Notitsen vegen shrayber, bikher un zhurnalen” (column), Forverts, 29 June 1921; Shmuel Niger, “Frumkayt—un makht,” Der Tog, 25 June 1921. One particularly ugly response was printed in English in the Chicago [Jewish] Sentinel, 24 June 1921: “It may interest our readers to learn that the head of the Agudas Isroel [sic] delegation in America, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, who is now super-Orthodox and preaching religious fanaticism as the only salvation of the Jews, was for many, many years one of the best known Jewish radical leaders in Europe. . . . We Jews, we do not like converts. . . . It is hard for us to believe in a man who has been converted not to one but to five or six different causes. . . . The queerest thing about his leadership is that he who wants to represent the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group is an ignoramus as far as Jewish learning is concerned.” 4.  Rogoff, “Notitsen vegen shrayber.” 5.  Ibid. 6.  Ibid. 7.  For a description of the origins, development, and political activities of the Agudath Israel, see Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 38–40. See also Bacon, “Imitation, Rejection, Cooperation”; and Mittleman, The Politics of Torah. 8.  For the term “Torah-true,” see page 347, note 1. 9.  Indeed, it is probably due to Birnbaum’s years in Bukovina that Horowitz came to know who he was. Bukovina was home to several major Hasidic courts, including Horowitz’s own Vizhnitz community, that would play major roles in the Agudah.

Notes to Chapter 6 10.  A summary of the sessions and issued statements from January 1919 was published in “Tagungen der Agudas Jisroel,” Der Israelit 60, no. 1 (9 January 1919). Protocols of a meeting later in the year in Frankfurt (6 June 1919), where Birnbaum’s role in establishing the Agudah’s immigration committee is discussed, can be found in the Birnbaum Family Archive. The title “general secretary” is attributed to Birnbaum by several sources, most notably Solomon Birnbaum in his biography of his father published in Men of the Spirit by Leo Jung, who was present in Zurich during the organizational meeting. Another reference to Birnbaum’s title is found in Ch. Krupnick, “Hebraeisch und Palaestina,” Volk und Land, dated around September 1919. 11.  For a detailed account of the society and culture of German neoorthodoxy, see Breuer, Modernity within Tradition. 12.  For an account of communal conflict in the communities of Germany and Hungary, see Katz, A House Divided. See also Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context. 13.  Katz, A House Divided, 24–25. See also Mittleman, The Politics of Torah, 93–145. 14.  Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 25–26; see also Manekin, “Politikah ve-­ ortodoksiyah,” 447–69, and “Ha-brit ha-hadashah,” 157–86. On the Kenesset Yisrael, see Levin, “Keneset Yisrael,” 29–62, and “Orthodox Jewry and the Russian Government,” 187–204. 15.  Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 30–32. 16.  Bacon, “Agudas Yisroel.” 17.  For a history of the Lithuanian yeshiva movement, see Shaul Stampfer, ­Ha-Yeshivah ha-lita’it be-hithavutah. 18.  For a discussion of the intellectual negotiations by both religious and anti­ religious members of the Hibbat Zion, see Ehud Luz, “The Limits of Toleration: The Challenge of Cooperation between the Observant and the Nonobservant during the Hibbat Zion Period, 1822–1895,” in Almog, Reinharz, and Shapira, Zionism and Religion, 44–55. The suspicion that Mizrahi encountered in traditional quarters was a key strategic tool used by the Agudah from the beginning. Exploiting fear that the Mizrahi was de facto controlled by the WZO (which was generally an unfair characterization) allowed the Agudah to position itself as the more uncompromising defender of Orthodoxy—even when its positions did not differ significantly from that of the Mizrahi Party. For a sample of the Agudah narrative vis-à-vis ­Mizrahi, see Schlesinger, In Defense of Torah Values. 19.  The Uganda Proposal was an offer by the British government to Herzl to allow for the creation of a temporary autonomous refuge in East Africa for Jews escaping persecution in Russia. Herzl submitted the offer for consideration to the delegates at the Sixth Zionist Congress held in Basel in 1903, and the result was bitter debate on the priorities of Zionism vis-à-vis settlement in Palestine. Israel Jacob Reines abstained from the vote to adopt the Uganda proposal. Although this may be read as indicating ambivalence, it shows a clear mark of separation from the “cul-

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Notes to Chapter 6 tural” Zionists of the Democratic Fraction who, defeated in their opposition to the measure 295 to 178, walked out en masse (they were later persuaded personally by Herzl to return to the congress). There is reason to suspect that Mizrahi may have supported the plan. Since the primary stated aim of Mizrahi was to preserve Jewish lives, any geographical location where a viable Jewish autonomy was possible could fulfill that goal. But one senses that Rabbi Reines would have preferred Palestine, and perhaps that growing pressure from anti-Zionist Orthodoxy had some impact on his support for the plan. Certainly later manifestations of the religious Zionist philosophy derived from Rabbi Reines’s project, in particular those of Isaac Abraham ha-Cohen Kook, emphasize the importance of Orthodox settlement in the Land of Israel as essential to the Zionist project, which they regarded as nothing less than the beginning of the redemption of Israel. For discussion of this element of Rabbi Kook’s philosophy, see Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism. 20.  See Shanes, “Aharon Marcus,” 116–60, for another example of an early attempt at Zionist-Orthodox engagement. 21.  Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 37–46. See also Grill, “The Politicisation of Traditional Polish Jewry,” 227–47. 22.  See Mendelsohn, “The Politics of the Agudas Yisroel,” 47–60. For an overview of the place of the Agudah in interwar Jewish politics, see Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics; and on the interwar context of Jewish politics in Poland, see Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 11–84. 23.  Support for the Agudah was far from unanimous among the various groups and factions within eastern European Orthodoxy, the most famous case being the resistance of the Belz Hasidim to joining the Agudah. See Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 91. 24.  For a description of the Agudath Israel Youth and its place within the larger organization, see ibid., 118–41. 25.  Open letter to the Agudath Israel Youth, “An die Jugend-, Mädchen und Tora-Gruppen der Agudas Jisroel,” 20 November 1918 (emphasis in original). 26.  Ibid. 27.  Ibid. These points of emphasis—settlement, Hebrew language, and history—also appear in the statement of Agudah platform points in “Tagungen der Agudas Jisroel,” Der Israelit 60, no. 1 (9 January 1919). 28.  “An die Jugend.” 29.  Ibid. (emphasis in original). 30.  Alan Mittleman, in his religious-political analysis of the Agudah, calls Jacob Rosenheim the movement’s “architect.” For his analysis of the Agudah in Rosenheim’s thought, see Mittleman, The Politics of Torah, 19–23, 118–26. 31.  For an image of the certificate conferring this title, see Schlesinger, In Defense of Torah Values, 31. 32.  For a detailed explanation of the structure of the Agudah, see Bacon, The Politics of Tradition. Jacob Rosenheim, a towering figure within the German Jewish Orthodox community and Agudah circles, deserves a detailed study. Although

Notes to Chapter 6 many of his lectures and writings have been preserved in print, there is only a thin biographical book printed in his memory by the editors of Dos Yidishe Vort, Yaakov Rosenheim Memorial Anthology. The book is of some interest as an “insider” history of the Agudah (in English) combined with a series of biographical sketches in Hebrew and Yiddish. See also Schlesinger, In Defense of Torah Values. 33.  Credit for Birnbaum’s rise in the Agudah has been attributed to different figures. Tuvia Horowitz and his connections clearly helped; Rosenheim and others in the German cultural milieu did as well. Joseph Friedenson, the nonagenarian editor of the Yiddish-language Agudah periodical Dos Yidishe Vort, suggested in an interview with the author that his father, Eliezar Friedenson, noted Agudah publicist, was instrumental in Birnbaum’s rise. It is likely that all played a role. 34.  For a detailed discussion of the impact of the war and German occupation on Jewish religious and philanthropic organizations in Lithuania, see Koss, “World War I and the Remaking of Jewish Vilna.” 35.  Jacob Rosenheim to Nathan Birnbaum, 24 July 1919. 36.  “Vegen a rede fun Dr. Birnboym in Kovna,” Dos Vokhenblat, 2 January 1920. 37.  Rosenheim to Birnbaum, 30 July 1919. 38.  Nathan Birnbaum to Jacob Rosenheim and Agudah Central Committee, 5 October 1919. 39.  Ibid. 40.  Ibid. 41.  Ibid. 42.  Rosenheim to Birnbaum, 25 October 1919. 43.  Ibid. 44.  See especially Nathan Birnbaum to Jacob Rosenheim, 27 October 1919 and 4 November 1919. 45.  In Birnbaum’s words, “I’d like to attract the attention of the founder of the Ponevezh Yeshiva, R. Kagammann.” “R. Kagammann” refers to R. Yosef Shlomo Kahanemann (1886–1969), the Ponevezher Rav, whom Birnbaum refers to earlier in the letter and who was both the founder of the Ponevezh yeshiva and head of the community after the passing of R. Yitzkhok Rabinowitsh (d. 1919). Birnbaum describes him as a man with “glowing enthusiasm for the old religion . . . a fulltempered opponent to any dilution of our principles . . . a noble and wonderful person.” Birnbaum to Rosenheim and Agudath Israel Central Committee, 20 November 1919. 46.  See Birnbaum to Rosenheim, 4 November 1919. 47.  Transcript, “The Agudah Delegation Received by Mr. Shuckburgh, Assistant Under Secretary of State for the Colonies,” 1920. Birnbaum Family Archive. 48.  Ibid. 49.  “Agudas Yisroel fangt an farhandlungen mit englischer regirung,” Der Tog, 5 August 1921. Forverts, 6 August 1921; Di Zayt, 7 August 1921. 50.  Rosenheim to Birnbaum, 16 February 1921 and 21 March 1921. There were two reasons given at different times for canceling the second delegation: a second

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Notes to Chapter 6 delegation could not be funded, and the delegates—primarily from Lithuania— could not obtain travel documents. 51.  Rosenheim to Birnbaum, 21 March 1921. 52.  Ibid. 53.  Tuvia Horowitz to Birnbaum, 16 February 1920 [sic]. 54.  It may not be a sign of Birnbaum’s lack of standing in the movement that he was not prominent in the delegation to London. Among other issues, his ­English was not as fluent as that of some of his colleagues, particularly Leo Jung, who presented the memorandum. Jung was a sincere admirer of Birnbaum and even included a biographical sketch of him in his book Men of Spirit. 55.  Lecture given by Agudah delegation in New York, summer 1921. 56.  Ibid. 57.  Ibid. 58.  Ibid. 59.  Ibid. (emphasis in original). 60.  To this day, two figures—one, the editor of the Agudah-oriented newspaper Dos Yidishe Vort, Josef Friedenson; the other, the rabbi and educator Gabriel Bechhoffer—are devoted contributors to the memory of Birnbaum’s religious life. 61.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 21 Shevat 5680 (1920). 62.  Horowitz to Birnbaum, 17 Adar 5680 (1920). 63.  Nathan Birnbaum, Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1 May 1922 (emphasis in original). 64.  For an interesting memoir of the personalities who appeared at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, see Ahrens, “Reminiscences of the Men of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus,” 245–53. 65.  See Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture; Barkai, Meyer, and Brenner, ­German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 141. 66.  Franz Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, 20 November 1923. 67.  Birnbaum, “Wesen und Wesentlichkeit,” 129–49. 68.  Ibid., 130. 69.  While he was editor (and primary contributor) to the first incarnation of the journal Jeschurun, Hirsch dedicated column space in several issues to Jewish symbols and symbolism. These articles can be read in the original in Jeschurun and in translation in The Collected Writings. 70.  For a detailed discussion of the concept of shalem and its role in the emergence of nineteenth-century right-wing Orthodoxy, see Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy.” 71.  Franz Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, 16 September 1923. 72.  Jacob Rosenheim to Nathan Birnbaum, 8 January 1924. 73.  For detailed discussion of the Agudath Israel Workers, see Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 100–117. 74.  Jacob Rosenheim to Wolf S. Jacobson, 20 June 1930. 75.  For a detailed explanation of the idea of da’at torah (usually referred to in

Notes to Chapters 6 and 7 its Ashkenazi form as daas torah or daas toyre), see Katz, “Da’at Torah”; Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 50–57. See also L. Kaplan, “Daas Torah,” 1–60. For an analysis of the concept from a religious perspective, see Feitman, “Da’as Torah,” ix–xxviii.

Chapter Seven 1.  One exception to this in the scholarly literature is Greenberg, “Yehuda Leib Gerst’s Religious Ascent through the Holocaust,” 62–89. 2.  These two periodicals are almost entirely unknown. Der Aufstieg, as its name indicates, was an organ for the Oylim movement and appeared in twelve issues between April 1930 and December 1932. Nathan Birnbaum edited and contributed a significant amount of its content along with others, including Maximilian Landau, Solomon Birnbaum, Uriel Birnbaum, Eliezer Schindler, and Samuel Oestersetzer, all figures in the fledgling Oylim. Der Ruf (also titled on its masthead L’appel), an “independent Jewish newspaper,” edited by Birnbaum, Alfanso Pacifici, and Aimé Pallière, was published until shortly after Birnbaum’s death in 1937. Pallière (1868–1949), a would-be Catholic priest who flirted with conversion to Judaism, was involved in Jewish and Zionist causes (including as president of the Universal Union of Jewish Youth in 1926) and ultimately was an advocate for “Noachidism,” the principle that non-Jews should observe the seven Noachide laws, commandments incumbent upon non-Jews to uphold in the Jewish tradition. See Poujol, Aimé ­Pallière. Pacifici (1889–1983), an Italian lawyer from Florence and editor of the journal Israel (founded 1934), ultimately settled in Palestine. 3.  A useful narrative overview of the complex economic and political dynamics of the last years of the republic is Evans, Coming of the Third Reich. 4.  Indeed, it was in the Weimar Republic that Jews entered into the upper levels of government for the first time. Most famous was Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, who was assassinated by a radical right paramilitary group in 1922. The presence (albeit still very small) of Jews in the leadership of the republic and the Social Democratic Party played a role in fueling anti-Semitic attempts to delegitimize the Weimar government. 5.  See Nathan Birnbaum, “Wir und die Gottlosen,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 10 (April 1932): 256; “Kommunismus als Erzieher,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 10 (April 1932): 257; “Eine gefährliche Legende,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 11 (May 1932): 283. 6.  Karl Kindermann was one of a circle of Germans in Russia who was accused, tried in a show trial, convicted, and sentenced to death (but not executed) in 1924 for plotting to assassinate Leon Trotsky. His book Zwei Jahre in Moskaus Totenhäusern: Der Moskauer Studentprozess und die Arbeitsmethode der OGPU was a sensationalist account of his experiences. According to Donald Niewyk, Kindermann had the dubious distinction of being a German Jew who gravitated to radical antiCommunist and anti-Semitic German politics. See The Jews in Weimar Germany, 99. Niewyk cites an article from Jüdische Rundschau, 7 August 1925, that provides background on Kindermann. For an interesting intersection, see Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 15 December 1926.

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Notes to Chapter 7 7.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Primitive Wueteriche,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 1 (April 1930): 13. 8.  Ibid. 9.  Birnbaum did probe the possibility of working with non-Jewish religious groups to mount public action against the threat of atheist (Gottlos) Communism and broached the topic with Rosenheim around the time he met Karl Kindermann. See Birnbaum to Jacob Rosenheim, 11 January 1931. “I have come to know Dr. Kindermann fairly well, and I can attest that he is a very charming and promising young man and I am certain that he will be useful in bringing me together with certain Catholic and Protestant leaders in the anti-atheist movement.” 10.  In an article attacking an apologetic report on the situation of Soviet Jewry by American Yiddish reporter Boris Smoliar, “A New Turn in Russian Politics,” Birnbaum writes that “enormous masses of those who have been judged to be nonproletariat by law, [their] children, and grandchildren are deprived of rights, cut off from all possibilities of making a living, and left to starve to death. And that is not all. . . . Neither does the writer comment upon the increasing hate that the Jews have had to carry more than any other people.” Birnbaum, “Für alle Zeiten,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 3 (August 1930). Boris Smoliar was an American Yiddish writer and reporter who wrote for a number of publications, including Unzer Vort and Tsukunft. 11.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Der übermut der Gottlosen,” Der Aufstieg 2, no. 8 (April 1931): 201. 12.  Ibid. 13.  Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, 18. 14.  Arendt’s journey through the Weimar years and her deep involvement with her teacher Martin Heidegger have been the subject of extensive scholarly study; see Ettinger, Hannah Arendt / Martin Heidegger; Wolin, Heidegger’s Children. The place of Joseph Ber Soloveitchik and Isaac Breuer in this group is a recent development in the scholarship of Weimer Jewish intellectuals. See Rynhold and Harris, “Modernity and Jewish Orthodoxy,” 253. On Isaac Breuer, see Myers, Resisting History, 130–57 (which also discusses Leo Strauss, 106–29). I am grateful to my colleague Daniel Rynhold, whose discussion of Nietzschean thought in the work of Soloveitchik alerted me to its affinity with Birnbaum and others of this milieu. 15.  The Nazis did not fare well at the ballot box for most of the 1920s until a second major economic crisis in 1929–32 increased its polling numbers. From approximately 18 percent of the seats in the Reichstag in September 1928, the NSDAP leapt to more than 30 percent in 1932 (and reached as high as 37 percent before contracting to 33 percent). Once Adolf Hitler was named chancellor and called for elections, which took place in March 1933, the party polled at about 44 percent. Until the very end of the republic, the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), the Communist Party of Germany, kept pace with the NSDAP. See Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 247–349. 16.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Verdienstlich und Lehrreich,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 1 (April 1930): 13.

Notes to Chapter 7 17.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Die deutschen Reichstagwahlen,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 4 (September 1930): 110. 18.  Ibid. 19.  Ibid. 20.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Die grosse Sünde,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 4 (September 1930): 99–103. 21.  Ibid. 22.  The idea of proselytizing among Falashas and Marranos was one of the more eccentric ideas that Birnbaum proposed. The inspiration for it came from Eliezer Schindler, a later Oylim member and contributor to Der Aufstieg and Der Ruf. Schindler was preoccupied with discovering and re-Judaizing “lost” groups such as the Falashas and Marranos, to the point that Birnbaum himself had to temper his enthusiasm for directing the resources of the Oylim movement to seeking out Marranos and Falashas. Schindler was raised as a Hasid, served in the Russian army, and lived for a time among nomadic Khirgiz tribes in the Volga region of the Soviet Union. Inspired by Birnbaum, he became a ba’al teshuva. A poet, he published at least two volumes of Yiddish poetry and composed anthems for the Oylim and the Beys Yaakov movements. He survived the war and settled in Lakewood, New Jersey. His son, Alexander Schindler, was a Reform rabbi and president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations from 1973 until 1996. Sharing his father’s passion for expansive Jewish outreach, Alexander Schindler was most famous for his advocacy of patrilineal descent as well as outreach to non-Jews by the Reform movement. I am grateful to Jacob Birnbaum for explaining the connection between Birnbaum and Schindler. 23.  For a detailed analysis of Isaac Breuer’s work and a fascinating contextualization among other interwar German Jewish thinkers, see Myers, Resisting History. See also Mittleman, Between Kant and Kabbalah; and Biemann, “Isaac Breuer,” 129–46. 24.  Isaac Breuer, “Erez-Jisroel Probleme,” Der Israelit 1935, no. 13 (28 March 1935): 1. 25.  Breuer’s model for using the Agudah apparatus as a means of building a strong Orthodox presence in Mandate Palestine was strikingly similar to Birnbaum’s ideal for the Oylim, which may have been a factor in Birnbaum’s criticism. 26.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Aufstand?,” Der Ruf 2, nos. 5–6 (1935): 1. 27.  Ibid. 28.  Ibid. 29.  Ibid. 30.  Ibid. (emphasis in original). 31.  Ibid. 32.  For an overview of the economic and political situation of Jews in Poland in the years leading up to the Second World War, see Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, 11–84. 33.  Nathan Birnbaum, “In dienste der Berufsumschichtung,” Der Aufstieg 1,

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Notes to Chapter 7 no. 5 (October 1930): 137. The ORT was a Jewish self-help society founded in Saint Petersburg in 1880. In the interwar period, ORT was key in assisting Jews with vocational training through the war years, including famously during the Second World War in the Kovno and Warsaw ghettos. Moshe Silberfarb (1876–1934), an activist in Russia and Poland, was a Jewish nationalist and autonomist, a founder of the prerevolutionary Vozrozhdenye (renaissance) movement in Russia, and later the chair of the ORT in Warsaw and the Tsysho school system. 34.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Um den Sabbat,” Der Aufstieg 2, no. 6 (February 1931): 186. 35.  Ibid. 36.  Birnbaum, “In Dienste der Berufsumschichtung.” 37.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Umstellung tut Not,” Der Aufstieg 2, no. 4 (February 1931): 171. 38.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Verländlichung,” Der Ruf 2, nos. 11–12 (January–­February 1936): 1. 39.  See “Der Neue Adel,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 5 (October 1930): 134–35. “The Revisionist Zionists have made their own kind of ascension ideal [Aufstiegs Ideal]. They speak of the ‘new race’ and ‘new aristocracy’ that they are creating. . . . Courage alone in an empty room is also a kind of dissent, and one needs not be an antimilitarist or an antifascist to find this kind of courage absurd.” On the next page, Birnbaum notes the disruption by Prague Revisionists of the film The Yiddish Mother by throwing inkpots and stink bombs at the screen, noting that “the only amazing thing about it is how far these lovely gentlemen have come in their aspirations to be ‘a nation like all other nations.’” 40.  See “Judenstaat oder nicht?,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 3 (August 1930): 113. 41.  Many of these themes are developed in “Die Schicksalfrage des Zionismus,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 5 (October 1930): 131. 42.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Die wirkliche Situation,” Der Aufstieg 2, no. 8 (April 1931): 209. 43.  Ibid. 44.  Birnbaum was not the only religious advocate and polemicist on behalf of the religious yishuv in Israel and its treatment at the hands of a rapidly developing Zionist infrastructure. We have already seen the active lobbying by the Agudah in Paris and London, and Israel Jacob de Haan advocated for the Orthodox community in the Mandate. While there has generally been some memoiristic and institutional discussion of political organization among the Orthodox Jews in Palestine (see, for example, Halevi, Retsah b’yerushalayim), a critical investigation of this important phenomenon is lacking. 45.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Hoffen wir: Gam su letauwo,” Der Aufstieg 2, no. 6 (February 1931): 182. 46.  Ibid. 47.  Nathan Birnbaum to Jacob Rosenheim, 2 May 1932.

Notes to Chapter 7 and Epilogue 48.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Von der Palaestinafront,” Der Aufstieg 1, no. 2 (May 1930): 49. 49.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Das Golus in Erez Jirsoel,” Der Aufstieg 2, no. 8 (April 1931): 207. 50.  Ibid. 51.  Ibid.

Epilogue 1.  The eighth day of Passover, an extension of the holiday observed only in the Diaspora, is widely understood to contain signs that the mystical initiate could interpret as clues to the coming messianic redemption. In the Hasidic tradition, for instance, a public third meal (seudah shlishit), called “the Messiah’s meal,” is held, a practice by Hasidic tradition established by the Ba’al Shem Tov. 2.  See Der Israelit, 8 April 1937, 1–3; “Nathan Birnbaum,” CV Zeitung (Berlin) 14 (8 April 1937): 3–4. 3.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Letztwillige Verfügungen,” 2 April 1936, unpublished. Birnbaum Family Archive. 4.  Perhaps reflecting the Diaspora from Europe already under way in the last years before the outbreak of war (by 1937, for instance, nearly half of all German Jews had emigrated from Germany), obituaries appeared in French, Spanish, Yiddish, English, and Dutch. 5.  Jacob Rosenheim, “Jacob Rosenheim über Nathan Birnbaum,” Der Israelit, 8 April 1937. “Moria journey” is a reference to the site of the patriarch Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of Isaac, one of the divine tests of Abraham’s sincerity in embracing monotheism, an allusion to Birnbaum’s own spiritual journey. 6.  Mayer Ebner, “Nathan Birnbaum, z’l,” Ostjüdische Zeitung, 11 April 1937. 7.  Robert Weltsch, “Nathan Birnbaum,” Jüdische Rundschau, 6 April 1937, 1–2. Robert Weltsch was cousin to poet Felix Weltsch and a close associate of Max Brod. A member of the Brit Shalom Society, he immigrated to Palestine in the late 1930s and became an important contributor for many years to Ha’aretz. 8.  Gustav Seidemann, “Erinnerungen an Nathan Birnbaum,” Die Stimme 10, no. 634 (9 April 1937).

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Index

Italic page numbers indicate illustrations. Abdülhamid (Ottoman sultan), 81 Abramovitsh, Sholem (Moykher Sforim Mendele), 191 “Account of My Life, An” (Birnbaum, 1924), 20–21, 59, 214–16, 218–19, 220, 221, 247 acculturaltion. See assimilation and acculturation Achaz (H. Harris), 195 Acher, Mathias (Birnbaum pseudonym), 5, 40, 109, 121, 143, 195, 215, 224–26, 230, 333n80 Achiasaf (publishing concern), 146 aesthetics of Jewish renaissance movement, 123–24, 128, 129 Agassi, Nahum Nathan (Birnbaum pseudonym), 47 Agnon, S. Y. (Shmuel Tchatchkes), 13, 154–55, 165, 287, 338n1 agricultural life, Birnbaum’s calls for Jewish return to, 307–9 Agudath Israel, 255–93 America, delegation to (1921), 255–58, 276–81, 279 Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf, 291, 302, 303, 307, 308, 310–11 Birnbaum’s move away from, 281–87, 292–93, 294 Council of Torah Sages (Moetses Gedoyle ha-Toyre), 258, 293 founding, development, and growth of, 259–64 Frankfurt Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus, Birnbaum’s relationship with, 212, 258, 286–89

general secretary of Central Committee, Birnbaum named as, 260, 353n10 German neoorthodoxy and, 261–62, 264, 268, 278, 303, 351n71 historiographical place of, 10–11 Horowitz and, 253, 256, 258, 259, 260, 277–78, 283, 352n1, 355n33 legacy of Birnbaum and, 313, 315, 316, 317, 318–19 Lithuania, mission to, 269–73 London delegation, 273–76 Oylim movement and, 253 Palestine, on settlement in, 266–68, 273–75, 281, 282, 360n44 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 266, 268 politicized Orthodoxy, concept of, 260–65 relationship of Birnbaum to, 1–2, 3–4, 256–58, 265, 276–77, 278 salaried position of Birnbaum within, 260, 276–77, 282, 353n10 spiritual awakening of Birnbaum and, 215 Zionism and, 266–68 See also Rosenheim, Jacob Agudath Israel Workers (Poyale Agudas Yisroel), 258, 290, 292, 295, 303 Agudath Israel Youth (Tseirey Agudas Yisroel or Agudas Jisroel Jugend­ organisation), 258, 265, 290, 292, 295 “Ahad Ha’am: A Thinker and Fighter for the Jewish Renaissance” (Birnbaum, 1902), 145–47 Ahad Ha’am Affair. See Altneuland (Herzl, 1902), Ahad Ha’am’s review of; Ha’am, Ahad

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Index Aleichem, Sholem, 191, 337n36 Alexander II (tsar), 44 Alter, Abraham Mordechai (Imre Emes), 259 Alter, Isaac Meyer, 262 Altneuland (Herzl, 1902), Ahad Ha’am’s review of (Ahad Ha’am Affair), 138–53 cultural aspects of Jewish nationalism, Herzl’s insensitivity to, 77, 140–41 involvement of Birnbaum in, 122, 139, 143–53, 155 Jewish renaissance movement and, 139, 146, 151 lack of direct involvement of Herzl in controversy, 143, 338n52 plot and literary quality of Altneuland, 139–40 public reaction to Altneuland, 140–41 responses to Ha’am’s review, 142–43 review of Altneuland by Ha’am, 140–42 Am Olam, 7 America, Birnbaum in Agudath Israel delegation of 1921, 255–58, 276–81, 279 speaking tour of 1908, 177–83, 191, 193, 216, 278 American Hebrew (periodical), 178, 180–81 anti-Semitism assimilation and, 41–42, 44, 48–49, 55–56, 61 autonomism, Jewish, 171 commerce trusts excluding Jews, 306 eastern versus western, Birnbaum’s recognition of identity of, 102–3 European Jewry, Birnbaum’s increasing concern with survival problems of, 69–70 of interwar years, 295–97, 299, 316 Jewish embrace of national identity as means of combating, 114–16 Megillah on, 31, 32 Nazism, rise of, 295–96, 297, 298–99, 300–301, 316, 358n15 Pinsker and, 44–45 as political tool, 72 racial theories of Birnbaum and, 114 in small towns of Austria-Hungary, 27, 96 in Vienna, 23, 36, 37, 61, 95–100 Arabs of Palestine, Birnbaum on, 310 Arendt, Hannah, 299–300, 358n14 Asch, Scholem, 191, 206

Aschheim, Steven, 11–12, 317 Assaf, David, 11 assimilation and acculturation Ahad Ha’am Affair, Birnbaum’s comments on, 145 anti-Semitism and, 41–42, 44, 48–49, 55–56, 61 autonomism, Jewish, 171 Birnbaum’s sense of alienation from, 22–24, 28, 48 Jewish renaissance movement’s interest in eastern European Jewry, 125 Jewish supporters of, Selbst-Emancipation’s attacks on, 49–53 Die jüdische Moderne on, 110–12 Megillah and, 28, 30, 32, 36 Pinsker and, 44–45 Smolenskin on, 35–36 spiritual awakening, Birnbaum’s account of, 217–18 Die Assimilationssucht (Birnbaum, 1882), 37–44, 51, 55, 247, 249 atheism, 285, 286, 297, 298, 358n9 Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf (periodicals), 294–312 agricultural life, calls for Jewish return to, 307–9 Agudath Israel and, 291, 302, 303, 307, 308, 310–11 Breuer, critique of, 303–6 on Communism, 297–300, 358n10 driving spirit of, 296–97 on economic plight of European Jews, 306–8 legacy of, 315–16 Nazism, rise of, 295–96, 297, 298–99, 300–301 Oylim movement and, 294–96, 312 publication details, 357n2 spiritual renewal, calls for, 301–3 on Zionism, 309–12, 360n39 Augustine of Hippo, 214 Ausgewählte Schriften (Birnbaum, 1910), 214 Austria-Hungary anti-Semitism in small towns of, 27, 96 Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867, 159 elections of 1907. See Reichsrat elections of 1907 Jewish emancipation in (1867), 23, 27, 248 Jewish national autonomy within, 169–75 nativism and Volkism in, 96

Index revolutions of 1848 in, 159 See also Bukovina; Galicia and Galician Jewry; Vienna Automemancipation (Pinsker, 1880), 38, 42, 43–46, 68, 326n52 autonomism, Jewish, 169–75, 183, 193–94 Ayzenshtat, Shimon (Barzel), 194–95, 196, 197, 198 Ba’al Shem Tov, 328n88, 361n1 ba’al teshuva, as term, 348n12 Bacher, Eduard, 330n9 Bacon, Gershon, 9, 11, 262 Bader, Gershon, 198 Bambus, Willy, 83, 84 Bar Kochba Society of Prague, 123 Barondess, Joseph, 179 Bartal, Israel, 11 Barzel (Shimon Ayzenshtat), 194–95, 196, 197, 198 Bechhoffer, Gabriel, 356n60 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 113 “Being and Essentiality” (“Wesen und Wesentkichkeit,” Birnbaum, 1973), 287–88 Bellamy, Edward, 139 Belz Hasidim, 354n23 Benedikt, Moritz, 330n9 “Benzion” (Birnbaum pseudonym), 47, 327n73 Berdyczewski, Micha Josef, 146, 338n58 Berkowitz, Michael, 335n11 Berlin/German Zionists, 80–85, 87 Bettelheim, S., 324n3 Beys Yaakov, 223, 253, 258, 273, 282, 292, 295, 359n22 Beys Yaakov Zhurnal, 282 Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, 123, 124, 128 Biemann, Asher, 127 Bierer, Reuben, 24–25, 46, 67, 213 biography, as genre, 14–16 Birnbaum, David (grandson), 13, 3330n80 Birnbaum, Eleazar (grandson), 333n80 Birnbaum, Jacob (grandson), 324n3, 333n80 Birnbaum, Jytte (wife of David Birnbaum), 13 Birnbaum, Menachem (son), 59, 230, 348n7, 351n57 Birnbaum, Menachem Mendel (father), 17–23, 18, 59, 71–72, 239, 324n3 Birnbaum, Miriam, née Seelenfreund (mother), 17, 20–23, 71–72, 324n3

Birnbaum, Nathan birth, family, and early life, 17–24, 349n44 Czernowitz, publishing business in, 207 death of, 313–14 eastern European Jewry (Ostjuden), focus on, 64, 100–103, 155, 168, 176–77 education of, 18–20, 22, 59 financial problems of, 59, 79–81, 90–91, 213, 331n21 health of, 282, 295, 313, 316 Jewish intellectual biography and, 14–16 Jewish War Archives, as editor of, 224 law career, 59, 66 legacy of, 313–20 marriage and children, 59, 224, 225, 230 modern reputation and place in history, 4–12 papers, survival of, 12–14 personal and professional nadir, 207–8, 213–14, 229–30 photographs, 121, 182, 210 postcard commemorating 50th birthday (1914), 348 transformations of, 1–4, 7, 15–16, 314–15, 352n3 Yoyvelbukh in honor of 60th birthday (1924), 20, 220, 223, 254 See also Agudath Israel; Altneuland (Herzl, 1902), Ahad Ha’am’s review of; Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf; Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference; Herzl, Theodor; Jewish renaissance movement; Kadimah; Orthodoxy; political theories of Birnbaum; Reichsrat elections of 1907; Yiddish; Zionism Birnbaum, Nathan, pseudonyms of Anton Skart, 337n27 “Benzion,” 47, 327n73 Mathias Acher, 5, 40, 109, 121, 143, 195, 215, 224–26, 230, 333n80 Nahum Nathan Agassi, 47 Birnbaum, Nathan, works of “An Account of My Life” (1924), 20–21, 59, 214–16, 218–19, 220, 221, 247 “Ahad Ha’am: A Thinker and Fighter for the Jewish Renaissance” (1902), 145–47 Die Assimilationssucht (1882), 37–44, 51, 55, 247, 249 Ausgewählte Schriften (1910), 214

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Index Birnbaum, Nathan, works of (continued) “Being and Essentiality” (“Wesen und Wesentkichkeit,” Birnbaum, 1973), 287–88 in Dr. Birnboyms okhenblat (periodical), 207, 213, 344n79, 348n8 From Freethinker to Believer (1919), 215, 216–19, 221, 247 God’s People, 246–54 on Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, 73–75, 148 Jewish Moderne, The (Die jüdische Moderne, 1896), 57, 109–16, 121, 122, 132, 247, 317–18 “Jewish Movement, The” 148 “Jewish Renaissance Movement” (1902), 130 “Jews and Ruthenians,” 174 “Judische Autonomie,” 170 in Jüdische Volkszeitung (newspaper), 67, 99–100, 102, 331n16 literary experimentation of 1899-1902 period, 337n27 in Megillah (Kadimah newsletter), 28–37, 29, 46, 69 National Rebirth of the Jewish People in Its Own Land, The (Die nationale Wiedergeburt des judischen Volks in seinem Lande, 1893), 74–75, 93, 120, 330n16, 332n54 “On the Vienna Municipal Elections” (1895), 97–98 periodicals contributed to by, 323n3 poetry as early form of nationalist expression, 30–31, 325n32 in Selbst-Emancipation (newspaper), 5, 33, 46–56, 58–64, 67, 99, 100, 314, 317 in Serubabel (newspaper), 58–60, 325n32 “‘Solutions’ to the Jewish Question” (1903), 143 “Some Thoughts on Anti-Semitism” (“Einige Gedanken uber den Antisemitismus,” 1902), 130 “Then and Now” (1928), 190–92 in Die Welt (newspaper), 69, 92, 117, 331n16 “What Is to Be Done?” (1894), 93–94 in Zion (Berlin periodical), 80–81, 117, 330n16 “Zionism als Culturbewegung” (1897), 330n16 Zionism, major essays on, 330–31n16

“Der Zionismus” (1896), 330n16 “Zionist Movement, The” (“Die Zionistische Bewegung,” 1895), 120, 330n16 “Zwei Vorträge über Zionismus” (1898), 330–31n16 See also Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf; Words of the Ascenders Birnbaum, Rosa, née Korngut (wife), 17, 59, 207, 213, 215, 276, 282, 295–96, 313, 316 Birnbaum, Solomon Asher (son), 13, 59, 177, 178, 181, 207, 213, 215, 230, 313, 333n80, 343n66, 350–51n56–57, 353n10, 357n2 Birnbaum, Uriel (son), 59, 230, 283, 351n57, 357n2 Birobidzhan, Jewish autonomous region of, 297 Blumenfeld, Emil, 25 B’nei Moshe, 41, 69 Bodenheimer, Max, 83, 87, 331n40 Boswell, James, 14 Brenner, David, 125, 335n2, 335n13 Brenner, Michael, 128 Brenner, Yosef Hayim, 7 Breuer, Isaac, 273, 284, 299–300, 303–6, 311, 319, 358n14, 359n25 Brit Shalom Society, 361n7 British Mandate Palestine, 212, 262, 273–75, 282, 304, 310, 312, 359n25, 360n44 Brod, Max, 211, 361n7 Brown Shirts, 298–99 Buber, Martin in Ahad Ha’am Affair, 143, 144 on Birnbaum’s National Rebirth, 121, 332n54 in Birnbaum’s period of intellectual drift (1908-1912), 213 Burckhardt’s influence on, 127–29, 336n17–18 connection of Hess to Birnbaum by, 329n107 Frankfurt Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus and, 286, 287 Herzl and, 118 “Jewish Renaissance” (Ost und West, 1901), 126–30, 336n15 Jewish renaissance movement and, 123, 124, 126–33, 137, 138 Orthodoxy, Birnbaum’s turn to, 212 Palestine, equivocal attitude toward establishment of physical state in, 129, 336n26

Index on pre-Herzlian Zionism, 335n7 Rosenzweig and, 287, 348n6 on shift in Birnbaum’s Zionism, 121–22 significance of Birnbaum and, 6 Bukovina, 21, 154, 161–63, 185–86, 207, 260, 284, 339n8, 344n79, 346n102, 352n9 Bund, 191, 192, 197, 202–5, 207 Burckhardt, Jacob, 127–29, 131, 336n17–18 Byk, Emil, 50–51, 103, 327n73, 327n78 Cahan, Abraham, 7 Carlebach, Emmanuel, 265, 271, 272–73 Chabad-Lubavitch movement, 236, 350n53 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 112–13, 132 Chassanowitch, Leon (Lazar Khazanovitsh), 197, 204, 205, 206, 255, 256–57, 288 “chauvinism,” racial or nationalist, 39, 63, 98, 114–16, 203, 218, 248 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich, 333n71 Chorin, Aharon, 324n3 Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei), 97–99 Chto delat? (Chernyshevsky), 333n71 Cohen, Shabbetai (the Shakh), 20, 324n2 Cohn, Pinchas, 265 commerce trusts excluding Jews, 306 Communism, 297–300, 358n10 culture and cultural regeneration Birnbaum’s concern with, 68–69, 74, 77, 176 Diaspora culture, Birnbaum’s turn to, 133–35 exile, importance of Jewish experience of, 148–53, 169, 193, 199 Herzl’s insensitivity to, 77, 140–41 national identity and culture, 128–29 See also Hebrew; Jewish renaissance movement; Yiddish Czernowitz, Birnbaum’s publishing business in, 207, 213 Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference (1908), 176–208 America, Birnbaum’s speaking tour in (1908), 177–83, 191, 193 Birnbaum’s loss of control over, 198, 201 Birnbaum’s memoir of (“Then and Now,” 1928), 190–93 Bund-Poalei Zionist faction at, 202–5 delegates to, 196 development and execution of plan for, 177, 183–86, 193–94, 201

failure of, 189–90, 206–8 goals of, 184, 192–94 Hebrew controversy at, 197–98, 203 Jewish cultural renewal through Yiddish language, as means of, 157–58 locked out of original venue, 196–97, 345–46n101 official statement, 205–6 opening address of Birnbaum at, 198–201 Reichsrat elections of 1907 leading to, 176–77 significance of, 318 significance of Birnbaum and, 1, 2, 7 site city, advantages and disadvantages of, 185–89 Yiddish press reports on, 194–96, 206–7 Zionism and, 203 Czernowitzer Tageblat, 208 Darwinism, 112, 113–14 de Haan, Jacob Israël, 211–12, 347–48n4, 360n44 Delbanco, Andrew, 15 “Democratic Fraction” of WZO, 118, 123, 354n19 Deutsche Zeitung, 97 Deutschländer, Leo, and wife, 271–72 Diaspora culture Birnbaum’s turn to, 133–35 exile, importance of Jewish experience of, 148–53, 169, 193, 199 Divrei ha-oylim (Birnbaum, 1917). See Words of the Ascenders Dos Naye Lebn (journal), 343n71 Dr. Birnboyms Vokhenblat (periodical), 207, 213, 344n79, 348n8 Dreyfus Affair, 112 Drumont, Edouard, 112 “dual loyalty” problem, 65 Dubnow, Simon, 170, 213, 342n41 eastern European Jewry (Ostjuden) Agudath Israel and, 283–84 Ahad Ha’am Affair, Birnbaum’s comments on, 145 authenticity ascribed to eastern versus western European mode of Orthodoxy, 246, 351n71 Breuer, Birnbaum’s critique of, 305 focus of Birnbaum on, 64, 100–103, 155, 168, 176–77

379

380

Index eastern European Jewry (Ostjuden)(continued) Jewish autonomism and, 171–72, 193 Jewish renaissance movement’s interest in, 125, 128–29 Orthodoxy, Birnbaum’s turn to, 249–50 spiritual awakening, Birnbaum’s account of, 217–18 Ebner, Meyer, 313 ecumenicalism within Judaism, 70, 94–95, 136, 146, 152–53, 157, 163, 175, 194, 262 religious, 285, 286, 358n9 Edah Haredit, 347n4 education of Birnbaum, 18–20, 22, 59 Einstein, Albert, 310 Eisemann, Heinrich, 269 elections of 1907. See Reichsrat elections of 1907 Elisha ben Abuya, 333n80 Elkan, Sigmund, 59 emancipation of Jews in Austria-Hungary (1867), 23, 27, 248 Eminent Victorians (Strachey), 14–15 Engels, Friedrich, 109, 111, 116 Enlightenment and secular humanism (“paganism”) in God’s People, 247–50, 252 Enlightenment, Jewish (Haskalah), 11, 20, 35, 53, 128 “Eretz Israel Problems” (Breuer), 303 Ester Frumkin, 191, 192, 197, 202–6 Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Hillel), 46 Etkes, Immanuel, 11 European Jewry, Birnbaum’s concern with survival of, 69–70, 94–100, 105–9. See also eastern European Jewry; western European Jewry Evalenko, Alexander, 183, 185 exile, importance of Jewish experience of, 148–53, 169, 193, 199 Ezekiel, Horowitz’s quotation from, 231, 236 Die Fackel (journal), 337n27 Falashas, 302, 359n22 Feiwel, Berthold, 6, 8, 123, 124, 143, 144, 317 Fellner and Helmer (architectural firm), 188, 345n85 Fesler (in Vyzhnytzia), 227–28 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 42 First World War, 13, 96, 126, 181, 208, 224, 264, 349n38

first Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz, 1908. See Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference First Zionist Congress, Basel (1897), 71, 83, 85–91, 120 Fishman, Joshua, 1, 333n80 Foundations of the 19th Century (Chamberlain, 1899), 112 Frankel, Jonathan, 177 Frankfurt Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus, 212, 258, 286–89 Franzos, Karl Emil, 188 Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus, Frankfurt, 212, 258, 286–89 Freud, Sigmund, 113, 324n7, 348n5 Friedenson, Eliazar, 355n33 Friedenson, Josef, 347n2, 355n33, 356n60 Die Friestatt (periodical), 213 From Freethinker to Believer (Birnbaum, 1919), 215, 216–19, 221, 247 From the Persian Parliament (Purim shpil in Megillah), 30 Fromm, Erich, 287 Frumkin, Ester, 191, 192, 197, 202–6 Gabel, Heinrich, 165 Galicia and Galician Jewry Buber’s origins in, 128 descent of Birnbaum from, 17–24, 100 ethnic makeup of, 160–62, 340n13 First World War and, 349n38 immigration to Vienna, 22–24, 96, 332n57 political activity of, 103–5 popularity of Birnbaum amongst, 155 Reichsrat elections of 1907, Birnbaum’s candidacy in (see Reichsrat elections of 1907) Ukrainians, Jewish alliance with, 161–64, 173–75, 318, 339–40n12, 341n21, 342n53 Galician-Bukovinian Verband, New York City, 178, 179 Gaon of Vilna (Elijah ben Solomon), 11 Gay, Peter, 324n7 Gegenwartsarbeit, 84, 106, 162 Geiger, Abraham, 336n17 Geiger, Ludwig, 336n17 gender and race, theories regarding, 113 Gerer Hasidim, 259, 262, 283 German/Berlin Zionists, 80–85, 87 German neoorthodoxy, 261–62, 264, 268, 278, 303, 351n71

Index German or western Jewry. See western European Jewry Germany Birnbaum on Bolshevizing of, 298 rise of Nazism in, 295–96, 297, 298–99, 300–301, 316, 358n15 Weimar Republic, 128, 286, 297, 299, 357n4 Ginsberg, Asher. See Ha’am, Ahad Glatzer, Nahum, 335n4 Gobineau, Arthur de, 112 God’s People (Birnbaum), 246–54 Goldfogle, Henry, 178 Gordin, Jacob, 179, 185 Great Depression, 296–97 Grodzienski, Hayyim Ozer, 259, 262 Guggenheim, Mr., 269 Ha-Kohen, Yisrael Meir (Hafetz Hayyim), 259 Ha’am (periodical), 195 Ha’am, Ahad (Asher Ginsberg) B’nei Moshe, 41, 69 correspondence of Birnbaum with, 13 Hebrew language, as exponent of use of, 146, 156 Herzl and, 8, 119, 120 Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, critique of, 148 introduced to German-speaking public by Birnbaum, 67 on Jewish settlements in Palestine, 61 modern reputation and place in history, 5 relationship with Birnbaum, 143–44, 330n2 See also Altneuland (Herzl, 1902), Ahad Ha’am’s review of Hafetz Hayyim (Yisrael Meir Ha-Kohen of Radun), 259 Hagar, Israel (Vizhnitzer Rebbe), 227, 228 Hagar, Menahem Mendel (Vizhnitzer Rebbe), 349n31 Halberstadt, Dr., 271, 272 Harris, H. (Achaz), 195 Hasidism Ba’al Shem Tov, 328n88, 361n1 Belz Hasidim, 354n23 Birnbaum’s adoption of Horowitz’s minhag of, 239, 350n56 Buber and Jewish renaissance movement’s engagement with, 127–28, 133 Chabad-Lubavitch movement, 236, 350n53

family connections of Birnbaum to, 20–21, 350n44 Gerer Hasidim, 259, 262, 283 Horowitz and, 225, 227–28, 232, 235, 236–37, 350n56 Messianic belief in, 236, 313, 361n1 in and near Czernowitz, 186 Satmar Hasidim, 266 use of term by Birnbaum, 328n88 Vizhnitz Hasidim, 186, 224, 227, 349n31, 352n9 Words of the Ascenders, Hasidic tenor of, 242–43, 245 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 11, 20, 35, 53, 128 Hasmoneans, 40 Hayzler (Zionist), 203 Hebrew Ahad Ha’am as exponent of, 146, 156 Birnbaum’s views on, as eventual national language, 42–43, 58, 68, 136–37 Czernowitz Yiddish Conference controversy regarding, 197–98, 203 Hebraist movement, 131, 133, 136, 146 Horowitz letter in, 349n38 transliteration of, xv Heidegger, Martin, 300, 358n14 Hellenistic Jewry, 40 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 42 Herodotus, 14 Herzl, Jakob (father), 71 Herzl, Theodor, 70–92 Ahad Ha’am and, 8, 119, 120 correspondence of Birnbaum with, 13, 59, 78–80, 81–82, 90, 92 cultural insensitivity of, 77, 140–41 death of, 143, 155–57 dislike and distrust of Birnbaum, 72, 75–80, 83–84, 86–87, 91–92 First Zionist Congress, Basel (1897), 71, 83, 85–91, 120 ideological differences with Birnbaum, 92–93, 105, 138 Jewish People’s Party (Jüdische Volkspartei) and, 83–84, 331n31 Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896), 6, 42, 71, 72–75, 148 life and background, 71–72, 97 loan to Birnbaum, 79 nature of Zionist views of, 77

381

382

Index Herzl, Theodor, 70–92 (continued) Ottomans, attempt at direct negotiation with, 81–83, 141 on pragmatism and consensus, 95 religious/Orthodox Zionists and, 264 salaried position for Birnbaum and, 80–81, 86–92 significance of Birnbaum and, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 66 similarities and differences of background, character, and appearance to Birnbaum, 71–73, 228, 330n4 socialism of Birnbaum and, 63, 76–77, 84, 107, 329n103 transformation of Zionist scene by, 70–71 Uganda, proposal for Jewish state in, 118, 143, 353–54n19 Die Welt and, 69 withdrawal of Birnbaum from organized Zionism under, 92, 117, 118–22, 157, 176 See also Altneuland (Herzl, 1902), Ahad Ha’am’s review of Hess, Moses, 5, 6, 63–64, 122, 253, 329n107, 334n101, 335n7 Hibbat Zion, 245 Hildesheimer, Esriel, 278 Hildesheimer, Meier, 276, 278, 279, 284 Hillel, Rabbi, 46, 49 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 261, 287, 303, 304, 356n69 historiography of Birnbaum’s reputation, 4–12 Hitler, Adolf, 316, 358n15 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 8 Hönigsberg, Jehiel, 167, 342n36 Horowitz, Tuvia, 221–40 Agudath Israel and, 253, 256, 258, 259, 260, 277–78, 283, 352n1, 355n33 Bukovina, Birnbaum’s years in, 352n9 death at hands of Nazis, 313 on death of Birnbaum, 313 engagement and marriage of, 235 Ezekiel, quotation from, 231, 236 God’s People and, 246 Hasidism and, 225, 227–28, 232, 235, 236–37, 350n56 intellectual isolation of, 227–29, 233, 235 Messianic redemption and, 233, 234, 236–38 “On the Threshold of Two Worlds” (1924), account of Birnbaum in, 223–27, 230

Oylim movement and, 229, 240–41, 243–46, 253 personal relationship with Birnbaum, 233–36, 239–40, 253–54, 278, 283 on physical similarities between Herzl and Birnbaum, 228, 330n4 practical and intellectual difficulties of Birnbaum’s teshuva, assistance with, 221–23, 239–40, 254 religious thought of Birnbaum and, 230–33 on spiritual awakening of Birnbaum, 216 Words of the Ascenders and, 240–46, 350n56 Hovevei Zion, 24, 43, 65, 67, 68, 69, 80, 119, 263 Hovurka, Anton, 166–67 Iarosevytch, Roman, 163–65 Ibsen, Henrik, 337n27 Igel, Lazar, 188 Imeles, Isidor, 25 immigration of Jews to Vienna, 17–24, 27, 96, 326n46, 332n57 Imre Emes (Abraham Mordechai Alter), 259 intellectual biography, as genre, 14–16 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 309 Jacobson, Wolf S., 269, 290–91, 313, 315 James, William, 209, 215 JCA (Jewish Colonization Association), 307 Jellinek, Adolph, 34, 326n36 Jeschurun (journal), 287, 356n69 Jewish Chronicle, 73, 87 Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), 307 Jewish emancipation in Austria-Hungary (1867), 23, 27, 248 Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), 11, 20, 35, 53, 128 Jewish Folksparty, 213 Jewish immigration to Vienna, 17–24, 27, 96, 326n46, 332n57 Jewish intellectual biography, 14–16 Jewish Moderne, The (Die jüdische Moderne, Birnbaum, 1896), 57, 109–16, 121, 122, 132, 247, 317–18 “Jewish Movement, The” (Birnbaum), 148 Jewish national autonomy, 169–75, 183, 193–94 Jewish National House, Czernowitz, 188– 89, 196, 345–46n101–102, 345n87

Index Jewish National Party coalition in Reichsrat elections of 1907, 162–65, 193–94, 318 Jewish nationalism. See Zionism Jewish People’s Party (Jüdische Volkspartei), 70, 83–84, 105, 108, 109, 137, 157, 162, 193, 213, 316, 317, 318, 331n31 “Jewish Renaissance” (Ost und West, Buber, 1901), 126–30, 336n15 Jewish renaissance movement, 123–38 aesthetics of, 123–24, 128, 129 Ahad Ha’am Affair and, 139, 146, 151 articles of Birnbaum associated with, 130 Buber’s “Jewish Renaissance” as manifesto of, 126–30, 336n15 Burckhardt’s concept of Renaissance and, 127–29, 130–31, 336n17–18 critical approach of Birnbaum to cultural arguments of, 130–35, 155 death of Birnbaum and, 314 defined and described, 123–24 eastern European Jewry, interest in, 125, 128–29 groundwork laid for, 117 periodicals, importance of, 124–26 on political organization, 137–38 Reichsrat elections of 1907 and, 169 Yiddish and, 1, 128, 134, 135–37 Zionism and, 125–26, 130, 137 “Jewish Renaissance Movement” (Birnbaum, 1902), 130 Jewish State, The (Der Judenstaat, Herzl, 1896), 6, 42, 71, 72–75, 148 Jewish War Archives, 224, 233 “Jews and Ruthenians” (Birnbaum), 174 Jews in Vienna. See Vienna John, Michael, 346n102 Johnson, Samuel, 14 Der Jude (periodical), 124 Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, Herzl, 1896), 6, 42, 71, 72–75, 148 “Judenwürde” (Schirer), 29, 30–31 “Judische Autonomie” (Birnbaum), 170 Jüdische Kultur, 197, 202 Jüdische Verlag (periodical), 124 Jüdische Volkszeitung (newspaper), 67, 99– 100, 102, 331n16 Jüdische Zeitung (newspaper), 178 Jung Juda (Young Jewish Movement), 123 Jung, Leo, 273–75, 284, 353n10, 356n34 Kabbalah, 243–44

Kadimah, 24–66 Birnbaum’s leadership of, 37–38, 67, 296 formation of, 24–28 growth and development of, 37, 64, 66 Die jüdische Moderne and, 109 Megillah, 28–37, 29, 46, 69 Selbst-Emancipation and, 47 Smolenskin and Pinkser influencing, 24–25, 33–36, 45–46, 54 Kafka, Franz, 6, 113, 211 Kahanemann, Yosef Shlomo, 355n45 Kahnmann, Mr., 272 Kaplan, Kleomenes, 25 Kassner, Salomon, 208, 319 Katz, Jacob, 11 Kaufman, Peretz Mordechai, 213 kedushah, 243–44 Kelbel and Felbel dialogues, Megillah, 32 Kellner, Leon, 84 Kenesset Yisrael, 262 Khazanovitsh, Lazar (Leon Chassanowitch), 197, 204, 205, 206, 255, 256–57, 288 Kierkegaard, Søren, 212 Kindermann, Karl, 297, 357n6, 358n9 Klein, Adolf, 25 Kohn, Pinchas, 273 Kohut, Alexander, 207 Kokesch, Oser, 84, 88 Kook, Isaac Abraham ha-Cohen, 354n19 Korngut, Asher Zalke (father-in-law of Birnbaum), 17, 19, 20 Kracauer, Siegfried, 287 Kraus, Karl, 7, 72, 113, 337n27 Kremenzky, Josef Meyer, 88 Landau, Isaac, 273 Landau, Max, 67, 357n2 Langer, Jiři, 211–12, 348n5 language Jewish language preferences, 344 nationalist theory and, 42–43 racial theory and, 57–58 See also Hebrew; Yiddish latifundia system, 160–61 Lazarson, M., 192 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 22, 324n5 Lev, Yosef, 278, 279 liberalism, failure of, 96–100, 108, 170 Lichtblau, Albert, 346n102 “light unto the nations,” 52 Lilien, E. M., 123, 124, 128

383

384

Index Lithuania, Agudath Israel mission to, 269–73 London, Agudath Israel delegation to, 273–76 Looking Backwards (Bellamy, 1887), 139 Löw, Eleazar (“Shemen Rokeah,” maternal great-grandfather of Birnbaum), 324n3 Löw, Malka Leah (maternal grandmother of Birnbaum), 324n3 Lueger, Karl, 72, 97, 98, 179 Luria, Isaac (Ha-Ari z”l) and Lurianic Kabbalah, 239, 243–44 Maccabees, 40–41, 54 Magnes, Judah, 179, 343n58 Mahler, Arthur, 165 Maimonides, 49, 226, 231 Maisl, Josef, 6 Makhzikey ha-Das, 103, 262 Malz, Dr., 89 Mandate Palestine, 212, 262, 273–75, 282, 304, 310, 312, 359n25, 360n44 “Männerwürde” (Schiller), 30 Marranos, 302, 359n22 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 109, 111, 116, 197, 203–5, 304 materialism Birnbaum’s early belief in, 217–18 Birnbaum’s spiritual awakening and rejection of, 216, 219–21 “racial materialism,” 111 Matityahu (Mathias, father of Judah Maccabee), 40–41, 54 Megillah (Kadimah newsletter), 28–37, 29, 46, 69 Melville, Herman, 15 Mendele, Moykher Sforim (Sholem Abramovitsh), 191 Mendelssohn, Moses, 324n5 Messianic redemption, 233, 234, 236–38, 251–52, 266, 313, 361n1 Michels, Tony, 177, 183 Mieses, Matthias (Matisyahu), 201, 346n115 minhag of Birnbaum, 232, 239, 350n56 “mission” of the Jewish people, 4, 52, 63, 220, 245, 248, 251–53 Mitnagdim, 232 Mittleman, Alan, 354n30 Mizrahi, 261, 262–64, 271, 274, 283, 289, 311, 353n18, 354n19 Mohilever, Shmuel, 263 Montefiore, Sir Moses, 54–55 Montesquieu, 145

Morgn Zhurnal, 342n55 “Mosaic faith,” 51–52 Motzkin, Leo, 118 Moysa-Rosochacki, Stefan, 163, 165–67 Munz, A., 88–89 Musar movement, 245 Musil, Robert, 72 mysticism, Jewish, 243–44, 245 Nadel, Ignaz, 25 Nathan the Wise (Lessing), 22, 324n5 National Rebirth of the Jewish People in Its Own Land, The (Die nationale Wiedergeburt des judischen Volks in seinem Lande, Birnbaum, 1893), 74–75, 93, 120–21, 330n16, 332n54 nationalism Ausgewählte Schriften (Birnbaum, 1910), 214 Birnbaum’s analysis of, 55–58 “chauvinism,” racial or nationalist, 39, 63, 98, 114–16, 203, 218, 248 culture and national identity, 128–29 nativism and Volkism in Austria-Hungary, 96 nineteenth century theories of, 42, 43 race and, 56–58, 94, 110–14 of Zhitlovsky, 183 See also Zionism nativism, 96 Naturei Karta, 266, 347n4 Nazism, rise of, 295–96, 297, 298–99, 300– 301, 316, 358n15 neoorthodoxy, German, 261–62, 264, 268, 278, 303, 351n71 Neue Freie Presse, 71, 73, 86 Neue Zeitung (newspaper), 165 New York, Birnbaum in. See America, Birnbaum in Niemcowicz, Israel, 24, 25, 36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 127, 128–29, 132, 146, 336n17, 358n14 Niewyk, Donald, 357n6 Niger, Shmuel, 256 Noachidism, 357n2 Nomberg, Hirsh Dovid, 191, 197–98, 206 non-Orthodox/nonreligious Jews, outreach to, 302–3 Nordau, Max, 89, 142–45, 152, 338n47 North America, Birnbaum in. See America, Birnbaum in

Index “Ode to Joy” (Schiller), 31 Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, 73 Oestersetzer, Samuel, 357 “On the Threshold of Two Worlds” (Horowitz, 1924), 223–27, 230 “On the Vienna Municipal Elections” (Birnbaum, 1895), 97–98 OPE (Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia Mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii, or Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews), 44 ORT (Society for Handicrafts and Agriculture), 306, 360n33 Orthodoxy, 209–54 difficulties of conversion to, intellectual and practical, 219–23, 239–40 eastern versus western European modes of, 246, 351n71 German neoorthodoxy, 261–62, 264, 268, 278, 303, 351n71 God’s People (Birnbaum), 246–54 historiographical consequences of, 5–6, 9–12 Jewish people, radical transformation of Birnbaum’s conception of, 220–21 legacy of Birnbaum and, 313–14, 318–19 Messianic redemption and, 233, 234, 236–38, 251–52, 266, 313, 361n1 minhag of Birnbaum, 232, 239, 350n56 Mizrahi, 261, 262–64, 271, 274, 283, 289, 311, 353n18, 354n19 mysteries of Birnbaum’s conversion to, 15–16 personal and professional nadir of Birnbaum and, 213–14, 229–30 physical manifestations of, 287–88 public response to Birnbaum’s conversion to, 211–12 shalem, concept of, 288, 356n70 significance of Birnbaum and, 1–4 spiritual awakening of Birnbaum, accounts of, 214–21, 348–49n14 Yiddish and, 250, 451–352n80 Zionism and, 218–19, 225–26, 232–33, 262–63 See also Agudath Israel; Horowitz, ­Tuvia; Oylim movement; Words of the ­Ascenders Ost und West (periodical), 124–26, 130, 131, 135, 139, 142, 143, 170, 213, 335n13, 337n36 Ostjuden. See eastern European Jewry

Ottomans, Herzl’s attempt at direct negotiation with, 81–83, 141 Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Yarnton, England, 1 Oylim movement Agudath Israel and, 253, 259, 266, 277– 78, 290–91 Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf and, 294–96, 312 (see also Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf) end of, 253, 315–16 etymology of “oylim,” 347n2 Falashas and Marranos, proselytizing, 359n22 Horowitz and, 229, 240–41, 243–44 independent emissaries for, Birnbaum’s involvement with, 294–96 legacy of Birnbaum and, 313, 320, 325–26 Palestine, settlement in, 244, 277, 290, 295, 312 periodicals, role of, 357n2 resemblance to other Orthodox movements, 245, 359n25 Rosenzweig on, 348n6 Words of the Ascenders and, 243–46, 266, 294, 295 Pacifici, Alfanso, 357n2 “paganism” (secular humanism and the Enlightenment) in God’s People, 247–50, 252 Palestine, as British Mandate, 212, 262, 273– 75, 282, 304, 310, 312, 359n25, 360n44 Palestine, existing Jewish settlements in Ahad Ha’am on, 61 Birnbaum’s early enthusiasm about, 43, 61 Herzl’s Altneuland and, 129–40, 141 Herzl’s attempt at direct negotiation with Ottomans and, 81, 141 Montefiore’s support of, 54–55 Zionist fund-raising for, 70 Palestine, settlement in, 58, 61, 64–65, 68–69 Agudath Israel on, 266–68, 273–75, 281, 282, 360n44 Ahad Ha’am Affair, Birnbaum’s involvement in, 150–51 Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf on, 307–12 Breuer’s ideas about, Birnbaum’s critique of, 303–6 Buber’s equivocal attitude toward, 129, 336n26 Mizrahi and, 263

385

386

Index Palestine, settlement in (continued) Ottomans, Herzl’s attempt at direct negotiation with, 81–83, 141 Oylim movement and, 244, 277, 290, 295, 312 shift in Birnbaum’s Zionist priorities and, 93–94, 108, 115–16, 169 Palestinian Arabs, Birnbaum on, 310 Pallière, Aimé, 357n2 Pappenheim, Bertha, 287 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 266, 268 Pawel, Ernst, 4 Peretz, Y. L., 135, 185–86, 191, 197–99, 202–4, 206, 257, 337n36, 347n125 Pfeffer, Jacob, 179 Pinsker, Leo Automemancipation (1880), 38, 42, 43–46, 68, 326n52 Birnbaum’s Die Assimilationssucht influenced by, 43–46 Birnbaum’s place in Zionism and, 6 Buber on, 335n7 Herzl’s ignorance of, 86 Jewish nationalism of, 57–58, 68, 94 Kadimah influenced by, 25, 45–46, 54 life and background, 43–44 Selbst-Emancipation and, 53 Pinski, David, 179, 183, 185, 337n36, 344n72 Plotzky, Meir Dan, 278, 279 Plutarch, 14 Poalei Zion, 197, 202, 204–5 poetry as early form of Jewish nationalist expression for Birnbaum, 30–31, 325n32 pogroms Kishniev, Bessarabia (1903), 141, 148, 151, 172 Odessa (1871), 34, 44 Ukraine (1881-82), 35, 44 widespread anti-Jewish violence in Russia after 1905, 172–73 Poles of Galicia in Reichsrat elections of 1907, 161–65, 168, 339–40n11–12 Political Action Committee of WZO, Birnbaum as secretary-general to, 86–92, 118, 120, 317 political office, Birnbaum running for. See Reichsrat elections of 1907 political theories of Birnbaum Agudath Israel and concept of politicized Orthodoxy, 260–65 (see also Agudath Israel)

autonomism, Jewish, 169–75, 183, 193–94 Communism, 297–300, 358n10 ecumenicalism, within Judaism, 70, 94–95, 136, 146, 152–53, 157, 163, 175, 194, 262 Engels, Friedrich, 109, 111, 116 European Jewry, ensuring survival of, 69–70, 94–100, 105–9 Galician Jewry, political activity of, 103–5 Jewish People’s Party (Jüdische Volkspartei), 70, 83–84, 105, 108, 109, 137, 157, 162, 193, 213, 316, 317, 318, 331n31 Jewish renaissance movement and, 137–38 liberalism, failure of, 96–100, 108, 170 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 109, 111, 116, 197, 203–5, 304 significance of, 318 socialism, 62–64, 76–77, 84, 107, 329n103 (see also socialism) Zhitlovsky’s political vision and, 183 Zionism as mass political movement, 64–66 Potocki, Andrzej, 165, 166 Proceedings of the Zionist Congress, 87–90 Rabinowitsh, Yitzkhok, 355n45 race and nationalism in Birnbaum’s thought, 56–58, 94, 110–14 Rachmilewitz, Nahman, 271 “racial materialism,” 111 Rashi, 350n44 Rasvet (newspaper), 192, 198 Rathenau, Walter, 357n4 Red Scholar, Red Windmill, Red Pioneer, and Red School Transmitter (Communist school newspapers), 298 Reform Judaism, 261 Reichsrat elections of 1907, 154–76 Agnon’s With Our Young and With Our Old memorializing, 154–55, 165–66, 338n1 corruption, fraud, and abuse in, 165–68 historical and political context, 158–62 importance in Birnbaum’s career and intellectual development, 168–69 Jewish national autonomy within AustriaHungary and, 169–75 Jewish National Party coalition, 162–65, 193–94, 318 Jewish renaissance movement and, 169 loss of race by Birnbaum, 165, 175–76, 318

Index Poles in, 161–65, 168 purpose of Birnbaum in taking part in, 157–58 Ukrainians in, 161–64, 173–75, 318, 339– 40n12, 341n21, 342n53 Yiddish, relationship to Birnbaum’s embrace of, 176–77 Reines, Isaac Jacob, 263, 353–54n19 religious awakening of Birnbaum. See Orthodoxy, Birnbaum’s turn to religious ecumenicalism, 285, 286 Renaissance, Burckhardt’s concept of, 127–29, 130–31, 336n17–18. See also Jewish renaissance movement Renan, Ernst, 31 Reyzen, Zalmen, 191 Ritter von Schönerer, Georg, 31, 32, 72, 97 Rogoff, Hillel, 256, 257, 288 Roosevelt, Theodore, 178 Rosenblatt, Yossele, 256 Rosenfeld, Josef, 188 Rosenfeld, Morris, 337n36 Rosenheim, Jacob America, Agudath Israel delegation to, 276–77 Birnbaum’s move away from Agudath Israel and, 282–85, 288–93 on death of Birnbaum, 313 Frankfurt Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus, Birnbaum’s relationship with, 288–89 Kindermann and, 358n9 Lithuania, Agudath Israel mission to, 269, 271–73 Oylim movement and, 290–91, 315 Palestine question and, 311 personal relationship with Birnbaum, 268–69, 273 role in Agudath Israel, 268, 293, 354n30, 355–56n32–33 Rosenzweig, Franz, 6, 9, 13, 212, 286–89, 348n6–7 Rozenblit, Marsha, 27, 332n57 Der Ruf. See Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf Rülf, Isaak, 327n70 Russia Birnbaum’s speaking tour of (1910), 207, 213 Communism, 297–300, 358n10 See also eastern European Jewry; pogroms Ruthenische Revue (newspaper), 170 Rynhold, Daniel, 358n14

Salanter, Israel, 245, 262 Salz, Abraham, 84 Satmar Hasidim, 266 Schach, Fabius, 87, 331n40 Schalit, Moshe, 67, 213 Schatz, Boris, 123 Schiffen, W., 273 Schiller, Friedrich, 30–31 Schindler, Alexander, 359n22 Schindler, Eliezer, 295, 357n2, 359n22 Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, 236 Schnirer, Moritz, 24–26, 29, 30–31, 33–34, 38, 46, 67, 80, 84, 88, 91 Schnitzler, Arthur, 8, 72, 337n27 Scholem, Gershom, 287 Schwartz, Leo, 25 secretaryships of Birnbaum general secretary of Central Committee of Agudath Israel, 260, 353n10 WZO Political Action Committee, secretary-general of, 80–81, 86–92, 118, 120, 317 secular humanism and the Enlightenment (“paganism”) in God’s People, 247–50, 252 Seelenfreund, Shlomo Shmuel/Solomon Samuel (maternal grandfather), 20, 324n3 Segel, Binyamin, 125, 335n10 Seidemann, Gustav, 314 Selbst-Emancipation (newspaper), 5, 33, 46–56, 58–64, 67, 99, 100, 314, 317 Semel, Bernard, 179 Serubabel (newspaper), 58–60, 325n32 Seven Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries (Langer), 212 Sex and Character (Weininger, 1903), 113 Shabbat observance, 222, 280, 307 Ha-Shahar (newspaper), 34, 35, 46, 326n36 Shakh, the (Shabbetai Cohen), 20, 324n2 shalem, concept of, 288, 356n70 Shapiro (in Lithuania), 272 Shapiro (in Vyzhnytzia), 227 Shapiro, Marc, 11 “Shemen Rokeah” (Eleazar Löw, maternal great-grandfather), 324n3 Sherenchewsky, Mr., 271 Ha-Shiloah (periodical), 67, 141, 143, 329–30n1–2 Shomer Israel, 50, 103 Shuckburgh, Sir John Evelyn, 273 Sichyns’kyi, Myroslav, 165

387

388

Index Silber, Gershon, 167 Silber, Michael, 11 Silberfarb, Moshe, 306, 360n33 Sixth Zionist Congress (1903), 118, 143, 263, 353n19 Skart, Anton (Birnbaum pseudonym), 337n27 Smolenskin, Peretz Birnbaum essay “Et la’asot” in Words of the Ascenders and, 351n61 Birnbaum’s Die Assimilationssucht influenced by, 43 death of, 25, 53 Jewish nationalism of, 57, 68, 94 Kadimah influenced by, 24–25, 33–36, 45–46, 54 life and background, 34, 326n36 Selbst-Emancipation and, 46, 47, 53 Ha-Shahar and, 34, 35, 46, 326n36 Smoliar, Boris, 358n10 Social Democrats, 84, 98, 111, 163–64, 297, 300, 341n28, 357n4 socialism of Birnbaum, 62–64, 76–77, 84, 107, 329n103 Czernowitz Yiddish Conference, BundPoalei Zionist faction at, 202–5 of Zhitlovsky, 183 Society for Handicrafts and Agriculture (ORT), 306, 360n33 Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews (Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia Mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii, or OPE), 44 Sokolow, Nahum, 140, 330n9 Soloveitchik, Joseph Ber, 299–300, 358n14 “‘Solutions’ to the Jewish Question” (Birnbaum, 1903), 143 “Some Thoughts on Anti-Semitism” (“Einige Gedanken uber den Antisemitismus,” Birnbaum, 1902), 130 Soviet Union, Communism in, 297–300, 358n10 speaking tours of Birnbaum America (1908), 177–83, 191, 193, 216, 278 America, Agudath Israel delegation to (1921), 255–58, 276–81, 279 Russia (1910), 207, 213 Spinoza, Baruch, 49 Spitzer, Asher Lemel, 278, 279

Springer, Moritz, 25 Stalin, Josef, 297 Stampfer, Shaul, 11 Stand, Adolph, 162, 165 Stanislawski, Michael, 336n23 Star of Redemption, The (Rosenzweig), 212, 348n6 Steiner, Dr., 89 Sternberg, Hermann, 189, 345n90 Strachey, Lytton, 14–15 Straucher, Beno, 162, 165, 170, 174, 186–89, 196, 208, 346n101–2, 347n128 Strauss, Leo, 287, 299–300 Sulamith (periodical), 124 Syrkin, Nachum, 256 Taafe, Eduard, 159 Taube, Laybl, 344n79 Tchatchkes, Shmuel (S. Y. Agnon), 13, 154–55, 165, 287, 338n1 Tenth Zionist Congress (1911), 264 teshuva of Birnbaum. See Orthodoxy “Then and Now” (Birnbaum, 1928), 190–92 Thon, Yehoshua, 83 Thucydides, 14 Tolstoy, Leo, 214 Torah im derekh erets, 261 “Torah-true,” as term, 347n1 transliteration of Yiddish and Hebrew, xv Trietsch, Davis, 123 “Truth from the Land of Israel, The” (Ha’am, 1891), 61 Two Years in Moscow’s House of Death (Zwei Jahre in Moskaus Totenhäusern, Kindermann, 1931), 297, 357n6 Uganda, proposal for Jewish state in, 118, 143, 263, 353–54n19 Ukrainians of Galicia, Jewish alliance with, 161–64, 173–75, 318, 339–40n12, 341n21, 342n53 Universal Union of Jewish Youth, 357n2 Unzer Leben (newspaper), 195 Vacher de Lapouge, Georges, 112 Varieties of Religious Experience, The (James), 209 Vienna anti-Semitism in, 23, 36, 37, 61, 95–100 as center of Jewish nationalism in Europe, 64

Index Jewish culture of, alienation of Birnbaum from, 22–24, 26–28, 36, 48 Jewish districts of, 17, 27 Jewish immigrants to, 17–24, 27, 96, 326n46, 332n57 liberalism in, failure of, 96–100, 108 racialist theory in, 112 Vital, David, 323n8 Volkism, 96 Wagner, Otto, 188, 345n84 Wagner, Richard, 112 Weber (Chief Rabbi of Slovakia), 273 Weimar Republic, 128, 286, 297, 299, 357n4 Weininger, Otto, 112, 113 Weinreich, Max, 190, 201, 202, 343n61, 345–46n101 Weiss, I. H., 34 Weizmann, Chaim, 118, 123, 124, 143 Die Welt (newspaper), 69, 92, 117, 124, 125, 142, 331n16, 334n1, 335n12 Weltsch, Felix, 361n7 Weltsch, Robert, 314, 361n7 western European Jewry Agudath Israel and, 283–84 Ahad Ha’am Affair, Birnbaum’s comments on, 145–46 assimilation and acculturation of (see ­assimilation and acculturation) authenticity ascribed to eastern versus western European mode of Orthodoxy, 246, 351n71 Diaspora culture, Birnbaum’s turn to, 133–35 Jewish autonomism and, 171 spiritual awakening, Birnbaum’s account of, 217–18 “What Is to Be Done?” (Birnbaum, 1894), 93–94 Winz, Leo, 123, 124, 125, 336n14 Wistrich, Robert, 333n80 With Our Young and With Our Old (Agnon), 154–55, 165–66, 338n1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 113 Wolffsohn (Wolfssohn), David, 80, 83, 87, 331n21 Wolpe, Mr., 272 Words of the Ascenders (Divrei ha-oylim, Birnbaum, 1917), 240–46 Agudath Israel and, 259, 265, 266, 287

Birnbaum’s turn to Orthodoxy and, 209–11, 240–46, 250, 251, 253, 254 critique of Orthodoxy in, 209–11, 301 “Dr. Birnbaum and His New Program” essay, 241, 243, 245–46 economic plight of European Jews and, 306 “Et la’asot” (“Time to Act”) essay, 31n61, 241–43 Hasidic tenor of, 242–43, 245 Horowitz and, 240–46, 350n56 Oylim movement and, 243–46, 266, 294, 295 “Words of the Ascenders” essay, 241, 243–45 world history, role of Jewish people in, 252–53 World War I, 13, 96, 126, 181, 208, 224, 264, 349n38 World Zionist Organization (WZO), 70, 92, 117, 118, 122, 123, 124, 224, 262, 264, 266, 274, 282, 311, 353n18, 354n19 X-Strahlen (journal), 337n27 Y. L. Peretz Writers’ Society, New York City, 257 Yiddish America, Birnbaum’s speaking tour in (1908), 177–83, 191, 193 Birnbaum’s fluency in and use of, 181, 191–92, 198, 238, 343n66, 350n55 embraced by Birnbaum, 1, 134, 135–37, 157, 176–77 Jewish autonomism and, 171, 172, 193–94 “Jewish Jargon,” Birnbaum’s initial rejection of, 101–2 Jewish language preferences and, 344 Jewish renaissance movement and, 1, 128, 134, 135–37 linguistic status of, 42, 135–36, 181 literature and theater at turn of nineteenth century, 135 Orthodoxy, Birnbaum’s turn to, 250, 451–352n80 transliteration of, xv Zhitlovsky’s political vision and, 183 See also Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference Yiddish Culture Society, 197 Yiddish Mother, The (film), 360n39

389

390

Index Di Yidishe Folksfraynd (journal), 344n79 Yidishes Tageblatt (newspaper), 198 Dos Yidishe Vort (newspaper), 282, 347n2, 355n33, 356n60 Der Yidisher Gazlan (newspaper), 156 Yidishes Vokhenblat (newspaper), 170 Yoyvelbukh tsum sekhstigen geburstog fun Dr. Nosn Birnboym (in honor of Birnbaum’s 60th birthday, 1924), 20, 220, 223, 254 Der Yud (newspaper), 170 Zachariewicz, Julian, 186, 188, 345n84–85 Di Zeit (newspaper), 73, 75 Zeitlin, Hillel, 195, 207 Zhitlovsky, Chaim at American speaking tour of Birnbaum (1908), 179, 183, 193 Czernowitz Yiddish Conference and, 183, 185, 190–94, 198, 201 photograph framed with Birnbaum’s, 182 transformations of, 7, 343n71 Ziff, Isaac, 167, 341–42n36 Zion (Berlin periodical), 80–81, 117, 330n16 Zionism agricultural life, Birnbaum’s calls for Jewish return to, 307–9 Agudath Israel and, 266–68 Ahad Ha’am Affair, Birnbaum’s involvement in, 152–53 in America, 178 Die Assimilationssucht (Birnbaum, 1882), 37–44 Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf on, 309–12, 360n39 coining of term by Birnbaum, 2, 60, 67 cultural regeneration as aspect of, 68–69, 74, 77 Czernowitz Yiddish Conference and, 203 early centrality of Birnbaum to, 67–69 early involvement of Birnbaum with, 1–5, 15 eastern European Jewry, Birnbaum’s focus on, 64, 100–103 European Jewry, shift in Birnbaum’s attitude toward ensuring survival of, 69–70, 94–100, 105–9

First Zionist Congress, Basel (1897), 71, 83, 85–91, 120 Galician Jewry, political activity of, 103–5 Gegenwartsarbeit, 84, 106, 162 Jewish renaissance movement and, 125–26, 130, 137 of Die jüdische Moderne, 114–16 legacy of Birnbaum and, 313–18 as mass political movement, 64–66 Mizrahi, 261, 262–64, 271, 274, 283, 289, 311, 353n18, 354n19 Orthodoxy and, 218–19, 225–26, 232–33, 262–63 race and, 56–58 Reichsrat elections of 1907 and, 168–69 salaried position of Birnbaum within, 80–81, 86–90 Selbst-Emancipation (newspaper) and Birnbaum’s developing sense of, 5, 33, 46–56, 58–64 Sixth Zionist Congress (1903), 118, 143, 263, 353n19 Smolenskin and, 35–36 of Straucher, 189 Tenth Zionist Congress (1911), 264 Uganda proposal for Jewish state, 118, 143, 263, 353–54n19 Viennese Jewish culture, Birnbaum’s early discomfort with, 23–24 withdrawal of Birnbaum from organized movement, 92, 117, 118–22, 157, 176 WZO (World Zionist Organization), 70, 92, 117, 118, 122, 123, 124, 224, 262, 264, 266, 274, 282, 311, 353n18, 354n19 Yiddish language and Jewish autonomism, Birnbaum’s support for, 193–94 See also Herzl, Theodor; Palestine, settlement in “Zionism als Culturbewegung” (Birnbaum, 1897), 330n16 “Der Zionismus” (Birnbaum, 1896), 330n16 “Zionist Movement, The” (Die Zionistische Bewegung, Birnbaum, 1895), 120, 330n16 Zunz, Leopold, 5 “Zwei Vorträge über Zionismus” (Birnbaum, 1898), 330–31n16