Please excuse the shameless self-promotion, but I thought the book
reviewed might be of interest.
Features » The Book Shelf»
TITLE: THE FIRST TITHE: MEMOIRS AND EDIFYING DISCOURSES OF THE HEBREW
WAR FOR FREEDOM
More Articles By Shmuel Ben-Gad
Shmuel Ben-Gad
Posted Sep 17 2008
Title: The First Tithe: Memoirs and Edifying Discourses of the
Hebrew War forFreedom
Author: Israel Eldad. (Translated by Zev Golan)
Publisher: Jabotinsky Institute
Reviewed by Shmuel Ben-Gad
The publication of this translation 58 years after the memoir's first
appearance in Hebrew is a signal event for Anglophone readers
interested in the history of Zionism and the founding of the modern
State of Israel.
The late Dr. Eldad is arguably the most significant and influential
intellectual figure of the Zionist right. Born in Galicia in 1910,
Eldad was profoundly rooted in Hebrew culture. He grew up in a
relatively traditional home and his father was an intellectual and a
Zionist. Eldad attended a Hebrew-speaking high school and was a
student at the rabbinical seminary in Vienna (though he never was
ordained). He was also philosophically educated, receiving his
doctorate from the University of Vienna.
This memoir covers 1938 - 1948, his first decade (hence "first
tithe") of prominent public activism, beginning with an address to a
world conference of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement,
Betar. He was a leader in Betar and upon immigrating to the Land of
Israel in 1941, joined the underground led by Avraham Stern, the
Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (FFI). After the British
assassinated Stern, Eldad became its chief educator and theoretician
and eventually a member of its central command until the FFI was
dissolved with the establishment of the state in 1948.
Advertisement
Eldad was a strong personality and a singular thinker and this is a
vivid memoir, not a dispassionate history. It has a number of moods:
lyrical, joyful, bitter, self-critical, and regretful. In this book
at least, Eldad is no dry logician but often draws insight from
concrete events and uses incidents or anecdotes to bring out more
general points.
In this approach Eldad seems to have been influenced (as
he much was) by the great poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, of whose mentality
Eldad says, "Everything is a symbol, coming to tell not of itself but
something else." Eldad had no use for a Zionism that merely tried to
solve the "Jewish problem" by creating a safe refuge and saw such a
state as an end in itself. The Zionism of Eldad (and Stern) was a
revolutionary national liberation movement.
In the memoir he defines it thus; "The return of the nation to the
homeland and establishment of the Kingdom of Israel as an instrument
of and an expression of the collective Hebrew creative
force." Stern's underground was opposed to any foreign rule in the
Land of Israel. Thus it regarded Britain - which held the League of
Nations mandate for "Palestine" and whose official policy since May,
1939 was a strict limitation on Jewish immigration and on land sales
to Jews - as an enemy to be fought and expelled, not a legitimate
authority to be placated or pressured. It saw that Britain was
weakened by its fight with Germany and declared war upon it while the
establishment Labor Zionist Haganah, and even the Revisionist
underground Irgun, encouraged Jews in Israel to enlist in the British
army to fight Hitler. Eldad argues that had more joined the FFI in
the fight in the early 1940s, Britain could have been expelled and
the Jews of Europe would have had a place to which to fle
e.
Eldad celebrates the fact that the FFI and the Irgun eventually drove
the British out, but he is melancholy about their failure to undo
the partition of the homeland imposed by Britain and, later, the
United Nations; its feeble, futile efforts to liberate the Old City
and eastern parts of Jerusalem; and its quiet acquiescence to the
Labor Zionists becoming the official government of the new state,
rather than seizing power and establishing the Kingdom of Israel. In
this, he is more critical of the FFI than of the Irgun, and more
critical of himself than of the FFI as a whole. Which is not to say
he is gentle towards Labor Zionism, the Hagana, Chaim Weizmann, David
Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and other lesser-known figures.
Indeed, while some might consider Eldad a romantic nationalist, on
the evidence of this memoir he was no sentimentalist about human
nature. Even amidst his praise of his comrades in the FFI, he is not
blind to personal faults. Eldad seems a pretty shrewd judge of
character and his character sketches of both the famous and the
unknown can be very interesting. Even more arresting are
observations that could just as easily be made today (e.g. "I wonder,
is this a law of our Nationalist movement - that our leaders reach a
certain apex and are then daunted?")
I think Eldad's book does what good memoirs often do - after reading
it, even if one is not close philosophically, politically or
temperamentally to the author, one will never think of the era it
covers in quite the same way again. For Hebrew nationalists, it
should be virtually required reading.
Shmuel Ben-Gad is Judaic Studies Librarian at the George
Washington University.
Shmuel Ben-Gad,
Gelman Library,
George Washington University.
Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author
and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL)
===========================================================
Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu
Ha-Safran Archives:
Current:
http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html
History:
http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html
AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
