In his 1898 "The Jewish Problem and the Socialist Jewish State, " Syrkin lays out these ideas. Regarding this, Syrkin argued that a classless society and national sovereignty were the only means of solving the Jewish question completely. He felt that this social revolution would be the key to the normalization of the Jewish condition. With this in mind, he argued that the Jew must therefore join the proletariat as the only way to end class struggle and redistribute power justly. Since the bourgeoisie betrayed the principles of liberalism, then Jews must be the torchbearers of Socialism.
While Syrkin is many times seen as working on his own, however he had predecessors and contemporaries who had a huge impact upon Zionist Socialism.
This included Aaron David Gordon, a Zionist ideologue who functioned as a spiritual force behind practical Zionism and Labor Zionism. A native of Troyanov, Russia, he was a founder of the Hapoel Hatzair and his movement set the tone for Zionism for many years to come.
According to Gordon, Jewish suffering was traceable to the abnormal state of Jews in the galut (diaspora) that were denied the participation in creative labor. As a cure, he promoted physical labor to spiritually uplift Jews. This experience of labor linked the person as an individual to hidden spaces of both nature and being which could be turned into spiritual vision, Jewish poetry and as spiritual life. He believed work in the land was sacred for both the individual and the Jewish people. Agriculture would unite the Jewish people and give justice to its existence there. War would not acquire the land, but working it would. By the Jewish people going back to the land, they were returning to their natural state of order with its natural rhythms of work. The people would not then be involved in something artificial. Rather, they would be involved in organic, mystical whole.
He preferred organic connections to nature and to society. He saw these bonds such as family, community and nation as vital and held that they were higher than the bonds of state, party and class. Above all, Gordon believed in practice over theory. He was an intellectual that experienced the troubles of the working class and united with them in the process.
In the case of contemporaries, we have a great example in the form of Yosef Trumpeldor. Trumpeldor's career and exploits and his commitment to building a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel to liberate the Jewish people is well-known, but it needs to be told in context. What is very necessary and usually not examined is who was his intellectual inspiration and inspired him to become involved in the kibbutz movement. This influence was also very key in the development of the philosophy of many other Socialist Zionists.
Trumpledor was born in Pyatigorsk, a city in Russia's northern Caucasus. The military influence initially came after his father Wulf Trumpeldor was conscripted into the czarist army for twenty five years. In spite of Wulf's lengthy Army hitch and the virulent anti-Semitism of the Czarist Army, Yosef's father maintained his Jewish identity and influenced his son to take pride in being Jewish. Like many of the Jews of the Caucasus, these Asian Jews grew up fiercely proud of their Jewish heritage.
After graduating from the gymnasium high school, Trumpeldor enrolled in the university where he studied dentistry. As a young man, he was continually disturbed by the persecution of Jews throughout Czarist Russia and the promotion of the image as a coward who would not defend himself. What bothered him even more was that this stereotype went completely unchallenged. As he became aware of the World Zionist Congress, he immediately became enthralled with Zionism as a movement. He became convinced that a national renaissance in Palestine for the Jewish People was absolutely necessary.
He was deeply influenced by the views of a non-Jew, but a person not engaged in anti-Semitism by the name of Peter Kropotkin and by a farming commune that he had seen. He then connected the ideas of anarchist communism with aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and a future Jewish yishuv. An anarcho-syndicalist, Kropotkin was enamored by the agricultural commune as a way of reforming the life in the Russian countryside and bettering the lives of the peasants. This fired the imagination of Trumpeldor and his contemporaries who then saw the anarcho-syndicalist agricultural kibbutz as the model of the new Jewish society in the land of Israel. Probably, the success of the kibbutz movement was the best and only example...
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