The Jewish Story: Rumors of War

people sleep peacefully in their beds at night says George Orwell only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf now I'm here on your behalf I'm not looking to do any violence but I do want to stand for a few things because I'm Rob Mike Feuer and this is the Jewish story episode 26 rumors of war doo-doo-doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo we're moving out of Exile and that means in some sense we're also stepping out of that framework that I've been offering again and again as definitive of exilic life that also powerful rabbinic phrase with nay hata a new Galina may art say no because of our sins we were exiled from our land what's of real interest to the driving elements of the Zionist air is actually the second half of that prayer being the rock Newman a lot maintainer and we've become distanced or strange from off of our land now that's not because I'm Israel has suddenly become holy righteous mind you on the contrary the ideological waves of the second and third alia are characterized by a largely ante religious attitude and that's gonna raise a big question one that will follow us all the way into season three as we discuss present-day Israel and the Jewish story is why was it dabka what is it specifically the Jews who broke with the Torah that succeeded in rebuilding the land and on a deeper level what's the connection between breaking with religion and breaking with exile how is it that those who gave up on the notion that history is driven by sin and merit were the ones who overcame the hurdles to national reembarked now our holy teacher of out in his Kaka Cohen kook saw religion itself as a product of exile which we've been following since season one you know is a theme that we've been developing at least since the Greek encounter and he never quite says it outright but you can make the logical connection I'm sure because if religion is a private of exile then redemption result in what you know a little bit of background in systems thinking and I want to tell you that every complex adaptive system at some point in its progress through life reaches certain moments in its development when the current configuration is inadequate to meet the task at hand we call them watershed moments and that's when the system either leaps to a higher order or collapses in on itself and when I look around it seems to me that the religious system that has succeeded so admirably in bringing us to the 21st century is insufficient to take us the next stage necessary perhaps but insufficient now I'm not advocating heresy or atheism for that matter the rough cook did say that the shallow and narrow religion he saw around him confuses everyone who believes in it depresses his spirit blunts his feelings inhibits the assertion of his sensibilities and uproots the divine glory in his soul if such a person should repeat all day that his faith is a faith in the unity of God his statement would be empty and would register nothing in his soul does that strike a familiar chord anyone and of cook also had a unique attitude toward atheism in particular Yoruba rock in Sokka my Sabbath my whole theme the guitar dumb and bears are on the rails Oh a heresy specifically atheism actually comes as some sort of powerful pained cry to redeem a person from the narrow pit of this estrangement as always Ralph's cooking vision the clash between the narrow religion which marks the end of exile and the atheism that broke down its boundaries as a dialectic process in which both are elevated and destroyed as they bring forth a new way of being because sometimes the situation is so broken that the only thing to do is destroy and what lies ahead then well well cook says that the tour of this world will be as in substantial vapor in comparison to the Tauri of our Messiah now he's only echoing the words of the sages nevertheless it's a sentiment that got a lot of people in trouble down through the ages I mean Jesus of Nazareth is the first to come to mind shop tight sphere we've talked about even the Baal Shem Tov got painted with that brush and love cook hardly presumed to be the Messiah but he did have a passionate vision the resurrection of Tom Israel to its full glory is a people in its land and as the crown jewel of that process and really the proof of its divine nature the return of prophecy now that may sound crazy the aspiration of a young Allu a young horrid genius born in Latvia in 1865 and it's true that legend has it when he rides a delusion Shiva that famously shiva that we've spoken about whose rushes you at the time was about Naftali sphere who the brilliant and it's seed so legend has it says that the net sieve said that if the Shiva been found it just educate rob cook Diana it would have been enough and by age 23 he was already out he'd assumed the rabbinate of zal mill and he began to write his first essays while engaging the mass killing the enlightened jews of his town in a lively discussion but prophecy really ready well as i said i'm in throughout at this point of our story was moving out of the mode of because of our sins we were exiled from our land and whether that was because something had changed within us or the world or god or all three the will to return to our land has been awoken and the actual return has begun therefore rob cook was focused on healing the damage described in the second half of the equation we need rakhna malum admati know that estrangement from our sacred ground because he knew that exile was about more than geography or even more than the historical socio-political reality in which we live and he knew that way back when the temple burned our shift from a national covenant with god to a religion and hailed the loss of many critical aspects of our nature exile is also alienation from self and in rough cook size estrangement from our land the disembodied national state of exile had robbed us of our ability to express our essential spiritual nature and the rear ooting the crossing of that distance between us and embodied reality in the land was going to demand a new face to the divine relationship a new old face really prophecy now do you remember Spinoza go back to episode 10 in this series for his full place in our story but for now just recall that we labeled him the first modern Jew because he stepped out of religion altogether but maintained his identity as a Jew something unique in the early modern period and that his doctrine of pantheism God his world world is God made him the demon of religious Christian and Jew alike as well as a philosophical hero for many generations to come to our day even the abstracted religion of exile was unable to embrace the truth that lay at the core of Spinoza philosophy that there's no need to seek God outside of the world he's waiting to embrace us right here but as I noted back in episode 10 of cook could see the light in the darkness of Spinoza's heresy and as a student of nineteenth-century evolutionary philosophy really in many ways a product of it he also understood that it required a process of clarification through history quote by Moshe Mendelssohn began purifying it but hasn't finished its repair but the holy baal shem tov purified it without knowing whom he was purifying for he did not need its source and the process is still not finished but ongoing and when it is entirely complete barukh Spinoza will leave the category of curse it and be among the blessed instead and what blessing exactly did the man label at the prime enemy of religion offer the omnis well you see the truth which lies at the heart of Spinoza pantheism offers a consciousness that itself can allow for a finite world to give voice to the infinite now cooked new in the depths of his being the truth of the words of our sages who taught that prophecy only exists within the land of Israel he knew this is not a technical issue god forbid or an expression of national it is amiss some would like to label it it's simply what happens to a seed when it's planted in its native soil and instead of just surviving finally flowers in Mount Cook's vision the consciousness which underlies creation finds unique expression when the healed resurrected people root themselves in the soil their land the boundless divine desires our embodied existence to give its voice but never forget embodiment is always a messy process anyone who's ever been present at a birth knows it's true and the seed must rot in the ground before any plant can grow so as we noted last episode I've cooked made his way up to the land in 1904 as part of the second Aliyah as its Rebbe in fact in many ways and it became the robbed of Yafo the spiritual pastor really of the new agricultural settlements springing up in the north of the country but like our father Abraham before him well cook didn't settle peacefully in the land traveling on behalf of the shoe in the community of Jews that was coalescing under the Zionist leadership he was caught abroad by World War 1 he spent quite a bit of time in both Switzerland in London and it was very productive for his writing but the seed was rotting the old world was finally beginning to fall away and even though they were wrong there's a reason that the people of the early 20th century called this the war to end all wars this war is going to open up many new avenues for the Jewish story and it's rumors are already being heard at this point now this episode will focus primarily on the challenges of embodiment on the local scale but don't lose the connection to the big picture as Rahab cook says when there is great war in the world the power of the Messiah awakens the time of pruning has arrived the pruning of the tyrants and the wicked are being eliminated in the world and it fills with a fragrant scent and afterwards with the cessation of war the world is refreshed with a new spirit in the footsteps of the Messiah become even peirong you know I got called out recently I want to thank everyone by the way who has responded to my request for feedback in particularly those who've shared their questions and aspirations for becoming season 3 and keep them flowing but I especially value it when you point out my shortcomings as difficult as I might find it in the short term and a good friend and listener recently pointed out to me and I've fallen into the ashkenazi trap he asked what's happening with our Sephardic brothers Spinoza and the converse of consciousness was our last real look and that was 200 plus years ago now part of the answer is I simply can't overwhelm you with everything a story about everything isn't a story at all and my goal from the beginning has been to tell a story of the past that helps us understand our present identity in an effort to point it toward the future we actually desire and whether your friend or foe of our national rebirth the process which led to the rise of the State of Israel defines the Jewish people today even the struggle around it and Zionism was driven by Ashkenazi Jewry for better or worse and we will speak in season 3 about the less than pleasant consequences of the xenophobic Eurocentric side of our nationalism and how it continues to play itself out in our culture today have no fear and truth is last episode at least I should have mentioned the small but significant Yemenite immigration during the first two waves of a yeah right there are those who actually say that the European idealists may never have succeeded in their desire to conquer agricultural labor if they hadn't been joined by the Yemenite brothers and sisters who actually knew how to farm and could handle the climate but beyond questions of the country of origin I'm actually fascinated by historic parallel that exists between this phase of our story and where we began back in the time of Ezra two seasons ago imperfect though the parallel maybe the second and third Aliotti will build the institutions and craft the cultural models on which the State of Israel shapes itself to this very day and they're made up of a few thousand people at most the majority of Jews simply did not come back to the land just as the majority of Jews stayed in Babylon in the time of Ezra and nevertheless in my eyes the main plotline of our story follows the Jews that went up just as it did in the time of Ezra now it remains to be seen whether the story ends the same way this time around but either way what we need to do is talk about the Ottoman Empire it's not just an excuse to fill in the Safari backstory because we need to understand this critical non-european political context for the next chapter of our story a couple of numbers in the early 20th century there were an estimated 200,000 Jews scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire Iraq was actually a largest community it reaches 65,000 by 1880 and we continue to grow especially once the British show up right Egypt and the Syrian Palestine province which of course is a particular interest to us contribute each another 25,000 or so and those were the major communities and then there were small to mid-size communities strung across North Africa and scattered throughout the East but I had to admit that the other cause of my Eurocentrism is that the vast majority of the Jews at this point in our story were in Europe by some estimates more than 80 percent it's the inversion of the situation that reigned during the height of the Islamic empire of the Middle Ages population statistics aside what we really need to do is talk about politics and a little bit of war or at least revolution because the Sultan had been happily ruling in Istanbul for centuries when in 1908 the Ottoman Empire was rocked by The Young Turk revolution right it's not just a media tag The Young Turks were a real movement the event that triggered this revolution was actually meeting between Edward the seventh of the UK and nicholas ii of russia in June 1908 nothing like two despots getting together to divide up the world and the officers of the Ottoman Empire were actually afraid that the two were indeed plotting to carve up all the Ottoman holdings and the Balkans remember at this point the Empire extended into a we think of today as Greece and most of the Vulcan so the army units across the Balkan provinces of the Empire rose in mutiny against Sultan Abdul Hameed the second motivated by his are basically to strengthen and preserve the state they weren't looking to take things down it wasn't the full birth of a Turkish Republic I will have to wait until 1923 when Mustafa Kemal atatürk fights the Turkish war of independence and who knows maybe we'll talk about it but there's a very interesting science connection to him but what this was was the first wave of violence or at least revolution that washed away some of the structures of the past holding back the future on July 24th the Sultan capitulated to the revolutionaries and he restored the Ottoman Constitution something that had been suspended for decades and thus the second constitutional era began brief though it was underground societies began to declare themselves as political parties the largest of which was the committee of Union and progress a liberal reform movement basically whose goal was to modernize the Ottoman Empire on the lines of the Japanese success story for familiar with the turn of the 20th century and return it to its former glory as a world power and by the end of 1908 elections were held for the first sitting of the seventh Senate of the Ottoman Empire in over 30 years and lo and behold the COP the committee of Union and progress rose to the head of the government and that was good news for the Jews or so it appeared because the Young Turk revolution stirred great excitement amongst the Zionists for two basic reasons first they expected that it would have an impact on Jewish immigration and land purchase in Israel and in the end this actually did prove to be significant although perhaps not in the way they expected we'll discuss that later but for now - future president of the State of Israel and icon of the practical Zionist approach expressed the hopes that the revolution raised for him in a 1910 letter saying of special significance where the anticipated changes in the administration of the provinces perhaps pre-staging an easing of restrictions in Palestine constrictions on immigration and land purchase the other shift triggered amongst the Zionists by the Young Turk revolution was a revival in a sense of political Zionism you know in the decades since her slit died the Zionist Congress had come to be seen as a semiannual excuse for a prolonged and somewhat fruitless conversation its leaders lack the status that Herzl had had or at least the will to stand before the princes of the world and negotiate for a homeland and instead as we saw in last episode the energy of Zionism had moved toward the inch-by-inch practical approach of creating facts on the ground one more dumb one more goat which is its own particular type of vision but in 1908 the young David ben-gurion of course future Prime Minister and rightly known as the father of the modern state he became so fired with the idea that the Empire was moving toward democracy that he changed tax entirely from practical Zionism as we'll discuss in some later episode ben-gurion never gave up on his belief in the Jewish worker as the primary unit of design is ideal but on the eve of the first world war he did turn away from the pioneering model of redeeming the land through the conquest of labour to a political vision and in the long run this change in attitude inspired by what amounted to a half failed rebellion may be one of the most significant events of the 20th century but in the short term in ben-gurion sighs the Young Turk revolution was a golden opportunity for the shoe right as the growing Jewish community in the land had come to be known because when the Sultan ruled the Jews were nothing more than another group of his subjects and the Palestine province was way too far from the seat of power to be of any real interest to him but a parliament would give the issue of real representation and it would allow it to assert its cause against the rising air of national voices of the empire and to tout the benefits of Jewish nationalism to the newly liberated Ottoman Empire ben-gurion even had dreams of uniting all Turkish dirty into a real political force that could rally behind the Zionist cause and so fired by that revolutionary excitement and frankly burned out from the poverty and back-breaking labor of a cultural life in Israel he and the future president you Ben's being ezreal show hot who we'll discuss later headed off to law school in Istanbul but as ben-gurion had no money no papers he wasn't even a citizen of Russia anymore he was deserted he didn't speak Turkish or Ladino which he only discovered was the language of the Jews when he got there he had to go by the way of the Jewish community in Salonika and we'll spend time talking about ben-gurion but I just want you to appreciate the power of the will that drove this man no money no papers no language I'm going to law school so it's Lanka was actually the home base of the committee for a union in progress and therefore really of the Young Turk rebellion but it was also a Jewish town it was so Jewish that the port was closed on Shabbat and then grinn later would claim that the site of Jewish sailors Jewish stevedores Jewish porters and Jewish mertens was his first glimpse his first idea even of what a truly multi-layered Jewish economy and society could actually look like and it's worth pausing just for a moment on that image the Salonika was at a particular socio-economic moment at this point in its history and one that's expressible a lot of the forces that shape the world of the day and are at play in our story though we can't discuss them all it seems first of all just to get a little backstory the Jews had been in Salonika since the before the destruction of the Second Temple but they really came in a significant number in the aftermath of the expulsion from Spain when if you'll recall the Ottoman Empire was more than happy to welcome these industrious and intelligent refugees from sporadic and they flourished throughout the 16th century and hopefully it wasn't so long ago you recall shabd heights be that false messiah if not go back to episode 9 for his story but just know that his fame really grew out of the Salonika community and even after his death he remained a hotbed of savety and heresy if you want to do a little bit of research on crazy conspiracy theories by the way go look up the connection between the Young Turks Turkish nationalism in general and the dawn man those secret followers of sob heights fee who continued to worship Him as a messiah even after he converted back to modernity because in modernity it was industrialization that brought life to Salonika and that was what so moved ben-gurion lay in the 19th century three major rail lines those which dominated the trade of the whole Balkan Peninsula placed their head at Salonika and the ship tonnage passing through the port doubled to two million tons a year by 1912 but fascinatingly enough until 1909 there was no direct rail access to the key everything that wanted to be shipped had to pass over a kilometer of bad Road from the rail station to the port and it all went in the hands of various groups of Salonika porters all of whom of course were Jews all told according to the reports there were seven major groups of porters each which handle a particular type of goods some dried food others leather it's open bad a third bulk grains you understand each group have to join a count book and at the end of the day they gather in their synagogue to pray together change their clothes and head to the pub to drink Arak and discuss the day's work and when the Salonika key company in the oriental railways company signed a deal to bring the trains all the way to the docks this world disappeared just like that a victim of economic efficiency in these developments together with the power gained by labor unions in the wake of the young turk revolt may the Zionist cause pretty much an uphill battle in Salonika and amongst turkish jury in general the Socialist Workers Federation was led by a Jew Abraham Vinay Ora and one might think that they'd be a natural ally to ban growing in his poll a Zion brand of socialism ISM but one would be wrong these were socialists more along the lines of the Bund in Europe that he spoke about staunchly internationalist and therefore fiercely anti-zionist nevertheless Zionists are know the Jews saw the consolidation of the Ottoman state under the Young Turk reforms as a good thing and that whether that was simply because they wanted to live in a strong centralized state something we've touched on many times in this story that is the instability of sort of multiple poles of power that tends to cause the greatest problems for the Jews in history or whether they saw their own Zionist nationalist hopes as dependent on Ottoman grace the Jews were a key minority community to which the Young Turks looked as allies and aides in their plan of modernization and the Jewish a lead of Salonika were heavily involved in funding the committee for you and in progress many went on actually to hold important political positions in the government through World War one and even up through the birth of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and in fact the link between the Cu P and the Jews was so close that it gave rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories the British Embassy which during the Young Turk revolt actually supported the liberal wing of Young Turks against the CFP even labeled the Cu P as the Jew committee of Union and progress in the words of Sir Gerard Luther British ambassador in Istanbul in 1909 the Turk devoid of real business instincts has come under the almost exclusive economic and financial domination of the Jew and as turkey happens to contain the places sacred to Israel it is natural that the Jews should strive to maintain a position of exclusive influence and utilize it for the furtherance of his ideal in return for in quotes unrestricted immigration of foreign Jews he's offered the Young Turks to take over the whole of the Turkish national debt the Jew can help the young turk with his brains business enterprise his enormous influence in the press of Europe and money in return for economic advantages and the realization of the ideals of Israel while the Young Turk wants to regain and assert his national independence and get rid of the tutelage of Europe as part of a general Asiatic revival classic huh is a prime example of the mix between anti-semitic theories of Jewish world domination and the colonialist conviction that non-western peoples were completely incapable of modern government without some European hand at the wheel also notice by the way how sure Gerard lumps together the practical Zionist aspiration for immigration and the hope to leverage Ottoman debt in service of the Jewish National dream that actually belonged to Herzl and political Zionism whatever you can't expect him to understand the difference so at first it indeed seemed that the Jewish connection to the COP would bear real fruit to the Zionist dream but it wasn't to be Arab nationalism is on the rise and it's rapidly becoming a major source of concern for the government in Istanbul and the stability of its Empire the Arab nationalists saw the potential the 1908 revolution in a very different light than the Jews did they thought that a weak Empire was their only hope for national liberation and they hope that this instability would only grow and thus they developed a double hostility toward the Jews not only over the specific competition for the Land of Israel but for their support of the new Turkish government in general and that hostility in turn poured cold water over any hopes that the Jewish connection with the Young Turks could turn into a Zion as a windfall in 1909 at the 9th Zionist Congress in the wake of the Young Turk revolution David Wilson Herzl x' friend who had inherited the presidency of the zionist organization announced the following goal we aspire to build within the framework of the Ottoman Empire and nationality like other nationalities in the Ottoman realm our ambition is to earn the reputation of being the most loyal trustworthy and useful nation amongst the national groups but a Jewish nation but when Viktor Jacobson the Zionist representative in Istanbul returned to the city in 1910 after the dust of Revolution encounter illusion had settled he felt a distinctly cool and guarded attitude toward Zion as' aspirations amongst even Jewish leaders much less than unionists in fact he reported that a prominent member the COP in her circle told him that he still favored Jewish immigration into Turkey the event snows sympathy towards Zionist aspirations which he implied were separatist they could undermine they lead to harmonious relations with the Jewish community this he would regret because the Jews were very valuable element you hear the threat but you know what in the end man plans God laughs or cries because within a few years everybody's hopes were overturned Young Turks political forums were not enough to save the Empire from being carved up by the European colonial powers David ben-gurion never got his law degree but rather together with so many other Zionist wander the world during the warriors struggling with poverty illness and a political vision seemingly too large for any one man unless that one man could embody the will of a whole nation and the Zionist hopes of attaining an instant home through ottoman agency were swept away as well when the smoke of war clears will appear that an Anglo zionist alliance is the wave of the future at least until it doesn't okay we need to talk about a complex subject one with legal moral and emotional dimensions that in many ways still define the posture of on Israel in Eretz Israel down to this very day and what I'm speaking about is land purchase and specifically I want to take a look at the link between Jewish immigration or as we Zionists like to think of it repatriation land purchase law and the nature of the Ottoman Empire you got all that and you need to know that the Ottoman Empire was struggling to function well before the Young Turk revolt in 1908 and in the mid 19th century it had gone through a period of governmental reform on every front and the most significant element of these Tanzimat reforms for our story was the land code of 1858 which was quickly followed by what's known as the taboo law the aim of these laws was basically to allow the Ottoman administration to better manage state lands and to collect taxes from private land and at their heart were new procedures for registering registering titles land transfers purchases of various types of land after 1858 according to the law no one in the Empire could claim to own land without registry and it's worth noting that the lands registration Bureau in the modern state of israel is still known as the taboo you know in general I don't think of the notion of land ownership kind of like a game of musical chairs I mean ownership of land is a funny thing an early stage of history either you didn't believe in land possession or you possess land because you were born on it or because you were strong enough to take it from someone and keep it down through the generations until everyone else recognized that you were the possessor and then somewhere along the way along with the notion of possession evolved the idea of ownership and at some point writing down the fact of land ownership gained what we call legal weight and what's a legal weight it means that there's some overarching power that I can use to marshal moral or violent force or both on my behalf in order to get my property back from you if you take it from me and for Ami's realm this change in relation to the land is marked by the transition from the tribal inheritances of the first temple to the return by ezra at the beginning of the Second Temple era under the ages of the Persian Empire who of course the legal context for the return you can go back to the opening episodes of season 1 for that full story but it's just another instance by the way in which these two returns design and have such a deep parallel anyway if you want to do some real homework I'll give you some yeah homework do some more work people the textual root of actually this whole relationship between land law and redemption for in the in the Hebrew Bible is the 32nd chapter of Jeremiah go check it out it's a took involved meanwhile for most of the world most of history was basically as I said a dance of musical chairs people are taking land they're taking it back moving through fighting wars making peace making sales sometimes writing things down they're going round and round round and round then at some point and I really like the pagan modernity between the two world wars for all intents and purposes at some point the music stopped and just like in a game with musical chairs anybody who was left standing around the move when it's not snagged the seat as close as possible and wrote their name down on it and then of course they proceeded to take a high moral posture toward anyone who is still playing the land game by the old rules so the Ottomans tried to stop the music in 1858 but life isn't that clean even in the best of circumstances which this was not the land reforms of 1858 are a classic case of good idea gone bad the peasant farmers who in the Palestine province were were concerned where what are known as Arab feta hing we're leaving on lands whose general rule was you gain possession by working it but that possession was not what we think of his private property was still subject to the government's bill furthermore they were mostly illiterate and the products of traditional society and in those societies residents and personal testimony why is that your land because I live here that has enough to support a claim to property that's one piece the other piece large established land owners distrusted the central government in the Istanbul completely they saw these reforms as simply an attempt to add taxes or even outright appropriate their property therefore many evaded registry altogether or played complicated games registering fake identities and separate properties in some historians and legal scholars claimed that corrupt people did not hesitate the register land that simply wasn't theirs an entire village could be gained at the stroke of a pen in the Fela Hien none the wiser so by the turn of the 20th century when the JNF Jewish National Fund and other Zionist land organizations start to seek out any and every purchase opportunity there was a significant concentration of property titles throughout the Syria Palestine region in the hands of absentee owners people who lived elsewhere who didn't work the land which they owned and not to mention that there was a tremendous confusion of documentation and add to this mess the documentary mass the bureaucratic chaos of the late out of an empire which had actually three levels administration function at this time in the land Israel first there were 13 local causes which all fell within one of two jurisdictions either the jean-jacques of Akko or that of Nablus and those Tucson Jack's were interned accountable to the valley of Beirut but sometimes the answer to the government Jerusalem because Jerusalem was so important his sadist made him independently and responsible to the Ministry of the Interior in Istanbul and even in Istanbul there was no one address for the questions of land and immigration guidelines were written rewritten conflicting sometimes even contradictory and often ignored because last and certainly not least we have to throw the endemic corruption of Ottoman society into the mix and so it's easy to imagine how this situation was ripe for the pursuit of the Zionist vision of one more dunam one more goat and right for conflict by the time World War One rolled around there were approximately 85,000 Jews in the Shu they made up about ten point six percent of the population 12,000 of them were agricultural workers scattered across around 43 rural settlements of various kinds increasingly collective by the by and at the outbreak of the war the issue of owned 420,000 Dunham which was about one and a half percent of the land which the Empire defined as Palestine now it's a truism that the immigrants of the second alia were absorbed by the task of pioneering to the point of self-absorption and were often intoxicated by the power and freedom of the homeland landscape as ben-gurion called it not to mention by the power of their isms nationalism Zionism communism socialism in their mix often led these idealists to see the world not as it was but as it would become and all this meant that the impact of their arrival on the Arab population be it native or they themselves economic immigrants went largely unconsidered unnoticed even by many and we're gonna have to discuss the national dimension of this failure at length particularly with our discussion of zeb Jabotinsky one of the more wide-eyed Zionists in this respect but for now I want to contemplate the difficulty on the individual scale of a thought experiment picture yourself as a member of a collective farm a young pioneer Oh we'll put you from ben-gurion hometown of Plonsk you show up in the gap with your other idealistic pioneers you're working extremely hard now why are you in the gallery because the Jewish National Fund has sent you this piece of land which they purchased from man who lives in Beirut who has of course a piece of paper registered in the Tabu in Istanbul that says it was his and now it belongs to JM f you're mine of course you are the possessors of this land meanwhile down the road there's an Arab fella Hina he lives there because he lives there because his father lived there we'll just go one generation back but not getting Demi polemics and so one day your cow wanders into his yard he's a nice guy brings the cow back next day your cow knocks over a bit of his fence a little bit annoying but you know these Jews have moved onto his property and hospitality is of value so he'll return the cow the third time the Jew who in the mind of the Jews sorry the Jewish cow in the mind of the juices just grazing on his own land comes into the veterans backyard he gets upset and so he takes the cow and meanwhile on the Jewish side of this picture what's happened your cow is grazing and it just got stolen you see where this problem comes so the Jews grab their guns they come to repossess their cow meanwhile this air man sees these Jews coming after their cow has trespassed and trampled his fields and he's being attacked who fires first in self-defense you see the Miss Manya will basha wits was born a revolutionary or nearly so in 1882 when she was only 2 her older brother left Russia Reid fled for the land of Israel after having been expelled from the University why was he kicked out he slapped a professor across the face after this man had the audacity to teach his students that the Jews were sucking the blood from the peasants of the Ukraine it beats the kids that used to break the nose of their teacher in the camp I work for by 1899 Monty was imprisoned herself because of her context with the Bund revolutionaries in the factory where she works and by 1901 she founded her own Jewish independent labor party she would go get her the party collapsed in 1903 following the kitchen of pogrom and apparently so did she and in her emotional distress she accepted an invitation from her brother Nahum who was now well-established in Ottoman Palestine to accompany him on expedition to some of the wilder places of the Land of Israel and money and not only found the land healing the beauty of it captivated her as soon as she arrived and in particular the settlement of the Huon which encompasses part of the mountains of the colon extending up into Syria present-day Jordan and she said the who Ron remained without a redeemer and my soul cleaved unto this place the Baron Rothschild Haqq she bought the land quite some time ago but in the purchase agreement the ottoman government stipulated that no Jews be allowed to settle there here our previous part of the story you can sell it to the Jews but the Jews can't live there now a small group of pioneers had disregarded that decision but they were evicted and the Baron resorted to leasing out plots of land he purchased two Arab fella Hien Manya was crushed and she decided to visit all the Varens colonies and see for herself why they were in such financial trouble and that trip made her amongst the first of the pioneers of the second alia to realize that only collective agricultural settlement would be the power to produce Jewish workers and Jewish farmers who could themselves be the basis for building a Jewish homeland always a woman of action Manya left for Paris in 1905 with the hope of convincing Baron Rothschild himself of the error of his ways but she arrived there just before a wave of pogroms swept the Russian Empire and she changed her goal she actually convinced him instead to donate fifty thousand gold francs towards the purchase of arms that the Jews of Russia could use to defend themselves she went out and bought the weapons but in order to smuggle them into Russia money disguised herself as a young Romany a young rabbis wife from Frankfurt bringing eight cases of books as a gift for these she voted the religious academies of Ukraine when in Odessa she was discovered by an undercover policeman she shot him dead with a silenced pistol before he could sound the alarm the guns were successfully delivered to the Jewish underground of Russia not one was lost so when money returned to the land of 1906 two ideas had possessed her mind the idea of collective settlement and the idea of Jewish self-defense and they'd welded into one model but she realized that the only way to convince her fellow pioneers that these two were not only compatible were actually essential for the Zionist dream was by putting them into practice she was a quintessential practical Zionist so Gianna was the first agricultural community founded by Jews in the lower Galilee in 1901 the JCA of the jewish colonization association took over management of some land purchased originally by Baron Rothschild and they developed their both emotion of awe like a sharecroppers colony basically everyone privately owned the land of which they work but they worked together for sort of harvest and distribution it was a motion and a training farm for unskilled workers it was a very important place were many of the young the agricultural pioneers actually learned how to farm now a few years after its founding most of the workers on the farm were members of the pole a/c own right this National Socialist Zionist movement and also the youth movement pop watts a year and when Manya joined them in 1907 she convinced her fellow idealist to join an experiment that would change the course of the Jewish story and some might say human history Manya managed to convince the Sahara farm manager to set up a collective which will allow the workers to organize their own schedule and share their pay and twenty workers mostly from the policy own join the collective which could rightly be called the first experiment and collective agriculture in the Land of Israel but the socialism and the collectivism was only a secondary goal for Manya she knew that in order to work the land you have to be able to defend it the settlers of the first alia had relied upon the political protection of the foreign consulate whose citizenship they claimed and had paid Arab Watchmen to guard their farm settlements and crops but the pioneers of the you know yeah like Manya will wash wits I can't say that name we're often fugitives they left there are former countries and some had deserted from the russian army and they shaped their identities in the self-defence struggles against the pogroms in Russia they were not allowed to let someone else defend them and amongst the collective workers money found an ally for her ideas in fellow member of that Sahara collective use for Al show hot Israel show hot ouch I thought was a typical pioneer he'd grown up in a religious home he had joined Paul 8c own and he come up to the land from Russia in 1904 upon arrival so hot became fascinated by this Circassians who'd settled in the Palestine province toward the end of the 19th century interestingly enough to this day the circassians are one of the three minority groups in Israel that regularly served faithfully and with honor in the Israeli army but at the time show hot saw them as a model of how a small minority could preserve its identity in a hostile environment and the key for show hut was that they cultivated their land and protected it with their own hands so in 1906 show had organized the first ever group of Jewish guards around the settlements of Zion Yaakov and in the following year he joined Manya and the other polite xi'an members at sahara and establishing not only a workers collective but the secret bar giora society named for one of the more powerful jewish generals of the great revolt against Rome back in the first century the barky hora society was committed to Jewish self-defense and they immediately began a campaign to replace the Arab watchman of the settlements in the Galilee at first it was hard going nobody was convinced that Jews could do it but 1908 was a fateful year for Jewish self-defense first of all money and Israel married you should know and she became Manya Show ha and second of all as you know that Young Turk revolution came about and the impact on practical Zionism was that the revolution at least in the short term weakened the authority of the Turkish government in the Land of Israel which in turn exposed the growing tensions between Arabs and Jews during the poram celebrations the air clashes erupted between Jews and Arabs violence in the streets of Jaffa and as that violence simmered Varga was able to make significant headway and taking over the defense of the settlements in the Galilee although still as a clandestine society but finally in the spring of 1909 a Jewish photographer was ambushed by Arab attackers on his way to the Palladian conference in Sahara now he shot and killed his attacker but that itself led to further clashes in with both Arabs and Jews were killed now we can add to the very fact the Jews were settling land their willingness to defend themselves instead of relying on the Arab protection racket and we can see that the die is cast in the wake of the violence and ensuing tension a meeting of the barky hora members was called and a decision was reached to come out of the shadows the result was Hashem air founded in 1909 a society for Jewish defense which immediately began to send its Watchmen to settlements first just in the Galilee but eventually over the entire issue now the 1st guards worked on foot but they realized that that was not an effective method not even tactically much less strategically so they soon acquired horses which vastly increased their power and their profile and they work to gain the respect of the Bedouin who are of course the chief threat by first learning to communicate in Arabic and then adopting actual Bedouin garb and assuming the swashbuckling posture of the Russian Cossacks whom they remembered from home now the older settlers worried that Hashem might upset the status quo with the local Arab settled population and indeed they aroused the ire of both the Bedouin by preventing them from stealing and the Arab guards whose job they had taken who were often by the way a little bit closer and League than one might light between the thief and the watchman but despite this Hashem era was known actually for the restraint the characteristic which would follow Jewish defense down to our day in fact the hush Romero rules of engagement read as follows you do not seek an encounter with a thief you chase them off and only when you have no choice do you shoot after all he's out to steal a bag of green not to murder you so don't murder him drive him off don't sleep at night if you hear footsteps fire into the distance if you feel as he's a few steps away and you can fire without him falling upon you fire into the distance only if your life is in danger fire now hush Oh Merritt never numbered more than a hundred men even at its peak but its impact on Jewish destiny and therefore really on world history was tremendous it was the first embodiment of Jewish self-defense in the Land of Israel and really the nucleus of today's military least in concept in 1920 Jumeirah reorganized itself to become the Hagana the underground army which of course went on to lead the backbone of the Israel Defense Forces right Sava Hagana Lee's rail but that's a story for another time and we'll tell it along with the Jewish Legion and other pieces that you may be familiar with for now I just want to end on a note of astonishment at how well all these pieces are coming together the old world is cracking and there's a tremendous opportunity to build the new and the spirit of the Maccabees is stirring once again that powerful and strange notion that sovereignty over geography is critical to Jewish destiny and lo and behold out of the ghettos and achieve Oh to the pale of settlement out of a culture of intellectual abstraction and physical disempowerment the Jewish warrior is rising once again I just want to thank a few people I want to thank all the folks that give their hard-earned money help make this show possible to keep it free and widely available and I want to invite you to join them go right now to rob Mike Tom in the upper right hand corner you'll see a be a patron button you can click on through to get a little bit of perb podcast support you can also connect to me by the way on Facebook send me your questions for season three I'm already trying to bubble over with ideas I want to thank the Land of Israel Network that's the Land of Israel calm for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many wonderful people I want to thank the partes gives a to lay our DES org al for building a Learning Institute that allows me to touch the heart to mine so many amazing Jews