A State at Any Cost, page 13
Hapo’el Hatza’ir was a competitor to Ha’ahdut, but Ben-Gurion took the side of Brenner. He stressed in particular the violation of Brenner’s freedom of speech. “Who puts limits on what is in the heart?” he asked. He kept himself outside the real point at dispute, stating only that religion and politics should not be mixed. “Religion alone and nation alone,” he asserted. But he could not keep himself from referring to the Haredim as “the blacks.”23
Ben-Gurion and his colleagues at Ha’ahdut lived in a secular enclave, but they did not divest themselves of all religious observances. Rachel Yanait later related what one Yom Kippur eve looked like. “We went up to synagogues and peeked inside through their shuttered windows,” she wrote. “For whatever reason, we didn’t dare go inside, perhaps because of our secular garb, perhaps because since becoming Zionist workers of Po’alei Zion we were cured of going to synagogue.”24
At that time, Jerusalem had a population of about seventy thousand, of whom forty-five thousand were Jews. Ben-Gurion had never before been part of such a large Jewish majority. He wanted to turn it into a unified force and to make the Haredim partners in the government of Jerusalem as a whole. But in this context he spoke of “the conquest of those communities,” meaning a revolution in the Haredi way of life, and advocated for yeshivot, the religious seminaries where most Haredi men studied, to provide general and professional education as well. But the Haredi way of life was too strong to allow such changes; Ben-Gurion did not yet understand that.
The article in which he made this proposal was not antireligious—in it, he also condemned those of his colleagues who treated the Haredim with contempt. But the language was, as was his wont, very blunt. He called for “purifying the filth” and replacing it with “healthy elements.”25 He did not reject the practice of Jews in Palestine seeking financial support from Jews overseas. The New Yishuv, as the non-Haredi recent immigrants were called, were no less dependent on Jewish philanthropists in other countries than were the Haredim, who were called the Old Yishuv. He himself solicited donations for Po’alei Zion.26 The argument was over control of the money. That was the main subject that interested him when he finally managed to get elected as one of the local party’s delegates to the World Union of Po’alei Zion, which convened in Vienna in July 1911. He was delighted to make the trip. That summer he had again been overcome by a longing for home.
He made his second visit to the country of his birth in the five years since his move to Palestine. Shlomo Zemach happened to be in Płońsk at the time, as was Rachel Beit Halahmi; she had gone there to give birth to her second daughter. Ben-Gurion did not dare go into town, because he was officially a deserter and had left Poland on a passport that was not his. In Warsaw he was more anonymous. He asked Rachel to meet him there. She did not.27 But his sister Rivka had in the meantime married a well-off businessman from Łódź and they gave him a warm welcome. Ben-Gurion had long since stopped pressing his family to settle in Palestine; his sister Feigele wanted to study in Berlin, and Ben-Gurion asked his father to support her.28
*
Brenner soon left Hapo’el Hatza’ir for Ha’ahdut. It was an important acquisition and Ben-Gurion did not miss the opportunity to impress his father. “The famous author Y. H. Brenner has taken my place on the staff,” he wrote. “He will be literary editor.”29
At the age of twenty-five, with a pretty firm conception of who he was, Ben-Gurion played with the idea of representing the Jews of Palestine in the Turkish parliament; maybe he could even be the government’s minister for Jewish affairs.30 In the meantime, he intended to study in Istanbul like some of his friends. But first he had to spend some time in Salonica, which was also under Ottoman rule.
“THE SHADOW OF WAR”
A few days after he arrived in Salonica, Ben-Gurion received a piece of advice: under no circumstances should he reveal to his Jewish landlady that he was Ashkenazi. There were many Jews in the city, and nearly all of them were Sephardim. Young Ashkenazi men like Ben-Gurion were thought to be involved in trafficking women.31 From time to time he had to explain why he did not speak Ladino, the principal language of Salonica’s Jews. For the most part he did not understand them and they did not understand him. “All around me is that world of the Sephardi Jews, so alien and distant from me in its customs and language,” he wrote to his father.32 He lived in a small room; the mattress lay on the floor, a kerosene lamp beside it, with books and papers strewn around it. He stayed up until the lamp went out.33
He did not go to Salonica happily. As he lacked a high school diploma, Istanbul University insisted that he complete his secondary studies. He preferred to do that in a different city, before joining the students Ben-Zvi and Israel Shohat, who had diplomas and had gone straight to Istanbul. Salonica was less expensive to live in than the capital city. In his memoirs, Ben-Gurion wrote that he chose Salonica because it was “the most Jewish city in the world.” He marveled in particular at the large number of Jewish laborers. And there was also “that matter,” as he insinuated to his father—the university was not content with the classes he took in Salonica and demanded to see his high school records from Poland, which he did not have. Ben-Gurion dealt with that problem in the same way that people back then managed with such bureaucratic annoyances—Ben-Zvi obtained a forged diploma for Ben-Gurion, from the gymnasium high school he had attended in Russia. Ben-Gurion asked his father to pay for the forgery and to destroy his letter forthwith.34
*
His father was also paying his costs in Salonica. His paralegal business was going well at the time, and he expanded into offering parabanking services.35 Ben-Gurion apprised him of his progress. “The Turkish language isn’t as hard as I thought,” he wrote.36 Four weeks later, he felt that he knew the language well enough to assert that Turkish was not yet worthy of being called a language. “You can’t express a single modern idea properly in it,” he maintained.37 He began taking French lessons as well.
His Turkish language teacher was another student, Yosef Stroumsa, three years younger than he was. The two became friends, and three months later Stroumsa stopped charging for the lessons. They would go for walks along the beach each day and talk, in Turkish, about everything. It seems to have been another very intense friendship. The two needed each other. “Those were my happiest moments that year,” Stroumsa later recalled. “All of me, I owe everything to him.” Ben-Gurion wrote: “He was my Turkish teacher, and I was his guide in life.”
But the impression is that he hated every day of his nine months in Salonica. He frequently wrote of his loneliness. Stroumsa’s first impulse was to deny that his companion had been lonely. “Ben-Gurion didn’t need people,” he said. But on reflection he confirmed that Ben-Gurion missed his family and friends very badly and wrote to them once a week.38
Like his previous letters, the ones he sent from Salonica display extreme swings between happiness and depression. As he matured, he became more aware of his psychological dynamics. “Here, I began in joy and ended in sorrow,” he once wrote. “Is that the result of the circumstances of my life or a fundamental characteristic? Even in my happiest moments I just cannot shake free that profound melancholy that has penetrated my entire being.”39
He sent several articles to Ha’ahdut, one of them in Turkish, and kept tabs on his party.40 In the meantime, he tried his hand a bit at local politics. On one occasion, he broke into a rally where a Jewish member of parliament was speaking and protested that the speaker had said nothing about Palestine. Stroumsa recalled: “All the Jews there were astounded—what did he want of us? What is he saying?” Ben-Gurion tried to set up a branch of Po’alei Zion in the city, hoping to enlist Jewish sailors who could serve as the kernel of a Hebrew fleet in Palestine. The city’s socialists, almost all of whom were Jews, were hostile. Most were not Zionists. It was another conflict between Zionists and socialists, reminiscent of his contention with the Bund in Płońsk.41
Politics already ran in his veins, and he missed home badly. His landlord was religious, and everything was “kosher,” Ben-Gurion wrote, putting the word in quotation marks, “but the Haggadah does not speak to me and the soup dumplings are tasteless.” In his father’s home there had been “secret moans … that wove fine threads and webs of woe and longing … My entire soul is drawn there.” He had also experienced such moments in Palestine, generally on holidays, he added. God willing, he wrote in Turkish, Mashallah, they would all be reunited in Palestine.42
*
While he was in Salonica, Turkey fought a war with Italy. It was his first war. The Turks issued an expulsion order against Italian nationals; in Salonica nearly all the deportees were Jews. Ben-Gurion reported this tragedy matter-of-factly, blaming the deportees themselves for their tragedy. They were Jews who had lived in the city for centuries, but had never accepted Ottoman citizenship. Ben-Gurion remarked that “Jews like to remain obstinate even when it hurts them and never think of their future.” His father noted that Ben-Gurion himself had not accepted Ottoman citizenship. Ben-Gurion explained that he first had to be accepted to the university, because otherwise he would be drafted into the Ottoman army. Students were exempt from military service.43
He was indeed accepted, and moved to Istanbul, but then war broke out between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Balkan countries. Ben-Gurion’s letters read like dispatches from a war correspondent. “The shadow of war stretches over the entire city,” he reported.44 He saw lots of soldiers, some of them mounted on horses; the rail terminal was closed because all the trains had been placed in the army’s service. It was his second war.
“I TRIED AND I MADE IT”
On the first day of his studies, at the end of his second class, the university rector came into the room and demanded that the students volunteer for the army. The university enrolled seven thousand students, but only twenty-nine had enlisted. The rector said he was ashamed of them and walked out; the students went home. Turkey was fighting to retain its control over the Balkans. It was the empire’s darkest era, Ben-Gurion thought, comparing its predicament to that of the Jews just prior to the destruction of the Second Temple. He viewed the war as a clash between Islam and Christianity and maintained that even if Turkey won the war, Europe would not allow it to savor its victory. “We may be on the verge of a European war,” he suggested. “In any case, it is clear that we are on the verge of huge historical events that will send Europe’s politics on an entirely new path.”45
It was a prediction that could have been made only by a person living on the margins of the European theater, looking at it from the outside. From the inside, everything still looked stable and hopeful. Forty years of peace had granted the world a wonderful complacency, wrote Stefan Zweig, who lived in Theodor Herzl’s Vienna. “Never had Europe been stronger, richer, more beautiful, or more confident of an even better future.”46
The university’s lecture halls filled with wounded soldiers; studies were halted. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi returned to Palestine. Ben-Gurion was not sure he could return. He considered going to Damascus to learn Arabic. He thought that, as an attorney in Palestine, he would find Arabic more useful than Turkish.47 But in the months that followed he did little. He returned to Ha’ahdut, met with other members of Po’alei Zion, and joined a medical mission that went to Tiberias when a cholera epidemic broke out there. “If I die in Tiberias I name you trustee of my legacy,” he wrote to an acquaintance.48 Four months later, he was back in Istanbul.
*
His father continued to send him money. The bank transfers from Płońsk were often delayed, apparently because of the war. The same thing had happened in Salonica. Ben-Gurion griped about this in reproachful impatience in almost every letter. Of course, he appreciated the help he was receiving. “I will never be able to repay you even a small part of all the sacrifices you are making for my studies,” he wrote. But he reminded his father that this was a compact of sorts they had made—he would study, and his father would pay.49
Some of his letters home seem to have been meant to make his father feel guilty. Once he wrote that his lack of money had almost killed him. He came down with scurvy, the result of a severe lack of vitamin C in his diet. The doctor attributed the condition to “chronic non-eating.” Ben-Gurion told his father that he suffered from agonizing pain in his mouth: “I couldn’t sleep or eat.” Sometimes he took a loan. “I have already had a number of bad experiences, but I never in my life had times like these,” he wrote toward the end of his second year of studies. His health was deteriorating “and like always,” at the toughest moments he remained penniless. It was time to take stock. “Apparently both of us made a terrible mistake,” he wrote to his father. “You took on something that was beyond your means and I agreed to live in conditions that are liable to ruin all my physical and moral fortitude.”50 In January 1914, he became so ill that he spent several weeks in the hospital.51
Ben-Zvi shared a room with Ben-Gurion in a small boardinghouse. Yosef Stroumsa of Salonica had come to Istanbul to complete his studies and Ben-Gurion invited him to join them. It was a crowded bachelor student room, not clean, but apparently, contrary to what Ben-Gurion had written, none of them went hungry at any stage. Ben-Zvi worked as a teacher to pay for his studies; Ben-Gurion lived off his father and did not work. “They were like two brothers,” Stroumsa later recalled. “More than two brothers—they were always together.” Ben-Zvi had his Rachel, and others had girlfriends as well; some were already married. According to Ben-Gurion, he also had Turkish and Arab friends, but they never spoke about Jewish affairs.52
Sometimes he apologized for his impatience. Waiting for money drove him insane, he explained. “It seems to me that I am not the irate type at all, but when you live in Istanbul in conditions like mine and you get into a mood like mine, even iron nerves can burst and crack.” But he had no reason to fear that he would be left without means. Stroumsa testified years later that Avigdor Gruen sent his son’s monthly allowance. He didn’t send a lot, but he was never late, Stroumsa claimed. If so, money coming late could not on its own have plunged Ben-Gurion into a profound crisis of the type he described. He complained of “nervous anger and depression” and “distress and pain,” adding that “I cannot bear my mental distress—it is an internal hell for me.” A few days later, he wrote: “There are moments when I would be happy if I could at least weep like a small child—perhaps the tears would take on some of the oppressive psychological suffering that has no outlet.” Again he apologized: “Sometimes a heavy sigh breaks through my imprisoned emotions without my even being aware of it.”53
His father and his sister Rivka suggested that he return home, as his father already had before. Ben-Gurion was furious. The goal he had set himself was “a question of life,” he wrote, and only death would prevent him from achieving it. Suggesting that he give up on his goal was tantamount, “morally and spiritually,” to suggesting that he commit suicide. He therefore wondered whether his father was even willing to assist him anymore. Rivka also often sent him money. He told her to stop—if she persisted, he would send it back. In any case, she sent more to their sister Feigele in Berlin, he noted resentfully: “Do whatever she wants with her money, but leave me alone.”*54
He excelled at his studies, receiving a ten, the highest grade, on most of his exams. Once he sent a postcard to Rachel Beit Halahmi telling her about his high grades—he made a point of noting that Ben-Zvi had gotten only a six on a test that he had received a ten on, and on which Israel Shohat, also in town, had earned only an eight. In his reports to his father he also frequently noted that most of his friends got lower grades than he did.55 “I tried and I made it,” he reported to his father at the end of exam period. At first he tended to disparage the quality of the university, just as he had the Turkish language and Oriental culture as a whole. When he advanced and excelled at his studies, he stopped making such comments. In fact, the faculty was a fairly good one.56
*
They were a band of young people from Palestine who were drawn to Istanbul by the revolutionary spirit of the Young Turks; so were many Arabs. Some of them later worked in the legal system in Palestine; three were appointed judges, and one served on the Supreme Court. Others found their way into the political elite. Israel and Manya Shohat were also there. Yosef Stroumsa recalled that, from time to time, Shohat would visit Ben-Zvi, his close friend from Hashomer. If Ben-Gurion was in the room, he and Shohat would have arguments and soon start shouting at each other.57
Shohat postured as if he were the leader of a nation, the head of a government-in-exile. When the Balkan Wars broke out, he claimed to have persuaded the Turkish war minister to establish a Jewish regiment in the Turkish army that would defend Palestine. When nothing came of that, Shohat offered the Turks fifty mounted volunteers that he would enlist from among the students from Palestine and members of Hashomer. He claimed that he had been appointed commander of the unit, with officer rank. Nothing came of that scheme, either. Ben-Zvi, for his part, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Jewish sailors from Salonica to move to Palestine.58 He and Ben-Gurion were active in the Jewish student association in Istanbul and attended the Po’alei Zion convention in Kraców and the Zionist Congress in Vienna. It was Ben-Gurion’s first Zionist Congress; most of the delegates outranked him. He seemed by this time to have made up with Rivka; he went to Łódź for Pesach and his father was there as well. It was Ben-Gurion’s third visit to Poland since leaving.
*
With their exams behind them, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi boarded a Russian passenger ship in Istanbul on July 28, 1914. They were scheduled to arrive in Jaffa ten days later. The Austro-Hungarian crown prince had been assassinated a month before and the winds of war had begun to blow in Europe. On Saturday, August 1, soon after they set sail after a stop in Izmir, word reached the ship that Russia had declared war on Germany. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi found themselves facing their third war. Among the dreams that were shattered at that moment nearly everywhere on the globe was Ben-Gurion’s hope of achievement his father had never enjoyed—being a real lawyer.
