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Four: Mishnah Impossible: Zionist Attempts to Transform the Jewish People
- University of Texas Press
- Chapter
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The heroic efforts to transform the Jewish people grew out of the ashes of the First World War, with many young Zionist activists projecting their utopian visions as unquestioned articles of Zionist faith. Even as they denounced as moribund and doomed to extinction the religion of their parents, Zionists could not imagine their collective future without an imperative set of strictures shaping belief and behavior. Anita Shapira saw that Labor Zionism became a potent movement partly because it substituted extraordinary ideological claims for once revered transcendent religious principles. “[T]he Palestinian labor movement was . . . first and foremost a great fraternity of believers—people whose lives were directed by an all-consuming faith.”1 Jewish teenage boys and girls in Europe caught in the tumultuous forces of war and nationalist uprisings turned their consciousness of being trapped between a repetitive past of repression and a future where hatred of Jews was deeply embedded into a certainty that a strict adherence to the enlightened principles of justice and equality would produce a utopian Jewish homeland. In World War I, Jews discovered that they inhabited one of the most strategically pivotal regions in Europe. Jewish towns and villages became battlefields for armies marching to engage their enemies, but slaughtering Jews on their way because the latter’s ethnicity and religion marked them as suitable subjects for hatred. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by czarist troops; half a million were exiled from their homes, whereas another 100,000 were massacred by anti-Bolshevik forces in the Ukraine during the civil war in Russia between 1917 and 1921.2 A vulnerable people , many of whose towns and villages were erased from Europe’s new geography and who appeared withered and dying, found spiritual hope, according to Anita Shapira, in f o u r Mi