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8 GoldaMeir and Other Americans MARIE SYRKIN Zionism in the United States did not originate with Judah Magnes, Stephen Wise, and Henrietta Szold, of course. In tracing the story of the relationship of American Jews with the Zionist idea one ought to begin with Mordecai Manuel Noah, the first well-known native-born American Jew. Although best known for his fantastic Ararat project, which was to have become a Jewish state "revived, renewed, and reestablished under the auspices of the United States" on Grand Island, near Buffalo, New York, in 1825, even more significant were his Zionist writings, most notably, his Discourse on the Restoration ofthe Jews, in 1844, which antedate those of Theodor Herzl by fifty years.1 One also must not overlook Emma Lazarus, whose Zionist writings were partly influenced by the misery of Jews in Czarist Russia, and partly inspired by the writings of non-Jews such as Laurence Oliphant and George Eliot, particularly her first novel, Daniel Deronda. As early as 1883 Lazarus wrote, "I am fully persuaded that all suggested solutions other than this [Zionism] of the Jewish problem are but temporary palliatives:'2 If the list were extended to include crackpots, romantics, and geopolitical realists, it would be considerable. In the 1880s and 1890s, the State Department was so plagued by proposals from Zionists that Assistant Secretary Alvey Adee complained that, "Our volumes of Foreign Relations are plentifully supplied with correspondence on the subject, from 1884-1898 . . . . Every few months we are asked to negotiate [with Turkey] for the cession of Palestine to the Jewish 'nation: The project is chimerical:'3 113 114 PART III. THE FIRST AMERICAN ZIONISTS Clearly, my study must be limited to the discussion of Americans who in fact settled in Palestine. Yet even within these confines difficulties appear. Who is an American? The conundrum is posed early. Although Jewish settlements of varying magnitude had existed in Palestine since the dispersion, American Jews only began to be identified about 1870, and for the most part, were naturalized American citizens and their offspring. When they claimed protection from the Turkish government, American consuls lamented that these were "spurious Americans" who had been born in Russia or Poland, had spent a few years in the United States and had settled in Palestine with no intention of returning to their country of citizenship. One outraged American consul, Selah Merrill, distinguished himself by his distaste for "Russian Jews" who demanded privileges due Americans : "To call them ~mericans' is an insult to American civilization:'4 His successive estimates indicated that from 150 in 1882, the number of these naturalized American Jews in Jerusalem had risen to 1,000 in 1902. In Jerusalem, in this medley of orthodox Jews, living mainly on halukah,6 one Polish Jew, Simon Bermann, who immigrated to the United States in 1852 and settled in Palestine in 1870, distinguished himself by his early plans for agricultural cooperatives combined with individual holdings. His book, The Travels of Simon, published in 1879, stimulated Jewish immigrants to settle on the land. Though his proposals had no practical result because of the antagonism of the halukah rabbis who feared that philanthropic funds might be deflected from their support, Bermann created something of an ideological stir. At any rate, he was dubbed the '~merican:' a designation to which his American style of dress and his eighteen years in the United States presumably entitled him? He can be viewed as a precursor of Eliezer Lippe Joffe, a Russian Jew who went to the United States in 1904 to study new methods of agriculture and settled in Palestine in 1910. His pamphlet, "The Establishment of the Moshavei Ovdim" (1919), emphasized cooperative settlements and individual initiative in cooperative settlements in contrast to the kibbutz.s The question as to who can be designated an American has been arbitrarily answered by some writers on the subject who accept a fiveyear residence in the United States as sufficient. This is as it should be, for it justifiably includes some of the chief ornaments of the American contingent, most notably Golda Meir. If place of birth or length of residence are to be decisive, Henrietta Szold and Judah Magnes are among the few early American Zionists with impeccable credentials. Of the hundreds of American volunteers who joined the Jewish Legion after World War I, an indeterminate number remained Golda Meir and Other Americans 115 in Palestine. Many of them, like Golda Meir, had been brought to the United States in childhood and...
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