Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925 by Brian Horowitz (review)

In recent years, historians of modern Europe have increasingly turned to biography to reclaim overlooked and unknown historical actors and revisit well-known and studied ones. In the introduction to her volume on the role and methodology of biography in modern historiography, Simone Lässig wrote that "the reconstruction of individual life courses helps to discover more about the context."¹ However, Lässig argued, the goal of such reconstruction is by no means a recounting of a coherent, purposeful "life," because "every 'life' is in some way fragmented and every person combines several changing roles, and that these roles in turn express themselves in different, mutually competing fields."²

Therefore, Brian Horowitz's assertion that his new book on Vladimir Jabotinsky is "not strictly a biography," but rather "arguments and evidence to explain the arc of Jabotinsky's development" (7), makes perfect sense. As a biographer, Horowitz focuses on Jabotinsky's "development, changing, and becoming" during his "Russian years," that is, in the Russian political, cultural, and literary contexts that shaped his life and thought (1). Jabotinsky's life, in fact, his parallel lives as a cosmopolitan multilingual journalist, Russian writer, and Jewish politician, were intertwined with the context of the Russian Revolution, World War I, shattering empires, and emerging nations. Horowitz argues that this context—Jabotinsky's formative years in Russia—has been largely neglected by scholars. He aims to show that, paraphrasing Jabotinsky himself, "it was easier to take Jabotinsky out of Russia than Russia out of Jabotinsky" (231).

Jabotinsky's political ambitions became evident very early. In the summer of 1903, in his articles reporting from the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Jabotinsky already presented himself, albeit indirectly, as a leader, seeking to take the movement to the next level. Horowitz demonstrates that because Jabotinsky moved with more confidence in Russian political circles rather than in Jewish ones, he became a proponent of Synthetic Zionism, engaging with political life in the Diaspora.

Horowitz makes a solid case that the 1905 Russian Revolution was a factor of paramount importance in modern Jewish politics on all sides—liberal, nationalist, socialist, and autonomist. For Jabotinsky, it was a life-changing encounter with Russian politics and an invaluable firsthand experience of making history. Initially, he was optimistic about making an alliance with Russian liberals who supported equal rights for the Jews. Eventually, frustrated by the liberals' opportunism and indifference toward the wave of pogroms that flooded Russia during the revolution, Jabotinsky came to the conclusion that the Russian Revolution was not good for the Jews, but Zionism was. At the same time, the revolution was in his opinion a positive experience as a "school for the new Jewish spirit" (66).

According to Horowitz, the fact that Jabotinsky was a member of a disappointed generation of Russian Jews who had put their hopes on the 1905 revolution but were bitterly betrayed, has gone unnoticed by historians (79). Russian liberals, whom Jabotinsky once considered natural political allies, ended up easily switching sides and embracing nationalism, and Jabotinsky came to believe that the only path for Jews was separatism, that is, Zionism. Jabotinsky was also tempted to explore nonliberal political alternatives and became acquainted with leaders, ideologies, and tools of the radical Right. Pride in the ability to defend oneself physically became for Jabotinsky the sine qua non of Jewish national consciousness. However, Horowitz emphasizes that Jabotinsky was the first Zionist to see the army as an essential instrument for achieving national and political goals, not merely a means of protection. Gradually, Jabotinsky's thinking about the actual situation of the Jewish minority in Russia shifted to the imaginary situation of a future Jewish majority in Palestine.

Referring to times when Jabotinsky found himself at a crossroads, especially from 1920–1922 when he lived in Mandate Palestine, Horowitz observes that Jabotinsky's "behavior is difficult to parse in terms of timing and intention" (171). To find and explain connections between his subject's various aspects, Horowitz explores Jabotinsky's duality...