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Abstract
Russian-Jewish army officer Joseph Trumpeldor (1880–1920) was arguably the most celebrated Jewish military hero of the first half of the twentieth century. He lost his left arm during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and endured a year-long Japanese imprisonment. In 1905–1906, en route back to European Russia, Trumpeldor visited the Manchurian city of Harbin and attempted to impart Zionism to the local Russian-Jewish population, albeit with very limited success. Trumpeldor’s personal commitment to Zionism received its fullest expression in 1912 when he emigrated to Kibbutz Degania in Ottoman Palestine and subsequently died in defence of the Tel Hai farming community. His career inspired the Zionist movement named after him, Brit Trumpeldor. Abbreviated BETAR, it influenced leaders of the Jewish exodus from China in 1948–1949 and energised the Herut/Likud parties in Israel. Viewing Trumpeldor as only partially successful in his political efforts in Japan and Manchuria may somewhat tarnish the myth of the one-armed soldier and pioneering farmer. The inclusion of the Japanese and Manchurian dimensions of Trumpeldor’s uphill political struggle situates this hero within a far more realistic, and less Eurocentric, context.
Notes
1. Lipovetzky, Joseph, 12; Kotlerman, “Betweeen,” 45. On Trumpeldor, the Zion Mule Corps, and the Battle of Gallipoli, see Sugarman, “Hagedud”; Lipovetzky, Joseph, 52–63; Zion Mule Corps; and photos of Trumpeldor at Gallipoli in the archives of the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv and at www.jabotinsky.org.
2. See, for example, the movie produced by the Japanese fundamentalist Protestant sect ‘Makuya’, entitled “Trumpeldor: Pioneering Father of Israel”, n.p.; Jabotinsky Institute Museum (brochure), n.p.; and Belotserkovskii , Zhizn; Cohen, History, 54, 226 n. 63; Laskov, Trumpeldor; Poznanski, Me-haye; Poleskin, Holmim, 277–302; Slutski, “Yehudim.”
3. “Russian Jews and the War,” 15; Bresler, “Harbin’s,” 202, 214; Slutski, “Yehudim,” 115–16; Lipovetzky, Joseph, 12–13; Shickman-Bowman, “Construction,” 196. Medzini, Under, 6, estimates that the Japanese captured 1300 Russian-Jewish POWs in Manchuria and brought them to Japan.
4. Israel’s Messenger, March 24, July 14, 1905; Slutski, “Yehudim,” 115.
5. David Beltcharchovsky cited in Lipovetzky, Joseph, 12–18.
6. During his imprisonment, Trumpeldor’s political and social welfare goals were expressed in multiple ways. Apart from his specifically Zionist work, he organised history, geography, and literature classes for approximately 500 fellow Jewish prisoners. In what had already become a feature of Russian-Jewish life, he established a mutual aid fund (Gmilut Hesed) to obtain tools for the craftsmen among the detainees.
He expressed his loyalty to the czar most forcefully in an apparently unread 1905 letter to Nicholas II, writing ‘if it were necessary for all of us to fall in battle, protecting Port Arthur, we would do this without thinking’ (Kotlerman, “Yosef,” 229–30. See also 171–86 [in Russian]). See also Lipovetzky, Joseph, 12–13, 24; Kotlerman, “Between,” 41–47; Kotlerman, “Jewish POWs”; Kotlerman, email to the author, March 9, 2016; “Zionism,” in Singer, The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 12, 680.
7. Lipovetzky, Joseph, 12–13, 24.
8. Bresler, “Harbin’s,” 200–14; Shickman-Bowman, “The Construction,” 187–97; “Siberia” in Singer, Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 11, 317–19; “Zionism” in Singer, Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 12, 684.
9. Kaufman, Jews, 28–9.
10. Kaufman, Jews, 28–9; Rabinovitch, Jewish; Weiser, “Folkists”; Bowman, “Unwilling,” 320; Shickman-Bowman, “Construction,” 191; Fang, “Jews,” 272.
11. Shickman-Bowman, “Construction,”191, 196–97; Fogel, “Japanese,” 99–100). Abram’s religious counterpart, Rabbi Aharon Kisilev, did not reach Harbin until 1913.
12. “Siberia” in Singer, Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 11, 317–19; “Zionism” in Singer, Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 12, 684; Roland, Jews, 129. On Zionist forerunners, see Herzberg, Zionist, 101–39. According to the report of A. Marmorek at the 7th Zionist Congress (Basel, 1905) there were several Zionist associations in East Asia: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and Nagasaki. Stenographiches Protokol, 38.
13. Sassoon, History, 217. Baghdadi Rabbis Yosef Haim Ben Elijah (1833–1909, known as the ‘Ben Ish Hai’); Obadiah Somekh (1813–1889); and Yaakov Haim Sofer (b. Baghdad 1870, d. Jerusalem 1935), were the Asian counterparts of European Rabbis Zvi Hirsch Kalisher (1795–1874), Shmuel Mohilever (1824–1898), and other leaders of the Hibbat and Hovevei Zion movements. According to historians Norman Stillman and Zvi Yehuda, these Baghdadis added a vigorous commitment to the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Ottoman and British Palestine and later Israel was then known. Baghdadi publications and Judaic periodicals from Bombay, Calcutta, England, Harbin, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Shanghai, and the United States, carried the endorsement of these rabbis for early forms of Zionism. Stillman, Sephardic; Yehuda, “Iraqi”; Goldstein, Jewish Identities, 15–26.
14. Betar in China.
15. Liberman, “Achievements of our China Betar,” 137; Liberman, Tears of Zion.
16. Horowitz, “Growing Up”, n.p.; also see Liberman, “Achievements,” passim; Liberman, My China; Liberman, Tears.
17. Trumpeldor was the precursor of, if not the direct inspiration for, the intensely Zionistic Noel Jacobs, the non-Jewish lieutenant (later captain) of Shanghai’s Jewish platoon, established in 1932, and of that city’s Volunteer Corps, founded in 1933. At the end of the Pacific War, in Calcutta, Shanghai, and Manila, US army chaplains Alvin I. Fine, David Seligson, and Dudley Weinberg engaged in Zionist political education among their troops and assisted in the rebuilding of Jewish institutions and youth groups. So did British chaplain and squadron leader S.M. ‘Sonny’ Bloch in Calcutta and Singapore and Dutch army chaplain E.J. Vaandrig Seeligmann and Captain Joost Tirosh in the Dutch East Indies. With minimal resources and little overall coordination, these officers inspired their soldiers as part of a worldwide effort to establish and populate a reborn Jewish state. If not Trumpeldor’s conscious emulators, they were functionally his successors. Sugarman, "Hagedud,” 183–208; Ristaino, “New Information,” 137; Kounin, Eighty-Five, 242. V-MAIL: Cpl. Joe Mogel, Manila, to Leopold Cysner, Providence, Rhode Island, March 9, 1945, Cantor Joseph Cysner Collection, Jewish Historical Society of San Diego, California; Letters: Dudley Weinberg, Chaplain, United States Army, Manila, to “friend,” September 19, 1945, Cysner Collection; B. Ph. van Zaiden, Batavia, to S. Rawson, London, April 14, 1947, CZA 55/12.170; J. Strauss, Batavia, to Zionist Organization, Jerusalem, January 1, 1948, CZA 55/12.170 ;E. J. Seeligmann, Jewish Chaplain, Netherlands East Indies (Batavia?), to Abe Berman, Jerusalem, June 18, 1947, CZA; J. Strauss, Batavia, to Zionist Organization, Jerusalem, November 15, 1949, CZA 55/12.170; Pamphlet: Jewish Museum, Milwaukee. “Rabbi Dudley Weinberg 1915–1976”; 2014, n.p.; Brasz, “After,” 374–6; Chakrabati, “Voices,” 37; Silliman, Jewish, 63; Goldstein, Jewish Identities, 194–5.
18. Trumpeldor: Pioneering Father of Israel.
19. Gibor Yosef Nafal in Ben-Shefer and Rozenne, Ha-aliya, 73–5; Jabotinski Institute Museum, 5–6; Belotserkovskii, Zhizn, 6–7; Laskov, Trumpeldor; Lipovetzky, Joseph; Trumpeldor, Tagebücher; Cohen, History, 54, 226 n. 63; Zerubavel, Recovered, 39–47; Segev, One, 19–22; Kotlerman, “Jewish POWs.”