Syrkin, Nachman

Nachman Syrkin was born in 1868 in the family of the wealthy Mahilyow mask of Eliezer Syrkin and his wife Tsivi ^[1] . He received a traditional Jewish education and studied at a Russian gymnasium in Mogilev, from which he was expelled for arguing with a teacher who negatively responded to his nationality ^[2] . After the family moved to Minsk in 1884, Nachman again entered the gymnasium, which he graduated the same year.

In Minsk, Nakhman Syrkin became an active participant in the Hibat-Zion movement and began to publish letters of political content in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melits , which resulted in arrest for revolutionary activities ^[2] . After his release, Syrkin left for London, where he studied English and tried to write plays for the Jewish theater. Not having succeeded as a playwright, he went to Germany, where in 1888 he entered the Faculty of Philosophy of Berlin University . Already in 1889, Syrkin, together with Shmaryahu Levin and Leo Motskin, founded the Zionist student circle in Berlin and also became one of the founders of the Jewish-Russian Scientific Association.

In 1896, the first scientific work of Syrkin was published, bearing the title "Reflections on the philosophy of history." In parallel with his studies, he continued to actively participate in Zionist activities, becoming a delegate at the first World Zionist Congress , held in 1897 in Basel . There he made a synthesis of Zionist and socialist ideas , but found no response from other delegates. Syrkin spent the next few years in Switzerland, where in 1899 he married the medical student Basa Osnos ^{[3] [4] [5] [6] [7]} . In the same year, their only daughter, Maria (1899–1989), later a well-known publicist, translator from Yiddish and poetess, was ^{born [8] [9]} . He himself began to study medicine in Basel, but his political activities took too much of his time, and he dropped out. Syrkin continued to propagate the ideas of socialist Zionism, in 1898 having published the article "The Jewish Question and the Jewish Socialist State", and at the Zionist congresses he gathered around him a group of Zionist socialists. At the IV World Zionist Congress in 1900, Syrkin and his associates published in Russian the declaration of the Zionist Socialist Party, which later tried to nominate its leader as a candidate for deputy of the State Duma . This attempt was, however, thwarted by the authorities of the Russian Empire ^[2] .

At the beginning of the century, Syrkin successfully combined political and scientific activities. In 1903, his work “Sensation and Idea” ( Ger . Empfindung und Vorstellung ) was published in Bern , which marked his receiving the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ^[2] . In the same year he returned to Berlin, where he tried to resume his literary career, translating Tolstoy's works into German. In Berlin, Syrkin began publishing journals of the Herut Zionist movement in Yiddish and Hebrew , but saw the light only in one issue. In 1904, Syrkin was deported from Germany for “subversive activities,” moving with his family first to Paris , then to Vilna , where he lived until 1907, and finally to the United States. During these years, at the head of a group of territorialists, he led the World Zionist Organization in the struggle for the Uganda program , which envisaged the creation of a Jewish national home in West Africa, but later abandoned this idea, joining the United States in the Poalei Zion movement, which by 1909 already headed . In 1914, Basia Syrkin died, and Nachman eventually married her sister, Masha Osnos, also a doctor by training, a graduate of the University of Montpellier ^{[2] [10]} .

During the First World War, Syrkin ardently supported the initiative of Vladimir Zhabotinsky to create a separate Jewish armed unit as part of the Entente troops, which was ultimately embodied in the form of the Jewish Legion . In 1919, he was part of the Jewish delegation at the Paris Peace Conference , and in 1920, Syrkin spent six months in Palestine as part of the delegation of the World Union “Poaley Zion” ^[11] . This turned out to be his only visit to Palestine: heart disease undermined his strength ^[12] , and he died in New York in 1924 .

In 1951, after the founding of the State of Israel, the remains of Nakhman Syrkin were transported there and buried in the Kibbutz Kineret together with other founders of socialist Zionism ^[13] . His name is the village of Kfar Sirkin near Petah Tikva .

By the age of twenty, Nakhman Syrkin had formed his own, by that moment practically unique, ideological position, which was a combination of Zionism and socialism . Thus, he found himself in opposition simultaneously to Russian Jewish socialists, who were pursuing the goal of freeing the working people of all nations — including Jews, and to “classical” Zionists, who were interested only in freeing Jews as a nation, without dividing into classes. Syrkin considered the leadership of the World Zionist Organization led by Theodor Herzl “bourgeois-clerical” because of Herzl’s attempts to enlist the support of his cause from any influential politicians, including the most reactionary. Syrkin also criticized "spiritual Zionism" Ahad-ha-Ama , believing that he ignored the real conditions of the existence of European Jewry, which included everyday anti-Semitism , pogroms and mass emigration to the United States. At the same time, he rejected the “abstract class approach” characteristic of contemporary Marxists , according to which the national liberation of the Jewish people was possible only as a result of the liberation of all mankind from social oppression. His public controversy with orthodox Marxism has been unfolding since 1896, when the work “Reflections on the Philosophy of History” ^{[11] was} published.

Syrkin’s political credo was set forth in the work The Jewish Question and the Jewish Socialist State, published in 1898, two years after Herzl’s book The Jewish State . According to Syrkin, an indispensable condition for the national revival of the Jewish people is its social restructuring and the construction of a socialist Jewish state. The path to such a state, as Syrkin believed, passes through the promotion of productive labor of Jews in industry and agriculture on a cooperative basis and the abolition of private property, social inequality and spontaneous market relations ^[11] . He owes the merit of popularizing agricultural kibbutz settlements ^[13] . Syrkin also advocated the creation of a national fund that will acquire land for Jewish agriculture ^[2] . At the same time, for him, unlike many Russian Zionists, it was not a matter of principle to revive the Jewish nation in the Land of Israel , and when the Uganda program was put forward that included the creation of a Jewish national home in West Africa, Syrkin became its supporter. Moreover, when in 1905 the V World Zionist Congress finally rejected this program, Syrkin left the World Zionist Organization, along with a number of like-minded people. This group is called " territorialist ". Only by the end of the decade did Syrkin reconcile himself with the fact that for the majority of Zionists, the revival of the Jewish people is possible only in its historic homeland ^[11] . Even his own brother, an artist and architect, (1883–1938), emigrated to Palestine at the beginning of the next decade, where he taught at the Bezalel Academy and the Reali school .

Despite the indifferent attitude to the location of the future Jewish state, Syrkin took a very definite position in relation to his language. He was a supporter of the revival of Hebrew and fiercely argued with those Zionists who saw in him the language of the reactionary and bourgeois circles, preferring Yiddish ^[11] . At the end of his life, Syrkin fought against the veiling of his native organization Poalei Zion , even expressing his readiness to join the Comintern in order to prevent its most left-wing representatives from leaving the party. During these years, he came to realize the need for constructive cooperation with non-socialist Zionist organizations and even with Jewish movements that did not share Zionist views. However, even taking this position, Syrkin strongly rejected the accusations of Ber Borokhov , a supporter of the class struggle in Jewish Yishuv , of refusing the Marxist idea ^[11] .

His selected journalistic articles in Yiddish were collected in the posthumous two-volume book “Heklibene tseenistish socialist-ish font” (1926).

• David Tidhar. Dr. Nakhman Syrkin // Encyclopedia of pioneers and builders of Yishuv = אנציקלופדיה לחלוצי הישוב ובוניו. - 1959. - T. 10. - p. 3585-3586.

• Syrkin Nachman - article from the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
• Bertoldi Syrkin, Nachman // Jewish Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron . - SPb. 1908-1913.
• SYRKIN Nachman - article from the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia
• Nahman Syrkin (neopr.) . Jewish Virtual Library. The appeal date is August 22, 2014.