186 ZYDZI
It is all too common, in fact, to exaggerate the influence of new ideas on the
ghetto communities of Eastern Europe. Unlike the Jews of Britain, France, and
America, or even of Germany, the Jews of Galicia and of the Pale clung to the
old ways with tenacious conservativism. They were as distinct from the world-
wide Diaspora, as they were from their Christian neighbours. Life in the small
Jewish towns of the East had a self-perpetuating quality which proved impervi-
ous to innovations. The practice of arranged adolescent marriages, the ritual
importance of Sabbath observance, the obligatory dietary and hygienic rules,
and the distinctive dress and hairstyles, the kaftan, and the side-curls: all served
to make people dependent on traditional social norms from a very early age.
Youngsters who defied the rules in thought or deed, risked outright rejection by
their relations, and were often driven to extreme radicalism on the rebound. The
maxim of the Haskalah, 'Be a Jew in your home, and a man outside', could be
practised in Berlin, London, Paris, New York; and conceivably in the larger cen-
tres such as Warsaw, Vilna, or Odessa. But in the shtetln, in the typical rural
backwaters, it could never be followed with any degree of comfort.^14
Opposition to mainstream Zionism emerged from many sources. On the con-
servative side, orthodox religious elements sought to preserve the educational
projects of the movement from godless progressives. Thus, only four years after
Rabbi Mohilever's message to the Basle Congress, the Mizrachi or 'Spiritual
Centre' was founded to protect the interests of the rabbinate within the WZO.
This centre was the direct progenitor of the National Religious Party in present-
day Israel. In 1912, the still more conservative Agudat Israel (Union of Israel)
was launched with the aim of rejecting Zionism outright. Its sponsors included
the Alter of Gur. In the First World War, it was patronized by the German
authorities, and by a special team of neo-orthodox German rabbis, imported to
mount an anti-Zionist campaign among the Jews of the occupied Pale.
Socialist criticism, too, came in both limited and absolute varieties. The
Poalei Zion Party (Workers of Zion), founded like the Mizrachi in 1901 and
copying their tactics, kept within the Zionist fold whilst seeking to influence
developments in line with their own particular principles. Its most influential
ideologist, Dov Ber Borochov (1881—1917), used Marxist arguments to show
that emigration offered the only sure escape from European Jewry's growing
economic and social conflicts. Its most illustrious member, David Ben-Gurion
(1886-1973), born at Plonsk near Warsaw, took an active part in the revolu-
tionary strikes of 1905-6 before heading for Palestine and his eventual elevation
as the first Prime Minister of Israel. The Jewish Bund, in contrast - The
Allgemeiner Yiddisher Arbeiterbund in Lite, Poilen, un Russland (United
Jewish Workers'league in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) - denounced the
Zionist cause as a middle-class nationalist fantasy. Marxist and internationalist
in complexion, it was founded in Vilna in 1897, and took the lead in forming the
revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Party. Offended by Lenin's organiza-
tional chicaneries, its leaders sided mainly with the Mensheviks.^15 Polish Jews
of the Litvak variety, such as Maxim Litvinov (1876-1951), the future Soviet