mahatma gandhi and the jewish national home 27with the Mahatma: Henry S. L. Polak and Hermann Kallenbach knew
the Mahatma when the latter was living in and later began his satyagraha
(nonviolent struggle) in South Africa between 1893 and 1914; the Zionist
offi cials Selig Brodetsky and Nahum Sokolov met the Mahatma on Octo-
ber 15, 1931, in London; the Sanskrit scholar Immanuel Olsvanger visited
India in 1936 as the offi cial emissary of the Jewish Agency in Palestine
and met the Mahatma; in 1937, Kallenbach came to India and secured a
private statement on Zionism and two years later returned and met with
his old friend Gandhi; Hayim Greenberg, the editor of the Zionist- socialist
periodical Jewish Frontier, corresponded with the Mahatma in mid- 1939;
Joseph Nedivi, the town clerk of Tel Aviv, met him on March 22, 1939;^8
the British MP Sidney Silverman met the Mahatma in March 1946; and
the Jewish delegation for the Asian Relations Conference met him in
New Delhi in early 1947.
These Jewish associations and contacts fall into two distinct catego-
ries. There are those who were drawn to the Mahatma because of their
shared interests and admiration for nonviolence, communal living, vege-
tarianism, natural cures for diseases, or his philosophical worldview. His
Jewish friends Kallenbach and Polak come under this category. They
lived in his ashram in South Africa, and their friendship continued even
after the Mahatma returned to India in 1914 and joined the nationalist
struggle. Though prominent, as Gideon Shimoni reminds us, “they were
not the only Jews closely associated with him.”^9
In the 1930s, the Mahatma encountered diff erent Jewish fi gures. They
were or ga nized and po liti cal in nature. The Jewish Agency sought his
endorsement for Jewish nationalist aspirations in Palestine. Toward this
end, it enlisted the ser vices of Gandhi’s Jewish friends from his South
African days. When the Sanskrit scholar Olsvanger met the Mahatma in
1936, he did so not as an individual admirer of the Mahatma but as an
offi cial emissary of the Jewish Agency. Soon afterward, upon the request
of Moshe Shertok (later Moshe Sharett and Israel’s fi rst foreign minister),
the head of the po liti cal department of the Jewish Agency, Kallenbach
sought to infl uence Gandhi’s views on Zionism. In short, if his friends in
South Africa happened to be Jews, later on Mahatma Gandhi was courted
by those who sought his support and endorsement for Zionist goals in
Palestine. This crucial diff erence is often overlooked by scholars who
have dealt with the role and infl uence of Gandhi’s Jewish friends.^10
As he admitted, through his personal acquaintance in South Africa,
Mahatma Gandhi “came to learn much of the long persecution” of the