of the Halutz movement. Although much older than most Zionist pioneers,
he nonetheless joined an agricultural settlement. Within a short time, he
became a guru and the spiritual mentor of the younger members of his
settlement. He preached a message of transformation through labor and,
more specifically, through working the soil of the Land of Israel. His
mantra became the slogan for generations of Zionist pioneers: We have
come to the land to build it, and to be transformed by it (Anu Banu Artza
Livnot u-lehibanot ba). If Ginsberg was Zionism’s agnostic rabbi, Gordon was
the movement’s secular mystic.
Alongside the emergence of spiritual and cultural Zionism was the rise of
Labor or Marxist Zionism. This brand of Zionism emerged following a second
wave of Russian pogroms in 1903–6. Compared to the pogroms of 1881,
these pogroms resulted in far more loss of life. Moreover, whereas the Russian
Socialists had condemned the pogroms of 1881 as counterrevolutionary, they
endorsed the second wave of pogroms as a revolutionary blow against Jewish
capitalists. This set off a wave of disillusionment among Jews who had joined
the Russian Socialist Party after 1881. Many of these, recognizing that social
revolution in Russia would not eliminate the inherent presence of anti-
Semitism, but unwilling to abandon socialism entirely, created a hybrid of
socialism and Zionism: Marxist Zionism.
As the name connotes, Marxist Zionists advocated creating a Jewish state,
but also believed that class struggle would be an inherent feature within that
state – that the Jewish state would be shaped by social revolution just like any
other state. The immigration of Marxist Zionists to Palestine after 1903
delineated a new stage of immigration and settlement, the Second Aliyah.
Prior to 1903, most Jewish settlements were small and teetering on the brink
of collapse. Marxist Zionism, when combined with cultural and spiritual
Zionism, forged a new, more vigorous type of agricultural settlement: the
kibbutz. The kibbutz was a collective settlement whose members pooled all
resources, and shared all goods and labor. In addition, the kibbutz movement
was infused with the socialist notion of active armed self-defense, teaching its
members to use weapons and defend the kibbutz from vagabounds and other
threats. In this way, the kibbutz movement accomplished two tasks that were
crucial to the development of Zionism and the expansion of the Yishuv: trans-
forming city Jews into farmers, and civilian Jews into soldiers.
Among the early success stories of the kibbutz movement was a young
Russian Jew named David Green. After moving to Palestine and joining a
kibbutz, he replaced Green, his “diaspora” name, with a more heroic one:
David ben-Gurion (literally, son of a lion). Ben-Gurion, who would later
become the first prime minister of the State of Israel, added two compo-
nents to the Zionist endeavor that reflected a seamless synthesis of Marxist
and spiritual Zionism. First, he argued that it was not enough for all Jews
to engage in labor; all labor on the Yishuv had to be performed by Jews,
194 Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914