Nachman Syrkin

Nachman Syrkin

Born: February 11, 1868, Mogilev;

Died: September 6, 1924, New York

Nachman Syrkin was a writer, Zionist activist, and founder of Socialist Zionism. Syrkin was born in 1868 in Mogilev. He received a traditional Jewish education. He started his Zionist activism early on in his life, while he was in high school he joined Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) an organization once headed by Zionist leader Leo Pinsker. He studied Philosophy and Psychology in Berlin for his higher education and started his career as a writer, contributing to a publication in Minsk.¹ 

He attended the First Zionist Congress in 1897, where he was a leader of the Socialist Zionists. In 1898, he wrote The Jewish Problem and the Socialist Jewish State. In this work he discusses his concept of Zionism based on cooperative settlements of the Jewish proletariat. He starts his work by writing that “it appeared as though bourgeois freedom and Jewish assimilation had finally solved the old Jewish problem. But, in reality, the splendor of the solution lasted only as long as the reign of liberalism. The more the bourgeoisie, once it became the ruling class, betrayed the principles of liberalism, the shakier the ideological underpinnings of the emancipation became… the classes fighting each other will unite in their common attack on the Jew. The dominant elements of capitalist society, i.e., the men of great wealth, the monarchy, the church, and the state, seek to use the religious and racial struggle as a substitute for the class struggle. Anti-Semitism, therefore, has the tendency to permeate all of society and to undermine the existence of the Jewish people. It is a result of the unequal distribution of power in society. As long as society is based on might, and as long as the Jew is weak, anti-Semitism will exist.”²

Syrkin goes on to say that “with respect to the Jews, we are driven to the sad and unusual conclusion that unlike all the other oppressed, he has no real, immediate weapon with which to win an easing of his lot. His only alternative, as it was centuries ago, is emigration to other countries. In western countries, the Jews seek a temporary solution in social isolation; in Eastern Europe, in emigration to free lands. How shall the Jew react to his unique tragedy… modern Jewry adopted the rational means of migration. To pave a united road for all the Jews who are being forced to migrate- for the poor driven by need for refined Jews stung by insults, and for romantic old religious Jews who bewail the deterioration of the people and the destruction of the Temple; to give a rational purpose to all those who feel the pain of the Exile; and to raise their individual protest to the level of a general moral resistance aimed at the rebuilding of Jewish life -that is the purpose of Zionism, a movement inevitably born of Jewish sufferings which has encompassed all segments of Jewry. Zionism is a real phenomenon of Jewish life. It has its roots in the economic and social positions of the Jews, in their moral protest, in the idealistic striving to give a better content to their miserable life. It is borne by the active, creative forces of Jewish life. Only cowards and spiritual degenerates will term Zionism a utopian movement. Zionism is a creative work of the Jews, and it, therefore, stands not in contradiction to the class struggle but beyond it. Zionism can be accepted by each and every class of Jews.”³

He believed that a “classless society and national sovereignty are the only means of completely solving the Jewish Problem.”⁴ He attacked Ahad Ha’am’s concept of Israel as a “spiritual center” saying that “it disregarded social realities like antisemitism and Jewish mass migration, which were the real forces pressing for a Zionist solution.”⁵ Syrkin also stated that “the Jewish proletarian masses are the “natural fulfillers of the Zionist idea,” and their Zionism “is more than the colonization projects of Ḥovevei Zion with its bourgeois limitations; more than the longing for a spiritual center of the maskil; more than the philanthropic Zionism of the West Europeans. Their Zionism is social and bound up with the idea of a new society.”⁶ Nachman Syrkin was also an early advocate of the Jewish National Fund, an organization founded to buy land in Ottoman and British Palestine for Jewish settlement. He died on September 6, 1924 in New York City.

1. “Nachman Syrkin.” Syrkin, Nachman, Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/syrkin-nachman. 
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2. “Texts Concerning Zionism: ‘The Jewish Problem and the Socialist Jewish State.’” “The Jewish Problem and the Socialist Jewish State” (Nachman Syrkin), Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-jewish-problem-and-the-socialist-jewish-state-quot-nachman-syrkin. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. “Nachman Syrkin.” Syrkin, Nachman, Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/syrkin-nachman. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎