“My Messiah Is Not the Messiah for Whom the Revisionists Are Waiting”

Between Love and Rebuke, Hillel Zeitlin on Uri Tzvi Greenberg (1929–1936)

Abstract

This article addresses one facet of Hillel Zeitlin’s messianic thought. From his youth until the end of his days, Zeitlin managed a complex relationship with the Zionist movement, which ranged from a deep appreciation of the movement’s activities to severe criticism, at times going so far as to argue against the justification of its existence. During the first half of the 1930s, the Zionist movement was characterized by harsh confrontations between the labor movements that controlled the World Zionist Organization and the revisionist movement that was greatly expanding at that time, especially in Poland. Zeitlin’s deep involvement in these confrontations manifested in his published articles, in which he typically supported revisionist positions. Uri Tzvi Greenberg joined the revisionist movement in the late 1920s and became one of its key figures. He introduced messianic concepts into the political-national terminology, such as “Messiah” and “The Kingdom of Israel.” This terminology appealed to Zeitlin, even though his messianic ideology differed greatly from that of Greenberg and despite his pacifistic tendencies. These differences between the two formed the basis for Zeitlin’s loving yet rebukeful relationship with Greenberg. This article examines Zeitlin’s attitude toward Greenberg against the backdrop of his views concerning revisionism. It focuses on four issues with respect to which Zeitlin responded to Greenberg’s positions, either directly or indirectly: first, the messianic nature of Zionism; second, the appropriate reaction to the 1929 pogroms; third, the treatment of “Brit HaBiryonim” (“The Covenant of Brutes”); and last, the appropriate response to Sabbateanism. The analysis described here is based on articles that Zeitlin published in a variety of places, from the Warsaw daily Der Moment through the intellectual magazine Der Aleph (which Zeitlin edited and published) and the Warsaw Hebrew weekly BaDerech to a chapter of his work Silence and Sound, which was published in Warsaw in 1936.