Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Natan Aridan and Ofer Shiff The following group of articles marks the 70th anniversary of a crucial dialog which took place between then Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and Jacob Blaustein, President of the American Jewish Committee, on August 23, 1950. By way of introduction we have chosen to compare two texts: an English translation of Nathan Alterman's "The New Pumbedita", and the full exchange between Ben-Gurion and Blaustein. "The New Pumbedita" was published about a month before this exchange on July 28, 1950, as part of Alterman's weekly op-ed called "The Seventh Column". Alterman's verse-form op-eds were regular features in the Friday edition of the daily paper Davar, the mouthpiece of Israel's ruling Labor Party.1 Although he never held an official office, Alterman was highly influential in Israeli politics, and often expressed ideological views akin to those of Ben-Gurion.2 In "The New Pumbedita" he echoed Ben-Gurion's opposition to forms of Zionism that do not hold Aliyah (immigration to Israel) as their ultimate goal. Alterman disdained American Zionists who did not fulfill this fundamental tenet of Zionism and expressed his views of them sardonically in the closing lines of "The New Pumbedita", as "pseudo-profound" ideologues who "strive to advocate why they shouldn't immigrate." Ben-Gurion had voiced similar criticisms in his September 1, 1949 statement to a Histadrut delegation from the United States, urging American Jewish parents to send their children to Israel, and implying that Israel might lure their children away against their wishes.3 Given these remarks, Ben-Gurion's declared position in the exchange with Blaustein is quite startling. Instead of prioritizing Aliyah to Israel, the ultimate message of Ben-Gurion's declaration was the recognition that it is incumbent on American Jews to pledge their civic allegiance to the United States and that the decision to immigrate to Israel must be made entirely on an individual basis. [End Page 1] The Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment and that is to the United States of America. They owe no political allegiance to Israel … the decision as to whether they [American Jews] wish to come [to Israel]—permanently or temporarily—rests with the free discretion of each American Jew himself. It is entirely a matter of his own volition.4 The apparent contradictions regarding Aliyah in "The New Pumbedita" and the Ben-Gurion-Blaustein exchange have intrigued researchers attempting to analyze and decipher Ben-Gurion's motivation 70 years later. However, rather than review the authors' hypotheses in the current issue or presume to offer our own, we shall seek their research questions through a comparison of "The New Pumpedita" and the text of Ben-Gurion's exchange with Blaustein. The first question to draw our attention concerns the different audiences addressed by the two texts. "The New Pumbedita" addresses American Zionist leaders and thinkers and opens with a pseudo-quote from an American Zionist credo to the effect that American Jewry plays a role in the Diaspora comparable to that of Pumpedita, the Talmudic center of Babylonia. This view was shared, with variations, by eminent American Zionist thinkers and leaders like Shimon Ravidowitz, Mordecai Kaplan and Abba Hillel Silver. Alterman depicted this American Zionist belief as an apologetic attempt to justify "why they [American Zionists] shouldn't immigrate [to Israel]." Ben-Gurion, in the exchange with Blaustein, addressed himself to a very different audience—American non-Zionist Jews, represented in his eyes by the American Jewish Committee and its President, Jacob Blaustein. A significant proportion of the research concerning the exchange, including that presented in the articles that follow, attribute great significance to the different identities of the two intended audiences, with a focus on Ben-Gurion's attitudes to them. A critical reading of "The New Pumbedita" may cast doubt on some of the assumptions shared by researchers vis-à-vis the distinction between Zionists and non-Zionists in the eyes of Alterman and Ben-Gurion. It is of course arguable that the criticism of American Zionism in "The New Pumbedita" was part of a wider advocacy...