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The Future of the Jews: Planning for the Postwar Jewish World, 1939-1946 Gil S. Rubin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Gil Rubin All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Future of the Jews: Planning for the Postwar Jewish World, 1939-1946 Gil. S. Rubin This dissertation examines a key transformation in the history of Jewish nationalism in the 1940s - the decline of autonomist visions in Jewish national thought oriented toward Jewish life as a minority community in Eastern Europe, and the emergence of a Jewish ethnic-nation state in Palestine as the dominant mode of Jewish national expression. The main argument advanced in this dissertation is that this shift cannot be explained exclusively as a Jewish response to the Holocaust, but ought to situated as part of the larger process of the homogenization of the nation- state in East Central Europe during the war and in its immediate aftermath through genocide and ethnic cleansing, population transfers and the rejection of international norms regarding the protection of minorities. Drawing on a variety of archival and published sources in Hebrew, Yiddish and English, this study reconstructs the vibrant Jewish postwar planning scene in New- York, Palestine and London. From the start of the war tens of Jewish leaders and scholars, many whom had bee recent refugees from Europe, turned to plan for the Jewish future after the war. This dissertation examines how these Jewish leaders and thinkers grappled with the question of the future of the Jews as they debated whether Jews would be able reintegrate into Eastern Europe after the war, learned about the extermination of European Jewry and observed the ethnic transformation of the multiethnic East Central European landscape through wartime and postwar population transfers and ethnic cleansing. Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….1 1. The End of Minority Rights: Jacob Robinson and the Fate of Jewish Diaspora Nationalism …………………………………20 2. ‘The Arabs will have to Make Room’: Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Population Transfers between Eastern Europe and Palestine….87 3. ‘If a Jewish state were possible, I would be strongly for it’: David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and Jewish-Arab ‘Parity’……………………………...135 4. A New Greece: David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and the Origins of the Jewish Commonwealth ……… 166 5. ‘If there are no more Jews, there is no need for a Jewish State’: Zionism, the Holocaust and the Geopolitics of Jewish Death …………………………………201 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………. 247 Bibliography and Sources …………………………………………………………………….. 256 i Acknowledgements This dissertation has been many years in the making and I owe enormous gratitude to many teachers, colleagues and friends who helped me along the way. I wish to thank my doctoral sponsor Michael Stanislawski for many conversations and advice throughout this period. His work, and in particular his book Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, served for me as a model for writing a critical intellectual history of Jewish thinkers that is rooted in a broader European context. I met Samuel Moyn when I first visited Columbia in the winter of 2010, and viewed him as an intellectual model since. By personal example, Sam instilled in me, as in his other students, the intellectual confidence to think for ourselves, and pursue our convictions even if they might provoke. Mark Mazower encouraged me to write the history of the Jews from the point of view of a historian of modern Europe. Before coming to Columbia I read, and was exhilarated by, chapter 3 of his book No Enchanted Palace – “Nations, Refugees and Territory: The Jews and the Lessons of the Nazi New Order.” This dissertation is part of my continued engagement with this text. I also wish to greatly thank Rebecca Kobrin and James Loeffler for their comments, advice and support. Alongside my doctoral committee, I wish to thank many colleagues and friends who supported me in the past several years. Yfaat Weiss, my teacher and undergraduate thesis advisor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, first introduced me to the study of history. In 2008 I joined a small reading group class in which we read chapter 9 of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” This text exposed me to the core themes of Yfaat’s work, that in turn became the main themes of my own work: the entangled histories of nationalism, ethnicity and citizenship, and how they shaped Jewish history in Europe and continue to shape Israeli society and politics to this day. Michal ii Shapira has been a close friend and an academic mentor in the past few years. Through almost daily conversations, Michal provided me with continued support and professional guidance. I wish everyone would have a friend like Michal. I also wish to greatly thank Moshe Sluhovsky for his great friendship and mentorship. Nathan Kurz possibly read, and patiently commented on, every line I wrote in the past seven years. I am greatly thankful for such a colleague and friend. I also wish to extend my gratitude to many colleagues who read and commented on my work during the past few years and encouraged me to become a better scholar. Dan Diner read numerous drafts of my article on Jacob Robinson and provided me with great academic support. His work continues to serve as an inspiration. Daniel Gerard Cohen’s astute comments have helped me make this a much stronger dissertation. For their support and advice I also wish to thank David N. Myers, Malachi Hacohen, David Biale and Arie Dubnov. I am also thankful to my colleagues and friends Yuval Tal, Tamar Menasche, Zalman Rotschild, Debra Glasberg, Nathan Schumer and Simon Taylor. Many fellowships supported my research. I would like to thank the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, the Posen Society of Fellows, the Tikvah Center for Jewish Law at NYU, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Yeshiva University and Cardozo Law School Jewish Law Fellowship and the Middle East Institute and the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. I would like to express my endless gratitude to my parents, Yosi and Mati Rubin, for their love and support. Their open-mindedness, inquisitive spirit and endless curiosity forged my intellectual world. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Niv Goldman (Nool), who filled my life with love. iii Dedication The opening sentence of Isaac Beshevis Singer’s novel Shosha reads: “I was brought up on three dead languages – Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish (some consider the last not a language at all.)” I dedicate this dissertation to my paternal grandmother, Tsipora Rubin Z”L, and to my maternal grandmother, Rivka Lifhsitz, TB”LA. When Tsipora passed away, we found a notebook in her attic in which she wrote down memories from her childhood in Poland in beautiful Hebrew prose. It always seemed to me that Rivka, on the other hand, had no language to call her own. When the war broke out, Rivka was eleven and lived in Botosani. I am told she spoke Romanian, but she left Romania at twenty. She also spoke Yiddish, but her older sister, the last person with whom she spoke Yiddish, passed away six years ago. Later in the same page Singer writes: “Although my ancestors had settled in Poland some six or seven hundred years before I was born, I knew only a few words of the Polish language.” Though she has lived in Israel for almost 7 decades now, Rivka’s Hebrew vocabulary remains limited. As a child I always noticed how she would never get gender pronouns right. With love to these women who built the Jewish future. iv Introduction In July 1939 Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini signed an agreement that called for the transfer of over 250,000 ethnic Germans from the Alto Adige region in the Italian Alps, also known in German as South Tyrol (Südtirol), to Germany. Within months, thousands of ethnic Germans crossed the Italian border into German-annexed Austria. While the South Tyrol agreement had not been the subject of major international attention at its time, one Jewish observer nonetheless described it as a development that would have profound consequences for the future of Europe and its Jews. “A precedent had been set that the world will feel and never forget,” he observed, “and perhaps this precedent had been set in order to fulfill, in the future, an important role in our own Jewish history.” The author of these lines was the fifty-nine year old Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder and leader of the right-wing Zionist Revisionist movement. For Jabotinsky, the South Tyrol agreement was an event of enormous historical significance because it augured what he believed was an entirely new vision for solving the European minority problem. The League of Nations system of minority protection, established by the Great Powers after the First World War, sought to deal with the problem of minorities in Eastern Europe by granting them a limited form of collective rights in the new states established in the region after the war. The South Tyrol agreement offered a radically different approach – getting rid of minority groups altogether by removing them to their purported ethnic ‘homelands’. Writing in the Palestine-based Revisionist Zionist daily Hamashkif, Jabotinsky reminded his readers that Hitler was not the first to promote the method of population transfers. In 1923 the League of Nations had brokered an agreement between Greece and Turkey that sanctioned the transfer of some 1.5 million Orthodox Greeks 1 from Turkey and about half a million Muslims from Greece, many of whom had already been displaced during the Greco-Turkish war (1919-1922).

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