GANDHI AND HIS JEWISH FRIENDS Other books by Margaret Chatterjee

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER SELVES PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRIES THE EXISTENTIALIST OUTLOOK THE LANGUAGE OF PHILOSOPHY *'S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT THE RELIGIOUS SPECTRUM THE CONCEPT OF SPIRITUALITY CONTEMPORARY INDIAN PHILOSOPHY (editor) THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIKUNJA VIHARI BANERJEE (editor)

*Also published by Macmillan Gandhi and his JelVish Friends

Margaret Chatterjee

M ©Margaret Chatterjee 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 978-0-333-56627-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1992 by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-12742-9 ISBN 978-1-349-12740-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12740-5 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. To Amala Contents

Preface viii

Introduction X

1 The Theosophical Connection 1

2 In a Strange Land 23

3 Gandhi and his Jewish Friends 39

4 Ashrams and Kibbutzim 72

5 Let My People Go 105

6 Prophets and Horizons 131

Epilogue 162

Appendix 172

Bibliography 176

Index 180

vii Preface

The studies in this book were sparked off by the consideration that I had made no reference to Judaism in my Gandhi's Religious Thought as I had not been able to find sufficient reference to it in the Collected Works. And yet throughout his life, and especially in , Gandhi had so many Jewish friends, and some were very close in• deed. Surely his relations with them must have left some mark on his life and thought. Was there any reason why amidst the proliferation of literature on Gandhi this whole area seems to have been neg• lected? Perhaps there was too little data available for any worthwhile research to be undertaken. Perhaps the matter was of such marginal interest that no one working in Gandhian studies had thought it worth pursuing. However the subject intrigued me and happened to pull together several of my own interests and so I decided to conduct an experiment of my own and try to analyse whatever material I could lay my hands on. This, unfortunately, excluded archival material in South Africa and . The aim therefore was a re• stricted one- at least to raise a few questions and open up an area of enquiry which would hopefully lead to further investigation by those better situated and qualified than myself. One of the studies provides the title. However not all of them are actually concerned with Gandhi's friends. I have included other themes as well, in all of which there is a characteristic intermeshing of ethico-religious, socio-economic and political strands. Gandhi's stances, even if they seem to be uniquely tied to historical circum• stances as he understood them, still remain challenging and worth reflecting on in the light of more recent experience. Events after 1947-48 do not come into my treatment, although from time-to-time there are pointers to what was to come, or to alternative possibilities for the future. I owe much to James D. Hunt's two books Gandhi in London (1978) and Gandhi and the Nonconformists (1986) in the latter of which he has made kind reference to me. I am glad to be able to return the compliment for he has been most generous in suggesting reading and also gave me the address of Dr Isa Sarid, Hermann Kallenbach's grand-niece, with whom I have since been in correspondence and to

viii Preface ix whom I am also indebted. I am furthermore grateful for the stimulus provided by Professor Neal Riemer's thinking on the prophetic in politics. In fact collegial help from friends in America and Israel has offered just that measure of encouragement which a researcher in an under-cultivated territory needs. Introduction

Gandhi had a genius for entering into close relationships with all kinds and conditions of men and women, becoming lifelong friends with some and finding enough in common with many others so as to be able to enlist them in the causes to which he devoted himself. The story of these relationships is to be found in his correspondence as well as in the historical records of their involvement in his work. He absorbed what he found congenial while at the same time was selective about the new ideas he encountered, this all the more so as his own life-style and meaning-system crystallised. His relations with Jewish friends and associates spanned decades of his life and were concentrated in London, South Africa and, back in , Ahmedabad and Bombay. The question immediately arises why he should have been attracted to them and vice versa. There is also the consideration, taken from later in his life during the Vykom days, that Gandhi believed that only those personally concerned with a particular issue should concern themselves with it. The spe• cific context in which this view of his was expressed was the Sikh offer to open communal kitchens for the satyagrahis. This situation, however, post-dates another important landmark in Gandhi's career, the Champaran campaign where volunteers from Gujarat and Maharashtra were sent by him to assist the satyagrahis in Bihar. The difference, however, does not really present a puzzle. In the earlier example, the Champaran one, Gandhi's effort was to bring out the all-India importance of the condition of the indigo workers. In Vykom the pedagogy was different. Those suffering the brunt of a particular disability must learn how to tackle it themselves. The intervention of Sikhs or Christians would not do anything to improve the relations between untouchables and caste Hindus who had to come to terms with each other within the general framework of Hindu society. In the South African period, which is the one which mainly concerns us, Gandhi's focus was of a different kind. He needed to enlist whatever local help he could find, especially European help, in order to win support for the cause of the immigrant Indians. Parallel to this he was experimenting with a new form of community life in which he strove to show how people of different kinds could yet live together peacefully and productively. Finally, he needed a London-

X Introduction xi Johannesburg link in order to mobilise support for the Indian cause. In each of these matters the support of Gandhi's Jewish friends was exceptional, especially the Johannesburg group who understood so well from their own experience the problems of immigrants. In this group, Hermann Kallenbach's involvement with the settlements, and the role of the Polak family, who were the most closely involved with Gandhi's political work both in London and South Africa, must receive a special mention. The next question that arises is whether there is any point in emphasising the Jewishness of his Jewish friends? How typical were they and what would typicality amount to in any case? As far as we can make out his closest associates were not observant and many were theosophists. The Jewish-theosophical connection is in fact very curious, and no less curious is Gandhi's own early interest in theosophy, something which waned but seems to have left its mark on his thinking. Was it their very marginality in South African socie• ty that drew them to Gandhi? But not all were equally marginal. Kallenbach, for example, was relatively wealthy and influential. We seem to find Gandhi drawing to himself a group of idealists whose roots derived from many cultures; on the Russian side from a spectrum of thinkers ranging from anarchists of various brands to pre-Tolstoyan thinkers like Bondaref; on the German, from philo• sophers who had wrestled with the spiritual and the material since the time of Kant; and on the English, from precisely that stream of rationalist utopianism that distanced a man like Henry Polak from the faith of his forefathers. There was every reason for Gandhi and his friends to feel a sense of commonality at the ground level, for all were engaged in coming to terms with the problem of how the new immigrant should com• port himself in the country of his adoption. In the matter of detail there were, of course, major differences. Apart from the difference of colour there was the difference between those at the lowest rung of the economic scale who were escaping rural indebtedness in their own homeland, and those who fled in the wake of pogroms. For the former, in Gandhi's day at least, the possibility of assimilation did not exist. Jewish settlers on the other hand were gradually establish• ing themselves in South African society. There was, however, a common dissociation from the sons of the soil, the Africans. Jewish immigrants did not wish to be classed with Asiatics and the latter did not wish to be classed with the Africans. For neither, however, xii Gandhi and his Jewish Friends was the option to return to one's place of origin a very genuine option, but again, for different reasons. But the place of origin could not be wholly forgotten. As Naoroji pointed out later, a critical consideration for Indians in South Africa was their status back home. If their status in South Africa was hedged in by disabilities, in the home country it was hedged in by colonial conditions. Jewish immi• grants likewise could not fail to keep track of the successive waves of anti-semitism in the countries from which they had come and to apprehend a spill-over of the same virus in South Africa. Both Indi• ans and Jewish immigrants were well aware that the more successful they were economically the more likely they were to be disliked by the host country. That both sets of immigrants had to orient them• selves vis-a-vis two communities that were themselves at logger• heads, the Boers and the British, further complicated the situation. This introduces a further factor which will need looking into, that of nationalism. Both Gandhi and his Jewish associates were critics of modern civilisation, but again from different standpoints. Gandhi assessed modern civilisation in terms of its fruits - colonialism and warfare. A veneer of sophistication overlaid a rapaciousness which was in no way bridled by lipservice to the tenets of Christianity. The prosper• ity of the few was gained at the expense of the immiseration of the many. The non-violent message of the had been cast aside by Christendom. The experience of Jewry had been no less disillusioning. Anti-semitism reared its head from generation to generation. In times of crisis assimilation provided but a flimsy defence against hostile powers and ultimately, no defence at all. Could nationalism provide any solution? In the South African pe• riod of his career Gandhi scarcely looked beyond the target of justice for his people under the umbrella of the British Empire. After 1915, and still more after 1919, the target was different- independence for a nation. The goal was intrinsically difficult given multiple ethnicities and multiple religious allegiances. Gandhi's own innermost sympa• thies, no doubt, were with a concept of community which went beyond frontiers. This part of the story takes us to the 1930s when Gandhi's energies were concentrated on bringing diverse communi• ties and sections of opinion into the nationalist movement and the attention he gave to the world scene was sporadic and less informed. It is for this reason that his correspondence with Kallenbach on the fate of the Jewish people tails off. He is fully preoccupied with Introduction xiii events at home. Belonging as he did to Hindu society whose as• similationist ethos sweeps up all and sundry under its wings, or in its maw, depending on one's point of view, he was unable to plumb the depths of the tragedy which had befallen European Jewry. As the leader of a movement which encompassed the tremendous inner diversity of Indian nationhood he was well-situated to appreciate the pressures which led the Jewish people to discover themselves as a nation, and yet it is clear that he had scarcely any understanding of these pressures at all. His Jewish friends of the South African days shared with him a universalistic ethic which seemed to them all deeply consonant with the inner core of religion minus its accrescences. The pull of this kind of universalism actually worked in an opposite direction to that of national allegiance or commitment to a particular religious tradition. Its roots had much to do with the belief of Gandhi and his friends in the need to criticise one's own tradition. Gandhi himself was in• spired in this endeavour in no small measure by Tolstoy's boldness in pinpointing the gulf that lay between the reified thing called Christianity and the message of Christ. For those who still had moorings in their own tradition the call to self-criticism could be salutary. It probably fell on stony ground in the case of those who had experienced the dismal failure of their own institutions to pro• tect them from personal disaster. Life in the kibbutzim provided a future for pioneers in a new generation, the generation that sur• vived. Around the same time Gandhi's own experiment with com• munity living in his ashram began to lose its momentum. Both Indians and Jews would gradually find that what was initially a far off divine event, nation-statehood, was less than divine once it was attained, that voluntary associations lose their savour when incor• porated into state machinery, that inner diversity is not easy to contain, and that the young are bound to seek new pastures overseas in quest of what appears to them to be a 'better life'. There will always be something both poignant and challenging about the contrast between visions of an ideal society and the push and pull of everyday political circumstance. The momentum of events, the sudden occurrence of the totally unexpected, can tum the course of history into unanticipated channels. This has been part of com• mon human experience. Tides in the affairs of men are less predict• able than the tides of the oceans. Among Gandhi's early associates, I am persuaded, there were few who shared as many of his ideas so xiv Gandhi and his Jewish Friends well as his Jewish friends did. Evidenced in many of their dialogues is a mutual striving of spirit in which the very diversity of their backgrounds witnesses to that subtle combination of rootedness and outreach which was as characteristic of Gandhi's own form of life as it is of the Jewish heart.