Jewish Space: Chaim Weizmann

An examination of the theme of Jewish space in the life (1874-1952) of scientist and statesman, Chaim Weizmann.

By Eli Barnavi

The following article should be read in conjunction with the introduction to the theme of Jewish space, and the article on Jewish space in the life (1646-1724) of the female German Jewish merchant, Glueckel of Hameln. It is reprinted from A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People edited by Eli Barnavi and published by Schocken Books.

 

In order to understand the "management of space" in Weizmann's case, let us turn to the first chapters of his autobiography Trial and Error (1949), describing the years prior to his becoming the incontestable leader of the Zionist movement. The very first para­graph highlights precisely the point we are trying to make: "The townlet of my birth, Motol, stood--and perhaps still stands--on the banks of the little river in the great marsh area which occupies much of the province of Minsk and adjacent provinces in White Russia; flat, open country, mournful and monotonous but, with its rivers, forests and lakes, not wholly unpictur­esque... All about, in hundreds of towns and villages, Jews lived, as they had lived for many generations, scattered islands in a gentile ocean; and among them my own people, on my father's and mother's side, made up a not inconsider­able proportion." Thus, within a natural conti­nuous environment (the "territory"), the expe­rience of the Jew is one of discontinuity.

 

The following passages describe the comings and goings between the isolated shtetl (the Jewish townlet) and the world beyond. For the Jews of Motol, space did not extend to the very limits of their village itself because of the rupture between them (gentiles) and “us” (Jews). “Even in the townlet we lived mainly apart. And much more striking than the physical separation was the spiritual. We were strangers to each other’s ways of thought, to each other's dreams, festivals, and even languages." In order to overcome the isolation of the shtetl, the Weizmann family, like many of their co‑religio­nists, used four “techniques": the economy, the Pale of Settlement, culture, and emigration (provisional or definitive).

 

Thanks to his father's occupation--Oser Weizmann was a "transportierer" of timber who traveled down the Pina, the Bug, and the Vistul­a rivers as far as Danzig--young Chaim's “cosmology was much broader than that of the peasant’s children. The widening of the hori­zons through commerce was a well‑known phenomenon in Jewish history, and requires no further elaboration.

 

“From Motol to Pinsk”-‑ the capital, where Chaim Weizmann studied in 1885, at the age of eleven—“was a matter of six Russian miles, or twenty-five English miles; but in terms of intel­lectual displacement the distance was astro­nomical.” Pinsk was omnipresent in Motol, as an economic and cultural term of reference, as well as a major Jewish center. For not only was Pinsk the provincial capital, it was also (after Berdichev) the second largest Jewish city within the Pale of Settlement.

 

“The language of the peasants in our part was an obscure dialect of Russian. Unlike the Ukrainian, it had no literature, and was not even written." The peasants were illiterate, Weizmann tells us, while the Jews "by contrast….had a high degree of literacy" but solely in Hebrew or Yiddish: "I myself knew hardly a word of Russian till I was eleven years old." Nevertheless, this did not mean cultural exclusion: his father’s bookshelves held copies of the Talmud, Maimonides, Gorki and Tolstoy, and “on the walls were pictures of Maimonides and Baron de Hirsch, of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and of Anton Chekhov." An impressive ecumenical collection.

 

Could the Jews in this forsaken townlet in the marshes of Belorussia maintain contact, if not real at least symbolic, with the great Russian culture? Five years later, when in Pinsk, "I think I may say that we spoke and wrote the [Russian] language better, were more intimately acquain­ted with its literature than most Russians. But we were rooted heart and soul in our own culture.” That is, in Yiddish, and even more, in Hebrew. “I, for instance, never corresponded with my father in any other language, though to my mother I wrote in Yiddish. I sent my father only one Yiddish letter; he returned it without an answer.”

 

Languages played an important role in Weizmann’s life: born to Yiddish (Motol), educated first in Hebrew then in Russian (Pinsk), he wrote a thesis in German (Darmstadt, Berlin, Fribourg), and taught in French (Geneva), and, after 1904, spent most of his life in an English-speaking environment (Manchester, London, then in Rehovot). It was in the latter language, chronologically his sixth, that he wrote his memoirs—an unprecedented case in the history of autobiographies. During the first thirty years of his life, each change of address entailed the acquisition of another language. Unlike Nikolai Gogol who aban­doned Ukrainian in favor of Russian, or Joseph Conrad who exchanged Polish for English, Chaim Weizmann accumulated languages, and with each language he accumulated in turn additional spaces of reference, as attested by his immense correspondence (over 30,000 survi­ving letters). Yet in all his writings there is one striking fact: this man who traversed the world, first as an emigrant, then as a diplomat, des­cribes a landscape only on one single occasion: the landscape of Motol.

 

His first country of "immigration" was Ger­many. Arriving at the age of eighteen at Pfung­stadt near Darmstadt, he made two perplexing discoveries. The space of "them," which he thought was homogenous, turned out to be quite different: "It was a marvelous new world that I entered with a beating heart, a clean neat, orderly world I had been accustomed to.” The world of “us” was even more surprising: “Pfungstadt was my introduction to one of the queerest chapters in Jewish history: the assimilated Jewry of Germany.”

 

Even their religiosity was different: "it was not the orthodoxy I had known and loved at home. It was stuffy, it was unreal, it had no folk background. It lacked warmth and gaiety and color and intimacy. It did not interpenetrate the life of the teachers and the pupils; it was a cold discipline imposed from the outside." Weizmann fled back home, to Pinsk. On his next adventure abroad, how­ever, in Berlin, he once more encountered a “ghetto,” the colony of Russian Jewish students: "It was a curious world, existing, for its Jewish students, outside of space and time." And even though "toward the end of my Berlin period we had managed to establish a certain relationship with part of the Jewish community of the city.. The gap between the two worlds was almost unbridgeable."

 

The only exception, then as always, was the language. As in Pinsk, the Jewish students plunged head down into the study of the local language. Thus emerged those circles of young people who lived their family lives in Yiddish, their friendship and ideology in Rus­sian, their utopian dreams in Hebrew, and their cultural lives in German. And yet it was they who rose to the historical challenge of leading a single mythical Jewish Destiny and "squeezing" it into a single mythical space: Zion.

 

Eli Barnavi is the Director of the Morris Curiel Center for International Studies and a Professor of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. This article is reprinted with permission from A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People edited by Eli Barnavi and published by Schocken Books. © 1992 by Hachette Litterature.