After a closer look at travel records it appears that Alexei Sheftel was joined in New York by one of Chaim Weizmann’s closest allies, the Socialist Zionist, Nachman Syrkin, who immediately prior to moving to America had spent much of his time in London and Berlin. Press reports in July and August 1907 see him warning of the urgent threat from the ultra-right in Russia — the Black Hundreds. Back in April, a meeting had been held at the Union Hall by the Odessa branch on which Syrkin spoke on the aims of Territorialism and Zionism. [1] The year 1907 marked a critical turning point for Syrkin. It was during this year that the founding father of Labor Socialism and Zionism permanently emigrated from the Russian Empire following the collapse of the 1905 Russian Revolution and transitioned his political focus. The changes taking place that summer meant that spreading socialist-Zionist ideas within Imperial Russia seemed no longer viable. It was also at this point that we began to see an ideological and tactical division appear in Eastern European Jewish political life as it became clear that Socialism and Zionism offered fundamentally incompatible visions for Jewish liberation. After the Eighth Zionist Congress in the Hague that year, Syrkin started to move away from the idea of seeking a Jewish territory anywhere in the world, to one that favoured Palestine. Whilst Syrkin remained committed to Socialism until his death in 1924, many of the people who straddled the Socialist-Zionist divide began to fall away.
Boarding the SS Canada in Liverpool in October 1907, Syrkin had arrived at Ellis Island on November 10th, just 24 hours after the arrival of Sheftel in New York. The address that Syrkin had entered as the address he would reside at was 146 Henry Street on the city’s Lower East Side (East Broadway). On arrival, Sheftel took up residence at 78-80 Rutgers Street, just 100 yards away. Syrkin’s Henry Street property was owned by Dr Samuel Ellsberg, a man who had earned a modicum of notoriety earlier in the year when it was revealed by the New York Press that he had provided the outspoken anarchist, Emma Goldman with a place of refuge and a job at his hospital. The article made another startling revelation. In what the Washington Post described as a ‘Special’, Goldman explained how her “society of anarchists” had some of the wealthiest and most prominent in the city, “men who live in Fifth Avenue mansions and are leaders in the social and commercial life” of New York. [2]
On his arrival in Manhattan, Syrkin would quickly pour his energies into founding the Zionist Socialist party, ‘Poalei Zion’. Goldman wouldn’t be Dr Ellsberg’s only famous visitor. Among a lively procession of writers, politicians and members of the Russian ‘Intelligentsia passing through his doors at Henry Street would be Yitzhak Ben Zvi (another Poale Zion member) and David Ben-Gurion, the future Prime Minister of Israel who served alongside their mutual friend, Chaim Weizmann. Vivid accounts of the various visitors are described in the memoirs of Syrkin’s daughter Marie.
Within a few years, Syrkin, now working as a journalist would join Jacob Massel as one of the active Committee members of the Jewish American Congress and David Pinski at the rather more short-lived Poalei Zion newspaper, Di Tsayt.
Syrkin’s first apartment on Charlotte Street in the Bronx was, incidentally, just 500 metres from the three bed-roomed flat at 1522 Vyse Avenue where Trotsky spent the first few weeks of his time in New York. Like his friend Weizmann, Syrkin had first encountered Trotsky as a student in Geneva, and remained hopeful of his Socialist aims — even after his Bolshevik takeover and subsequent escape. Paper merchant Morris Syrkin — Nachman’s cousin — could likewise be found at 2118 Vyse Avenue with wife Annie. Living just a few doors down from Syrkin at 2086 Vyse Avenue was Lithuanian, Jacob Benjamin Salutsky, known subsequently as J. B. S. Hardman. If any one single figure bonded this fairly loose coalition of American Jewish Socialists with Massel and Pinski’s Socialist Zionists and Leon Trotsky it was Salutsky. The friendship between Trotsky and Salutsky went back as far as the 1905 Revolution when both played incendiary roles in leading the Worker’s Council. A former member of the Jewish Labour Bund, Salutsky would later emerge as a leader of the Jewish Socialist Federation after a dramatic escape from the Tsar’s Secret Police in Europe in 1909. As the February Revolution of 1917 got underway, New York’s Jacob Massel and David Pinski published Salutsky and Litvak’s ‘Dos Revoluzionere Rusland’, a history of the various revolutionary movements since the first Decembrists revolts of 1825. In May that year, Salutsky joined Herman Bernstein, Jacob Schiff, Scholom Asch, Samuel Untermyer, Stephen Wise, and other members of the executive committee of the American Jewish Congress, in appealing for a fresh congress to take place in September that would plot a practical course in securing full rights for Jews not just in Russia but across the whole world. [3] The date they put in the diary was September 2nd 1917, some eight weeks before the October Revolution (November 7th) and the Balfour Declaration (published November 2nd). To celebrate the latter, the Bronx-based Zhitlowsky and Syrkin joined scores of euphoric Socialist Zionists — and future leader Ben Gurion — at a bash at the Cooper Union hall in Manhattan, the venue that had hosted Trotsky’s debut address in the last week of January that year. According to reports the audience packed the hall to the doors. In addition to the stars and stripes draped respectfully over the platform hung the white colours of the House of David. [4]
In terms of radical clumps, the area immediately south of Crotona Park in the Bronx was shaping up to be every bit as active as that in Brownsville. Bernstein was there, Syrkin was there, Malech Epstein was there, Salutsky was there and now Trotsky was there. Another Pinski-Massel author and Bronx resident, Chaim Zhitlowsky would complete the picture. A close associate of Father Gapon assassin Pinchas Rutenberg, also in New York, and ‘Murder League’ organizer, Gregory Gershuni, Zhitlowsky had moved through the various layers of the Jewish territorial and nationalist movements to become one of the Socialist Revoltionary movement’s most passionate advocates of the Yiddish language. Despite the obvious challenges Pinski, Massel and Zhitlowsky believed it was not only possible but necessary to synthesize political radicalism and Jewish nationalism, if only to correct the atrociously poor start of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Pinski and Zhitlowsky had forged something of a bond ever since the first Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of September 1908. A controversy had been stirred as delegates disagreed as to the legitimacy of Yiddish. Whilst few rejected it outright, Hebrew was seen by some as the only Jewish national language and looked upon Yiddish as a ‘Diaspora language’ to be phased-out once full freedoms and rights had been established on an international basis. For the likes of Pinski and Zhitlowsky, Yiddish was a living Jewish language and Hebrew its ceremonial equivalent that should be reserved exclusively for historical purposes and for prayer.
[1] ‘Jewish Territorial Organisation’, The Jewish World, July 19, 1907, p.17
[2] ‘Rich Reds in New York’, Washington Post, January 8, 1907, p.3
[3] Chicago Sentinel, May 11, 1917, p.23
[4] Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, December 7, 1917, p.6