Syrkin, Nachman

(1868–1924)

   A founder of Zionist socialism. From his student days Syrkin, who came from Byelorussia, started developing original theories reconciling Marxism and Zionism. They were set out in 1898 in a booklet called ‘The Jewish Problem and the Socialist Jewish State’. He and a small group of delegates propounded these views at the early Zionist congresses, and sharply attacked the ‘bourgeois’ leadership. Syrkin’s small, bearded figure became a focus for angry polemics.

   Unlike his left-wing Jewish contemporaries in the Bund, Syrkin saw internationalism as a still distant vision. The Jews needed to go through the historic stage of the nation-state. But Zionism had to be based on social justice. In the society he contemplated, the land would be state-owned; both agricultural and industrial production would be carried on in large workers’ co-operatives; and the capital would come from national sources. In this way, the class war would be superseded. A Jewish commonwealth could be created only by mass migration from Eastern Europe to Palestine, where a ‘proletariat of shopkeepers, peddlers, tailors and shoemakers’ would become productive workers. Syrkin propagated his solution by speeches, pamphlets and articles in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German and English and poured scorn on all other approaches to Zionism.

   After HERZL’S death, Syrkin left the Zionist ranks in disillusionment, and for some years associated himself with the Territorialist movement (see Israel ZANGWILL) that sought a Jewish area for settlement elsewhere than in Palestine. In 1904 he was banished from Germany as a revolutionary. After living in Paris and for a while in Russia, he settled in the United States in 1907. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 revived his hopes, and he returned to the Labour Zionist movement. By this time, an organized Poale Zion (‘Workers of Zion’) party had been established, largely due to the zeal of a younger man, Ber BOROCHOV. Syrkin became a leader of that party in America. In 1919, he was a member of the American Jewish delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. In the same year, he played a prominent role in the World Conference of Poale Zion in Stockholm and headed the study commission that formulated the principles and programme of the movement. He died in New York in 1925. Sixteen years later his remains were reinterred in the kibbutz of Kinneret on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. His name is carried by the village of Kfar Syrkin and several streets in Israel towns. A biography was published in 1961, written by his daughter Marie Syrkin, herself one of the leading American exponents of Labour Zionism.