Who's Who in Jewish History: After the Period of the Old Testament

b. 1912. French writer. Jabes was born in Cairo, but moved to France in 1957. His publications include the seven-volume series The Book of Questions (1963-74) for which he was awarded the Prix des Critiques. Both Jacques DERRIDA and Maurice Blanchot have written essays on this work which is a continuous meditation on God, nothingness, exile, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. A further series, The Book of Resemblances continues these themes.

(Ze'ev) 1880-1940. Zionist leader and founder of the Revisionist movement. Jabotinsky was the most controversial figure in the pre-State Zionist movement. He was gifted in exposition, bold and imaginative in his ideas, and had great energy and charm. Yet he could never gain the leadership of the movement, and most of his career was spent in rebellion against the more moderate policies of the Zionist establishment.

Jabotinsky was born into a middle-class Odessa family. His education was in Russian schools, and was mainly secular. As he himself later stated, he had in his youth 'no inner contact with Judaism'. At the age of eighteen, he went to study law in Berne and Rome, at the same time serving as foreign correspondent for the Odessa press. On his return to Odessa, he obtained a job on a newspaper. The wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that started in Kishinev in 1903 shocked the young Jabotinsky into a greater awareness of the Jewish problem, and swung him towards Zionism. He played an active part in organizing local Jewish self-defence. He attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1904 and was greatly impressed with the personality of HERZL, already a dying man. However, Jabotinsky sided with the other Russian Zionists against Herzl in the fight over the Uganda Project.

For the next decade, until the outbreak of World War I, he devoted himself to Zionist work, wrote regularly for the Russian Zionist periodical Razsvet, and travelled extensively. As a propagandist, he was superbly equipped, being a brilliant speaker and writer in a number of languages: Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French and German. He tried hard to promote the adoption of Hebrew as the language of instruction in Russian Jewish schools, but with little success.

In 1906, he was a delegate at the Helsingfors Conference of the Russian Zionists, and helped to draft its programme. In 1909, after the Young Turk revolution, he was sent to do political work and edit Zionist publications in Constantinople. He left this post because of disagreement with David WOLFFSOHN, the president of the Zionist Organization after Herzl's death.

At the outbreak of World War I, Jabotinsky was in Cairo as a journalist. Together with Joseph TRUMPELDOR, he formed the Zion Mule Corps from young men who had been expelled from Palestine by the Turks and had reached Egypt. It later served in the Gallipoli campaign. Jabotinsky's major goal now became the formation of a separate Jewish Legion as part of the Allied

-187-