Rebels in the Holy Land, by Sam Finkel

TRAPPED IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF HISTORY

They were accused of torpedoing the whole settlement effort by thumbing their noses at the Great Benefactor, Baron Edmond de Rothschild; they were lazy, they were schnorrers; they were simpletons; they were turning back the clock and reintroducing a new form of Chalukah – dependence on charity; all this in order to allow themselves the indulgence of observing a stringency that the great Russian rabbis had ruled was unnecessary. Acrimonious accusations and counter-accusations swirled throughout Palestine and the Diaspora, and the eyes of the world came to rest on little Mazkeret Batya, a colony founded by strictly Orthodox Jews from Russia in 1883.

Autumn 1888. Rosh Hashanah was just around the corner. The harvest of the past summer had been dismal. A worldwide influenza epidemic had reached the Holy Land and begun to claim casualties. And the controversy over Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor’s Heter Mechirah – whether or not to circumvent Shemittah –was swiftly becoming a practical issue.

According to Jewish law, there is an agricultural cycle of seven years in the Land of Israel. Every seventh year it is not farmed, similar to the day of rest on the seventh day of every week, a year-long Sabbath. The Rothschild wanted the farmers to abide by the Heter Mechirah – a legal leniency that would circumvent the Shemittah prohibition by temporarily selling the land to Arab farmers. Rabbi Spektor and other leading authorities on Jewish law in Europe accepted this procedure as legitimate, but the Ashkenazic rabbis in Jerusalem did not. The farmers faced a dilemma. Should they follow their own religious principles and accept the counsel of their spiritual leaders in Jerusalem? Or should they accept the ruling of the European rabbis, guaranteeing that Baron Rothschild would continue to favor them with his financial support?

Like farmers all over Palestine who were supported by Baron Rothschild, they debated with one another, sometimes furiously, about which course of action to take.

Mazkeret Batya may have looked to other settlers who were meticulous in their observance of Jewish law, such as in Yesud Ha-Ma’alah (in the Hula Valley, to the north) and in Petach Tikva, to see how they were coping with the dilemma.

As it turned out, about half the farmers of Petach Tikva did not rely at all on the Heter Mechirah. Another twenty-one farmers, who accepted the heter of Rabbi Spektor in principle, did not see the prospect of hiring Arabs as economically viable, and they too ceased from work. The rest relied on the heter. The pioneers of Petach Tikva were attacked by the maskilim on the pages of Ha-Melitz and were accused of turning into lazy schnorrers.

Many of the religious farmers of Zikhron Yaakov and Ness Ziona (Nachalat Reuven) chose to rely on the Heter Mechirah and to work the fields. In Rishon Le- Zion, a number of farmers were already engaged in grape and wine production and were allowed to tend to the vines in order to keep them alive, even according to the strict rabbinical opinion.

The great surprise was Gedera, the only settlement fully funded by Chovevei Zion and the only one manned by non-Orthodox Jews. Ironically, these farmers decided not to work the fields during Shemittah. They had been taught by their patron and spiritual mentor, Rabbi Yechiel Michel Pines. He, in turn, had been influenced by his mentor, Rabbi Mordechai Gimpel Yaffe, an “old style” Orthodox rabbi. Pines had developed relationships with the former university students (some of whom were maskilim who had been raised in religious homes) and members of the Russian revolutionary movements who became the original settlers of Gedera. Their determination did not last, however. When Leon Pinsker [the secular president of Chovevei Zion] found out about what was going on in Gedera, the mild-mannered gentleman became uncharacteristically enraged, along with other secular leaders. Hounded by the non-religious leadership of Chovevei Zion, the Gedera farmers returned to work in the middle of the Shemittah year.

The farmers of Mazkeret Batya reached their decision just a few days before Rosh Hashanah: they would keep Shemittah as determined by the Jerusalem Rabbinate. The decision was not unanimous, however. Two of the settlers decided they would rely on the heter and work that year. The majority understood that it had to establish a united front in order to stand firm against the inevitable pressure it would face. Confronting the two dissenting farmers, the others threatened them with excommunication if they refused to fall in line. The threat worked.

Baron Rothschild had this to say about his beneficiaries in Mazkeret Batya:

I understand and admire all religious outlooks. I would never have entertained the notion of acting against [the farmers’] religious principles, but the Shemittah year is just a pretext for them not to work. For there are things they are permitted to do, things that were permitted by the most pious rabbis who lived in the days when Palestine was a Jewish land. Now [their] case is different. They simply don’t want to work. I sensed the rebellion that was beginning….

Understanding that the settlers needed financial support to sustain them through the Shemittah year, the rabbis promised the farmers of Mazkeret Batya a full year’s supply of bread if they stuck to their religious principles.

True to their word, thirty of the most prominent Ashkenazic rabbis of Jerusalem issued a proclamation titled “Kol me-Heichal – A Call from the Palace” in October of 1888 [with an addendum by Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin and Shmuel Salant, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem]. It appealed to Jews the world over to contribute funds to support the farmers who were valiantly observing Shemittah. The “Palace” referred to the city of Jerusalem, the seat of the Holy Temple. The “Call from the Palace” was a euphemism for the onset of an ideological struggle – a call to arms to defend the traditional religious way of life. (This proclamation may be considered the first shot from the Old Yishuv in a Kulturkampf that persists to this day.)

The courageous farmers had many detractors, but they also had many admirers and financial supporters, some from unexpected quarters. This support included rabbis who ruled in favor of the heter, such as Rabbis Yisrael Yehoshua Trunk of Kutno and Chaim Eliezer Wachs of Kalish.

On the list of contributors to the Shemittah cause that was published in Chavatzelet, other famous names appear as well: Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, the dean of the rabbinical seminary in Berlin; and Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the rosh yeshivah (dean) of Volozhin and one of the rabbinical heads of the Chovevei Zion movement. He wrote to Dr. Leon Pinsker, the secular head of Chovevei Zion:

May God grant us that in the upcoming Shemittah we will see everyone upholding the sanctity of the land in all its details, which is the basis of our existence in our Holy Land. And I don’t have to spell out to a wise man like you (may there be more like you in Israel!) that observing Shemittah is our pride, and the pride of all Israel and the Torah.

… Every time a generation wants to integrate, to be equal, and to imitate all the gentiles’ ways, God instills in the hearts of the nations of the world an intense hatred [in order] to distance the Jews from them – so the Jews will know who they really are.

One of the most inflammatory critiques of the rabbinic appeal for funds came from a maskil named Mordechai Lubman, who had some very sharp words to say about the Jerusalem sages and the founders of Mazkeret Batya:

An awesome and fearful storm has begun to demolish and uproot all that we have built with so much toil and travail. Darkness and gloom have covered the skies of the Yishuv, and a fearful adversary has come out of his hiding place with threatening weapons to attack us and eradicate us from the land.

Shemittah is the means being used by the shepherds of Israel to scatter their flocks … the Kol me-Heichal proclamation that was issued by the rabbis of Jerusalem will certainly be read by you – and then you will realize the gall and chutzpah that drips from each and every word. It has the potential to infuriate the Benefactor – which is its whole purpose. For he will spit on the rabbis and all our brothers who repay his kind deeds with insults and curses! When I read this travesty, my blood froze within me, and I was in shock! Such open chutzpah against such a unique man, upon whom the honor of all of Israel is dependent. I couldn’t believe that [these rabbis] were capable of being such “impudent dogs.”

To Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Rabbi Shmuel Salant his colleagues represented the last obstacle to be removed before the Jewish people could finally be liberated from centuries of superstition and exile. Irreligious [BILU] settler Dr. Chaim Chissin viewed Shemittah as just another impediment religion imposed on the farmer who wanted to live a “normal” life.

Mordechai Diskin, one of the first pioneer farmers of Petach Tikva, had this reaction to Eliezer ben Yehudah and his newspaper:

I shudder and cannot calm myself. Now I understand, in retrospect, what the rabbis of blessed memory meant when they said, “the sinners of Israel do not repent even at the gates of Hell!” What the publishers of Ha-Tzvi are trying to do by assigning guilt to the rabbis of Jerusalem…is to create animosity toward the rabbis of Jerusalem and the residents of Mazkeret Batya, and to convince people throughout the world that [Ben-Yehuda] is a

“Lover of Zion.”…How is it possible that the Ha-Tzvi newspaper is not ashamed to print, “And perhaps they succeeded in destroying [Mazkeret Batya] forever,” when they know full well that the writer of those lines is the cause – he is Satan!

The issues surrounding Shemittah observance in 1888- 1889 galvanized many Orthodox European Jews against the aliyah movement. They reasoned that since the source of the pressure brought to bear on Rabbi Spektor and other rabbis ultimately derived from the non-Orthodox maskilim active in the Chovevei Zion movement, the spiritual harm that would inevitably result from that partnership would outweigh the spiritual benefits of living in the Holy Land.

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Rebels in the Holy Land: An Early Battleground for the Soul of Israel, by Sam Finkel, published by Feldheim Publishers.

Sam Finkel was the director of a social service agency in Queens, New York where he helped Jewish refugees from Russia make a new home in America. He received rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (Yeshiva University). While doing volunteer agricultural work in the Ultra-Orthodox community of Beit Chilkiya- he was exposed to Israeli Chareidi farm life. In 2004, while taking a tour guiding course, he learned about the nineteenth century fervently Orthodox agricultural community of Mazkeret Batya. All these experiences prepared him to write this book.