Message in a bottle from the Lovers of Zion – 140 years on

This week marks the 140th anniversary of Zionism’s first significant international conference, held in today’s Katowice, Poland from November 6 to 11, 1884. But with all the torturous matters currently underway in Israel, who can be surprised if there’s no commemoration?

The Katowice Conference was convened by the Hovevei Zion – ‘the Lovers of Zion’ – in order to formalize the emergent Zionist movement of the early 1880s and to sustain the First Aliyah that had begun with the outbreak of pogroms all across the Pale of Settlement in 1881. Resembling how the First Zionist Congress of August 1897 grew out of the publication in February 1896 of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State – the ‘Lovers of Zion’ conference of November 1884 drew upon Leon Pinsker’s seminal treatise Autoemancipation! published in September 1882. “Pinsker was the originator of the gospel of political Zionism, and Herzl its apostle”, is how Ahad Ha’am eulogized the man.

Indeed, the Katowice Conference made Pinsker its co-chairman, alongside rabbi Samuel Mohilever, then serving in Białystok. It boasted 36 participants, though the well-known portrait taken on the fourth day of deliberations includes only 26 of them. Most of the three dozen Zionist activists were from such cities of the Russian empire as Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Białystok, Kaunas, Vilnius, Riga, Pinsk, Poltava, Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv… Six were from the German empire (Katowice/Kattowitz, Toruń/Thorn, Ełk/Lyck). There were also two participants from London, one from Paris – and one from Jassy, Romania.

As the surviving protocols show, the Katowice Conference was held at the Concordia Lodge, although the Lodge’s exact location in 1884 is something of a mystery. Locating the meaning of the Conference in Zionist history, however, is quite easy: “the Kattowitz convention of 1884 should be understood as marking the founding of a Jewish nationalist movement”, writes the historian Yossi Goldstein, “that sought to establish a home in Erez Yisra’el for the Jews of eastern Europe”.

The fruits of the Katowice Conference were a veritable cornucopia. After all, the secret of Herzl’s later success was that Hovevei circles at once rallied to him: Lovers of Zion from Romania, Russia, Poland and Lithuania, Austrian Galicia – Vienna, London, Cardiff, Cologne. The noteworthy Zionist leader (and early Hovev) Menachem Ussishkin stressed that 185 of the 205 delegates at the Congress in 1897 were Hovevei. One of them – Dr. Karpel Lippe from Jassy, alluded to above – delivered the First Congress’s opening address, thereby stressing Zionism’s continuity in his very person.

Unsurprisingly, veteran ‘Lovers of Zion’ were careful to commemorate their pioneering contribution – for instance, in 1909 they assembled again in Katowice to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Conference, and did so once more for the 50th anniversary in 1934. At the latter, the Zionist activist Joachim Neiger stated that “Pinsker was the Herzl of Katowice, and Herzl the Pinsker of Basel”. At the former, in 1909, Kraków’s rabbi Ozjasz Thon (Herzl’s second biographer – 1917) opined historiosophically, “Without Katowice we would never have gone on to Basel, and without Basel we would not today be celebrating Katowice”.

And the message in a bottle? It’s dated November 11, 1884, and bears Leon Pinsker’s final words from his closing address in Katowice:

Today we are a people hounded and torn apart. Enemies lurk on all sides. Though we comprised a single people in Eretz, [in exile] we have been unable to unite into a tight-knit group. We have fought brother against brother and sown internal quarrels. Self-love and the pursuit of material goods prevailed among us. This has brought us to the downfall we all witness today.

But here in this hall a new sun now shines for us, one that will illuminate the path to future days. In this hall, the words Eretz Yisrael have become the tie that binds the hearts of brothers who had forsaken one another. Here in this hall we have seen old and young clasp hands in love and trust. Here brothers faithful to the premise of national unity have gathered from different lands and joined together to face the shared threat of calamity. Here mutual understanding was also born. We attentively listened to each other, and mutually arrived at a determination without which we could not possibly co-operate for the good of our cause. As we dreamed here from afar of Eretz, the cradle of our nation, a yearning for the land we once departed was reborn within us anew. This arduous labor that gives strength, and this unity that brings blessing – they impart confidence that our work will achieve its goal and serve the coming generations of our people.”