The Burning Crusade of a Stateless Wanderer

by Janet Tassel (June 2014)

Jabotinsky: A Life
By Hillel Halkin
Yale University Press, 
May, 2014
246 pp. $25.00

 

 

Nothing would be harder to imagine than Ben-Gurion, say, taking off at the age of 17, as did Jabotinsky, without even waiting to receive his diploma, and decamping, a newly hired young correspondent for an Odessa newspaper, to become a law student, writer,  and all-around hell-raiser in Bern and then, for three years, in his beloved Rome.

Rome was the real thing. It was the beating heart of a country that had been freed in a long struggle for independence led by the intrepid figure of Garibaldi, whose Italian nationalism was tempered by a democratic humanism, and it left Jabotinsky with a lifelong vision of what a decent, free, and pleasurable society could be  like—the society he was to want for another former and future people of the Mediterranean: his own.

haganah. The British, unwilling to fire on the rioters, accordingly threw nineteen of the new group, plus Jabotinsky, into the old Turkish prison in Acre. Early in the summer, as Halkin writes, the prisoners were pardoned, and Jabotinsky “emerged from the episode a national hero.”

It was at a Betar summer camp in the Catskills that Jabotinsky died of a heart attack in August 1940, two months before his 60th birthday.

 

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