Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University
Reuben Brainin and The Jewish Polity Roots of Zionism
Did the political culture of fin de siecle diaspora cities shape pre-state visions of settling the Jewish state? A particularly apt entryway into the Jewish political roots of the early Zionist movement is through the social networks, institutional relationships, and migration patterns of the first biographer of Zionist icons Reuben Brainin. He was born in the pale of settlement in Lyady (1862), then moved to Smolensk (1879), Vienna (1891), Berlin (1896), Montreal (1915), New York (1918), Palestine (1925), before finally settling in New York in 1926. He was a delegate to the first World Zionist Congress, instrumental in building the Yiddish and Hebrew presses of Vienna, Berlin, Montreal, and New York city, he took up executive roles in both the Canadian and American Jewish Congresses, considered in his New York Times obituary as the “grandfather of Hebrew letters”, and is largely forgotten in the historical record. By tracing his engagements with the organized Jewish world, and the subsequent political projects he publicly supported, one is brought before a connected polity, its leaders, institutions, and political ideals. These ideals were not uniform, and in Brainin’s own life he meandered between General Zionist, Labour Zionist, Communist, and Cultural/maskilic ideas, social networks, and institutions. His breadth of ideological affiliation eventually led to his excommunication from Chaim Nachman Bialik’s Hebrew Writer’s Association. His life provides a thread which weaves through the broad ideological tent of the trans-imperial Jewish polity, and the role that Zionism played in invigorating this polity ideologically, socially, and institutionally. My dissertation will trace this thread through social network analysis in python, urban point pattern analysis, and other mapping visualizations using GIS.