The Jewish History Russia Is Trying to Destroy in Odessa

Since Saturday, Russia has subjected the Ukrainian city of Odessa to a steady bombardment. Even before this latest assault, the fact that the city lies some 80 miles behind the frontlines didn’t translate into safety for its residents: a missile strike on July 1 had left 21 dead. Its usually bustling harbor, meanwhile, has seen a cessation of activity thanks to the Russian blockade. As the city remains in this parlous state, we might remember an earlier time when its Jews attained skyscraper heights in culture and politics. The “Wisemen” of Odessa—as the great Jewish intellectuals at the end of the 19th century were known—were among the first to conceive of both Zionism and such alternative nationalist movements as Territorialism and autonomism, and contributed immensely to the development of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish literary modernism.

A bit about the city as an introduction: founded in 1794, Odessa (the Russian spelling of what in Ukrainian is Odesa) was the administrative center of the agriculturally rich region of southern Ukraine known as New Russia—so called because of its recent addition to the tsarist empire. Its location on the Black Sea made it a natural hub for trade, and an international city that hosted a mixed population of Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Tatars, French émigrés, other assorted adventurers, and Jews, the latter making up over 30 percent of the population by the 1890s.

Jews began to play a crucial role in Odessa’s economic life in the middle of the 19th century. Perhaps even more importantly, the city occupied a vital place as the innovative engine of Jewish politics, especially nationalism. It was the home of proto-Zionism (Ḥibbat Tsion) and then Zionism proper, and the beating heart of the revival of the Hebrew language and Jewish literature, led by such Odessan intellectuals as Ahad Ha’am, the Yiddish writer Mendele Mokher Sforim, the Zionist theorist Ben-Ami (born Mordechai Rabinovich; ca. 1854–1932), and the Hebrew literary pioneers Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, Yehoshua Ravnitsky, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, and Joseph Klausner. Other outstanding Jewish figures who hailed from Odessa include Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv’s founder and first mayor; Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist Revisionist leader; and the Soviet writer Isaac Babel.