The Long Shadow of Joseph Trumpeldor

Joseph Trumpeldor is a name familiar throughout Israel. Most of the country’s cities have streets bearing his name (Haifa has two), and Tel Aviv’s most iconic cemetery carries it as well. But beyond the basics—his one arm, his gallant death 100 years ago on March 1, 1920—knowledge of the man tends to dwindle.

That is a shame; Trumpeldor’s life was short, but his achievements in it were vast: combat decorations in Manchuria, co-founding the first Jewish combat units in millennia, helping unify a factious and fractious Zionist movement in Palestine. And in his death he became Zionism’s most-celebrated martyr—one whose example fused and sanctified settlement, labor, and perseverance and served as a model for Jewish self-defense and Jewish self-sacrifice ever since.

Trumpeldor’s family confronted the same choices facing most Russian Jews in the latter half of the 19th century: Torah or Tolstoy, separation or assimilation, perseverance or emigration. But in one crucial aspect the family differed: its patriarch was, by no choice of his own, a military man.