Berl Katznelson (1887-1944)

Berl Katznelson  was born in Russia in 1887, and though he was active in the Jewish parties there, he moved to Jaffa when he was 22. Arthur Hertzberg writes, "In these early years he led a strike, founded a traveling library for farm workers, helped create a labor exchange to find work for new-comers, and wrote frequently for the journals of the Labour-Zionist movement."

He joined the new Battelion of Palestinian Jews under the British in WWI, and afterward was a high ranking official amongst Palestinian Jews and in the World Zionist movement. He founded the Tel Aviv newspaper "Davar" and the publishing house "Am Oved."

Hertzberg writes, "In Katznelson there was a greater harmony between the new of Socialist-Zionism and the old of traditionalist emotion than is to be found in anyone else."

Quotes from "Revolution and Tradition":

"Man is endowed with two faculties - memory and forgetfulness. We cannot live without both. Were only memory to exist, then we would be crushed under its burden. We would become slaves to our memories, to our ancestors. Our physiognomy would then be a mere copy of preceding generations. And were we ruled entirely by forgetfulness, what place would there be for culture, science, self-consciousness, spiritual life? Archconservatism tries to deprive us of our faculty of forgetting, and pseudorevolutionism regards each remembrance of the past as the 'enemy.'"

"The Jewish year is studded with days which, in depth of meaning, are unparalleled among other peoples. Is it advantageous - is it a goal - for the Jewish labor movement to waste the potential value stored within them? ...We must determine the value of the present and of the past with our own eyes and examine them from the viewpoint of our vital needs, from the viewpoint of progress towards our own future."

"Let us take a few examples: Passover. A nation has, for thousands of years, been commemorating the day of its exodus from the house of bondage. Throughout all the pain of enslavement and despotism, of inquisition, forced conversion, and massacre, the Jewish people has carried in its heart the yearning for freedom and has given this craving a folk expression which includes every soul in Israel, every single downtrodden, pauperized soul! From fathers to sons, throughout all the generations, the memory of the exodus from Egypt has been handed on as a personal experience and it has therefore retained its original luster. 'In every generation every man must regard himself as if he personally had been redeemed from Egypt.' There is no higher peak of historic consciousness, and history - among all the civilizations of the world and in all the ages - can find no example of a greater fusion of individual with group than is contained in this ancient pedagogic command. I know no literary creation which can evoke a greater hatred of slavery and love of freedom than the story of the bondage and the exodus from Egypt. I know of no other remembrance of the past that is so entirely a symbol of our present and future as the 'memory of the exodus from Egypt.'"