The City of Dreams

When Vladimir Jabotinsky arrived in Rome in the autumn of 1898, it is highly likely that he was totally oblivious to the Roman triumphalism, displayed on the Arch of Titus, which depicted the defeat of the Jews in the Land of Israel in the year 70. The inscription ‘Judea Capta’ had no real meaning for Jabotinsky.

He had attended school in multi-ethnic Odessa and eventually persuaded his mother that he should be allowed to escape the city's provincialism and Russia's authoritarianism – and study abroad. He was a thoroughly Russified Jew, yet unlike other Jewish intellectuals who had willingly relegated their Jewishness, he had no inkling of the historical legacy of his forefathers and no knowledge of the inner lives of the impoverished Jews of the Moldavanka district of his own city. According to the 1892 census, around 112,000 Jews were living in Odessa and constituted a third of the port city's population. While approximately 90 percent of Odessa's Jews spoke Yiddish, a small minority, fewer than 15,000, stated that Russian was their first language.1 This was the young Jabotinsky's cultural milieu; he was a speaker of Russian and Italian rather than of Hebrew and Yiddish.

He was a child of Novorossiya – New Russia – and its beacon city of Odessa. The city proved to be a powerful magnet for Jews seeking a creative space where they could reinvent themselves and their understanding of Jewishness. Odessa was deemed to be an integral part of Russia, yet more than fifty different languages were spoken in this most unusual and independent of cities. Significantly the rebbes of the Tsarist Empire, the men of great Talmudic learning, had no great desire to move to Odessa to encounter such openness. The city was seen as home to the Berlinchiki, the exponents of the Berlin Enlightenment, and those who wished to tinker with Jewish tradition. This tendency was reinforced numerically by the expulsion of Jews from Russian cities in the 1880s and the 1890s, as well as the famine of 1891–1892. Many Jewish revolutionaries were drawn to Odessa in order to escape police surveillance.