The Murder of Moshe Barsky: Transformations in Ethos, Pathos and Myth
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13537120500535373
ISSN1743-9086
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish Identity and Society
Resumo‘This Jew is the greatest political Zionist after Herzl’. These were the words with which Chaim Weizmann honoured Naphtali Hertz Barsky during a public Zionist meeting organized by the French Zionist Federation in Paris in March 1914. While Weizmann appears never to have mentioned Barsky again in his letters, speeches or in his autobiography, his words made a considerable and memorable impact. How did Hertz Barsky earn such great praise? It was all due to one letter he wrote after the death of his son, Moshe, in Degania. The circumstances that led him to write the letter and some of the main motifs in it, which illuminate an important part in our understanding of the lives of the Jews in Eretz Israel in the last 100 years, form the subject of this paper. It also reflects the following observation by the poet Nathan Alterman (referring to the Second Aliyah, which bears a more indirect relationship to the present discussion): ‘The great change that took place in this episode of Jewish history was made up, more than in any other revolutionary epoch, out of the life-stories of private individuals’. We shall follow one of these personal narratives, whose fate over time is instructive of this period and, to an extent, beyond it. Like all myths the changing needs of society caused the Barsky myth to be rewritten, as in each period it yielded different meanings. The drama of Moshe Barsky may well have been lost to our memory were it not for his indirect link to Moshe Dayan. Moshe Dayan’s parents, Dvora and Shmuel Dayan, belonged to the so-called Second Aliyah and were amongst the founders of the first Kvutzah, Degania. They named their son, the second child to be born in Degania, for Moshe Barsky who had been killed only eight months after arriving in Palestine. Moshe Dayan was to begin his autobiography with these words: ‘My name, Moshe, was born in pain’. Dayan, well versed in the Bible and aware of the way Biblical references tended to be incorporated into the founding mythologies of the Jewish
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