Dr. Nathan Birnbaum embarked on a quest that led him to the “promised lands” of Zionism and secular Yiddish culture. Then he had an encounter that changed everything

It was soon after arriving in Israel

to learn in yeshivah that I went in search of Rechov Nathan Birnbaum. The street named after my great-great-grandfather, I was told, was somewhere in the upper reaches of Jerusalem’s Zichron Moshe neighborhood. Making my way past Geula, I encountered Zichron Moshe’s legendary shul, once the stage for Rav Sholom Schwadron and beloved of bochurim from Brisk. At the corner of Rechov Soloveitchik, I turned left and went uphill.

Filled with anticipation at seeing a road named after my ancestor, I almost missed the blue and white sign. “Rechov Nathan Birnbaum,” it read, “writer and philosopher.” Looking around at a passageway little more than an arm-span across, my pride gave way to disappointment. It occurred to me that the street was probably named by a bureaucrat who never saw it. This was no “Rechov,” merely an alleyway.

But this backstreet, it later struck me, is actually a fitting metaphor for the man whose name it bears. Because Dr. Nathan Birnbaum is the forgotten giant of modern Jewish history, although he was a leader of three mass movements that shaped the Jewish world.

Born in Vienna, he was one of the founders of the Zionist movement even before Theodor Herzl arrived on the scene. But then Birnbaum committed Zionist heresy by embracing Yiddish and advocating for Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora. His odyssey continued when, as a world-famous Jewish intellectual, he abandoned secularism. Birnbaum became arguably the first baal teshuvah of the modern era, rising to prominence in the nascent Agudas Yisrael organization. But written out of Zionist history, and part of a secular Yiddish culture that has vanished, Nathan Birnbaum is preserved only as a dim memory in the religious world; a fate symbolized by this modest passageway in Zichron Moshe.

Just over 80 years after his odyssey ended, I embark on a journey of my own to learn more about him. As a great-great-grandson of Nathan Birnbaum, I’ve always known the basic facts, but now these coalesce into a story. It’s one worth retelling, because Nathan Birnbaum’s dramatic life was a microcosm of 150 years of Jewish history, and his story of teshuvah is capable of inspiring all of us today.

The Vienna into which Nathan Birnbaum was born in 1864 was the melting pot of Eastern European Jewry. As the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a gateway from the impoverished east to the cultured west. Jews such as composer Gustav Mahler, psychologist Sigmund Freud, and author Franz Kafka were making an outsize contribution to this bastion of German culture. But their Eastern European brethren were marked as backward and embarrassing Ostjuden — a label that ambitious newcomers were eager to avoid. The prevailing snobbery is captured by Professor Joshua Fishman in his work The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum, with a clever Yiddish put-down. Er is nit azoi a Viener vi a Bukovina, one might say of an Ostjude trying to blend in: “He’s not really Viennese, but from Bukovina.”

Menachem Mendel Birnbaum and his wife, Miriam, made the journey from chassidic Galicia to cultured Vienna in the early 1860s. Many sources (likely quoting each other) describe a home drifting away from observance. But according to my great-uncle Mr. David Birnbaum, archivist of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum archives in Toronto, that wasn’t the case. “Menachem Mendel owned a yeast business and one Pesach he had a problem with the sale of the stock. After asking a sh’eilah, he threw away his whole stock at great loss.” Clearly, although no longer chassidim, his parents were religious.

Sadly, Menachem Mendel passed away when Nathan was only 11 years old. Given that early bereavement and the freethinking spirit of the times, it is perhaps unsurprising that a teenage Nathan should abandon his parents’ Jewish attachment.

But despite the fact that he, like many of his contemporaries, had become unobservant, one thing set young Nathan apart. He saw himself as Jewish, not German, as he later wrote: “although at that time there was not a single other Jewish youngster in Vienna who did not consider himself to be German.” This belief, expressed at approximately 16 years old, was to take this teenager on a remarkable sequence of events. The precocious ability to go against the current remained a feature of his life until the end.

Common wisdom has it that Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement in the wake of the 1894 Dreyfus trial, and just over half a century later the State of Israel came into being. The truth is far more interesting. In 1882, Nathan Birnbaum headed to the University of Vienna to read law, philosophy, and Near Eastern studies. The following year, this young student founded Kadimah, the first nationalistic Jewish student organization. Then in 1884, at the age of 20, he published a pamphlet called Die Assimilationssucht (“The Assimilation Mania”), arguing that the renaissance of the Jewish people depended on the Land of Israel. Over the next decade he went on to turn this idea into a movement.

As a lifelong and prolific writer, Nathan Birnbaum built his movement up with his pen. From 1885–1894 he edited (and wrote much of) Selbst-Emancipation!, a vastly influential Zionist paper. Jess Olson, associate professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and author of the recent book Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity, describes how he developed a program of Zionism in a series of essays during the 1890s. He used his newspaper to “call for the formation of a Zionist political party to transfer Zionism into a mass movement.” His influence was such that “Nathan Birnbaum’s associates represented a who’s who of early Zionist figures.”

Birnbaum himself gave the movement a name, the Hebrew Ziyonut and the German Zionismus. While others were talking about similar Jewish nationalist ideas, historians agree that he alone was responsible for coining — and popularizing — the new term.

Determined to make his ideas a reality, in 1892 he headed east to Galicia to promote a program of settlement in Palestine, under the name of the Zion Union for the Colonization of Palestine. He succeeded in founding more than a dozen branches of the group. The “ancient national home of the Jews” was the only place that this rebirth could happen, not in Argentina or the United States, as other Jewish leaders proposed. By the time that a shocked Herzl reacted to the Dreyfus trial with his book Der Judenstaat, Zionism as a movement was a going concern.

The father of Mishpacha editor Rabbi Moshe Grylak was close to Nathan Birnbaum towards the end of Birnbaum’s storied life. In fact, as I discover, Rabbi Grylak provides a tangible link to my ancestor with a memory he has as a two-year-old. “I was zocheh to sit on his lap and pull his beard,” Rabbi Grylak tells me. On Nathan Birnbaum’s place in the Zionist pantheon, Rabbi Grylak is clear: “He was the dominant — the deepest — thinker in Zionism.”

But where Birnbaum had succeeded in galvanizing an intellectual movement, it was Herzl who proved to have the organizational ability to create a successful political movement. It was Herzl, not Birnbaum, who convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. At the Congress Birnbaum was asked to speak about “Zionism as a Cultural Movement.” His eminence within the movement was recognized by his election as the secretary-general of the new Zionist Organization. But it was clear that a new sun had risen over the movement that Birnbaum had created.

A popular image of Theodore Herzl is of a bareheaded, black-bearded figure in formal attire gazing out over the water in a visionary pose. From a distance, Nathan Birnbaum could have been mistaken for Herzl, as is obvious from photographs of a young Birnbaum. But there any similarities ended. Their personalities were too different — and too large — to coexist for long at the head of the same movement.

Herzl’s diaries reveal an unmistakable condescension towards Birnbaum who, as an unsuccessful lawyer and lifelong activist, was practically penniless. He attacks Birnbaum’s “shameless begging letters” for daring to ask for a stipend from the Zionist Organization, complaining that he “dares to draw comparisons between him and me.” Clearly, although by this point Herzl was in control of the movement, he was wary of the challenge that Birnbaum still represented.

Besides the personal difficulties, there were real ideological differences as well. Whereas for Herzl, Zionism was about achieving political independence as a solution to the “Jewish question,” Birnbaum’s thinking had evolved. Zionism was to be a movement first and foremost of cultural regeneration of the Jewish people.

Within a year of the Zionist Congress, after Herzl opposed his re-election to the post of secretary-general, Nathan Birnbaum had left the Zionist Organization. He closed the door on the movement that he had founded, just as it was taking off for meteoric success.

History, it is said, is written by the victors. In the struggle for the domination of the Zionist movement, Herzl had succeeded. And in the best tradition of such struggles, Nathan Birnbaum was erased from the history books. A very recent biography of Herzl fails to make mention of his existence at all. An older biography dismisses Birnbaum in a footnote as “erratic.”

But the truth is that Nathan Birnbaum was anything but erratic. The evolution of his thinking was dragging him inexorably eastward, toward the benighted galus Jews whom the Zionists scorned. It was time for the second act of Birnbaum’s drama.

Photographs taken throughout Nathan Birnbaum’s life are clear evidence of his evolution. The nattily dressed young university student with Kadimah friends gives way to a brooding, middle-aged intellectual, and finally to a majestic, quasi-rabbinic figure. The camera doesn’t lie: This is a formidable face, that of a leader. But equally, the camera doesn’t tell the whole truth. I’m left wondering what type of person Nathan Birnbaum was in private. Here and there, I find fragments of information.

Mirjam Birnbaum was a daughter of Nathan Birnbaum’s son Uriel. She passed away a few years ago, having spent her whole life in Holland, and she remembered her grandfather from his final years. I myself never met her, but my grandmother, Mrs. Eva Guttentag ,recalls her saying that despite his severity, “When he smiled, it was like the sun coming out.” To another cousin, my great-uncle Mr. David Birnbaum, she described a “warm and loving Opa.”

Professor Olson paints a similar picture of Birnbaum’s personal side. “In some of the correspondence I examined between Nathan Birnbaum and his children, he comes across as a very warm father, even unusually so for the period.”

As for his severe look, he tells me that “although he could be irascible at times, he certainly had a sense of humor. It went all the way back to his youth. One of his earliest contributions to the origins of Jewish nationalism was in a student-produced, partly humorous journal, Megillah, that he and early Kadimah members published.”

One picture in particular speaks loud and clear about Nathan Birnbaum’s celebrity. It’s a photo taken in Buczacz, Galicia in 1907, and it shows a middle-aged Birnbaum surrounded by a crowd of hundreds of men and women. While some are in modern dress, many are visibly religious. Nathan Birnbaum was by then a candidate for an Eastern Galicia seat in the Austrian parliament, and these were amcha, the Jewish masses coming out in his support. But how had this Viennese intellectual become involved in the rough-and-tumble of Eastern European electoral politics? This is the heart of Birnbaum’s second stage, his advocacy of Diaspora Nationalism.

Underlying Birnbaum’s rupture with the Zionist movement, in addition to his fallout with Herzl, was his discovery that the eight million Jews of Eastern Europe didn’t need the Zionists’ promised land to be transformed into a nation. They were already a living entity by virtue of their language, Yiddish, and the unique culture it had given birth to. What they needed was cultural autonomy right where they were.

From 1902 onward, Birnbaum developed a theory of Jewish nationalism he called Pan-Judaism. Whereas Western Jews derided Yiddish as a “jargon” — a backward ghetto dialect — he taught himself Yiddish and promoted it as the authentic expression of Jewish culture. This belief proved far-reaching. His son, my great-grandfather Professor Solomon Birnbaum, held the first chair in Yiddish at the University of Hamburg. This was just one aspect of the particularly close relationship between the famous father and his eldest son. It was a bond that grew deeper as they later undertook a parallel journey to discover their Judaism.

Although a new convert to Yiddishism, Nathan Birnbaum again took a leadership role. In 1908 he convened the first Yiddish Conference in Czernovitz (present-day Ukraine), attended by the leading Yiddish writers of the day. In what was a very active year, he also crossed the Atlantic to preach the importance of Yiddish in the United States. Again, Birnbaum’s stature can be grasped from the fact that he met President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a visit arranged by New York Congressman Henry Goldfogle.

Where once as a Zionist he had preached nationalism in the Land of Israel, now he sought autonomy for the Jewish people as a nation in the Diaspora. Everywhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire restive minorities were demanding self-determination, and Birnbaum saw a chance for the Jewish People. So in 1907 he stood as a candidate for the Reichsrat, the Austrian parliament.

It was on the campaign trail for this election that the picture was taken — a campaign that should have met with success. But he was denied a seat due to electoral fraud on behalf of the Polish candidate, Stefan Moyser. According to David Birnbaum, “My father told us that during the first ballot the Polish faction didn’t tear up enough ballot papers, but in the final ballot they did.”

Birnbaum’s focus on Yiddish and Diaspora autonomy would prove to be on the wrong side of history. As the American experience proved, a secular Yiddish culture could not be any bulwark against the forces of assimilation. And Jewish autonomy fell prey to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But Nathan Birnbaum was far from a spent force. As Europe descended into the upheaval of the First World War, he was about to mount his own internal revolution.

The baal teshuvah movement is today a fact of Jewish life. Kiruv centers dot the globe. Outreach organizations are active on university campuses and within communities, and their alumni fill yeshivos in Israel and beyond. With the movement itself well into middle age, it is hard to imagine a world in which Jews don’t rediscover their Judaism.

But the first baal teshuvah was not a product of the Six Day War and an encounter at the Kosel. The first baal teshuvah of the modern era was Nathan Birnbaum. His teshuvah was so sincere and shocking that his contemporaries named him “der Baal Teshuvah.”

But Nathan Birnbaum’s teshuvah was a process, not an overnight decision. In retrospect, the precursor of that dramatic teshuvah was a scene recalled by Solomon Birnbaum from his own childhood. He remembers his father looking down to the street from their third-floor apartment. There in the road was a poor family whose cart had overturned, scattering their belongings. The reaction was curious. “Nathan Birnbaum began to chide G-d. How could He, if He existed, allow such a thing to happen?” Clearly, a lot lay beneath the surface of this atheist’s mind.

But the realization of G-d’s existence finally came from an encounter with the massive forces of nature. “The first sensation of the Master of the Universe was awoken in me as I was traveling across the ocean,” Nathan Birnbaum later wrote. He was referring to the journey to America that he undertook in 1908, still a secular intellectual. The Chazon Ish writes at the beginning of his classic work Emunah u’Bitachon that belief grows from an encounter with the vastness of heaven and earth. And the Chazon Ish used to reference Nathan Birnbaum’s own transformation as a result of the awe-inspiring physical world.

According to Rabbi Moshe Grylak, the sea would continue to exert this hold on him even many years later. Having left Berlin, his home since 1911, with the rise of the Nazis in 1933, Birnbaum lived in the seaside town of Scheveningen, Holland. As Rabbi Grylak’s father walked with him along the beach, tears came to Birnbaum’s eyes and he began to speak about his teshuvah. In fact, Nathan Birnbaum’s tzavaah asked his descendants to read the book of Yonah, another story of teshuvah connected to the sea, on his yahrtzeit.

But the initial spiritual awakening on this boat journey lay dormant for a few years. In a speech in St. Petersburg in 1912, his feelings suddenly crystallized. At a secular conference, having finished speaking about another topic, he suddenly rose again and spoke about the spiritual mission of the Jewish People — a startling scene that was witnessed by Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, who later became the second president of Israel.

Determined as ever to live by his convictions, by the middle of the First World War, Nathan Birnbaum had become a full-fledged baal teshuvah. A major influence at his early-teshuvah stage was Rabbi Tuvia Horowitz, a nephew of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe. Another person he turned to was a young Rav Moshe Chaim Lau, father of former Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Letters that he sent to Nathan Birnbaum are headed “rabbinical candidate,” meaning that he was still early in his rabbinical career when they met in Vienna, where the Lau family spent the First World War.

To appreciate the shock effect of Nathan Birnbaum’s very public change, one has to grasp just how prominent he was. In an age when intellectuals could be celebrities, he was a household name in the Jewish world. This was a man whose image featured on greeting cards. Since the days of the French Revolution, the traffic had been one way only: from east to west, as Jews abandoned Torah life in droves in the name of “enlightenment.” Yet here, for the first time, was an intellectual at the pinnacle of European Jewish life, who had done the unthinkable. He had declared that the true light lay to the east, in the long-scorned world of Torah.

Perhaps the best contemporary comparison to Birnbaum is Rabbi Uri Zohar. An Israeli cultural icon of the 1970s, he was the epitome of the new secular Israeli. His teshuvah sent shockwaves through Israeli society, as Birnbaum’s had in his time, and opened the door for others to make the same journey.

Russian Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin was one person who had encountered Birnbaum at the different stages of his metamorphosis. In 1891 he came through Vienna and made his pilgrimage to the famous Zionist leader Dr. Nathan Birnbaum. After they had finished talking, Ussishkin asked Birnbaum whether he was able to direct him to a kosher restaurant. Birnbaum walked his guest there, but refused to join him inside. “I won’t eat in such a place,” he said.

Many years later Ussishkin came through Vienna again and met Birnbaum, now fully religious, and reminded him of their last encounter. “You, Ussishkin, have stayed the same,” Birnbaum told him. “But I have changed; I represent the dynamic type of Jew.”

Dynamism was a feature of Nathan Birnbaum’s character throughout his life, including his last, religious stage. Although a newly minted baal teshuvah, he wasn’t prepared to take a back seat in his adopted world. In 1917 he published a pamphlet called Divrei HaOylim, in which he criticized what he saw as the failures of religious Jewry in their observance. He founded groups called Oylim (Ascenders) under the umbrella of Agudas Yisrael, which he hoped would go on to create a movement that would transform the Jewish people.

His new vision was typically sweeping. Oylim were to focus on three elements: Daas, Rachamim, and Tiferes. Broadly, these stood for service of Hashem, rachmanus and care for others, as well as an outward dignity appropriate for G-d’s servants. The Oylim were to be involved in agriculture — which Birnbaum saw as less corrupting than bourgeois occupations — and live in communities to be founded both in the Land of Israel and abroad. The Oyleh would combine the best of chassidus, mussar, and an elevated derech eretz.

Once again, Birnbaum succeeded in working his magic. According to Rabbi Grylak, “The cream of Poland’s young religious intellectuals, such as Rabbis Yehuda Leib Orlean and Alexander Zusia Friedman Hy”d, counted themselves as Birnbaum’s followers.” A circular published in 1928 promoting the Oylim lists luminaries such as Rav Avraham Elya Kaplan, the young gaon of Slabodka who was the head of the Berlin Beis Medrash L’Rabbonim, as well as leading rabbis from Germany. Reprinted in the mussar journal HaNe’eman published in Telshe, it testifies to the waves that Nathan Birnbaum’s program was making.

A sense of his fiery commitment to his new path, and what made Birnbaum such a great publicist, comes from a famous essay he wrote in Zurich in 1919. Titled “In a Jewish Galus,” he denounces the fact that leadership of the Jewish people has gone to those distant from the Torah. “On the day that the idea appeared in the minds of the Jews,” he writes, “that the light shines in foreign quarters and that in our camp there is darkness, and that therefore we must bring in light to the darkness — on that day, our exile started among our fellow Jews.” Yet again, Nathan Birnbaum succeeded in pinpointing the central issue of the time — the “Galus among Jews” — in a way that rings true still today.

Not long after, “der Baal Teshuvah” began playing a leadership role within Agudas Yisrael, newly reconstituted after the First World War. In 1919 he was appointed the organization’s first secretary-general.

Not everyone within the Agudah world was on the same wavelength as the newcomer. “After Nathan Birnbaum spoke about saving the Jewish People,” says Rabbi Grylak, “a Hungarian rav rose to disagree saying “Vachamushim olu — only a fifth of the Jewish people left Egypt.” Appalled by the implied disregard for Am Yisrael’s fate, Nathan Birnbaum rose to speak again. He exclaimed: “Did you ever eat on Yom Kippur?” The rebuke was clear: Nathan Birnbaum had himself proven that the Jewish People are never too far to come back.

The Birnbaum archives show that at this stage he was in contact with luminaries as varied as the Gerrer Rebbe, the Reisher Rov, Rav Aharon Lewin, Rav Joseph Tzvi Carlebach of Altona, and leader of the Chovevei Tzion movement Rav Shmuel Mohilever. His correspondence shows him deploying his well-honed skills as an activist to build the young Agudah, the major communal project of the Orthodox world at the time.

Today’s Agudath Israel of America dates its birth to 1922. In a very real sense, Nathan Birnbaum had a hand in the creation of this legendary organization as well. A famous photo from that year shows him seated next to the gaon Rav Meir Don Plotski, known as the Kli Chemdah, and other illustrious rabbanim. They are en route to America on behalf of Agudas Yisrael — a mission that led to the creation of the Agudah in the new world. Life, for Birnbaum, was coming full circle because it had been in 1908 as a secular ideologue that he had last visited the United States.

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Nathan Birnbaum left Berlin and moved to Holland, which had been a neutral country in the First World War. Also, as a Nordic country Holland seemed to be safe from Hitler. He spent his final years in the seaside town of Scheveningen, a suburb of the Hague. From there, he published yet another of his innumerable newspapers, Der Ruf (The Call), and spoke out about the coming threat to European Jewry.

By the time he passed away in 1937 he was revered across the Jewish world. Historian Dr. Maximilian Landau wrote, in almost lyrical terms, that Birnbaum retained until the end of his life a “childlike nature, an almost unimaginable degree of freshness.” He describes “an amazing natural dignity,” and Nathan Birnbaum’s “instinctively aristocratic bearing.” Rabbi Alexander Altmann, who emigrated from Germany via England to the United States, describes Birnbaum as a “prophetic personality” who possessed “the ethos of the pathfinder who surveys the scene as a whole.”

But self-made as he was, Nathan Birnbaum was never quite at home in any movement — only with his burning passion for the Gottesvolk, the people of Hashem. This was uppermost in his mind with his final words, “Use my death to spread my ideas.”

Nathan Birnbaum’s burial place in Wassenaar, the Hague, turned out to be significant for myself personally. Only a few years ago I discovered that buried next to him are his friends and admirers, Leo and Erna Kruskal. They are none other than my wife’s great-grandparents.

From my first encounter with the alleyway in Zichron Moshe, one question has persisted in my mind. What did Nathan Birnbaum leave behind? Does the man who abandoned Zionism just when it was taking off, who advocated for a soon-to-vanish Eastern European Jewry, and who is barely remembered in the religious world he embraced, have any legacy at all?

For Professor Olson, the answer is yes. “Even if his legacy is not easily measured in terms of concrete accomplishments made relative to those who followed him, he was a pioneer for these positions. Perhaps if he hadn’t blazed a trail, things would be very different. When Nathan Birnbaum helped create Jewish nationalism in the 1880s, he wrote so extensively that he himself was largely responsible for an untold number of people taking it seriously. The same held true for his foray into Yiddish and his teshuvah. He was an inspiration to many important figures in each intellectual world he inhabited.”

But there’s no doubt that his main legacy was as “der Baal Teshuvah,” so utterly sincere was his return to Torah. In the preface to a slim volume of Birnbaum’s writings that he translated, Rav Moshe Sheinfeld puts it best. He explains that the title “gaon” describes perfection in a certain area. “Dr. Nathan Birnbaum z”l,” he goes on to write, “was a gaon of teshuvah.”

Even if there were no direct links between the teshuvah movement of the 1960s and Nathan Birnbaum, he was the first to show that it could be done. According to Rabbi Grylak, “He was the first to make the dramatic change, to say that we have to go back to Har Sinai.” He faced the entire majestic edifice of Western secularism in its prime, and declared it to be a house of cards. And as a major intellectual force in the secular Jewish world, the shock waves spread far.

Today’s students aren’t lured from the beis medrash, as they once were, by intellectual giants and towering revolutionaries. The contemporary secular world lures in a different way: It promises fun. But teshuvah is teshuvah. Nathan Birnbaum is still relevant because he showed that the call of Sinai is more potent than the siren song coming from foreign shores.

Dr. Nathan Birnbaum’s life story was epic by any measure. To those whose Judaism meant nothing to them, he was erratic, founding movements and abandoning them. But viewed from a Torah perspective, things look different. Beginning as a teenager, his life was one relentless quest, a journey to discover the fissile core of the Jewish people.

For that alone, Nathan Birnbaum deserves to come in from the dusty side streets of Jewish memory.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 726)