As a keen and relentless champion of the rights of Jews, Dr. Leo Motzkin, who died at the age of 66 in Paris Tuesday, was renowned for his efforts in behalf of his race, for which he sought recognition as a national minority. He was born in Russia and later pursued higher studies in Berlin. In the first year of the present century he headed the Democratic faction of Zionism and opposed the acceptance of a British offer to establish a national homeland for the Jews in Uganda, Africa. During the War he directed the Copenhagen bureau of the World Zionist Organization and in 1920 he organized the first international conference for the relief of Jews who suffered as a result of the World War. He has been a representative of world Jewry at conferences of the League of Nations at Geneva, and has always held the respect of every faction of Zionism, regardless of their views.
The death of Leo Motzkin in his 66th year, leaves the world poorer by the passing of one of the men who literally made Jewish history in the past half century. The Motzkin type are little understood, and perhaps less appreciated in the United States where Judaism is essentially a rabbinic function, and Jewish secular and national life a phrase rather than a fact, to most Jews. In his youth, counting by actual years, rather than mentality, Motzkin, Russian born, became a student in Berlin and there unlearnt whatever tendencies he may have had, in common with the intelligentsia of his period, towards assimilation. In Berlin in 1883 he was one of three students who organized a Jewish national academic society, and the Gospel he preached in it colored his whole life and fashioned his career.
A natural linguist, he had half a dozen languages ready on his lips, and even in advanced years acquired a working knowledge of English on a visit to the United States. This made him a flexible force in that Jewish cause that knows no parish, has no set boundaries, and at times sets up new organizations over night when it lacks some visible instrument for its particular purpose.
STUBBY MAN, SCRAGGY BEARD
Physically he was not prepossessing, a stubborn type, a wry mouth and a scraggy beard. He had no social graces, was indifferent to his wardrobe; he was Leo Motzkin, mental free-lance and “elder of Zion” in tweeds or tuxedo. His dignity and worth, and both had full expression, exposed themselves in his intellectual ability to rise to great occasions. He possessed moral honesty and the ability to clothe in words serious aspirations. No one would have set down Motzkin as an orator. On the contrary, sometimes in these later years, after his recovery from a stroke of paralysis, he mumbled, and lost himself in a stream of words. Then suddenly the spent frame would be controlled and one listened to a man wholly conscious of responsibility, on whom the whole Jewish tragedy, weighed heavily, and who was choosing the fit word, the language of statecraft and determination. And with it, as he swung from German into Hebrew, or interrupted himself in Russian, there was a quaint, even elfish, type of humor, for he looked gleefully at the members of any committee when he had turned its tenseness into a laugh.
In these later years Motzkin was above all the chairman of the Zionist Congress. He did many other things, did them perhaps better, but from 1925 he was the presiding officer over a fractious assembly that he knew and understood better than any other man. He was jealous of his prerogatives. He gave his vice-chairmen a show, but at the critical moment, Motzkin was on the platform asserting his authority.
That he managed to preside over the congress and the General Council for eight years with increasing affection on the part of the delegates so that he was the one man on whom all united without caucus or “trade”, was evidence of some rare quality in the man, some faith that he inspired, that took him wholly out of the normal rut. He loved endurance tests and ended every congress at breakfast time after an all night session. Spry and determined despite the serious heart malady from which he suffered, he could be found a few hours after one of these gruelling tests ready to preside at some committee meeting, commenting audibly on a decadent generation that needed sleep.
Behind it all was the national movement to which he had welded himself in his youth. To re-nationalize the Jews was his objective and he was as keen about life in the Diaspora as in Palestine. He came to the first congress as a leader of a youth movement that showered flowers on him when he proclaimed his views on cultural effort in the Diaspora in opposition to the policies of Herzl. That incipient effort died but Motzkin came to the second congress with a nascent “Democratic fraction” which lived to 1901 and then it too disappeared. He championed “lost causes” with alacrity. He knew the Jews could not win equality in Russia but he fought for it just the same.
He took the long distance view. All these failures were contributions to the moulding of character, the remaking of Jewry, which concerned him greatly. When I asked him what he had achieved in his two monumental volumes on the Constitutional Riots in Russia in 1905-6, he answered me off hand: “the organizations that contribute to the publication of this work may sometime remember that there were riots. I cultivated their memories.”
His visit to America impressed him with the American outlook. He rode one night with me across Brooklyn Bridge. The scene impressed him. “This is a new kind of beauty. It isn’t in the books and will not be approved by the academic, but I am willing to borrow the whole setting for transference, from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea.”
THE “DOUBLE-FACED” LEO
He organized the Delegations Juive at the Paris Peace conference and struggled for minority rights, and maintained the organization through the succeeding years. I noticed than when Motzkin entered a Zionist gathering the minority rights cause did not exist for him—he was Palestine Centric, and in the minority sessions he blocked Palestine from his vision. One day I commented on this mental feat, reproaching him that as a political Zionist there was some contradiction in his policy. “Don’t tell. I am Zionist first and last, but these people will never understand us till they have individually discovered the impossibility of their theories.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
