Nahum Sokolow? Most Israelis know a Sokolow Street—several older Israeli cities have one.
Fewer can locate Beit Sokolow, the headquarters of the Israeli Journalists’ Association in Tel
Aviv, or know of the biennial Sokolow Prize, a journalism award. Scarcely anyone is aware that
Sde Naḥum, a small kibbutz in the Beit She’an valley, is named after him.
But as this short list suggests, Sokolow has been almost entirely forgotten. Unlike Weizmann, no
institute or memorial bears his name, no currency or stamp bears his image. He is buried on
Mount Herzl, where he was reinterred in 1956, two decades after his death. Even then, an Israeli
newspaper reported that “those born in Israel and the new immigrants who encountered the
funeral processions, asked: ‘Who is this Nahum Sokolow?’” Today, more than 80 years after his
death, only a few historians remember Sokolow, and none has troubled to produce a scholarly
biography.
Who then was he? Nahum Sokolow was born sometime between 1859 and 1861 in central Poland
and received a traditional rabbinic schooling. But he taught himself secular subjects and soon
gained renown as a prodigy, a polyglot, and a prolific writer on a vast array of subjects. In 1880 he
moved to Warsaw and later assumed the editorship of the Hebrew journal Hatsefirah, which
became a daily in 1886. There he contributed a popular column and wrote much of the rest of the
paper, so that his fame spread with the spread of modern Hebrew. He was soon acknowledged as
the world’s most prominent Hebrew-language journalist.
In 1897, Sokolow reported from the First Zionist Congress and fell under the spell of Herzl. It was
he who translated Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland into Hebrew and who gave it the Hebrew
title Tel Aviv, which a few years later became the name of a new Jewish city. Leaving daily
journalism in 1906, he became the secretary general of the World Zionist Organization, which
was struggling after the death of Herzl two years earlier.
Sokolow is the entry point into the fuller story of the Balfour Declaration.
Indeed, at the time of the declaration, many Jews around the world gave
him more credit for it than they gave to Weizmann.
Sokolow thereupon threw himself into lobbying, diplomacy, and propaganda, traveling across
Europe, America, and the Ottoman Empire. In 1911, he was elected to the Zionist Executive; in
1914, following the outbreak of war, he relocated to Britain, where he joined forces with the
dynamic young Chaim Weizmann in the campaign to win British recognition for Zionist aims.
Sokolow is the entry point into the fuller story of the Balfour Declaration. Indeed, at the time of
the declaration, many Jews around the world gave him more credit for it than they gave to
Weizmann. This was partly because Sokolow the Hebrew journalist was better known than
Weizmann the biochemist. As Herzl’s contemporary, he was also senior to Weizmann in age and
in his standing in world Zionism.
But Sokolow was also given credit because he accomplished what many thought impossible:
during the spring of 1917, he secured the explicit or tacit assent of the French and Italian
governments, and even of the Catholic pope, to a Jewish “national home” under British auspices.