At the end of the First World War, AZR published a sharply critical article on the leaders of the community in Safed. The response was dramatic: a formal ban and an order to burn all copies of the journal. This is the only affair in his life in which his social criticism provoked so extreme an institutional response.
The text of the ban was published in a newspaper of the period. Thus the document opened:
"When the heads of the people gathered together, all the sages and rabbis of the community of Israel, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, in the holy city of Safed, to judge the vile deed that this rebellious elder, A. Z. Rabinovitz, has done in Israel, in printing a wilted and filthy leaf under the name of the HaGalil collection, part one, in which he casts abominations and pours a pitcher of contempt upon the rabbis and geniuses of Israel whose rest is honor..." The text of the ban as published in the press of the period · quoted in Ze'ev Galili, "Reason in Madness," 2012
The document included the full laws of the ban: that none may sit within four cubits of him (in his home, in the synagogue, in the public domain), and none may eat or drink with him. The epithet "rebellious elder" (from the Talmudic concept of a sage who rebelled against the court) marks the severity of the accusation in the rabbis' eyes.
In a memoir book that AZR published in 1935, he changed the original wording that had ignited the affair: he replaced "the flesh of their daughters" with "the corpses of their daughters." A subtle but significant change, evidence that AZR himself, years later, saw the original wording as too sharp. Galili
The story "From the Ruins of the Halukka" attacked the system of the "Halukka," the network for distributing donation funds from the Diaspora to the members of the Old Yishuv. During the war, when the connection with the Diaspora was severed and famine struck, the system collapsed, and AZR, a man of the Second Aliyah and of labor, saw the leaders of the old community as responsible for abandoning the residents. The affair illustrates the fault line between the Old Yishuv (the Halukka) and the New Yishuv (labor), which AZR represented.
The scope of the population crisis during the war is documented in research: Azriel Schmelz, "The Decline of the Population of the Land of Israel in the First World War" (in "Under Siege and Distress," edited by Mordechai Eliav, 1991); and "The Census of the Jews of the Land of Israel" (Jaffa, 1919). Academic research
| Source | Contribution | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Ze'ev Galili, "Reason in Madness" (2012) | Text of the ban from the press; the softening in 1935 | Research blog |
| Blog "Galil Press, Safed" (roashhorot) | The printing context; the burning of the copies; dating to 1919 | Research blog |
| Schmelz; Census of the Jews of the Land of Israel, 1919 | The population crisis during the war | Academic research |
| "From the Ruins of the Halukka" + research | The fact of the ban and the title of the story | Primary source + research |