The Eshkol Family

Modern Hebrew onomastics teaches that a considerable share of the surnames borne in Israel proceeds from a deliberate Hebraization, undertaken by immigrants eager to erase the names of the Diaspora in favor of names drawn from the language of the Bible [Family Names in Israel, Eshel, 1967]. Eshkol is a case in point of this dynamic: image-name, virtue-name, it draws from agricultural and biblical vocabulary. Reference repertories on Israeli surnames classify these creations among the most significant of national renaissance, where naming becomes an act of identity refoundation [The Book of Names — 200 Most Popular Surnames in Israel, Ariel, 1997].

This practice is not fortuitous: it extends an ancient Jewish conviction that the name engages the being. Works on the origin of Jewish names remind us that the passage from a diasporic surname — often imposed by imperial administrations — to a freely chosen Hebrew name constitutes a reconquest of dignity, a gesture of return to the source [Origins of Jewish Names, Stahl, 2005]. In adopting Eshkol, the family we are concerned with made the grape cluster the emblem of a double fidelity: to the land one cultivates and to the Law one transmits. The grape cluster, in the vocabulary of the Sages, moreover designates metaphorically the accomplished man of study, in whom "all is gathered" — learned echo that gives the surname its Talmudic depth.

The figure who made this name illustrious was born under another: Levi Shkolnik. He was born on October 25, 1895 in Oratov, a village in Ukraine then integrated into the Russian Empire, in a traditional Jewish family [Levi Eshkol — Jewish Virtual Library ; World Jewish Congress]. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, he received a traditional Jewish education before the call of the land of Israel seized him [Levi Eshkol — Jewish Virtual Library]. At eighteen, he emigrated to Ottoman Palestine, where he later joined the Jewish Legion constituted under British auspices [World Jewish Congress].

This trajectory condenses the experience of a generation born in the world of Yiddish and Eastern European communities, whose historiography has demonstrated cultural vitality and political fragility [Le Yiddish. Histoire d'une langue errante, Baumgarten, 2002]. These young people, nourished by rabbinical tradition but won over by ideas of emancipation and national renaissance, left the shtetl universe to build a new society [La Renaissance culturelle juive en Europe centrale et orientale, Bechtel, 2002]. The logic of emancipation that animated them — to exit minority status and enter history as a collective subject — has been finely analyzed as one of the major springs of Jewish modernity [Les Juifs et le monde moderne, Kriegel, 1977]. By abandoning Shkolnik for Eshkol, this man made this movement his own: he changed his name as one changes worlds.

Upon arriving in Palestine, Levi Eshkol devoted himself first to working the land. He was among those who participated in the kibbutzim adventure, these agricultural communities where socialist ideals and a return to the soil were combined. His life was organized around collective work, the defense of settlements and labor organization, before politics called him to national responsibilities [Eshkol (Shkolnik), Levi — Encyclopedia.com].

Here is expressed, in the facts, one of the cardinal virtues that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries: involvement in collective life, the klal, that conviction that the salvation of the individual passes through service to the community. The pioneer who drains a marsh, stands guard and shares his harvests embodies an ethic of care for the other and the common good. This collective dimension of Jewish existence has its roots in the conception of the Law as the foundation of political life, where the Torah is not only private devotion but the organization of a just city [Philosophie de la Loi, Trigano, 1991]. By linking his destiny to that of an agricultural community, Eshkol prolonged, in a secularized mode, the ancient commandment of social justice — tsedaka understood not as charity but as an obligation of right.

Levi Eshkol's ascent to the summit of the State was that of a builder. In 1952, he succeeded Eliezer Kaplan at the Ministry of Finance, a position he held until becoming Prime Minister in 1963, implementing the economic plan whose fruits he was to reap [Eshkol (Shkolnik), Levi — Encyclopedia.com]. He formed the twelfth government of Israel in 1963 and presided over sustained economic growth, whose symbol was the inauguration, in 1964, of the national water supply system [Levi Eshkol — Military Wiki].

This hydraulic work — the Mekorot ha-Yarden, the conveyance of the waters of the Jordan toward the Negev desert — was Eshkol's great cause, which he supported with constancy [Eshkol (Shkolnik), Levi — Encyclopedia.com]. Bringing water to the desert, making arid land bloom: the gesture miraculously joins the meaning of the name. The promised cluster of the valley of Eshkol found, in the canal that made the Negev green, its contemporary fulfillment. One can measure here the virtue of economic action conceived not as accumulation but as stewardship of the common good, modern extension of the biblical imperative to feed the people and make the land habitable. In his honor, the central filtration plant of the network and the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood in Jerusalem bear his name, as do several schools [Levi Eshkol — Military Wiki].

The name Eshkol remains attached, in Israel's Memory, to the days of tension that preceded the Six-Day War. His mandate as Prime Minister is perhaps chiefly remembered for this June 1967 conflict, at the end of which Israel defied the allied armies [World Jewish Congress]. In the days of anguish that preceded it, Eshkol consented to appoint General Moshe Dayan to the Ministry of Defense [World Jewish Congress] — a decision that bears witness to a rare form of humility in a leader: accepting, under pressure, to share a power that one held.

It is here that tradition and archive answer each other while refining themselves. Popular memory long retained the image of a hesitant leader; historiography has restored the portrait of a leader concerned with not hastening his people into war, and whose prudence stemmed as much from wisdom as from weakness. The Jewish tradition's relationship to war has always been serious and reluctant, marked by an awareness of the price of blood and by a preference for peace. The reflection on ethical responsibility, as carried by contemporary Jewish thought, illuminates this tension: authentic power lies not in mastery but in response to the other and the refusal to sacrifice them lightly [The Trace of the Infinite. Emmanuel Levinas and the Hebrew Source, Chalier, 2002]. Eshkol's hesitation, if it was weakness, was also moral restraint in the face of the irreparable.

Levi Eshkol died of a heart attack on February 26, 1969, while in office, founder of the Israeli Labor Party after holding the highest posts of state [Levi Eshkol — Google Arts & Culture]. But the surname did not die with him: it spread into other domains of Israeli life, notably that of artistic creation, where the name Eshkol distinguished itself in the field of dance and movement notation, extending on the terrain of the spirit the fruitfulness that the name carries within it.

This passage from politics to art says something about the way a lineage — of blood or name — participates in the Jewish contribution to universal thought and culture. Jewish modernity distinguished itself by this capacity to combine action and reflection, service to the city and contribution to knowledge [Modern Judaism, Hayoun, 1992]. That the name of a cluster is found inscribed on learned institutions, schools and works testifies to this calling: to gather, like the grains of the same cluster, the diverse fruits of the same tree. One thinks of the inaugural gesture of Jewish modernity, that of a Mendelssohn opening Judaism to the dialogue of cultures without renouncing anything of its source [Moses Mendelssohn. The Birth of Modern Judaism, Bourel, 2004].

From the biblical cluster brought back from the Promised Land to the canal that greens the Negev, the name Eshkol will have woven, across a single century, constant fidelity between land and Law, work and people. The lineage that bore it left no talmudic treatise nor rabbinic dynasty; it left something better, perhaps, in the eyes of Israel's collective Memory: proof that a chosen name can become a destiny, and that a man from a village in Ukraine can make a desert bloom.

Among all the virtues that the Jewish tradition has carried, it is involvement in collective life — the selfless service of the klal, the commitment of one's strength to the common good — that this lineage will have expressed best. The pioneer of the kibbutzim, the builder minister, the Prime Minister who hesitated before war out of concern for his people: all express the same virtue, that of the man who knows himself accountable to the community. And on this master virtue are grafted, like grains on a bunch, economic action conceived as stewardship, the humility of the leader who shares power, and Jewish gravity before spilled blood. Thus the cluster keeps its promise: many grains, one cluster; many lives, one fidelity.