Alexander Zaïd

Alexander Zaïd (1886–1938) occupies, in the history of labor Zionism and the Second Aliyah, a singular position: at once a man of action and an almost mythical figure, he embodies the passage from a revolutionary youth forged in the Russian Empire to the ideal of the New Jew rooted in the land, armed to defend it and working with his hands. Among the founding members of the armed guard organizations Bar-Giora (1907) and later Hashomer (« the Guardian », 1909), he belongs to that small generation of pioneers who, at the turn of the 1900s–1910s, set out to transform the Jewish condition in Ottoman Palestine [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The figure of Zaïd, however, eludes the purely documentary register. His violent death in 1938, during the Great Arab Revolt, made him a martyr of the Yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine), and the erection of his equestrian statue on the hills of Beit She'arim completed his elevation to the rank of national icon. The present work strives to distinguish, as far as the sources permit, what pertains to the archive and to historical research on the one hand, and to collective memory and heroic legend on the other. This tension between established History and transmitted Memory constitutes the guiding thread of our study.

According to the widely repeated biographical tradition, Alexander Zaïd was born in 1886 in Zima, in eastern Siberia, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, into a family with an unusual history [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Yad Ben-Zvi]. His father is said to have been a Jew exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activities, and his mother is said to have come from the Subbotniki — those Russian peasants converted to Judaism who observed the Sabbath. This dual heritage, blending Russian political revolt with a Judaism of conversion, is constantly invoked to explain the man's moral fortitude and singularity [Yad Ben-Zvi].

It must be emphasized here that most of these genealogical elements reach us through the channel of transmitted narrative, often reworked after his death from a hagiographic perspective. Orphaned of his mother fairly early, the young Zaïd is said to have known a childhood marked by uprooting and poverty, making his way to Crimea and then to Vilna, where he became acquainted with Jewish working-class circles and the ideological ferment of the time — between the Bund, Russian socialism, and nascent Zionism [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. This intellectual and militant formation, made of self-teaching and commitment, prepared his adherence to the socialist-Zionist current which, unlike the other movements, placed emigration to the Land of Israel at the heart of its program. The share of myth and the share of fact remain difficult to disentangle here, and we deliberately adopt the register of transmitted memory.

Zaïd emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1904, at the age of eighteen, in the wake of the first contingents of the Second Aliyah (1904-1914), that wave of immigration carried by young idealists who came primarily from the Russian Empire after the pogroms and the failure of the 1905 revolution [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. These pioneers distinguished themselves from the First Aliyah by their ideology: they advocated the conquest of labour (kibboush ha-avoda) and Jewish self-sufficiency, rejecting the model of the agricultural colony employing an Arab workforce.

Upon his arrival, Zaïd worked as an agricultural labourer and quarryman, sharing the harsh condition of the halutzim (pioneers) in the farms of Judea and Galilee. It was in this context of taking root through manual labour that another concern matured, decisive for his trajectory: that of defence. Jewish settlements at the time relied on guards, often non-Jewish, to protect crops and herds. The idea that Jews should ensure their own security themselves — an essential component of the ideal of national autonomy — was gaining ground among the young activists. Zaïd was one of the most determined promoters of this conviction, which led him to found the first guard organisations [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Yad Ben-Zvi].

In September 1907, Zaïd was among the small group of pioneers gathered in Jaffa, in the room of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi — future second president of the State of Israel — who founded the secret organization Bar-Giora, named after Shimon Bar-Giora, one of the leaders of the Jewish revolt against Rome. This clandestine society adopted as its motto a formula inspired by a poem by Yaakov Cohen, evoking the idea that in blood and fire Judea fell, and in blood and fire Judea would rise again [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The group notably included Israël Shochat, who was its driving force, as well as Manya Wilbushewitz-Shochat.

Bar-Giora served as the nucleus for a larger and more structured organization, Hashomer ("the Watchman"), founded at Mesha (Kfar Tavor) in April 1909. Hashomer took charge of guarding several settlements in Galilee and the Jezreel Valley, forming an elite of armed horsemen, combining military expertise, knowledge of the terrain, and command of Arabic and local codes. Zaïd played a leading role there, recognized for his courage and uncompromising spirit. The organization, small in number but of great symbolic weight, laid the foundations of a tradition of Jewish self-defense that would later feed into the Haganah [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Yad Ben-Zvi]. These facts, attested by the memoirs of the founders and by the historiography of Labor Zionism, belong to the firmly established record.

The history of Hashomer was not free of internal divisions, and Zaïd found himself caught up in them. After the First World War, disagreements set the former members against one another over the organization's future and its relations with the nascent institutions of the labor movement. Hashomer was formally dissolved in 1920, its functions absorbed by the Haganah, a new defense organization placed under the authority of the Histadrut and the Zionist bodies [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Some of the former members, including Zaïd, also took part in the debates surrounding the creation of a clandestine apparatus and the acquisition of weapons. Tradition holds that Zaïd, faithful to a certain ideal of the guards' independence, did not always align himself with the majority orientations. These episodes, where the memory of the protagonists and later reconstructions intersect and sometimes diverge, remain objects of historiographical discussion: this is why we set them down under the sign of the intersection between tradition and archive, with a probable status. What is certain, by contrast, is that Zaïd never renounced the ideal of rootedness and guardianship that had shaped his youth [Yad Ben-Zvi].

At the turn of the 1920s-1930s, Alexander Zaïd settled with his family on the hills overlooking the Jezreel Valley, in the Sheikh Abreik region, in the service of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet) to guard the recently acquired lands. It was there that one of the most significant, and historically attested, episodes of his life unfolded: the rediscovery of the ancient site of Beit She'arim [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Israel Antiquities Authority].

While exploring the caves and cavities of the hill, Zaïd uncovered burial chambers and inscriptions that proved to belong to the necropolis of Beit She'arim, an important Jewish center of late Antiquity, seat of the Sanhedrin and burial place associated with Rabbi Yehouda ha-Nassi, redactor of the Mishna. His reports paved the way for the archaeological excavation campaigns conducted notably by Benjamin Mazar from the 1930s onward, which revealed an exceptional ensemble of catacombs and inscriptions [Israel Antiquities Authority]. The site is today inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Zaïd's role in this rediscovery, duly documented, constitutes a facet of his legacy distinct from his military fame and establishes a tangible link between the modern guardian and the ancient Jewish memory of the land.

On July 10, 1938, during the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, Alexander Zaïd was killed in an ambush near his home in the hills of Sheikh Abreik, while patrolling on horseback [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. His death, at the age of fifty-two, deeply shook the Yishuv and was interpreted as the exemplary sacrifice of the guardian who fell on the land he had spent his life defending.

The event immediately transformed the man into a symbol. Zionist collective memory made Zaïd the archetype of the shomer (guardian), linking his fate to the long chain of defenders of Israel, from ancient warriors to modern pioneers. The precise circumstances of the ambush, the motives, and the identity of the assailants have been recounted in accounts that are consistent but marked by the emotional and national charge of the era; we therefore place them under the sign of a transmitted memory bound to attested facts. The moshav Givat Zaid and several places now bear his name, perpetuating his memory [Yad Ben-Zvi].

Zaïd's commemorative apotheosis took material form in 1938, shortly after his death, with the erection of an equestrian statue depicting him as a horseman scanning the horizon of the Jezreel Valley, the work of sculptor David Polus, raised on the heights of Beit She'arim [Yad Ben-Zvi]. This monument, one of the most recognizable in the Israeli landscape, durably fixed the image of the solitary, vigilant guardian, fused with the land and its history.

The figure of Zaïd thus entered the pantheon of the founding heroes of Labor Zionism, celebrated in textbooks, songs, and commemorations. This posterity belongs fully to the register of Memory: it speaks less of the historical man than of the use a nation under construction made of his example, erecting into myth the ideal of the rooted pioneer-soldier. Distinguishing the Zaïd of the archive from the Zaïd of legend remains the task of the historian, without thereby denying the reality of the commitment and sacrifice that founded this Memory.

Alexander Zaïd moves through the history of Zionism as a threshold figure: born on the edges of Siberia from a revolutionary heritage and a Judaism of conversion, he came to die as a sentinel on the hills of Galilee. A founding member of Bar-Giora and Hashomer, rediscoverer of the ancient site of Beit She'arim, a martyr of 1938 elevated to an icon by the equestrian statue, he condenses into a single trajectory the great themes of the Second Aliyah: labor, defense, rootedness, and sacrifice [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Yad Ben-Zvi].

Our study will have sought to hold together the two sides of this figure: the man attested by the sources and the memoirs of the founders, and the hero shaped by national memory. Where the archive speaks — the founding of Hashomer, the rediscovery of Beit She'arim, the date and place of his death —, the historian advances on firm ground; where tradition takes over — his origins, his intimate motivations, the symbolic significance of his end —, it is important to name honestly the passage from fact to narrative. It is in this balance that the proper understanding of Alexander Zaïd resides.