Ber Borochov, the founding father of Marxist Zionism, is largely a forgotten figure today. For the international labour movement and in particular, for the Marxist Left, his effort to synthesize socialist internationalism with Jewish nationalism must appear today even more bizarre, not to say illegitimate, than it did to Lenin shortly before World War I. Even in Israel, where the labour movement owed much to his theoretical inspiration, his legacy seems increasingly irrelevant to a society preoccupied with altogether different issues. The contemporary Israeli or Jewish reader will find nothing in this or any other of Borochov's writings to illuminate his understanding of the conflicts between Israelis and Arabs, Sephardis and Ashkenazis, religious or secular Jews; let alone to guide him in grasping the larger issues confronting the Zionist movement today in its relations with the international community or the Jewish diaspora.

This is not of course surprising. Borochov died in 1917, at the early age of 38, barely a month after the Bolshevik Revolution and the Balfour Declaration, two events which were to profoundly transform Jewish history in the twentieth century. His commitment to a theory of revolutionary class struggle, so characteristic of the Russian milieu from which he came, never had much relevance to the sociological realities in Eretz Israel, even in Borochov's own time. Moreover, the social base of Borochov's theorizing, the existence of a world-wide Jewish proletariat which was not only landless but increasingly displaced from its traditional sources of livelihood, subject to discrimination at home and to alien laws in the lands of emigration abroad, has long since ceased to exist. What then is left of the edifice of Borochovism, that almost mathematical mode of Marxist determinism with its insistence on the iron laws of historical necessity and at the same time its burning faith in the charismatic idea of socialism? What remains of this ‘pioneering social scientist of the Jews’, who in 1906 believed that Palestine would be the future land of spontaneous waves of Jewish immigration or who thought that the Inquisition and mass expulsions could never recur? (Borochov, like other Zionist theorists, was deeply pessimistic about the diaspora, but never remotely imagined the possibility of a genocidal anti-semitism.)