Jerusalem: The Biography

* As the British contemplated limiting immigration to Zion, Joseph Stalin was building his own Soviet Jerusalem. ‘The Tsar gave the Jews no land but we will,’ he announced. His views on the Jews were contradictory. In a famous 1913 article on nationality, Stalin declared that Jews were not a nation but ‘mystical, intangible and otherworldly’. Once in power, he banned anti-Semitism, which he called ‘cannibalism’, and in 1928, approved the creation of a secular Jewish homeland with Yiddish and Russian as official languages. Inaugurated in May 1934, Stalin’s Zion, the Jewish Autonomous Region, was a wasteland, Birobidzhan, on the Chinese border. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others backed the creation of another Jewish homeland in the more attractive Crimea – a Stalinist California – which ultimately aroused Stalin’s vicious anti-Semitism. Yet by 1948 Birobidzhan contained 35,000 Jews. Today it survives with a few thousand Jews and all its signs still in Yiddish.