jews-from-italy

"In order to uproot all spirit of opposition I believe it is fundamental to implement a broad educational endeavor, because certain prejudices of the Western world cannot be addressed in a few hours."

"The time has now come for choices between a messianism that keeps hope alive, which kindles the Jews by motivating them daily to efforts and sacrifices, such as the building of a culture which is adapted to a better society – not the best that utopian fantasy can imagine – and a messianism that is only a camoflauge for intransigent politics, which finds its very best allies in the fundamentalists of the Arab-Islamic world, who are its mirror image."

"My first realization of inequality and injustice grew out of these experiences in my early childhood. I saw that there were those who commanded and those who obeyed, and probably because of my own rebellion against my mother, who ruled my life and who for me personified all despotism, I instinctively sided with the latter. Why, I asked myself, should mother be able to rise when she pleased, while the servants had to rise at an early hour to carry out her orders? After she had raged at them for some mistake, I would implore them not to endure such treatment, not realizing that necessity held them as tightly to our home as it had held the peasants to the feudal landlords. (page 4)"

"Balabanoff's position was characteristic of the general movement and in keeping with her previous view that women's rights issues were secondary to the question of the workers' struggle. She sought to make proletarian women and men aware of capitalistic society as their common enemy, but she was most sympathetic to women, since they often bore the burdens of class oppression as well as the brunt of fascism and war. Balabanoff became highly emotional when describing their suffering and hoped to rouse women from their passivity."

"After reading this chronicle of my collaboration with the international labour movement in its periods of victory and defeat, the reader is entitled to ask where I stand now. At sixty I am drawing conclusions from those experiences. My belief in the necessity for the social changes advocated by that movement and for the realization of its ideals has never been more complete than it is now when victory seems so remote. I am more than ever persuaded that a militant international labour movement must be the instrument of those changes. The experience of over forty years has only intensified my Socialist convictions, and if I had my life to live over again, I would dedicate it to the same objective. This does not mean that I do not recognize my own mistakes or those of the groups in which I have worked. (page 314)"

"The path of least resistance can very easily become a trap and the price one pays for taking it may ultimately come too high. This has certainly been the case with Russia. The trials and executions of the past two years which have dishonoured not only Russia but the entire revolutionary movement, may cancel in the memory of mankind the gigantic social and technical achievements of the Revolution. These crimes did not begin with Stalin. They are links in a chain that had been forged by 1920. They were implicit in the development of the Bolshevik method-a method which Stalin has merely amplified to incredible proportions and used for his own non-revolutionary ends. (page 185)"

"One writer noted that "her single most remarkable trait [is] her total integrity, which is why she fail[ed] in the game of power politics"; while another wrote that "to listen to her soft, compassionate voice, telling of the suffering of the people of Italy and all over Europe. . is to understand that revolutionary faith can be synonymous with humanitarianism.""

"most readers will note that Miss Balabanoff resembles not only some of the early romantic socialists but also some of those active in women's liberation movements today, especially those whose parents represent the affluent society. Above all, Balabanoff provides insights concerning the international socialist movement during the first two decades of the twentieth century. She is especially informative concerning socialism among the poor Italian textile workers in northern Italy and in Switzerland, but she also attended the crucial 1907 congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Before the war, her extraordinary talents as a speaker and as an interpreter-she spoke six languages fluently-brought her into close contact and often friendship with all of the socialist leaders, Auguste Bebel, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Jules Guesde, Jean Joures, and all of the Italian leaders. Mussolini received her greatest attention and her deepest contempt, not only for his betrayal of socialism in 1914 for French money, but also because of his servility and his gross interest in the things of this world, rather than in helping the poor."

"Balabanoff supported the organizing of working-class women and wrote several pamphlets on women's liberation-among them a denunciation of the Baryshnyas, "young ladies from petty-bourgeois families accustomed to idleness and being kept by men of wealth and position." She also maintained that when asked to assume leadership responsibilities in the Women's Union, she refused because she claimed to have neither the interest nor the talent for such work."

"She had not wavered in what she believed to be the true work of socialists; that is, the education of the masses toward a consciousness of their human and social rights resulting in a spontaneous mass movement that would inevitably lead to an egalitarian society."

"Angelica Balabanoff was the last great representative of the nineteenth century revolutionary tradition in Russia. Her emphasis upon ethical values, her thrust for liberty and equality, and her deep concern for the poor of all countries put her squarely in the sentimental socialist movement which appeared first in the 1830's and 1840's in Western Europe. She was a romantic idealist, in many ways an anarchist, and a true European and internationalist. Thus, she was one of the first of the old socialists to recognize that Lenin and his Bolshevik colleagues, who were riding the storm of the Russian Revolution and creating the new Soviet State, were cynical, ruthless, and self-interested. She therefore left Moscow and the Third International in 1921 and was expelled from the Communist Party a few years later for placing her ideals and integrity above the demands of the Party, even of Lenin."

"Angelica Balabanoff paid us a visit last week, and brought us personal greetings from [[Emma|Emma Goldman. The poor soul changed a lot since I have seen her in Berlin last: she looks so old! But not only physical (sic) she has changed, she seems to be so pessimistic and depressed. Her lectures are not very successful we are told, and if not for the Italians it would be worse still. She is envying Emma that she can be active in England, just the country where she would love to be. And Emma enrages her that she is in the states: that how it is, nobody can have ones choice, even not in the most elementary and simplest things these days, it is a miserable state of things."

"If a new world war-which can no more make the world safe for democracy than did the last-does not plunge us into a new nightmare within the next few years, I believe that the international labour movement can be built again, and that in this movement and its courage and solidarity lies the only hope for humanity. Such a movement will have learnt from its past defeats at the hands of Fascism and from the mistakes and the betrayals of the Russian experiment. A new world war, with the inevitable rise of totalitarianism of various sorts within the democratic countries, can very well kill the possibility of such international action for decades to come. I am proud to have lived and worked with the artisans of a new social order. Many of them are now dead or defeated-in exile or in their own countries. But a new generation will take their place-to build more wisely and more successfully on the foundations we have laid. (page 319)"

"It is this that kills the spirit of the labour movement-not only in Russia, but throughout the world: that an Idea which has inspired whole generations to matchless heroism and enthusiasm has become identified with the methods of a régime based upon corruption, extortion and betrayal; and last, but not least, that the sycophants and assassins of this régime have infected the world labour movement. In this, Bolshevism identifies itself more and more with the methods of Fascism. I am among the few people who have not been surprised at the various abrupt changes in the tactics of the Communist International. I knew that its tactics were always imposed, rather than accepted, and as they never corresponded to conviction, there has been no need of any psychological adaptation. These changes have been the result of bargains, or the failure of bargains, between Stalin and the military and diplomatic authorities of other countries. (page 319)"

"The two leading Communist women of Russia proved the greatest contrast. Angelica Balabanoff lacked what Kollontay possessed in abundance: the latter's fine figure, good looks, and youthful litheness, as well as her worldly polish and sophistication. But Angelica had something that far outweighed the external attributes of her handsome comrade. In her large sad eyes there shone profundity, compassion, and tenderness. The tribulations of her people, the birth-pangs of her native land, the suffering of the downtrodden she had served her whole life were deeply graven on her pallid face…I left the dear little woman with mixed feelings. Soothed and comforted by her rich fount of love, I at the same time disapproved of her acquiescence in the evils and abuses about her. I had known of her as a fighter, always firm and unflinching in her stand. What had made her so passive now, I wondered. Communists enjoyed the right of criticism, as I had learned from the Bolshevik press. Why, then, did Angelica not use her pen and voice in and out of the party? It kept worrying me and I sought an opportunity to speak to her woman comrade who had served us tea. From her I learned that Angelica had been secretary of the Third International. In that capacity she had fought determinedly against the growing bureaucracy of the clique led by Zinoviev, Radek, and Bukharin. As a result she was most unceremoniously kicked out and denied all responsible work. [...] Her mental state was due to the methods employed by her party, including the wide-spread suffering, the terror, and the cheapness of human life. Angelica could not face them…she suffered more than most of her comrades from the latest somersault of her idol Ilich. To see constantly the hungry crowds around the bakeries and pastry-shops was torture to one who, like Angelica, felt guilty to accept the gift of even a few biscuits from her Swedish friends. It was a purgatory which only we, who knew her well, could appreciate."

"Like many other Social Democratic women, she did not examine specifically how Marxist theory related to women, and her approach still remained quite reductionist or economistic when it came to the "woman question." Nevertheless, she showed increasing interest in the crucial role women could play in creating a socialist society and clearly seemed aware of specific problems women faced in the postwar world."

"As her old friend Bertram Wolfe observed, "she is too honest with herself not to realize that her dream has failed to come true.""

"Living in New York, she discovered support for Mussolini in some Italian-American and conservative circles before the United States entered World War II, and so she edited and wrote a small periodical, Il Traditore, which between January, 1942, and May, 1943, contained a series of articles describing Mussolini's early years, his persecution of socialists, and the fascist record of assassinations and brutality in Italy.""

"Balabanoff, the revolutionary humanist."

"Victor Serge describes her as secretary: "Perpetually active, she hoped for an International that was unconfined, open-hearted and rather romantic.""

"Alix Kates Shulman's narrator quotes the real memoir of revolutionary socialist Angelica Balabanoff: "the experience of the individual in relation to historic events does not belong to oneself alone.""

"Throughout her life, in letters and other personal expressions, Balabanoff consistently emphasized her sense of duty to alleviate the sufferings of others. While she recognized that society and nature contained no perfect justice, she believed that self-denial and moral humility provided the only real guidelines for the realization of her ideal "to share the sufferings and deprivations of the poorest among the poor." In the sense that the party had remained her family and the workers her children, the obituary in the Corriere della sera correctly pointed out "the only monogamy to which she felt morally pledged was to that of her own ideology." Peace, equality, social welfare, and justice were her values."

"The issue of dissent from established doctrine was clearly in her mind when she wrote: "You have to choose between what you conceive to be your duty, between your personal dignity and honesty, and your collaboration with this institution.... You can't expect a revolutionist to remain indifferent when methods he considers damaging are applied to the movement he is supposed to serve.""

"The guideline for her own life was clear; "there has never been any conflict between my heart and my brain.""

"At the time that Balabanoff joined the PSI, concern for the emancipation of women was already a stated party goal largely through the work of Anna Kuliscioff's"

"When Angelica Balabanoff died in Rome on November 25, 1965, at the age of eighty-seven, an obituary referred to her as "one of the most striking personalities of the International Socialist Movement." Her life since 1878 was marked by activism in a wide range of radical causes. As a leader of the Italian Socialist party (PSI) and later of the Italian Social Democrats as well as an intransigent antifascist and a dedicated humanist, Balabanoff was a key figure in the history of European radical politics."

"Our conference [Women's Congress in Bern] had two tasks to perform: to publicize the fact that in spite of the vetoes of their governments and the opposition of the labour leaders, women had met and worked together for peace and for Socialism; our second task was to formulate slogans for this struggle and to publish a leaflet for women to whom the reaction to the war marked a first approach to social problems, to explain the causes and consequences of the war and the manner in which they could be abolished. Our appeal to them began: "Where are your husbands, your brothers, your sons? Why must they destroy one another and all that they have created? Who benefits by this bloody nightmare? Only a minority of war profiteers...Since the men cannot speak, you must. Workingwomen of the warring countries, unite!" (page 131)"

"He and Benedetto Croce actively attacked the regime from their seats in the Senate. After 1930 Volterra was dismissed from the University and stripped of his membership in all Italian scientific societies. The same thing later happened to Levi-Civita. To the honor of the Santa Sede, he and Volterra (both of whom were Jews) were soon thereafter appointed by Pope Pius XI to his Pontifical Academy."

"Si vous demandez à tout mathématicien si dans son esprit il fait une distinction les théories de l'élasticité et celles de l'électrodynamique, il vous dira qu'il n'en fait pas, car les types de équations différentielles qu'il rencontre, et les méthodes qu'il doit employer pour résoudre les problèmes qui se présentent, sont tout à les mêmes dans le deux cas. (If you ask any mathematician if in his mind he makes a distinction between the theories of elasticity and those of electrodynamics, he will tell you that he does not, because the types of differential equations he encounters, and the methods which he must employ to solve the problems which arise, are all the same in the two cases.)"

"C varieties in four-space were first investigated by Segre, in two memoirs ... which are still classic, and in which he gave a generation of those having more than six nodes, especially the one with ten nodes, while he also considered varieties containing a plane, and gave some of their properties."

"I did not hesitate at the Congress of Mathematicians at Paris to call the nineteenth century the century of the theory of functions, as the eighteenth century might have been called that of infinitesimal calculus."

"The study of the geometry of a Galois space Sr,q, i. e. of a projective r-dimensional space over a Galois field of order q = ph. where p, h are positive integers and p is a prime (the characteristic of the field), has recently been pursued and developed along new lines ... In it, both algebraic-geometric and arithmetical methods have been applied, including the use of electronic calculating machines; moreover, some of the problems dealt with are deeply connected with information theory, especially with the construction of q-ary error-correcting codes. It is actually a chapter of arithmetical geometry, which reduces to the investigation of certain questions on congruences mod p in the particular case when h = 1."

"Non vi sarebbe quindi da stupirsi se le geometrie di Galois venissero and avere in futuro applicazioni anche al campo della fisica, da cui attualmente sembrano molto lontane esce anzi tali spazi finiti portassero alla costruzione di schemi a modelli dove i fenomeni fisici trovassero interpretazioni matematiche più semplici di quelle consuete. (It would not be much of a surprise if Galois geometry in the future came to have applications in the field of the physics, from which these finite geometries are currently far removed. These finite geometries might lead to the construction of models in which physical phenomena have simpler mathematical interpretations than the models now used. — modified from the original translation by Tallini)"

"A nonsingular cubic surface F can be rationally represented upon a plane α if and only if F contains a rational point."

"On my way home in May 1932, when I stopped in Rome to see Vito Volterra and explained my 92 Andre Weil formula to him, he jumped up out of his chair and ran to the back of the apartment, crying to his wife: "Virginia! Virginia! Il signor Weil ha dimostrato un gran bel teorema!" ("Mr. Weil has proved a very beautiful theorem!")"

"Art possesses the formidable tool of . Take, for instance, theatre. Theatre, by convention, agrees to be fake; thanks to this convention, which is innocuous, it can tell the truth. Art can tell the truth, because it is a transfigured language which doesn’t claim to possess divine truth; with its ability to transform relationships, it can address even the most terrible issues, exploring them without being destroyed by them. But artists have to be conscious of their role."

"I don’t want to stay in a place that calls itself a Jewish community but is the propaganda office of a government. I am against those who want to ‘Israelianize’ Judaism."

"Every minute of our life must be lived to the full – whether enjoyed or suffered. We must study, see the good around us, and fight the bad, and not waste time writing to a 90-year-old woman to tell her you wish she’d die. Besides, nature will take care of that."

"Your personal mission, your strength and your bravery are a role model for us in Israel and for Jewish communities around the world."

"Those with wholeness of understanding will be primarily motivated towards Watchfulness by their coming to see clearly that only perfection and nothing else is worthy of their desire and that there is no worse evil than the lack of and removal from perfection. For after this has become clear to them, as well as the fact that the means to this end are virtuous deeds and traits, they will certainly never permit themselves to diminish these means; nor will they ever fail to make use of their full potential. For it would already have become clear to them that if these means were reduced in number or not employed with complete effectiveness, with all of the energy that they called for, true perfection would not be attained through them, but would be lacked to the extent that sufficient exertion was lacking in relation to them."

"If man had been created solely for the sake of this world, he would have had no need of being inspired with a soul so precious and exalted as to be greater than the angels themselves, especially so in that it derives no satisfaction whatsoever from all of the pleasures of this world. ... "What is this analogous to? To the case of a city dweller who married a princess. If he brought her all that the world possessed, it would mean nothing to her, by virtue of her being a king's daughter. So is it with the soul. If it were to be brought all the delights of the world, they would be as nothing to it.""

"Man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in God and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His Presence; for this is true joy and the greatest pleasure that can be found."

"We thus derive that the essence of a man's existence in this world is solely the fulfilling of mitzvoth, the serving of God and the withstanding of trials, and that the world's pleasures should serve only the purpose of aiding and assisting him, by way of providing him with the contentment and peace of mind requisite for the freeing of his heart for the service which devolves upon him. It is indeed fitting that his every inclination be towards the Creator, may His Name be blessed, and that his every action, great or small, be motivated by no purpose other than that of drawing near to the Blessed One and breaking all the barriers (all the earthy elements and their concomitants) that stand between him and his Possessor, until he is pulled towards the Blessed One just as iron to a magnet. Anything that might possibly be a means to acquiring this closeness, he should pursue and clutch, and not let go of; and anything which might be considered a deterrent to it, he should flee as from a fire."

"If we do not look into and analyze the question of what constitutes true fear of God and what its ramifications are, how will we acquire it and how will we escape wordly vanity which renders our hearts forgetful of it? Will it not be forgotten and go lost even though we recognize its necessity? Love of God, too—if we do not make an effort to implant it in our hearts, utilizing all of the means which direct us towards it, how will it exist within us?"

"Is it fitting that our intelligence exert itself and labor in speculations which are not binding upon us, in fruitless argumentation, in laws which have no application to us, while we leave to habit and abandon to mechanical observance our great debt to our Creator?"

"Whatever tends to lighten one's burden must be examined carefully. For although such alleviation is sometimes justified and reasonable, it is most often a deceitful prescription of the evil inclination, and must, therefore, be subjected to much analysis and investigation."

"All of the character traits, which are in such great need of correction and cultivation—who will cultivate and correct them if we do not give heart to them and subject them to exacting scrutiny?"

"Though the beginnings and foundations of saintliness are implanted in every person's heart, if he does not occupy himself with them, he will witness details of saintliness without recognizing them and he will trespass upon them without feeling or perceiving that he is doing so. For sentiments of saintliness, fear and love of God, and purity of heart are not so deeply rooted within a person as to obviate the necessity of his employing certain devices in order to acquire them."

"There are few, however, who devote thought and study to perfection of Divine service—to love, fear, communion and all of the other aspects of saintliness. It is not that they consider this knowledge unessential; if questioned each one will maintain that it is of paramount importance and that one who is not clearly versed in it cannot be deemed truly wise. Their failure to devote more attention to it stems rather from its being so manifest and so obvious to them that they see no need for spending much time upon it. Consequently, this study and the reading of works of this kind have been left to those of a not too sensitive, almost dull intelligence. These you will see immersed in the study of saintliness, not stirring from it. It has reached the stage that when one sees another engaging in saintly conduct, he cannot help but suspect him of dullwittedness."

"There is also no lack of deterrents which keep saintliness at a distance from a person, but then again there is no lack of devices by which these deterrents may be held afar."