Joseph Marco Baruch and Bulgarian Zionism
Joseph Marko Baruch’s Zionist Association in Sofia on the Day of the Shekel, 1915. (Photo: World Zionist Organization Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem)
The rich history of Bulgarian Jewry is centuries-old. After all Jews were expelled from the Kingdom of Spain in 1492, followed by Portugal in 1496, tens of thousands emigrated from the Iberian Peninsula to eastern and southern Europe. Many Sephardic Jews found respite in the Ottoman-controlled Balkan states, including modern Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. The Turkish sultans weren’t particularly concerned with their Jewish subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and an Orientalized Jewish culture flourished around the Aegean Sea.
The kingdoms of Austria and Russia began to excel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provoking a series of territorial wars with the Ottoman caliphate. Collectively, these wars devastated the old sultanate, effectively ending Turkish occupation on the European continent by1878. The significance of the rebirth of a Medieval Bulgarian kingdom in the form of a modern independent state, forged from the ruins of a retreating Ottoman empire, was not lost on Bulgarian Jews. Having fought in the Balkan wars, Jewish eyes turned to their own ancestral homeland, still under Ottoman jurisdiction, and wondered if a war for independence there might also revive their ancient kingdom into a modern state.
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By the 1880’s and 90’s, as the Zionist movement gathered steam across Europe, Bulgarian Jews were already primed for it. Importantly, they enjoyed the unique advantage of a (mostly) friendly European host. As pogroms raged across the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, and as France was embroiled in the Dreyfus Affair, the Jews of Bulgaria were organizing a democratically-elected leadership structure within the new constitutional monarchy. Many survivors of the period recounted excellent relations between Bulgarian Jews and Christians during this period. The first tsar of modern Bulgaria, Ferdinand I, oversaw the construction of a synagogue in the heart of the capital of Sofia. It stands today as the largest synagogue in the Balkans and the third-largest Sephardic synagogue in Europe.
It was in this congenial environment that Zionist leaders began to arise in Bulgaria. Unlike the Jewish leadership in other European states, the Bulgarian rabbis did not oppose the tenants of Zionism, nor did they fear the consequences of its promulgation vis-à-vis the Bulgarian monarchy. It was in Sofia in 1895 that a young Zionist firebrand named Joseph Marko Baruch finally settled after bouncing from Constantinople to Vienna to Algeria in previous years. Baruch’s eccentricity and magnetism made him an effective student organizer, and he found an eager Jewish student body in the Bulgarian capital. He founded a Zionist student union there before travelling across Bulgaria to organize its satellite groups. In Plovdiv, Baruch published a French and Ladino (Hebrew-Spanish) language periodical named Carmel, which advocated for a realpolitik advancement of the Zionist movement. Like Theodore Hertzl, Baruch favored an open Jewish revolution against Ottoman rule in the Levant to create a Jewish State. But recognizing that such an endeavor was unlikely to garner support from either European states or Jewish leaders, he also advocated for a policy of “infiltration,” or waves of organized Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael. Although political autonomy would be the goal of such an enterprise, it would not be a guarantee. It is believed that Baruch’s principles were influential on Theodore Hertzl in his formation of a similar strategy of mass Jewish emigration to the Land. Although Hertzl appreciated Baruch as an ally and an asset to the Zionist cause, he didn’t completely trust his colleague’s overzealous and eccentric personality.
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Meanwhile, the Zionist movement in Bulgaria continued to grow. As Theodore Hertzl travelled through Sofia on his way to the Turkish capital in 1896, he was surprised by the throng of supporters who met him at the train station. He learned of the flourishing Zionist organizations in Sofia and Plovdiv, some of which had been founded by Joseph Baruch. In 1897, Chief Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis organized the Bulgarian delegation to the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The following year, Baruch chaired the first Bulgarian Zionist Congress, after which the first National Congress of Bulgarian Jewry was held in 1900. These nation-wide gatherings in support of the Zionist movement had the profound effect of unifying the greater Jewish community in Bulgaria prior to the Second World War. It was a solidarity that Bulgarian Jews would need in order to survive the coming storm of Hitler’s Germany, which would begin to sweep across the European continent a few decades later.
Baruch later travelled to Egypt, where he continued his work as a Zionist organizer for a short time before committing suicide at the age of 27 in1899. Despite his untimely death, Joseph Marco Baruch is regarded as the founder of the Zionist movement in Bulgaria, so that even a half-century later, when Bulgarian Jews emigrated to the pre-state of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, they gave the name Tel Baruch to their settlement in northeast Tel Aviv.
