Israel Eldad

Eldad was born Israel (Sheib) Scheib in Galicia. The National Library of Israel’s archive biography gives his birth year as 1909, while other biographical accounts give 1910; the sources agree that he died in 1996.[5][1] A reference biography identifies his birthplace more specifically as Podvolochisk, in Eastern Galicia, and says his family moved to Vilna in 1914 and later settled in Lvov.[1]

He completed studies at the Vienna Rabbinical Seminary and studied philosophy and history at the University of Vienna, where he wrote a thesis on Schopenhauer. The Jewish Virtual Library says he studied for a doctorate, while an Encyclopedia.com biography says he received a Ph.D.; the available accounts therefore differ on whether the degree was completed.[1][6] He subsequently returned to Poland and taught Jewish studies at the Jewish Teachers Seminary in Vilna.[1]

Before emigrating, Eldad was active in Betar and published literary and political articles in Polish-Jewish and Yiddish publications. He attended the World Conference of Betar in 1938 alongside Avraham Stern, who later became the leader of Lehi.[1] One family recollection describes Eldad working in 1934 as a private tutor to a boy named Maxi Weintraub at a Jewish estate in a remote Austrian village. In that account, a question from the boy about the Passover song “Dayenu” prompted Eldad to reflect on the relationship between the successive events recounted in the song.[7]

Eldad and his wife lived in Vilna with Menachem Begin’s family before leaving Europe. In 1941 they were permitted to leave Soviet-occupied Vilna for Turkey and then made their way to Palestine.[1] After arriving, he taught Bible in Tel Aviv before joining Lehi.[1]

Eldad joined Lehi, a Jewish underground organization that waged a terrorist campaign against British rule before the establishment of the State of Israel. After Avraham Stern was killed by British police in 1942, Eldad became one of the movement’s three leaders. He served as its ideologue and edited its underground monthly He-Ḥazit and weekly Ha-Ma’as.[1][2]

Sources differ over when the triumvirate was established or Lehi’s operations resumed under its leadership. One account says the organization had been reconstructed under Yitzhak Shamir, Eldad, and Natan Yellin-Mor by 1943; another dates the resumption of operations under the three to early 1944.[2][8] A National Library account says the three leaders did not always remain at liberty: at least one was imprisoned during the rest of Lehi’s history, and they stayed in contact through notes or letters written in secret code.[9]

Eldad’s role combined ideological work, publishing, and instruction. In addition to editing Lehi’s underground periodicals, he wrote wall leaflets, prepared radio broadcasts, and taught in the organization’s courses.[1][10] The Jabotinsky Institute’s catalogue also records an overview by Eldad about Stern and Stern’s principles, documenting his later writing on the movement’s founder.[11]

In 1944, while trying to evade arrest by the British, Eldad was wounded in the back. He was held in a Jerusalem prison hospital and later at the Latrun detention camp; Lehi members helped him escape in 1946, after which he continued underground activity until Israel’s establishment.[1] An account of Lehi’s internal discussions places him in a meeting in spring 1947 alongside figures identified as Gara and Mazal, then commander of the fighting unit, and says he had been smuggled out of prison about a year earlier.[10]

Lehi’s anti-British campaign involved propaganda and terrorist attacks, including bombings, killings, and bank robberies. Its methods were opposed by the Zionist leadership and much of the Yishuv.[2] The same organizational history recounts Lehi members’ assassination of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 and the subsequent dismantling of the group. These organizational actions are not evidence that Eldad personally carried them out.[2] A separate source reports Eldad’s retrospective claims of personal responsibility for the assassinations of Lord Moyne and Bernadotte, but those claims are not independently verified in that account.[12]

After Israel’s establishment, a political and ideological division emerged among former Lehi members. Yellin-Mor’s supporters sought a neo-socialist party, while Eldad’s supporters adopted a right-wing nationalist approach and emphasized political activity outside parliament.[1] Accounts of Lehi’s post-Stern development describe an ideological shift among some members toward the Soviet Union and class struggle, while identifying Eldad as the leader of a faction that retained right-wing positions aligned with Revisionist maximalism.[2]

Eldad founded the group Ḥazit ha-Moledet. After Lehi members assassinated Bernadotte in September 1948, the Israeli government declared the group illegal; several members were detained, while Eldad avoided detention.[1] The political division also carried into the Fighters’ List, founded by Lehi veterans. At its first national assembly, most members aligned with Yellin-Mor and Shamir, who leaned toward a socialist platform. Eldad led the right-wing minority that withdrew, and the party soon faded from prominence.[9] A National Library account describes the resulting breach between Eldad and Yellin-Mor’s followers as lasting and irreparable.[9]

Eldad expressed his political ideas in Sulam, a periodical that continued until 1964 and gathered an ideological circle around it.[1] He advocated Revisionist maximalism and a Zionist goal of a Kingdom of Israel (Malkhut Yisrael) extending from the Nile to the Euphrates.[1] A later account of his family’s ideological outlook describes the whole Land of Israel as foundational to Jewish redemption and other arrangements as temporary or objectionable compromises.[13]

Eldad continued to seek an electoral role. In 1969 he headed the “For the Land of Israel” list, which used the ballot letters כן, but it failed to pass the electoral threshold and he did not win a Knesset seat.[1][14] A National Library photograph records him campaigning in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighborhood in October of that year and identifies the photographer as Shalom Bar Tal.[15] After the Six-Day War, Eldad became a prominent figure of the radical right and helped found the Greater Israel Movement. In 1979 he helped found the Teḥiyya party with Geula Cohen, although he did not run for the Knesset on its behalf.[1]

The political divide among former Lehi leaders became part of the later interpretation of the movement’s legacy. Yellin-Mor took a strong leftist position, while Eldad led the faction aligned with Revisionist maximalism; the split ultimately proved irreconcilable.[2] Their disagreement was not only a debate about party organization but reflected competing political paths taken by people who had shared leadership in the underground.

Eldad became a prolific writer and public intellectual. He regularly published articles in Haaretz and Yedioth Aharonoth.[1] His books included Ma’aser Rishon, described as memoirs of the underground, and Hegyonot Mikra, on the Bible.[1] The sources give different publication dates for Ma’aser Rishon: one entry lists a 1975 third edition, while an Encyclopaedia Judaica entry lists a 1950 publication, without explaining the edition history.[1][8]

Eldad undertook a major Hebrew translation project of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings for Schocken Publishing House. Hebrew readers encountered Nietzsche through this project, and a third volume containing The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science appeared in 1969.[3]

Eldad argued that Nietzsche deserved to be translated into Hebrew even if readers did not identify with Nietzsche’s views, and that reading him could encourage a renewed Jewish self-estimation.[3] His own discussion of Nietzsche’s relation to Judaism was interpretive: Eldad wrote that Nietzsche associated Judaism with Christianity and criticized it for having brought Christianity about, while also admiring what Eldad regarded as the biblical, rooted character of Judaism and the Jewish people’s will to live.[3] These reported views are Eldad’s readings of Nietzsche rather than a consensus account of Nietzsche’s views.

Eldad later lectured in humanities at the Haifa Technion and at Beersheba University, now Ben-Gurion University.[1] Recollections also describe public intellectual exchanges beyond his formal teaching: in the 1960s, hundreds of students reportedly attended weekly debates between Eldad and Yeshayahu Leibowitz at the Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus. Eldad’s son Aryeh recalled that the audience consisted mainly of intellectuals and future politicians from a particular social stratum, rather than the public at large.[16]

The archive associated with Eldad’s papers preserves manuscripts of his Nietzsche translations, letters, draft articles and notes, diaries, printed material by or about him, and drafts of lectures. Among the printed material are issues of Divrei HaYamim, a historical journal he edited in the form of an up-to-date newspaper.[5] The Jabotinsky Institute catalogue’s record of an Eldad overview of Avraham Stern adds another example of his writing about the movement’s history and ideas.[11]

During the 1950s, Eldad was frequently accused of incitement to violence and underground activity, although no concrete evidence was found. David Ben-Gurion, then defense minister, ordered him dismissed from his high-school teaching position and barred him from teaching in public schools.[1]

The instruction was issued in 1950 amid claims that Eldad’s writings encouraged the use of weapons against the Israel Defense Forces and the government. Eldad petitioned the High Court of Justice, which ruled that Ben-Gurion’s instruction was outside his authority and void. The judges did not rule out restrictions on teachers’ political activity, but objected to Ben-Gurion himself deciding that Eldad had violated such a restriction.[17] The Supreme Court’s acceptance of Eldad’s petition has been described as one of Justice Shneur Zalman Cheshin’s landmark rulings. Cheshin wrote that disqualifying a person’s opinions should not mean closing off that person’s livelihood.[4]

Accounts differ over the later consequences of the dispute. The Jewish Virtual Library says Eldad could not find teaching work after the ruling, founded a student association called the Nationalist Cells, and earned a living as a translator.[1] A separate biography describes his departure from the Haifa Technion as following Ben-Gurion’s response to inflammatory remarks, whereas other accounts describe him later teaching at the Technion and Beersheba University.[1][6] The sources therefore do not give a single, consistent account of the timing and circumstances of his teaching career.

Eldad took part in debates about the public remembrance of Lehi members. In spring 1965, on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the hangings in Cairo of Lehi members Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim, he argued that the two remained outside Israel’s public commemorations. He contrasted the attention given to Winston Churchill’s death with what he saw as the absence of recognition for Bet-Zuri and Hakim, predicting that they would not be commemorated in synagogues, educators’ discussions, or state radio.[18]

Eldad expressed the distance he perceived between the two men and the country for which they had acted in a statement that “not only their bodies […] are far from the homeland for which they gave their blood and lives, but also their light and heroism are remote from here.”[18] In 1975, at a state ceremony connected with their reburial, he delivered a speech and made pointed remarks about state leaders. An academic account describes the participating underground veterans as experiencing the ceremonies as a kind of retroactive victory: people who had earlier been marginalized and ostracized were now at the center of state events.[18]

That change in public standing is part of the broader contest over Lehi’s place in Israeli history. Accounts of the 1975 ceremony show how commemoration could signify not only remembrance of particular individuals but a reassessment of the underground’s status in public life.[18]

Eldad’s legacy is associated with several roles that overlapped across his life: Lehi leader and ideologue, political writer, translator of Nietzsche, editor, teacher, and publicist. His extensive Nietzsche translation project introduced Hebrew readers to major works including The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science, while his political writings made him a prominent figure of the Israeli right.[1][3]

His papers were deposited permanently at the National Library by his son, Prof. Aryeh Eldad, in stages. The first deposits took place in November 2005 and July 2009; writings by Pinchas Heller were incorporated in 2016, and in January 2021 Aryeh Eldad deposited a major part of his father’s archive, including letters, manuscripts, and printed material.[5] The archive’s breadth—covering translations, correspondence, drafts, diaries, lectures, and periodicals—provides a documentary record of Eldad’s intellectual work and public activity.[5]

Biographical and memorial accounts also emphasize his family and personal legacy. Eldad’s son Aryeh was elected to the Sixteenth Knesset on the National Union list.[1] A biography of Eldad titled Sambatyon takes its name from the legendary river described in the account as rushing and casting stones in every direction.[13] A family account portrays the home in which Aryeh grew up as shaped by strong ideological commitments, readiness for personal sacrifice, and an emphasis on personal and intellectual integrity.[13]

Some descriptions of Eldad’s influence are explicitly evaluative. A Jerusalem Post opinion article calls him a “fiery writer and editor of the far right,” and reports Yellin-Mor’s assessment that Shamir’s “will and cruelty,” together with “Eldad’s ardor,” helped build Lehi.[19] A JNS report quotes a Herut North America director describing Eldad as a major leader of the pre-state underground and a well-known public intellectual; the report’s description of him as one of Israel’s most influential newspaper columnists is a promotional assessment rather than an independently established measure.[20]

Biographical records differ on some basic details. The National Library archive biography gives Eldad’s birth year as 1909, while other sources use 1910.[5][1] Accounts also disagree over whether he completed a doctorate in Vienna.[1][6] Sources give different dates for Ma’aser Rishon, apparently referring to different editions without explaining their history.[1][8] They also give different years for the reconstruction or operational resumption of Lehi’s triumvirate leadership.[2][8] These discrepancies do not alter the broad outline of his career, but the available records do not resolve them.

Eldad’s political outlook, his place in Lehi, and the organization’s legacy have been characterized in strongly political terms. Sources describe him as the leader of Lehi’s right-wing faction and record the political split with Yellin-Mor and the resulting disputes over the movement’s legacy.[1][2] Accounts of the teaching ban also differ in how they describe the circumstances of his dismissal and subsequent work, although they report that the court invalidated Ben-Gurion’s instruction as outside his authority.[1][17]

Some claims about the state’s treatment of Eldad rely on personal recollection rather than independent documentation. His son Aryeh recalled that, when private telephones could take years to obtain, his father received one within two weeks; Aryeh attributed the expedited installation to security-service interest in monitoring Eldad’s calls and to Isser Harel’s concern that he might establish an underground movement against the government.[21] That explanation is presented as the son’s recollection, not as an independently corroborated finding.