Paperin, L.: Liberia (A Negro State)

Title

Liberiia (negritianskoe gosudarstvo), Grodna 1906

Liberia (A Negro State)

Keywords

Summary

The book contains an author’s foreword, wherein he elucidates the essay’s main goal: to analyse the feasibility of establishing a centre for the Jewish people, that is economically viable and capable of meeting the general needs of the Jewish community. The essay itself is focused on the case of Liberia and on the “black brothers”, who have a shared history of suffering from slave trading and colonisation. In the subsequent pages, the author briefly recounts events leading up to 1884, highlighting President Hillary Richard Johnson’s inaugural speech, marking him as the first Liberian president born in Africa. The author endorses President Johnson’s assertion that “only hardworking people can create for themselves a prosperous state”. He claims that if individuals dedicate their energy to this objective, success is inevitable. The author concludes by suggesting that his own “impatient” people can get valuable lessons from Liberia’s experience.

Bio

Léon (Leib) Paperin was a scholar, journalist, and translator who worked in Ukraine and France. One of the promoters of the Jewish Zionist movement, he was a member of the Jewish Territorial Organisation. In 1899 Paperin became one of the founding editors, along with Abraham Rokéach, of the newspaper “L’Écho Sioniste”, which was intended to replace the short-lived publication “Kadimah”. “L’Écho Sioniste” ceased to exist in 1905. In 1906-1907 Paperin edited the periodical “Evreiskii golos” [Jewish Voice] in Odessa. Following the publication of Gershon-ben-Gershon’s The Zionist Movement among the Jews (1900), Paperin replied with an essay entitled Something About Political Zionism (1900), where he criticised Gershon’s interpretation of Theodor Herzl’s work The Jewish State. In 1905 he edited and translated in Russian Herzl’s Collected Speeches and Articles on Zionism. He also authored twenty-one entries in the Brockhaus and Efron Jewish Encyclopaedia (1906-1913), including the articles devoted to Alexandre Dumas fils and Voltaire. The essay Liberia (A Negro State) was first published in 1904 in “Evreiskaia zhizn’” and is mentioned in a 1903 article by Vladimir Zhabotinskii, entitled “Zionism and Communism. Critiques of Zionism”.

Sources

L. Paperin, Impressions de Bale, “L’Écho sioniste”, 05.09.1899, p. 7-8;

L. Paperin, Koe-chto o politicheskom sionizme: (Po povodu brosh. g. Gershon-ben-Gershona: “Sionistskoe dvizhenie sredi evreev”), Khar’kov 1900;

D. Shevelev, Obzor russkoi dorevoliutsionnoi istoriografii istorii sionizma, in Rossiiskii sionizm: istoriia i kul’tura: materialy nauchnoi konferentsii, ed. by O. Budnitskii, Moskva 2002, p. 198-214;

V. Zhabotinskii, Sionizm i kommunism. Kritiki sionizma, in O zheleznoi stene: rechi, stat’i, vospominaniia, ed. by F. Dektor, Minsk 2004, p. 161-186;

V. Vilmain, Lire un journal “non lu”, l’exemple de L’Écho Sioniste (1899-1905), in L’Histoire et la Presse, ed. by S. Laithier, V. Vilmain, Paris 2007, p. 21-34;

G. Bernier, Témoignages sur Léo Glaeser, Strasbourg, 2015, p. 24-25.

A.F., M.E.