A Spiral of History. Iosif Trumpeldor, Nikolai Russel, Kōtoku Shūsui and the ›Hamadera Moment‹

Their lives overlapped for about six months in their educational activism for prisoners of the Russo-Japanese war during Trumpeldor’s internment in the Hamadera camp in Japan. This ›Hamadera moment‹ of a Russian-Jewish-Japanese encounter reveals a meeting point of ideologies often regarded as incompatible—Russel’s internationalism and Trumpeldor’s Zionism in the context of the Japanese transnational anarchism and pacifism. Trumpeldor’s and Russel’s activities inside and outside the POW camp, facilitated by the Japanese anarchists, reveal the cross-fertilization of intellectual and transcultural experiences which contributed to forming the early thought-practice of the ›Jewish state‹ as a multi-national, parliamentary democracy. The lecture recovers the place of Asian revolutionaries in creating the global democratic paradigm.