September 26, 1937

September 26, 1937, is singled out as a date to remember in the history of antisemitism because Adolf Eichmann’s journey toward Palestine brought German officials and Zionist representatives into contact over Jewish emigration. The episode is presented within a broader argument about historical time: political aims and transformations can intersect without sharing a single cause, moment, or meaning.

The Planned Visit to Palestine

On September 26, Adolf Eichmann and an assistant boarded a train in Berlin. Reinhard Heydrich had authorized Eichmann to accept an invitation from Feivel Polkes, a senior member of Haganah, to visit Tel Aviv and discuss coordination between German and Jewish organizations to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine.

The account identifies an overlap of practical aims, not an identity of political purposes. German officials wanted Jews to leave Western Europe; Zionist representatives sought to increase the Jewish population in Palestine relative to the Arab population. The planned visit did not proceed: violent unrest led the British to block access to Palestine. Eichmann and Polkes met days later in Cairo, where they discussed coordinating German and Zionist activities.

The Episode’s Contested Significance

The book treats the encounter as an unsettling instance of interests converging across opposing political positions. It interprets both sides’ demographic aims as sharing a project of changing the population balance, and develops that comparison through the charged concept of ethnic cleansing. That is the author’s polemical framing of the episode, rather than a neutral description that makes the parties’ broader ideologies or purposes equivalent.

The discussion then turns to Palestinians, whom it describes as an obstacle within the political relation between Israelis and Arabs. This extension belongs to the book’s argument about how a population can be made to occupy the position of a remainder that obstructs a settlement. It should be read as the author’s political analysis, not as a further event that took place on September 26.

Revolution and Uneven Historical Time

Elsewhere, the book uses dates and periods to challenge the idea that a revolution’s political beginning, social transformation, and institutional settlement occur together. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account places collectivization and rapid industrialization in the late 1920s within the internal dynamic of the October Revolution. On this interpretation, the revolutionary sequence continued until 1937; its Thermidor came when the purges were cut short, allowing the Party nomenklatura to stabilize as a new class.

The account distinguishes that transformation from the difficult but politically urgent years of 1917–1921 and the subsequent New Economic Policy period. The latter consolidated Soviet state power, it argues, while leaving much of the social fabric intact. The thrust beginning in 1928 was different: it aimed at the composition of society itself, liquidating peasants as individual owners and replacing the old intelligentsia with a new one. A comparison of Moscow in 1924 and 1934 conveys the scale of the change: someone returning in 1924 might still recognize the city’s shops, offices, theaters, and many people in charge; ten years later, the texture of social life had altered so extensively that the city would no longer be recognizable.

Revolutionary Energy and Historical Parallax

The book resists two simplified explanations of Stalinism: that it was merely a contingent deviation from the revolutionary project, or that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. It instead asks readers to hold together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. Isaac Deutscher’s account of forced collectivization helps explain this tension: confined within the Soviet Union after revolution failed to spread, revolutionary energy turned inward, making industrialization and collectivization substitutes for expansion abroad and the liquidation of the kulaks a substitute for overthrowing bourgeois rule elsewhere.

This account of political time complements the book’s concept of temporal parallax. A shared historical principle, it argues, may take different forms at different levels and therefore fail to appear everywhere at once. The date September 26, 1937, belongs specifically to the Eichmann–Polkes episode; the surrounding discussions of 1937, the late 1920s, and the revolutionary years describe other historical sequences. Their juxtaposition does not make them one event. It shows instead how the book uses dates to mark distinct processes whose meanings emerge through their contrasts and uneven timing.