What if: Lenin or Trotsky turn Zionist?

IOTL, a lot of prominent Zionist Jews were originally members of Socialist movements in Europe, who were driven out of those movements due to the Anti-Semitism they faced, or otherwise stopped believing Socialism is the only cure for Anti-Semitism, and decided that while a Socialist society must be reached, for Jews specifically it can only be done by founding their own state.
So, let's say that among those Jews are our famous fellows, Lenin and Trotsky. They face Anti-Semitism of some degree, and decide to emigrate to the then-Ottoman Palestine, likely joining a Kvutza (the predecessors of the Kibbutz), and becoming prominent in local politics. Historically, the Labor Zionist movement started out as much more Socialist than it came to be in 1948, and began splitting in the mid 1920's into a nationalist faction, headed by Ben-Gurion and a more Marxist-leaning faction. I suppose that Lenin and\or Marx would come to lead the Marxist faction, which historically became less and less significant as time went on and was overtook by the Nationalist faction with the Mapai party at its head, which slowly took control of the Histadrut labor federation and the political mainstream, until it caused the Marxist faction to ultimately almost completely disappear. This was very much helped due to the Marxists support of Stalinism. Trotsky being a part of this movement would certainly butterfly their support of Stalinism, and Lenin being there might even butterfly Stalin himself away.
So, what do you think?
 
His maternal grandfather was a Jew-turned-Russian Orthodox. Lenin himself, though, had nothing to do with Jewish culture, religion or language.
 
Would Lenin and Trotsky keep their birth names or change them to something Jewish inspired? And as said above, he wasn't Jewish. I think that a lot of the Jewish socialists/communists were actually mislabeled, as they were agnostic or atheist due to their parents converting to a Christian faith or due to thinking... Less than favorable thoughts about small Jewish cloisters. And looking into things, Lenin is not even listed on Wikipedia as a Soviet Jew and Trotsky turned down the Chairman of the Council role to him because he thought his own Jewishness would look bad. I have to say, I am happy to have discovered all of this. All the talk about Lenin being Jewish in the past made me believe it.
 
But Trotsky certainly was Jewish. And you don't have to be religious at all to be considered a Jew. The early Zionist movement was almost entirely a secular-nationalist movement. Herzl and Ben-Gurion were Atheists.
 
But Trotsky certainly was Jewish. And you don't have to be religious at all to be considered a Jew. The early Zionist movement was almost entirely a secular-nationalist movement. Herzl and Ben-Gurion were Atheists.
Yes, to be considered. It doesn't mean that the title should be forced upon someone if they do not seem themselves as being either racially or religiously Jewish. It reminds me too much of that social rule in parts of the US that having an African centuries back in the family tree legally made you Black. Though it was obviously more complicated than that.
 
Yes, to be considered. It doesn't mean that the title should be forced upon someone if they do not seem themselves as being either racially or religiously Jewish. It reminds me too much of that social rule in parts of the US that having an African centuries back in the family tree legally made you Black. Though it was obviously more complicated than that.

Yet it was precisely that-the inescapable label of Jew applied to secular, assimilated Russian, Polish, and Germann socialists that done so many to become Zionists.
 
Yet it was precisely that-the inescapable label of Jew applied to secular, assimilated Russian, Polish, and Germann socialists that done so many to become Zionists.

Exactly.
And that's why I think Trotsky could have become a Zionist.
 
Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was introduced to Maria Alexandrovna Blank, they married in the summer of 1863. From a relatively prosperous background, Maria was the daughter of a Russian-Jewish physician

You've got to be born from a Jewish mother to be Jewish, not from a Jewish father.

Back to the argument, there were communist zionists, people like Moses Hess (well, a proto-zionist), and labour zionism was, at least in the beginning, an admirably socialist movement so...why not?
But would Lenin or Trotsky have the same success they had in real life, if they become Jewish left wing nationalists?
Here, Lenin did an admirable job at keeping order in the various Soviet nationalities. Would Lenin be as good as here, there, by preventing any partition of the land and creating a binational socialist state? (zionists didn't even consider partition before 1937. Herzl himself gave for granted the idea of Palestinians living in peace with Jewish immigrants. He envisioned a state in wich Arabic and Hebrew were the most spoken languages, with German being the high language and the lingua franca)
 
Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was introduced to Maria Alexandrovna Blank, they married in the summer of 1863. From a relatively prosperous background, Maria was the daughter of a Russian-Jewish physician

And yet there's no evidence that Lenin even knew about his Jewish ancestry, much less that it constituted a serious part of his life.

As some noted, there is something disturbingly racist about all this.
 
Trotsky probably has the literary ability to become a Zionist intellectual of some formidable influence - he'll probably make his name with a Zionist newspaper of some kind. His political and/or military career will be determined by how extreme his position is. If it's extreme as in OTL - he won't have much of a chance to make himself much of a organisational base in Mandatory Palestine due to being in prison all the time.

He will, of course, not be called Trotsky.
 
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