Revolutionary Yiddishland

A History of Jewish Radicalism

Sylvie Klingberg, Alain Brossat, Sylvia Klingberg, David Fernbach

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784786076
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784786090
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Social Sciences

Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag.

Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions-a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.

1.

The Immense Pool of Human Tears

A terrifying abyss opens

in the immense pool of human tears

marked by a flow of blood.

It cannot grow more deep or dark.

‘Song of the Bund’

A former communist cadre trained in the schools of the Comintern, who held important positions in Poland after 1945; a Bund militant who found refuge in the Soviet Union in 1939 but spent long years on the banks of the Kolyma in Siberia; a member of the left Poale Zion who sought to realize the impossible synthesis between the Zionist aspiration and the communist programme in 1930s Poland – these men were opposites in so many ways: the political battles they waged, their itineraries, their versions of history, their summing up of the century. But behind their political commitment in each case, they evoke their childhood years in Poland, Lithuania or Romania; their family; and the social and cultural environment in which they grew up. The picture then changes and the originality and unity of the world in which their consciousness was formed reveals itself: Yiddishland.

A social and cultural space, a linguistic and religious world, rather than a territory in the strict sense. Yiddishland had no frontiers, and at the time our witnesses were born it had long overspilled the limits of the Pale of Settlement invented by the tsars. A space interwoven with other cultural and national worlds, intersecting them, supervening on them, yet remaining so readily identifiable when these men and women speak:

My father was a practising Hassid who prayed three times a day and wanted above all else that his children should continue his path. My parents never had a stable source of income. Most often they went from one market to another, cobbling bits and pieces together to sell – they were what we called Luftmenschen.

Or again:

My father worked for a bank. He was a believer, but not fanatical. He kept the traditions, wore a beard but not side-locks. He wore the Hassid dress on Saturdays, prayed every day, but didn’t wear the skullcap at work. He insisted that the festivals were properly kept up, that we ate kosher at home, and that the Shabbat should be respected, but despite this he was very open to the world; he was very cultivated and read a lot, particularly in German. He’d started work very young, after studying in a heder.

When our witnesses came into the world, at the turn of the century, this universe was rapidly changing. From the mid-nineteenth century the advance signals of the irruption of modernity into Yiddishland made themselves visible. The Pale of Settlement in which the majority of Eastern European Jews were concentrated, on the western borders of the tsarist empire, was not a backward and unchanging Orient, untouched by the great economic currents that were sweeping Europe. It was, on the contrary, a crossroads of exchange and influence where capitalism sprang up in the 1860s, basically in the form of petty industry, but soon also larger enterprises such as the match and cigarette factories in Byelorussia where the first concentrations of a modern Jewish proletariat appeared.

This rise of capitalism overturned the structures of traditional Jewish life in Eastern and Central Europe. A process of social differentiation rapidly developed within the Jewish population, coinciding with a process of concentration in urban agglomerations, from the shtetl to the big city. The first systematic census of the Jewish population in the tsarist empire was conducted in 1897. It showed that Jews made up more than 50 per cent of the urban population of Byelorussia and Lithuania; that in Minsk 52 per cent of the population were Jews, 64 per cent in Białystok, 41 per cent in Vilnius and 48 per cent in Grodno. If we take into account the transition from a type of activity that was principally intermediary (in 1818, 86.5 per cent of the Jews in Ukraine, Lithuania and Byelorussia were traders) to the new functions promoted by the rise of capitalism, far more differentiated and dominated by manual labour, this completely upset the social and cultural universe of Yiddishland. The second half of the nineteenth century, in fact, saw the rise of a new Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, a culture that broke with traditional Jewish life in the sense that it was open to the influences of the modern world, seeking to realize a synthesis between modern culture and Jewish values, attacking the ‘formalism’ of religion and the forms of existence it imposed, and drawing its inspiration from the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

In the 1850s, under Alexander II, who relaxed somewhat the discrimination against Jews, a stratum of enlightened intellectuals and traders developed. As increasing numbers of Jews began to attend high schools and universities, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this Jewish intelligentsia who had mastered Russian (while Yiddish remained the mother tongue of 96.6 per cent of the Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement in 1898) would play an essential role of intermediary between the Jewish population and modern ideas, between the nascent Jewish workers’ movement and that of both Russia and Western Europe.

The abolition of serfdom in the tsarist empire quickened the decomposition of the feudal world, clearing the ground for the development of capitalism. The 1880s saw an influx of landless peasants into the towns, seeking work in the factories, where they formed the nucleus of the Russian and Polish proletariat; for them the Jewish worker was a competitor. In 1881, in the wake of the assassination of Alexander II by the Narodniks, pogroms broke out in many towns of the tsarist empire – anti-Semitism would be a major element of modernity in this part of Europe. The early 1880s were a turning point in Jewish history, seeing the first waves of massive emigration and the appearance of the first embryos of a Jewish workers’ movement, forerunners of the Bund, as well as the first Zionist circles.

If a large fraction of the Jewish population in this watershed period turned to productive work in urban centres, they remained largely concentrated in the handicraft sector, a type of production with a low technological level at the end of the production chain: tailors, shoemakers, weavers, carpenters, locksmiths, etc. This specific character of Jewish labour was defined as follows by Borochov, the theorist of Poale Zion: ‘The more a trade is removed from nature, the more Jewish labour is concentrated in it’.

It was this wretched complex of workshops and petty industry that would essentially form the base of the Jewish workers’ movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Misery and isolation from the other national proletariats that were forming at the same time (Russian, Polish, etc.), were two fundamental characteristics of the Jewish populace of the towns. This explains the radicalism of the first manifestations of the Jewish workers’ movement, as well as the emergence of forms of organization that were exclusively Jewish.

Until the revolution of 1905, the lead taken by the Jewish workers’ movement over that of its Russian, Polish, Baltic, Ukrainian and Caucasian counterparts was an evident and remarkable feature of the situation in the tsarist empire. In the 1880s, the first kassy developed in Lithuania and Byelorussia, mutual aid funds designed to support the needs of workers on strike. Radical intellectuals organized the first study circles specifically for Jewish workers. The organic connection that was then established between revolutionary intellectuals and workers would make for the great strength of this movement at the turn of the century, a time when the theorists of Russian Social Democracy were still very weakly linked to the proletariat. In the 1880s, the first groups of Jewish Social Democrats in Lithuania undertook a systematic agitation among Jewish workers and artisans, inspiring strikes and publishing the first socialist newspaper in Yiddish, Der yiddisher arbeyter (The Yiddish Worker). When the Bund was formed in 1897, the movement already had solid roots in the Jewish proletariat, particularly in Lithuania and Byelorussia. At this time, 1,500 workers paid contributions to the kassy in Vilnius and 1,000 in Minsk.

Soon after the foundation of the Bund, the first congress of the RSDLP was held; it was the Bund that took charge of the congress arrangements, possessing as it did material resources and an organization that were far superior to those of the Russian and Polish Social Democrats. It was also the Bund, in the western part of the empire, that helped the Russian Social Democrats to print their first publications and secretly distribute them to the industrial centres. And on 1 May 1899, the Bund organized the first big public demonstration of the Jewish proletariat in Russia. After the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, it organized Jewish self-defence. And when the 1905 revolution broke out, while the Russian party had 8,500 members, the Bund had close to 30,000.

This lack of synchrony between the growth of the Jewish workers’ movement and the other national movements it was in contact with would have significant consequences. The intellectuals who gathered the first circles of Jewish workers, and inspired the first strikes of the Jewish proletariat, originally conceived this activity as a work of socialist propaganda and agitation among Jewish workers, not as the construction of a specific Jewish workers’ movement distinct from the organization of workers in Russia in general. It was naturally necessary to address Jewish workers in their own language, in order to be effective, and likewise appropriate to take into account their particular conditions of work and existence, but this was no more than one moment in the development of the awareness of the Russian proletariat in general; the development of capitalism in Russia, it was then generally believed, would soon lead to the disappearance of what distinguished the Jewish proletariat from the Russian, Polish or Ukrainian.

At the turn of the century, however, the growth of the workers’ movement in the Russian Empire gave the lie to this prognosis. It became apparent in particular that the development and class consciousness of the proletariat and its organizations that were forming at this time responded not just to the development of capitalism, but also to the perpetuation of national oppression; organizations such as the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the Bund developed along the dual track of struggle against capitalist exploitation and the fight for national identity. The great strength of the Bund in its hour of glory – around the revolution of 1905 – was precisely to have been far more than simply a vanguard organization of the Jewish proletariat, but rather what Vladimir Medem, one of its most prestigious leaders, called ‘a living creature’, whose many-sided action, on the terrain of class struggle but also that of the promotion of Jewish culture and the ‘new Jewish man’, crystallized the aspirations of all the popular classes of Eastern European Jewry; it embodied, at a moment when the world of this population was being ruptured, all the positive values of a new way of life, the outlines of a new culture, the promotion of a modern and progressive figure of Jewishness. But this was not the orientation of all the radical Jewish intellectuals of the tsarist empire, and above all it was not that of the Russian Social Democrats represented by Plekhanov and Lenin, nor even Jews such as Martov, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. The ‘nationalism’ of the Bund led to a ‘federalist’ view of the revolutionary party in Russia; when the Bund demanded, at the second congress of the RSDLP in 1903, that it should be recognized as representing the entire Jewish proletariat, including that in the southern provinces of Russia where Jewish workers were far more integrated into the general working class, the split was consummated with those who, like Lenin, dreamed of organizing the whole of the Russian proletariat in a centralized and disciplined party, as the unequal battle against the tsarist autocracy required.

After the 1905 revolution, the Bund drew closer again to the Bolsheviks; then, from 1912, it made common cause with the Mensheviks. But this was not the main thing: it was the split of the Bund in 1903 that really inaugurated a break in the Jewish workers’ movement that would continue until the destruction of the Jewish working class during the Second World War. On the one hand, there was the Jewish radicalism that developed on the terrain of Jewish identity, the cohesion of the Jewish working class – but this could not spread beyond the limits of this world, and was vulnerable to everything that might shake or unbalance it. The Bund in interwar Poland was the embodiment of this current. It was no accident that it dominated the Jewish trade union movement, that it appeared the embodiment of the new Jewish culture against a Jewish bourgeoisie that sought in vain to coexist with the Polish ruling class; but it was also no accident that the most radical fraction of the Jewish proletariat and youth escaped its hold and experienced the force of attraction of the Russian Revolution, or that it failed to survive the Second World War as an active political current. On the other hand, in the diatribes of Trotsky and Martov against the Bund at the second congress of the RSDLP, and the sarcasm of Rosa Luxemburg against the ‘Jewish shopkeeper’ of the Bund, we see the other current of Jewish radicalism, a universalist current that wagered on the extinction of the Jewish question, the discrimination that Jews were victims of, as a result of assimilation – a trend that seemed to them inscribed in the iron laws of capitalist development. And so thousands of Jewish communists in interwar Poland assimilated, or believed they assimilated, into the great current of the revolution.

Yiddishland in the early years of the century remained a relatively homogeneous and coherent ensemble, but powerful factors were working towards its destabilization. Even if held back by a multitude of social and political factors, the integration of Jewish workers into large-scale industry (textile, engineering, chemicals) was advancing, creating among the Jewish proletariat an opening towards wider groupings – Russian and Polish. On the other hand, the irruption of modernity into Yiddishland precipitated a crisis of the religious conservatism that had until then been dominant. The intellectual and everyday life of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe was now increasingly marked by a tension and antagonism between these traditional forms and the ‘new culture’, particularly the emergence of a new secular identity of the young Jews who broke with tradition. The rapid rise in the cultural level of the Jewish population in the early twentieth century, and the growing attendance of Jewish youth in secondary and higher education, brought about a growing opening towards the non-Jewish world and a secularization of Jewish life.¹

The multiple effects of the Russian Revolution would amplify this destabilization of the Yiddish universe. The geographic, social and cultural unity of Yiddishland, however relative, was broken. The Russian Civil War, particularly in Ukraine, destroyed all the traditional structures of Jewish life, drawing the Jewish population into a formidable whirlpool. The establishment of a collectivized economy, the destruction of the social fabric of old Russia, the ‘reconstruction of lifestyle’ in the USSR in the 1920s, overturned the social existence and consciousness of the Jewish population from top to bottom: many people were proletarianized, assimilated to the Russian working class; others became more than ever Luftmenschen, suspended in the air; others again ‘assimilated’ into the new society by finding a place in the Party or the new state’s body of functionaries. In the newly independent Poland, Jewish workers and their movement were confronted immediately after the First World War with a double adversary: a chauvinist Polish bourgeoisie incapable of giving any consistency to the ‘miracle’ of renewed independence, and the Jewish capitalist bourgeoisie.

These upheavals brought about a complete recomposition of the political forces of Yiddishland. Many militants from the Bund joined the communist movement, not only in Russia and Ukraine, but also in Poland. The Polish Bund experienced the attraction of the Russian Revolution in the early 1920s; the socialist Zionists were torn between sympathy for Soviet power and their ‘Palestinian’ utopia. A new generation of communist Jewish militants appeared in Eastern Europe, providing many cadres for the international communist movement, from the Spanish war through to the ‘building of socialism’ in Poland after the Second World War. It was into this unstable and rapidly changing world that our witnesses were born. The lines of fracture that pervaded it are clearly drawn as soon as they describe their milieu and their youth.

Léo Lev was born in 1905 in the small town of Ostrowiecz, near Radom. ‘Until the beginning of the century’, he says,

The rabbis were the masters of our community, all social life was dominated by religion, the Jewish community was under the thumb of the rich. But the First World War overthrew the traditional state of affairs. The workers’ organizations began to exert their influence, and Poale Zion developed in our region. A broad debate took place in the [Polish] workers’ movement of the 1920s: what perspective was most favourable for Jews? To settle in Palestine, or to integrate ourselves into the struggle of each country? The petty bourgeois leaned in the direction of Poale Zion; but among the youth, communism was dominant, so great was the prestige of the USSR.

Elija Rosijanski was born in Kovno (Lithuania) in 1902. He passed the matriculation exam and began studying medicine, but was bored to death in the ‘big village’ that Lithuania was at the time. He dreamed of a wider world. Besides, he didn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the 2009 Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Immense Pool of Human Tears
• 2. Rally Round Our Flag!
• 3. The Spanish Sky
• 4. Silent Starry Night
• 5. The Song of the Revolution Betrayed
• 6. I Am Tired of Defeats
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index