For those who no longer know what the “workers’ movement” is, or who have forgotten, here is a book of great freshness, meant to remind them how courageous and difficult was the awakening of the working masses — in this case the Jewish ones — to politics in Eastern Europe (Russia, and above all Poland). Henri Minczelès, an author known for his works on the Bund, on the Jews of Lithuania and Poland, recalls for us the attraction of the Jewish revolutionaries to populism, then to Marxism, at the end of the nineteenth century. A difficult journey, for the Jewish intellectuals as much as for the working masses, whom he reminds us were so exploited: does anyone still know that the ten-hour day was one of the major demands for those who worked 10 to 15 hours a day?
The Jewish masses’ entry into politics also contained another promise, one that was fulfilled: to bring “the Jewish worker out of the synagogue and the Yeshiva,” as one of the first leaders of the Hashomer, Itzhak Tabenkin, put it. But, Minczelès reminds us, “the Bund’s secularism does not, however, turn into hatred of religion, nor into provocation, as is the case among the anarchists.”
The Bund was popular among the Jewish proletariat; it was even the Bund that invented the professional revolutionary, immortalized by Lenin — an invention that is, moreover, open to debate.
Minczelès evokes the dilemmas of these first generations of Jewish workers: to integrate into the Russian or Polish workers’ organizations, or to create Jewish organizations. What, then, should their language be? The question of language was central. In order to “go to the Jewish people,” many Jewish intellectuals converted to Yiddish: from 1890 on, political education was conducted principally in Yiddish.
But to adopt Yiddish, as the Bund did, assigned to its speakers a strongly marked identity, hardly conducive, according to its adversaries, to mutual understanding. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the Polish socialists were opposed to it. For Luxemburg, Yiddish was likened to a “jargon,” in which “plebeian uncultured-ness” crossed paths with — as Minczelès acutely notes — “a combination of social backwardness and religious specificity.” She does, to be sure, recognize in the Jews the character of a specific nationality, but without the possibility of acceding to national autonomy. Precisely, certain intellectuals in Vilna, Minsk, and Bialystok founded, as early as 1895, “Zhargonishe Komitetn” (Jargon Committees), meant to promote works accessible in Yiddish to poor, unassimilated Jews.
Internationalists, Lenin and Luxemburg fought for the world revolution, which required as little particularism as possible. The Polish socialists of the PPS held, on the contrary, that one had to fight for both national and social emancipation. Ludwik Waryński, a Polish social democrat opposed to the PPS’s choices, advanced this famous remark: “There exist in the world people more unfortunate than the Poles — they are the proletarians.” History proved the PPS right, as far as Poland was concerned.
The notion of “Luxemburgism,” which underscored above all the Jewish origin of the militants, poisoned the Polish communist movement, which often divided, in various forms, between national and Cominternian options. One must not view the Bundist option — favorable to cultural autonomy and to social emancipation — through the sole prism of the tragic fate of the Jewish proletariat. For several decades, the Bundist path exerted a powerful influence, and no one knows what its evolution might have been.
Henri Minczelès reminds us of buds of hope, of forgotten solidarities — ever necessary.