Universalist engagement and national identity: the Bund

In these regions, like the other peoples, the Jews were not only a religion but formed a specific nationality, with their own language — Yiddish first of all, secondarily Hebrew, and to a lesser degree the idiom of the host country — with their traditions, their customs, their culture.

If one takes the example of Austria-Hungary, Austrians, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Slovenes, Romanians, and Jews sometimes lived in the same regions, with their differences, each people with its problems and its demands. In the “prison of peoples” that was the Russian empire, the various national communities, living to varying degrees in oppression — notably the Jews, in the situation of pariahs — therefore aspired to the attainment of civic and national rights.

A failed emancipation, an impossible assimilation

This process was not uniquely Jewish. It marked the coming to consciousness of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. It is certain that the Jewish communities — here almost nonexistent, elsewhere forming a more or less considerable minority in the urban centers, and even, in certain agglomerations, making up the majority — had their own past in relation to the surrounding collectivities. Given their compactness — a city such as Warsaw grouped more than 200,000 Jews, Vienna and Budapest almost as many — it is certain that emancipation, granted here and refused there, posed a problem. Moreover, in many regions, in Ukraine or in Poland, assimilation proved totally impossible. Finally, the Russian autocratic regime, especially from the 1880s onward, carefully sustained the notion of the scapegoat directed against the Jews, and the power applied itself to provoking or supporting waves of pogroms, as in 1881, which bloodied southern Russia and which brought about a massive emigration. In no case could the Jews attain emancipation. It was necessary to await the Revolution of February 1917 for political and national rights to be granted to them.

It was in this inegalitarian context — a failed emancipation, an impossible or illusory assimilation — that the Jewish workers’ movement evolved. Not only was the power violently hostile to it, but if the socialist left of the time was unanimous in making the Jews full citizens, it refused them national rights, holding that the Jews ought to renounce their identity, set aside their Jewishness, and dissolve into the surrounding masses. Otherwise put, they were accepted as men in the abstract, but not as Jews.

The Polish or Russian neighbors, whether they were socialists or not, did not admit a Jewish particularism. The social theorists — democrats, Marxists or not, reformists or revolutionaries, in the terminology of the time — with a few exceptions, held that the emancipation of the Jews — taking up in this the ideas of the German Aufklärung (Enlightenment) — would mean the end of Judaism. According to these masters of thought, the ghetto and the mentalities inherited from that situation would have had their day. For a Jew bearing universal values and the ideas of progress, there could be no place for a Jewish specificity other than a confessional one. It was therefore a purely private affair. What had been seen in France — the emergence of the Israélite — and in Germany — an integration through assimilation, whether or not accompanied by conversion to Christianity — was supposed to settle the Jewish question. Consequently, the advent of a socialist society in all latitudes would see the disappearance of all racial, ethnic, or religious discriminations.

The birth of the Bund, an original creation

Without dwelling on the origins and development of the Jewish workers’ movement between 1870 and 1900, let us note the birth in Vilna, in Lithuania, in 1897 — after an ideological journey that lasted more than a generation — of the Union of Jewish Social-Democratic Workers, otherwise known as the Bund. At its founding, the Bund grouped around 3,500 workers — the weavers, the tanners, the brush-makers, the tailors, the shop clerks — adhering to professional Unions, embryos of the future Jewish trade unions. They had endowed themselves with a socialist — Marxist doctrine centered on the realities of the class struggle and proletarian internationalism. But this ideology implied a national character, a nationalitarian particularism that would develop over the years.

The birth of the Bund is an original creation, for it resolutely departs from the official canons of the Marxism of the time, since its members claim at once civic rights and national rights. Civic rights to be equal to others. National rights to remain different. This was a novelty for the time, and moreover a very popular one, since six years after its creation the Bund counted more than 30,000 members, very young for the most part, resolutely combative, and who rose up against their condition as, in the words of Plekhanov, the father of Russian socialism, “pariahs among the pariahs.”

Indeed, the Jewish popular masses spoke Yiddish in their near-totality, and very few Jewish workers spoke Polish or Russian as a vernacular language. If they were influenced by German culture — the German socialists setting the tone for all the socialist movements — and by Russian populism and the radical Russian organizations, the debate that arose within the Jewish community as a whole was that, in the sections of the Bund, while being Marxist militants and fervent internationalists — the history of that party readily demonstrates it — most of the Jewish leaders were convinced that, contrary to Marx’s opinion of the Jewish people (a people without history and men of money), contrary to what Karl Kautsky wrote in speaking of a “caste,” contrary to the theses of Lenin taken up by Stalin, contrary finally to the Austro-Hungarian theorists such as Otto Bauer, for whom Judaism was a religion and nothing else — the Jews had to resolve their own problems, that no people could do it in their stead.

Among their ideological opponents, certain theorists accepted the idea of nationality for peoples backed by a territory. However, in September 1899, at the congress of Brünn (today Brno), national and cultural autonomy was admitted for peoples without territory, as soon as their customs and traditions, their religion — in short their past, their destiny — were different. It was Karl Renner, the Austrian social-democratic leader, a jurist by training, who enunciated the principle of extraterritoriality — that is to say, like the Jews, peoples without territory. In his works, État et Nation (State and Nation) and later in La lutte des nations pour l’État (The Struggle of Nations for the State), a synthesis of socialist doctrines and the national problem, he demonstrated the necessity of a federalism of multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-confessional States. A given community, with or without a territorial base, thereupon engaged, in a voluntarist act, to be autonomous, to manage its political and cultural problems. It was a solution that in fact gave each collectivity equality of opportunity, equality of rights and duties.

The Bund made this type of demand its own. Other Jewish organizations — the autonomists grouped behind the historian Simon Dubnow — also defended the national and cultural autonomy of the Jews in the diaspora. The Yiddishists, led by Chaim Zhitlowsky, supported this thesis, taking as their basis the Yiddish language and culture. For their part, the Zionists of various tendencies, notably the Poale Zion, Zionist-Marxists led by Ber Borochov, skillfully combined their socialist consciousness and the necessity of creating a Jewish State.

Proletarian internationalism and the national question

Nonetheless, for several years and three consecutive congresses, the Bund had difficulty in formulating a coherent doctrine. It was awkward to make it accepted that one could be a good socialist, a Marxist, a partisan of the class struggle — the frequency of strikes proves it — and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and at the same time a perfect internationalist, all the while remaining viscerally Jewish.

As early as the 3rd congress, held in Kovno in December 1899, the national question came onto the agenda. At the 4th congress in Białystok in May 1901, this question was the principal theme of the congress members. It was only at the 5th congress that the Bund fixed its doctrine. Leaders such as John Mill, Mark Liber, Pavel Rosenthal, and later Noah Portnoy, Vladimir Kossovsky, and above all Vladimir Medem — most of them issued from milieus already more or less assimilated — feared that the intrusion of a nationalitarian dimension into socialist sentiment might risk blunting a flawless internationalism.

Vladimir Medem in particular, in studying the internal organization of the Jewish communities — in this case the Kehillot (community councils), which over the past centuries had maintained the homogeneity of the Jewish group in the diaspora — had at his disposal autonomist elements that ought to be taken up and adapted so as to render them compatible with socialist doctrine. Applying a Marxist reflection to the Jewish question, the sentiment of yiddishkayt (Jewish cultural belonging) revealed in the end no contradiction between thought and praxis. The demand for an autonomous nationality, for a nationalitarian consciousness, and the struggle for socialism or in favor of the immediate interests of the Jewish working class did not enter into conflict with the principles of the class struggle. Moreover, the Bundist ideology was taken up by other parties whose communities found themselves in a similar situation. Many Austrian Marxist theorists, as well as Serbs, Georgians, Armenians, and Latvians, confronted with the same problems, brought forward similar solutions.

On the eve of the Revolution of 1905, the political doctrine of the Bund was henceforth fixed. To be a revolutionary and to belong to a national community of destiny and lot were not antinomical. The sentiment of doykeyt (the principle of “hereness” — being there, locally, for centuries and in solidarity in the struggle) was abundantly commented upon by Medem, who wrote very fine pages in his Memoirs (Fun mayn Lebn)¹, as well as theoretical essays, Demokratie un di Natsionale Frage (Democracy and the National Question), and thus formulated national and cultural autonomy seen from the Jewish angle. This did not prevent the Jewish workers’ party from regarding itself as diasporic, opposed to Zionist nationalism; democratic, as opposed to the Bolsheviks and later to the communists; and finally profoundly secular.

Yiddish and the Bund

In the years that followed, in tsarist Russia, in Ukraine in the aftermath of the revolution of 1917, then in Poland during the interwar period, the Bund — a member of the Second International and then of the Labor and Socialist International in 1930 — fought alongside the Russian Mensheviks, then the PPS (Polish Socialist Party). It took part in numerous campaigns of solidarity, espoused all the Jewish demands while fighting against antisemitism, and was an adversary of all dictatorships: Stalinist and later Nazi.

But parallel to its universalist engagement, the Bund was a firm support of the Yiddish language and culture. At the linguistic conference of Czernowitz in Bukovina, in 1908, in which Yiddish was recognized as “a national language of the Jewish people,” the Bund showed that it was deeply attached to it. As early as 1895, with the creation of the “Jargon Committees,” then the constant and repeated support given to Yiddish writers, the establishment of evening classes for the literacy of Jewish workers was not merely the use of the language for purposes of propaganda. The importance of this language, of yiddishkayt, in a yiddishland without frontiers, served as a substitute for territory. Before the end of the First World War, the birth and development of full-time Yiddish schools, especially in Poland between 1918 and 1939, testify to this logic of giving a real basis to the national consciousness. The Bund established, in its schools of the Cisho (the central organization of Yiddish schools), a daily socialist education thanks to a secular and resolutely modernist school network: coeducation, parents’ councils, cutting-edge pedagogical methods, without however setting aside the Jewish traditions. Which was not the case for the communist Jews of the Soviet regime.

The whole of the Bund’s ideology may, at first glance, seem sophisticated to some and border on utopia for others. It is true that it belongs to the past, all the more so as this century of killings and massacres has shattered generous ideas based on equality and justice.

The Shoah has spread its shroud; the extermination of six million Jews remains, in the end, a frightful failure of humanity. Nonetheless, the doctrine of national and cultural autonomy advocated by the socialist movements at the beginning of the century constitutes an element of reflection that has found its peaceful application among several minorities — in Estonia, in Hungary, in Mexico — and that perhaps may be able to extend to other collectivities. It is not impossible that societies may at last find peaceful solutions to their conflicts instead of tearing one another apart.

Notes