It is fitting to recall a singular page in the history of humanity, threatened with falling little by little into oblivion: the Jewish anarchist movement. Here is a rapid overview of a movement that exerted a little-known influence on the political struggles waged in its time.

In the Western world as much as in the countries of triumphant Marxism, official historiography sought to sink the libertarian movements into oblivion. All the more so when these were Jewish — a phenomenon that may even seem implausible today. Zionism aggravated this oblivion further still, by endowing the Jews with an official history that generally attenuates, in collective memory, the past of the Jewish revolutionaries, and particularly that of the anarchists. Yet the Jews were numerous among the anarchists. They were, in essence, Ashkenazim, originally from Eastern Europe.

To tell the truth, the commitment of the Jews took place within the bosom of the general revolutionary movement, rather than under a national banner. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the anarchists were the principal revolutionary component in Western Europe and in the United States, and the Jewish anarchists were particularly active. This was because the economic, social, and cultural conditions of life of the Jewish masses pushed them toward revolution. Indeed, in Eastern Europe they were practically on the road to destitution, while in the countries of emigration they found themselves in a situation of extreme poverty.

Finally, anti-Judaism and antisemitism confined them to the margins of society, inciting them to an identity withdrawal — or to revolt.

The conditions of the libertarian commitment

It should be noted that the anarchist movement was born first in the West and not in the Russian “Pale of Settlement,” where, nevertheless, the presence of the Jews was massive — and their poverty extreme.

For this, a few possible reasons:

Paris and London were the hubs of propaganda and of the militant formation of the revolutionaries, often in transit, for the ultimate goal for many Jews was America. However, the attachment to Russia remained profound, and exchanges continued. Propaganda pamphlets departed toward the militants who had remained or returned to Eastern Europe. And the émigrés were always divided between nostalgia for “Mother Russia” and their new life.

Some characteristics of the Jewish anarchists

In Eastern Europe, Yiddish was their principal vehicle of communication. The miserable conditions in which they lived gave them a sense of belonging to the class of the exploited; to this was added the marginalization due to antisemitism. Their movement was animated by semi-intellectual workers. Most of them had in fact passed through the religious schools and therefore had a relatively advanced level of schooling. Their ideas then distancing them from religion, they found themselves declassed and joined the Jewish proletariat.

In the West, the bulk of the Jewish proletariat was employed in the garment trade, in subcontracting work. This was the “sweating system”: small Jewish bosses exploited the latest arrivals under extreme conditions. They worked in hovels for starvation wages, from dawn to dusk. Louise Michel spoke of the East End of London as the “cesspool of humanity.”

In both regions, anarcho-syndicalism had an important implantation within the Jewish proletariat, even if it took on different realities depending on the country. Ideological discourse was very present. Anti-electoralism and antimilitarism were its spearhead.

The relation to religion

A twentieth-century libertarian might be astonished at the role that the religion of their fathers could play for these men. One must remember that it was an important factor in the society from which they issued. It played, moreover, in a contradictory manner:

To die weapons in hand…

Another fact that upsets the a priori assumptions: many Jews took up arms to defend the ideal of universal liberty. Not all of them let themselves be killed like sheep, victims of the pogroms or, later, in the death camps.

Yet to arm oneself in this milieu was not easy. Emma Goldman recounts in her memoirs that she tried to prostitute herself in order to buy the pistol that Alexander Berkman was to use to kill a steel magnate, guilty of having brutally repressed a strike. The terrorist, moreover, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The story of Simón Radowitzky, who attempted the life of a police chief in Buenos Aires, was also terrible, and ended with 15 years of penal servitude at Ushuaia.

Let us recall that among the Russian anarcho-terrorists of 1905 half were Jews; that, a few years later, it was the anarchist Samuel Schwartzbard who assassinated in Paris the Ukrainian pogromist Petliura; that there was a section of Jewish gunners in the “black army” of Nestor Makhno, leader of an ephemeral anarchist army in Ukraine during the civil war.

A few years later, during the Spanish War, not all the Jewish volunteers of the International Brigades were Communists…

The press and the writings

There was a profusion of titles of anarchist-expression newspapers and reviews. Dozens of them were counted throughout the world. However, in Eastern Europe this press was ephemeral on account of Tsarist repression. So it was from the West that the propaganda principally came.

The Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) lasted 100 years, its print run reaching as high as 12,000 copies. Germinal and the Arbeter Fraynd (The Worker’s Friend), newspapers at once political and cultural, sold several thousand copies and radiated throughout the world.

In Argentina, the FORA (organ of the Argentine anarcho-syndicalists) opened a page in Yiddish in its national newspaper.

In France in the 1960s La Libre Pensée (Free Thought) still had a print run of 1,000 copies.

The libertarian movement of past decades also left an important and diversified literary testament. For example David Edelstadt and Moris Rosenfeld, who wrote numerous poems expressing the suffering of the people. Ernst Toller was known as an important playwright. Gustav Landauer theorized anarchism; Bernard Lazare and Martin Buber explained Jewish messianism. Shoel Yanovsky and Joseph Cohen were brilliant journalists and polemicists.

Some survivors of the Russian revolution left a perceptive historical analysis of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks; the description of the lived experience of the Russian people during the revolutionary period and the beginnings of the Bolshevik counter-revolution has enough in it to make the historians of today’s liberal right turn pale: the humanist writings of Gorelik, Berkman, Goldman, or of Voline express a revolutionary critique of authoritarian centralism and inscribe themselves in an aspiration toward the collective and communist liberation of individuals.

Alexander Berkman left a moving recollection of his life in American prisons, and his friend Emma Goldman retraced her life as a feminist militant, as a libertarian, in Living My Life (here cited as L’Épopée d’une anarchiste, “The Epic of an Anarchist Woman”), with the passion that characterized her whole life.

One of the most beautiful writings on the Spanish war was recently reprinted. It is the book by Kaminski, Ceux de Barcelone (Those of Barcelona). This book is the libertarian equivalent of L’Espoir (Man’s Hope) or of the film Land and Freedom. This same author also wrote a biography of Bakunin, as well as the first pamphlet against Céline (Céline en chemise brune, “Céline in a Brown Shirt,” éd. Mille et une nuits).

The implantation by country

In the West, England was the bastion of the anarchist movement; it was hegemonic there until 1914. Its trade-union movement would remain autonomous in relation to the TUC. Now, it should be recalled that there were more Jews among the anarchists in this country than there were Britons.

In France, they entered the CGT. They were at the initiative of the only meeting held in the immigrant Jewish milieu during the Dreyfus Affair. They were present in the theater, constituted debating circles, opened libraries. The police prefecture counted 450 anarcho-communists in 1907 in Paris, for a community estimated at 20,000 persons. The proportion is significant.

In the United States, they joined the reformist unions or rallied to the IWW. Groups implanted themselves in several cities and a Yiddish-language anarchist federation came into being.

Argentina, like Uruguay, had an attested Jewish anarchist presence.

In Eastern Europe, and in particular in the “Pale of Settlement,” the situation was very different on account of the ferocious repression organized by Tsarist absolutism. The militants were often very young people, little hardened; the press and the propaganda material came from abroad. However, a clandestine printing press held out a few weeks in Białystok. Political meetings often took place, as for other revolutionary movements, outside the towns, in the woods and forests. Violence was very prevalent. During the demonstrations in the cities, the anarchists marched dressed in black, under black flags. They played an important role during the insurrections, in 1905 as much as in 1917. Many gave their lives fighting both the Whites and the Bolsheviks.

At the periphery of the Pale of Settlement, the Jewish libertarians were present in Bulgaria, in Romania, and as far as Thessaloniki, where a few libertarian centers of Sephardic origin were even noted. The best-known personality among them was Alcalay, who took part in the Spanish revolution as a schoolteacher, aided by his knowledge of Judeo-Spanish. In Bukovina, David Stetner1 recounts that in the 1930s a group of about a hundred persons gathered in a clearing to read libertarian texts there.

The particular case of Central Europe: Here, most of the Jewish anarchists issued from the local bourgeoisie. They were in rupture with the assimilation advocated by their parents. They forged a particular personality for themselves by theorizing the messianic side of Judaism, while referring to the class struggle. If Germany was the principal reference, there also existed a Yiddish variant in Vienna, and a group in Prague in which the young Kafka made a few appearances. The Frenchman Bernard Lazare found himself in the same kind of configuration.

Some had a tragic destiny. Landauer was assassinated during the repression of the workers’ councils of Bavaria. The Nazis continued the work, either directly — for example with Mühsam, who perished, murdered in a latrine of the Oranienburg camp in 1933 — or indirectly: Toller committed suicide in New York, Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin did the same at the foot of the Pyrenees. Pierre Ramus died under strange conditions on a boat that was taking him to America.

Where they were not expected…

The relation to the libertarian goyim

A few figures of non-Jews profoundly marked the Jewish libertarian movement. Here are some examples:

The American Voltairine de Cleyre, who did literacy work in this milieu of immigration.

The German Johann Most was the ideological reference of the Americans.

Rudolf Rocker, also of German origin, was the animator of the movement in England. He structured the political agitation, the strike movements, learned Yiddish, and took charge of the reviews Germinal and Arbeter Fraynd. His companion, Milly Witcop, was of Jewish origin. The non-libertarian English Jews respected him and regarded him as a sort of Messiah — which is somewhat paradoxical for a Goy… He wrote a book that exists only in an English or Spanish version: Nationalism and Culture, which ought to be an alternative reference for the ethnic wars in the world. His experience within the London East End gave him this faculty of analyzing ethnic problems from a libertarian point of view.

Louise Michel, the Frenchman Sébastien Faure, the Italian Malatesta had occasion to associate with the Jewish anarchists.

In return, some Jews had an influence on the general libertarian movement; the American Jews helped to structure the movement in the United States; in England they were at the origin of the acquisition of a building to create a center for propaganda and culture in London.

Among the individuals to note, a woman, Maria Korn, alias Marie Isidine or Goldsmith, was one of the principal animators of the French student organization ESRI.

However, the most extraordinary case is found in China: the great Chinese libertarian poet Ba Jin turned his gaze upon Judaism. He said he was astonished, through the readings he was able to procure on Russia, to learn that there could be capitalist Jews or rabbis, for the only reference to Judaism that he knew was the Jewish anarchist group of Paris. In his book Dream on the Sea he recounted the story of Samuel Schwartzbard, whose name he translated into Chinese as “White Beard.”

National identity

The identity question arose for the Jewish anarchists in three ways:

Those who considered themselves internationalists and whose principal reference was the attachment to the class of the exploited;

Those who privileged identity through language and culture, and through the particular conditions of exploitation within the communities. Here, identity belonging was recognized as an integral part, among others, within the international of exploited peoples.

Finally, the temptation of the revolutionary Zionism initiated by Moses Hess and Bernard Lazare took on its full importance owing to the fact that Western societies were unable (and the Dreyfus Affair furnishes a classic proof of it) to eradicate antisemitism. The Kishinev pogrom also left an important trauma in memories. The Shoah finished tipping a large part of the movement toward the hope of a national home in the land of Israel. The mystification of the communist kibbutz finished perfecting the ideological justification.

What remains of it today?

If the Freie Arbeiter Stimme continued to appear until 1981, the specific movement ran out of breath as early as before the Second World War. After the war, groups continued to exist, but they were much diminished. This descending curve is to be inscribed within the framework of the anarchist decline in general. A few figures are, however, in the direct line of this movement, above all in the United States. Such as the academic Paul Avrich, or the ecologist Murray Bookchin, or the linguist Chomsky (who was at one moment very controversial for his ambiguous ties with the negationists). In France, the anarchist federation published in 1980 two issues of Schwartz Fohne (Black Flag). In Israel a few militants are gathered within the kibbutzim movement and in the universities, but all this remains very marginal.

However, with the fall of authoritarian communism, Jews are involving themselves anew in the libertarian currents. These are often issued from the social movement within which they committed themselves, but the Yiddish identity is nonexistent there, all the more so as several of them are of Sephardic origin.

To conclude, a particular experience in Toulouse. A group formed there (Jews and non-Jews, for the most part issued from the far left), which took the name “Pitchkepoï.” Through Yiddish cooking, it appears at the city’s anti-racist festivals, or again at the festival of minority languages, which is held each year on the Place du Capitole. This group, which one may qualify as anti-authoritarian, strives to promote locally the heritage of a revolutionary Jewish culture with exhibitions, book sales, informative leaflets.

Notes

  1. I take the opportunity to pay tribute to David Stetner who, at 87 years old, is the last representative of the Jewish libertarian group of Paris. He confirmed to me the veracity of the facts set out here, which are part of his own history. I must say that it warms my heart to know this “Grand Monsieur” who took part in the adventure of an effort to liberate his people through the internationalist and libertarian ideal.↩︎

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