The Left and the Jews the Jews

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David Cesarani is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway,University of London. His publications include (ed.) Port Jews: Jewish

Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, – ( );Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind ( ); (ed.) Genocide and Rescue:The Holocaust in Hungary, ( ); (ed., with M. Fulbrook) Citizen-ship, Nationality and Migration in Europe ( ); The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry – ( ); (ed.) The Final Solution: Origins andImplementation ( ); Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge forNazi War Criminals ( ); and (ed.) The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry ( ).

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TheLeft

and the Jews

The Jews

and theLeft

David Cesarani

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First published in Great Britain in by Labour Friends of Israel

BM Labour Friends of IsraelLondon WC N XX www.l.org.uk in association with Prole Books Ltdwww.prolebooks.co.uk

Copyright © Labour Friends of Israel

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Contents

Introduction 1 Enlightenment and revolution: the sources of

inspiration and ambivalence 7 Socialism and the Jews from Saint Simon

to Karl Marx 18 Social democracy and the Jews 26 Jews, socialism, and revolution in Eastern Europe 34 Socialists and the Jewish labour movement 41 Zionism and the Left 48 Jews and the Left in the face of Fascism and Nazism 52 The Left and the Jews from post-war to Cold War 60 The Left and the Jews since the end of the Cold War 71 Conclusions 78

Notes 82 Bibliography 93

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1 Introduction

The relationship between Jews and the Left stretches back years. Understanding it is important both for the history

of the Jews and the history of socialism. The course ofthis complex, fascinating and often troubled relationshiptouches on central questions of Jewish existence and socialistthought. Despite the transformation of the political constel-lation since , these questions remain as urgent as ever.

Historians, mostly Jewish, have routinely treated thesubject in apologetic or pejorative terms, and not withoutgood reason. The writing of modern Jewish historycommenced in the shadow of anti-Jewish movements thatroutinely identied Jews with Marxism and widely fearedrevolutionary movements. Institutionalised anti-cleri-calism and the repression of most Jewish political life inthe Soviet Union overshadowed an objective evaluation ofthe role played by Jews in the Russian Revolution. Jewishhistorians writing in the wake of the Nazi genocide against

Europe’s Jews, a catastrophe that the Left failed to stop andthat seemed to expose the hollowness of slogans aboutfraternity, also saw socialism in a less than positive light.Consequently, many Jewish scholars tended to denigratethe ties between Jews and the Left, treating Jewish social-ists as apostates or deluded idiots. They read forward fromMarx, who was at best negative towards Jews in theory, or

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backwards from Stalin, who was at worst hostile in practice,and concluded that socialism from its theoretical inceptionto its most concrete embodiment held nothing but ill forJewish people.1

It is certainly easy to assemble appalling anti-Jewishquotations emanating from the mouths or pens of leadingsocialist thinkers and activists from the middle of the nine-teenth century to the present. But crude polemics of this kindrely on wresting statements out of their immediate contextand ignore the bigger picture of relations between Jews andnon-Jews. The Jewish–Left dyad is only one feature of adynamic relationship stretching over centuries. It is markedboth by the ravages of religious conict and by the attemptto escape religiously determined attitudes. The troubledsaga of Jewish–Christian relations clearly left its imprint onChristian Socialist attitudes towards the Jews, but attemptsby socialists to transcend religion did not remove sources ofambivalence or even hostility towards Jewish particularity.Furthermore, despite the universalism of socialist principles,the interaction of Jews with the Left was always geographi-cally and culturally specic. And it changed in nature overtime as its social components altered. The relations betweenworking class Polish Jews and Russian Bolsheviks in

cannot be simply compared to the links between BlackAmerican New Leftists and middle class Jewish socialists inNew York in the s.2

This essay will survey the crucial ideas, movements,personalities, and turning points that characterised rela-tions between Jews and the Left. It will treat the relationshipas mutually dynamic, characterised by ambivalence on both



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sides. It begins with the Enlightenment and the ambiguityof rationalism when confronted by traditional religions andwhat we would today call ethnic groups. As far as the Jewswere concerned, this ambivalence was rst given tangibleexpression during the French Revolution. The emancipatoryforces unleashed in eventually enabled Jews to partici-pate fully in the mainstream of European social, economicand political life. However, the sudden prominence of a fewJews who beneted from economic liberalisation provokeda backlash from the Left. At roughly the same time, philo-sophical currents in Germany that embodied a critiqueof Judaism helped inspire scientic socialism. As a result,Marxism was both emancipatory and shot through withambivalence towards the existence of the Jews as a separatefaith group.

Marxism supplied the theoretical underpinning for acentury of socialist activity. This essay will touch on therelations between Jews and the social democratic and labourmovements in Western Europe and the USA, includingrelations with the emerging Jewish labour movement. Itwill examine the role of Jews in the Russian revolutionaryparties and the situation of Jews in the early years of theUSSR. Marxism also provided the framework for the Left

to analyse the emergence of Jewish nationalism in the formof Zionism and the diaspora nationalism of the Bund– the Jewish socialist labour party of Russia and Poland.But mutual perceptions did not depend on ideology alone.They were dramatically affected by the rise of anti-semiticand anti-socialist parties in the s, and by the impact offascism after the First World War. This essay will look at the



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not aligned with Moscow, while the Bolsheviks establishedthe Communist International as a rallying point for Marxistorthodoxy (and a tool of Soviet foreign policy). In the s,Leon Trotsky set up the Third International in opposition to‘actually existing socialism’. After , Maoism and the NewLeft added to the fractured landscape of the Left. Since thecollapse of the Soviet Union the scene has mercifully simpli-ed.3

While there was much in common ideologically betweenall segments of ‘the Left’, policy towards the Jews and ‘Jewishissues’ varied greatly. So, as far as possible, in this paperthe section of the Left under discussion will be specied,although sweeping generalisations are unavoidable.

The denition of Jews and the Jewish Left is no lesschallenging. But as it is less familiar, the changing natureof Jewish identity – from traditional to secular by degrees– and shifting Jewish political allegiances will be spelled outas necessary. It has been suggested that there is an afnitybetween Jews and socialism on account of the story of theExodus and the prophetic writings in the Hebrew Bible. Thisis debatable. What is more certain is that living as a diasporicminority for most of their history, Jews constituted small,enclosed communities that functioned as ‘mini-welfare

states’ undergirded by traditions of tzedakkah or charity forthe poor and needy. It is also evident that the experienceof minority status fostered a strong preference for tolerant,pluralistic, rights-based polities. However, modern Jewishhistory suggests that individual Jews and entire communi-ties became involved with socialism only after a rupture withthe past. This paper uses fracture as the operating principle



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to explain how and why Jews came to intersect with theLeft and how the Left contributed to that uncoupling fromcommunity and tradition. 4



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2 Enlightenment andrevolution: the sources

of inspiration andambivalence

The European Enlightenment, personied by Jean-JacquesRousseau and Voltaire, is well known as a source of eman-cipatory thought and revolutionary movements. Less wellknown is the Jewish Enlightenment, the haskalah , whichfollowed in its wake, but which was the source of similarferment within the Jewish world. Jewish revolutionarieswere children of the haskalah in much the same way that theJacobins owed their inspiration to the philosophes .

In the Jews of Europe lived a life apart from themajority population of the countries and domains in whichthey resided. Jews were a despised, alien minority. They livedunder special Jewry laws that governed their choice of liveli-

hood, place of residence, and even right to marry. Forbiddenthe right to own land or to trade and manufacture withinChristian guilds of craftsmen and merchants, they werepushed to the margins of the economy or squeezed intoits interstices. A small number enjoyed shaky prosperityas moneylenders, merchants, cattle or grain dealers; morewere craftsmen and hand workers, mainly serving their own



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communities; most were poor, eking out a living as pettytraders, market stall holders, pedlars, old-clothes men,and second-hand dealers. The typical image of ‘the Jew’in paintings and prints of this era depicts a dirty, uncouthand foreign-looking character whose beard and side curlsmark him out as ignorant and superstitious. Most of Jewishlife was passed in autonomous communities, accordingto Jewish law, under the immediate supervision of rabbisand communal notables. In a number of communitiesthroughout central Europe a few privileged Jews enjoyedgreater freedom and the opportunity to share the lifestyleof gentiles. The members of this elite were the hofjuden , or court Jews. Their temporary privileges were held in returnfor providing local rulers with nancial or other services.Another type of exception was to be found in port citiessuch as Bordeaux, Amsterdam, London and Trieste. In thesemaritime trading centres the dominant pragmatic mercan-tilist outlook allowed for the growth of cosmopolitan popu-lations attracted by the promise of economic opportunityand religious toleration. Jewish refugees from the Inquisi-tion had settled in these ports since the s and ourishedthere. 5

Mercantilism and toleration were two aspects of a broader

change in attitudes towards Jewish people. ThroughoutEurope, absolutist rulers wanted to remove the structuresthat preserved the autonomy of social groups, be theychurchmen, nobles, burgers or Jews, and maximise theirdirect scal contribution to the state. Thinkers were increas-ingly critical of discriminatory laws that violated the naturalrights of men, particularly religious minorities, even if they



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happened to be Jews. Rationalists attacked practices thatappeared to be validated only by the longevity of the preju-dices they embodied. The philosophes were not freed of suchprejudices, least of all when it came to Jews, but they wereconvinced that Jewish populations could shed what werecommonly considered to be their objectionable features ifthe conditions under which they existed were improved.Given favourable circumstances, they might even shed theirsuperstitious ways, embrace reason, and stop being Jews. 6

Voltaire and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing represent twostrands of Enlightenment thinking about the Jews that wereto inuence progressive thinkers, social reformers and poli-ticians of the Left for a hundred years.

Voltaire excoriated received wisdom, superstition, mythand anything, including privilege, not founded on demon-strable reason or validated by observed experimentation. Hepersistently attacked the Old Testament because it containedthe foundational myths of both Judaism and, more impor-tantly, Christianity. To Voltaire, Christianity was one of thesources of social and political infamy, but the Church waspowerful so he was careful to attack it obliquely. It was saferto lambast the creed from which Christianity had sprungand to which it was indissolubly linked. Thus Voltaire’s

statements about Jews were full of malice. In his Diction-naire Philosophique ( ), he wrote: ‘It is with regret that Idiscuss the Jews: this nation is, in many respects, the mostdetestable ever to have sullied the earth.’ However, Voltaireadvanced arguments for toleration and condemned religiousdiscrimination against Jews. His animosity towards themwas philosophical, not personal. To him, Judaism fostered



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the mythological basis of the belief systems he sought todestroy and suggested the possibility that a people whoseexistence was founded on wrong thinking could survivethrough the ages. Jewish resilience deed his prescription,and that of other philosophes, for changing and improvingthe world. Reason dictated that the Jews should disappearalong with superstition and all religion. However, on theone hand they seemed impervious to reason while, on theother, they could not be extirpated. Voltaire’s rage againstthe anomalous persistence of the Jews would be echoed byrationalist, materialist and progressive thinkers of the Leftfor generations to come. 7

Voltaire played a key role in the modernisation andtransmission of anti-Jewish discourse. Of course, Judaismhad been a target of Christian polemic since the days of theChurch fathers. Jews were stigmatised as Christ-killers who,in the person of Judas, rejected the true messiah, conspiredagainst him and betrayed him for money. This was the basisfor stereotyping Jews as stubborn, avaricious, treacherousand hostile to Christians. Over the centuries various addi-tions and modications were made to the litany of anti-Judaism, but these charges remained at the core. Throughtexts, iconography and preaching they were inscribed in

popular culture and inculcated into the hearts and mindsof churchgoers. However, while secularisation led to thedeletion from popular belief of many other superstitionsand irrational practices, anti-Jewish prejudice continued.It was Voltaire’s achievement to secularise this prejudice,casting it as a rational response to Jewish behaviour in thepast (as allegedly recorded in the Bible) and in the present.



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It was in the nature of Jews, he maintained, to be money-loving and shifty. Their nature, more than their religion, was atfault. Racial thinking was to arrive on the scene decades afterVoltaire’s death, but by uncoupling anti-Jewish discoursefrom religion and anchoring it in ethnography he laid thefoundations for racial theorists like Count Joseph Gobineau,Paul Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Voltairealso enabled the notion of Jews as nancially adept, conspir-atorial and fundamentally alien to coexist with the emanci-patory impulses of the Enlightenment and every progressiveideology that descended from it. Thanks to him it becamemandatory for progressives to contest religiously inspiredanti-Jewish discrimination while at the same time aspiringto the transformation, even the evaporation, of the Jews. 8

By contrast, Lessing accepted Jews for what they were andpleaded for their social inclusion. In his play The Jews and his drama Nathan the Wise , he challenged everynegative stereotype of the Jews then current. If Jews weresuperstitious and followed despicable trades it was becausethey were denied schooling and the choice of a calling. TheJewish character in his play says: ‘If two nations are tolive together faithfully and uprightly, each must contributean equal share. But what if one of them considers it a matter

of religion, and practically a work of merit, to persecute theother?’ Lessing befriended the self-educated Jewish philoso-pher Moses Mendelssohn who in his lifetime travelled from atraditional Jewish background to become one of the leadingsecular thinkers of his day. To Lessing, Mendelssohn provedthat Jews were capable of reason and intellectual perfection,if given the chance to progress. While some intellectuals



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tried to convince Mendelssohn to convert, on the groundsthat if he could master philosophy he must see the false-ness of Judaism, Lessing defended his right to be a Jew anda philosopher. 9

Mendelssohn was not just a master of European philos-ophy: he was a talmudic scholar and rabbi. As such he advo-cated a policy of enlightenment within Judaism, sought torevivify Hebrew, and tried to show that Biblical texts offeredcontemporary ethical guidance. He urged Jews to embracesecular education, diversify their professions and integrate:‘To be a Jew at home and a gentile on the street.’ Mendelssohncondemned all forms of religious coercion and challengedthe power of the rabbinate. He maintained that Judaism wasa religion of reason that depended on voluntary adherenceand, consequently, deserved equal status with other ‘natural’,i.e. reasonable, religions such as Christianity. Mendelssohnwas thereby seeking to defend and rehabilitate traditionalJudaism using modern philosophy, to make it attractive for young Jews, the scions of the hofjuden , who were exposed tosecular learning and Enlightenment thought. But to someChristians he seemed to herald the dissolution of Judaismand an end to Jewish apartness. His Jewish followers andgentile admirers assumed that his reform agenda was keyed

to achieving the end of Jewish exclusion and it was here thata religious programme collided with a social and politicalone, with revolutionary results. 10

Mendelssohn was friendly with the educational and polit-ical reformer Christian Wilhelm von Dohm. When Mendels-sohn was asked by the Jews of Alsace to intercede on theirbehalf against discriminatory and repressive laws he asked



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Dohm to act on their behalf. Dohm obliged with a treatiseentitled On the Civil Improvement of the Jews ( ), in whichhe argued that the exclusion of the Jews retarded generaleconomic progress. He maintained that the Jews should beintegrated into society and the state even though they hadmany disreputable features. They were petty, superstitiousand morally corrupt – but that was only to be expected ifthey were treated like pariahs. They would only have anincentive to change and feel affection for their country andits people if they were put on an equal footing with othercitizens. Dohm both articulated and reinforced a commonperception of advanced thinkers on the eve of the FrenchRevolution that the Jews were, indeed, inferior, but couldbe changed for the better. In this context, change entailedceasing to live according to Jewish tradition and religiousprescription. 11

The French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rightsof Man and the Citizen propelled the ideas of men likeDohm into the realm of policy-making. The announcementthat all men were equal provoked the Jews of Bordeaux, whoresided in the city thanks only to revocable privileges, toask the National Assembly if that meant they were also nowFrench citizens with all the rights that citizenship connoted.

The petitioners were Sephardim: Jews of Spanish and Portu-guese origin who had lived double lives as secret Jews or NewChristians until they ed the Iberian peninsular. They weremostly prosperous merchants, urbane and fully acculturated.Yet their plea still posed a dilemma for the men of the ThirdEstate imbued with the ideas of Voltaire and Dohm. Duringthe winter of – , the National Assembly debated at



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enormous length whether a Jew could be a citizen. It nallyresolved that the Spanish and Portuguese Jews living inFrance could become citizens, but the Jews of Alsace, fourtimes their number, were excluded. The Alsatian Jews wereAshkenazi, Yiddish speaking and Orthodox. They had livedfor centuries under Jewry laws in small towns and villageswhere they made a living as pedlars, cattle and grain dealers,and money-lenders. Their emancipation would have to waitnearly two years until the progressive radicalisation of therevolution made such a daring act conceivable. 12

The debates in the National Assembly during the winterof – and the Constituent Assembly in set a patternfor progressive and Leftist politicians confronted by Jewishdemands for equal treatment. During one of the exchanges,Count Stanislaus de Clermont-Tonnerre pronounced that:‘To the Jews as a nation everything is to be denied; every-thing should be given to them as individuals; they must notconstitute a political body nor an order within the state; theymust be citizens individually.’ He added that Jewish commu-nities which insisted on preserving their autonomy shouldbe liquidated. Clermont-Tonnerre had observed that theSpanish and Portuguese Jews constituted a self-containedcommunity, dubbed ‘the Naçion ’, governed by Jewish law.

He demanded that they disband their communal struc-ture, surrender their peculiar identity, and live according toFrench law as French men and women. The Sephardim wereonly too happy to oblige, although they quietly reconstitutedtheir communal institutions in another guise. The AlsatianJews proved more resistant to such demands and onlygrudgingly gave up their communal autonomy. Even so, the



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revolutionary cadres were not content with these sweepingchanges to Jewish life. Jews in Alsace were subjected toforced acculturation and integration aggravated by swellinganticlericalism. At the height of the Jacobin ascendancy, inaddition to taking on all the duties of citizenship such asarmy service, Jews were compelled to close their places ofworship, work on the Sabbath and rest only on the tenth day.Circumcision and the slaughter of cattle according to Jewishreligious law were prohibited until the fall of the Jacobins. 13

In a sense none of this was the result of anti-Jewish senti-ment. It was the outcome of doctrinaire radical thinking andextreme rationalism. While Jews in France embraced therevolution because it offered them civic equality and socialinclusion, they discovered that the very universalist prin-ciples that entitled them to emancipation were also at bestinsensitive or at worst inimical to Jewish particularity. Thiswas to be, in a nutshell, the perpetual dilemma which theLeft posed to the Jews when it championed emancipationwith one hand while menacing the preservation of Jewishparticularism with the other.

However, not all Jews saw the exchange of Jewish traditionfor civil rights as a poor bargain. Some of the more radicalacolytes of Moses Mendelssohn were propelled by the logic of

Jewish enlightenment into a far-reaching critique of Judaismand Jewish difference. This led them to question the value ofthe traditions, practices and beliefs that separated Jews fromChristians and that were used by Christian antagonists to justify the second class status of Jews. The willingness to trimJudaism and overthrow traditional authority was increasedby their experience of revolution and reaction between



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and . When the French revolutionary armies conqueredcountries and brought them under French inuence, theghetto walls were literally torn down and local Jews weregranted the same equality that Jews enjoyed in France.But with the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of theancien régime these rights were revoked, often violently.Many young Jews who tasted freedom could not adjust tothe revocation of emancipation. The parents of Karl Marx,for instance, converted and had him baptised so that his lifeand career would not suffer because he was a Jew. The poetLudwig Börne converted in order not to lose his position asa public ofcial. Börne went on to provide poetic inspirationfor German socialists, but his radicalism stemmed in a largemeasure from his exposure to the radical critique of Judaismand traditional authority. He later wrote: ‘As I was born aslave, I love freedom better than you. As I grew up a slave, Iunderstand freedom more than you. As I had no fatherlandto call my own, I long for it more passionately than you.’ 14

Other German Jews sought to remould Judaism to makeit congruent with perceived Christian expectations andso win back emancipation. A group of young intellectualmodernisers formed an association for the scientic studyof Judaism – the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des

Judentums – to research Jewish texts to prove that Judaismcould be adapted to contemporary mores. Their numberincluded another future radical poet, Heinrich Heine. Afterattempting unsuccessfully to reconcile his Jewish identitywith his environment through this form of scientic study,Heine converted. It was a searing experience. Like Börne,his anti-authoritarian stance, irreverence and penchant



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for critique bears the stamp of a uniquely Jewish dilemma.The rst generation of socialist Jews was thrown up by theinternal dynamic of Jewish thought as much as by circum-stances. Their willingness to identify with oppressed andmarginal groups was a reection of their own odyssey, butthey were rst unhinged from Jewish tradition by the reformmovement within Judaism itself. 15



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3 Socialism and the Jewsfrom Saint Simon to

Karl Marx

The emancipation of the Jews in France released a ood ofenergy and enterprise. Within thirty years Jews had migratedfrom the country to the towns, from the eastern provincesto Paris, and entered a new range of trades and professions.A tiny few, like the Rothschilds, achieved fabulous wealth.Yet to the early French socialists like Charles Fourier ( –

), there seemed to be a connection between the ‘rise ofthe Jews’ and the explosion of capitalist enterprise. He railedagainst the ‘hordes of Jews and vagabonds’ that had arrivedin Paris from Alsace and rued emancipation as premature:the Jews should have been morally reformed before theywere allowed to fully enter society. Instead they had infectedsociety with their vices of avarice and sharp dealing, the core

of capitalism. ‘The Jews, with their commercial morality, arethey not the leprosy and perdition of the body politic?’ heasked. ‘In short, the Jews, politically, are a parasitical sectthat tend to invade commerce at the expense of the nationalsof the states in question without identifying themselveswith the fate of any single fatherland.’ Nothing about thisanti-Jewish sentiment was intrinsic to socialism. Fourier’s



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reaction of the s and s at rst presented itself.’ Evenif the conjunction was momentary and rooted in an earlystage of socialist thought, it was of terrible long-term signif-icance: ‘the anti-capitalism and anti-Jewish themes wereintertwined, [and] it took considerable time before theycould be disentangled.’ 17

Fourier, Toussenel, and Proudhon were later to becomethe targets of ‘scientic socialism’ and were ridiculed byKarl Marx ( – ), its progenitor. Unfortunately, Marx’scritique of unscientic utopian, communitarian and syndi-calist socialism did not extend to a rejection of the anti-Jewish discourse that infused it. This was because, like hispredecessors, he was inuenced by Enlightenment percep-tions of Jews and Judaism as archaic and redundant. And hiscritique was accentuated by his own desire as a convert andthe target of anti-Jewish abuse to distance himself from theJewish people.18

Although Marx reacted against Hegel and his followers,his thought is rooted in Hegelianism. For Hegel ( – ),monotheistic Judaism was an essential stepping stone toChristianity and, hence, human progress towards realisingthe spirit of reason. However, the Jews had achieved mono-theism at the expense of creating for themselves an all-

powerful, unforgiving deity and living in a realm of abstractmetaphysics outside nature. ‘The subsequent condition ofthe Jewish people’, he wrote, ‘which continues up to themean, abject, wretched circumstances in which they stillnd themselves today is all simply the consequences andelaborations of their original fate. By this fate – an innitepower which they set over and against themselves and have



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never conquered – they have been maltreated and will bemaltreated until they appease it by the spirit of beauty andso annul it by reconciliation.’ While in the s Hegel advo-cated Jewish emancipation, he never altered his view thatJudaism had been superseded by Christianity and that itexpressed a profound alienation of man from the world. Bycontrast, one of his leading followers, Bruno Bauer ( –

), totally rejected Jewish emancipation on the groundsthat Judaism was exclusionary. In an essay published in ,the title of which coined the term ‘The Jewish Question’, heargued that: ‘The emancipation of the Jew in a thorough,successful and secure fashion is only possible if they will beemancipated not as Jews, that is, as beings who must remainforever alien to Christians, but if they will make themselveshuman beings who will not be separated from their fellowcreatures through some barriers falsely deemed to be essen-tial.’ In any case, the Jews did not need formal emancipation,since through ‘money power’ they held enormous inu-ence: ‘the Jew who may be without rights in the smallest ofGerman states determines the fate of Europe’. True emanci-pation would only come with revolution and the emancipa-tion of society. 19

Bauer’s essay on the ‘Jewish Question’ provoked Marx to

write a riposte that became the foundation text for socialistsconfronting Jewish issues. ‘Zur Judenfrage’, , is distin-guished by particularly vituperative language about Jewsand Judaism. ‘Money’, Marx announced, ‘is the zealous godof Israel, beside which no other god may stand.’ ‘The godof the Jews has become secularised and is now the god ofthe world. Exchange is the true god of the Jew.’ But Marx



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was not attacking Jews per se or engaging in abuse for itsown sake. Indeed, he defended the emancipation of the Jewsand mocked Bauer’s position. He scolded Bauer for seeingonly the ‘sabbath Jew’ who demanded equality of religionwhile overlooking the ‘everyday Jew’ who was the Jew ofcommerce. Bauer had got it all wrong: the problem wasnot that Jews lacked emancipation, but that society lackedemancipation from the Jews. For, in the eyes of Karl Marx,Judaism was the spirit of commerce. Ending discrimina-tion against the Jews on the grounds of religion would givethem political equality but would do nothing to solve theproblem of why religion existed in the rst place, whichwas due to social inequality. Religion was the expression ofman’s alienation under the conditions of capitalism and trueemancipation would mean the end of the capitalist system.It was here that the two parts of Marx’s argument joined up.‘Emancipation from huckstering and from money, that isfrom practical, real Judaism, would be the same as the self-emancipation of our age.’ By this he meant that the spirit ofthe Jews, commerce or monetary exchange, had become thedominant form of transaction in society. And for Marx, justas for Hegel, Judaism represented the alienation of man fromnature. In Marx’s version, though, it was money exchange,

the essence of practical Judaism, that alienated man fromhis labour. Religion was thus the expression of alienation,and the ending of alienation by revolution would put paidto religion. Hence the Jewish Question would be resolvedonce and for all. 20

There is a great deal of speculation about the deeper,possibly unconscious motives, for Marx’s essay on the Jewish



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( – ), a child of the French Revolution and Jewish enlight-enment. He was born in Bonn to Jewish parents who enjoyedfreedom under French rule from the s until . There-after he tasted the bitterness of discrimination and exclu-sion but remained a Jew, perhaps thanks to the schooling inJudaism he received from his pious grandfather. Hess driftedinto the revolutionary movement in France in the s, wrotesocialist tracts, and collaborated with Marx on a number ofsignicant left-wing publications. Hess’s socialism was partlyrooted in Jewish traditions of social justice and he unsettledMarx by referring to the Hebrew prophetic writings as asource. Their paths diverged not least because Hess becameincreasingly concerned about anti-Jewish trends in Europeanpolitics and felt the tug of solidarity with other Jews. Afterthe failure of the revolution in Germany, Hess settledin France from where he observed French expansion intothe Levant and the rise of Italian nationalism. In hepublished Rome and Jerusalem, an extraordinary synthesis ofJewish values, socialist goals, and aspirations for the restora-tion of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Hess began by proclaiming his identity with the Jewishpeople. He trumpeted Jewish ideals, which he saw as an inspi-ration for social justice, and not to be lightly renounced. In

any case, he observed that assimilation was not succeeding,while anti-Jewish animosity was taking on a new, irreme-diable character: ‘The German … objects less to the Jews’peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses’. The Jew whosought to blend in was despised ‘for disowning his racebecause the heavy hand of fate oppresses it’. Instead, Jewsought to recognise themselves to be a nation and use their



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nationality as a vehicle for their historic mission to bringsocial justice to mankind. This could only be accomplishedif the Jews had their own country: until then the Jewishmasses would be beyond reform and Jewish energies wouldbe dissipated. ‘With the Jews, more than with any othernations which though oppressed, yet live on their own soil, allpolitical and social progress must necessarily be preceded bynational independence. A common, native soil is a primarycondition if there is to be introduced among the Jews betterand more progressive relations between capital and labour.’Hess argued that in view of the deepening French involve-ment in the Levant and Egypt the Jews might obtain Frenchpatronage for a return to Palestine and there build an idealsociety. The Jewish homeland would serve as a platformfor their role in the revolutionary regeneration of society:‘The Jewish people will participate in the great historicalmovement of present day humanity only when it will haveits own fatherland.’ 21

Rome and Jerusalem sold few copies and Hess died alittle-known gure. Yet he was uncannily prescient aboutthe dangers of racism in Germany and outlined the coreof what became socialist Zionism. His warnings had littleresonance amongst the German Jewish bourgeoisie because

they were bent on assimilation and sensed that liberalnationalism in Germany was working in their favour. Hesshad little purchase amongst Jewish workers who, where theyexisted at all, were concentrated in Eastern Europe. What hewrote only made sense twenty years later when social andeconomic forces that could not have been predicted actuallycame into alignment as he suggested.



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the Jews would have been a minor chapter in this story ofpolitical success. But the tragic turn in German history hasmade the SPD’s position on the ‘Jewish Question’ a subjectof intense historical scrutiny – and much anguish. Fromthe s onwards, Germany was also the arena for the rstmass-based anti-semitic parties and the failure of the SPD tocheck anti-semitism and, ultimately, its collapse in the faceof the National Socialism in the s have posed hard ques-tions about socialism and the Jewish Question.

The rise of anti-semitic parties that were also explic-itly anti-socialist forced the SPD leadership to address the‘Jewish Question’. This was an acutely uncomfortable processeven for a party that prided itself on its freedom from preju-dice. Many SPD leaders and its chief thinkers, notably KarlKautsky ( – ), were Jews. Between and , fteenout of seventeen non-baptised Jewish deputies in the Reich-stag sat for the SPD. Whereas the Liberals courted Jewishvotes but caused intense embarrassment by selecting Jewishconverts as Reichstag candidates, the SPD accepted Jewswithout differentiation. However, party organs frequentlyattacked Jewish capitalists as Jews and pandered to popularprejudice. The leadership was nervous about tackling anti-semitism head-on for fear of alienating working class voters

who were viscerally anti-Jewish. Engels ( – ), the doyenof the party till his death, tended to pardon working classanti-semitism as primitive anti-capitalism and repeatedMarx’s line that the Jews would anyway disappear along withcapitalism. Engels argued that anti-semitism only appearedwhere capitalism was underdeveloped and in Jewish hands.Consequently, anti-Jewish animus would be eroded by the



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development and ramication of capital. The only reasonfor opposing anti-semitism and warning workers against itwas that it occluded the class struggle. The rage of workerswas diverted on to one target and missed the bigger classenemy: the bourgeoisie and the ruling class as a whole. 23

Engels represents a persistent tendency on the Left todemean, excuse and marginalise anti-semitism. His analysisreected a feeling of contempt or indifference towards Jewsthat was rooted in the Enlightenment, a sense that their exis-tence and welfare were of little importance in the long run.Jews and Judaism were reduced to class phenomena. It wasroutinely believed that Jews were attacked for reasons of class,not due to deep-rooted religious or cultural misconceptionsor racism. So the end of class struggle would bring the endof anti-semitism. Engels and his peers did not perceive thatanti-Jewish feeling was autonomous from class issues, andthey had no sense that the Jews were a collectivity whichmerited as much respect and defence of its human rights asany other.

The failings of the socialist approach were starkly exposedduring the Dreyfus Affair. Although the quixotic Jewishsocialist-anarchist Bernard Lazare ( – ) identied thefallacy of the case against Dreyfus and early on campaigned

for a retrial, the appeals for support that he addressed to theFrench socialists fell on deaf ears. In , the ConfédérationGénérale du Travail issued a pamphlet that declared: ‘We theWorkers, constantly exploited, have no call to take part inthis conict between Jew and Christian! They are both thesame, since they both dominate and exploit us!’ It was onlythe socialist deputy Jean Jaurès who realised that the cause of



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Dreyfus was linked to the cause of justice and democracy inFrance and was, therefore, a matter for the workers. 24

Socialist responses to anti-semitism in Germany, too, werecontinually vitiated by the use of class as the sole category ofsocial analysis and advocacy of Jewish assimilation. The SPDleader and propagandist August Bebel ( – ) famouslydismissed anti-semitism as ‘the socialism of fools’. He urgedworkers to resist the blandishments of the anti-semitic andChristian Socialist parties, but not for the sake of the Jews. Inthe statement on anti-semitism that he drafted for the SPDconference in he reduced anti-semitism to ‘the discon-tent of certain bourgeois strata, who nd themselves adverselyaffected by the development of capitalism and are, in part,destined to perish economically as a result of these trends’.Bebel characterised the Jews as a ‘race’, condemned theiralleged apartness, and predicted that they too would disap-pear thanks to the force of progress. In Rasse und Judentum[Race and the Jews, ], an analysis of anti-semitism thatbecame the gospel for German socialists, Kautsky wrote: ‘itis only in the ghetto, as a condition of compulsory exclu-sion from their environment and deprived of their rightsand surrounded by hostility, that Jews can maintain them-selves among other peoples. They will dissolve, unite with

their environment and disappear, where the Jew is regardedand treated as a free man and an equal.’ 25

The position of the Austro-Marxists is even moreperplexing. Almost the entire leadership cadre of theAustrian Social Democratic Party was Jewish, and Viennawas one of the testing grounds for anti-semitic politics inthe s. Yet the party’s inspirational leader Victor Adler



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( – ) asserted that hatred of Jews was no more than asymptom of crisis in the bourgeoisie. The Jews, he claimed,were no less a product of capitalism. So the conict repre-sented by anti-semitism was nothing to do with the workers.Adler proclaimed in that ‘The Austrian workers desireneither “Jewish” nor “Christian” exploitation and nobodycould ever mobilise them either for or against the Jews.’ Headvised that opposition to anti-semitism meant taking theside of one faction of the bourgeoisie against another. Atthe congress of the Second International, Adler evenchampioned a resolution equating and condemning bothanti- and philo-semitism. Adler’s reluctance to challengethe rising tide of Jew-hatred may have been partly related tohis unease about his own Jewish background: he convertedto Christianity and was always trying to shake off Jewishassociations. But it was by no means unique and cannot bereduced to personality alone. 26

Because they operated in the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Austro-Marxists also struggled withthe questions of nationality and ethnicity, a self-evidentlycrucial phenomenon that had nevertheless always been ablind spot in Marxist doctrine. The Jewish-born Otto Bauer( – ), one of the chief theoreticians of the Austrian

SPD, devised an innovative way to embrace national struggleswithin class struggles inside the empire. In his pathbreaking

book The Question of Nationalities and Social Democ-racy , he categorised the aspirant national groups, such asthe Czechs, and explained how the achievement of nationalrights (within a democratic, federated entity) was essen-tial for the fullment of socialist goals. Yet Bauer dismissed



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Jewish demands for national rights or cultural autonomy inthe region of Galicia (where , Jews lived), insistinginstead on assimilation. He replicated Marx’s slightinganalysis of the Jews as little more than an outgrowth ofexchange, doomed to disappear after the revolution, andblamed Jews for anti-semitism by suggesting that as longas they sought to preserve their identity they would arousehostility. ‘All attempts to articially block assimilation and tocultivate inside Judaism an ideology opposing assimilationgo against progress, are reactionary.’ 27

However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the anti-anti-semitism of social democracy as a whole and to read backinto the s the catastrophe of the s. Even cham-pions of Marxist orthodoxy like Kautsky were capable ofreworking their doctrine. In the s Kautsky condemnedZionism as a reassertion of Jewish ‘separateness’ and a formof bourgeois nationalism, but he recognised the achieve-ments of the Jewish labour movement in Russia, Englandand the USA. He sympathised with its use of Yiddish andautonomous unions and parties to mobilise Jewish workers.Eduard Bernstein ( – ), the revisionist who trans-muted doctrinaire revolutionary Marxist socialism into agradualist electoral strategy, was moved by his contact with

Jewish workers in London’s East End in the s. Bernsteincame from an assimilated Jewish background and admittedthat he absorbed negative attitudes towards Jews. He wasone of the few SPD leaders to condemn its tolerance of anti-semitism even though he sympathised with comrades whosaw it as a bridge to real socialism. 28

Rosa Luxemburg ( – ) is often wheeled out as an



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example both of the weakness of Marxist class analysis whenconfronted by elemental forces of nationalism and xeno-phobia, and of a Jewish socialist who sublimated her identityin the working class movement and blinded herself to thehatred that eventually destroyed her. (She was murderedby anti-semitic right-wing terrorists in Berlin.) Luxemburgwas born in south-west Poland into a family shaped by theJewish Enlightenment and made a career in the SocialistDemocratic Party of Poland and Lithuania. She bitterlyopposed Polish nationalism, even its socialist variety, andJewish nationalism in all its forms. Her attitude towards anti-semitism was notorious. In she wrote: ‘For the followersof Marx, as for the working class, the Jewish Question as suchdoes not exist , just as the “Negro Question” or the “YellowPeril” does not exist. From the standpoint of the workingclass, the Jewish question … is a question of racial hatred asa symptom of social reaction, which, to a certain extent, isan indivisible part of all social elites based on class antago-nism.’ However, if her refusal to recognise the specicity ofthe Jewish case was a mistake, it was at least congruent withher mistaken attitude towards all national movements. Norwas Luxemburg’s dogmatism reducible to Marxist blinkersbecause, as Kautsky and Bernstein showed, it was possible

to recognise the danger of anti-semitism and applaud theJewish working class struggle within a conventional Marxistframework. 29

Luxemburg’s harsh attitude towards specic Jewish issueswas as much a product of her time and place as it was theconsequence of Marxist dogma. By , she was engagedin a four-cornered struggle for the allegiance of workers



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in Poland. There were Polish nationalists, Polish social-ists, Polish internationalists (like herself) and parties of thenational minorities within Poland, including the Bund – theGeneral Jewish Workers’ Party of Lithuania, Poland andRussia. It is to the Jews of Russia that we now turn.



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5 Jews, socialism,and revolution in

Eastern Europe

By the Russian Jewish population stood at around million, mostly crammed into the Pale of Settlement inwestern Russia and Poland – an area to which Jews had beenrestricted since the s. The Jewish population was over-whelmingly small-town and rural. Outside of a few indus-trial centres, such as Warsaw and Lodz, Jews were engagedin small manufacturing or trading and processing agricul-tural produce. The vast majority were Yiddish-speaking andreligiously observant. However, since the s and s thereformist ideas of Moses Mendelssohn had percolated intoRussian Jewry, giving rise to the haskalah – the East Europeanversion of the Jewish Enlightenment. The haskalah , assistedby the liberalising measures of the Tsarist regime in the s,

led to the emergence of a Russied Jewish bourgeoisie. Thesemiddle class Jews were half removed from traditional Jewishlife, which they regarded with contempt, and half integratedinto Russia society, which treated them with extreme caution.Doubly alienated and schooled to challenge authority by thehaskalah literature they had absorbed, these Jews were naturalrecruits for the anti-authoritarian Populist movement. 30



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As a result, Jews were integral to the development of therevolutionary movement in Russia from its inception in the

s. Signicant numbers of Jewish men and women, outof all proportion to their numbers in the general popula-tion, entered the ranks of the Populists – the seedbed ofthe Russian revolutionary movements. These Jews tendedto come from maskilik backgrounds, that is, their parentswere involved in the haskalah . A typical example of this earlywave of recruits was Pavel Akselrod ( – ), who was athread connecting Populism to Bolshevism and an inuenceon both Marx and Lenin. The rst circles of Jewish Popu-lists crystallised in the University of St Petersburg and thestate-run rabbinical seminary at Vilna. The Vilna seminarypropagated modern interpretations of Judaism that uninten-tionally undermined all sorts of traditional allegiances andfostered a phenomenal number of Jewish revolutionariesuntil it was shut down. One of its most famous alumni wasAron Liberman ( – ). After his revolutionary activity inVilna was exposed, Liberman ed from Russia to London’sEast End where, in , he founded the rst Jewish tradeunion in the world. Another alumnus, Abraham Cahan( – ), went on to found the hugely inuential Jewishsocialist newspaper Forwarts in New York that at its peak

sold , copies daily. However, Liberman and Cahanwere exceptional in the early timing of their commitment towork amongst Jews. 31

Until , Jews in the three main incarnations of therevolutionary movement – the People’s Will, the Land andFreedom Party, and Black Repartition – eschewed specialattention to the plight of Jews and Jewish workers in Russia.



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They were aware that Jews faced discrimination, but believedit would be alleviated through a successful regime change.Although they subordinated ethnic-religious ties, theynevertheless made a distinctively Jewish contribution to therevolutionary movements. Jewish activists were typically theleading organisers, technicians, and nancial managers in theunderground – all areas in which the children of the RussianJewish professional bourgeoisie had accumulated experi-ence. Jews also proved adept at terrorism and assassination.The involvement of a Jewish woman, Hesia Helfhand, in thesuccessful plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander II led to a crisisthat transformed the landscape of Jewish socialism and therelations between the Left and the Jews. 32

Following the assassination of Alexander II in March ,and the detection of Jewish involvement, the Russian author-ities fomented the idea that Jews were behind the revolu-tionary movement. The Interior Minister, N. P. Ignatiev,proclaimed that: ‘Judaism was the natural breeding groundof subversion.’ In the spring of a wave of anti-Jewishriots spread from the Ukraine across southern Russia andinto Poland. The riots were not engineered by the regime, aswas once thought. It was actually taken aback by the break-down of law and order and feared that the disturbances

marked the onset of a revolution. Nevertheless, Jews blamedthe government for the lack of protection and suspected thatviolence on such a scale could only have occurred if it wasofcially inspired or condoned. Thousands of Jews ed theriot-torn districts and headed for ports and border crossingsto escape the country. Russied Jews who had believed thatRussia was following the path of Western Europe towards



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emancipation were bitterly disillusioned. Many turned fromassimilation to new ideologies such as Jewish nationalism.Jewish revolutionaries were no less stunned. They werehorried that elements of the People’s Will welcomed themayhem as a step towards revolution while propagandistsfor the revolutionary cause validated popular claims that theJews were parasites feeding off the peasantry and the urbanpoor. 33

Akselrod reected the shock of Jewish revolutionaries inan essay addressed to Jewish youth in early . He recalledhow many like him had put aside Jewish ties in order to workfor the revolution, only to nd their comrades urging on therioters to an orgy of murder, rape and destruction aimedagainst the Jews. ‘Indiscriminate destruction and violenceagainst tens of thousands of Jewish families,’ he wrote, ‘hasnally opened the eyes of the Jewish-socialist intelligentsiato its mistake’. 34

Akselrod eventually helped to persuade the People’sWill that the pogroms were not revolutionary and stayedin the movement, along with a majority of its Jewish activ-ists. But signicant numbers sheared off and re-evaluatedtheir ideology and afliations. Stung by the pogroms andthe apparent rejection of Jewish revolutionaries, groups in

Vilna and Minsk formed socialist circles amongst Jewishartisans who had formerly been ignored by the peasant-obsessed Populists. In , Julius Tsederbaum (later knownas Martov; – ) was sent into internal exile in Vilna,a city of which per cent of the population was Jewish.Martov was a Russied Jew from a maskilik family whohad entered revolutionary circles while a student and been



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converted to Marxism. In Vilna he discovered a large Jewishartisanal proletariat that was ripe for organisation: they heldtheir rst May Day strike the year he arrived. But rst theRussied Jewish intellectual had to learn Yiddish in ordereven to communicate with the other Jews. By , Martovwas issuing propaganda in Yiddish and appealing to a specif-ically Jewish working class agenda. Martov and other Jewishsocialists made a three-fold transition in the early s.First, they learned Marxism and gave up utopian, terroristicPopulism. Second, they abandoned the peasantry in favourof organising the urban artisans and proletariat. Third, theyresolved to organise Jewish workers even if that meant acti-vating ethnic and communal ties that had been allowed toshrivel and that were frowned upon by universalistic, main-stream Marxist socialists like Rosa Luxemburg. 35

Between and the Jewish workers’ movementgrew rapidly and was at the forefront of a strike wave thatimpressed hardened revolutionaries. In Martov andother Jewish socialists formed the Bund, which they intendedto function as no more than a Jewish branch of the RussianSocial Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). However, theBund developed its own dynamic. Its leaders recognised thatJews faced specic discrimination and a double oppression –

from the Russian authorities and Jewish employers. Becausethe Jewish population formed a compact mass in the Pale,they believed it warranted recognition as a national minoritylike the Poles and Baltic peoples. At its Congress, theBund formally demanded not just equal rights for Jews asindividuals but national rights as a minority in the RussianEmpire. This decision was popular with the Jewish rank



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and le and helped the Bund fend off competition from theZionists; but it set the movement on a collision course withthe internationalist RSDLP led by Lenin, Plekhanov, LeonTrotsky, Akselrod and Martov. The conict came to a head atthe RSDLP congress held in the East End of London in .Lenin refused to accept the Bund as a constituent element ofthe RSDLP if it pursued a nationalist agenda. Defeated in avote, the Bund walked out. The Bund’s departure upset thevoting pattern on other issues. Martov and Trotsky foundthemselves at the head of a minority in opposition to other ofLenin’s policies. This minority, the mensheviks , subsequentlyseceded and the RSDLP split into two factions, the majoritycomprising the bolsheviks . For the next fourteen years thesefactions in effect became separate and rival parties. 36

Meanwhile the Bund went its own way. Between and , it organised Jewish armed self-defence againstpogroms. During the Russian Revolution of – itcoalesced in practical action with the RSDLP and sufferedhorrendous casualties in street battles with the police andarmy throughout the cities of the Pale. After the failure ofthe revolution, thousands of Bundists emigrated to England,the USA, South Africa and Palestine. But the party remainedintact and recovered. In the weakened Bund rejoined the

RSDLP on condition that its demand for national-culturalautonomy was recognised. By now the Bund was not only apowerhouse of industrial organisation: it was a dynamo ofYiddish culture. Through political and industrial action theBund forged a proletariat; through its press and patronage ofwriters it fostered a modern, secular, socialist Jewish culturein Yiddish. However, its leaders knew that the ideological



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and practical base of the Bund was always fragile. It couldnot achieve a revolution alone and always depended onother class parties. Yet these parties were loath to cooperateand constantly poached each other’s members. The demandfor national-cultural autonomy sounded good and held theZionists in check, but no one knew what it would entail inpractice. While proclaiming internationalism and solidarity,the Bund knew that its very existence was a testimony tothe apartness of the Jews and the difculties of integration.Failing the promised revolution, it was locked in a viciouscircle. Over the years, these tensions would test the Bund todestruction. 37



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6 Socialists and the Jewishlabour movement

The anti-Jewish riots in Russia and the anti-Jewish legisla-tion that followed triggered a wave of mass migration fromthe Tsarist Empire to Western Europe, America and SouthAfrica. Between and , about . million Jews migratedwestward. Only a part of this migration was a direct result ofthe pogroms: most of it was economic migration. Jews hadbeen leaving Russia and Poland steadily since the s owingto the pressure of population on jobs and resources in thePale. The riots, which were anyway conned to two periodsin – and – , were localised. In the first period, thenorth-west of Russia was unaffected, yet it was from here thatthe bulk of emigrants departed. Similarly, Galicia in AustriaHungary exported tens of thousands of Jews, but they lefta region untouched by riots and in which Jews were fullcitizens. The pogroms and persecution in Russia, however,

convinced millions of Jews that they could not expect a betterlife for themselves or their children under Tsarism and turneda steady trickle of migration into a tidal wave. 38

The mass migration of East European Jews had a doubleimpact on relations between Jews and the Left. First, it ledto the formation of a large Jewish proletariat in cities suchas Paris, London and New York. Second, it stimulated calls



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to restrict Jewish immigration and thus created a ‘JewishQuestion’ for the Left in countries that had not seen onesince the struggle for emancipation – if at all. 39

Between and , about , Jews settled perma-nently in England with many thousands more spending timein London, Leeds or Manchester while en route to America.They lived in the cheap slum districts, notably the East Endof London, close to their places of work and were over-whelmingly concentrated in the traditional Jewish artisanaltrades (clothing, footwear, and furniture making) and pettycommerce. 40

In England, voices were raised against mass Jewish immi-gration as early as . East London MPs rst raised theissue in Parliament in . Between and the call forimmigration restriction was led by Tory MPs. However, theyattracted support from old craft unions which feared compe-tition from Jewish artisans and also from some leaders ofnew model unions, notably Ben Tillet ( – ) and TomMann, of the Dockworkers’ Union. The TUC debated ‘alien’immigration in , and , and on each occasionpassed resolutions calling for restriction against the inux ofwhat they saw as cheap labour. This contradicted the labourmovement’s historic commitment to free trade and piqued

the interest of Tory imperialists such as Joseph Chamber-lain who had been urging protection in the form of tariffson goods imported from outside the empire. Chamber-lain knew that protection was unpopular with the workingclasses, who traditionally associated tariffs with high foodcosts and remembered that the Tory Party had fought tokeep the Corn Laws which had prevented the importation of



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cheap corn and thereby increased the cost of bread. He wasnow able to argue that there was no sense in seeking protec-tion against cheap labour entering the country if goods thatwere produced abroad by the very same cheap labour wereallowed in without controls. Chamberlain thus saw workingclass animosity to immigration as a Trojan horse with whichto smuggle protection into their camp. At his instigation,immigration restriction became a plank of the Tory partyelection appeal in . Chamberlain’s ploy, and the tradesunion response to Jewish immigration, worried Keir Hardie( – ). He told the TUC that what workers neededwas unemployment insurance and labour exchanges, notrestriction of immigration. However, the Tories took heartfrom working class xenophobia in East London and success-fully exploited the immigration issue in the GeneralElection. The election resulted in the arrival in Parliamentof a large cadre of Tory imperialist MPs who immediatelydemanded action against immigration. They won a royalcommission that sat from to and came up with areport that proposed a variety of restrictionist measures. Thedebate over Jewish immigration coincided with a sustainedeconomic slump and high unemployment. Many Tory MPssaw restriction as a cheap gesture to appease working class

voters and pressed the government of A. J. Balfour to passappropriate legislation. A bill to curb ‘alien immigration’ wasintroduced in , but was so savaged by Winston Churchilland Charles Dilke, two leading Liberal MPs, that it had to bewithdrawn. Balfour, who was convinced that restriction wasessential, brought in a new bill in . The Aliens Act waspassed and came into force in January .41



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Immigration restriction split the English labourmovement. The Social Democratic Federation, led by HenryHyndman ( – ), was in favour of immigration control.The Socialist League, led by William Morris ( – ) andEleanor Marx ( – ), defended unrestricted immigrationand actively cultivated ties with the Jewish working class inEast London. Jewish workers were not idle bystanders to thedebate. Amongst them were men like Morris Winshevsky( – ), a graduate of the revolutionary circle in Vilna.In he founded the Polishe Yidl , London’s rst Yiddishsocialist newspaper, and in followed it with the longerlasting Arbeter Fraynt . Winshevsky was a guiding light inthe development of the Jewish trades union movementin London until he left for America. He presided over thesuccessful tailors’ strike of , the rst mass industrialaction by Jewish workers in London. But the gains madein did not last long. Jewish trades unions tended to beunstable because they operated in seasonal industries cursedby a high proportion of casual labour and out-workers whowere nearly impossible to unionise. London was in any casea bleak terrain for trades unionists. Even so, by the s theclothing, footwear and furniture trades featured a numberof well-established Jewish trades unions afliated with the

British labour movement and serving to integrate Jews intothe wider working class. This was a success and an unfore-seen boon because it helped to counter the allegations thatJews were nothing but homo economicus .42

The formation of Jewish immigrant communities inBritish cities created a ‘Jewish Question’ for the Left in Britain.The issue of immigration had already caused tension; now



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labour leaders had to dene a position regarding Jewishworkers, their communities and their unions. Should theBritish labour movement support separate Jewish unions?Should it admonish workers who expressed hostility to theimmigrants and cultivate solidarity with them? Or shouldit articulate the fear in sections of the working class that theJews were swamping inner cities? Keir Hardie embodiedthese ambivalences. He opposed the Aliens Act, but proposedan amendment to enable the exclusion of immigrant strike-breakers. Tillet eventually dropped restrictionism andresolved that his trades union would help London Jewsorganise. ‘We may not like you,’ he reputedly said, ‘but wewill do our duty by you.’ Throughout the Left, Jews werespoken of as ‘aliens’, a term that denoted the immigrants asunEnglish and unassimilable. Amongst their alleged unEng-lish traits was the inability to understand fair play. They wereaccused of introducing sweating, of undercutting, and oftaking the jobs of Englishmen. The reluctance of Jews to joinEnglish trades unions was ascribed to their ‘individualism’rather then their lack of language skills. The instability ofJewish trades unions was taken by observers such as BeatricePotter ( – ) as evidence of the ruthless desire of Jewsto get ahead on their own. Potter (later Mrs Beatrice Webb

and a founder of the Fabians) made her observations whileacting as an investigator for William Booth’s great study ofLondon life and labour. She opined that Jews ‘Have neitherthe desire nor the capacity for labour combination.’ ‘Thelove of prot distinct from other forms of money earning’,was, she wrote, ‘the strongest impelling force of the Jewishrace’. Potter’s prejudiced reportage was nothing unusual: it



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stemmed from pre-existing notions about Jewish behaviourthat were embedded in the left by Voltaire, Fourier and theirilk.43

The Left in England, like the SPD, was not immune to‘rich Jew anti-semitism’, either. During the Boer War, Englishsocialists accused the government of pandering to Jewishgold mine owners in South Africa, the so-called ‘RandLords’. In his attacks on British military action against theBoers, J. A. Hobson, a leading opponent of imperialism,complained that the Transvaal was under the sway of ‘Jewpower’. Struck by what he believed he had stumbled onduring the Boer War, in his inuential critique of imperi-alism Hobson singled out Jews as exemplars of internationalnance capitalism and suggested that they played a shadowyrole in world affairs. Although Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Ches-terton cannot be called men of the left, they helped to set thetone in left-wing circles in the Edwardian era by their muck-raking journalism and exposure of nancial corruption inbusiness and government. Belloc and Chesterton constantlyindulged in innuendo against Jews and often employed crudeanti-semitic stereotypes in their writing and speeches. It wasno accident that two of the most sensational scandals theyunleashed, the Marconi Scandal and the India Silver Scandal,

involved a number of prominent Jews. On the eve of theFirst World War, then, it was common on the Left in Britainto nd Jews negatively coupled with both high nance andcheap, sweated labour. 44

A similar dynamic was evident in the United States, whichabsorbed over two million Jewish immigrants. The weaknessof organised labour in America forestalled any coherent



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opposition to the inux and, in any case, the doors wereheld open by powerful vested interests eager for unlimitedcheap labour. But even though Jews formed powerful tradesunions and established a major presence in local politics,in New York especially, the Left regarded their arrival withambivalence. By , half a million Jews were crammedinto the Lower East Side of New York where they lived ingrim tenements and toiled in grimmer sweatshops. Jewsdominated the electorate of the th district, but the SocialistParty studiously ignored their needs and interests. TheRussian, Polish and Romanian Jews who read the Yiddishpress worried about ‘old country’ issues and the threat ofimmigration restriction, as well as bread and butter ques-tions concerning wages, conditions of work and the provi-sion of welfare. The Socialist Party’s founder and candidatein and was Morris Hillquit ( – ), who washimself a Jewish immigrant. But Hillquit was afraid that ifhe addressed the agenda of the Jewish population he wouldbe accused of being ‘foreign’ himself. In he even spokeup for the restriction of immigration by ‘backward races’.As a result of his timidity and ‘assimilationism’ he repeat-edly failed to gain what should have been a solid seat. In

, Meyer London ( – ) succeeded Hillquit as the

Socialist Party candidate and things changed. London playedup his Jewish immigrant roots and unashamedly addresseda range of Jewish immigrant concerns. He spoke out againstthe anti-Jewish measures in Russia and fought to maintainfree immigration. London nally won the seat in andheld it until – the only socialist in the US House ofRepresentatives. 45



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7 Zionism and the Left

The pogroms that had sparked the development of Jewishsocialism in Russia and led to the mass emigration thatproduced Jewish proletarian communities in western citieswere also responsible for the crystallisation of modernZionism and, ultimately, the emergence of socialist Zionismas a political force.

In – , a number of disillusioned Jewish Populistsresolved that, since Russia had rejected them, they wouldemigrate to Palestine, the ancestral Jewish homeland, andthere work on the land to found utopian socialist commu-nities. The rst waves of emigrants were not very successfulas farmers and were only rescued by the benecence ofBaron Edmond de Rothschild. Meanwhile Theodor Herzl( – ) published his manifesto for the modern Zionistmovement, The Jewish State , in . Herzl depicted thecreation of a Jewish state as the solution to the ‘JewishProblem’, that is, the persistence of anti-semitism and the

apparent failure of assimilation. He identied part of the‘problem’ as the involvement of Jews with the revolutionarymovements, which further aggravated Jewish-Christian rela-tions. Zionism, he claimed, would diminish anti-semitismby siphoning away surplus and unassimilable Jews fromthe Diaspora to their own country, where they would enjoyequality and freedom from the warping effects of hatred and



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the effort to appease it. Zionism would also wean alienatedand discontented young Jews away from revolution. Herzlwas a classic nineteenth-century liberal nationalist, who wascapable of making progressive overtures to labour whileat the same time adopting a fundamentally non-socialiststance.46

Herzl went on to found the World Zionist Organisationas a vehicle for achieving his vision. But he rapidly encoun-tered dissenters, especially amongst Zionists with left-wingpolitics. Nahman Syrkin ( – ), a Russian Jew froman enlightened and Russied background, resented Herzl’sdeployment of Zionism as an antidote to Jewish socialism.In he published a book entitled The Socialist JewishState ( ), which argued that the Jewish bourgeoisiealone could never restore the Jewish state, because such anenterprise in an undeveloped region would require centralplanning, mobilisation of the Jewish masses as workers, andsocial ownership of the land and natural resources. Syrkin’smost powerful arguments were reserved for socialists andthe Jewish Left, in particular. He agreed that Jew-hatred wasa product of economic friction and inequality, and that anti-semitism was used by reactionaries to transcend class divi-sions and create a false unity. Yet socialism alone could not

solve the ’Jewish Question’. Socialists prescribed revolutionfollowed by assimilation, but Syrkin insisted on the value ofJewish existence and the continuity of Jewish values of social justice. Moreover, Jews were doubly oppressed as workersand members of a religious-ethnic minority; they couldnot wait for the revolution and did not want to disappearafterwards. The only solution, therefore, was transfer to their



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own state where the class struggle could be waged untram-melled by false solidarities and the contradictions of classand ethnicity. Jews would then be able to join the strugglefor world socialism. 47

Syrkin founded the rst socialist Zionist party – PoaleZion. Its members led the second and third waves of emigra-tion to Palestine in – and – and were responsiblefor creating the infrastructure of a socialist state: collectivefarms, cooperatives, factories owned and run by the tradesunion movement, health and education services. The secondwave of socialist Zionists were armed with a more sophis-ticated theory by the more rigorously Marxist thinker BerBorochov ( – ). Ber Borochov tapped into the thoughtof the Austro-Marxists who were groping towards a socialisttheory of pluralism that would allow socialists to advocateclass struggle and the realisation of minority rights withinthe multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire. From themBorochov drew the lesson that unrequited nationalismdistorted and blunted class struggle, while only the workingclass could supply a nationalist leadership that eschewedreaction. He argued that only the Jewish working class wouldbe able to carry Jewish nationalism forward, because theywere the only element of the Jewish people with nothing

to lose. Jewish capitalists would never show much interestin emigration to, or investment in, an undeveloped cornerof the world such as Palestine. In other words, the verydynamics of capitalism compelled Jewish workers to assumethe vanguard of Jewish nationalism and, in turn, dictatedthat the Jewish state would be a socialist state destined forintegration into a new socialist world order. 48



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Zionism, however, incurred the wrath of both the mainRussian social democratic movement and the Jewish Bund.It was denounced by Marxist socialists as a form of bour-geois deviationism, a distraction from the class struggle.Kautsky formulated the most potent and inuential critiqueof Zionism that still resonates in the Left today. To Kautsky,the Jews were a religious group and not a people or a nation.They were essentially urban dwellers and had no businessgoing to the land – least of all someone else’s. Their fate andfuture was assimilation in Europe or wherever they lived. ‘Wehave still not completely emerged from the Middle Ages aslong as Judaism still exists among us,’ he wrote. ‘The soonerit disappears, the better it will be for society as well as for theJews themselves.’ Jewish nationalism only fostered a senseof apartness and actually aggravated Jewish/non-Jewishrelations. ‘Zionism’, he maintained in Rasse und Judentum,‘meets anti-semitism half way in this striving, as well as inthe fact that its goal is to remove all Jews from the existingstates.’ The opposition of the Bund was, if anything, morehyperbolic since the Poale Zion was competing directlyfor the same constituency in Russia and Poland. It was, ofcourse, impossible for the Marxist left to foresee that worldrevolution would not come and that the removal of the Jews

would, in the end, be the only way of saving them fromcatastrophe. 49



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the central committee of the Communist Party was Jewish.The high proportion of Jews in the upper reaches of theBolshevik Party gave rise to the myth that ‘the Jews’ werebehind the revolution and somehow inherently prone toMarxism. During the Russian Civil War, counter-revolu-tionary White ofcers circulated The Protocols of the Elders ofZion , a notorious forgery that purported to record a Jewishplan for world domination, as if it explained all that hadoccurred. The Protocols were picked up by British ofcersaiding the White armies and transmitted to London. In the rst English version of the Protocols was published inthe Morning Post . It attracted considerable attention and wassoon selling well in book form under the title The Causes ofthe World’s Unrest . Even Winston Churchill came to believethat Jews had to choose between two Jewish ideologies, onebenign, and the other malign: Zionism or Bolshevism. TheProtocols and the belief in an international Jewish conspiracyto overthrow the established order became received wisdomon the anti-socialist right. 51

Heightened nationalism and xenophobia compromisedthe status of even the most assimilated Jews and left Jewishimmigrants terribly exposed. In , the British governmentpassed a wartime Aliens Restriction Act terminating immi-

gration, amongst other measures. In , while in the gripof a xenophobic, anti-alien, anti-Bolshevik and anti-semitichysteria, Parliament passed the Aliens Restriction (Amend-ment) Act. It permitted immigration ofcers, the police,magistrates and the Home Secretary to detain and deportwithout right of appeal any alien engaged in political or ‘indus-trial’ subversion, convicted of a crime, or found in breach of



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the alien registration rules. Hundreds of immigrant Jews weredeported under these extraordinary powers, mostly while SirWilliam Joynson-Hicks was Home Secretary in the Conserva-tive administration of – . Only a few Liberal and LabourMPs opposed the Act. One of them was Josiah Wedgwood( – ), who became known as the champion of Jewishimmigrants and other Jewish causes, including Zionism.Despite making sympathetic noises to the Anglo-Jewishcommunity while in opposition, the Labour Party declined torevoke the Act when it held power in and – . It did,however, institute an appeals tribunal in .52

The Red Scare that accounted in part for the AliensAct took hold in the USA, too, where hundreds of RussianJews were rounded up and deported in the so-called PalmerRaids. Emma Goldman ( – ) and Alexander Berkman( – ), two leading socialist-anarchists, were amongstthe most prominent victims. Goldman was deported toRussia where she became a scourge of Lenin’s dictatorialtendencies. Ironically, in Russia itself the Bolsheviks werebeginning the systematic destruction of Jewish communallife. Jewish sections of the Communist Party, the Evsekstiia,were set up to liquidate the Bund and the Zionist parties.Jews were granted national minority status in the USSR and a

degree of cultural autonomy, but this became a liability oncethe regime embarked on the suppression of Jewish religiouslife and anything not congruent with Bolshevism. Never-theless, Jews were permitted to establish collective farmingsettlements in which Yiddish was used, and in the sStalin even ordained the creation of a Jewish Sham ‘autono-mous region’ in Birodidzhan, in remote Central Asia. 53



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In Britain, the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ seemed to typify thesituation in microcosm. In early October , Sir OswaldMosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, threatened tomarch thousands of pro-Nazi Blackshirts through the Jewishdistricts of the East End of London. Left-wing Zionists andJewish socialists prepared to stop them, although the Jewishcommunal leadership notoriously advised Jews to stay athome on the day of the march. Under pressure from Jewishmembers, the CPGB at the last moment cancelled a demon-stration in Trafalgar Square in solidarity with the SpanishRepublic and told its members to rally instead in the EastEnd. Uniting under the slogan ‘They Shall Not Pass’, whichwas taken from the defence of Madrid against the Fran-coist forces, an estimated , people, including Jews,Irish dockworkers and East London trades unionists of alldescriptions, blocked access to Whitechapel and Stepney.Although much romanticised and manipulated in retro-spect, to Jews the role of the Left in the defence of Jewishpeople cemented bonds of loyalty. This loyalty bore fruit in

when Mile End became the only British parliamentaryconstituency to elect a Communist member of parliament,Phil Piratin ( – ).55

Thanks to the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for

Palestine, during the interwar years Britain was uniquelyentwined in the ‘Jewish Question’. The Balfour Declarationwas another outcome of the Great War that rec

The Left and the Jews the Jews

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