Today, Jewishness and Zionism seem linked; few representatives of the Jewish community have a critical discourse on Zionism or the policies of the State of Israel.
However, Jewish collectives calling themselves decolonial or anti-Zionist are gaining fame with the movement of solidarity with Palestine. However, these collectives are embryonic and contradict each other on their positions regarding Zionism, thus closing the perspectives of common development of these movements.
A look back at Jewish political history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries provides an overview of anti-Zionism carried by Jewish socialist activists, the activists of the “General Bund of Jewish Workers” (Bund means union in Yiddish).
The Bund and the Jewish Condition
Since the great medieval expulsions from Western Europe, a strong Jewish community has resided in Eastern Europe, reaching 5.2 million individuals in 1897. Eastern Jews in the 17th century had the highest population growth in the world, and this remained very high during the 19th century.
Thus, a Jewish family at the beginning of the 20th century is often very large. They live in small towns with a large Jewish population, called Shtetl (small towns in Yiddish, it also means market towns, medium-sized towns) in Poland, Lithuania and part of Western Russia, at the time in the Russian Empire. The Jews there are mostly small traders, small artisans, often very poor and modest and whose children have partly become urban workers.
Anti-Semitism was extremely present in the Russian Empire. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by revolutionary activists in 1881, the first wave of pogroms broke out in Russia until 1884. During his reign, the Tsar had implemented a policy of religious tolerance towards Jews, who were exempt from special taxes. Rumours grew and, little by little, Jews were accused, according to age-old prejudices of treason, of being behind the assassination. Pogroms broke out against Jews and often left many dead and injured.
The Jews of Russia were therefore oppressed as poor workers from large and destitute families, but also as Jews, and therefore as perfect scapegoats. In response to anti-Semitism, the 1st World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 led to the birth of Zionism with the aim of emigration, “Alyah” to Palestine. The Bund was founded the same year in Vilnius in secret and very quickly distanced itself from the Zionist movement.
The Party of the Jewish Proletariat
The party allied itself from 1898 with the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Lenin’s party) and became its Jewish section. The 4th congress of the Bund in 1901 was the moment of an ideological clarification, under the influence of Vladimir Medem. Medem was a Marxist and an internationalist who tipped the line towards anticlericalism and anti-Zionism.
Zionism is denounced as an ineffective and bourgeois solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. Indeed, an anti-Semite, for the time, often wants the exclusion of Jews. If Jews leave of their own accord for a Jewish state and leave other countries, the majority of anti-Semites can only rejoice. Medem denounces Zionism as a capitulation.
Within the Bund he theorized the “Doikeyt”. This is a doctrine that aims at the strengthening and political action of the community wherever it is, and which condemns the creation of a Jewish nation-state. As the Israeli historian Daniel Blatman would say, Bundism “on the contrary encourages Jews to integrate into the host society in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and to participate in the general struggle for a just and tolerant society, a socialist, democratic and pluralist society.”
The Bund advocated federalism in post-revolutionary Russia to give each community national-cultural autonomy (without territorial reality, with preservation of state borders). On this point, the Bundists opposed Lenin, who advocated assimilation, and moved closer to the Mensheviks.
In a declaration in 1903, the Bund asserted itself as “the only social-democratic organization of the Jewish proletariat” in the Russian Empire and aimed to achieve Jewish cultural and community autonomy. At the 1903 RSDLP congress, which saw the confrontation between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, this declaration by the Bund was outvoted. The Bundist delegates left the congress and allowed the Menshevik faction, to which they were closest, to lose its majority to Lenin’s Bolsheviks. This was therefore a triple division of the RSDLP that took place in 1903.
Despite everything, the Bund organized itself against the pogroms of 1903-1906 caused by bad harvests and a part of the aristocracy who used anti-Semitism to evade their responsibility in this crisis. Defense groups were created, which made the Bund popular. There were 35,000 activists in 1906. However, the repression after the failed revolution of 1905 dealt a blow to the Bund (only 600 activists in 1910). The party survived and rejoined the RSDLP (Menshevik). It managed to regain its 1906 numbers thanks to the growth of Yiddish publishing that it financed, militant cultural activities and the creation of a youth organization in 1910, di Tsukunft.
The Bund directly organized Jewish workers. Proof of this is the general strike of 20,000 Jewish workers, a real demonstration of force, in 1913, at the time of the Beilis affair (the real Russian Dreyfus affair against the backdrop of an alleged ritual murder).
At the dawn of World War I, the Bund had achieved its goal of 1903. The party owed its success to the working class conditions of the early 20th century, but also to the ostracization of the Jews, which created the need for a Jewish party to organize the political struggle to overthrow the ruling classes of Russia, which fueled anti-Semitism when necessary to divide the workers. The unity of the Jewish proletariat was achieved, against anti-Semitism, against Tsarism, against Zionism, against religion and for socialism, for autonomy, for revolution.
A forgotten party with a rich heritage
The Bund is little known, it officially disappeared in 1955 in Israel, its activists are all deceased, popularization content on this party is complex to find. Only the former activists continued to carry the history of the Bund and its ideas, notably in the documentary « Bund: the hope and the past » in 1987. This is all the more paradoxical because the Bund was for almost its entire existence before the Second World War a real institution of the Jewish community of Eastern Europe, and much more influential than Zionism.
Today, the existence of a Jewish revolutionary party modeled on the Bund may seem exciting, but we must not forget that this party is a product of its time. The Bundists are the unity of workers of a diasporic, marginalized community, a scapegoat community. There is a good chance that the Bund would not have existed if the Jews of the Russian Empire had been emancipated as in Western Europe. They would therefore have directly joined the RSDLP, carrying within it the demands of the Jewish community such as the fight against anti-Semitism (as in the French workers’ movement during the Dreyfus affair).
