The Making of Modern Zionism by Shlomo Avineri

Author:Shlomo Avineri [Avineri, Shlomo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465094806
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

BOROCHOV: ZIONIST MARXISM

THE PROCESS OF CONFRONTING SOCIALIST IDEAS WITH ZIONIST thought, started by Syrkin, gained tremendous momentum with the development of the revolutionary socialist movement in Eastern Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many of the activists and theoreticians of the revolutionary movement in the czarist empire were of Jewish origin. The message of universal human salvation, inherent in socialism, drew to its banner a large number of young Jewish intellectuals, who had left the traditional mode of life of the Jewish ghetto yet found society closed to them. Joining one of the various revolutionary underground movements became for many of these young men and women the only way for social and spiritual emancipation. Through the socialist revolution, so they felt, the whole structure of oppressive czarist society would come tumbling down. This would also signal the death knell to anti-Semitism and would solve the Jewish problem through an integration of the young Jewish intelligentsia within the general context of universal human redemption. This young Jewish intelligentsia had consciously cut itself off from traditional Jewish culture. After being rejected by the dominant Russian culture, Marx’s slogan “The proletarians have no homeland” represented, in a way, their social existence and their messianic hopes perhaps even more than was true for the actual Russian proletariat who was, after all, deeply embedded in the national and historical culture of the Russian people.

Moreover, the largest and most developed socialist organization within the czarist empire at the turn of the century was the Jewish Workers Association (Bund). For many years its membership was larger than that of any other socialist organization in Russia, and the quality of its intellectual activities was truly impressive. The Bund acknowledged the uniqueness of the Jewish problem in the general economic and cultural context of Eastern Europe and did not deny that the emancipation of the Jewish masses in Russia would have to take place within social and cultural structures specifically related to Jewish social history. It is for this reason that the Bund advocated the development of Yiddish culture, which it saw as the language of daily Jewish life, carrying within it the social struggle of the Jewish masses—a clear Jewish echo to Russian populist traditions. In this frame of thought, Yiddish as the language of the toiling masses was juxtaposed to the Russian and Polish languages adopted by the assimilationist Jewish bourgeoisie and to Hebrew, which was conceived as the clerical language of the past and of the old religious establishment. The future was perceived by the theoreticians of the Bund as the integration of the Jewish proletariat, conscious of its own cultural heritage, within the general revolutionary proletarian movement; in future socialist society the cultural and linguistic heritage of the Jewish masses would be preserved just as the Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish languages would remain the focus of identity for the non-Jewish proletariat within the general structure of universal revolution.1

At the same time, the cultural nationalism of the Bund, which by itself was

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