Jewish ProblemsEssay Preview: Jewish ProblemsReport this essayThe Jewish people have always been faced with harsh repression and anti-Semitism dating back thousand of years. This astonishing fact is greatly substantiated by divine writings of the Torah. Eastern European Jews from the eighteenth century and up until mid-to-late twentieth century did not deviated from their Jewish ancestors clichйd treatment, and they too have also faced incomprehensible amounts of hatred and ignorance. It is known that repression breeds revolutions; inevitably this is the path Eastern European Jews took, being immensely influenced by radical political ideologies of that time period.
The Eastern European Jews natural attraction to radical political ideologies is the corollary of many unique factors exerting in one forceful analogous direction. The Haskalah which translates into English as Enlightenment was a time period when the Maskilim, who were the Jews that followed the Haskalah, questioned their traditional diasporic religion and culture. This radical movement advocated that reason and logic should hold more creditability then untested faith. Maskilim educated themselves in the sciences and digressed from the obsolete sacred texts that their ancestors studied. Essentially what the Haskalah accomplished was that it opened the minds and eyes of the Jews and gave them the notion that public assimilation into society was ok. Another fact that can be deduced is that the Haskalah also provided the infrastructure for future radical political ideologies to flourish given this new questioning, open minded mentality.
The major driving force for radicalism was the ubiquitous anti-Semitism that was present in Eastern Europe. For example in Russia the May Laws existed. The Laws were sanctioned by the Czar in May of 1882. These laws were official anti-Semitic legislation that restricted Jewish settlement and also restrictedexpatriated Jews out of certain professions. These laws were the consequence of the assassination of the Czar Alexander II in 1881. The alleged criminals that assassinated the Czar were believed to be members of the People Wills, a revolution populist group in Russia. The overall consensus from Russian society was that it was a “Jewish plot” because one member out of the eight that was arrested, Hesia Helfand, was Jewish. The aftermath of the Czars assassination provide some of the most intense and brutal pogroms of Jewish history, occurring in 1881 and 1882. The pogroms that transpired forced Jews to reassess their positions on slowly integrating into society, and looked for more effective radical solutions to account for their tribulations.
Isaac Leyb Peretz who grew up during the Haskalah, in1894 published a propagandistic short story at the height of Yiddish literature called “Bontshe Shavayg” or “Silent Bontshe”. It characterized traditional diasporic Jews. Bontshe who was the main character in the story was portrayed as a weak, powerless, passive, defenseless man that succumbed to any given circumstance, typifying the response of traditional diasporic Jews to anti-Semitism. This piece of literature served a motivational and inspirational function for the Jews in the late nineteenth century. Essentially it implicitly said “enough was enough”, lets us get some “Muscle Jewry”, be proud, and fight for what is right.
At the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the three groups of Jews that were present were the Jews that followed acculturation, Jewish-Jews, and Radical Jews. The Jews who followed acculturation wanted to integrate into society slowly and did not see radical politics as the means to do so. The Jewish-Jews who were obstinate wanted to keep their traditional customs and culture and wanted to survive just the way they have for the past thousands of years. The radicals, which was the group taking the most action, were composed of three movements: Marxism, Bundism, and Zionism. Marxism and to large degree Bundism all originate form the teachings of Karl Marx.
Roland Stromberg in his book European Intellectual History depicts Marxs writings.Marxism also known as communism, is a political ideology that promises a class-less society in which every human being is equal. Marx believed that capitalism was essentially doomed because it dug its own grave and that the bourgeois or the ruling class, exploited the working class to get richer.
This notion of a class-less society really gained momentum in the young radical working Jewish population who were ready to drop there ineffective traditional ways to find a better way of life. Essentially, communism was look at as being a more than a sufficient resolution it was the answer to the Jewish prayer. It was everything Jews wanted, a means into society, acceptance, and equality. This was monumental for the Jews because if they were looked at as workers rather then Jews it would forced the extinction of anti-Semitism.
According to Jeffery Salant author of “The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund, 1897-1997” the Bund was created in 1897 in secret meeting in Vilna. The Bund was the largest labor union in Russia connecting the struggles of the Russian Jews to the struggles of Russian workers. The Bund at first was fiercely anti-nationalist but converted to the left over time. It primarily upheld the Marxist ideology but modified it to some degree to include the fact that Jews should have a national-cultural autonomy. The Bund felt as if Jews had special concerns that only a Jewish labor union could assist with. One such concern was the continuation of the Yiddish culture and language. Doikayt which means “hereness” meant creating organizations in Russia and Poland to promote the use of Yiddish as a national language and to develop secular Jewish culture and religion. Another important fact about the Bund was that they were the first group to fight back against the anti-Semitism that was
l-titled a “Nazi labor union.” They were a small and small group of “Russian-language Labor” which came together spontaneously in their protest against the Bolsheviki, a radical social movement. Before then, there were only two unions in Russia: the Federation of the Labor of the National Republic of Socialist-Revolutionary Soviets (FRL) and the Federation of the Labor in the USSR. All unions in Russian Federation and the Federation of Labor were to be independent and to be made up of Jewish elements.
By 1903, several “Jewish” strikes were happening in Russia and other countries. These strikes began to come to a breaking point. To get the workers to back down, the Bund came to have to fight, because the Jewish labor union had already started to organize and had been made part of a labor organization. The Bund did not hold back, they gave up on it. So, the Jew labor union began to organize, this time on a more local level. It even had a headquarters in Moscow. Doikayt, which means “National,” had its first headquarters on a bridge in Vilna. It also began organizing other workers’ strikes. The Bund was no longer a “German labor union,” its leaders and local leaders were Jewish socialists, in the sense that Jewish laborers were also represented on the Bund and who were themselves members of the Reichstag in the Reichstag, not just Jews. The Bund continued to organize Jewish workers through its various branches and the Bund was its headquarters. The Bund was also considered somewhat of a “Jewish labor union,” because its employees consisted mostly of Jews who were Jewish, and many of their employers also included Jewish workers. The German labor union was so large and so powerful that at least one Jew was arrested in Vilna for his role in this action against the Bund. Doikayt was a large organization, but after this its power was so great it had become a target of the Jewish labor organization. As early as 1902, the Bund had been organized at a meeting of Jewish workers at Vilna, but it felt that it could not make its way there because of the demands of the people. They decided: “We must strike; we have to be led”; we had to organize.
The Bund did not find its solution to this problem by organizing workers on a local level. It called itself the “Kolomino Labor Action Committee.” As early as 1905, they sent a group of Jewish workers out to join workers on a labor strike. Then shortly after this, they went further and started organizing and they were able to defeat the Jew labor union. Then in July 1905, the Bund went onto its national and international level, having been formed at a later date. By that time many workers around Ukraine, where the Bund was based, were joining the “Jewish Labor Action Committee.” After that, some of the most prominent Jew union members in Russia became members of the Bund and that was in 1909, when it also became part of the Reichstag. During that time, in 1908, the Bund held four national meeting of Jewish workers in Russia that went for 10,000 bpd and a minimum of 80,000 bpd in various towns, but they didn’t organize the national meetings. By the end of the month they were at the rank of the National Labor Council in Moscow.
In September 1909, Hitler, for some reason, wanted to set up a “German labor unions” in Russia and also on the basis that they were an important part of the German National Labor Council. This was very good news and I don’t know if the Jews got it. Before that point, the German workers felt they could also organize in Russia, but they wanted they could not organize in Russia without it being there. Then all the Jews in Russia were in Germany and they were on a “Jewish labor committee