Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism

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Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism

Jonathan Frankel, Editor

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STUDIES IN C O N T E M P O R A RY J E W RY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

DARK TIMES, DIRE DECISIONS Jews and Communism STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL

XX

2004 Edited by Jonathan Frankel Guest Symposium Editor: Dan Diner

Published for the Institute by

1

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dark times, dire decisions: Jews and Communism / edited by Jonathan Frankel; guest symposium editor, Dan Diner. p. cm. — (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ISSN 0740-8625; 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-518224-8 ISBN 0-19-518224-3 1. Communism and Judaism—History—Congresses. 2. Jewish communists—History—Congresses. 3. Jews—History—Book reviews. I. Frankel, Jonathan. II. Diner, Dan, date. III. Series. DS125.S75 no. 20 [HX550.J4] 909'.04924s—dc22 [335.4'089'924] 2004058337

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

Editors Jonathan Frankel Eli Lederhendler Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Mordechai Altshuler, Haim Avni, David Bankier, Avraham Bargil, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Blatman, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Allon Gal, Nitza Genuth, Moshe Goodman, Yisrael Gutman, Anat Helman, Menahem Kaufman, Israel Kolatt, Hagit Lavsky, Pnina Morag-Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Uzi Rebhun, Gideon Shimoni Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Hannah Levinsky-Koevary International Advisory and Review Board Chimen Abramsky (University College, London); Abraham Ascher (City University of New York); Arnold Band (University of California, Los Angeles); Doris Bensimon (Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle); Bernard Blumenkrantz (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Solomon Encel (University of New South Wales); Henry Feingold (City University of New York); Martin Gilbert (Oxford University); Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan); S. Julius Gould (University of Nottingham); Paula Hyman (Yale University); Lionel Kochan (Oxford University); David Landes (Harvard University); Seymour Martin Lipset (George Mason University); Heinz-Dietrich Lo¨we (Albert-Ludwigs-Universita¨t); Michael Meyer (Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati); Alan Mintz (Brandeis University); Gerard Nahon (Centre Universitaire d’E´tudes Juives); F. Raphae¨l (Universite´ des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg); Jehuda Reinharz (Brandeis University); Monika Richarz (Germania Judaica, Ko¨lner Bibliothek zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums); Ismar Schorsch (Jewish Theological Seminary of America); Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study); Bernard Wasserstein (University of Glasgow); Ruth Wisse (Harvard University)

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Preface

The publication of volume XX naturally constitutes something of a landmark in the history of Studies in Contemporary Jewry. In the preface to the first volume, I wrote that “it behooves a new periodic publication to view itself with much hope, but with a modesty even greater. The success of such ventures has to be measured in terms of decades rather than single issues.” Now 20 years on (the first volume appeared in 1984), we are, of course, more than pleased that the annual has been able to establish itself as a significant publication within the field of modern and contemporary Jewish studies. There have been considerable changes in that field since we first discussed what shape to give to Studies. More journals have been launched (or revived) since then; and book reviewing, which was then vastly underrepresented, has likewise much increased. In consequence, over the years, the collection of articles—the symposium or “book within a book”—has emerged as the dominant section within the annual. (We are attaching a list of the varied topics that we have covered in the first 20 volumes in addition to the next three, currently in progress.) Nonetheless, we continue to see in the book reviews and free-floating articles an important part of the project. Shortly after we decided that volume XX would be devoted to the theme of Communism and the Jews, we learned that a conference was to be held at the Simon-Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University in November 2001 on the same theme (“Jewish Questions—Communist Answers? On Secularization, Ethnicity, and Secondary Conversions”). Rather than enter into competition, we suggested to Professor Dan Diner, the head of the Simon-Dubnow Institute—and also a professor of history at the Hebrew University—that we pool our resources. Professor Diner and I thus became joint editors of the symposium, with what, we hope, are good results. As a joint enterprise, it turned out to be productive and remarkably frictionless. Every volume of Studies in Contemporary Jewry is the product of close cooperation among the four editors; I am most grateful for all the advice and encouragement provided by Eli Lederhendler, Peter Y. Medding, and Ezra Mendelsohn. The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, headed over the last years by Professor Gideon Shimoni, has continued to provide Studies with all possible backing. We also wish to thank the Samuel and Althea Stroum Foundation, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and the Federman Fund for their continued support. Finally, as always, it gives me special pleasure to thank the managing editors, Laurie Fialkoff and

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Preface

Hannah Levinsky-Koevary, whose commitment to the success of Studies is truly exceptional and whose cheerful approach to the tasks at hand, regardless of the normal wear and tear involved, makes the work of the editors so much easier and, indeed—mirabile dictu—enjoyable. J.F.

The “Book within a Book”: Symposia Titles

Volume 1—Ostjuden in Central and Western Europe (ed. Jonathan Frankel) Volume 2—The Challenge of Modernity and Jewish Orthodoxy (ed. Peter Y. Medding) Volume 3—Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-ethnic World (ed. Ezra Mendelsohn) Volume 4—The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914–21 (ed. Jonathan Frankel) Volume 5—Israel: State and Society, 1948–1988 (ed. Peter Y. Medding) Volume 6—Art and Its Uses: The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society (ed. Ezra Mendelsohn; guest symposium editor: Richard I. Cohen) Volume 7—Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning (ed. Jonathan Frankel) Volume 8—A New Jewry? America since the Second World War (ed. Peter Y. Medding) Volume 9—Modern Jews and their Musical Agendas (ed. Ezra Mendelsohn) Volume 10—Reshaping the Past: Jewish History and the Historians (ed. Jonathan Frankel) Volume 11—Values, Interests and Identity: Jews and Politics in a Changing World (ed. Peter Y. Medding) Volume 12—Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts (ed. Ezra Mendelsohn) Volume 13—The Fate of the European Jews, 1939–1945: Continuity or Contingency? (ed. Jonathan Frankel) Volume 14—Coping with Life and Death: Jewish Families in the Twentieth Century (ed. Peter Y. Medding) Volume 15—People of the City: Jews and the Urban Challenge (ed. Ezra Mendelsohn) Volume 16—Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy (ed. Jonathan Frankel) Volume 17—Who Owns Judaism? Public Religion and Private Faith in America and Israel (ed. Eli Lederhendler)

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Symposia Titles

Volume 18—Jews and Violence: Images, Ideologies, Realities (ed. Peter Y. Medding) Volume 19—Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege (ed. Ezra Mendelsohn) Volume 20—Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism (ed. Jonathan Frankel; guest symposium editor: Dan Diner) Volume 21 (forthcoming)—Jews and Catholics in Dialogue and Confrontation: Religion and Politics Since the Second World War (ed. Eli Lederhendler) Volume 22 (forthcoming)—Sephardic and Oriental Jewry Today (ed. Peter Y. Medding) Volume 23 (forthcoming)—Jews and Sports (ed. Ezra Mendelsohn)

Contents

Symposium Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism Dan Diner and Jonathan Frankel, Introduction—Jews and Communism: The Utopian Temptation, 3 Jaff Schatz, Jews and the Communist Movement in Interwar Poland, Istvań Dea´k, Jews and Communism: The Hungarian Case, Gennady Estraikh, The Yiddish-Language Communist Press,

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38 62

Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater as a Cultural and Political Phenomenon, 83 Ezra Mendelsohn, Jews, Communism, and Art in Interwar America,

99

Alan Wald, Between Insularity and Internationalism: The Lost World of the Jewish Communist “Cultural Workers” in America, 133 Jason L. Heppell, Party Recruitment: Jews and Communism in Britain, 148 Reneé Poznanski, On Jews, Frenchmen, Communists, and the Second World War, 168 Jan T. Gross, After Auschwitz: The Reality and Meaning of Postwar Antisemitism in Poland, 199 Walter Laqueur, Jews and Communists in the Islamic World: A Note on Abraham Serfaty and Henri Curiel, 227 Pinhas Ginossar, From Zionism to Communism and Back: The Case of Moshe Sneh (1948–1967), 236 Karin Hartewig, A German Jewish Communist of the Second Generation: The Changing Personae of Klaus Gysi, 255

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Contents

Essay Kalman Weiser, The “Orthodox” Orthography of Solomon Birnbaum, 275

Review Essays Michael Rosenak, The Face of Modern Orthodoxy,

299

Haim Genizi, Sheerit Hapeletah: Between Destruction and Rebirth, Ira Sharkansky, Still More Books about Jerusalem,

305

311

Book Reviews (arranged by subject) Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army, Deborah Dash Moore, 317 Joseph Berger, Displaced Persons: Growing Up in America after the Holocaust, Judith Tydor Baumel, 320 David Kranzler, The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello, El Salvador and Switzerland’s Finest Hour, Michael Berenbaum, 323 Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–1950, Haim Genizi, 305 Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany, Haim Genizi, 305 Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War, Deborah Dash Moore, 317 David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, Henry L. Feingold, 326 Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, Franç ois Guesnet, 329

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Contents

Biography, History, and the Social Sciences Israel Bartal and Yisrael Gutman (eds.), Kiyum veshever: yehudei polin ledoroteihem (The broken chain: Polish Jewry throughout the ages, vol. 2), Judith Kalik, 332 Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories, Gerald Sorin,

334

Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger (eds.), Remembering the Lower East Side: American Reflections, Gerald Sorin, 334 Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, Geoffrey Alderman, 338 Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970, Andrew R. Heinze, 339 Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, Theodore R. Weeks, 342 Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men, Eli Lederhendler, 345 Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919–1945, David Engel, 350 Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I, Klaus Ho¨ dl, 352 Hilary L. Rubinstein, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J. Edelheit, and William D. Rubinstein, The Jews in the Modern World: A History since 1750, Lloyd P. Gartner, 354 Evelyn Salz (ed.), Selected Letters of Mary Antin, Eli Lederhendler, 345 Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent, Eli Lederhendler, 356

Language, Literature, and the Arts Emily Miller Budick (ed.), Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, Murray Baumgarten, 359

xiv

Contents

Ranen Omer-Sherman, Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth, Emily Miller Budick, 360 Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire, Brian Horowitz, 363 Jeffrey A. Summit, The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship, Judah Cohen, 365 Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-TwentiethCentury Literary Left, Caren Irr, 367 Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, Stephen C. Feinstein 369

Religion, Thought, and Education Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverton, Jonathan Karp, 373 Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (eds.), New Perspectives on the Haskalah, Jonathan Karp, 373 Norman Lamm, Seventy Faces: Articles of Faith, Michael Rosenak, 299 Tzvi C. Marx, Disability in Jewish Law, Shmuel Shilo,

377

Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron, Jonathan Judaken, 379

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem, Ira Sharkansky, 311 Marshall J. Breger and Ora Ahimeir (eds.), Jerusalem: A City and Its Future, Ira Sharkansky, 311 Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, Ira Sharkansky, 311

Contents

xv

Eli Lederhendler (ed.), The Six-Day War and World Jewry, Michael Brown, 383 Asher Naim, Saving the Lost Tribe: The Rescue and Redemption of the Ethiopian Jews, Shalva Weil, 385 Chanan Reich, Australia and Israel: An Ambiguous Relationship, Shlomo Slonim, 388 Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz, and Jay Harris (eds.), Idan haziyonut (The age of Zionism), Allon Gal, 390 Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City, Ira Sharkansky, 311

Contents for Volume XXI, 392 Note on Editorial Policy, 393


Symposium Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism


Introduction Jews and Communism: The Utopian Temptation Dan Diner the hebrew university university of leipzig Jonathan Frankel the hebrew university

As the articles in this volume demonstrate, what lies concealed behind the phrase “Jews and Communism” is a subject marked by exceptional variety and complexity. Apart from anything else, two distinct themes are grouped under this single heading. On the one hand, there is the issue of Jews as Communists, primarily as party members but also significantly as “fellow travelers.” And on the other, there is the issue of Communist policy toward the Jewish people, Judaism, and Jews. That there is no necessary connection between these two phenomena is clear enough. In the Communist regimes of China, Korea, and Vietnam, where there is essentially no Jewish population, Leninist doctrine regarding the Jewish people may be valid but is essentially irrelevant to domestic politics. However, in Europe, the Americas, and South Africa, the fact that Jews at various times and in various places were disproportionately represented in the Communist movement (be it in the total membership, the apparatus, or the leadership) was rarely without political significance at many levels of reality. In principle, the Communist movement was committed to a strictly internationalist worldview that discounted ethnicity in favor of class solidarity. But that stance had to coexist uneasily with the realpolitik advocated by Lenin the revolutionary strategist. In opposition to such internationalist purists as Rosa Luxemburg and Lev Jogiches, Lenin had insisted from his Iskra days (1900–1903) that the Marxists could not afford to ignore the power of nationalism as a factor in modern politics and would have to harness it when necessary to their cause.1 The ill-fitting match between a utopian or quasi-messianic faith in the imminent triumph of the brotherhood of man and the extreme pragmatism of a ruthless revolutionary code would leave its stamp on the entire history of the interrelationship between Jews and Communism. 3

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Dan Diner and Jonathan Frankel

Resorting to a high level of abstraction, it is possible to discern certain recurring patterns of development in that interrelationship, which can be summarized as follows. Jews were at times attracted in disproportionate numbers to the Communist movement precisely because it promised an escape from the realities of life within a minority marked off variously by ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic boundaries into a new world where all such boundaries would be eliminated. However, the presence of a relatively large number of Jews (by origin, although for the most part not by allegiance) in the Communist ranks, and especially in the upper party echelons, had as one of its results the exacerbation of hostility among broad strata of the population toward both Communism and the Jewish people. Rather than breaking down hostility between nationalities, the conspicuous presence of Jews in the party served to augment traditional anti-Jewish resentment. This was true even though Communists of Jewish origin were never more than an extremely small percentage of the total Jewish population in any given country. And it was the case even though, once in power, the Communist movement pursued policies—the attacks on religious and communal institutions; the destruction of the multiparty system; the purges; and the elimination of private enterprise (via the liquidation, as a class, of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie)—that in many cases did more damage to Jews than to the majority peoples subject to the same regime. For their part, faced by mounting antisemitic enmity from within large sections of society, Jews in increasing numbers fell back on the Communist movement (when it was out of power and in opposition to right-wing governments) and on the Communist regimes (once they were established). This reaction served to aggravate antisemitism still further. In consequence, the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and in East-Central Europe took steps, sooner or later, to reduce radically the presence of Jews within the higher and middle-ranking strata of the state and the society. These policies, in turn, contributed significantly to the fact that, when given the opportunity, Jews en masse sought, with repetitive frequency, to escape the Communist world by means of emigration. Thus, the potentially catastrophic effects of the identification of Jews with Communism can best be visualized not so much as a circle—a vicious circle—but rather as a spiral driven upward and outward by fear, hatred, and violence. That this would be the case should have come as no surprise. The dangers inherent in the association (real, but still more imagined) of Jews with the Left had become apparent long before the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the creation of the Communist regime. For decades, conservative and ultra-right forces in tsarist Russia had accused the Jews (socialists, anarchists, liberals) of spearheading revolution and hence of bringing the pogroms of 1881–1884 and 1903–1906 upon themselves. At the same time, the anger and loathing produced by the discriminatory policies of the regime and, even more, by the hundreds of pogroms, only served to increase the number and commitment of young Jews to the revolutionary cause.2 This same cycle of actions and reactions had in fact emerged still earlier, albeit on a far lesser scale, in Central Europe during the Vorma¨rz period and the revo-

Introduction—Jews and Communism: The Utopian Temptation

5

lutions of 1848. It was then that the “Jewish question” had first emerged as a key subject of political controversy in the German-speaking lands as, indeed, also in France. On the Right, conservatives perceived the demands for Jewish emancipation as an attack on the Christian state and therefore as a major threat to the very foundations of the established order, whereas on the Left, the grant of civil equality to the Jews was seen as an inevitable step toward a constitutional, a democratic, or even a socialist future. In the most radical circles (arguably heirs to the Jacobins and spiritual forefathers of the Bolsheviks), it was widely assumed that such equality would entail the disappearance of the Jewish people as a collectivity, whether in the religious sense, pace Bruno Bauer, or in the socioeconomic sense. (Karl Marx, in his essay “On the Jewish Question” of 1843, identified Jewry quintessentially with a bourgeois society doomed to self-destruction.3) What had heretofore been mere issues of public debate took on far more acute significance during the revolutionary years of 1848–1849.4 It is enough to mention the widespread outbursts of anti-Jewish violence, motivated variously by ethnic, political, and economic factors (most specifically the identification of the Jews as the moneylenders and the bankers); the role played by revolutionaries of Jewish origin in the insurrectionary events (Fischhof and Goldmark in Vienna, Marx and Hess in the Rhineland, Jacoby in Ko¨nigsberg, Cre´mieux and Goudchaux in Paris, Manin in Venice); and the mounting tendency within the ancien re´gime to see the revolutions as somehow rooted in Jewish interests, led by Jews and therefore totally illegitimate. Nonetheless, it was during the years 1918–1920 that the full implications of the association of Jews with the revolution, and specifically with the Communist revolution, first became apparent. With a striking number of Jewish-born individuals in the Bolshevik leadership—Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, and Uritsky to name just the most conspicuous—it was inevitable that the new regime should find itself branded as being dominated by Jews. From that premise, it was not far to the assertion that the Bolshevik revolution was part of a conspiracy designed to win domination for the Jewish people in Russia and eventually throughout the world. This theory was lent apparent plausibility in the spring of 1919, when insurrections culminated in the installment of Communist-led regimes in Hungary and Bavaria and in the sudden prominence of even more Jews at the top—some party members, others nonaffiliated pro-Soviet socialists, and still others anarchists (among them, Be´la Kun in Budapest and Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller, and Gustav Landauer in Munich).5 From the traditionalist perspective, the images of Leon Trotsky standing at the head of the Red Army, and of the Jewish Chekist in leather jacket with a Mauser pistol carrying out mass liquidations, conjured up an existential threat of demonic proportions. Seeking an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable reversal of the hallowed order of things, opponents of the revolution found it in the idea that world Jewry was intent on gaining control of the entire globe. It was now that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which exposed, as it were, the inner workings of this vast conspiracy, first became an extraordinary best-seller across Europe. Thus, it was hardly a cause for surprise that Hitler and the Nazi party should have defined their primary enemy as the interlocking force of world Jewry and

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world Communism (organized since 1919 in the Communist International, or Comintern). Theories of this kind had been incubating over the previous century and now could be seen as confirmed by reality. This was true even though only a miniscule number of German Jews identified themselves with the Communist party and even though, with ever greater thoroughness, the Communist leadership in Germany did everything it could to keep its leading Jewish members out of the limelight. During the Civil War in Russia, which lasted from 1918 until 1920 and even 1921 (and overlapped in its final stage with the Russo-Polish war), the Jewish population was subjected to wave after wave of pogroms that were unprecedented, at least in modern times, in their ferocity.6 In Ukraine, which was crisscrossed not only by the Red and White armies but also by innumerable indigenous forces of varying sizes, the number of Jews killed ran into many tens of thousands; some sources put the total at 200,000. Lending legitimacy, as it were, to the orgy of death, rape, and destruction unleashed by these many armed units were not only longstanding interethnic tensions but also the identification of the Jews with the profoundly hated Communist regime in Moscow. Faute de mieux, the Jewish population (initially almost unanimously hostile to the Bolsheviks) felt itself, for the most part, left with no realistic choice except to hope for the victory of the Red Army and to contribute to that victory whenever possible; units of the Red Army did at times organize pogroms, but at least those responsible could not count on going unpunished. And so the witches’ cauldron was stirred ever higher as false assumptions about the overlapping identity shared by Jews and Communists became increasingly self-fulfilling. Emerging victorious from the Civil War, the Communist regime did not at first hammer out a clear-cut or single-minded set of policies toward its Jewish population (now, with the loss of Poland, the Baltic areas, and Bessarabia, about three million strong). In the Russian regions of the Soviet Union, the orthodox Marxist policy of russification and assimilation was the norm. But in the Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, policies that can be described as Jewish “nation-building,” with a special focus on the Yiddish language, were pursued within the context of an overall strategy designed to appease Ukrainian and White Russian national sentiment. This pragmatic and eclectic approach even brought the regime to develop projects that envisaged the creation of a Jewish territory, either an autonomous region or a republic, within the Soviet Union—first (as a tentative possibility) in the Crimea and then, as a concrete plan, in Birobidzhan.7 However, by the eve of the Second World War, nothing substantial remained of Jewish “nation-building.” Yiddish-language schools, institutes, and journals, as well as the Birobidzhan project, were in a state of rapid decline. The Jews were clearly expected to merge as fast as possible into the industrializing economy being developed at breakneck speed, and also into the Russian-speaking Soviet people—an expectation that was, if anything, overfulfilled. Simultaneously, their role in the upper reaches of the regime was to be reduced to a level more or less proportional to their percentage of the population at large. Henceforward, it would be impossible to recruit actual facts, rather than fantasies, in support of the claim that Communism was an instrument employed by the Jewish people in its quest for world domination.


7

As if to underline the point, Stalin dismissed Maxim Litvinov (who was of Jewish origin) as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs in May 1939, replacing him with the Russian Viacheslav Molotov: one decision among many that laid the ground for the conclusion of the German-Soviet pact a few months later. The Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement inevitably engendered a measure of disillusionment among Jewish Communists in the West who, until then, had seen the Soviet Union and the Comintern as the primary bulwark standing firm against Nazi Germany and the fascist threat. Nonetheless, in what was probably the most allencompassing of such not-infrequent reversals of opinion, Jews leaning to the Left rallied instantly and unreservedly to the support of Communist Russia from the moment that the news arrived of the German invasion on June 22, 1941. It is possible to see here a repetition on a vastly broader scale of the syndrome that had emerged during the Russian Civil War. However, in contrast to the years 1919– 1920, Jews now did not have the option of adopting a neutral or anti-Communist stance: the Red Army alone stood between the Jews of Europe and annihilation. Thus, for the Jewish Communists and fellow travelers in the West, this was the time of their greatest acceptance within the Jewish sub-world and in society at large. For a short time, in view of the Nazi crimes and the Soviet role in the defeat of Germany, Stalin’s Russia could be seen as representing something of a grand reconciliation between power and morality; and the massive purges carried out by the Communist state during the 1930s sank into near oblivion. With the establishment of Soviet-dominated dictatorships in East-Central Europe between 1944 and 1948, the relationship between Communism and the Jews became an issue of considerable political importance not only, as hitherto, exclusively in the U.S.S.R., but now also in the “People’s Republics” further west. To complicate that increasingly uneasy relationship, those same years witnessed the struggle for the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, culminating in the establishment of Israel in 1948. Until Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, the line to be pursued toward the Jews in the so-called satellite countries was largely dictated from Moscow; it is thus not surprising that the relevant policies developed by the states primarily concerned— Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia—were broadly similar. In all these countries, the truncated Jewish populations that had somehow survived the genocidal campaign pursued by the Nazi forces were permitted in large numbers, if only by default, to migrate westwards (primarily, in the initial stages, to the DP camps in West Germany). Thus, the regimes were able to entrench the all but monoethnic character of the societies under their control, a move designed, at least in part, to lessen the anti-Communist hatred that was widespread in East-Central Europe (particularly in Hungary and Poland). At the same time, killing two birds with one stone, they were able to undermine British imperial policy in the Middle East, which was seeking at the time to prevent large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine but had now to cope with vast numbers of homeless Jews under AngloAmerican control, with nowhere else to go. In the immediate postwar years, leaders and functionaries of Jewish origin played a prominent part in the struggle to attain a monopoly of power for the Communist parties in the so-called “satellite” states. Suffice it here to mention the names of

8


such leaders at the very top as Jakub Berman, Hilary Minc, and Roman Zambrowski in Poland; Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi and Ernest Gero¨ in Hungary; Rudolf Slańsky´ in Czechoslovakia; and Ana Pauker in Romania. The Jewish presence likewise carried real weight at the upper- and middle-ranking levels of the governmental and party apparatus. This development, of course, was reminiscent of that which had emerged in Soviet Russia during its early period of consolidation. But if in Russia, the reduction of the Jewish presence in positions of power and prominence to minimal levels was a process that stretched over the course of two decades or more, in East-Central Europe it was set in motion no later than 1949 (with the Rajk trial in Budapest) and by 1952 was taking on a grotesque form with the show trial of Slańsky´ and his 13 associates (nearly all Jews) in Prague.8 Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, the remaining forms of organized Jewish life, except for a few dozen synagogues, had been liquidated in the years 1948–1949; and signs were developing, with the announcement of the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” of January 1953, that the Soviet Jews might be awaiting total marginalization or even mass deportation to labor camps in the east.9 Stalin’s sudden death put an immediate end to the more fiendish features of the Communist system in Europe. But subsequent developments would demonstrate that there was a measure of socio-political logic underlying the processes that had first elevated and then almost eliminated the Jewish presence in the political, military, security, and diplomatic branches of government. The process of reducing the role of Jews in public life proceeded in East-Central Europe throughout the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in their virtual expulsion from Poland in 1968. In parallel—specifically in the case of Romania and again in Poland—the gates were opened periodically to allow for renewed emigration of the (anyway much reduced) Jewish population at large. Even Soviet Russia permitted emigration on a considerable scale from 1971 until 1979 and again from 1988—an exodus that took on massive proportions, many hundreds of thousands, in the last days of the Communist system in 1990–1991. While it is possible, then, to sketch in brief and in general outline the uneven and often profoundly tragic relationship between Jews and Communism, such an exercise simply opens up an entire range of questions that have to be asked, but cannot here be addressed in detail. The truth is that, as of today, there is still no study examining the overall history of Communism and the Jews.10 The 12 articles in this volume can thus be regarded as building blocks to be used by those historians of the future who undertake to examine this subject in all its multifaceted and contradictory aspects. A basic question that is partially examined in this volume concerns the statistics of Jewish participation in the Communist movement. How many Jews were party members in any given country and time? How large was the circle of sympathizers and fellow travelers? What proportion of the Communists were Jews? And what percentage of the Jewish population was Communist? The questions are straightforward, but given the fact that Communist parties were often clandestine and did not necessarily keep accurate records or encourage large memberships—in general,


9

the movement defined itself as an avant-garde—finding fully accurate answers regarding both the core and the periphery may not always be possible. A related question, namely, how significant was the contribution played by Jews to the victory of the Bolsheviks in the early years of their regime, is bound to produce conflicting answers. Would the Bolshevik triumph have been possible if Jews in large numbers had not rallied to the cause? And when, exactly, did they so rally—before the Civil War (as Solzhenitsyn argues in his two-volume study of the Russian-Jewish relationship, Dvesti let vmeste [Two Hundred Years Together]);11 or during the Civil War and in the wake of the mounting violence? Similar questions can be asked of East-Central Europe after 1944, although only a few would argue in this case that Communists of Jewish origin played a decisive role: that function rather belonged to the Red Army (which had liberated, or conquered, the region), and to overwhelming Soviet might. Still a third set of questions involves the causes that induced Jews to join, or identify with, the Communist party, often in disproportionate numbers. One set of answers would undoubtedly have to focus attention on the Pale of Settlement as a natural breeding ground for political extremism, revolutionary socialism, and faith in a new world awaiting to emerge almost ready-made from the intolerable, unjust, and obscurantist order of things. With a population of some five million Jews in 1900 and an unusually high rate of demographic growth, the Pale could supply a steady stream of radical recruits to socialist and revolutionary movements not only in the Russian empire, but also overseas to the Americas, Western Europe, and South Africa. With the emergence of Communism as the self-proclaimed heir to orthodox, revolutionary Marxism, it inevitably attracted followers both from within these cohorts and from their descendants, despite the fact that “reformist” socialism and liberalism were able to compete effectively for their support.12 However, the quasi-messianic, utopian, and extremist political culture fostered by the polarization characteristic of late tsarist Russia can hardly serve as the sole explanation for the attraction of Jews, at certain moments of history and in certain countries, to Communism. Why should Hungary, where Jews had long enjoyed a relatively privileged position, have supplied so extraordinary an example of the phenomenon as it did in 1919? And if the long-established Jewish communities in England and France, as opposed to their immigrant populations from Eastern Europe, proved to be essentially immune to Communist magnetism, why was this less the case with regard to the offspring of the Jewish Bu¨rgertum in Germany (however few the party members among them might have been in absolute numbers)? Beyond these questions involving empirical historiography, there remains the ethical issue of collective responsibility. Given that, at some times and in some places, Jews were disproportionately involved in the massive crimes committed by the Communist regimes in Europe, did they in the process morally “contaminate” the Jewish people as a whole? Did they act solely as individuals whose origins happened to be Jewish or was there a linkage, however construable, between their Jewish extraction, their Communism, and their participation in atrocities? If for no other reason, this question cannot be avoided because the argument is so often made in Eastern Europe today (in Poland and Lithuania, for example) that

10


the large number of Jews within the Soviet security agencies took a leading role in the years 1939–1941 both in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims to the deadly Siberian labor camps and in numerous executions— and, by so doing, opened the way to the acts of vengeance visited on the Jewish people by their Gentile neighbors from the moment the Red Army was forced back by the Wehrmacht. If, for example, the entire Polish people is to be held in some way responsible for the Jedwabne massacre carried out by Polish villagers, does it follow that the Jewish people should share in the guilt incurred by the murderous acts of Jewish NKVD/MVD operatives? None of the articles in this volume is devoted primarily to this issue, although it is addressed by a number of authors either explicitly or implicitly. It clearly warrants a full-length treatment of the kind that cannot be provided in a short introductory note such as this. Suffice it to suggest two possible lines of response. First, it can be argued that most (although by no means all) Communists of Jewish origin had broken every last tie with Judaism and the Jewish religion. Seeking universality—and perhaps in fear of the power exercised by their own origins— did not the Jewish Communists or Communist Jews feel a deep compulsion to revoke their congenital bonds to the Jewish collectivity? Did not Jewish Communists so often (again, not in all cases) feel a special sense of gratification when they took up the struggle for all oppressed groups, except the group to which they were affiliated by birth? If that was the case, why should their “own people,” thus repudiated, have to share in responsibility for their actions?13 A second form of argument would approach the issue from the other pole, as it were. That is to say, should one simply assume that the Jews constitute a collectivity like any other? Within a typically Zionist and nationalist conception of history, to be sure, such an assumption is usually taken for granted: the Jews are seen as a people no less than other peoples, a nation among the nations. Yet does it follow from this that the Jewish people as a whole should be held responsible for the actions of Jews acting as individuals? After all, the Jewish people as a diasporic entity were never in a position to exercise sovereign power (in the interval between the Roman conquest of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948); nor, in the 20th century, did it even possess those judicial and coercive powers that it had often held, on a regional and local basis, in the medieval and early modern periods. Under those conditions, does it make sense to hold the Jews collectively to blame for the politics of men and women who denied their links to Judaism and the Jewish nation, or even, in extreme cases, denied the very existence of such a nation? Or is this perhaps too simple and self-serving an answer? It is not unusual, after all, for Jews when writing history to assume some collective credit for writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and statesmen who, strictly speaking, were not Jewish at all (Felix Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Benjamin Disraeli, Gustav Mahler, and Boris Pasternak are among the many names that come to mind). Can it be that Solzhenitsyn with his insistent calls for nations, the Jewish people included, to hold themselves responsible for the actions of their members has some justice on his side?14 (This might still be true despite the fact that his extraordinary focus on the Jewish role in Russian history smacks of the obsessive. Could not Two Hundred


11

Years Together just as logically have focused, for example, on the relationship between the Russian and Georgian peoples?) Communism represented for the Jews perhaps the most radical encounter with modernization and modernity. As an ideology, it posited the total merger and disappearance of the Jewish people into mankind. And yet, as the articles in this volume make clear, many Jewish Communists actually believed that they were involved in Jewish nation-building or, at the very least, in the politics of the “Jewish street”— hardly to be differentiated from Bundists or revolutionary Zionists. So varied was this chapter within Jewish history (or on its margins or beyond its borders) that it has to be asked whether these instances of a-typicality were merely exceptions to the rule. Or should one acquiesce in the idea that, at a certain point, “Jews and Communism” is a subject that denies attempts at overly strenuous generalization?

Notes 1. For a concise summary of Lenin’s ideology vis-a`-vis the national question, see Alfred G. Mayer, Leninism (New York: 1971), 145–160; Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, Mass: 1964), 34–49. 2. On the politics of the tsarist regime toward the Jewish population, see, for instance, Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-wing Politics in Imperial Russia (London: 1986); on the role of Jews as revolutionaries, see Eric Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth Century Russia (Cambridge: 1995); and Leonard Schapiro, “The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement,” The Slavonic and East European Review 40 (1961– 1962), 148–167. 3. See, for example, Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: 1978), 92–186; Shlomo Avineri, “Marx and Jewish Emancipation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 3 (1964), 445–450. 4. On Jews and the 1848 revolutions, see Salo W. Baron, “The Impact of the Revolution of 1848 on Jewish Emancipation,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (1949), 195–248; Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1847–1871: zwischen Revolution, Reaktion und Emanzipation (Dusseldorf: 1977), 277–361; idem, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland: von Jena bis Weimar (Tu¨bingen: 1966), 1–109; cf. Zosa Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 (New York: 1970). 5. For analyses of the Jewish dimension within the extreme Left in Germany, see, for example, Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apolcalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (1985), 78–124; Michael Lo¨wy, Redemption et utopie: le judaı¨sme libertaire en Europe centrale (Paris: 1988), esp. 162– 200. 6. For a comprehensive study of the war in Ukraine, see Peter Kenez, The Civil War in South Russia, vol. 1, 1918: The First Year of the Volunteer Army (Berkeley: 1971); vol. 2, 1919–1920: The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley: 1977). On the pogroms, see ibid. 2:166– 177. 7. On the policies of the regime toward the non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union, see the recent study by Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: 2001); on the application of those policies toward the Jewish nationality, see Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton: 1972); and Mordechai Altshuler, Hayevsekziyah bivrit hamoez ot: bein leumiyut lekomunizm (Tel Aviv: 1980).

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8. A most useful collection on the situation of the Jews in East-Central Europe during the late Stalinist era remains that of Peter Meyer et al., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites (Westport, Conn.: 1971 [1953]). 9. See, for example, G.V. Kostyrchenko: Tainaia politika Stalina: vlast i antisemitizm (Moscow: 2001), 351–709; Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: 2001). 10. See Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars and Communism, 2 vols. (New York: 1974); although most informative, this work (despite its title) does not provide an overall study of the subject. 11. A.I. Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste (1775–1995), vol. 2 (Moscow: 2002), 81–82. 12. For important evaluations of this issue within the broader context of American socialism, see Arthur Liebman, Jews on the Left (New York: 1979), 1–69; Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals 1880–1920 (Bloomington: 1985), 1–123. 13. For a forceful statement of this position, see Shmuel Ettinger’s comment, delivered during a heated conference discussion dealing with the role of Communists of Jewish origin in the Soviet governmental apparatus that was responsible for creating and aggravating the famine in Ukraine in 1933 in which millions died: If a Jewish political party or . . . intellectual group had said: “Well, we should kill Ukrainians . . .” then I think there would have been collective responsibility. But it was nothing of the kind. There were people in the state apparatus . . . whom I personally don’t consider Jews at all. What is Jewish in them? They were born to Jewish mothers and I, not being a racist, do not see anything in it. They were not culturally or religiously Jewish, not in any . . . Jewish movement. . . . Are we to say that if a Jew, an individual Jew, is a criminal, . . . all Jews are criminals? (quoted in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Peter J. Potichny and Howard Aster [Edmonton: 1988], 481). 14. In his book, Solzhenitsyn discusses this issue at length. The following is a short excerpt: Jews as Bolsheviks—so much ink has been spilled about that. Whoever feels compelled to prove that the [October] revolution was not Russian [ne-russkoi] but an alien import, points out the Jewish names and the pseudonyms, all in the effort to lift the blame for 1917 from the Russians. And as for the Jewish authors . . . they all agree that they [the Bolsheviks of Jewish origin] were not Jews in spirit. They were schismatics. We, too, accept that. People should be judged by what they stand for. And yes, they were schismatics. However, the Russians among the leading Bolsheviks were similarly not Russian in spirit, often actually anti-Russian and specifically hostile to the Orthodox church. . . . Let us put the question differently: how many random schismatics are needed to form a non-random tendency? What part does their nation have in this? As for the Russian schismatics, we know: within the Bolshevik ranks their numbers were depressingly and unforgivably large. And how great and how active was the part played by the Jewish schismatics in the reinforcement of Bolshevik power? . . . Can peoples disassociate themselves from their own schismatics? (Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste, 2:75).

Jews and the Communist Movement in Interwar Poland Jaff Schatz institute for jewish culture, lund

The subject of Jews and Communism has traditionally been a minefield of myths, emotions, and misconceptions. In Poland, where myths flourish and Communism is often attributed almost exclusively to the Jews, the issue is apparently still hot. To my surprise, several well-meaning acquaintances have privately voiced their opinion against public discussion of the matter, on the grounds that “the time is still not ripe”—this, despite the fact that, in public debates during the past decade, anti-Jewish actions in the past and anti-Jewish sentiments in the present are often justified as being the natural outcome of alleged Jewish participation in the Communist dictatorial regime and its crimes. In such contexts, whether explicitly or implicitly, some kind of collective Jewish apology is often demanded. Even within the international academic community, where one would expect the discussion to be more balanced, various misconceptions still emerge from time to time regarding the issue of Jews and Communism. Some of these misconceptions are clearly founded on traditional anti-Jewish sentiments.1 At the same time, scholars in the field of Jewish studies frequently ignore or downplay the issue—in marked contrast to many Polish Jews of the previous generation, who felt compelled to prove time and again that not all Jews were Communists and not all Communists, Jews. Rather than dealing with the question of why this issue is apparently so controversial, or with the precise nature of the myths surrounding it, I propose to focus on the following questions: What was the historical, ideological, and societal background that caused many Polish Jews to turn to Communism? What was the quantitative and qualitative significance of Jewish participation in the interwar Polish Communist movement? How large and how important was this category within the larger Polish Jewish community? And finally, just how “Jewish” and how “Communist” were the Polish Jewish Communists; that is, in what ways did they differ from—or resemble—their non-Communist Jewish peers, on the one hand, and their non-Jewish Communist comrades, on the other? A number of factors allowed the Communist movement to make effective inroads into the Jewish population during the interwar period. Among the most important 13

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of these were the changing occupational structure of Polish Jewry, which at the time numbered some three million individuals, or about 10 percent of the total Polish population; its predominantly urban character; and the anti-Jewish discriminatory practices present in most spheres of Polish life. Whereas Jews constituted only 9.1 percent of those employed in crafts and industry in 1921, they accounted for close to 20 percent of this category a decade later. By 1931, Jews were more active in manufacturing (42.2 percent) than in trade (36.6 percent), and they constituted 10.1 percent of all nonagricultural workers in Poland.2 On the question whether this process signaled a proletarianization or a pauperization of the Jewish masses, the answer is probably both. In any case, Jews were largely absent from the ranks of the traditional working class, in the sense of working in large industrial plants: more than 80 percent of the Jews active in industry worked in small shops, and 44 percent of them were self-employed craftsmen. Polish Jewry in the interwar period was dominated by the lower middle class and proletariat. It is estimated that of the total Jewish population, some 100,000 belonged to the bourgeoisie; about two million to the petty bourgeoisie; 700,000 to the working class, and about 300,000 to the professional sphere and the intelligentsia.3 Had there been increased opportunities for industrial employment, significantly more Jews would have been proletarianized.4 Even more significant than the trend toward proletarianization was the fact that a majority of Polish Jews were truly poverty-stricken—a situation that radically worsened during the years of general economic crisis. By 1931, the unemployment figure for Jewish breadwinners stood at 29.2 percent, in contrast to 21.1 percent among the non-Jewish population.5 According to the Polish Ministry of the Interior, there were 223,000 unemployed Jewish workers in 1931; two years later, the number had risen to 325,000. Among those employed, many worked only three days a week or even less—on the average, Jewish workers were employed between 16 and 22 weeks annually.6 Moreover, the overwhelming majority of Jewish workers was active in industries with the lowest wages7 and most were not entitled to unemployment benefits, since these were available only to those working in enterprises that had more than five employees. Bankruptcy among the self-employed was another common phenomenon. In 1930, a year of worldwide economic crisis, approximately 35 percent of all Jewish enterprises in Poland were forced out of business.8 Less than half of the 200,000 Jewish families in Lodz were considered capable of paying even the minimal community tax, and in the smaller cities, about 90 percent of the Jewish families had to rely on philanthropy for their survival.9 Augmenting the widespread sense of profound malaise were the tensions that characterized relations between the national majority of ethnic Poles and the Jewish minority that, together with the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and German communities, made up some 30 percent of Poland’s population. Enjoying formal civil equality, the Jews were in reality subjected to various forms of discrimination, a development that prompted several Jewish leaders to describe the economic situation as a “cold pogrom.” Even if the impoverishment of Polish Jewry was largely a function of the general economic crisis, the community’s problems were seriously aggravated by exclusivist practices in the labor market and by an anti-Jewish economic policy.

Jews and the Communist Movement in Interwar Poland

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The policy of the state was clearly discriminatory. Jews were rarely employed in public transportation, the school system, public administration, or the civil service. In the territories that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire prior to their inclusion in the Polish state, 12,312 Jews had been employed as state and municipal officials and more than 6,000 had worked in post, telephone, or telegraph offices. Most of these employees were pensioned off after Poland became independent. Jewish physicians and lawyers were not employed in state institutions. Among Poland’s 77,150 elementary and high school teachers, only 2.5 percent were Jews. Overall, Jews constituted only 1.8 percent of all those employed in the public service, which left unemployment or a free profession as the only alternatives open to the vast majority of the Jewish intelligentsia. The nationalization of industries that produced tobacco, salt, matches, and alcohol was another blow to Polish Jews, as these were branches in which Jews were traditionally conspicuous. With the imposition of a state monopoly on these products, some 32,000 Jewish workers and shopkeepers lost their jobs. The Sunday rest law was also instrumental in this context, as those who did not report to work on Saturdays risked dismissal. Moreover, taxation policies resulted in a disproportionate tax burden falling on small and medium-sized enterprises, where Jews were concentrated; in consequence, Jews paid between 35 and 40 percent of all direct taxes to the state. The overall discriminatory policy against the Jews was demonstrated in more extreme form by a boycott against Jewish shops that was proclaimed by the extreme Right in May 1936.10 Prime Minister Filicjan Sławoj-Składkowski commented regarding the boycott: “Beating Jews—no. Boycotting them—yes, please.” Anti-Jewish violence, which during the first chaotic years of Polish independence (1919–1921) and the Soviet-Polish war took on dramatic proportions, declined in the years of Marshal Jo´zef Piłsudski’s rule.11 It erupted again, however, with renewed ferocity in the four years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. This violence was coupled with intense nationalist propaganda and anti-Jewish economic activity. The roots of the phenomenon were to be found in the great depression that hit Poland in 1929; in the intensified competition between the Jewish and the rising Polish middle class; and, at a later stage, in the Nazi takeover in Germany, which greatly impressed the extreme Right. According to official sources, there were 21 pogroms and 348 individual acts of violence in 1936 in the Bialystok region alone; according to Jewish sources, 79 Jews were killed and approximately 500 wounded across the country between October 1935 and April 1936.12 The opposition National Democratic Party and the various semifascist parties affiliated with it (or splintered from it) succeeded in influencing a large segment of the population.13 With the resurrection of an old slogan, z˙ydokomuna (the JewishCommunist conspiracy), and the introduction of a new one, folksfront (an antisemitic use of the Yiddish term for “popular front,” the would-be alliance between the Communists, the Polish Socialist Party and the Bund), they attempted to create an atmosphere of impending Jewish threat to the existence of the Polish state. An aggressive nationalism and antisemitism also blossomed at the universities, where agitation for a numerus clausus later grew into demands for a numerus nullus. In

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several university faculties, “ghetto benches” were forcibly introduced into the classrooms so that Jewish students would be segregated from the others. Interwar Poland was characterized by the interplay between two opposing political traditions. The first was symbolically associated with the ethnically and religiously homogeneous Polska Piasto´w (the Piasts were the first Polish royal dynasty), and the second with the multiethnic Polska Jagiellono´w (the Jagellonian dynasty governed a multinational Poland between 1385–1572). The Piast alternative was advocated by the leader of the National Democrats, Roman Dmowski, and supported by the Polish Right and center, whereas the Jagiellonian concept was represented by Piłsudski. However, the idea of Poland as a state composed of nations rather than as a nation-state was never implemented in the field of practical politics even during Piłsudski’s increasingly authoritarian reign. After his death in 1935, the so-called colonels’ regime in effect adopted the National Democrats’ antiJewish program, which asserted that the Jews, unlike other minority groups, could not be assimilated and should therefore be compelled to emigrate.14 However—and the importance of this fact cannot be overestimated—from the mid-1920s, with the gates of the United States and Palestine all but closed, mass emigration was not a viable possibility.15 Although the Polish Left, as well as the liberal and democratic segments of the Polish intelligentsia, consistently opposed antisemitism, they represented a distinct minority. In addition, their opposition to antisemitism was not founded on approval of a separate Jewish cultural identity, but rather on their conviction regarding the possibility and desirability of full Jewish assimilation. Any discussion of Communism and the Jews in interwar Poland cannot overlook another factor of the greatest importance: the extremely intense nature of Polish Jewish politics. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Poland at the time was the world center of modern Jewish politics.16 Divided between socialists and antisocialists; the Orthodox and the anticlericals; nationalists and assimilationists; Zionists and anti-Zionists; Hebraists and Yiddishists, the Jewish parties developed an extraordinary variety of ideologies and programs, which were all defended with an unyielding (some would say, blinkered) sense of conviction. These programs represented an entire spectrum of responses to the question of Jewish identity— whether secular, religious, or national—and, above all, to the basic question of how the predicament of Polish Jewry should be solved. Overall, there were four basic strategies: those of the Bundists (and autonomists); the Zionists; the Orthodox; and the Communists. The first three promoted practical political tactics that were explored throughout the interwar period by the relevant political parties. None, however, was able to produce any significant improvement in the worsening Jewish situation. The Communist movement, which for the great majority of the period was illegal, placed its fundamental hope in revolutionary change that would eventually benefit everyone, including the Jews. Although quite active on the “Jewish street,” where it competed particularly with the Zionists and the Bundists, the Communist movement, like the others, had very little practical impact in the sense of improving the lot of Polish Jewry. Thus, although all of these strategies were pursued with great intensity and conviction, “the dilemma of


17

powerlessness,”17 as Ezra Mendelsohn has termed it, continued to be manifested in unfulfilled hopes, painful frustrations, and a prolonged sense of impotency. This situation clearly affected the emotional and political atmosphere among the young Jewish generation, which was gradually overcome by a general feeling of deep hopelessness. The result was increasing radicalization and political polarization. Challenging the established moderate Zionist leadership, the strongly nationalist and antisocialist Revisionist movement gained unexpected strength during the 1930s, as did the left wing of the Zionist camp. Similarly, the socialist (and antiZionist) Bund, which was most conspicuous in the struggle against antisemitism, dramatically increased its influence and by the second half of the 1930s had become the strongest of the Jewish political parties. Not surprisingly, the radical ideals of the Communist movement also attracted a growing number of young Jews. By the 1930s, it was the rule rather than the exception that younger Jews belonged to different political movements than did their parents. The divide between children and parents was deepening into an abyss. This growing gap was closely connected to the rapid processes of acculturation and secularization that emerged in the late 19th century and accelerated during the interwar period. Acculturation exerted an impact on dress, language, and self-identification. To an increasing degree, young men cut their side-locks, shaved their beards, abandoned traditional Jewish dress, and spoke Polish. Had the Holocaust not occurred, the polonization of the bulk of Polish Jewry within one or two generations would most likely have been fully comparable to the acculturation of Jews in Western countries.18 Nonetheless, approximately one third of the interwar adult Jewish population was still Orthodox or traditionalist.19 At the opposite pole were the assimilationists, who regarded themselves as Poles—“of the Mosaic faith,” or “of Jewish descent”— and who constituted some 8 to 9 percent of the Jewish population.20 Rising antisemitism proved their program of radical assimilation to be insufficient or impossible, so that their direct ideological influence on the young generation remained limited.21 Young Polish Jews were more apt to consider themselves both Polish and Jewish, along a very broad continuum, depending on the level of secularization and acculturation. Polonization meant a widening gulf between achieved and ascribed identity and, together with secularization, was an important factor in the widening divide between the generations. As noted, interwar Polish Jewry was characterized by a vibrant political life. The same was true of its social and cultural activity, which entered a period of unprecedented creativity. More than 200 daily Jewish papers and periodicals existed in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish; on any given day, some 790,000 copies came off the presses.22 There was an impressive network of Jewish schools, some of them affiliated with the various political movements.23 Jewish theater and film blossomed. Apart from political parties, there were Jewish trade unions, informal educational groups, sports and social organizations. The air was full of discussion and debate: alongside a sense of deepening anxiety, there was also expectant desire. The social situation of Polish Jewry in general, and of the younger generation in particular, constituted the broad background against which Polish Jewish radicals were formed. Evolving through a myriad of individual contingencies, some of these

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radical young men and women came to be part of the Polish Communist movement of that time, forming the political generation of Polish Jewish Communists.

Size and Composition of the Interwar Polish Communist Movement It is difficult to determine the precise number of Polish Communists during the interwar years. Since the movement itself was illegal during virtually the entire interwar period, official membership figures obviously could not be publicized, and there were also several constituent groups of varying sizes, rather than one central organization. The numbers given here and in Table 1 are thus estimated figures. The largest grouping within the Polish Communist movement was the Polish Communist Party (Komunistyczna Partia Polski [KPP]). During the 1920s, membership in the KPP fluctuated between 2,500 and approximately 6,000.24 Between 1929 and 1934, its numbers increased steadily to a peak of 10,300. For the two other groupings in the Polish Communist movement, the Communist Party of Western Belarus (Komunistyczna Partia Zachodniej Białorusi [KPZB]) and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (Komunistyczna Partia Zachodniej Ukrainy [KPZU]), membership peaked in 1933 and in 1936, respectively. The movement as a whole, including youth movements affiliated with each of the three main groupings, reached its highest membership in 1936, with a total of 33,736. These figures do not take into account those individuals who, at any given time, were in prison. In 1933, for instance, 6,340 Communists were imprisoned.25 Thus, the number of committed Polish Communists in that year totaled approximately Table 1. The Communist Movement in Poland, 1929–1937 1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

Communist parties KPPa

3,446

3,300

7,092

8,032

9,200

10,300

9,000

7,517

7,092

KPZBb

*

2,000

2,300

3,500

4,000

3,500

3,400

2,000

*

KPZU

*

1,300

2,500

3,600

4,600

3,400

4,157

4,719

*

c

Communist youth organizations KZMPd

3,530

2,850

4,550

7,500

7,300

7,250

*

9,000

*

KZMZBe

2,200

810

1,150

*

3,800

3,400

*

2,500

*

KZMZU

520

1,240

1,300

*

3,900

3,100

*

8,000

*

f

*—number unknown a

KPP—Komunistyczna Partia Pokski (Communist Party of Poland)

b

KPZU—Komunistyczna Partia Zachodniej Ukrainy (Communist Party of Western Ukraine)

c

KPZB—Komunistyczna Partia Zachodniej Bialorusi (Communist Party of Western Belorus)

d

KZMP—Komunistyczny Zwia¸zek Młodziez˙y Polski (Communist Union of Polish Youth)

KZMZB—Komunistyczny Zwia¸zek Młodziez˙y Zachodniej Bialorusi (Communist Union of Western Belorusian Youth)

e

f KZMZU Komunistyczny Zwia¸zek Młodziez˙y Ukrainy (Communist Union of Western Ukrainian Youth) Sources: A. Bystrzycki, “Rozwoj organizacyjny KPP 1929–1938” (unpublished thesis); Henryk Cimek, “Koncepcje i problemy sojuszu robotniczo-chlopskiego w ruchu rewolucyjnym w Polsce (1918–1939),” in Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 1918–1938, ed. Henryk Cimek and Lucjan Kieszczynski (Warsaw: 1984).


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40,000—an impressive figure, given the movement’s secret and conspiratorial nature. Fluctuations in the Communist movement’s membership were a function of economic and political factors. During the years 1930–1934, for example, the membership of the KPP rose more than threefold, against a backdrop of economic crisis and increased unemployment. Afterwards, however, the quantitative strength of the movement decreased in consequence of better economic conditions, heightened government repression, and the negative influence of the Moscow show trials. Of utmost interest is the social composition of the movement. It claimed to be the vanguard of the working class, but from 1931 onward, the proportion of industrial workers among its membership fluctuated between 11 and 17 percent.26 Although these low figures are sometimes regarded as proof of the Communist movement’s failure to attract workers, they should be judged in the context of Poland’s occupational structure.27 According to the census of 1921, only 17 percent of Poland’s working population belonged to the industrial proletariat, as against 74 percent who were either self-employed peasants or agricultural laborers.28 In Ukraine and Belarus, the territories covered by the KPZU and the KPZB, peasants and agricultural laborers accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the parties’ membership; in ethnic Poland, where the KPP had its base, they represented 30 to 40 percent of the total.29 Accordingly, the Polish Communist party of the 1930s was regarded by the Comintern, the international Communist movement, as the most “peasant” of the European Communist parties (which, incidentally, may be one of the reasons why Stalin at a later stage said that introducing socialism to Poland was akin to putting a saddle on a cow). The movement’s internationalist profile and its opposition to discrimination against the national minorities acted as powerful sources of attraction for the often persecuted Ukrainians, Jews, and Belarusians. The Soviet Union regarded the nationality problems that troubled Poland (like other Central European states) as weak points in the capitalist system to be exploited for purposes of Communist propaganda and recruitment. The establishment of the KPZU, the KPZB and the Central Jewish Bureau (Centralne Biuro Z˙ydowskie [CBZ˙]) should also be seen in this context. Indeed, in a sense it can be argued that the Communists’ nationalities policy proved almost too successful: by the 1930s, ethnic Poles had become a minority in the Polish Communist movement. This was especially the case regarding the youth organizations. In the Communist Union of Polish Youth (Komunistyczny Zwia¸zek Młodziez˙y Polskiej [KZMP]), Jews actually constituted a majority of the membership (51 percent) in 1930, as against ethnic Poles (19 percent), Ukrainians (18 percent), and Belarusians (12 percent); comparable figures for 1933 were 33 percent for ethnic Poles, 17 percent for Ukrainians, 19 percent for Belarusians, and 31 percent for Jews.30

Jews and the Communist Movement As noted, the participation of Jews in the Polish Communist movement has given rise to many stereotypes, the most persistent of which is summed up in the term

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z˙ydokomuna. This allegation of a Communist-Jewish conspiracy was particularly powerful in interwar Poland, especially following Piłsudski’s death. Z˙ydokomuna effectively conflated the general Polish fear of Russia with anti-Communist and anti-Jewish attitudes—overlooking the fact that antisemitism not only predated the Jewish involvement in the Communist movement, but was a major cause of such involvement.31 And here a major caveat must be noted: whereas individuals of Jewish origin did in fact constitute a substantial portion of the Polish Communist movement, Communist ideals and the movement itself enjoyed very limited support among the wider Polish Jewish community. Jewish participation in the Polish Communist movement began even before the end of the First World War and increased during the 1920s, when the Communist party incorporated splinter groups from both the Poale Zion party and the Fareynikte (the Fareynikte yidisher sotsialitisher arbeyter partey). The Kombund, a large splinter group from the Bund (perhaps a quarter of its membership), joined the Communists in 1923. Shortly thereafter, the Central Jewish Bureau was established, which was responsible for organizing Communist activities on the so-called “Jewish street.”32 Many Jews joined the Communist movement in the second half of the 1920s (especially between 1926 and 1928), and many more in the 1930s, when the activities of legal Communist front organizations dramatically increased. As previously suggested, throughout the interwar period, Jews did constitute an important segment of the Communist movement. According to both Polish sources and Western estimates, the proportion of Jews in the KPP was never lower than 22 percent countrywide, reaching a peak of 35 percent (in 1930).33 According to some available data, the level of Jewish members of the Communist movement then dropped to no more than 24 percent for the remainder of the decade. Other data, however, indicate that Jewish membership actually went up in the large cities; in Warsaw, for example, Jewish membership rose from 44 percent in 1930 to more than 65 percent in 1937.34 In the semi-autonomous KPZU and KPZB, the percentage of Jewish members was similar to that in the KKP.35 The number and proportion of Jewish members in the youth movements was even higher, ranging from 31 percent to a high of 51 percent. Working on the assumption that Polish Jewish Communists constituted between a quarter and a third of the Communist movement during the 1930s, the total of Polish Jewish Communists (including youth group members but excluding political prisoners) ranged between 5,000 and 8,400. If prisoners are included, the numbers range between 6,200 and 10,000.36 In addition, Jews comprised the overwhelming majority of one of the legal front organizations, the Polish-based International Organization for Help to the Revolutionaries (Mie˛dzynarodowa Organizacja Pomocy Rewolucjonistom [MOPR]), which collected money for and channeled assistance to imprisoned Communists. In 1932, out of 6,000 members of the MOPR, about 90 percent were Jews.37 Perhaps even more significant was the Jewish representation among the Communist movement leadership. Although party authorities consciously strove to promote classically proletarian and ethnically Polish members to become leaders and party functionaries, Jews accounted for 54 percent of the field leadership of the KPP in 1935 and 75 percent of the party’s technika—those responsible for pro-


21

ducing and distributing propaganda materials. Communists of Jewish origin also occupied a majority of the seats on the Central Committees of both the Komunistyczna Partia Rabotnicza Polski (KPRP) and the KPP.38 A combination of three factors accounted for the significant Jewish presence in the Polish Communist movement. First was the attractiveness of Communist ideals to a portion of the Jewish community—particularly, as has been seen, to members of the younger generation. Second was the social composition of the Communist movement. And finally, there were the cultural and social characteristics of the Jewish Communists themselves. Antisemitism does much to explain the appeal of Communism to many Polish Jews. More than any Polish political party, the Communist movement vigorously opposed antisemitism.39 Promising to build a society free from both national and class oppression, it held great potential for attracting radicalized, angry, and disappointed young Jews. The injustices of a capitalist society were easier to perceive in the urban setting, and those living there were also much more exposed to radical ideologies. And, of course, within Poland’s predominantly agricultural society, Jews were a highly urbanized group—according to the census of 1921, 76 percent of Polish Jews lived in cities.40 Poland’s social structure was largely mirrored in the Polish Communist movement. As already noted, even in the more urbanized KPP, peasants and agricultural laborers constituted 30 to 40 percent of the membership during the 1930s (and in the other two Communist groupings, the percentage was much higher). During the same period, Jews accounted for about 24 percent of KPP members, and since the number of Jewish peasants was negligible, this meant that Jews comprised about 37 percent of the party’s non-peasant membership. Finally, given the relatively high degree of formal or informal education and intellectual sophistication to be found among Jewish Communists, along with their devotion and ideological fervor, it is not surprising that many of them attained positions of leadership. Given such figures and factors, one might be tempted to agree with the stereotype of z˙ydokomuna. But this leaves out an extremely important piece of the context: the fact that, within the Jewish community, Communists represented a small and not very well-regarded minority. Even assuming that the claim made by Jewish Communists after the war was correct—that “of the highest number of votes the Communists ever polled in Poland, i.e., of the 266,528 votes collected on several lists of front organizations at the Sejm elections of 1928, two-fifths were cast by Jews”41 —simple arithmetic reveals that Communist ideals were supported by no more than approximately 5 percent of all Jewish voters. Thus, a more accurate formulation is that, whereas Jews did play a very important role in the Polish Communist movement of the time, the Jewish population at large was far from sympathetic to Communism.

The Party Line vis-a`-vis the Jews With regard to the Jewish question, the Polish Communist movement focused on three closely related topics. The first, as already mentioned, was antisemitism. The second was Jewish “ethnicity,” by which was meant issues involving Jewish culture

22

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and religion. Finally, there was the Communist movement’s stance vis-a`-vis rival political ideologies and movements among the Polish Jews, notably Zionism and socialism (particularly as represented by the Bund). Apart from the Polish Socialist Party, the Communist party was the only general Polish party to energetically and consistently oppose antisemitism. In accordance with the stand taken by the international Communist movement, antisemitism was regarded as a product of the capitalist system, as “a tool for entrenching capitalism and the blackest reaction” and, in its capacity to split the working class, as “the most terrible danger” to an effective class struggle to be waged by all the nationalities in Poland. Because of this, it was resolved in 1927 that “the party should resolutely fight for the national equality of the Jewish working masses and against bourgeois antisemitism and chauvinism, which aim at diverting the attention of the Polish and Jewish working masses from the struggle against their oppressors and exploiters, the fascist dictatorship.” This ideological stand was repeatedly expressed in connection with the government’s anti-Jewish policies, the worsening social situation of the Jews, and, above all, the pogroms. Communists frequently denounced pogroms as the outcome of “reactionary manipulation” and called upon Polish workers and peasants to defend Jews not only out of human compassion, but also because “those workers and peasants who passively observe while fascism murders the Jewish poor commit a crime against their own class interest.”42 Analyzing the bloody pogrom in Brzesc on May 13, 1937, a well-known Communist publicist, Julian Brun, wrote that “pogroms must be seen as a dangerous attack by the reactionaries, aimed at weakening and splitting the antifascist forces.”43 On various occasions, the KPP called for the creation of multiethnic defense groups, crossing party lines, that would help protect the Jews. Although most of the anti-pogrom rhetoric was probably sincere, it should also be seen as part of the divisive tactics of the “united front from below.”44 This, in any event, was how it was viewed by a number of rival parties, notably the Bund and the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, which dismissed as propaganda the Communist proposal in 1936 to jointly fight antisemitism. Such attempts, however, strongly contributed to increased Communist sympathies among Jews and added to the attractiveness of the movement’s internationalist profile, according to which a lasting solution to antisemitism could be achieved only through a total overturn of society’s political and economic foundations. Regarding Jewish ethnicity, the Polish Communist stand, in accord with the Soviet party line, was far more ambiguous.45 In the long term, the “progressive” solution to the “Jewish problem” was seen to be assimilation. But in the short term, the Communist movement supported a program calling for secular, state-sponsored schools with Yiddish as the language of instruction, as well as for what was vaguely described as “free cultural development.” In other words, as Jerzy Holzer notes, “it tolerated linguistic and, to some extent, cultural Jewish autonomy, but this always stemmed from practical needs rather than comprehension of the Jewish national problem.” In retrospect, Holzer is correct when he argues that the Communist line with regard to Jews “meant only an extension of the period within which the assimilation would be accomplished on the principle of the melting pot.”46


23

On Judaism as a religion, there was no ambiguity. Communists viewed Judaism as sheer superstition that should be rejected and fought against, and bitterly denounced the influence of “Jewish clericalism” on the masses.47 The Communist movement in the Jewish arena had to compete with various Jewish political parties. Taking a stand on the concrete issues facing Polish Jews— the problem of taxation, economic boycotts, pauperization, the lack of state support for Jewish schools, and the like—the Communists frequently proposed the same solutions as the Bund, the Zionists, and even the religious parties. Being determined, however, “to achieve a dominant position on the ‘Jewish street,’ ”48 they also had to attack these parties for alleged political and ideological wrongdoing. This line was coherent insofar as the Communists were convinced that the “Jewish problem” could only find a definite solution through a revolution under their leadership, as “the victory of the proletariat will mean equality of rights for all the oppressed nationalities.”49 Consequently, they regarded all competing Jewish parties with a fundamental hostility, and their calls for cooperation, common fronts, and alliances were never more than tactical. In practice, there was a continuous struggle for power in which infiltration, diversion, ideological debate, the disruption of meetings, and even violent fistfights were frequently employed. Starting in the late 1920s, the Communist line on the Jewish street focused on attacking “social-fascism,” meaning the moderate socialist parties. This policy was pursued until 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany with his radically antiJewish rhetoric and program. The immediate result was augmentation of Jewish national sentiments in Poland and a consequent decrease of Communist influence. With Hitler now perceived as a major threat to the Soviet Union, the attack on the “social-fascists” was replaced by the idea of a popular front against fascism, which the KPP proposed in March 1933 to the Polish Socialist Party, the Bund, and the Left Poale Zion. Although after repeated negotiations the Communist calls for cooperation were turned down, the appeal of such slogans as a “proletarian popular front” or an “antifascist front,” as well as of the proposals for a “popular front from below” and joint actions against pogroms, soon led the Communists to regain their relative strength on the Jewish street. Other contributing factors were the very successful propaganda concerning the achievements of Jews in the Soviet Union and the increased influence of violently antisemitic fascist and semi-fascist organizations in Poland. The Communist calls for unity against antisemitism and fascism, coupled with polemics against “Jewish nationalism” and “Jewish separatism” (aimed against the Zionist parties and the Bund), as well as attempts to infiltrate the ranks of nonCommunist parties and organizations, were to last until 1938, when Stalin, acting through the Comintern, ordered the dissolution of the KKP. This extraordinary chapter in the annals of the Great Purge meant that almost all the Polish Communists who found themselves in the Soviet Union were either shot or sent to concentration camps. The same fate met not only the entire leadership of the KPP but even minor functionaries who fell into Soviet custody. The exact number of victims is unknown; estimates run from “several hundred” to “some five thousand.”50 Most probably, the truth lies somewhere in between. The proportion of Jews among the victims of this purge was very high.

24

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The official reason for the KPP’s dissolution was its alleged infiltration by police spies and provocateurs, on the one hand, and by “Trotskyites,” on the other. The real motivation remains unclear, even though the KPP was rehabilitated in February 1956. Probably Stalin never forgot nor forgave the support the KPP had given Trotsky. Moreover, the fact that the Soviet leader at the time was presumably already contemplating an alliance with Nazi Germany would also have spoken against the KPP—which, with its large Jewish membership, could not have been relied upon to support such a total about-face.

How “Jewish” and How “Communist” Were They? As has been seen, although interwar Polish Jewry was overwhelmingly non- or even anti-Communist, there were between 5,000 and 10,000 Communists of Polish Jewish descent. Although relatively few in number, they frequently aroused attention and ire for being the most radical rebels of all. Moreover, Jews were undeniably a significant and highly self-conscious group within the Communist movement. But were they really homogeneous in their attitudes toward issues of Jewish identity and concern? Furthermore, in what ways did they differ from, or were similar to, the non-Communist Jews—and the non-Jewish Communists? These are fascinating and complicated questions, and what follows can do no more than provide a few hints regarding this social-psychological complex. By and large, those Polish Jewish Communists of the interwar period who grew up “on the Jewish street” also worked and were politically active in the same social settings as their non-Communist fellow Jews. Yet they differed greatly from them, and frequently regarded those in Jewish political parties as their main opponents. The basis of these differences can be found in their widely varying attitudes toward the range of specific Jewish concerns, identity, and culture—or, to be more exact, in their different visions and strategies regarding Jewish emancipation. The Orthodox, as previously mentioned, were strongly conservative, defending traditional Judaism against secularization, modernization, and secular nationalism, and demanding religious autonomy alone. In this they differed from the three other main actors on the Jewish street, the young Zionists, Bundists, and Communists, all of whom refused to accept what they saw as the political passivity of the Jews. What divided Bundists, Zionists, and Communists were their competing concepts of emancipation. The core of the Zionist vision was its principled critique of the diaspora and the conviction that the cultural, moral, political, and even physical emancipation of the Jews could be attained only through return to Eretz Israel and the reestablishment of Jewish autonomy there. The Zionist solution would turn the Jews into a nation among the nations, normalizing their political situation, social structure, and moral stand. In contrast, the Bundist vision of emancipation condemned the Zionist idea as nationalist, bourgeois, reactionary and, in addition, unrealistic. Bundists were determined to put an end to social and national injustice by means of a socialist transformation of Poland (albeit without a proletarian dictatorship); an alliance between the Jewish and the Polish working class; and a program for Jewish cultural autonomy in which the secular Yiddish culture would flourish. Class and national


25

conflicts would gradually ease in the future socialist-run Poland, where the country’s various ethnic groups would live together in peace. But the Communists dreamed of something far grander: a historically inevitable, total, and fundamental social change. Implemented through the dictatorship of the proletariat and engulfing all of Europe, indeed all of the world, it was to eliminate the very foundation of class and national injustice. This Communist reconstruction, the final goal of history, would lead to the universal emancipation of humanity, Jews and non-Jews alike. Given such differences in ideological outlook, it is understandable that, irrespective of former personal friendships or even family ties, there was a fundamental hostility among politically active Jews belonging to the rival groups. The attitude of Jewish Communists to the Jewish political parties was intensely negative—probably much more so than that of the non-Jewish Communists, who opposed Zionism and Bundism simply on the basis of overall strategy and tactics. In contrast, for the Jewish Communists, the political rivalry frequently had a direct existential bearing on their own identity. As one of them put it: “For a Kowalski [a common Polish surname], it was a question of carrying out the policy of the party. For us, it was different; many of my own childhood friends were Zionists or Bundists, and it was a question of a struggle for the unity of the working class against nationalist diversion. One felt personally responsible.”51 For their part, the religious parties were, of course, regarded as the obscurantist champions of the existing order, a tool of the Jewish bourgeoisie, which sought to “keep Jews in the ignorance and superstition of the ghetto.” In addition, since Polish authorities regarded the religious parties as their allies, the Orthodox were held to be directly involved in maintaining the capitalist social order and the reactionary state. The Communist Jewish attitude toward these parties was one of total rejection and contempt. The Communists’ more serious competitors were the Bundists and the Zionists. In the Communist perception, the Bund was anti-Soviet, and its program of cultural autonomy was an attempt to separate the Jewish and Polish working masses. Even the radically Marxist Left Poale Zion was accused of being a “branch of Zionism in the ranks of the proletariat” and “the agent of the Jewish bourgeoisie and the present social system.” On the street level, as previously mentioned, this competition manifested itself in violent ideological debate and the disruption of meetings, in occasional physical violence, infiltration, and sabotage, and in frequent local attempts to take over nominally Bundist or sometimes Zionist-run unions, libraries, or other social-cultural institutions. Despite the continual competition with political forces that stressed particularistic needs and perspectives, those Communists who worked on the Jewish street were in no way foreign to the local scene. They had an intimate knowledge of Jewish concerns and problems; they spoke Yiddish; they worked, lived, and acted among other Jews; and they believed that the official Soviet policy concerning nationalities was truly the solution to the Jewish predicament. In addition, most had begun their political activity in Bundist or Zionist organizations. Their initiation into the Communist movement and their specific existential situation (engaged in underground activity, they lived in constant danger of arrest and imprisonment) made them

26

Jaff Schatz

different from non-Communist Jews. Yet in many cases, a Zionist or Bundist past had already deeply affected them—and not only ideologically. One Polish Jewish Communist recalled years later: If you did not know the comrades and if you had to assign different tasks to them, it was always helpful to inquire if they had been Bundists or Zionists before. . . . If I wanted flags or banners to be posted the next day, I took a former Shomer [member of the Hashomer Hazair]. For a tailors’ strike, I would take a former Bundist. The former Bundists were the most disciplined and efficient. . . . The former Zionists were the most fervent on ideological questions.52

Nonetheless, the Jewish Communists, unlike their Bundist or Zionist peers, did not strive for Jewish self-assertion, and this attitude deepened the more they became involved in the movement. In the process of becoming committed Communists, particular Jewish problems and concerns, which might have constituted part of their initial attraction to Communism, came to be perceived as insignificant or even harmful to the grand revolutionary design, and “working on the Jewish street” became just another party task. At the same time, Polish Jewish Communists were far from being monolithic in their attitudes regarding Jewish concerns, identity, and culture; the general party line on these matters was not interpreted in the same way by all. Generally speaking, varying attitudes often mirrored an individual’s previous social background. For instance, there were “Jewish Jews,” typically coming from working-class homes, who internalized and took at face value the party line, fully believing in the officially proclaimed Soviet policy of just treatment for all nationalities and their free cultural development. Others, often from assimilated and middle or uppermiddle class families, tended to complete the process of polonization within the movement; still others, whom one might call the “universalists,” believed passionately that the Communist line would eventually result in “a single humanity,” as one put it, because all the other differences except those rooted in class “are not important and will disappear.” In sum, Communism could mean the possibility of downplaying the importance of ethnic boundaries while still hoping for the peaceful symbiosis of ethnic cultures in a society without class or national oppression. Alternatively, Communism could provide a chance both to escape Jewish particularity and to sever bonds with an ascribed identity. Varying in intensity and intertwined with one another, all the different perceptions were similar in their being rooted in a sense of Jewish predicament and stigma. A belief in de-ethnification was, of course, particularly strong among those choosing to operate among non-Jews. Many of them came from assimilated homes and were already alienated from their Jewish background. On another level, the nature of their political activity and of the settings in which they operated led to further alienation from the Jewish world. But all of them—the “Jewish Jews,” the “non-Jewish Jews,” and the “universalists”—were alike in their being extremely committed Communist internationalists. Dreams of erasing or, at least, radically reducing national borderlines had been one of their initial motives for joining the Communist brotherhood, and these aspirations


27

were further reinforced in the process of conformation within the movement. As one of them put it: “A Pole could be a Pole and a Communist, but a Jew could only be a Communist.” It is true that this statement was subject to modification. For one thing, whereas “Jewish Jews” and Jewish “universalists” might feel doomed “only to be Communist,” many “non-Jewish Jews” could and did opt for a Polish ethnic identity as well. Second, the “Jewish Jews” had less of an urge to sever ties with their Jewish background than did “non-Jewish Jews.” Nonetheless, their internationalism led them, too, to a fairly radical form of de-ethnification. Ultimately, with regard to Jewish identity and self-assertion, the differences between these subgroups were really one of degree, not of kind. It is said about Leon Trotsky that he was once asked if he considered himself to be a Russian or a Jew. “No, you are wrong,” he is said to have answered. “I am a Social Democrat and only that.” Had the same question been put to the young Jewish Communists in Poland, their answer, in most cases, would probably have been similar, although some would have formulated it in sophisticated, literary Polish, while others would have responded in Yiddish.53 Although highly disciplined and utterly committed to their movement, Jewish Communists—even those who were very assimilated within Polish culture—differed in certain characteristic ways from their non-Jewish comrades. Let me illustrate this with two issues: the images of, and attitudes toward, friends and foes; and the intellectual and emotional traits that developed in the course of their becoming mature members of the Communist movement, a process that reached a peak during their prison sentences. Actively participating in an outlawed, underground movement under constant threat of infiltration, searches, painful investigations, and long prison sentences, all Communists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, were subjected to demands for secrecy and unconditional discipline. Under these circumstances, they developed party slang and code words, as well as characteristic images of heroes and foes.54 The heroes were those whose courage, ability, and behavior became legendary in the movement. For Jewish Communists, heroes included not only God-like figures on the international Communist scene such as Lenin and Georgy Dimitrov but also several “local heroes” of Polish Jewish origin. Among the latter were Samuel Engel, who shot a police informer and was consequently sentenced to death; Adolf Reichman and Samson Bornstein, who both died during the course of harsh police interrogations without having betrayed their comrades; a 14-year-old named Waynsztok and a 24-year-old named Fridman, who were killed during a demonstration held on Communist International Youth Day in Warsaw in 1928; and Shayah Charnam, who was fatally wounded by a plainclothes police officer in the course of organizing a workers’ meeting in front of the Biderman factory in Lodz in 1929. All of these figures were immortalized in Communist folklore and song. As the myths and songs were passed on, these heroes grew still larger in stature (although the exact details of their deeds, and even their names, were distorted). Thus, despite their fervent internationalist convictions, Polish Jewish Communists took special pride in such examples of Communist heroes of Jewish descent. Regarding foes, all Communists shared a deep hatred of political and ideological

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antagonists: police informers; former comrades who might become traitors or dissidents; hostile political movements; the government; the political police; the prison authorities; and the capitalist state itself. Yet here, too, Jewish Communists were different from others. First, to the degree that certain major forces within Polish society—for instance, the semifascist movements or the extremist part of the Catholic clergy—were linked with antisemitism, Jewish Communists had an additional and very personal reason to hate them. Second, although the Zionist movement and the Bund were perceived as “hostile forces” by all Polish Communists, the enmity toward them of non-Jewish Communists was, as already noted, quite impersonal, whereas Jewish Communists, especially those operating on the Jewish street, had both theoretical and concrete grounds for their antagonism. Thus, applying to the situation a Jewish joke that holds that Jews are like everybody else, only more so, one might say, with merely a little exaggeration, that while all Polish Communists had many objects of hatred, the Jews among them had more—and hated them more intensely. During the course of prison sentences, a number of intellectual and emotional differences between Jewish and non-Jewish comrades were manifested. Imprisonment was very much a part of the Communist experience; at any time during the interwar period, a Polish Communist was one who had served, was serving, or was extremely likely to serve a long prison sentence. Seen in a broader perspective, these prison terms were the crowning point of the Communists’ revolutionary careers and the highpoint of their revolutionary schooling. The years spent in prison strengthened their self-respect, confirmed their revolutionary significance, and were of crucial importance in the process of their individual and collective coming into being.55 The prison experience was also a bond linking all those who had shared it, Jews and non-Jews alike. Yet here, too, several traits obviously connected to their cultural background were particularly—though by no means exclusively—characteristic of the Jewish comrades. Most important was the emphasis that the Jews tended to place on the educational function of prison. Indeed, as they themselves often said, the prisons were Communist universities, an intense period of study both in general subjects and in esoteric Marxist doctrine. With few exceptions, such studies were quite advanced, especially when compared to the prisoners’ often low or incomplete level of formal education. They studied foreign languages (Russian and French seem to have been most popular), mathematics, and literature, with the borderline between general subjects and ideology often being quite vague. In particular, social history and the study of contemporary society—the main areas of interest—were understood in highly ideological and political terms. Studies were perceived as being not merely abstract learning for pleasure, but as “useful for the revolution.” In any given prison, the Communist “commune” and individual prisoners owned a library. There were legally owned books alongside contraband that was smuggled in. Anyone who read a book of general interest was expected either to pass it on or to recapitulate its contents to fellow inmates. Individual and group studies were supplemented by occasional lectures given by the outstanding intellectuals and scholars among the prisoners. In prisons with large cells and a lenient regime, such


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lectures could be delivered directly in the cells to a considerable number of prisoners. Otherwise, they were given during walks, and listeners later summarized their contents to small groups of fellow inmates or cellmates. In prisons where the inmates were especially well organized, the educational curriculum included several specified areas—for instance, the theory of evolution, Marxism-Leninism, history, mathematics, and Polish literature. However, schooling in party doctrine and practice held a central position. The advanced study of the Communist classics, of the French and Russian revolutions, of the developmental trends in the non-Communist world, and of the strategy and tactics of the Soviet Union and the Comintern formed the cornerstone of the curriculum. Party news and political evaluations of current events were prepared by the party authorities and smuggled in from outside. In some prisons, there existed a “troika” system whereby one intellectual was allotted two workers or peasants. These were instructed in party doctrine, with current events explained to them in the “proper light.” As one Jewish Communist noted, the overall goal of the troika was to learn “what it really was all about” and “how to see it in a broader perspective.” Thus, even for those prisoners who entered prison barely educated, the general studies and the doctrinal schooling formed a process of intellectual coming into being—a process often modified and reinforced by their cultural heritage. The basic method was self-study, augmented by tutoring given by more advanced scholars. The inmates read texts and discussed them, and if they could not agree on the meaning of a specific text, or when issues proved too complicated, they asked for the help of an expert whose authoritative opinion was generally accepted. If two experts had different interpretations, one was chosen but both were respected. Moreover, the classic texts were regarded with utmost veneration as the highest authority. These provided answers to all questions that could possibly be asked. The practical difficulty was to find the most suitable fragment of the texts and interpret it correctly, so that the hidden answer would appear. Both analytical and interpretative abilities were deemed important and were reinforced in this process of learning. To these was added a third: that of memorizing long texts. Prisoners who enjoyed the highest respect generally knew large portions of the classic texts almost by heart. More “advanced” scholars were also those who could quote statistical data to support their analyses and generalizations, such as the figures concerning the production of bread, sugar, or steel both before and after the October Revolution. Although such study was termed “revolutionary science,” it strongly resembled pilpul, the classic Jewish method of study and didactics. Indeed, years later, Jewish Communists often compared their former mentors to the intellectual-moral authorities of their parents’ world. In the words of one of them, “we behaved like yeshiva bokhers and they like rabbis.”56 Interlaced with this orientation toward study and learning, and establishing yet another bridge from the present to the future, were the hopes shared by many of the prisoners, but again (it would seem) particularly by the Jews. Such expectations took their form from a peculiar mixture of Communist ideology, revolutionary romanticism, and facts drawn from developments in the Soviet Union—which were

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then refracted through their own cultural lenses. They found expression, inter alia, in the rich repertoire of Communist songs as well as in serious discussion and conversation. One Jewish Communist later recalled: Sometimes we talked about the details of Communist society, how it was going to be, all in light of what had been written, but more relaxed. . . . We dreamed about the future, equality, and brotherhood. . . . When one thought like that, the difficulties of one’s present situation were easier to bear. . . . It helped one not to feel lonely and helpless, one was part of historical forces, of a new world that was bound to come, a world without class or national oppression, without contempt, in which all men were brothers. . . .

Another summed up: “When we were depressed, we comforted ourselves with developments in the Soviet Union and dreamed that the whole working class and all oppressed nations were behind us, that the revolution would break out any time and liberate us. . . . We waited for the revolution as for the messiah.” This merging of ethnicity, ideology, and politics was later symbolically described by one of them: “I believed in Stalin and in the party as my father believed in the messiah.”57 Although the content of such utopian visions was not necessarily different from those of other revolutionaries, there was a definite Jewish tinge to them. The longing for a “world . . . without contempt” seems a clear reference to a society without antisemitism; and references to the messiah reflect characteristically Jewish messianic longings. All in all, these dreams pointed to a political subculture within the broader movement. Certainly there were both Jewish Communists who deviated from this pattern and non-Jews who matched it. Overall, however, Jews were rather distinct in the drive to attain knowledge, in the means by which they learned, and in their specific longings for the future. Despite their conscious effort to become like all other Communists, they remained somewhat different. Finally, as touched upon earlier, there was another process that distinguished Jewish Communists from their non-Jewish comrades: the further estrangement from the world of their parents and their non-Communist Jewish peers. Prison terms were not only their universities, but were also high schools of further Communist de-ethnification and polonization. Together with Jews, the Poles and Ukrainians formed the majority of the Communist prisoners, alongside some Belarusians and ethnic Germans. Polish was the lingua franca of this multiethnic community, and linguistic acculturation reinforced the drift toward a polonized sense of identity. Thus, some Jewish Communists who came from impoverished Orthodox homes, who spoke primarily Yiddish, and who had only a poor command of Polish, learned to speak, read, and write reasonably fluent Polish while they were in prison. Others refined their preexisting mastery of Polish and deepened their knowledge of Polish literature. (Some Jews who spent their prison terms in the eastern territories acquired a knowledge of the Ukrainian language and way of life. However, their acculturation to this minority culture usually stopped at a basic level, forming an intermediary step in the process leading from their Jewish background toward polonization.) Moreover, while there were no illiterates among the Jews, this was not the case with some of their Polish comrades from peasant back-


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grounds, and such instances among the Ukrainians were quite frequent. As a rule, both illiterates and those who did not have a command of Polish were taught the language during their prison terms—often by Jews, who displayed a particular eagerness in acting as acculturating agents. Life in a multiethnic Communist prison collective was in itself a practical training in de-ethnification. Given the common denominator of joint struggle, shared ideological commitment, and identical social status as prisoners, ethnic differences seemed not only unimportant but even detrimental. In the daily life of the prison, unity overshadowed particularity and difference. This intense feeling of joint participation, coupled with an absolute lack of antisemitism, was a very positive experience. In such an atmosphere of brotherhood, holding on to the separate ethnic divisions of Polish society seemed ever more inappropriate. For Jewish prisoners, the old world of habit and tradition seemed hopelessly outdated, and the national affirmation of their Zionist or Bundist peers now appeared to be more reactionary and dangerous than ever. Over time, Jewish assertive identity became increasingly subordinated to Communist self-identification. The paradox was that the radical de-ethnification of Jewish Communists was itself a distinguishing Jewish characteristic. Poles or Ukrainians did not strive for a similarly radical break with their background. Although they too regarded their ethnicity as subordinate to their Communist convictions, they did not view their Polish or Ukrainian and their Marxist identities as being in conflict, and they thus handled their ethnicity with much greater ease. This difference between Jews and non-Jews had been apparent even before the prison experience, but became more marked within the prison walls. In consequence, Jewish Communists, at least in their own self-perception, were more internationalist than their Polish or Ukrainian counterparts.

Looking Back Few members of the interwar generation of Polish Jewish Communists now remain alive, and for most of them, it has been many years since their ideological dreams were shattered. In 1968, the world witnessed their final existential defeat when most of the remaining Communist Jews were singled out, slandered, ostracized, degraded, threatened, and forced to leave Poland. As so often before, the Jews proved to be a kind of litmus paper for what was eventually to come: in this case, the final degeneration and subsequent implosion of Communism on the European continent. There are many lessons to be learned from the history of this generation. Among them, on the moral level—at least for this author—is the importance of dreaming great dreams and never accepting humiliation, while at the same time not being blinded by promises of total redemption and not abandoning the practice of common human decency. On the level of social science, one of the lessons is to be extremely wary of the pitfalls of reductionism and simplification (“the yes-or-no crude model treated as reality itself,” as Theodor Shanin puts it).58 I try to apply both lessons in the following summary.

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An assertion is often made that Jews were attracted in clearly disproportionate numbers to Communism. Based on this premise, the notion of z˙ydokomuna then makes the claim that the Communist movement was primarily led and largely manned by Jews—and was essentially a form of Jewish conspiracy. The aim is to demonize both Communism and the Jews. In approaching this highly fraught issue, one must therefore be conscious of the intellectual and moral hazards involved in lumping together individuals (in this case, Jews) into categories (Jewish Communists) that are then deemed “proportional” or “disproportional” with regard to these individuals’ group of origin or their group of political affiliation. Once this caveat is kept in mind, it certainly can be maintained that, during the interwar period, there were “disproportionately” many Jews among Polish Communists. At this point, however, it is important to ask why people of Jewish origin participated in radical movements, including the Communist movement—and here the answers are in no way surprising. Numerous historical examples may be brought to show that, given a certain level of literacy, education, and exposure to the injustices of society, members of discriminated minorities are more likely than others to join radical movements for change, whether these be on the Left or on the Right. In the case of interwar Polish Jews, the discrimination against them was undeniable, despite the fact that they were the only ethnic minority that did not pose any threat to the territorial integrity of the Polish state. The politicalization of the younger generation—encouraged by the relatively democratic foundations of the Polish state and by the competing visions of social, political, and national emancipation—must be seen against this background. Second, the overwhelming majority of young radical Jews joined political movements expressing particular Jewish concerns, whereas relatively few joined the movement—Communism—that promised universal redemption for all. Yet here, too, it must be reiterated that the Communist movement opposed class oppression and antisemitism more vigorously than any other Polish political party, thus appealing both to the traditional Jewish yearning for justice and to the hope for an end to antisemitism. Third, the Polish Communist movement itself was distinguished by a particular social structure (relatively less dependent on the industrial proletariat than other Communist parties, with a greater mix of ethnic minorities) that allowed for greater participation of Jews. The fact that the movement was better organized in the cities (where Jews were concentrated), and that Jews were relatively more educated than the general population, also accounts in part for their qualitative weight within the movement. Those who postulate a mysterious connection between Jews and Communism should recall that most Jews who were initially drawn to the movement acted in defiance of their own religious and cultural background. Although Communism, as noted, did appeal to a certain Jewish sense of justice and redemption, the involvement of individuals in this radical movement was in most cases an act of rebellion either against the traditional world of their parents or against the concern with particularistic Jewish issues as expressed by movements such as Zionism or Bundism, or against both.


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Whereas the Communist involvement of a certain portion of Polish Jewry is beyond dispute, this fact in no way justifies the establishment of a causal connection between ethnicity (in this case, Jewish) and ideology (in this case, Communism). The fallacy of such an approach is even more evident when actual numbers are taken into account. Even if we accept boastful (hence doubtful) claims made by Jewish Communists after the war regarding the most successful of their prewar parliamentary campaigns (that of 1928), it means, as already noted, that only about 5 percent of Polish Jewry, at the most, ever supported the Communist program. The total picture that emerges is thus as follows: an important role was played by Communists of Jewish origin in the prewar Polish Communist movement; most of these Jewish Communists became Communists despite or in defiance of their cultural heritage; and most of the Jewish community at large was far from sympathetic to the Communist vision and program. Since the beginning of the 1990s, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay, several voices in the former Eastern bloc countries have “explained” antisemitism by invoking the participation of Jews in the Communist regimes, stressing the involvement of functionaries of Jewish descent in Communist crimes, postulating some kind of collective Jewish responsibility for those crimes, and demanding some form of collective apology from the Jewish people as a whole. In fact, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that to explain antisemitism as the consequence of Jews’ involvement in Communism is putting the cart before the horse, turning one of the most important causes for this participation into one of its effects. And, contemplating the fact that the Communist functionaries of Jewish descent made no distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish opponents of the regime, whether real or imagined, would it not be regarded as the utmost in absurdity if the Russians demanded a collective apology from the Georgians for Stalin’s or Beria’s crimes, or from the Poles for Dzierzynski’s?

Notes 1. See, for example, David Lieberman, “Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study of Kevin MacDonald’s Research Techniques,” http://www2.h-net.msu .edu/⬃antis/papers/dl/macdonald_schatz_01.html (H-Antisemitism: Occasional Papers, posted, 29 Jan. 2001). 2. Jerzy Tomaszewski, “Robotnicy z˙ydowscy w Polsce w latach 1921–1939,” Biuletyn Z˙ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce 85 (1964), 21–39. 3. Jerzy Z˙arnowski, Społeczenstwo II Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw: 1973), 391. 4. Szyja Bronsztejn, Ludnosć´ z˙ydowska w Polsce w okresie mie¸dzywojennym (Wrocław: 1963); Celia Heller, On the Edge of Destruction (New York: 1977), 72, 98–106; Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: 1983), 11–32. 5. Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, with a Historical Survey of the Jew as Fighter and Soldier in the Diaspora (London: 1974), 181. 6. J. Auerbach, “Niekto´re zagadnienia działalnosći KPP w s´rodowisku z˙ydowskim w latach kryzysu (1929–1933),” Biuletyn Z˙ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce 55 (1965), 35. 7. In 1931, in large and medium-large industries, the pay was 94 grosze an hour, whereas in the garment industry it was 65 grosze; in the food industry, 84 grosze; and in the timber

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industry, 52 grosze. See Jerzy Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodo´w (Warsaw: 1985), 155. 8. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, 181. 9. Auerbach, “Niekto´re zagadnienia działalnosći KPP,” 34–35; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 166. 10. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, 181; Joseph Rothschild, “Ethnic Peripheries versus Ethnic Cores: Jewish Political Strategies in Interwar Poland,” Political Science Quarterly 96, no. 4 (1981–1982), 591–606; Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, 42; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 106, 262. 11. Bernard D. Weinryb, “Poland,” in Peter Meyer et al., The Jews in Soviet Satellites (Ithaca: 1953), 208; Henry Rabinowicz, The Legacy of Polish Jewry 1919–1939: A History of Polish Jews in the Interwar Years 1919–1939 (London: 1965), 47. 12. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, 172; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 118. 13. For a description of these organizations and their ideologies, see Szymon Rudnicki, Obo´z narodowo-radykalny: geneza i działalno´sć (Warsaw: 1985); J.J. Lipski, “ONR ‘Falanga’ a kultura,” Krytyka 5 (1980), 135–154; Jan Majchrowski, “Problem z˙ydowski w programach głownych polskich obozo´w politycznych (1918–1939),” Znak 339–340 (1983), 383–394; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland (New York: 1982) 494– 495; and Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 83–86. 14. Edward D. Wynot, “A Necessary Cruelty: The Emergence of Official Antisemitism in Poland, 1936–39,” American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (Oct. 1971), 1035–1058; Joseph Marcus, The Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (Berlin: 1983), 349–376. 15. Toward the end of the 1930s, Poland attempted to solve its “Jewish problem” through international arrangements for the emigration of Polish Jews. Colonel Boguslaw Miedzinski, one of the closest associates of Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly and the deputy speaker of the lower chamber of the Polish parliament, said in a speech in 1936 that “Poland has room for no more than 50,000 Jews,” such that “three million Jews must emigrate.” As late as 1938, the foreign minister, Jo´zef Beck, contemplated plans to resettle the main bulk of Polish Jewry in Madagascar. In November 1938, the Polish ambassador to the United States proposed Angola as a place where Polish Jews could be settled. For more details regarding these plans, see Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, 172–176; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 136–138; Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 392–399; and Pawel Korzec, “Antisemitism in Poland as an Intellectual, Social, and Political Movement,” in Studies on Polish Jewry 1919–1939: The Interplay of Social, Economic, and Political Factors in the Struggle of a Minority for Its Existence, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (New York: 1974), 91–98. For an authoritative analysis of the Polish government’s policy toward Jews, see Wynot, “A Necessary Cruelty.” Between 1921 and 1937, a total of 395,223 Jews emigrated from Poland, “their proportion in the total emigration from Poland being more than twice as large (21.7%) as their proportion (ca. 10%) in the total population” (Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 281). Excluding the years 1924–1926, when some 32,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate to Palestine, this destination was not a major option, both because of the British Mandatory immigration policy and because of the economic crisis that struck Palestine in 1926. 16. For authoritative analyses of the major Jewish political parties in interwar Poland, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven: 1981); idem, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (on the Zionist parties); Bernard K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Worker’s Bund of Poland (Ithaca: 1967) (on the Bund); Gershon Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916–1939 (Jerusalem: 1996) (on Agudat Israel). For shorter descriptions, see Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 261–291; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 168–181, 249–293; Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodo´w, 167–


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196. On Jewish politics, see Mendelsohn, “The Dilemma of Jewish Politics in Poland: Four Responses,” in Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Bela Vago and George L. Mosse (Jerusalem: 1974); Leonard Rowe, “Politics under Stress: The Jewish Response in Poland,” Bennington Review 4 (Spring 1968); Rothschild, “Ethnic Peripheries versus Ethnic Cores.” 17. Mendelsohn, “The Dilemma of Jewish Politics in Poland,” 204. 18. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 66–68, 216–219; Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, 67–68. 19. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, 187, who claims that Orthodox Jews constituted about 20 percent of Polish Jewry. The approximately one-third figure is cited both by Rabinowicz, The Legacy of Polish Jewry 1919–1939, 108–117; and Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 144. 20. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 188–189. Heller states, however, that some researchers estimate the number of assimilated Jews to have been between 150,000 and 200,000, or about 4 to 6 percent of the total Polish Jewish population. 21. On assimilationists and assimilation, see ibid., 183–210. Also see idem, “Poles of Jewish Background: The Case of Assimilation without Integration in Interwar Poland,” in Fishman (ed.), Studies on Polish Jewry, 1919–1939, 244–250; Alina Cała, “The Question of the Assimilation of Jews in the Polish Kingdom (1864–1897): An Interpretative Essay,” Polin 1 (1986), 130–150; J. Lichten, “Notes on the Assimilation and the Acculturation of Jews in Poland,” in The Jews in Poland, ed. Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky (Oxford: 1986), 106–129; Aleksander Hertz, Z˙ydzi w kulturze polskiej (Paris: 1961), 133–167. 22. On the Jewish press in interwar Poland, see Marian Fuks, “Z dziejo´w prasy z˙ydowskiej w Polsce w latach 1918–1939,” Biuletyn Z˙ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce 75 (1970), 55–74; idem, “Czasopisma z˙ydowskie w Warszawie (1918–1939),” ibid. 97 (1976), 31–60; idem, “Prasa,” in idem, Zygmunt Hoffman, Maurycy Horn, and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Z˙ydzi Polscy: dzieje i kultura (Warsaw: 1982), 76–84. 23. By the middle of the 1930s, Jews accounted for 18 percent of Poland’s high school students. See Zygmunt Hoffman, “Szkolnictwo,” in Fuks et al. (eds.), Z˙ydzi Polscy, 90. On Jewish schools in Poland, see Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 145–162; and Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the Two World Wars, 64–68. 24. F. Swietlikowska, “Liczebnosć´ okre¸gowych organizacji KPP w latach 1919–1937,” Z pola walki 2 (1970), 187–201. 25. Henryk Cimek and Lucjan Kieszczynski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 1918–1938 (Warsaw: 1984), 439. 26. Ibid., 437; Zbigniew Kowalski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 1935–1938 (Warsaw: 1975), 79–82. 27. See, for instance, Jan B. de Weydenthal, The Communists of Poland: An Historical Outline (Stanford: 1978), 26. 28. Davies, God’s Playground, 406. 29. Cimek and Kieszczynski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 438; Kowalski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 68, 81. 30. Ibid., Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 438–439. 31. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 255. 32. Edmund Silberner, Kommunisten zur Judenfrage: zur Geschichte von Theorie und Praxis des Kommunismus (Opladen: 1983), 221–223. 33. Auerbach, “Niekto´re zagadnienia działalnosći KPP,” 42–43; Antoni Czubinski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski (1918–1938) (Warsaw: 1985), 215; A. Strapinski, Wywrotowe partje polityczne (Warsaw: 1933), 89; Swietlikowska, “Liczebnosć´ okre¸gowych organizacji KPP w latach 1919–1937,” 185; “Communism,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: 1971), 5:803; Weydenthal, The Communists of Poland, 26. 34. Z. Szczygielski, “Warszawska organizacja Komunistycznej Partii Polskiej,” in Warszawa II-ej Rzeczypospolitej, ed. M. Drozdowski (Warsaw: 1968), 1:191.

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35. T. Jedruszczak, Piłsudczycy bez Piłsudskiego, panstwowe wydawnictwo naukowe (Warsaw: 1963), 32. 36. Compiled from data in Cimek and Kieszczynski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 436– 439; Czubinski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski (1918–1938), 215–216, 229–268; Jedruszczak, Piłsudczycy bez Piłsudskiego, 32; A. Kochanski, T. Rawski, and Z. Szczygielska, 100 lat polskiego ruchu robotniczego: kronika wydarzen´ (Warsaw: 1978), 154; Strapinski, Wywrotowe partje polityczne, 38–40. 37. Cimek and Kieszczynski, Komunistyczna Partia Polski, 439. 38. Ibid., 439; Z pola walki 4 (Warsaw: 1958), 96–100. 39. This attitude was first expressed in a resolution against antisemitism that was adopted at the first party congress (see KPP: uchwaly i rezolucje [Warsaw: 1953–1956], 1:54) and was followed by other resolutions and appeals throughout the interwar period (for complete texts of all the resolutions, see ibid.). For a review of articles against antisemitism in the Communist press, and Communist resolutions on this issue in the late 1930s, see Tatiana Berenstein, “KPP w walce z pogromami antyz˙ydowskimi w latach 1935–1937,” Biuletyn Z˙ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce 13–14 (1955), 29–37. The widespread nature of Polish antisemitism meant that even the ranks of the Communist movement was not entirely free of the phenomenon. Party leaders frequently warned about the existence of antisemitism in the party ranks; see, for instance, Silberner, Kommunisten zur Judenfrage, 233. 40. Davies, God’s Playground, 406; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 72. 41. Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 291. 42. Quoted in Berenstein, “KPP w walce z pogromami antyz˙ydowskimi,” 32. There were three waves of pogroms in interwar Poland. The first, which took place in the years 1918– 1920, was connected with the reestablishment of the Polish state and with the Polish-Soviet war. The second, occurring against the backdrop of economic crisis, took place in 1929– 1931; whereas the third wave (1935–1937) followed Piłsudski’s death. For descriptions of the pogroms, see, for example, ibid., 4–29; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 50–53, 117– 118; Rabinowicz, The Legacy of Polish Jewry 1919–1939, 47, 57; Weinryb, “Poland,” 208. 43. Quoted in Berenstein, “KPP w walce z prgromami antyz˙ydowskimi,” 34–36. 44. According to Silberner, Kommunisten zur Judenfrage, 237, there was also a fear on the part of the KPP that it might be perceived as a “Jewish” or “pro-Jewish” party. Consequently, the brunt of the task of fighting antisemitism was left to the Jewish Communists, which is why the fight was unsuccessful. This opinion, however, was not shared by most of the Jewish Communists whom I interviewed. 45. On the Soviet attitude vis-a`-vis the “Jewish question,” see Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Section of the CPSU, 1917–30 (Princeton: 1972); J. Miller, “Soviet Theory on Jews,” in The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, ed. Lionel Kochan (Oxford: 1978), 46–63; “Communism,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 5:794–801. 46. Jerzy Holzer, “Relations between Polish and Jewish Left-wing Groups in Interwar Poland,” in Abramsky et al. (eds.), The Jews in Poland, 142, 143. 47. This rejection of religion was not exclusively Communist. The Bundists and a significant part of the Zionist movement were also against “Jewish clericalism.” The difference was that the Bund sought to transform traditional Jewish organizations into the basis of Jewish cultural autonomy, while the Zionists sought to turn them into organs of a broader form of (diaspora) national autonomy. 48. Stated in a report for the period 1 Sept. 1930–31 Dec. 1932 put out by the Polish Ministry of the Interior, political department (quoted in Auerbach, “Niekto´re zagadnienia działalnosći KPP,” 37). 49. Ibid., 37–38. 50. M.K. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland: An Outline of History (Cambridge, Mass.: 1959), 150; cf. Davies, God’s Playground, 545. 51. Quoted in Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley: 1991), 125.


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52. Ibid., 126 53. Ibid., 127. The Trotsky quote appears in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (London: 1967), 441. 54. Schatz, The Generation, 110–112. 55. Ibid., 128–145. 56. Ibid., 138. 57. Ibid., 139–140. 58. Theodor Shanin, Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth (London: 1986), 314.

Jews and Communism: The Hungarian Case Istvań Dea´k columbia university

Jews, or rather, persons of Jewish origin but not of the Jewish religious persuasion, occupied decisive positions in the Hungarian Communist party and, in general, the Hungarian socialist movement. Moreover, because the Communist party was in power in Hungary for 133 days in 1919 and again, roughly, from 1947 to 1989, it is no exaggeration to say that political personalities of Jewish origin played a decisive role in 20th-century Hungary. To take matters a step further, one can state with confidence that Jews held a near monopoly on political power in Hungary during the 133 days of the Soviet Republic in 1919 and again from, roughly, 1947 to 1953, and then again from 1955 to the fall of 1956. Because nowhere else in Europe did persons of Jewish origin ever share in such large numbers in similar long-term dictatorial powers, it is clear that Hungary’s was a unique situation. This does not mean, however, that the Jewish Communists exercised their authority in the name of Jewry or on behalf of other Jews. On the contrary, the Jewish Communists tended to keep silent about their Jewish origin, often even before their friends and family. Furthermore, they were as ruthless with their real or imagined Jewish political enemies as with those who were not Jewish. They also claimed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that being Jewish was of no import in a socialist society. The truth is that it was of very great consequence from the point of view of Hungarian, Jewish, and Communist history that Be´la Kun and the dozens of other people’s commissars who dominated the Hungarian republic of soviets in 1919 were of Jewish origin. Or as an American historian has put it: “The Jews were highly visible in the revolutions of Russia and Germany; in Hungary they seemed omnipresent.”1 Experiences with the Kun regime caused a good part of the Hungarian public to turn against the Jews; more than that, antisemites the world over invoked Kun’s name when attacking Jewry as a whole. The Communist experiment of 1919 became one of the major excuses for many Hungarians to welcome the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in 1944. All this, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Hungary’s Jews wanted to have nothing to do with Kun and his ilk. 38

Jews and Communism: The Hungarian Case

39

Similarly, those who belonged to the famous “Quadriga” that ruled Hungary in the late 1940s and early 1950s—Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi, Erno˝ Gero˝, Miha´ly Farkas, and Jo´zsef Re´vai—were of Jewish origin. And even though the reaction of the public to a Jewish-led totalitarian regime in post-Second World War Hungary proved milder than was feared, it is still a major reason for the disturbing manifestations of antisemitism in present-day Hungary. Jews in the highest party leadership were but the most conspicuous among persons of Jewish origin in elite positions.2 Because, as will be seen, ordinary Jews seemed politically more reliable than ordinary non-Jews, the tendency of the Communist leadership was to take Jews into their employ, both in 1919 and following the Second World War. As a result, for a few years after the Second World War, the Hungarian Communist party, the trade unions, the political police, the state bureaucracy, industry, foreign trade, the media, the country’s main cultural and academic institutions, and the diplomatic service included functionaries of Jewish origin vastly in excess of their proportion in the general population. This, too, put Hungary ahead of such countries as Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union—where the Communist party was likewise in power and where there were also a substantial number of educated Jews—but where the proportion of Jews in important positions did not come close to that in Hungary. Interestingly, despite the uniqueness of the Communist system, the pattern of Communist party policy toward the Jews after the Second World War showed many characteristics reminiscent of the traditional Hungarian governmental policy. In the 19th century, when agriculture, industry, and cultural life had to be developed from near-medieval conditions, and when there was no Magyar bourgeoisie worthy of its name, Jews (along with Germans and other immigrants from Western Europe) were encouraged to undertake the task of modernization. In exchange, the ruling nobility offered the Jews complete legal emancipation, which enabled many of them to accumulate great wealth as well as achieving dazzling careers in nearly every profession. Following the First World War, however, middle-class ethnic Hungarian refugees from the new neighboring states inundated the truncated, impoverished country while a newly trained non-Jewish middle class clamored for jobs and positions.3 Moreover, in the new, smaller Hungary the Jews were no longer needed to tip the ethnic balance in favor of the Magyars. For all these reasons, as well as because of the experience with a Bolshevik regime in 1919, Jews were subjected to various degrees of state-directed persecution. This development culminated in the events of 1944 when the government handed over two thirds of the country’s Jews to Nazi Germany for extermination, and when the state and the public alike plundered the property of the Jews.4 The highway robbery, euphemistically called “measures adopted in defense of the Christian population,” which occurred between 1938 and 1944, came to an end with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Soon thereafter, the new Communist-dominated regime introduced ominously similar measures against Hungary’s traditional governing elite and its native German population. As a result, the former Hungarian aristocracy, gentry, and administrative class were reduced to dire poverty, while Hungary’s German minority was largely expelled from the country. It quickly became clear, however, that it was easier to eliminate all these educated people than

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to replace them; and it was therefore only natural that Hungary’s new rulers turned to the 200,000 relatively well-educated Jewish survivors to fill the gap. This move was made easier by the fact that of all of Hungary’s inhabitants, only the Jews were genuinely grateful to the Soviet Union, the patron of the Hungarian Communist regime, which had saved their lives. As a consequence, Jews came to be employed not only in their traditional occupations of commerce, industry, and the professions, but also as replacements for the old-regime personnel in the administration and political elite. This extraordinary period lasted perhaps a decade or two: by the 1960s, a non-Jewish educated stratum, this time often of worker and peasant origin, became readily available for the important jobs and positions. This demographic shift, in turn, made the Jews less indispensable. In any case, their numbers had been steadily declining, due to continuous emigration and a declining birthrate.5 All of this means that the spectacular successes of persons of Jewish origin within two Communist systems were merely dramatic phases in the long-term rise and fall of Hungarian Jewry, which moved from constituting 0.5 percent of the total population in mid-18th century to 6 percent after the First World War, to a little more than 2 percent following the Holocaust, and to a fraction of one percent today. While in the first half of the 19th century there was only a handful of Jewish lawyers, journalists, skilled artisans, urban shopkeepers, high school teachers, merchants, industrialists, and bankers, by the early 20th century their proportion within these occupations rose to between 30 and 80 percent.6 Furthermore, while the number of individuals of Jewish origin in the police, the army officer corps, the government, the administrative machinery, and the diplomatic service did not exceed their proportion in the general population before the First World War, and had dwindled to nil by mid-1944, Jews also came to be vastly overrepresented following the Second World War in these occupations, too.7 Today, however, the Jewish presence in the professions, in the media, and in the administration is significant only in the eyes of the antisemites, meaning that the Jewish successes were but a temporary and necessary interlude in modern Hungarian history. Ironically, rather than impeding success, the Holocaust facilitated the takeover by persons of Jewish origin of command positions in the state, the economy, and cultural sphere. The reason for this is that Jewish survivors were to be found disproportionately among the assimilated and educated Jews concentrated in the Hungarian capital. The great deportations of May-June 1944 had affected primarily the women, children, and old people of the countryside; men between 18 and 48 had a far better chance of survival in the labor battalions set up by the Hungarian army. Nor were the Jews of Budapest deported, although they did suffer grave losses in the fall and winter of 1944 under the fascistic Arrow Cross regime. It was as if the German and Hungarian Nazis had conspired to cleanse the Hungarian Jews of their poorer strata, leaving the country mainly with its best-educated, strongest, and most resourceful Jews, who were then available for employment by the postwar regime. Witness the West German businessman of a Nazi background who stated to me, early in the 1960s, that, in contrast with some other socialist countries, it was possible to do business in Hungary because of the large number of Jews in foreign trade positions. Today, however, Hungary is a monoethnic country, as are


41

nearly all other countries in East Central and Central Europe; Jews, as a group, have become as insignificant as the Germans and all other minorities. In premodern times, Jews in Hungary were relatively few in number and represented no political or religious dilemma for the ruling elite, in part because of the multiplicity of religious denominations in the country. Unlike Poland, where Catholicism defined the nation, Hungary had Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran nobles vying for influence under the overlapping suzerainties of the Muslim Ottomans and the Catholic Habsburgs. Even after the expulsion of the Turks at the end of the 17th century, religious differences remained, although these were gradually overshadowed by the rise of modern nationalism. The divisions were now less often along religious and more often along class and national lines, with these two forms of identity continually intertwined. Thus it happened that during the revolutions of 1848–1849, people in certain parts of Hungary were killing each other not because one was a pro-Habsburg Catholic and the other a pro-independence Calvinist, but because one was a Hungarian noble landowner and the other, let us say, a Romanian serf. In the melee among Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, revolutionary nobles, patriotic Hungarian farmers, and pro-Habsburg Slavic and Romanian peasants, Jews stood out as having no patrons in neighboring lands and as being most keen on profiting from the Hungarian leadership’s liberal innovations.8 In the eyes of enlightened, younger Jews, to embrace Hungarian patriotism seemed to be a small price to pay for group emancipation and individual freedom. There had long been a close association, in any case, between the Hungarian noble landowners and their Jewish tradesmen and stewards. Gradually, an unwritten agreement came into being between the political elite in Hungary and the assimilationist segment of Jewry, according to which one group would govern and the other would more or less manage the economy. This agreement worked to perfection, with Hungarian economic production increasing to what seemed to be astronomical heights, and with assimilated and patriotic Jews tipping the ethnic balance in favor of the Magyar group by the end of the 19th century. But then new elements in political life began to threaten the symbiosis of liberal Hungarians and equally liberal Jews. Emancipation, triumphantly concluded in 1895 with a law making Judaism equal in status to the Christian churches, was just one more step in the gradual demotion of the Catholic church, which had previously controlled education, all religious denominations, marriages, and public morality. Now many Catholic clergymen, especially the Jesuits, turned their fury on the Jews, whom they blamed for the crimes of liberalism, Free Masonry, atheism, sexual immorality, anticlericalism, and irreligious licentiousness. The church’s growing antisemitism was accompanied by a popular revulsion against capitalism and much too rapid urban development, which seemed to leave the country people behind. Nevertheless, both Emperor-King Franz Joseph and successive Hungarian governments remained steadfast in their support of religious tolerance. Early clerical enemies of alleged Jewish immorality, capitalism, and Marxist socialism included such famous preachers as Bishop Ottoka´r Proha´szka and the Jesuit Be´la Bangha. Their arguments did not differ much from those of the anti-

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Dreyfusards in France or the followers of Karl Lueger in Vienna, except that they targeted with particular vehemence those Jewish intellectuals on the Left who dared question what these clerics and their rightist friends saw as eternal Hungarian values. Never mind that Proha´szka himself was of Slovak origin. He wrote: I do not want to lock the Jews into a ghetto, but I don’t want either for the spirit of the ghettoes to infest the flowers of our spiritual life. . . . Our vocation is not antisemitism but Hungarism, by which I understand the need to awaken the Christian nation . . . to point to the [Jewish] conquest of the country that is now taking place.9

Proha´szka and Bangha were, incidentally, no enemies of progress and social reform; they belonged to that rather large group of Hungarian intellectuals who dreamed of an ethnically pure and socially progressive Hungary. Many members of the group, especially the so-called populists, were equally opposed to the Jewish and German presence in Hungary; the years 1944–1946, when first the Jews were very largely eliminated by the Right, and then the Germans were nearly all expelled by the Left, brought the populists’ dream close to realization.10 There were, indeed, a good number of young men and some women of Jewish origin, many of them baptized and generally of good families, who by the last decades of the Habsburg era had become relentless critics of the Hungarian establishment. Because the establishment was the Jews’ main protector in an increasingly anti-liberal, nationalistic, and antisemitic Europe, this struck some members of the elite as rank ingratitude. The anarcho-syndicalist Ervin Szabo´, the sociologist Oszka´r Ja´szi, members of the so-called Galileo Circle, the “Revolutionary Engineers,” and other groups fiercely attacked Prime Minister Istvań Tisza, who in fact never flinched in his determination to preserve the absolute equality of Jews.11 These attacks were another sign that young Jewish intellectuals did not see themselves as Jews but rather as Hungarian patriots or as internationalists. Some among the radicals damned Tisza as a pawn of the Habsburgs; others bemoaned the misery of both the laborers on the large landed estates and of the industrial proletariat crowded into small city flats; again others were inspired by new Western social philosophies, and there might also have been some among them who were inspired by the famed “Jewish messianism.” This last factor is supposed to be a secularized version of the traditional Jewish longing for the Messiah—although on the rare occasions when these intellectuals used religious imagery to project their utopia of happy socialism, they were more likely to refer to the New rather than to the Old Testament.12 It is tempting to explain the large presence of Jews prior to 1914 in the diverse socialist movements as resulting from their despair over ever being accepted as full members of the nation in which they lived. In truth, a Jew had to be lucky even in the liberal Hungary of Habsburg times never to be subjected to antisemitic insults. Yet no Communist, socialist, or radical democratic writer seems ever to have cited popular antisemitism or a failure to be accepted by others as the cause for his or her choice of far-Left politics. Whereas being Jewish in Hungary before the First World War was often humiliating, it also presented fabulous opportunities to make a career. None of the later Communist leaders seems to have been particularly unsuccessful in his early employment; nor is there any evidence of his having been


43

rejected from a job or a learning opportunity because of his Jewish origin. Quite the contrary—and here it should be enough to cite the case of the philosopher Georg (Gyo¨rgy) Lukaćs, whose grandfather was an illiterate craftsman and his father a highly successful banker ennobled by Franz Joseph, and who himself attended the best schools and universities, signing his name, when in Germany, as Georg von Lukaćs. Or Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi, Hungary’s Stalinist leader in the late 1940s and early 1950s, who was the son of a modest country tradesman, and who as a young man benefited from a scholarship at the prestigious Oriental Academy, which enabled him both to study abroad and to learn many languages. The aggressive criticism voiced by a few hundred left-wing intellectuals (who were incidentally rejected by the more moderate trade union and Social Democratic leaders) would not have counted for much, had Hungary not gone through a number of difficult years before the First World War. Caught in the dilemmas of growing ethnic class conflicts, even the most liberal members of the old elite resented the forceful critique of the Jewish intellectuals. The historian John Lukacs, certainly no friend of the far Right, accuses the left-wing Jewish intellectuals of arrogance and naivete´ and states in his Budapest 1900 that they contributed to “the tragic rift between Hungary and Budapest, between Christians and Jews, between the older liberals and the newer radicals.”13 It is noteworthy that Lukacs’ argument drew strong protests from some left-wing intellectuals in present-day Hungary—a fact that shows that the debate is not over. As Lukacs points out, before the First World War, the alienation of many among the old-fashioned establishment figures from the Jews was complemented by the outright anti-Jewish hostility of newfangled right-wingers. All this foreshadowed the uneasy interwar cooperation, on the Jewish question, between the otherwise mutually hostile old conservative-liberal ruling elite and the new fascist elements. Despite growing antisemitism, it was during the First World War that Hungarian Jews reached the apogee of their success, with several members of the royal government, including the minister of defense—a four-star general—being Jews or baptized Jews, and with dozens of Jews sitting in parliament, in professorial chairs at the universities, and in the highest courts. During the war, some 25,000 Jews served in the Habsburg army as reserve officers, while in the Hungarian National Guard, Jews made up nearly one third of the reserve officer corps. These were relatively higher proportions than among any other religious or ethnic group.14 It is noteworthy that, before falling into Russian captivity and learning about Communism in the POW camps, practically all the Bolshevik revolutionary Jews of 1919 fame, including Kun and Ra´kosi, served in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces as officers or as officer candidates. The First World War brought the usual antisemitic charges that Jews were shirkers and war profiteers, but again, it was the agitation of radical leftist journalists and politicians that caused the greatest fear and indignation in traditional circles, especially as, this time, the agitators enjoyed significant success in stirring up the masses. Exasperation with the endless war as well as with poverty and hunger led to great strikes early in 1918 but, ultimately, it was not the workers but the soldiers who put an end to the old regime. By 1918, only a small fraction of the Habsburg armed forces was at the greatly shortened front lines in Italy and the Balkans; the

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vast majority was at home, partly immobilized by the lack of rolling stock. Many of these soldiers now proved to be open to nationalist and socialist agitation. In October 1918, Austria-Hungary collapsed under the multiple blows of an Entente offensive in the Balkans and of the soldiers’ revolts at home. In contrast to Prague, Zagreb, Trieste, and Lwo´w, where the emphasis was on national independence, the demonstrating soldiers in Budapest and Vienna marched primarily under the leadership of socialist agitators, many of whom were in officer’s uniform. In the late fall of 1918, Hungary became a democratic republic under the leadership of Count Miha´ly Ka´rolyi who, as is well known, could do no better than to preside over the collapse of the economy and the truncation of Hungary. Ka´rolyi’s main critics were the Communists, many with personal experience in the Red Army of Lenin and Trotsky. While remaining staunch internationalists, the Communists also held out the hope of restoring a greater Hungary in the course of the proletarian world revolution. On March 21, 1919, Ka´rolyi gave up and ceded his power to an alliance of Communists and left-wing Social Democrats, which soon organized a partly professional, partly proletarian Red Army. The latter drove the hastily organized Czechoslovak forces out of parts of northern Hungary and threatened even the Serbian and Romanian occupiers of southern and eastern Hungary. The Entente powers, however, were determined to thwart the establishment of the first Bolshevik state outside Russia. And indeed, the combined forces of France and of its Central European allies caused the collapse of the republic of soviets on August 1, 1919. Kun and most of the people’s commissars fled abroad; the handful who were caught in Hungary were either hanged, imprisoned, or exchanged for Hungarian officers in captivity in Soviet Russia. Unluckiest were often those who had fled to Russia, for eventually most of them, including Kun, fell victim to Stalin’s terror.15 I have dwelt so long on the events of 1919 because, as already mentioned, these 133 days had a decisive influence on later Communist history. Note that 31 of the 45 (in some accounts, 49) people’s commissars and three fourths of the 200 most important functionaries were of Jewish origin, and that real power belonged to Be´la Kun and some of his equally Jewish companions. The Hungarian republic of soviets went down into history as a time when, in the words of the French brothers Je´rome and Jean Tharaud, L’Israe¨l est roi.16 Furthermore, because the zealous intellectuals in charge of religion and culture threw themselves mindlessly into curing the populace of the disease of religiosity, their regime came to be associated with godlessness and immorality. Finally, because the regime treated the matter of agrarian reform dogmatically, many small farmers resorted to armed opposition, forming a rural counterrevolution that preceded the crushing of the Soviets by Hungary’s neighbors. There was also the conflict between the Social Democrats and the Communists, which made the two parties forever suspicious of each other. It must be admitted, however, that even had all the people’s commissars been angels, the Hungarian republic of soviets would still have been hated by many as a state created by Jewish upstarts. A question repeatedly asked is why these young men took power in 1919, and why they exercised their absolute power with a self-confidence rarely matched in Hungarian history. We have seen that idealism, social concerns, and (arguably) a


45

secularized Jewish messianism may all have played a role; to this, we should add (as a matter of speculation, since incontrovertible evidence is missing), that Kun, Jeno˝ Hamburger, Jo´zsef Pogańy (later, in the United States, called John Popper), Tibor Szamuely, Jeno˝ Landler, Be´la Szańto´, Jeno˝ (Eugen) Varga, Lukaćs, Otto Korvin, and others liked power. And when we look for an explanation as to why the Hungarian republic of Soviets caused such a trauma to the members of the former governing elite, it is because they found that others, horribile dictu Jews, were also capable of governing the country. Later, when in exile in Vienna, Berlin, and Moscow, the Communists engaged in bitter ideological debates on what had gone wrong and what ought to have been done. These debates deeply affected party history even into the post-Second World War years and landed many a loyal Communist in Ra´kosi’s prisons. Remember that most of those in power after 1947 had begun their political careers in 1919; for them, the post-Second World War period was but a continuation of the old struggles against their reactionary and fascist enemies as well as against enemies within the party. Yet there was also another side to the story of 1919 that gave the Communists confidence in governing the nation after the Second World War. Communist Jews, especially, must have felt that theirs was the true patriotism, given that the counterrevolutionaries of 1919 both hid under the wings of the French expeditionary army and secretly encouraged the Romanian army to occupy Budapest. Unlike the head of the counterrevolutionary movement, the Austro-Hungarian Admiral Miklo´s Horthy, and his cronies—who never fired a shot, except to kill captured revolutionaries—the Red Army fought brave battles against Hungary’s enemies. In this, it benefited from the active support not only of the proletariat but also of many former career officers. And while Horthy and several of his officers spoke Hungarian with a heavy German accent, the republic of soviets succeeded in rallying some of Hungary’s greatest poets, writers, composers, and artists.17 Their alliance with the best of the Hungarian literary and artistic scene caused the Communist leaders to develop the thesis that they, and they alone, were the true heirs to Sańdor Peto˝fi, the great patriotic poet of 1848, and to such immortal champions of Hungarian independence and social justice as Prince Ferenc (Francis) Ra´koćzi in the early 18th century and Lajos (Louis) Kossuth in the 19th century. According to the Communist writer Jo´zsef Re´vai, because Hungary in 1848 lacked a bourgeoisie able to overthrow the feudal order, as the French Third Estate did in 1789, it fell to the Hungarian lower nobility, led by Kossuth, to take up this task. Similarly, Re´vai argued, the Communist party had the right, nearly a century later, to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to lead the way to socialism.18 Note also that the Comintern (Communist International), founded in 1919, categorically condemned the Paris peace treaties of 1919–1920, which, among other things, reduced Hungary to one third of its size and to not much more than one third of its original population. In brief, according to the Hungarian Communists, they were the true representatives of the people; more than that: they were the People, writ large. Ra´kosi, who had himself called the “Wise and Beloved Leader of the Hungarian People,” carefully cultivated his regional Hungarian accent and threw around folksy metaphors and proverbs. It seems that he occasionally also

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referred to an imaginary gentry ancestry. All this made him the butt of many (although, of course, carefully concealed) satirical remarks. Admiral Horthy’s counterrevolutionary troops marched into Budapest in November 1919, long after the Romanian army had overturned the Communist regime. By then, Horthy’s officers had a well-earned reputation as butchers of Communists, the rural poor, and the Jews. The counterrevolutionary regime had as its basic creed that Jews were responsible for the tragedies of the lost war, the truncation of Hungary, capitalist exploitation, liberal a-patriotism, godlessness, the excesses of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and urban vice. Whether voiced elegantly and intelligently by the historian Gyula (Julius) Szekfu˝, or almost hysterically by the talented novelist—and later feminist—Cecile Tormay,19 the message remained the same to the end of the counterrevolutionary regime in 1944–1945. As Tormay wrote in her popular An Outlaw’s Diary of the early 1920s: We saw how the Jews, coming from the East, took possession of the land after acquiring the liquor shops of the villages. From the little draper’s shop in the town they laid their grasping hands on our whole economic life. We saw them during the war withdrawing into safety and acquiring millions while our folk gained crutches. We heard that the Zionist Congress of Paris carried the following resolution: “Jewry must try to get possession of Budapest first, then Hungary, so as to have a base for the establishment of its world-rule.” . . . Now . . . 24 Jewish People’s Commissars lead the rest and pronounce judgment of life and death upon Hungary.

Or: The cruelty of the Bolsheviks . . . is imbued with the sensuality of [a] pathological aberration. Its origin is neither Slav nor Turanian, but of another race living in our midst. The history of the Hebrews, the Covenant, the Talmud and the Jewish literature of the various languages of the world, everything that originates with Jews, is overflowingly sensual. Cruelty finds its fantasy and energy in sensuality. The bloody invasion of the Turks, the merciless oppression of the Austrians, were incomparably milder than the cruelty of the Bolsheviks.20

The reality of the international situation and Hungary’s desperate economic plight dictated a milder approach to the Jewish question, and thus consolidation began, around 1921, with the government putting an end to the White Terror and Jewish industrialists and bankers securing substantial foreign loans for the country. By the second half of the 1920s, things had in many ways reverted to the “peacetime” liberal period. But there was no more tacit agreement between the Jews and the nobility for a division of labor in the interest of Hungary; in any case, the old nobility was quickly losing power to the new middle class and to the state bureaucracy. Now even the most moderate antisemite in the government machinery hoped that, one day, most of the Jews would leave the country. Interwar Hungary had an authoritarian system in which it was practically impossible to vote the government out of office, and in which Regent Horthy had nearly the same powers as those once possessed by the Habsburgs. But there was also a functioning parliament, which as late as March 1944 still included a few Jews and Social Democrats; the press was almost as free as in Western Europe, and the judiciary amazingly independent. Only the Communists were beyond the


47

pale, which meant that the agents of the Comintern—almost all of Jewish origin— were regularly arrested as soon as they crossed the border into Hungary, and so were unduly active members of the underground party. It was said that up to one half of the party membership worked for the police, at least occasionally. The half a dozen or so Communists executed between 1921 and the German invasion in 1944 were of Jewish origin, but this disproportionality was partly caused by the fact that the courts were more lenient toward non-Jews. Ra´kosi spent 15 years in a Hungarian jail, as did Zoltań Vas, another well-known Communist leader and likewise a Jew. Although there are no reliable statistics on party membership in the interwar period, it is clear that the majority was made up of Jewish intellectuals. This is not to underestimate, however, the influence of such famous non-Jewish Communists as La´szlo´ Rajk, Jańos Ka´dar, and Imre Nagy. In fact, there were a handful of secret party members even in the career officer corps. Heightened oppression and internal dissension reduced party membership to a few hundred during the Second World War, but there were also thousands of sympathizers. In 1944, when the Final Solution began to be applied in earnest, Jewish Communists fared generally better than other Jews because the party tried to take care of its own both at home and in the camps. Moreover, the authorities were more likely to imprison (and often, torture) Jewish Communists than to dispatch them to Auschwitz. Ultimately, almost all the important leaders of the party, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, survived the war; and to them have to be added the so-called Muscovites who came back in 1945. The ranks of the latter had, however, been terribly thinned by the Stalinist purges. This time is as good as any to stop for a brief consideration of the historiography of Jews and Communism. We have seen that the so-called “Jewish Question” has been the major preoccupation of a vast number of Hungarians since at least 1919; it was the alpha and omega of counterrevolutionary ideology. This preoccupation led to a great number of antisemitic publications, very few among them of any scholarly value. There were also a good number of admirable public letters and manifestoes written by artists, poets, and scientists protesting the persecution of the Jews. The first truly scholarly writings on the subject were those of the sociologist Istvań Bibo´, later of 1956 fame. Even before the Second World War, Bibo´ began to investigate the roots of Hungarian antisemitism, finding them in the country’s anachronistic social structure as well as in the corruption of the Hungarian elite. The latter was now, in both the prewar and war years, being fatally corrupted by the opportunities for ill-gotten gain offered by the anti-Jewish measures.21 Immediately following the Second World War, there appeared many publications, as if from the opposite side, consisting mainly of survivors’ memoirs and documentary collections on the Final Solution. But then came near silence under Communist rule: Jewish victims, when mentioned at all, became “martyrs of the working-class movement,” or, more frequently, “other victims of fascism.” No one was allowed to investigate and to reveal the vast extent of Hungarian antisemitism before the Second World War and the collaboration of thousands in the Final Solution. Yet it has been recently demonstrated that about 200,000 Hungarian public employees participated actively in the Final Solution22 from the prime minister

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down to railroad workers and midwives. The midwives were called upon to help search for hidden jewelry within the private parts of Jewish women. History registers no midwife—or medical doctor—who refused to perform this patriotic task. Further, nothing was said in Stalinist times about the strong links between Jews and Communism. Not even in the most voluminous histories of Hungary published at that time do we find the admission that most of the Communists discussed in the book were of Jewish origin and thus targets of the right-wing’s fanatical hatred.23 A reader could at best guess that Communists of “petty bourgeois” background came from the ranks of the Jewish bourgeoisie; most others in the party, whether Jews or non-Jews, were said to have a working-class or poor peasant background. The situation was not really different in the writings of the democratic emigration or in the underground publications of the dissident movement. Neither group would want to risk the charge of antisemitism, which was the monopoly of the Arrow Cross e´migre´s. The ice was broken only following the end of Communism in Hungary in 1989. Now there exists a growing scholarly literature on Jews and Communism by, among others, Gyo¨rgy Borsańyi, Robert Gyo˝ri Szabo´, Viktor Kara´dy, La´szlo´ Karsai, Andra´s Kovaćs, Jańos Pelle, Miklo´s Szabo´, and Krisztian Ungva´ry—all of them talented and unbiased historians or sociologists. None has an easy task, as their writings are inevitably combed for signs of philoor antisemitism. By daring to call a spade a spade, however, these writers have opened new vistas on Jewish and Communist history. Certainly, they have served as an inspiration for this essay.24 Today there is also a thriving antisemitic literature in Hungary, with repeated reprintings of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of books by deceased, Jewhating mass murderers. All repeat the mantra of the far Right, which is that Jews equal Communism and Communism equals Jews. In December 1944, the Soviet High Command set up a provisional national assembly and a provisional government in Hungary composed of members of five leftwing political parties and of a few politically reliable independents. In an analogous situation in the United States today, an occupying power might create a provisional U.S. government and Congress from among radical Democrats, Greens, and representatives of various socialist groups. From the very start, the Communists, emerging from illegality, enjoyed the support of the Soviet army. Thus, even though they formed a minority in the parliament and in the government, they had the ultimate say in everything that counted, such as food supplies, reconstruction, land reform, and retribution. However, because Stalin favored cooperation with the West at that time, the Hungarian Communists cooperated with the Social Democrats, the Peasant Party (made up mostly of crypto-Communists), the trade unions (similarly full of crypto-Communists), and the so-called Smallholders’ Party, which, willy-nilly, represented most of those opposed to Communism. Meanwhile, the gulf separating Jews from non-Jews became even wider; whereas the arrival of the Soviet Red Army had constituted a genuine liberation for the former, it was perceived as an occupation by most in the latter group. Understandably, Jewish survivors flocked into the Communist party, which seemed to be the only buffer against the return of fascism. In the words of


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Jerry Z. Muller: “Nowhere were Jews more prominent in the Sovietization of the nation.”25 Somewhat to their surprise, new Jewish members encountered in the party a large number of so-called “little Nazis,” former minor members of the Arrow Cross whom the Communists saw as socially radicalized and easy to control through intimidation. But ordinary citizens also joined the party, which, among other things, was able to provide its members with a daily bowl of soup—a huge benefit in recently liberated and ruined Budapest. Small wonder that party membership increased from a few hundred during the war to 30,000 in February 1945, and to half a million by the end of the year.26 Obviously, not all these miraculous conversions were genuine, as attested by the free parliamentary elections in November 1945, in which the Communists received only 17 percent of the votes as opposed to 57 percent cast for the Smallholders. Still, despite their gain of the absolute majority of votes, the Smallholders were forbidden by the Allied Control Commission—in other words, the Soviet High Command—to govern alone. The broad antifascist coalition had to continue, with the Communists playing an increasingly important role in the administration, especially in the police. It is not the task of this essay to describe the well-known salami tactics practiced by Ra´kosi and his cronies; it is enough to note that the presence of Jews in the ever more powerful Communist party led to new problems and even to some tragic events. As was the case more or less everywhere in Europe, the end of the Second World War precipitated a flare-up of popular antisemitism in Hungary, motivated by the double fear of Jews’ taking revenge and of their demanding the return of their stolen property. In Hungary, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the blood libel was revived, and mothers in some regions did not let their children out to play lest they be turned into matzoh. The killing of 42 Jews in Kielce, Poland, in July 1946, was not an isolated incident: in Hungary, at least four Jews died in pogrom-like conditions between 1945 and 1947. In Hungary and elsewhere, the Communists bore a significant part of the responsibility for such actions, as the Communist press persistently recommended violent action against black-marketers, profiteers, and other capitalists. To many people, exploiter equaled Jew. In Hungary, the Communist press on occasion went so far as to list the names of arrested black marketeers, adding to their “magyarized” names their original Jewish-sounding names. (This was particularly outrageous, as the party itself expected its Jewish functionaries to assume Hungariansounding names; never would it admit that Kun’s original name was Kohn, for instance.27) Communist papers encouraged “the toiling people” to take revenge on the “bloodsuckers” or on persons who were “hoarding” a few pounds of sugar or fat. At a great public gathering in Budapest on February 16, 1946, Ra´kosi said: “We affirm that, in a democracy, there is space for the instinctive action of the masses; the people are entitled to take justice into their own hand.”28 In May 1946, peasants in Kunmadaras killed two Jews and wounded more when it seemed that some Jews would be asking for the return of what was theirs. On July 23, 1946, in the great industrial center of Miskolc, Ra´kosi asserted before a quarter of a million people that “those who speculate with the forint [Hungary’s

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new stable currency]; those who try to undermine the economic basis of our democracy, ought to be hanged.”29 Workers in the region responded to the incitement by lynching one alleged black marketer and badly wounding another, even though both were already under arrest. A third black marketeer, a non-Jew, was let go. When the police arrested some members of the lynch crowd, the workers turned on the police and killed a lieutenant who was a Jew. Non-Jewish police officers were not harmed. Thus what had started out as an anti-capitalist protest rapidly degenerated into a pogrom, only gradually calmed by the intervention of Soviet army units and police forces sent from the capital. The Communist press at first tried to blame the Smallholders and the clerical forces for the incidents, but when it became clear that the murderers were bona fide peasants and proletarians, sentences were either greatly reduced, as in the case of the Kunmadaras peasants, or else judicial proceedings were quietly abandoned, ´ zd proletarians. Because these complicated as in the case of the Miskolc and O processes were nearly impossible to understand at that time, Jews continued to join the party, which many saw as their only safety net. It must be stated, however, that at least as many if not more Jews chose the more moderate Social Democrats or the bourgeois democratic party.30 The incidents showed the absolute callousness of Ra´kosi and other Jewish party leaders toward Jewish concerns as well as the influence on the party leadership of the populists within the Communist and Peasant parties. Some of the Peasant Party leaders had long objected to the idea of treating Jewish survivors as persons deserving any compensation. Retribution turned out to be another grave problem for the Communist party and the Jews. The obligation to punish the war criminals was part of the armistice terms with Hungary. It was also the wish of the Jews and of many other people who felt that someone should be punished for the disastrous war in which more than a million Hungarian citizens had died (half of them because they were Jews) and 40 percent of the nation’s wealth had been destroyed. Retribution included, among other things, the expulsion of the ethnic Germans; the investigation of a large part of the population by special de-nazification commissions, and the trials of the war criminals by so-called people’s courts. As part of the Potsdam Declaration, issued in June 1945, the Allied powers authorized the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. By then, millions of them were already on the move, either fleeing spontaneously or being driven west, often under conditions rendered atrocious by Poles, Czechoslovaks, and the Soviet Red Army. Hungary, too, was authorized to send away some of its Germans, mainly so as to make room for the Hungarian inhabitants of Czechoslovakia whom the Benesˇ government wished to expel. Originally, the only Germans to be deported were those who had belonged to the Volksbund, a pro-Nazi ethnic organization; in reality, some 170,000 ethnic Germans, whose houses and lands were of value, were dispatched to Germany. The principal advocates of the expulsion were the Communists and the Peasant Party; its main opponents were several well-known members of the Social Democratic Party, the heads of the Catholic and Evangelical-Lutheran churches, the sociologist Istvań Bibo´, and Margit Schlachta (a Grey Sister and a deputy in parliament who, during the war, had been a heroic defender of the Jews). She and


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Bibo´ were outraged by the Hungarian government’s arrogant claim that their country, which had been Nazi Germany’s last ally, was morally entitled to get rid of the ethnic Germans who had been living in Hungary for hundreds of years. Imre Kovaćs, a celebrated populist writer and Peasant Party leader, unthinkingly repeated the phrase used a few years earlier by his fellow populist Ma´tya´s Matolcsy: “Let them go the way they came, with a single sack on their back.”31 Matolcsy had been a deputy representing the fascist Arrow Cross, and he had been referring to the Jews, whereas Kovaćs was a deputy belonging to the democratic Peasant Party, and he was referring to the Hungarian Germans. Both, however, unwittingly demonstrated that the essence of Hungarian politics in those years was ethnic cleansing. The expulsion also showed that the Communists were waging not only a class, but even more, an ethnic war, and that neither the Jewish members of the party nor the leaders of the Jewish community in Hungary understood the injustice and dangers of collective punishment—a policy that had been targeted against them only one or two years earlier. In the course of the postwar purges, thousands of people, especially civil servants, were deprived of their jobs. The result was a substantial “changing of the guard” at every level of society. The most serious instruments of retribution were, of course, the ad hoc people’s courts, which represented a curious mixture of oldfashioned judicial fairness and outright prejudice, of judicial autonomy and strict political control of the proceedings. As a result, the treatment of the defendants ranged from fair to outrageous.32 The trouble was that, in Hungary as well as in many other countries, politically reliable professional policemen, prosecutors, and judges were in very short supply. In Austria, for instance, the newly constituted people’s courts could not find a single professional judge who had not been in the Nazi party. In Hungary, the situation was a bit better; still, the courts often had to operate with personnel who were untrained in law. Most judges and prosecutors had been delegated by the parties of the anti-fascist coalition; the defendants were allowed to choose their defense lawyers only from a list approved by the same political parties. Inevitably, many Jews sat in judgment over the thousands of defendants, which gave rise to the whispered claim that the people’s courts represented the revenge of the Jews. In reality, sentences were often quite mild, if mostly unsystematic, and there is no proof that Jewish judges were more severe than others. In all, as a result of the trials, one former head of state (Ferenc Sza´lasi), three former prime ministers, one deputy prime minister, and nearly 200 other top political leaders and military commanders of the pre-1945 regimes were executed. Also in the group were quite a few of those involved in the local organization and execution of the Holocaust. There can be no doubt that most of those executed deserved the maximum punishment. In addition, some 27,000 persons were sent to jail.33 The problem was less with the courts than with the public in the courtrooms, which was made up mostly of survivors. They applauded the fiercest prosecutors and booed even the most cautious arguments made by the defense. A few of the captive mass murderers had to be protected from lynching. More disturbing were the articles appearing in the Communist and other left-wing newspapers, again most often written and edited by Jews, which, in language reminiscent of the defunct far

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right-wing press, not only demanded the death penalty for almost all of the major defendants but also threatened lenient judges and defenders. Admittedly, even in such arch-democratic countries as Norway and Denmark, the war crimes and treason trial proceedings were not much more dignified. Yet in Scandinavia, Jews played no role in the proceedings, whereas in Hungary, a part of the public saw the trials as belonging to a Jewish-Communist takeover. Note, however, that many non-Jews also had no objections to the verdicts, and some even welcomed them. The transformation of antifascist volunteers hunting down Nazi war criminals into professional members of the Communist political police hunting down mostly imaginary enemies was a fairly rapid process. By 1947, the main war crimes trials were over. Two years later, the very same People’s Court that had tried Ferenc Sza´lasi and his Arrow Cross confederates now sentenced to death La´szlo´ Rajk, a former Communist minister of the interior, a hero of the Spanish Civil War, and perhaps the most important “home-grown” party leader in Hungary. Some historians surmise that Ra´kosi selected Rajk for elimination because, unlike himself (Ra´kosi was short, bald, corpulent, and virtually neckless), Rajk was young, handsome, eloquent, elegant—and non-Jewish.34 There is, however, no proof that this was the case; hundreds of less handsome Communist leaders, including many Jews, were also arrested, tortured, and thrown into jail. It is certain that Ra´kosi courted the non-Jewish populist writers and was fond of dropping antisemitic hints. In any case, around 1950, one in ten Hungarians was either in jail, in a concentration camp, in internal exile, or under police supervision.35 Considering that most of these victims were adult males, it was nearly as common for a Hungarian man to be in trouble with the authorities as to be free. One more major Stalinist move hit the Jews of Hungary at least as badly as it hit the non-Jews. Beginning in June 1951, the government deported about 16,000 so-called class enemies from Budapest and the major provincial towns, dumping all in the poorest of villages and hamlets where they were obliged to do agricultural work, often under atrocious conditions. While many were former aristocrats, army officers, and officials, 35 percent of the deportees were listed as former factory owners, bankers, directors, and wholesale merchants. From these figures some historians have calculated that about 15–20 percent, or perhaps some 2,000–3,000 persons, were Jews. In other words, Jews were again vastly overrepresented not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.36 Today it seems certain that the major motivation of the deportations was not to help the workers to gain access to decent apartments but to provide the new, titanic state bureaucracy with family accommodations. In general, the regime treated the Jewish grand bourgeoisie as shabbily as it treated the former non-Jewish elite. Charged with being exploiters and as having been much too well integrated into the “Horthy-fascist” regime, former Jewish industrialists, bankers, wealthy lawyers, and stockbrokers were either reduced to poverty or, in most cases, managed to emigrate before the closing of the frontier in 1948. Only individuals with needed expertise or those who had joined the party were considered employable. All of this should bring us to the question of who exactly were the Communist Jews, especially those who became officers in the political police. Did many of


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them become political torturers and heartless bureaucrats primarily out of hatred for the very rich and very successful? After all, Jews in Hungary had always been divided by geographic origin; those whose ancestors had immigrated from Germany and from Moravia-Bohemia in the 18th or early in the 19th century tended to look down on those who had arrived more recently from Poland. The latter were generally poorer and less well educated; the Holocaust also hit them harder. But, as mentioned earlier, many Jewish men from the countryside survived in the compulsory labor service. Having lost their families, many flocked into the Communist political police, where they were able to address their resentment not only against their Gentile enemies, but also against the wealthier Jews. Certainly, the charges the police drew up against the Budapest Jewish community leaders in the late 1940s and early 1950s placed great emphasis on the alleged betrayal, by the Jewish capitalists, of the Jewish proletariat in 1944. This said, it must be noted that the thesis of class antagonism on the part of Communist Jews needs to be verified by sociological studies of the party membership and especially of the political police, which, as far as I know, have never been undertaken. Among the victims of the police system were many Zionist leaders. At first, in 1948, when Stalin supported the creation of an independent Israel, Zionists were allowed to recruit and train followers; the authorities tolerated illegal Jewish emigration to Palestine; and in 1948, they welcomed the Israeli embassy to Budapest. Jewish community leaders and many Zionists of leftist persuasion responded to these developments with enthusiasm, and a large number of Zionists even joined the party. But later in that same year, the Soviets turned against Israel, and thereafter life was made more difficult for the Hungarian Zionists. In 1949, the first Zionist trial was held in Hungary, but this was no show trial, and the accused were merely punished for smuggling younger Jews out of the country. Limited emigration was again made possible in 1950, allowing some 3,000 Jews to leave the otherwise hermetically sealed country. It was in 1952 that the wholesale attack on the Hungarian Zionists and the Jewish community leaders began. Many were arrested, tortured, and prepared for a big show trial similar to that of Rudolf Slańsky´ and other top party leaders in Czechoslovakia. Even the president of the Jewish community, Lajos Sto¨ckler, was arrested, although no man could have been more subservient to the regime and no one had protested more vehemently against Jewish intervention from abroad on behalf of Hungarian Jewry. (Ironically, this was no novelty in the Hungarian Jewish experience: throughout the Horthy period, patriotic Hungarian Jewish leaders protested foreign Jewish propaganda directed against Hungary and claimed that there existed no official antisemitism in the country.) With the death of Stalin in 1953, the persecution of the Zionist and religious leaders stopped, but by that time, Hungarian Zionism had ceased to exist. What makes shattering reading are the reports by the political police commanders, themselves often Jews, to Ra´kosi, which heaped blame on the Jewish community leaders.37 Although several of Rajk’s co-defendants in the trial of 1949 were Jewish, the trial itself did not assume the antisemitic character that would mark the Slańsky´ trial in Czechoslovakia three years later. Still, the Jewish origin of some of Rajk’s co-defendants was made clear by references to their “cosmopolitan” background;

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Rajk’s German ethnic origin was also brought to the fore. From 1949 on, the Politburo and the police proceeded on an insane course of purges without any regard to the religious or racial origins of their victims. Jewish police officers tortured Jewish and non-Jewish Communist defendants, and when Ra´kosi or Miha´ly Farkas decided to get rid of some of these policemen, other Jewish—and nonJewish—policemen obligingly beat their colleagues to death. Finally, in 1952, Stalin took the first steps toward what is seen today as his outright anti-Jewish campaign. Victims were singled out in Hungary as well as elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, among them Ga´bor Pe´ter, the notoriously brutal commander-in-chief of the political police. Clearly, Ra´kosi was trying to save his own skin by selecting top Jewish Communists for persecution. His next Jewish targets would most likely have been Vas and perhaps even Re´vai, the latter a member of the Quadriga, but by then Stalin had died and the anti-Jewish campaign thereafter wound to a halt. In June 1953, the highest-ranking government and party leaders were summoned to Moscow, where Ra´kosi was accused of having ruined the Hungarian economy and of having created his own personality cult. In reality, he had only obeyed instructions and hints from Moscow. In the course of this confrontation, Lavrenti Beria is said to have turned to Ra´kosi with the following words: Listen to me, Ra´kosi . . . We know that there have been in Hungary, apart from its own rulers, Turkish sultans, Hapsburg emperors, Tartar kings, and Polish princes. But, as far as we know, Hungary has never had a Jewish king. Apparently, this is what you have become. Well, you can be sure that we won’t allow it.38

It is uncertain whether these were Beria’s exact words; what counts is that then and there the non-Jewish Imre Nagy was made prime minister of Hungary, with Ra´kosi being allowed to continue as first secretary of the Communist party. Like Kun, Ra´kosi, and so many other Communists, Nagy had been a POW in Russia during the First World War. In 1929, he returned to the Soviet Union, where he was employed at an academic institute of agriculture. It seems that, while in Russia, he also worked for the Soviet secret police. Nagy returned to Hungary in 1945. Although a high-ranking party member who served in several cabinets, Nagy had only very limited influence until his appointment as prime minister in June 1953. At this point, he presented himself to the public as a Hungarian patriot with the interest of the nation at heart. Instead of preparation for war and continued major investment in heavy industry (disguised as “the struggle for peace”), Nagy proposed increasing the production of consumer goods and allowing many peasants to leave the collective farms. He also toned down Communist propaganda, and, most importantly, freed many political prisoners. At first, only Communists were rehabilitated, which meant the release of many Jews—again reinforcing the public perception of Jews as a privileged caste. Later, however, others (though by no means all) were released from jail. The tales told by these returnees radically changed the thinking of many Jewish Communist intellectuals who had previously been among the regime’s most dedicated followers. Because Nagy was actually not much more successful than Ra´kosi in improving the economic situation, and because Nagy’s protector, Beria, had been executed in the summer of 1953, Ra´kosi forced Nagy’s removal, in 1955, from the post of


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prime minister. By then, however, Nagy had cultivated a group of friends and political supporters who began agitating for reform. Their efforts culminated in the revolution of October 23, 1956. Most members of the Nagy circle were younger men and women of Jewish origin, some of whom had previously been among the most aggressive followers of Stalin and Ra´kosi, but who now were pushing for a more humane Communist society. Although Ra´kosi threatened the agitators, he did not at first dare to crack down on the opposition. This, after all, was taking place in the aftermath of the explosive 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, at which Nikita Khrushchev had revealed some of Stalin’s crimes. As with the Galileo Circle in 1917, the Peto˝fi Club now incited the students and intellectuals to demand reforms. In all this, Jewish writers and journalists, including Tibor De´ry, Istvań Vas, Zoltań Zelk, Tibor Me´ray, Gyula Haý, Tama´s Acze´l, Georg Lukaćs, and Gyo¨rgy Litvań played a decisive role.39 The revolution immediately assumed both a minimalist and maximalist character: compulsory study hours at the universities were to be reduced—and the Soviet troops were to leave Hungary. There were peaceful demonstrations every day alongside fierce firefights, in the course of which lightly armed workers and students knocked out dozens of Soviet tanks. Although Nagy was now reappointed prime minister, he and his followers had difficulties keeping up with events; by late October, old political parties had been reconstituted and new ones had been formed. The reconstituted Communist party joined the revolutionaries, but on November 4, the Soviet tanks returned en masse, and with them, Jańos Ka´da´r, a member of Nagy’s revolutionary movement who had gone over to the Soviet side.40 That moment, I would argue, forever ended the symbiosis between Jews and the Communist party, not only in Hungary but everywhere. Outraged by the spectacle of workers shot down by Soviet tanks, intellectuals in large numbers, many of them Jews, left the party in France, the United States, and elsewhere. In Hungary, some Jewish reform Communists, such as the philosopher Georg Lukaćs, gave in to the new Ka´da´r regime almost immediately, but many others, such as the writer Tibor De´ry, preferred to spend several years in jail before finally asking the party for forgiveness. Among the hundreds of active revolutionaries and street fighters who were executed were several Jews; several more stood trial with Nagy. The Jewish journalist Miklo´s Gimes was hanged with Nagy. Their judge was a Jew, as were several members of the Ka´da´r regime, especially Gyo¨rgy Acze´l, who was to become postrevolutionary Hungary’s cultural tsar (although previously, he—as well as Ka´da´r—had been a victim of Stalinist purges). The Jewish membership of the Communist movement was irrevocably split. Even among supporters of the regime, the old enthusiasm and dedication never came back; the party was now perceived as, at most, a lesser evil. Most importantly, Hungarian Jews voted with their feet; during the revolution, more than 20,000 of them left Hungary. Although Jews accounted for 1 percent of Hungary’s population, they comprised fully 10 percent of the refugees. Their motivations for leaving were as mixed as those of the non-Jewish refugees, although in the case of the Jews, the fear of pogroms undoubtedly played a role. In fact, there were very few antisemitic manifestations during the revolution, and generally,

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just as there was no plundering, people were extremely careful not to voice antisemitic sentiments. Zoltań Zelk, a famous Stalinist writer and poet, who in 1953 had become a dedicated reformist, recounted after the revolution that, at first, he did not dare attend the demonstrations because, as a Jew, he feared that he would be torn to pieces. All the greater was his joy when, finally appearing in the street, he was hoisted on the shoulders of the demonstrators.41 This said, it is possible that, had the revolution not been suppressed, former Nazis would eventually have come to the fore. In any case, there were now so few Jews left in Hungary, and so many younger non-Jewish cadres eager to take up their former positions, that one could no longer talk of a Jewish preponderance in any of the regime’s major institutions. Meanwhile, the government only reluctantly followed Soviet instructions regarding the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist campaigns. In the decades following 1956, the Ka´da´r regime went from the murderously brutal to the quite humane, embracing all those who were not outright opposed to the government. Still, it was a Communist dictatorship, and in a sort of last hurrah, demonstrating their undiminished political energy, scores of younger intellectuals turned against their government. While Hungary was becoming, as the saying went, ´ gnes the “merriest barrack in the Soviet camp,” Marxist philosophers such as A ´ gnes Erde´lyi, Jańos Kis, and Gyo¨rgy Bence, as well as the writer Gyo¨rgy Heller, A Konra´d and scores of other intellectuals, including Ivań Szeleńyi, La´szlo´ Rajk, Jr., Ivań Peto˝, Ga´bor Demszky, Miklo´s Haraszti, Ferenc Ko˝szeg, and Ba´lint Magyar demanded more and more fundamental reforms, amounting to the complete democratization of Hungary. Of them, the great majority was of Jewish origin. Protected by international opinion and the increasing aimlessness of the world Communist movement—and, in at least some cases, by parents who were prominent party members—the dissidents could take liberties that would have been inconceivable in earlier times. What did the Hungarian public think of this strange assemblage of opposition figures? I remember a Hungarian national celebration held early in the 1980s at the Kossuth statue on New York City’s Riverside Drive, at which speakers solemnly invoked the names of the “brave Hungarians, our beloved compatriots who dared to defy the Communist oppressors.” I wondered whether the assembled multitude, complete with boys and girls in flowery national costumes, knew that all of the names pronounced aloud were those of Jews. At last, toward the late 1980s, the democratic dissidents were joined by some of the populist writers whose flaming patriotism, xenophobia, and various degrees of antisemitism had never been an obstacle to their cultivating good relations with whatever political group was in power. During the Second World War, few among them had turned against the rightist regimes; after the war, some of the previously antisemitic members of those regimes accepted positions in the Communist government. In 1956, the populists were generally the last to join the revolution and the first to accept the rule of Ka´da´r. This did not prevent some among them from accusing the Jewish “urbanist” intellectuals of opportunism and cosmopolitanism. Now these two groups, the democratic intellectuals and the populists or national conservatives, negotiated with the increasingly liberal Communist leadership for


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the creation of a democratic Hungary. In 1989, the Communist regime came peacefully to an end. Jewish life in Hungary can be said to have been both a huge success and a terrible tragedy. Assimilation went so far that, at the time of the anti-Jewish laws, many an antisemitic Catholic or Protestant youngster had to be warned by his parents that, unfortunately, he, too, was of Jewish origin. Similarly, after the Second World War, many an establishment youngster learned only from the silent hostility of classmates that he was a Jew; at home he had always been told that the family were Communists and not Jews.42 But assimilation had proved worthless when it came to Hungary’s sending nearly half a million of its fellow citizens to Auschwitz, and assimilation is no help to the few public personalities of Jewish origin today who are hated by many, although by far not the majority of Hungarians. The Communist-Jewish symbiosis came to an end as had the symbiosis between the nobility and the Jews after 1918. Hopefully, there will never be a need for another such silent contract, and the few remaining Jews will be seen by the rest of the population for what they are: Hungarians.

Notes 1. Jerry Z. Muller, “Communism, Anti-Semitism and the Jews,” Commentary, 86, no. 2 (Aug. 1988), 32. 2. According to U.S. political scientist Charles Gati, 10 of the 15 members of the Communist party’s Central Committee in 1919, and six of the 11 members of the ruling Politburo around 1950, were of Jewish origin. See Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham: 1986), 101. 3. Ma´ria M. Kovaćs, Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics: Hungary from the Habsburgs to the Holocaust (Washington, D.C.: 1994), 53, describes the crisis of the professions after the First World War, noting too that “by the end of the 1920s, [Hungary] had the highest number of lawyers and medical doctors relative to the population anywhere in Europe.” 4. Estimates on the number of Jews affected by the anti-Jewish measures and the number of survivors vary a great deal because of changes in Hungary’s boundaries before, during, and after the Second World War; because many survivors remained abroad; and because many assimilated and baptized Jews never reported their survival to the authorities after the war. The consensus, however, is that in March 1944, that is, at the time of the German occupation of Hungary, there were about 825,000 persons in so-called Greater Hungary who qualified as Jews according to the racial laws of 1941. Of them, between 550,000 and 569,000 died during the Holocaust, which means a casualty rate of about 68 percent. In socalled Trianon or Truncated Hungary, which means Hungary between 1919 and 1937 as well as Hungary after 1945, there were about 490,000 persons whom the anti-Jewish laws defined as Jews; of them, about 50 percent must have perished. See “Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York:, 1990), 1799, and Ro´bert Gyo˝ri Szabo´, A kommunista pa´rt e´s a zsido´sa´g (The Communist party and the Jews) (Budapest: 1997), 301. A much-disputed but scholarly study, Tama´s Stark, Zsido´sa´g a ve´szkorszakban e´s a felszabadula´s utań 1939–1955 (Jewry during the Holocaust and following liberation) (Budapest: 1995) argues for a considerably lower number and proportion of Jewish losses.

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Of the many works, in English, on the history of Hungary’s Jews, see primarily Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Detroit: 1996), and Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: the Holocaust in Hungary, 2nd. ed., 2 vols. (New York: 1994). 5. Today’s Jewish community registers list contains about 15,000 members, but guesses vary between 80,000 and 100,000 as to the number of Jews in Hungary. (Personal communication from Robert Fro˝hlich, chief rabbi of Hungary, 25 Aug. 2003.) The question is who is a Jew. On the one hand, because of intermarriage and assimilation, persons of at least partly Jewish origin might number well over 100,000. However, this could be of little significance considering that many of these people either know nothing or are not interested in knowing anything about their often only partly Jewish descent. On the other hand, there is the public that might—or might not—be interested in detecting Jewish descent in others. 6. In 1910, for instance, when Jews made up 5 percent of Hungary’s population, 45.2 percent of the lawyers, 48.4 percent of the medical doctors, and 42.4 percent of the journalists were Jews by religion. In the Hungarian capital, the proportions were even higher: 61.5 percent for the lawyers, 58.8 percent for the medical doctors, and 48.4 percent for the journalists. These figures do not include the numerous converts to one or another Christian denomination. By 1930, the proportion of Jews had decreased somewhat in the medical profession and journalism but, surprisingly, it increased to 49.2 percent among Hungary’s lawyers. Add to this that, also in 1910, 85.0 percent of the self-employed persons in banking and finance were Jews, and that mining and heavy industry were mostly in their ownership. Following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, there were officially no more practicing Jewish lawyers and journalists in Hungary, and the few medical doctors who were not in Auschwitz or in labor service were supposed to treat only Jewish patients. The statistical data are from Gyula Zeke, “Statisztikai melle´kletek” (Statistical appendixes) in La´szlo´ Bańyai et al., He´t e´vtized a hazai zsido´sa´g e´lete´bo˝l (Seven decades from the life of this country’s Jewry), 2 vols. (Budapest: 1990), 1: 187–199 and Szabo´, A kommunista pa´rt e´s a zsido´sa´g, 304. See also Istvan Deak, “Hungary,” in The European Right: A Historical Profile, ed. Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber (Berkeley: 1965), 367–368. Regarding the wealth accumulated by Jews, it is enough to say that, in 1918, Jews owned between 20 and 25 percent of the national wealth. Also in 1918, of the 269 millionaires in Budapest, 175 were Jews by religion, most of the rest being aristocrats, German businessmen and industrialists as well as converts from Judaism. Note that the proportion of Jewish millionaires in Budapest had barely changed by 1941 when the last such statistics were collected. This shows that the anti-Jewish legislation barely affected the upper strata of Jewish society. See Krisztiań Ungva´ry, “E´rtelmise´g e´s antiszemita ko¨zbesze´d” (The intelligentsia and antisemitic discourse), Besze´lo˝ 6 (2001), 9, and Gyo¨rgy Zentay, Besze´lo˝ sza´mok (Talking numbers) (Budapest: 1941), 73–103. 7. Remarkably, even among state functionaries the proportion of Jews reached 5.5 percent in 1910 and among judges and prosecutors, 3.8 percent, showing that professions usually reserved for the middle and lower nobility now had their fair proportion of Jews. This is excluding the converts who probably outnumbered un-baptized Jews in these traditionally Christian occupations. By 1930, the proportion of Jewish functionaries had decreased to 1.5 percent and that of judges and prosecutors to 1.9 percent. See Zeke in Bańyai, “He´t e´vtized,” 193. 8. On Hungarian Jews before and during the 1848 revolution, see George Barany, “Magyar Jew or Jewish Magyar,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1974), 1–44. See also Istvan Deak, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 (New York: 1979), 113–120, passim. 9. Ottoka´r Proha´szka, “Ele´g volt-e?,” Hunnia 104 (1918), reprinted in Kultu´ra e´s terror: Va´logatott ´ıra´sok (Culture and terror: selected writings), 2nd ed. (Budapest: 1997). 10. On the history of Hungarian populism, see Gyula Borbańdi’s sympathetic account, Der ungarische Populismus (Mainz: 1976). For a critique of populism by one of its “urbanist”—that is, Jewish—opponents, see Paul Ignotus, Hungary (New York: 1972), 180– 185.


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11. On the older Jewish generation’s devotion to Istvań Tisza, and on the shock caused in conservative-liberal circles by the radicalism of younger Jewish intellectuals, see Gabor Vermes, Istvań Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statecraft of a Magyar Nationalist (East European Monographs 184) (New York: 1985), esp. ch. 6. 12. The pre-First World War generation of mostly Jewish left-wing intellectuals is well described in Mary Gluck, Georg Lukaćs and his Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1985). 13. John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New York: 1988), 200. 14. Istvań Dea´k, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: 1990), 196. On Jews in the Habsburg officer corps, see also Erwin Schmidl, Juden in der k (u.)k. Armee, 1788–1918/Jews in the Habsburg Armed Forces (Eisenstadt: 1980). 15. Two of the more satisfactory books, in English, on the events of 1918–1919 are Oscar Ja´szi, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Hungary (New York: 1969 [1924]), and Rudolf L. To¨ke´s, Be´la Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic: The Origins and Role of the Communist Party in Hungary in the Revolutions of 1918–1919 (New York: 1967). 16. Je´rome and Jean Tharaud, Quand Israe¨l est roi (Paris: 1921). 17. Perhaps the best English-language book on Admiral Horthy and the interwar counterrevolutionary regime is Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback: Miklo´s Horthy, 1918–1944 (East European Monographs 396) (New York: 1994). There are also two excellent new books in English on Hungarian history: La´szlo´ Kontler, A History of Hungary: Millenium in Central Europe (London: 2003), and Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat, trans. Ann Major (Princeton: 2002). Lendvai is particularly interesting and challenging on the role of Jews—and Communists—in Hungarian history. 18. See, for instance, Jo´zsef Re´vai, Kossuth Lajos (Budapest: 1945); idem, Marx e´s a magyar forradalom (Marx and the Hungarian revolution) (Budapest: 1953). 19. See especially Gyula (Julius) Szekfu˝, Ha´rom nemzede´k: Egy hanyatlo´ kor to¨rteńete (The three generations: the history of an age in decline) (Budapest: 1920), and Cecile Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary: The Commune (London: 1923). On Tormay, see Jańos Hankiss, Tormay Cecile (Budapest: 1939), a highly sympathetic biography of her as a writer. 20. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, 38, 154. 21. The best summary of Bibo´’s views on Jewish-Hungarian relations is to be found in his “Zsido´ke´rde´s Magyarorsza´gon 1944 utań” (The Jewish question in Hungary after 1944) Va´lasz (Budapest) (1948), 10–11. This and similar writings were reprinted in Istvań Bibo´, Va´logatott tanulmańyok (Selected studies) 3 vols. (Budapest: 1986), 2:619–809. 22. La´szlo´ Karsai, Holokauszt (Budapest: 2001), 240. ´ rokay in Kun Be´la (Budapest: 1986) and Be´lańe´ 23. Kun’s biographers, including Lajos A Kun (his widow) in her Kun Be´la (Budapest: 1969), managed to avoid mention of the fact that he was born into the Jewish religion, and neglected to mention whether he was affected by the incessant and ferocious antisemitic attacks on him. The same applies to the voluminous fawning literature on Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi, or to Ra´kosi’s own Visszaemle´keze´sek, 1940– 1956 (Memoirs), ed. Istvań Feitl, Ma´rta Ge´lle´rine´ La´za´r, and Levente Sipos (Budapest: 1997). 24. Relevant writings by the above-named authors have appeared mainly in such Budapest journals as Besze´lo˝, Medvetańc, Mozgo´ Vila´g, Sza´zadve´g, Szombat, and Vila´gossa´g. The only scholarly book I know of that is specifically devoted to the subject is Szabo´’s, A kommunista pa´rt e´s a zsido´sa´g. Such an important—and controversial—general work on Jews and Communism as Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein’s “Ju¨discher Bolschewismus”: Mythos und Realita¨t (Dresden: 2002), devotes less attention to Hungary than it deserves. Clearly, non-Hungarian authors are often discouraged by the difficulties of the Hungarian language. 25. Muller, “Communism, Antisemitism and the Jews,” 36. 26. On the post-Second World War history of the Communist party, in English, see especially Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc; Bennett Kovrig, Communism in Hungary: From

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Kun to Ka´da´r (Baltimore: 1970), and Miklo´s Molna´r, From Be´la Kun to Jańos Ka´da´r: Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: 1990). Statistical data on party membership vary as do, incidentally, all statistical data referring to these turbulent times. My figures are from Molna´r, From Be´la Kun to Jańos Ka´da´r, 105. 27. Egon Balas, Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey Through Fascism and Communism (Syracuse: 2000), 159. 28. Cited in Szabo´, A kommunista pa´rt e´s a zsido´sa´g, 148–149. The most detailed and up-to-date description of the 1946 pogroms in Hungary are in the same excellent book, 148– 173. 29. Cited in ibid., 160. The pogrom in Miskolc is best described in Jańos Pelle, “A konstrua´lt ve´rva´d” (The constructed blood libel) in Valo´so´g, nos. 1 and 2 (1995). 30. Founded in 1880, the Hungarian Social Democratic Workers’ Party always included a good number of Jews, especially among its intellectuals. Even in the antisemitic interwar period, the party kept an amazing number of Jews in its higher ranks, including that of parliamentary deputies. In June 1948, the Social Democratic party lost its independence through its enforced unification with the Communist party. 31. Cited in Krisztiań Ungva´ry, “E´rtelmise´g e´s antiszemita ko¨zbesze´d” Besze´lo˝ 6 (2001); also posted at htpp://beszelo.c3.hu/01/06/09ungvary.htm (p. 8). 32. On the postwar purges, see La´szlo´ Karsai, “The People’s Courts and Revolutionary Justice in Hungary, 1945–46,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. Istvań Dea´k, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton: 2000), 233–251, and Istvań Dea´k, “A Fatal Compromise? The Debate Over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary,” in ibid., 39–73. 33. Karsai, “The People’s Courts and Revolutionary Justice in Hungary,” 233. 34. On the history of the speculations regarding the “ugly Jewish Ra´kosi against the handsome non-Jewish Rajk,” see especially Szabo´, A kommunista pa´rt e´s a zsido´sa´g, 230. 35. Kontler, A History of Hungary, 412. 36. François Fejto, Les Juifs et l’antise´mitisme dans les pays communists (Paris: 1960), 94. 37. On the persecution of the Hungarian Zionists and community leaders, see Szabo´, A kommunista pa´rt e´s a zsido´sa´g, 199–251. 38. Quoted in Tama´s Acze´l and Tibor Me´ray, The Revolt of the Mind: A Case History of Intellectual Resistance Behind the Iron Curtain (London: 1960), 159. Note that Acze´l and Me´ray were foremost Stalinist journalists at that time of the Moscow meeting, meaning that they may have had precise information on the events. Soon thereafter, they joined Nagy in opposing Ra´kosi. In 1956, Acze´l and Me´ray participated in the revolution; thereafter both fled to the West. Incidentally, Ra´kosi knew very well that there were too many Jews in the party leadership. He recounts in his memoirs, written in exile in the Soviet Union following the 1956 revolution, that, back in Moscow in 1944, Georgi Dimitrov advised him to put the non-Jewish Nagy in the provisional Hungarian democratic government, and to employ the Jewish comrades Gero˝, Re´vai, Farkas, and Vas “in such positions where their knowledge can be used without their having to come into contact with the broad masses.” See Ra´kosi, Visszaemle´keze´sek, 2:925. Considering the highly conspicuous roles that Gero˝, Re´vai, Farkas, and Vas played in Hungarian affairs from 1945 to 1956 and beyond, it does not seem that Ra´kosi followed Dimitrov’s advice. In the thousand printed pages of his memoirs, Ra´kosi never mentions that he, too, was born a Jew. 39. On the role of the intellectuals in the turbulent events of 1956, see E´va Standeisky, Az ´ıro´k e´s a hatalom 1956–1963 (The writers and state power) (Budapest: 1996). For a review essay on the subject, see Istvań Dea´k, “On the Leash (E´va Standeisky),” The Hungarian Quarterly 40 (Winter 1999), 54–63. The only drawback of this very fine book is that not even Standeisky could bring herself to give the Jewish part of the issue the attention it deserves. 40. The revolution of 1956 boasts an enormous literature. The following is an excellent


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summary, reflecting the more recent state of research on the subject: Gyo¨rgy Litvań (ed.), The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression, 1953–1963, ed. and trans. Jańos M. Bak and Lyman H. Legters (London: 1996). 41. Standeisky, Az ´ıro´k e´s a hatalom, 34. After 1956, Zelk was imprisoned for “counterrevolutionary activities.” 42. There are quite a few writings on how and when assimilated young Jews in Hungary learned from their parents of their Jewish origin; see, for instance, Ferenc Ero˝s, Andra´s Kovaćs, and Katalin Le´vai, “Hogyan jo¨ttem ra´, hogy zsido´ vagyok?” (How I found out that I was a Jew), Medvetańc nos. 2–3 (1985).

The Yiddish-Language Communist Press Gennady Estraikh new york university

The history of Yiddish socialist newspapers and other periodicals, and especially their cultural politics and linguistic peculiarities, represents a field of study that continues to attract scholars working in various countries.1 The origins of the Yiddish socialist press can be traced back to the early 1880s. However, it emerged in its Bolshevik variant only after 1917, simply because the party of Lenin never bothered to produce Yiddish periodicals in its pre-October period.2 Similarly, “Yiddish Communism” emerged as a distinct phenomenon only in early Soviet Russia, where it was controlled by Byzantine bureaucracies that were divided into institutions with “newspeak”-abbreviated names. The “Jewish sections” of the Communist party were the best known and most lasting of these institutions, and their abridged name in Russian, Evsektsii (or Evsektsiia, in the singular form), became a byword for Communist activities related to Jews.3 The very establishment of the Evsektsiia was something of an anomaly for a political movement whose leaders had always argued that the Jews did not constitute a nation. According to Stalin, the Bolsheviks’ main authority on nationalities problems, the Jews could not claim national status because, inter alia, they lacked a common territory and a common language. After the October revolution, however, the Bolsheviks changed course, accepting as “a historical fact” that the Jews formed a constituency with its own specific linguistic, cultural, and social characteristics.4 In the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), 1921–1927, the party adopted nation-building as a key component in its policy of “socialist construction.” In consequence, it designated appropriate regions for the Soviet Jewish nation-inthe-making in the European part of the country. This policy in its more extreme form even took on something of a “territorialist” dimension, most notably in the southeastern part of Ukraine and in the Crimea.5 Ultimately, however, in the postNEP years, the Soviet government selected for this purpose an underpopulated territory in the easternmost section of the country, which from the late 1920s began to be called Birobidzhan. Assimilated Russian-speaking intellectuals and semi-intellectuals predominated among the Jewish Bolsheviks prior to 1917. They usually could not be involved in Yiddish propagandist activities (nor did they wish to be), and the Soviet Jewish institutions therefore had no choice but to recruit people of many different back62

The Yiddish-Language Communist Press

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grounds, including recent political opponents. After all, in hunger-stricken Petrograd and Moscow, Yiddish literati could be “bought for a few pounds of millet and vobla.”6 Yiddishism, the elevation of Yiddish to the status of the (or at least a) Jewish national language, was the elixir that facilitated the apostates’ transfer of allegiance from various other kinds of socialism to Communism. By adjusting their ideological outlook and absorbing the Communist idiom, they could preserve much of their pre-Communist (that is, Bundist, socialist Zionist, or Territorialist) Yiddishist outlook. Many of them jumped on the bandwagon of the Communist movement because of the hope that it held out for the development of Yiddish culture. Contemporaries even noted who among the new Bolshevik recruits was motivated by such Yiddishist considerations.7 The first Yiddish-language Communist newspaper, the daily Di varhayt (Truth), emerged in Petrograd on March 8, 1918 as the organ of the People’s Commissariat for Jewish Affairs in Lenin’s government, and was sporadically published until May 1918. Its name reflected that of the flagship Bolshevik newspaper Pravda (Truth) and at the same time mirrored the penchant of the Jewish socialists for German sound-alike names. (Hence, for instance, the name of the famous New York socialist daily, Forverts [Forward], which copied the German Vorwa¨rts.) Following its premature closure due to both the lack of pro-Communist Yiddish journalists at the time and the Commissariat’s move from Petrograd to the new Soviet capital, Moscow, the paper was resuscitated in August 1918 under the synonymous but more idiomatic name Der emes. The head of the Jewish Commissariat, a veteran Bolshevik named Shimon Dimanshtein, succeeded in recruiting a few non-Communist journalists, who (in all but name) edited Der emes until February 1919. At the close of 1918, however, Dimanshtein was transferred to Vilna, where he served as a commissar in the short-lived Lithuanian-Belarusian republic. As a result, Der emes found itself deprived of its ideological head and was once again phased out. Not until November 7, 1920 (the third anniversary of the revolution) was it relaunched; this time, it remained in print until 1938, becoming the trend-setting Yiddish Communist daily.8 During the Civil War (1918–1920), local Yiddish Communist publications would appear and soon disappear, depending on the fortunes of the Red Army and the availability of printing facilities, paper, and journalists. The editors did not show interest in finding original names for their ephemeral publications, calling them Der komunist (The Communist), Der yidisher komunist (The Jewish Communist), Der komunistisher veg (The Communist way), or Di komunistishe shtim (The Communist voice).9 A spartan look prevailed: the Kharkov-based Komunist was printed on blue wrapping paper previously used for packing sugar; the Gomel Komunistisher veg made use of grey wrapping paper; and the Odessa Komunist shtim utilized old postal wrappers. The story of Der shtern (The star), which would develop into one of the most significant Yiddish-language Soviet newspapers, is representative of the Yiddish Communist press in the early years. Der shtern’s first issue appeared in Smolensk on November 7, 1918. Zalman Khaykin, the paper’s editor, publisher, writer, and proofreader, was killed fighting in Vilna a few months later. In December 1918, when Minsk came under Soviet control, Der shtern reemerged there, only to be

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moved to Vilna in March 1919. Two months later, following Vilna’s occupation by the Polish army, the newspaper returned to Minsk. Not long afterwards, however, that city was also seized by the Poles, and Der shtern was evacuated to Vitebsk, where it was published until the end of July 1920. At that time it again returned to Minsk, which was once more in the hands of the Red Army. In April 1921, Der shtern merged with another Yiddish paper in Minsk, Der veker (The tocsin), after the latter—hitherto a Bundist newspaper—had reinvented itself as the central organ of the Jewish Communist movement in Belarus. Finally, in 1924, Der shtern was renamed Oktyabr (October) and remained publishing under this name until June 1941.10 The most important Communist newspaper in Ukraine was also established on the basis of journals that were previously published by the various Jewish socialist parties. Komunistishe fon (The Communist banner) which appeared from 1919– 1924, was a product of the merger of two Bolshevized Kiev papers—the Fareynikte’s11 Naye tsayt (New time) and the Bund’s Folks-tsaytung (People’s paper). Under its new name, it became the main organ of the Ukrainian Communist party’s Jewish section. Since the Yiddish-language press was a central link in the so-called yidarbet (yidishe arbet, or Jewish work/activities) of the Communist party, it is not surprising that the Moscow School of Yiddish Printers, opened in 1922, was one of the earliest educational institutions to be founded under the aegis of the Evsektsiia. The younger generation of Yiddish journalists was trained for the most part in Yiddishspeaking university departments, teacher training colleges, and party schools opened in Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Vitebsk, Gomel, and a few other towns. Yet Soviet Yiddish periodicals targeted primarily the less assimilated cohorts of the Jewish population that could not, or would not, consume propaganda in Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian. Significantly, yidarbet shunned non-Yiddishspeaking Jews. Moyshe Kamenshteyn, an apparatchik of the yidarbet, argued that if Soviet Jewish institutions were to organize any activities in Russian, Ukrainian, or other non-Jewish languages, they would essentially be disseminating a “culture national in form and in content alike”—in other words, a “nationalist culture.”12 There were two schools of thought in the Soviet Yiddish press regarding the task of the yidarbet. The “internationalists,” many of whom came from the Bund, regarded Yiddish primarily as a means for conducting Communist propaganda, and were therefore inclined to use the most understandable, colloquial forms of the language rather than to employ sophisticated neologisms. In contrast, the “nationbuilders,” led by former members of the other Jewish socialist parties (Territorialists, Folkists, and Zionists) believed that a more literary form of Yiddish should be promoted, setting a standard to which the readership would gradually rise. Moyshe Litvakov, editor of Der emes and formerly a Territorialist, was a central figure among this latter group. The editors of many other papers disagreed with Litvakov’s purist approach, arguing that their readers simply could not understand the highbrow language of Der emes. In the end, however, the purist approach (albeit falling somewhat short of Litvakov’s degree of stringency) prevailed. Apart from introducing numerous new coinages, the attempts to improve Yiddish in the Soviet spirit included respelling words of Hebrew origin and abolishing


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word-final allographs.13 But apart from radical innovations in spelling, Yiddish Communist journalism also came to be marked by extreme political correctness, as was de rigueur for Soviet journalism in general. This was especially the case once the “Great Break” (velikii perelom)—superaccelerated industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture—had been initiated in 1928. Thus, an article called “On a Slippery Road,” published in 1930 in the Kharkov-based daily Der shtern, criticized the provincial newspaper Der odeser arbeter (The Odessa worker) for publishing 3,214 lines about the guest performances of the Moscow Jewish State Theatre, whereas only 2,967 lines had been allotted to materials concerning the congresses of the Communist parties of Ukraine and the Soviet Union.14 The result of such political correctness was dull and derivative writing that drove away many readers. Yet the number of Yiddish periodicals, all of them state-sponsored, was considerable. Seventeen titles with a total circulation of almost 150,000 represented only the most important Soviet Yiddish newspapers published, for example, in 1931. Various institutions, including factories and collective farms with large numbers of Yiddish-speaking workers, also published Yiddish newspapers. For instance, the factory newspaper Shtolene nodl (Steel needle) of the Tiniakov clothing factory in Kharkov had a readership of about 1,500. Smaller organizations, such as schools, produced “wall newspapers” that were usually single-copy, handwritten publications; in 1927, there were 319 Yiddish wall newspapers in Ukraine alone.15 In the 1920s, Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine, became the hub of the Soviet Yiddish press. Thus, for example, in November 1923, the central Yiddish newspaper of the Ukrainian Komsomol, Der yunger arbeter (The young worker), was launched there (in 1924, its name was changed to Yunge gvardye [Young guard], presumably because the previous name was reserved for a Minsk-based sister publication). In that same year, Kharkov also became the home of the daily newspaper published by the Jewish Communists of Ukraine; named Der shtern, it replaced the Kommunistishe fon, which, as noted, had been published in Kiev. Over the next few years, several other Yiddish newspapers came out in Kharkov: Der yidisher poyer (The Jewish peasant), in 1926; Der kustar (The artisan), in 1927; the children’s paper Zay greyt (Be ready), in 1928; and the pedagogical monthly Ratnbildung (Soviet education) in that same year. By 1930, Kharkov had nine Yiddish periodicals and two literary journals, Di royte velt (The red world) and Prolit (Pro[letarian] lit[erature]).16 All Yiddish newspapers took part in the “worker-correspondent” movement, which, as initiated by the Communist party, was aimed at drawing newspapers closer to their readership. The Komunistishe fon organized the first group of such correspondents writing in Yiddish in 1922. This campaign (in which the Yiddish component was actually very minor) would eventually recruit millions of people and would also serve as a model for the Communist press outside the Soviet Union. In 1934, during the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress, Stalin mentioned the three million worker and peasant correspondents as comprising the third most important leadership sector in the Soviet Union (following the party and Komsomol memberships).17 Among the huge numbers thus brought into the literary profession, there were, of course, many of little talent. Litvakov was one of the first who

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was alarmed by this phenomenon. He regarded the way in which the workercorrespondent movement had developed as a perversion of the original idea: instead of trained reporters, it tended to produce graphomaniac literary hopefuls. And, indeed, the promotion of vigilante third-raters, whose careers had originated in the worker-correspondent movement, increasingly became part and parcel of Soviet journalistic and literary life.18 Some of the Soviet Yiddish periodicals were discontinued in the late 1930s. Der emes, as noted, was closed in 1938; its editor, Litvakov, as well as several other Yiddish journalists stationed in Moscow and in the provinces, were then executed or, in some cases, banished to the gulag. Yet, on the whole, the Soviet Yiddish press survived until the German invasion of June 1941. Moreover, on the eve of the war, a few new periodicals were launched on the territories occupied by the Red Army following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939: in Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Bialystok, and Lviv. However, during and after the war, Eynikeyt (Unity, 1942– 1948) remained the only significant Yiddish newspaper published in the Soviet Union. As the organ of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, its main function as envisaged by the authorities was to publish articles that could be used, or even reproduced, by the foreign press—in particular, by the Jewish Communist journals.

Yiddish Communist Periodicals and the Comintern In the 1920s and 1930s, millions of people, including a considerable number of Jews outside Russia, revered Moscow as the future capital of a just and democratic civilization. Yiddish Communism formed a distinct subculture in the international Communist movement, being overseen, in one way or another, by the apparatus of the Comintern, the Communist International. However, Yiddish-speaking Communists abroad did not constitute a separate constituent body, but were rather scattered as members of various national parties, most notably those in the United States, Canada, Argentina, France, Poland, Palestine, Belgium, Austria, Uruguay, and Romania. Yet regardless of their country of domicile, the Communists of East European Jewish vintage represented a relatively homogeneous group of people who were devoted to the Soviet Union—that faraway proletarian fatherland, which also held nostalgic significance as the alte heym (old home). Through the blur of distance, time, and utopian expectations, the Soviet Union became a dreamland of freedom and equality. Many Jewish Communists went so far as to regard themselves as “Soviet foreigners,” to borrow a term provided by Hirsh Bloshtein, an Argentinian and later Soviet Yiddish poet.19 Ironically, although Yiddishism had been condemned by the Bolsheviks as a mainstay of Jewish nationalism, it was in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s that many a Yiddishist dream seemed to be coming true, particularly when the Soviet government initiated Jewish territorial projects. Despite its less than modest achievements, Birobidzhan became the alluring symbol, during the 1930s, of a successful solution to the Jewish question. In various countries—in addition to those previously mentioned, one can add Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Latvia, Lithuania, South Africa, and Sweden—the Com-


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munists created organizations that were meant to supply a Soviet answer to the Zionist colonization of Palestine.20 In some instances, such bodies even had the same name as the Soviet mother organization, the Association for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land (Gezerd, in its Yiddish abbreviation).21 Thus, the Gezerd in South Africa, founded by a group of pro-Soviet Yiddishists, published the monthly journal Gezerdvort (The word of the Gezerd), appealing to its readers “to shake off the harmful and illusory dream of establishing a ‘National Home’ in Palestine through an alliance with British imperialism.”22 Birobidzhan, together with other aspects of Soviet Jewish life, was among the central topics discussed in the Communist Jewish press. In contrast to the predominantly anti-Soviet stance of the Russian e´migre´ intelligentsia, pro-Soviet Yiddish writers and journalists represented a sizable part of the international world of Yiddish letters, and Communist Yiddish periodicals became centers of gravitation for pro-Soviet intellectuals. Argentina was a prime example. In 1919, a group of left-wing Jewish Argentinians had accepted the Comintern program, and on November 7, 1923—the sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution—the Jewish Communists launched their own newspaper, Der royter shtern (The red star). Another Yiddish-language Communist journal in Argentina, Der yidisher poyer, focused specifically on Jewish agricultural projects in the Soviet Union.23 Similar trends could be observed in other Latin American countries. Thus, for example, in Uruguay, the newspaper Undzer fraynd (Our friend) was provided with support by the Soviet embassy and edited by Ber Halpern, later a Soviet writer.24 Poland, for its part, attracted many writers and journalists who were previously active in revolutionary Russia. Particularly conspicuous was the poet Perets Markish, who lived in Poland in the first half of the 1920s and embodied the iconoclasm of Russia’s Jewish literary world. Significantly, he did not leave Russia as a counterrevolutionary, but merely argued that the revolution had liberated only select strata within Soviet society. As a contributor to Albatros, the Warsaw “journal for new poetic and artistic expression,” Markish adhered to the group’s manifesto, which stated that its sponsors had departed the land of the revolution temporarily, in expectation of the day when the entire population would enjoy freedom.25 In the meantime, Markish exerted a clear influence on the pro-Soviet writers who later formed the Linke shrayber-grupe (The Left writers’ group) and published the Literarishe tribune (The literary tribune) from 1931 to 1935. (Markish himself chose to return to the Soviet Union in 1926.) With many Communist parties outlawed in interwar East-Central Europe, it was not unusual to find Yiddish periodicals being published illegally. In Lithuania, the underground monthly Undzer emes (Our truth) had a circulation of 3,000. The Communists of Western Belarus (that is, in Poland) printed 2,000 copies of Yunger komunist (Young Communist) and a few thousand copies of Bolshevik. Illegal small-circulation papers in Yiddish were likewise published by the young Communists in Latvia.26 In 1934, a legally published pro-Soviet newspaper, Fraynd, began to appear in Warsaw. Published by Boris Kletzkin, one of the best-known and most respected members of the Yiddish publishing world, Fraynd was actually sponsored by the

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underground Polish Communist party. Dovid Sfard served as the party’s representative on the paper, empowered to prescribe what Frayd could and could not publish. Alter Katsizne served as editor, and among the contributors were notable writers such as Kadie Molodowsky and Dovid Mitsmakher. In addition, Khaim Grade and Elkhonen Vogler, who belonged to the literary group Yung Vilne (Young Vilna)—which included both Communists and fellow travelers among its members—published some of their first works in Fraynd. The newspaper also began to put together a network of worker-correspondents. After a mere 11 months of existence, however, Fraynd was banned, the police having uncovered its Communist links.27 The contemporary Israeli Yiddish writer Musia Landau recalls how her father, a typesetter at Kletzkin’s Vilna publishing house, was involved in the production of a similar Communist-sponsored newspaper, Zibn teg (Seven days), in the spring of 1936.28 The strongest and most numerous circle of pro-Soviet Yiddish writers emerged in the United States. At the Comintern headquarters in Moscow, it was understood that the American Jewish Left could provide fertile soil for pro-Communist recruitment. In consequence, a number of agents, selected from among the revolutionaries who had returned to Russia after the February revolution of 1917, were sent back to the United States to work in this field. A conspicuous example was the former Bundist Shakhne Epstein, who had served briefly as the editor of Der emes in Moscow when it was relaunched in 1920. In the summer of 1921, he arrived in New York to set up Der emes, the precursor of the longest-running Yiddish Communist newspaper, Frayheyt (later Morgn-frayheyt), founded in April 1922.29 Epstein edited Frayheyt together with Moyshe Olgin, who turned from Bundism to Communism in the wake of his journey to Moscow in 1920.30 Both men were established Marxist literary critics, and they envisaged their paper as a forum for the most trenchant Yiddish writing of their time, thereby continuing the tradition of earlier Jewish socialist organs with strong belletristic sections. With his doctorate in Russian literature from Columbia University, Olgin was a rare phenomenon within the Yiddish critical guild, dominated as it was by autodidacts. Morris Winchevsky, the legendary Yiddish journalist and sweatshop poet, was also among the founders of Frayheyt. As early as 1884, he had edited in London Der poylisher yidl (The humble Polish Jew), arguably the first socialist journal in Yiddish. His contribution to the international (pro-Communist) labor movement won him a Soviet state pension and a red carpet reception during his visit to the Soviet Union in May 1925. In the left-wing mythology, he was regarded as the “grandfather” of Yiddish worker poetry, his reputation parallel to that of Mendele Moykher Sforim in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature.31 Frayheyt also recruited such popular writers as Avrom Reisen, H. Leivick, Isaac Raboy, Lamed Shapiro, Menakhem Boreisha, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Moyshe Nadir, and Dovid Bergelson. Nadir later recollected how he and Halpern moved toward Communism: “Look,” we tried to convince each other, “a new newspaper, a poor one, with no money. It will perhaps attract the most original writers. In that case,” we decided, “it is our duty to join the paper.” M.-L. Halpern hesitated a while. I immediately became a Frayheyt staff member.32


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Some of “the most original writers” did indeed join the Frayheyt, but, for the most part, only a few years later. Avrom Reisen, for instance, did not become a Frayheyt writer until 1926, following the celebration of his 50th birthday by the paper and the successful negotiation of several financial issues.33 With such a galaxy of literary lions, the Frayheyt editors did not pay much attention to young aspirants, mainly recent immigrants, who combined toil in the sweatshops with literary efforts. Desperate to find an outlet for their writings, the latter eventually founded their own publication, called Yung kuznye (The young smithy), which was initiated by Alexander Pomerantz, Shloyme Davidman, and Khaim Pet. The first number of this “literary almanac” (literarishe zamlbukh) was published in August 1924, and its 1,500 copies were almost immediately sold out. Four issues followed soon thereafter and established Yung kuznye as the first notable Communist literary periodical in the world. From the third issue, the editors naturalized the spelling used in the journal, applying the same phonetic and morphological rules to all words, most notably those of Hebrew origin. This spelling had earlier been introduced both by a group of American avant-garde poets known as the Introspectivists and by Soviet Yiddish reformers. While the Introspectivists’ respelling was essentially a poetic jeu d’esprit, the Soviet reform pursued ideological and practical ends. The “young smiths” were apparently likewise motivated by ideological considerations, similar to those summarized by Yekhiel Shraibman, a Romanian-based left-wing writer who made his debut in the 1930s in the New York journal Signal, a successor to Yung kuznye: the word khaver [comrade/friend] written with a “khof,” an “alef” and a doubled “vov” [i.e. phonetically] set my fancy in flight. . . . From this erroneous unusual khaver came the breath of unlikeness and renewal. . . . In a sense, this new khaver epitomized both justice and romantic visions.34

Naturalized spelling was never implemented in the large-circulation Frayheyt nor in the books published under its imprint. Rather, it would remain the trademark of proletarian publications aimed at a specific, well-defined audience—notably the very low-budget publications put out by proletarian youth, who felt that they could not jostle their way in among the established writers. At the end of 1926, a number of young Yiddish writers began to publish a new journal, Yugnt (Youth). At about this time, the American Communist party reformed its organizational structure in accordance with new Comintern directives: all of the ethnic federations (English, Jewish, Russian, German, Finnish, and others), which had hitherto enjoyed a dominant position within the party, were replaced by factory and district cells. Each of these numbered 15 to 20 party members of various nationalities, and they conducted their activities in English. This move, billed as the “Bolshevization of the party,” clearly threatened to overthrow many of the Communist-affiliated cultural programs. A way out was found in “workers clubs”— Communist front organizations—which included a number of Yiddish-speaking organizations. Yugnt represented an attempt to recruit readers from among the workers clubs. However, after publishing only four issues, the journal was phased out because of insoluble financial problems. In the meantime, Pomerantz and his fellow

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writers were given an assignment by the party to organize a U.S.-based workercorrespondent movement; as Pomerantz later had to admit, he and his colleagues failed signally to replicate the success achieved by the Soviet precedent.35 The climate in Yiddish literature had ominously changed by the late 1920s, the years of the “Great Break.” In its wake, Soviet Jewish functionaries significantly raised the barriers between the Soviet and non-Communist Western literary milieus. Relations with the more moderate wing of the Jewish Left in the West were rendered even more confrontational following the Arab riots in Palestine in the summer of 1929, when the Soviet Union sided with the Arabs and blamed the Zionists—a political stance that led a number of writers, including Avrom Reisen and H. Leivik, to cut their ties with the Frayheyt. In fact, the party’s relations with its fellow travelers had begun to deteriorate from the very start of 1929, when Olgin, carrying out an order from the party, called a meeting of the fully committed Communist writers and journalists of the Frayheyt without inviting the fellow travelers. (Ironically, in his pre-First World War publications, Olgin—himself a minor prose writer—had categorically rejected the notion of a narrowly proletarian literature containing “only battle songs, military marches, and the popularization of economic and social issues.”36 By the mid1920s, however, he had converted himself into an advocate of proletarian literature and even published his own proletarian novel.37) At the meeting, Olgin argued that the Communist paper could no longer rely on petty-bourgeois writers such as Reisen but rather needed contributors who would write “with swords in their hands.” Accordingly, participants were instructed to form the Frayheyt Writers Association, which in September 1929 became known as Proletpen, in contradistinction to the Yiddish PEN club, which advocated nonpartisanship in Yiddish literature.38 Proletpen went on to become the largest Yiddish Communist writers’ organization outside the Soviet Union. Its effective center was in Moscow, at the headquarters of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW), the literary arm of the Comintern.39 On September 14, 1929, Moyshe Nadir published an open letter to the “runaways”—those, like Reisen and Leivik, who had left the Frayheyt—in which he took up the cudgels against them, announcing that he himself intended to become a card-carrying member of the party. Although some of those castigated by Nadir eventually returned to the paper, the Communist Yiddish literary world in America was generally populated, from 1929 on, by its own cohort of writers who were entirely cut off from non-Communist literary circles. The stratum of Jewry associated with the movement was rather narrow, numbering about 40,000 in 1934, with only a few thousand card-carrying Communists among them. The others were “sympathizers,” members of front organizations such as the International Workers Order or the Workers Musical Alliance. These sympathizers generously supported the Frayheyt; in 1934, for instance, they collected some $60,000 for the paper. However, party leaders were worried that many workers who donated money did not actually read the Frayheyt.40 The mission of the Communist writers and journalists was declared to be the production of high-quality reading material. In April 1934, Be´la Kun, a Comintern leader, instructed Communist editors to publish “full newspapers” that would satisfy


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all of their readers’ interests, diverting them from any temptation to read the bourgeois press.41 For their part, members of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers were required to support all the policies and programs of the Soviet regime.42 In 1935, during the (pro-Soviet) American Writers’ Congress, Nadir spoke as the representative of Yiddish writers, arguing that American proletarian writers “love[d] America as one of the most beautiful flowers in the bouquet of the world Soviets of tomorrow.”43 Four years later, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nadir, together with a few other writers, left the Frayheyt in protest. At that point, Leivick, too, broke off relations with the Communist movement, with which he had again chosen to collaborate in the framework of the World Alliance of Jewish Culture (a product of the World Yiddish Cultural Congress held in Paris in September 1937).44 However, the Comintern was powerful enough to force its more loyal Jewish groups to praise the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Although the Kremlin pressure demoralized some Jewish Communists to the extent that they left the party, the vast majority remained, and new members continued to join them. During the Spanish Civil War, about 15 percent of the soldiers in the International Brigades were Jewish, many of them Communists. In December 1937, a Jewish company named “Botwin” after the young Polish Jewish Communist Naftali Botwin, executed in Poland in 1925, was formed within the 13th Polish Dombrowski Brigade. The company produced a few issues of a Yiddish fronttsaytung (front-line newspaper), Botvin.45

The Progressive Camp Despite losing millions of speakers in the Holocaust, Yiddish continued to be a living language in all Ashkenazic Jewish communities even after the Second World War. In the mid-1950s, almost a quarter of all Jewish periodicals published outside Israel were in Yiddish, including all of the 12 Jewish dailies, whereas all the efforts to publish a Jewish daily in English (in London), in Spanish (in Buenos Aires) or in German (in Vienna) had ended in failure.46 The sacrificial role of the Red Army (and the Soviet Union as a whole) during the course of the Nazi invasion had served to enhance the Communist movement’s image in the postwar world generally, and in several Western countries—in particular, the United States, Canada, France, Argentina, and Israel. Yiddish Communist periodicals still boasted a readership of many thousands. On the one hand, these journals cultivated in their readers an aversion to the capitalist system; on the other, they promoted an outlook that combined pro-Sovietism with adherence to secular Yiddish culture. The largest among the Communist dailies remained the New York Morgnfrayheyt (Morning freedom); the Frayheyt had assumed this double-barreled name in June 1927, when it began to appear in the morning rather than in the afternoon. In 1947, the circulation of Morgn-frayheyt was 21,000, roughly the same as the circulation of the American Communist English-language daily, Daily Worker.47 (The most popular Yiddish daily in the United States was, of course, the Forverts, but this paper was politically objectionable in the eyes of Frayheyt readers. Not only did the Forverts symbolize an attenuated, “reformist” socialism, but it also

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held to a cultural program of Americanization and popular mass culture that the Frayheyt rejected.) Other Communist Yiddish dailies with significant readerships included the Naye prese (New press), in Paris; Kanader vokhnblat (Canadian weekly), in Toronto; and Undzer lebn (Our life), in Buenos Aires. In Tel Aviv, the Israeli Communists published a weekly called Fray yisroel (Free Israel). Elsewhere, a few publications, such as the Johannesburg journal Dorem afrike (South Africa), which came out during the years 1947–1989, were strongly influenced by Communist sympathizers, some of whom—ironically—were wealthy businessmen.48 The Yiddish press in the Soviet bloc, apart from Poland, entered a near-comatose state in the wake of the anti-Jewish policies initiated by Stalin in the period 1948– 1953. In Warsaw, though, the Folks-shtime (People’s voice), launched in 1945, was published four times a week, while the monthly journal Yidishe shriftn (Jewish writings), published there between 1946 and 1968, became a forum for literary publications. In marked contrast, only one Yiddish periodical remained in the Soviet Union in the wake of the anti-Jewish policies that had swept away virtually all the remaining Jewish cultural institutions: the Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan star), a newspaper published for local distribution only. The Jews of Romania found themselves deprived of any official Jewish organ when the three Jewish periodicals (in Yiddish, Romanian, and Hungarian, respectively) were discontinued in 1953. Three years later, however, a trilingual journal— in Romanian, Yiddish, and Hebrew—called Revista Cultului Mozaic din R. P. R. (Journal of the Mosaic religion in the Romanian People’s Republic), began to appear in Bucharest as a monthly and, later, as a biweekly. Interestingly, while the earlier journal in Yiddish, the IKUF-Bleter (1946–1953) had been a secular, Stalinist periodical, employing a Soviet-style orthography, the new journal’s Yiddish section reverted to traditional spelling. The journal was edited by Romania’s controversial chief rabbi, Moses Rosen, who somehow succeeded in paying dues to both God and Caesar.49 Despite such highly disturbing signs as the disappearance both of the Moscow Yiddish newspaper Eynikeyt and of the organization that published it, the Jewish Antifascist Committee, Communists in the West showed a remarkable capacity for ignoring the various signs indicating anti-Jewish policies in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Soviet propaganda machine kept feeding the West with news of Jewish life in the country, denying all rumors concerning the arrests of Yiddish writers and activists. The propagandist smokescreen was finally dispersed in April 1956, when the Warsaw Folks-shtime published a sensational article titled “Our Pain and Our Consolation,” written by its editor, Hersh Smolyar. This article confirmed the information, leaked earlier to the Forverts, about the execution of a group of prominent Soviet Yiddish writers and other Jewish public figures in August 1952.50 The news that Stalin’s secret police had imprisoned and later executed such writers as Dovid Bergelson, Perets Markish, and Itsik Fefer, who were very well known outside the Soviet Union, dealt a heavy blow to the Yiddish Communist circles abroad, especially as Nikita Krushchev’s revelations about the Stalinist regime had already provoked a general crisis in the international Communist movement. Only a minority of Jewish Communists succeeded in clinging to their faith,


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whereas many thousands left the movement. Those who remained tended to become more open-minded in their assessment of Soviet policy, especially as the realities of life in the U.S.S.R. were increasingly revealed as being at odds with their personal Communist beliefs. Ideologically they often evolved from a Communism subordinated to the Kremlin to a kind of “back-to-basics” Marxism-Leninism, eventually creating a peculiar hybrid of Left yidishkeyt and Euro-Communism.51 Some of them were ultimately forced to leave their respective parties, which in many cases continued to follow the Kremlin’s lead. For instance, Paul (Peysekh) Novick, the editor of the Morgnfrayheyt, was expelled in 1972, charged with “opportunistic capitulation to the pressures of Jewish nationalism and Zionism,”52 whereas Joshua Gershman, who edited the Kanader vokhnblat, was given the opportunity to resign rather than be expelled.53 The circles of Novick, Gershman, and other such drop-outs from the Communist party tended to define themselves as constituting part of the “progressive movement.” The idea of a “progressive” secular Yiddish culture was originally formulated by Moyshe Olgin in 1937, during the World Yiddish Cultural Congress in Paris.54 A decade later, in November 1947, the American Yiddish Cultural Conference, paraphrasing Olgin’s definition, declared that such a culture consisted of “all those aspects of the collective Jewish life that express the positive, forward-looking aspirations of the Jewish people,” and that it should serve the people “in the struggle to achieve for itself the full rights and opportunities that should be accorded all Americans.” The conference, with its openly pro-Soviet orientation, attracted 1,200 delegates, representing numerous front organizations. Among those in the conference’s organizing committee were the artist Marc Chagall and the best-selling Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch.55 While Chagall was a veteran of the Left, Asch’s collaboration with Communists was probably to be seen as more of a marriage of convenience: in 1943, Morgn-frayheyt had serialized his controversial novel The Nazarene, which came out in book form later that year under the imprint of the Communist daily.56 The rather loose notion of progressive culture became the main tenet of the Yiddish ex-Communist (and heterodox Communist) movement. The progressives asserted their autonomy from the Communist parties and protected it jealously. It is illuminating, for instance, that Khaim Suler, who wrote for the Morgn-frayheyt, chose to protest in 1970 against a Bundist publication that had written in contemporary terms about Communist Jewish sections and their journals. According to Suler, there were no longer any Jewish Communist “sections.”57 In reality, though, some of the progressives did remain card-carrying members of the party, and both the party and the progressive leaderships accepted such a dual loyalty. Following the line of “critical Sovietism,” the progressives basically supported the Soviet Union, the great country of Lenin, where Jews enjoyed unique opportunities for social and cultural advancement. Thus, Paul Novick rejected “the wrong, harmful slogan of ‘Soviet anti-semitism’ [as] a slogan of reaction.” Although he was ready to admit some “manifestations of anti-Semitism” in the Soviet Union, he ascribed them, at least partly, to the legacy of the war, when the hostility toward Jews had been inflamed by the racial theories of Nazi Germany.58 Regarding the Soviet

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Union, Novick and other progressives reserved their criticism for Stalinism (or anything they regarded as Stalinism) and other “deviations from Leninism.” In the years following 1956, the Jewish Communists and progressives in the West brought constant pressure to bear on the Soviet leadership, insisting that the ban on Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union be lifted. Representatives of several Western Communist parties, then visiting Moscow, tried to convince the Soviet authorities that Yiddish cultural and educational activities should be revived on a significant scale, at least comparable to the level maintained in postwar Poland. For Jewish Communists, Poland came to be seen as a praiseworthy model (nusekh Poyln) of self-governing socialist Jewish life, with its Yiddish cultural, educational, publishing, and even economic institutions (specifically, co-operatives). Optimists saw all this as a framework conducive to Jewish national survival. Khrushchev and his fellow leaders, however, remained suspicious of all forms of nonterritorial Jewish activity, insisting that only in Birobidzhan could the Jewish population be regarded as a national community within the Soviet Union. Elsewhere in the country, he argued, Jews should be treated “like all other Soviet citizens.” Members of the state and party apparatus during both the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras dogmatically followed this Stalinist territorial principle, despite the fact that the Birobidzhan Jews represented less than 1 percent of all Soviet Jews.59 Ironically, in 1973, Brezhnev and other members of the Politburo were apparently surprised to learn that a Yiddish journal, edited by a certain Aron Vergelis, actually existed in Moscow. This “illogical” publication, Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland), had been established as an organ of the Soviet Writers’ Union in August 1961 in order to fulfill two main functions: first, to serve as a sop to those vociferous foreign activists, most notably Jewish Communists and fellow travelers, who were lobbying for a Jewish cultural revival in post-Stalinist Russia; and second, to disseminate Soviet propaganda, not only at home but, more particularly, among Yiddish-speaking left-wingers abroad. Thus, the journal immediately occupied the hitherto neglected Soviet Yiddish sector of the Cold War front, and its editor soon became a seasoned “cold warrior.”60

The Yiddish Cold War Although Soviet leaders later seemed to have forgotten about it, the initial appearance of Sovetish heymland was reported around the world. On August 26, 1961, the New York Times remarked that “the Yiddish language [has] won a round in the struggle with the Kremlin.” Such coverage for the launch of a Yiddish periodical was in all probability without precedent. Vergelis, for his part, became more widely known at the end of 1963, when he visited the United States as a member of a delegation of Soviet intellectuals. The British historian Max Beloff (prompted, it can be surmised, by Israeli officials) “welcomed” Vergelis to the West with a letter in the London Jewish Chronicle warning American Jews that Vergelis’ name was “associated in a circumstantial way with the purge of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia between 1948 and 1953” and that “Vergelis himself opposed the revival of Jewish literature after the end of the purge.”61 Furthermore, according to Israeli Communist


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sources, a special representative of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs went to the United States in order to organize a boycott against Vergelis.62 In 1964, Vergelis and Sovetish heymland again became newsworthy, this time in association with Bertrand Russell, whose letter to Vergelis voiced his concern about the Jews’ “right to a full cultural life in the Soviet Union.” In his reply, Vergelis pounced on the sad state of Yiddish culture in England and argued that the eminent philosopher was being exploited by enemies of the Soviet Union.63 That Russell was advised to address his letter to Vergelis demonstrates that the Moscow editor was regarded abroad as an influential personality. In the West there was a tradition of singling out a Yiddish editor who ostensibly voiced the general line of the Soviet leadership toward Jews and Jewish culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, the role of the panjandrum of the Soviet cultural world was ascribed to Moyshe Litvakov, editor of the Moscow Yiddish daily Der emes. Similarly, during the Brezhnev period, Vergelis was often mistaken for a powerful Jewish commissar who hobnobbed with high-ranking Soviet functionaries. No doubt, Vergelis himself skillfully overemphasized his importance, especially during his relatively frequent foreign tours. The Six-Day War was followed by the intensification of Jewish consciousness and support for Israel among a large number of Soviet Jews. Opposition to Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R. thus became a significant issue for the Yiddish journal in Moscow, as for the “agitprop” sectors of the Soviet regime generally. During the years 1967–1969, Sovetish heymland did not involve itself in any sharp political confrontations. Its declaration concerning the Six-Day War was milder than that published in the Warsaw Folks-shtime, whose editors tried to protect themselves from censure by the state apparatus.64 In the late 1960s, the Yiddish press in the West, including its “progressive” wing, was focused on the events in Poland where, in the wake of the Six-Day War, the government unleashed an anti-Jewish campaign, forcing the vast majority of the remaining Jews to leave the country. The Polish Communists’ antisemitism was a huge disappointment for the Jewish Communist and progressive circles. Characteristically, the Parisian Naye prese included in its 1970 manifesto a section “Against the Anti-Jewish Course in Poland,” counterbalancing it with another section titled “Against the Anti-Soviet and Anti-Communist Hysteria.”65 Toward the end of 1970, the death sentence initially imposed on a number of Jews who tried to hijack a Soviet plane in Leningrad in order to reach Israel aroused widespread support for the Soviet Jews. The reaction of the Soviet propaganda machine and its Yiddish auxiliary, Sovetish heymland, was not long in coming. On March 4, 1970, Vergelis took part in a highly publicized press conference concerning “problems associated with the situation in the Middle East.” The September issue of Sovetish heymland featured a statement authored by 59 Soviet Yiddish writers who sharply criticized Israel, appealing to their colleagues around the world to help establish peace between the Arab countries and the Jewish state. The progressive press abroad tended to share Vergelis’ (that is, the Soviet) position, “unmasking the dangerous anti-Soviet hysteria” around the Leningrad trial.66 To Novick, Soviet Jewish emigration was a devastating disappointment, “a tragic development for socialism.” He naively predicted that many of the emigrants would soon flee Israel, “where the worker face[d] a difficult struggle,” and return to the

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Soviet Union.67 At the same time, he from time to time criticized Soviet policy toward Yiddish culture. In 1971, the first split emerged between the progressives and Sovetish heymland when Vergelis criticized Morgn-frayheyt for its policy of conciliation with nonCommunist Yiddish journalists.68 Thereafter, year after year, the schism between progressivism and Soviet Communism widened. For Vergelis, the “progressives” were now renegades, the detritus of the Communist movement, and he never reached a reconciliation with the recalcitrant Morgn-frayheyt editors (the paper existed until September 1988). However, his relations with the circles of the Naye prese, Undzer lebn, and the Israeli Communist Der veg were much warmer. The Israeli journal was the only foreign Yiddish periodical distributed in the Soviet Union. At the same time, Vergelis kept a jealous eye on the Soviet Jewish writers who published (or sought to publish) their output in foreign periodicals. He had a strong dislike for the Warsaw Folks-shtime, which had a considerable number of Soviet readers who had managed to establish direct contact with its editorial staff, for example, by having Polish friends pay for their subscriptions. This Communist publication had a nonconformist reputation among Soviet Jews. A former Soviet Yiddish poet recalled that being published in the Paris-based Naye prese represented something of a “purification” from the “sin” of having published a piece in the Morgn-frayheyt or the Folks-shtime.69 After all, the Naye prese remained in the orbit of the French Communist movement; those who had left the movement in France subscribed to other publications.70 In February 1971, the first international conference in defense of Soviet Jews was held in Brussels. The conference was a reaction to Soviet restrictions and persecutions, most notably the Leningrad trial. Yiddishist groups played a minor role in this essentially Zionist forum, with the Bundists, for instance, criticizing the conference for its slogan of “Let my people go!” They argued that the Zionist campaign pursued evacuation rather than emigration, ignoring the right of Soviet Jews to go wherever they wanted (rather than to Israel alone) and rejecting any attempt to restore organized Jewish life in the Soviet Union.71 Vergelis was dispatched to Brussels to take part in a counter-propaganda press conference; simultaneously, the conference received a telegram of greeting from a number of “refuseniks” in the Soviet Union, including the Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. In this way, Vergelis and Kerler became symbolic figures on the Yiddish front of the Cold War. Kerler, who was soon allowed to emigrate to Israel, was treated as a Jewish national hero, whereas Vergelis was vilified in the Western media. In 1971, the journal Midstream published a vitriolic article alleging that Vergelis had long served as an agent of the Soviet secret police.72 One of the charges raised against Vergelis was the fact that he continued to turn a blind eye to the tragedy of the Jewish writers put to death on Stalin’s orders. The “progressive” camp, too, could never forget the pain of August 1952. Among the executed writers were the former American Communists Leon Talmi, Ilya Vatenberg, and Chayka Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya. Novick knew that he himself was implicated in their interrogations as an alleged American spy and Jewish nationalist.73


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The progressives were angry that Sovetish heymland suppressed information about these events, completely ignoring the fact that Vergelis could not even think about mentioning the executions of August 12, 1952 until the Soviet authorities officially admitted that they had taken place; and no such admission was made until 1988. Interestingly, the editor of the Tel Aviv mainstream Yiddish daily Letste nayes (Latest news), Mordechai Tsanin, took a sober view of Vergelis’ role, arguing that no Soviet editor could have acted differently and that it was important to support Sovetish heymland, “the most debate-provoking literary journal in the history of Yiddish literature.”74 The importance of the Yiddish press—and of the Yiddish milieu generally—for the Cold War gradually became appreciated in Israel, where Yiddish had long been tolerated only as an atavistic remnant of diaspora life. In the early 1970s, an experienced Labor Zionist functionary, Yitzhak Korn, emerged as an organizer of Yiddish activities. On April 12, 1972, the 20th anniversary of the day on which the leadership of the Jewish Antifascist Committee had been executed, a Yiddish Committee was founded in Israel by Korn, together with Dov Sadan, the head of the Yiddish department at the Hebrew University, and Avrom Sutzkever, the editor of the flagship literary journal Di goldene keyt (The golden chain), published in Tel Aviv.75 (Sutzkever’s literary career had started in the Yung Vilne group, and he later took part in the Vilna ghetto resistance movement, becoming a Communist writer in postwar Russia for a brief period.) Yiddish culture now began to be seen as a factor supporting Jewish national survival in the Soviet Union, which was regarded by many Yiddish activists as the last significant reservoir of Yiddishspeakers. Sovetish heymland, with more than 100 contributors—on average younger than their Western counterparts in Yiddish journalism and literature76 —played an important role in creating this misconception. Chone Shmeruk, who replaced Dov Sadan as the head of the Yiddish Department, wrote in 1972: “No one disputes the need to continue with the demands to allow every Jew who desires to emigrate to Israel to do so. . . . On the other hand, is this not also the right time to fuse this basic demand with increased pressure to recognize the cultural needs of Soviet Jews [in the U.S.S.R.]?”77 Vergelis and his journal could probably credit themselves with having contributed in some part to spreading the idea that emigration could not solve the Soviet Jewish problem, and that it was therefore of paramount importance to develop Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Vergelis used his international exposure in order to expand Sovetish heymland: from January 1980, the journal began to appear with a booklet as a supplement, and in 1981, Vergelis organized a two-year course for Yiddish editors at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. The year 1985 saw another expansion—an annual Russian-language digest called God za godom (Year after year). In the early 1980s, he even toyed with the idea of an academic center associated with the journal, but the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Commission, formed on his initiative in 1981, attracted mostly dissidents and refuseniks, and he hastened to shelve this project. In the mid-1980s, Vergelis began to lose his international standing, and during

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the Gorbachev years, he no longer received invitations to visit abroad. The proSoviet Yiddish circles were becoming extinct. By 1989, Sovetish heymland sold only about 500 copies abroad, many of them to libraries.78 Soviet Communism itself was declining, and the Cold War was drawing to a close. On the Yiddish front, that “war” came to an end in May 1991 during the Moscow convention of the World Council for Yiddish and Yiddish Literature. On the eve of this event, Vergelis faced a mutiny when almost all the members of his journal’s editorial board along with several other authors issued a call to organize an international conference dedicated specifically to furthering the Yiddish language and culture in the Soviet Union. And at the convention of the World Council, the Soviet and nonSoviet writers suddenly found themselves fraternizing—without hindrance—on the premises of the Shalom Moscow Jewish Theatre. Vergelis did not attend the meetings of the World Council, and Yitzhak Korn did not visit the editorial office of Sovetish heymland. However, many other delegates did visit Vergelis in his office and promised him their support, especially since he was ready to concede ideological defeat on practically all fronts, as long as it could save his journal. Ironically, one of the results of the World Council’s Moscow convention was the reinforcement of Vergelis’ shaky position. A few months later, when the journal lost its state sponsorship, the Naye prese could provide only a little emergency support. (The Naye prese itself closed in June 1993.) However, more substantial financial assistance came from non-Communists, most notably from a former archenemy—the New York Forverts, a stronghold of Bundist and other “reformist” veterans. With the name Sovetish heymland becoming anachronistic after 1991, the journal was able to enjoy a few years of afterlife under the name of Di yidishe gas (The Jewish street).79 Concurrently, the Warsaw Folks-shtime marked its break with Communism when it began to appear as a Polish-Yiddish biweekly called Dos yidishe vort/Slowo z˙ydowskie (The Yiddish word). In 1995, the Bucharest Revista Cultului Mozaic changed its title to Realitatea Evreiasca. Initially a monthly with departments in Romanian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, it ultimately became a Romanian journal with a page in English and a page in Hebrew.80 The symbolic date of August 12, 1992, marking the 40th anniversary of the execution of the leading Soviet Jewish writers, became the culminating point in Vergelis’ reconciliation with the West, when Mordechai Tsanin and Itzhak Warshawski, then co-presidents of the World Council, visited the editorial office of Di yidishe gas. On August 16, Vergelis hosted them at his dacha in Peredelkino, the elite colony of the Soviet writers near Moscow. There the three aged figures formulated the basic principle of their cooperation: “a single Yiddish literature for the single Jewish nation.”81 In other words, Vergelis agreed to abandon the Communist tenet of two national cultures, one “proletarian,” the other “bourgeois.” But hardly anyone was interested in this armistice day. By that time, the Yiddish Communist periodicals and their editors were already playing a totally marginal role even within the marginal world of Yiddish letters. The era of the Yiddish Communist press came to its final end in December 1996, when its last relic, the Tel Aviv Der veg, was closed down.82

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Notes 1. See, for instance, Steven Cassedy, To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America (Princeton: 1997); Susanne Marten-Finnis and Heather Valencia, Sprachinseln: Jiddische Publizistik in London, Wilna und Berlin, 1880–1930 (Cologne: 1999). 2. On the only pre-1917 Bolshevik pamphlet in Yiddish, see “Di ershte bolshevistishe broshur,” Sovetish heymland 4 (1970), 108–113. 3. Zvi Y. Gitelman’s Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton: 1974) remains the most comprehensive monograph in English on the Evsektsii. 4. Hersh Smolyar, Vu bistu khaver Sidorov? (Tel Aviv: 1975), 78–79. 5. Francine Hirsch, “Toward an Empire of Nations: Border-making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities,” The Russian Review 2 (2000), 201–226. 6. Daniel Charney, “Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher komunistisher prese,” In shpan 1 (1926), 132. 7. Abraham Golomb, Tsu di tifn fun yidishn gedank (Tel Aviv: 1974), 328. 8. Gennady Estraikh, “Yiddish Literary Life in Soviet Moscow, 1918–1924,” Jews in Eastern Europe 42, no. 2 (2000), 25–55; David Shneer, “The History of ‘The Truth’: Soviet Jewish Activists and the Moscow Yiddish Daily Newspaper,” in Yiddish and the Left, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: 2001), 129–143. 9. See the compendium for Soviet Yiddish bibliography, Chone Shmeruk (ed.), Pirsumim yehudiyim bivrit hamoaz ot (Jerusalem: 1961). 10. Charney, “Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher komunistisher prese,” 132–134. 11. The Fareynikte was formed by the merger of the Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party (the Territorialists) and the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (the Seymists). 12. Moyshe Kamenshteyn, “Na fronte kulturnoi revoliutsii,” Tribuna (Moscow), no. 10 (1930), 6–7. The doctrinally correct Communist slogan was “national in form; socialist in content.” 13. On various approaches (not just Soviet) regarding Yiddish orthography, see Kalman Weiser, “The ‘Orthodox Orthography’ of Solomon Birnbaum,” in this volume, 275–295. 14. M. Shnitser, “Af a glitshikn veg,” Der shtern (8 Aug. 1930). 15. Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: 1999), 45–48, 57, 64, 74. 16. Gennady Estraikh, “The Kharkiv Yiddish Literary World, 1920s-mid-1930s,” East European Jewish Affairs 32, no 2 (2002), 72–73. 17. Iosif Stalin, Voprosy leninizma (Moscow: 1939), 477. 18. Moyshe Litvakov, “Arbkorn-shafung,” Der emes (4 May 1924); Anna Shternshis, “From the Eradication of Illiteracy to Worker Correspondents: Yiddish-Language Mass Movements in the Soviet Union,” East European Jewish Affairs 32, no. 1 (2002), 120– 137. 19. Itsik Fefer, Di yidishe literatur in di kapitalistishe lender (Kharkov: 1933), 86. 20. Henry Srebrnik, “Diaspora, Ethnicity and Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Birobidzhan Project,” in Estraikh and Krutikov (eds.), Yiddish and the Left, 84. 21. Dovid Sfard, Mit zikh un mit andere (Jerusalem: 1984), 85. 22. Quoted in Joseph Sherman, “With Perfect Faith: The Life and Work of Leibl Feldman,” in Leibl Feldman, Oudtshoorn: Jerusalem of Africa (Johannesburg: 1989), 16; cf. David Rechter, “The Gezerd Down Under,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 7, Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: 1991), 275–282. 23. Albom lekoved dem yoyvl fun progresivn yidishn vort in Argentine (Buenos Aires: 1973). 24. Sara Lapitskaia, “Publitsisticheskaia deiatelnost Bera Galperina v Parizhe,” in Evrei Rossii—immigranty Frantsii, ed. Wolf Moskovich, Vladimir Khazan, and Sabine Breuillard

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(Jerusalem: 2000), 144–151. Undzer fraynd still appeared in the 1970s, edited by Meir Tshizh and Fishl Tobiash—see Aron Vergelis, Rayzes (Moscow: 1976), 163–167. 25. Albatros 1 (1922), 16. 26. Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (hereafter: RTKIDNI), 495/30/761, 43–44, 68–70, 107, 122. 27. Sfard, Mit zikh un mit andere, 52–69; presumably also written by Sfard: “Der virklekher zin fun der provokatsye kegn der progresiver yidisher tsaytung in Poyln Fraynd,” Folks-shtime (4 Dec. 1958). On Yung Vilne, see Justin D. Cummy, “Tsevorfene bleter: The Emergence of Yung Vilne,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, ed. Antony Polonsky, vol. 14 (2001), 170–191. 28. Musia Landau, Mit shraybers, bikher un mit . . . Vilne (Tel Aviv: 2003), 98–101. 29. For the early history of Frayheyt, see Tony Michels, “ ‘Socialism with a Jewish Face’: The Origins of the Yiddish-Speaking Communist Movement in the United States, 1907– 1923,” in Estraikh and Krutikov (eds.), Yiddish and the Left, 24–55. 30. Daniel Charney, A yortsendlik aza (New York: 1943), 291–293; Raphael Abramovitsh, In tsvey revolutsyes (New York: 1944), 398–399. 31. Ber Grin, Fun dor tsu dor: literarishe eseyen (New York: 1971), 148–149; William J. Fishman, “Morris Winchevsky’s London Yiddish Newspaper: One Hundred Years in Retrospect,” the second annual Avrom-Nokhem Stencl Lecture in Modern Yiddish Literature, delivered before the Oxford Summer Programme in Yiddish Language and Literature on 9 August 1984 (Oxford: 1985). 32. Moyshe Nadir, Humor, kritik, lirik (Buenos Aires: 1971), 258. 33. Alexander Pomerantz, Proletpen: etyudn un materyaln tsu der geshikhte fun dem kamf far proletarisher literatur in amerike (Kiev: 1935), 173. 34. Quoted in Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish, 139–140. 35. Pomerantz, Proletpen, 51. Yugnt, according to “D. Rozumovitsh,” “tried to encourage club members to produce Yiddish wall papers.” See his article, “Di rol fun a vant-tsaytung,” Yugnt 2 (1927), 15, 24. 36. Moyshe Olgin, In der velt fun gezang: a bukh vegn poezye un poetn (New York: 1919). 37. Moyshe Olgin, Havrile un Yoel (New York: 1927). 38. On the Yiddish PEN Club see, for instance, Nakhman Meisel, Geven amol a lebn (Buenos Aires: 1951), 278–290. 39. Lawrence H. Schwartz, Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930s (Port Washington, NY: 1980), 41. In 1934, the IURW had about 15 sections, which published 30 periodicals. See RTKIDNI, 495/30/988, 2–3. 40. RTKIDNI, 495/30/3492, 2–3; ibid., 495/30/3993, 19. 41. Ibid., 495/30/1014a, 80. 42. Ibid., 495/30/988, 17. 43. Quoted in Henry Hart (ed.), American Writers’ Congress (London: 1935), 153–156. 44. See Olgin’s “farewell” to Leivick in Moyshe Olgin, Folk un kultur (New York: 1939), 75–80. 45. Gerben Zaagsma, “ ‘Red Devils’: The Botwin Company in the Spanish Civil War,” East European Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2003), 101–117. 46. Josef Fraenkel, The Jewish Press of the World (London: 1954), 47–49; idem, The Jewish Press of the World (London: 1956), 52–53; idem, “Di yidishe prese in di tfutses,” in Yidishe dialogn: asifes fun yidishn velt-kongres, ed. Moyshe Lavani, vol. 1 (Paris: 1968), 138. For the state of the Yiddish press in the mid-1970s see Shimen Veber, “Di lage fun der yidisher prese oyf der velt,” Barikht fun der velt-konferents far yidish un yidisher kultur (Tel Aviv: 1977), 160–167. 47. David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism: A History of the Communist Party of the United States since 1945 (London: 1959), 90. 48. Joseph Sherman, “Between Ideology and Indifference: The Destruction of Yiddish in South Africa,” in Memories, Realities and Dreams: Aspects of the South African Jewish Experience, ed. Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn (Johannesburg: 2000), 42–45.


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49. Elvira Gro¨zinger, Die jiddische Kultur im Schatten der Diktaturen: Israil Bercovici— Leben und Werk (Berlin: 2002), 42–157. On Rosen, see Leon Volovici, “Romanian Jewry under Rabbi Moses Rosen during the Ceausescu Regime,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 19, Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 2003), 181–192. 50. Gennady Estraikh, “Metamorphoses of Morgn-frayhayt,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish and the Left, 144–150. 51. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (London: 1987), 193; idem, “Yiddish Left,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (Urbana: 1990), 868. See also Sid Resnick, “Umberto Terracini,” Morgn-frayheyt (1 Jan. 1984). 52. “U.S. Communists Say Yiddish Paper Serves ‘Imperialism,’ ” New York Times (15 May 1977), 43. 53. Morris Biderman, A Life on the Jewish Left: An Immigrant’s Experience (Toronto: 2000), 163–164. 54. Moyshe Olgin, “Far a progresiver yidish-veltlekher kultur,” in his Folk un kultur (New York: 1939), 30–49. 55. Nakhman Meisel and Yakov Mestel (eds.), Amerikaner yidisher kultur-tsuzamenfor (New York: 1948). 56. See, for example, Hillel Rogoff, Der gayst fun Forverts: materyaln tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher prese in Amerike (New York: 1954), 74–75. 57. Khaim Suler, “Eynike fragn dem bundishn ‘Veker,’ ” Naye prese (26 Oct. 1970). 58. Peysekh Novick, Amerikanishe yidn, der tsienizm, medines yisroel (New York: 1972), 42. 59. Gennady Estraikh, “Literature Versus Territory: Soviet Jewish Cultural Life in the 1950s,” East European Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2003), 30–48. 60. For the establishment of Sovetish heymland, see Gennady Estraikh, “Aron Vergelis: The Perfect Jewish Homo Sovieticus,” East European Jewish Affairs 27, no. 2 (1997), 3–20; Matvei Chlenov, “Puteshestvie iz Birobidzhana v Moskvu: reabilitatsiia iazyka idish v SSSR, 1956–1961,” Tirosh 4 (Moscow: 2000), 248–267. 61. Quoted in Joseph Brumberg and Abraham Brumberg, Sovetish Heymland: An Analysis (New York: 1965), 8. 62. Aron Vergelis, On the Jewish Street: Travel Notes (Moscow: 1971), 76–77. 63. Estraikh, “Aron Vergelis,” 6–7. 64. Shmuel-Leyb Shneiderman, “Arn Vergelis geyt in shpan,” Letste nayes (Tel Aviv) (24 July 1970). 65. “Manifest fun der land-konferents fun der ‘Nayer prese,’ ” Naye prese (7–8 Nov. 1970). 66. “ ‘Morgn-frayheyt’ un ‘Vokhnblat’ demaskirn geferlekhe antisovetishe histerye,” Naye prese (5 Feb. 1970). 67. Ibid., 41. 68. Sovetish heymland 10 (1971), 162–163. 69. Meir Khrats, “Vegn a bibliografish verk,” Yerusholayimer almanakh 5 (1975), 205. 70. Moyshe Saltsman, Di groyse enderung in yidish lebn in Frankraykh (Tel Aviv: 1981), 27, 35–37. 71. Emanuel Sherer, “Far di rekht fun sovetishe yidn?,” Undzer tsayt 4 (1971), 3–5. 72. Shmuel-Leyb Shneiderman, Stalin’s Inferno: The Jewish Circle (New York: 1971), 5; idem, “Sovietish Heimland and Its Editor, Aron Vergelis,” Midstream 27, no. 8 (1971), 28– 42. 73. Vladimir P. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud: poslednii stalinskii rasstrel (Moscow: 1994), 378, 381. 74. Mordechai Tsanin, “Tsen yor ‘Sovetish heymland,’ ” Letste nayes (24 Sep. 1971). 75. Di goldene keyt 76 (1972), 239; Itzhak Korn, Dos gerangl far yidish (Tel Aviv: 1982), 226–234.

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76. Chaim Sloves, “Sovetish heymland,” in Yidishe dialogn: asifes fun yidishn veltkongres, vol. 1 (Paris: 1968), 163. 77. Chone Shmeruk, “Jewish Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Jewish Perspectives: 25 Years of Modern Writing, ed. Jacob Sonntag (London: 1980), 279. 78. For more on the journal’s circulation, see Gennady Estraikh, “The Era of Sovetish Heymland: Readership of the Yiddish Press in the Former Soviet Union,” East European Jewish Affairs 25, no. 1 (1995), 17–22. 79. Gennady Estraikh, “ ‘Jewish Street’ or Jewish Cul-de-sac? From Sovetish Heymland to Di Yidishe Gas,” East European Jewish Affairs 26, no. 1 (1996), 25–33. 80. Gro¨zinger, Die jiddische Kultur im Schatten der Diktaturen, 107. 81. Di yidishe gas 3 (1993), 137. 82. Sid Resnick, “Yiddish Communist Paper in Israel Closes Down,” Outlook (Vancouver) 35, no. 3 (1997), 10.

The Moscow State Yiddish Theater as a Cultural and Political Phenomenon Jeffrey Veidlinger indiana university

Even before the anomaly of the Jewish national minority in the Soviet Union was officially—and duplicitously—resolved with the creation of a Jewish “territorial homeland” in Birobidzhan, the Jews were treated by the Bolsheviks in much the same manner as officially recognized national minorities. While hoping eventually to assimilate them, the Soviet government was willing in the interim to accord limited collective rights to the national minorities, including the right to use their own language. Consequently, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a secular Yiddish infrastructure was established in the Soviet Union, consisting of Yiddish courts, newspapers, literary journals, party cells, trade unions, schools, and theaters. The license to communicate in Yiddish, though, was not intended as an endorsement of Jewish national yearnings. Rather, discourse in Yiddish, like that of other national minority languages, came to be regulated in the 1930s by the doctrine of socialist realism and by the slogan “national in form; socialist in content.” This doctrine permitted a form of kitsch nationalism (epitomized by the ubiquitous folk dancing in colorful peasant dress that characterized most Soviet national minorities in the public arena), but prohibited more meaningful expressions of ethnic identity. Yet despite the strictures and limitations inherent in the principles of Socialist Realism, the doctrine allowed sufficient leeway for the partial expression of national sentiment. Ultimately, during the interwar period, use of the Yiddish language provided a forum in which Jewish fears, aspirations, and conundrums could be openly expressed, provided they were articulated within official guidelines. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, commonly known by its Russian acronym Goset (Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii teatr), provides a remarkable example of the ways in which Jewish cultural activists were able to promote their own national culture within the confines of Soviet nationality policies. While sharing many aspects of the state’s educational ideals and class-based worldview, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater successfully resisted all attempts to turn its stage into just another platform of Soviet propaganda. Soviet politics on the Yiddish stage retained a distinctly Jewish orientation not merely by dint of being performed in a Jewish language, but more importantly by virtue of overt and covert cultural contexts and signifiers. In 83

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many ways, the theater’s productions were Jewish not only in form, but also in content. The Soviet state promoted Yiddish theater as part of its nationality policy, believing that theater could play an important role in the dissemination and reception of Communist ideals among the Jewish masses. Beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R., in Warsaw and in New York, for example, this belief was shared by the Jewish Left, which saw in the theater, whether professional or amateur, an effective way of presenting new ideas to working-class audiences. The theater was capable of preaching Communist ideals to individuals who, although rarely illiterate, did not have the occasion or the inclination to spend their valuable leisure time studying Marxist economics. A night at the theater could provide the workers with a reprieve from the daily grind, combining entertainment, socialization, and information to an extent rivaled only by the theater’s close cousin—the cinema. Theater activists did not view the stage merely as a practical means of spreading propaganda. They also attributed mystical qualities to the bime, seeing the auditorium as a temple where the new messianic ideals of Communism would be worshipped. Soon after the revolution of 1917, the Communist party in Russia realized that in order to create a base of support among the non-Russian minority nations, it would need to encourage the communication of Soviet ideals in local languages and discourses. Thus, Bolshevik thinkers and activists created Communist literary unions, films, and theaters in the languages of the minority nations. The hope was that these institutions would provide effective Communist education, such that national distinctions and aspirations would eventually be replaced by a supranational class consciousness.1 It was in this context that the Communist party, and particularly its “Jewish section” (Evsektsiia), supported the establishment and promotion of Yiddish theater. The Evsektsiia believed that theater, with its mass appeal and revolutionary associations, could reach working-class Jews in a way that no other medium could. Moyshe Litvakov, the editor of the Soviet Yiddish daily newspaper Der emes, was one of the most ardent supporters of Yiddish theater as a means of propaganda, both in his theoretical writings and in his role as a member of the governing board of the State Yiddish Theaters.2 Joseph Stalin, who was serving as Commissar of National Affairs at the time of the State Yiddish Theater’s creation, shared this enthusiasm for theater as propaganda. In October 1918, Stalin’s commissariat contacted the theatrical section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment to propose the establishment of a Yiddish theater in Moscow.3 The Commissariat of Enlightenment, however, had already begun working on a broad program to establish theaters among all minority nations.4 In the end, the formation of the Soviet Yiddish State Theater was not the brainchild of Communist activists (despite their later numerous claims to the contrary). Rather, it was the outcome of efforts on the part of a group of amateur and professional Jewish theater enthusiasts whose goals were simultaneously to introduce high art and culture to the Jewish masses and to present Jewish culture to the general theatergoing public. It emerged out of one of the numerous voluntary cultural associations that proliferated among the Jewish community in the period between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917: the theater commission of the Jewish Folk Music Society of Petrograd. Formed in February 1916 after several members of

The Moscow State Yiddish Theater as a Cultural and Political Phenomenon

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the society had gained inspiration from a theater conference held in Moscow, the commission was soon enlarged to become an independent society. In March 1918, Alexander Granovsky was elected as the society’s director.5 Born in Moscow in 1890 and having grown up in Riga, Granovsky had previously had little exposure to Yiddish culture—he did not even speak the language. Rather, his professional background lay in the European modernist schools. Granovsky had studied theater in Petrograd in 1910–1911, where he was influenced by Vsevolod Meyerhold’s experimental studio. He had also studied in Germany, in 1913, under the tutelage of Max Reinhardt, the prominent symbolist theater director. Upon learning of Granovsky’s theater, the Commissariat of Enlightenment invited the director and his troupe to Moscow, where they were provided with an auditorium seating 90, and were officially renamed the State Yiddish Chamber Theater (Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii kamernyi teatr). Soon thereafter, the theater was moved to a larger 500-seat hall on Malaia Bronnaia Street and the adjective “chamber” was dropped. By the mid-1920s, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater had become the center of a network of Yiddish theaters with branches throughout the Soviet Union. Granovsky used his theater to present popular prerevolutionary Yiddish literature, such as the works of Sholem Aleichem, Yitskhok Leyb Perets, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and Avrom Goldfadn, in the modernist framework that was then one of the dominant trends in Russian theater. The theater’s early productions were informed by what Katerina Clark has called a “romantic anticapitalism,” which mocked the bankruptcy of capitalist bourgeois life while championing the simplicity of the lower classes.6 But the goals of its participants were more aesthetic than ideological. Few were committed to any particular ideology, and only one actor in the theater of the 1920s was a member of the Communist party.7 Most were simply aspiring actors. They were more concerned with memorizing their stage lines than the party line, and they had few political loyalties beyond the theater’s trade union. In order to guard against political deviation, though, the theater’s governing board, composed of party activists and loyalists, oversaw the implementation of all productions. Newly redacted texts of prerevolutionary Yiddish works radicalized the message, politicized the content, and revolutionized the aesthetic. In order to transform popular plays by Sholem Aleichem and Avrom Goldfadn into Soviet material, a group of Communist Yiddish writers was employed to rewrite them in a form more amenable to party ideology. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Yitskhok Nusinov, Lipe Reznik, Nokhem Oyslender, and Shmuel Halkin—all of whom would become original Yiddish playwrights or critics themselves—worked in the field of adaptation at some point in their careers. The satirical humor, folk appeal, and social awareness of the originals were transformed into biting attacks on the bourgeois lifestyle and capitalist system. Each play heralded the revolutionary epoch in a modernist framework. These adaptations generally removed any language that could be interpreted as supportive of religion and emphasized the role of characters whose outlook corresponded most closely to those of the Communist party. Many adaptations of the 1920s also introduced elements of the grotesque and incorporated the experimentation of Russian and European avant-garde theater and agitprop. For instance, in Sholem Aleichem’s Two Hundred Thousand, a poor tailor wins

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200,000 rubles in the lottery, only to be swindled out of his fortune. The 1923 Moscow State Yiddish Theater production transformed this simple tale of bourgeois excess and working-class morality into a radical attack on the capitalist system and on the decadent lifestyle of the nouveau riche. In the Soviet version, the characters were all portrayed as social types rather than as psychologically complex individuals. The sharp contrast between the newly wealthy Shimele and his working-class background was emphasized by a split stage: workers were placed high above, on ladders effortlessly floating above the heavy-set bourgeoisie, whose obesity tied them to the ground. The action all took place within a constructivist set and behind grotesque make-up, hiding individual characteristics and emphasizing the commonalities of social types. When this production was taken on tour to Europe, critics were impressed with the technical achievements of the theater, but were often disgusted at what had been done to Sholem Aleichem. In the words of one critic: “Who believed that Sholem Aleichem’s hero Shimele Soroker, the simple folkish man who wins the big win and later loses it, that he the poor tailor of the shtetl, would be transformed into a symbol of the revolution against the old world?”8 Similarly, Avrom Goldfadn’s The Sorceress, written in 1877, told of a cruel stepmother who kills her stepdaughter for her inheritance. The production at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in 1922 transformed Goldfadn’s play from a melodramatic caper of thrills and adventure (with a mystical edge) into an attack on private property, capitalism, religion, and even melodrama itself. The story tells of a Jewish child of aristocratic heritage who is sold off as a slave by her wicked aunt when her father is arrested. Though the original text had an inherent message against the wanton pursuit of money, this message was insufficient for the type of propaganda demanded by ideological zealots. Hence, it was rearranged by Dobrushin and Litvakov; and the play was also altered through revolutionary staging techniques. A constructivist stage set was designed that consisted of scaffolding, ladders, and platforms protruding at various levels—reminiscent of a building site. This was both a symbol of progress and a setting familiar to a proletarian audience. Elements of sacrilege, such as the equation of the sorceress’ spell with the Kol Nidre prayer, were incorporated into the performance. Both The Sorceress and Two Hundred Thousand lionized the Jewish lower classes and their honest lifestyle, while chastising the capitalists who exploit the common folk. But both productions were also derived from popular Jewish plays and retained hints of the original humor. Despite the Yiddish theater’s enormous popular success, both the Soviet press and the Communist party were dissatisfied. Nearly a decade into its development, the theater was continuing to present plays based on the works of popular prerevolutionary Yiddish writers, neglecting (so it was charged) the work of contemporary Soviet writers. The Management of State Academic Theaters began a campaign to move the theater from Moscow to Belarus, on the grounds that it would have greater propaganda value in the former Pale of Settlement, where the majority of Jews still resided. Many in the theater saw this as thinly veiled antisemitism, a position that was seconded by the Evsektsiia. When the relocation effort failed, the Management of State Academic Theaters began a campaign to deprive the Yiddish theater of its


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extensive state funding. By this time, the Communist party was becoming wary of the theater’s autonomy: as Granovsky’s fame and self-assurance increased, he became less willing either to abide by instructions from above or to dilute his aesthetic goals for ideological purposes. As a result, in 1926, the Union of Artists dismissed Granovsky from his post as administrative director, and threatened as well to replace him as artistic director.9 By late 1926, Granovsky was no longer able to resist the pressure placed upon him, and he was forced to put on a propagandistic production, authored by the contemporary Soviet Jewish playwright Avrom Veviurka, titled 137 Children’s Homes. The play, originally titled “Comrade Shindel,” tells of a smuggler named Shindel who, traveling to a shtetl, claims to be a local party boss collecting money for the establishment of orphanages—in fact, he is trafficking in contraband diamonds that are hidden in phylacteries. When his assistant loses the phylacteries in which the contraband is hidden, Shindel is forced to buy up all the phylacteries in the town, in the hope that someone has come across his. The Jews all willingly trade in their phylacteries and even offer to sell various other types of religious paraphernalia to the visiting official. In contrast to the subtle satire of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater’s previous plays, 137 Children’s Homes was essentially a pedantic warning to beware of counterrevolutionary smugglers and enemies of the people. Moreover, although set entirely within a Jewish milieu, it reflected little sympathy toward Jewish tradition. The last-minute change of title to 137 Children’s Homes, however, may have been a surreptitious allusion to Psalm 137, the well-known exilic lament that bemoans the inability of the exiles to perform music while being held captive in a foreign land. Certainly as restrictions and impositions from above hindered the theater’s aesthetic goals, many of the theater’s participants must have felt like the Israelite exiles who were forced to sing and be mirthful for the benefit of their captors. Devoid of the song and dance that had helped make the theater famous, the production was the theater’s biggest failure until then.10 Granovsky soon found himself too hampered by bureaucratic and ideological impediments to continue as the theater’s director. In 1928, during the theater’s European tour, he defected to Germany, where he would remain until his death ten years later. Granovsky’s departure coincided with Stalin’s “second revolution” and—reflecting the radical new turn—the reordering of Soviet cultural life. In 1928, the relatively liberal Management of State Academic Theaters was abolished and replaced with a Central Arts Administration, entrusted with the task of directly overseeing all Soviet culture. A repertory commission was also established for each state theater, responsible for recommending scripts and approving all productions. The first step undertaken by the theater’s new supervisory organs with regard to Yiddish theater was to appoint Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels, the theater’s longtime star actor, as the new director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. From a political perspective, Mikhoels was a risky choice. His Communist credentials were severely lacking. He was not a party member and would never become one. In contrast to the majority of Soviet Jewish cultural figures, Mikhoels was never a radical ideologue of any kind. He joined the company out of a love of both theater and Jewish culture, rather than as a means of spreading Communist

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propaganda. Even within the theater, Mikhoels shunned political activity of any kind—he stubbornly refused to join even the theater’s own trade union. In contrast to many supporters, including Granovsky, he never expressed any grandiose vision of the theater as a temple for the new proletariat. He simply sought to entertain. Mikhoels’ roots lay in traditional Jewish life. As a youth, he showed no interest in the socialist and populist circles that had enticed so many members of the Jewish intelligentsia; rather he spent his time writing his own Hebrew poetry. In one messianic poem he penned with his brother, Mikhoels even envisioned a Jewish redemption in Jerusalem. His first attempt at acting, at the age of 12, was in a play called The Hasmoneans that a youth group in Dvinsk presented for Hanukkah.11 While he drifted away from the hasidic lifestyle in which he was reared, he never rejected Judaism outright. He retained much of his early religious education, never tiring of peppering his lectures with rabbinical adages or retelling Jewish folktales to anyone who would listen. Even when presenting formal addresses to party organs in an official capacity, Mikhoels could rarely resist entertaining his audience with a diversion into Jewish folklore, or elucidating a point with biblical and talmudic references. During the Second World War, he even took to carrying a Bible with him. Like millions of Jews around the world, Mikhoels had eschewed religious practice, but he continued to embrace the ethical principles of Judaism as well as to celebrate yidishkeyt and the Jewish cultural heritage. He identified himself as Jew before all else, and circulated primarily within a Jewish milieu. All of this was problematic for the authorities. Mikhoels, however, was the only viable choice for a director. He had natural talent and charisma, and he was willing to use the stage to promote the work of his colleagues, to enhance the prestige of the artistic community to which he proudly belonged, and to nurture the development of Soviet Jewish culture. Perets Markish, an author who would become a regular contributor to the repertoire of the theater, praised Mikhoels for having the courage and vision to introduce audiences to young and unproven writers.12 By giving such writers a large and already acclaimed forum in which to present their newest works, the theater’s contribution to the maintenance of Yiddish literature throughout the 1930s and beyond cannot be overstated. Yet the Soviet authorities, for their part, demanded repertoires from contemporary Communist playwrights that reflected the “great achievements” of the Bolshevik revolution. One of Mikhoels’ first productions was The Deaf, based on a short story of 1907 by Dovid Bergelson. The deaf protagonist of Bergelson’s play, who is never given a formal name, is a simple inarticulate mill worker who lost his hearing in an accident at the mill because of the negligence of the owner, Shimon Bika. He lives alone in his silent space with few concerns about the outer world beyond the welfare of his only daughter, Esther, whose mother was worked to death at the mill. Plagued by emotional and physical pain, the Deaf silently accepts his lot. The play begins as the Deaf discovers that Esther, who is employed as a servant in Bika’s house, has been seduced by Shimon’s son, Mendl, and now is pregnant. Grieving, the Deaf remains silent until he learns of a plan to bring in new machinery and lay off half the workers. No longer able to control himself, he joins a futile rebellion against Bika. However, when the Deaf breaks into the miller’s home with an axe, he is easily apprehended and arrested, leaving the workers to continue


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their futile strike. Seemingly fated to linger in obscurity as merely one of the injured working masses, the Deaf’s pent-up anger, frustration, and desperation suddenly cause him to explode, thrusting him into the forefront of a rebellion and turning him into a working-class hero.13 The Deaf was appreciated for, as one critic wrote, “decisively expos[ing] the Jewish bourgeois nationalists, who contend that within united Jewry there never were class antagonisms.”14 It provided a concrete example of class struggle within the Jewish community, demonstrating that class often cut across national lines. As with many other Communist plays written by the better Soviet writers, The Deaf was not solely a formulaic propaganda piece, but also drew from Jewish traditions and Judaic motifs, most notably the biblical story of Esther. Like the biblical heroine, Bergelson’s Esther is a poor young woman whose only source of love is her male guardian. As a result of her extraordinary beauty, Esther’s fortune changes, in both stories, when she is brought into the camp of the overlord. Her guardian is left on the other side of the real or metaphorical palace wall, where he discovers a plot emanating from within to destroy his people, either through death (the Bible), or the loss of livelihood (the play). Together, Esther and her guardian attempt to foil the plan. In this play, Mikhoels, as the Deaf, developed what he called a “gesture leitmotif ” in which, beginning to raise his hands to the stars, he instead brings his right hand to wipe the sweat off his brow. After a moment he becomes lost in thought, his right hand lingering in a clenched fist resting limply over his head. This gesture, combined with the stuttering voice Mikhoels used to speak the meager 30 words his character utters during the course of the play, might be seen once again as a reference to Psalm 137 (and to a major theme of the Zionist movement): “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning/If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” With or without symbolic allusions, the play successfully straddled the demands of party zealots for theatrical productions depicting the revolutionary struggle, on the one hand, and the theater’s own raison d’eˆtre as a Jewish theater, on the other. Following The Deaf, Soviet Yiddish dramatists were ordered to portray specifics from the Bolshevik revolution and the ensuing civil war. Dramatists and writers were now told to draw their inspiration not from the blind fury of the frustrated masses, but rather from the conscious workers. The first Yiddish play in this direction was a production of 1931, Four Days, written by Daniel Meyerovich (known as M. Daniel) and derived from his novella, Iulis. The narrative was based on the true story of Iulis Shimeliovich, a Communist activist who committed suicide together with eight other Bolsheviks during the 1919 German occupation of Vilna. Four Days drew its name from the time when the Bolshevik partisans within the city were forced to wait before the expected arrival of the Red Army. The play was intended both to exalt the Bolsheviks’ role in defending the revolution against the perceived treachery of the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party and to educate audiences about the differences between the various ideologies. Most of the play’s action takes place within the Vilna soviet, as the Bundists and Polish Socialists break away from the Bolsheviks (led by Iulis) over the issue of whether the soviet should remain solely the organ of the working class or should

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instead expand itself, as the Bolsheviks desire, into an organ of government. The excitement peaks as one nationalist asks, “To whom does Vilna belong? To Warsaw or Moscow?”—to which a Bolshevik hero responds: “to the working class of Vilna!” Unconvinced, the Polish Socialist Party and the Bund turn against the Bolsheviks and stave off the Red Army, allowing the Whites to take control of the city. During the final exciting battle scene, the Bolshevik partisans, beginning their rebellion from within the city, wait in vain for the Red Army to back them up. Realizing that they have been betrayed by the opposition parties, they commit suicide before the counterrevolutionary forces are able to capture them.15 Four Days had obvious pedagogical aims in educating audiences about the conflicts dividing the competing socialist parties during the civil war. The character of Iulis was also a “wonderful example of a Bolshevik,” in the words of one reviewer.16 Iulis is a sophisticated Marxist who embraces the revolution not out of frustration or naive hope, but rather out of an academic conviction based on the laws of dialectical materialism. Only his final suicide was regarded as politically inappropriate behavior. “Iulis is a proletarian revolutionary who is capable of the greatest sacrifice,” wrote one critic, “but who does not completely possess the necessary Bolshevik duty to fight.”17 The suicide scene, though, did link Iulis to a chain of Jewish martyrs beginning with the zealots of Masada, continuing through the Jewish victims of the medieval Crusades, and culminating with his Bolshevik Jewish comrades. Thus the play presents an episode of the civil war within the mold of traditional Jewish historical interpretation. The similarity to the Masada story, which had become very popular in the late 1920s as a Zionist founding myth, may also have instilled within audiences a feeling of national pride. By the mid-1930s, the Yiddish theater was able to insert more overt references to Jewish national existence. The congress of Soviet writers held in 1934, at which the doctrine of Socialist Realism was formally enshrined, warned ethnic writers against producing mere facsimiles of Russian culture. Artists and writers were urged to draw from the cultural traditions with which their people identified. They were told to appeal to the narod, the common folk. Yet despite its celebration of cultural diversity and exoticism, the regime sought to divorce cultural production from the ethnic ethos behind it; culture was permitted to be national, but not nationalist. In other words, Soviet folklorist culture was expected, as already noted, to present “kitsch nationalism,” a superficial recognition of a nation’s cultural idiosyncrasies, devoid of political or religious implications. Official recognition of a nation’s distinctive cultural traditions was not expected to validate that nation’s claim to meaningful autonomy, and certainly not to sovereignty. However, Mikhoels and the Yiddish theater used this new party line to further promote Jewish national awareness. The demand to resurrect national myths came directly to the Yiddish theater in an extraordinary episode. One night in 1937, Lazar Kaganovich, who was numbered among Stalin’s leading henchmen, attended a performance of the Yiddish theater. During the period of collectivization and that of the party purges, Kaganovich had proven his ability to effectively carry out Stalin’s most ruthless orders, garnering him the dictator’s unrivaled trust. It was not Kaganovich’s sheer power,


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however, that most disturbed the Yiddish theater troupe. Rather, unlike most official party representatives who occasionally observed the theater, Kaganovich was both Jewish and fluent in Yiddish. He had received a typical Jewish religious education and his grandfather had been a cantor. Thus he was able to understand and appreciate every linguistic and cultural nuance. Further, despite his background, Kaganovich was not known to be a friend of the Jewish people. One negative word from this illustrious guest, and the entire theater could be closed down and its participants arrested. When Kaganovich appeared backstage after the performance and addressed the trembling artists, his comments were most unexpected: “It is a shame to me, a shame . . . look at me, at what I am . . . I am a Jew, as was my father: exalted, bright, healthy. Why do you drag down such Jews on your stage? Deformed, lame, crippled?! I want you to arouse sensations of pride in today and yesterday with your plays. Where are the Maccabees? Where is Bar Kokhba? . . . Where are the Birobidzhan Jews who are building themselves a new life?”18 Remarkably, rather than chastise the theater for too much national content, Kaganovich was asking for more. Kaganovich, indubitably acting with Stalin’s support, had strong reasons for encouraging heroism. As Nazism took hold in Germany, Stalin began to prepare his people psychologically for the possibility of war. In an effort to rouse the people’s patriotism, the Soviet state soaked its propaganda in the historical heroism of the nation’s defenders. Films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Aleksander Nevsky drew from the distant past to resuscitate historical figures as models of patriotism. Personal valor and military might were the character traits most valued for the coming confrontation, and it was now the goal of Soviet culture, Yiddish included, to provide the appropriate historical examples.19 Accordingly, the Yiddish theater’s next play, Shmuel Halkin’s Shulamis, was set in post-biblical Judea during the heroic age of the Jewish people. The play, adapted from a work of 1880 by Goldfadn, retells the talmudic parable of the weasel and the well. In this parable, a young woman wandering in the desert falls into a well. She is rescued by a young warrior who falls in love with her and vows to marry her. In need of the two witnesses required by Jewish law to validate an oath, the couple decides to use the well and a nearby weasel as their witnesses. Later, the warrior breaks his vow and marries another woman. She bears him two children— the first is killed by a weasel and the second dies after falling down a well. The fable was rendered famous by a talmudic reference in which R. Hanina uses it to argue that, if a vow to a weasel and a well must be taken so seriously, imagine how earnestly one must adhere to a vow before God.20 In Halkin’s version, however, the oath is made not to the weasel and the well, but rather to “the heavens and the earth.” Thus, the entire ironic structure of the narrative is removed and the audience is confronted with a far more serious oath— the very oath before God about which R. Hanina warned. The vow before “the heavens and the earth” is also reminiscent of “Haazinu,” the penultimate portion of the Pentateuch, in which Moses reaches the border of the Promised Land; it opens with the phrase, “Give ear, O heavens, let me speak/Let the earth hear the words I utter” (Deut. 32:1). Furthermore, the oath before the heavens that is made

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in the Canaanite desert—the setting for the play—alludes to the biblical covenant between God and Abraham in which, in return for its allegiance, God promised the Jewish people the land of Israel. The symbolism is strengthened by a segment in which a folksinger tells of an ancient Canaanite who, like the biblical Abraham, was rich in sheep and cattle, but longed for a son. This Canaanite, we are told, was so modest that he never even looked directly at his wife’s face: only once, when her face was reflected in the water in a well, did he see her beauty and, overcome, fall into the well. The story is drawn directly from a popular midrash concerning Abraham’s modesty toward his wife, Sarah. Thus, the audience is reminded of the covenant with God, and the oath in Halkin’s play is transformed into a warning to those who believe that the covenant can be broken without consequence. The heroine’s name, Shulamis, was also reminiscent of the heroine of the biblical Song of Solomon. Even for those who were not able to appreciate the rich biblical and talmudic allusions of the play, a production set in ancient Israel was sure to affect those in the audience who were longing for Jewish content. Shulamis’ setting had too many national associations for the play to be merely another story about class struggle.21 In that same year, the Yiddish theater premiered Markish’s opus The Family Ovadis, about the struggle within one family to build socialism in an unnamed borderland (obviously intended to represent Birobidzhan). The play would become one of the most widely performed Yiddish plays in the USSR with productions in Moscow, Minsk, Birobidzhan, Bialystok, Lvov, Kishinev, and elsewhere. The Family Ovadis revolves around Zayvl Ovadis and his five sons: Motka, the party worker; Shleymka, the border guard; Borukh, the factory worker; Kalman, who works as a lumberman with Zayvl; and the eldest son, Shayke, who has emigrated to Palestine. The play begins as the family prepares for Kalman’s wedding. As they anxiously await news from Shleymka, they receive instead a letter from Shayke, who wishes to return to his Soviet homeland. The letter sparks a debate within the family as Avrom, Zayvl’s father, laments the hard life of Jews in the Soviet Union, pointing to the fact that their town does not even have a train station. Motka reminds Avrom of the Jewish situation in the rest of the world: “Do you really think the Germans or Poles or Romanians are patting the Jews on the back? And in Palestine they don’t slaughter Jews?”22 On the wedding day, the family finally receives the long-awaited news of Shleymka. But the news is tragic—he has been killed in a border dispute fighting for the Red Army. The wedding seems to be ruined and the newlyweds cursed until Motka justifies his brother’s martyrdom: “Shleymka did not die, father . . . Shleymka gave his life for himself and for all of us because twenty years ago, others gave their lives for him. He is not dead . . . he will forever live in the hearts of all.”23 Motka is right, the family realizes—and so the death turns into a blessing for the newlywed couple as they decide to enlist in the Red Army to begin a better life. In the final dramatic scene, which takes place in the newly built local train station, the commander of the Red Army unit hands Kalman his dead brother’s rifle with the words: “By command of our people’s committee, the rifle of the fallen hero of the frontier guards, Ovadis, is given to his brother Kalman Ovadis


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to defend the border of our socialist fatherland. . . . So, Kalman Ovadis joins in today’s patrol for Stalin.”24 The play ends with Zayvl coming to terms with the new socialist “truth.” The Family Ovadis exhibits many traits common to socialist realist fiction. It is the tale of how a naive simpleton gradually emerges into a state of revolutionary consciousness through the guidance of a trained mentor. Zayvl’s skepticism toward the changes occurring around him is assuaged as he comes to realize, with the help of his sons, that he can be truly free only under socialism. Further, the heroic ending of the play was a common characteristic of socialist realist fiction in the 1930s. Markish’s play also adheres to the party line on Birobidzhan, despite its gross inaccuracy. The genuinely arduous conditions and barren surroundings of the region are invoked only in the bitter ramblings of the grandfather. In all the other descriptions given in the play, Birobidzhan (which by the play’s premiere had already been abandoned by half of its Jewish colonizers) is depicted in purely fantastical terms. Despite a formulaic storyline and pedantic dialogue, the play did present a complex psychological portrait of Zayvl. Brought up in the Pale of Settlement during the tsarist period, Zayvl lacks the means to comprehend the changes occurring around him. Although he cannot blame his eldest son for being lured by Zionist promises, he sympathizes more with the younger sons who seek to find a niche for themselves in their land of birth. However, he himself finds it hard to adapt. “For forty years I have been wandering on a path, on a foreign path . . . and the foreign path has become my own, and my children have become foreign,” he laments.25 Zayvl’s cry is clearly a reference to the forty years that the ancient Israelites spent in the desert before reaching the Promised Land. Like the Jews of Exodus, Zayvl realizes that his is a life of wandering. Like Moses, he will not live to see the Promised Land—that privilege must await the next generation. Birobidzhan will never be Zayvl’s Promised Land; it will always remain a “foreign path.” This conflict of generations remained a central motif in the plots of many Soviet Yiddish plays. Such works often dramatized the stark contrast between the fathers, reared on talmudic erudition, piety, and an attachment to the shtetl community, and the sons, who were being taught to neglect its religious traditions and abandon its ancestral homes either for new factories in the cities, collective farms in the country, or an altogether new society in the Soviet Far East. The Family Ovadis, however flawed, was a triumph because it managed to reflect socialist realist goals while retaining Jewish motifs and addressing specifically Jewish concerns. It was socialist in content but national in form, and it stands out as a genuine artistic achievement appreciated by critics and audiences alike. The following year, in 1938, during Stalin’s Great Terror, the theater presented another play by Halkin. Bar Kokhba told the story of the Judaean revolt against Roman rule in 132 c.e. This time the nationalist message was even more explicit. Although for centuries the rabbinic tradition had marginalized Bar Kokhba, the Zionist movement, starting from the late 19th century, had promoted a hagiographic image of that anti-Roman rebel leader. Ironically, when Goldfadn’s play Bar Kokhba, on which Halkin’s was based, had first been performed in Russia in 1883, the tsarist regime of Alexander III reacted by banning all Yiddish theater, allegedly

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fearing that the glorification of a Jewish rebellion against foreign rule would be interpreted as a modern call for revolt. Yet in the paranoid atmosphere of Stalin’s Russia in 1938, the play was once again permitted. In his writings on the play, Halkin claimed that he was debunking the “myth” of the revolt as a national movement, arguing instead that it was a class rebellion. Rather than a Jewish uprising against the destroyers of the Temple, Halkin claimed that the revolt was fought on behalf of all the downtrodden enslaved by the imperialist Romans.26 The actual text of the play, however, tells an altogether different story. Although non-Jews are represented among the oppressed people, they do not play a role in either the planning of the rebellion or the rebellion itself. The art and musical score also alluded to the national origins of the uprising. Alexander Tyshler, who designed sets for the troupe, constructed a simple set of palm trees and ancient ruins, alluding to the destruction of the Jewish Temple; whereas Lev Pulver, the theater’s chief composer, drew all his musical themes from East European Jewish folk music, thereby further emphasizing the Jewishness of the uprising. The final scene, depicting the battle between the rebels and the Romans, also highlighted the national character of the uprising. The fight is between the Jews and the Romans, with rich and poor Jews alike dying for the cause. Bar Kokhba’s last words, also the final words of the play, pay tribute to his people, his folk: “He who dies for the freedom of his people, is destined to remain alive forever. The battle is not yet over.” As the curtains close, a fellow rebel kisses the hero, alluding to the midrash that recounts how God recalled Moses to heaven with a kiss.27 Bar Kokhba is thereby equated with Moses, the most important Jewish prophet, who led his people from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the land of Israel. Once again, the staging of the play overrode its officially sanctioned interpretation, alluding instead to one of the proudest moments in Jewish national history. During the Second World War, the theater continued to produce plays with Jewish content. However, the narrative themes followed the party line with regard to the fate of the Jewish people in the war: there were no allusions to collaboration with the German invaders by members of various Soviet nationalities, and there were few references to the exceptional nature of the genocidal policies directed against the Jews by those same invaders. Perets Markish’s An Eye For an Eye, which premiered in Moscow in the fall of 1942, is typical of the theater’s repertoire during this period. The play was a passionate attack on fascism, arguing that the Nazis could only be defeated by the solidarity of all oppressed peoples, backed by the strength of the Soviet army. The first scene opens as a Nazi soldier forcibly marches a group of Poles into the town square. In the next scene, the oppression of the Poles is juxtaposed to the oppression of their Jewish neighbors. Markish takes the audience into the Jewish ghetto, where a family huddles together in its living room. The sets, designed by Alexander Tyshler, depicted broken portraits hanging awry, representing the destruction of the family’s heritage. The family watches as night falls on the street and a Jew is beaten by a Nazi soldier, who, watching the Jew fall to the ground in pain, yells: “Get up vermin!”28 The repulsive spectacle is broken as Stanislaw, a Pole, enters the house, explaining that he is working for the Polish underground


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against the fascists. “Not one Pole will die before biting through the throats of three fascists,” he promises.29 Stanislaw has come to recruit partisan fighters, and he convinces the Jewish children, Binyomin and his sister Vigda, to join them. “We no longer need the halo of the laws of Moses and Israel!” declares Binyomin: We need to tie our lives to the battle. . . . We must swear to ourselves not to die until we pay back for our ruin, until we settle accounts for our pain and shame, for all those who die hanging, dangling in the windows or lying, unburied, on the street. For our dishonored sisters and destitute children! An eye for an eye!! This must be our vow!30

On the surface, Binyomin’s impassioned speech asserts the goals of the partisan movement as portrayed in Soviet lore. True to Soviet propaganda, he openly discards the “laws of Moses and Israel” and the traditions that sanctify them. Yet at the same time, his battle cry is drawn from the very same tradition he renounces— the biblical injunction of “an eye for an eye.” This incongruity illustrates the torn identity of many Soviet Jews during the war. On the one hand, they recognized the military achievements of Soviet power and felt a loyalty to the state they called home; but on the other, the shared knowledge of the Nazi determination to destroy the Jewish people united them with Jews abroad, and the emergence of Russian nationalism stimulated their own sense of national identity. Just as many Russians invoked the vicious policies of Ivan the Terrible to nourish a sense of historical continuity and fuel modern bellicosity, Jews could turn to a reinterpretation of the laws of Leviticus to justify their own militancy. Although the play conceals any Polish-Jewish discord, the Jewish community itself is sharply divided along generational lines. Survivors from the prerevolutionary intelligentsia are convinced that the German rationalism of Kant and the Aufkla¨rung will eventually triumph over the madness of the Third Reich, while the elder Orthodox Jews have faith that God will not allow them to suffer any longer. Only the younger Jews are drawn to the partisans, convinced that their salvation lies in their own military might. This generational conflict ties An Eye For an Eye to the theater’s favorite theme, one of the most durable subjects of Jewish literature. However, in contrast to Markish’s earlier portrait of the old generation in The Family Ovadis, here the audience is given little reason to pity those who wait in vain for God’s help as the youths risk their lives in battle. Even on the eve of Zhdanovshchina—the campaign for a renewed cultural discipline—the Moscow State Yiddish Theater was able to put together a play celebrating Jewish perseverance in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Freylekhs, which premiered in January 1945, was based on material assembled by the Yiddish folklorist Zalman Shneer-Okun. The production was a celebration of life in the face of death; it was Mikhoels’ affirmation of the strength of human dignity and a commemoration of the people’s victory over Hitler, enlarged into a victory of humanity over inhumanity. This symbolist play uses a traditional Jewish wedding as a metaphor for the renewal that was to take place among the Jewish people after the war. The play begins in complete darkness as seven dim lights—evoking the seven days of cre-

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ation—emerge from the void. The lights then reveal human forms (just as the light of the Divine Presence created the first human), and suddenly burst into a flurry of color, revealing a badkhn (jester) who calls upon the audience to rejoice in a celebration of life and renewal. The wedding guests then begin to arrive: an officer returning from the front; a mother who has lost her only child; and an old soldier who had been recruited into the tsarist army. A series of dances then follows, beginning with the dance of the elders and ending with that of the future grandchildren, symbolizing the revitalization of the Jewish community through the next generation. Even the old soldier’s beard becomes a symbol of rejuvenation. The long, scraggly beard he wears in the first scene gradually becomes shorter, until at the end of the wedding he shaves, revealing a youthful visage. At the close of the play, in contrast to the darkness of the opening, a rainbow of colors, as in a prism, merges into a single shaft of white light. As Zhdanovshchina was launched in 1946, several Yiddish writers, including Shmuel Halkin, came under attack for exhibiting traits of “bourgeois nationalism.”31 Nevertheless, there were few signs to suggest a change of direction in the policy of the theater. Its final production before Mikhoels’ murder in January 194832 was Aleksei Brat and Grigori Linkov’s Velder royshn (Tumultuous forests), which premiered in November of 1947. The play was a revised version of Linkov’s War to the Home Front of the Enemy, a Russian play about a Jewish partisan who dies in battle. The production was set in the forests where the partisans established their staging grounds. Although the lead character of the play was Jewish, his religion and religious sentiment were generally placed in the background. Yet even in this play, subtle gestures continued to evoke Jewish practice. For instance, near the beginning of the play, a tallis appears to dangle from a tree in the forest. As the partisan rises to his feet and passes the tree, he reaches out his hand and kisses the tallis.33 The Moscow State Yiddish Theater provides the most dramatic example of the means by which Jewish national awareness could be expressed in the Soviet Union, but it is not the only such example. Rather, it is representative of the different ways by which Jews were able to retain a sense of ethnic identity within the confines of Soviet nationality policy. Indeed, recent scholarship has found similar manifestations of Jewish identity in the interwar period within the Soviet Yiddish press34 and Soviet Jewish popular culture.35 Others have looked at the celebration of religious holidays as a means of expressing national consciousness.36 By appealing to the collective memory of the Jewish people, particularly in its biblical manifestations, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater stimulated and reinforced Jewish identity markers even as its spokespeople called for ecumenicism and the abandonment of tradition. Further, by performing in Yiddish to largely Jewish audiences, the theater solidified Jewish communal identity, just as Yiddish-language schools helped ensure the maintenance of a distinct Jewish community. However, as the campaigns against “cosmopolitanism” and “bourgeois nationalism” were launched after the Second World War, the space in which Jewish cultural expression was permitted became increasingly confined. In the years between


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the murder of Mikhoels and the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, consistent efforts to eliminate Yiddish cultural expression forced Jewish awareness into increasingly subterranean channels.

Notes Portions of this article were previously published in a different form in my book The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: 2000). 1. For some important works on this topic, see Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 414–452; and Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1928–1939 (Ithaca: 2001). 2. Moyshe Litvakov, Funf yor melukhisher yidisher kunst teater, 1921–1925 (Moscow: 1924). 3. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (hereafter: GARF), 2306/24/510, 3–11 (correspondence between the Collegium of National Minorities and the theatrical section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, October 1918–May 1919). 4. GARF, 2306/24/510/35. 5. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (hereafter: RGALI), 2307/2/ 529 (founding principles of the Jewish Theater Society) and 530 (protocols of the dramatic section of the Jewish Theater Society). For the origins of the Jewish Theater Society, see Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (hereafter: TsGIA SPb), 1747/1/2/99. 6. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: 1995), 16–23. 7. Khayim Krashinskii was the only Communist party member of the troupe in the early 1920s. Krashinskii was a minor member of the troupe’s acting personnel, but as secretary of the theater’s trade union, he held a powerful position. He was formerly an official in the Commisariat of National Affairs’ Jewish Department. 8. A. S. Lirik, “Shimele Soroker als revoliutsioner,” Haynt (20 April 1928). 9. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (hereafter: RGASPI), 445/1/183 (correspondence from the Jewish Section regarding Jewish theater, 1926–1927). 10. The text of the play can be found in RGALI, 2307/2/126 (137 Children’s Homes). For major reviews, see P. M., “137 detskikh domov,” Pravda (9 Oct. 1926); G. Ryklin, “Sto tridtsat sem detskikh domov,” Izvestiia (2 Oct. 1926). 11. Aharon Steinberg, “Mayn Dvinsker khaver Shloyme Mikhoels,” Di goldene kayt 43 (1962), 142–152. 12. Perets Markish, Mikhoels (Moscow: 1939), 24. 13. The climactic scene was published in Deklameter fun der sovetisher yidisher literatur (Moscow: 1934), 375–379. 14. I. Krugi, “Novye postanovki Glukhoi,” Rabochii i iskusstvo (5 Sept. 1930). 15. M. Daniel, 4 Teg (Minsk: 1932). 16. M. Shteingauer, “V evreiskom teatre” Elektrozavod (3 March 1935). See also G. Ryklin, “Chetyrie dnia” Pravda (28 Nov. 1931). 17. Der emes (5 Nov. 1931). 18. Quoted in Yosef Sheyn, Arum moskver yidishn teater (Paris: 1964), 148. 19. For more on the revival of historical national heroes in the late 1930s, see Serhy Yekelchyk, “Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian ‘Heroic Pasts,’ 1939–45,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 1 (Winter 2002), 51–80.

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20. Taanit 8a. 21. Shmuel Halkin, Shulamis (Moscow: 1940). Segments of the text as performed at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater are available at the Israel Goor Theater Archive and Museum, Goset collection, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 22. Perets Markish, Semia Ovadis, trans. M. A. Shambadal (Moscow: 1938), 42. 23. Ibid., 70. 24. Ibid., 79–80. 25. Quoted in S. Nels, “Tema Mikhoelsa,” Teatr 2–3 (Feb.-March 1939), 163. 26. RGALI, 2307/2/462. 27. Shmuel Halkin, Bar Kokhba (Moscow: 1939), 127. 28. The text of Perets Markish’s Oko za oko can be found at the Diaspora Research Institute (DRI), Tel Aviv, P-20/90/ 5. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Ibid., 13. 31. For some recent works on postwar attacks on the Jews, see Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: 2001); G. B. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: vlast i antisemitism (Moscow: 2001) and Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: 2003). For some exceptional earlier analyses, see Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: 1984); and Yehoshua A. Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 1939–1953 (Boston: 1971). 32. The murder of Mikhoels by Stalin’s agents in January 1948 is often regarded as the first salvo in Stalin’s turn against the Jews. Within the next five years, the remaining Jewish cultural institutions (including the Moscow State Yiddish Theater) were closed down and numerous leading Jewish intellectuals were arrested and executed. See Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina and Arkadii Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews (New York: 1994). 33. A photograph of this scene can be found in the Goset photo collection at the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv. See also the film The King and the Fool (1994). 34. David Shneer, “A Revolution in the Making: Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001). 35. Anna Shternshis, “Soviet and Kosher: Soviet Jewish Cultural Identity, 1917–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2000). 36. Yaacov Ro’i, “H ag hapesah mul hamishtar hasovyeti” Bar-Ilan 24–25 (1989), 173– 195.

Jews, Communism, and Art in Interwar America Ezra Mendelsohn the hebrew university boston university

In 1935, the John Reed Clubs, a Communist-led cultural society with branches in various American cities, decided to organize an American Artists’ Congress, whose tasks would be to protest against warmongering, the rise of fascism, and the wretched economic situation of the American artist.1 Twenty-two New York-based artists participated in drafting the Call for the American Artists’ Congress, of whom at least ten were of Jewish origin. A total of 378 men and women—mostly artists, sculptors, architects, and photographers—signed this Call. Most of them were either closely associated with the U.S. Communist party or else were fellow travelers (there were also some “liberals,” whose participation in Communist-directed events was deemed especially important in these early days of the Popular Front). Approximately 20 percent of them were Jews, including such figures as Max Weber, Jack Levine, Paul Strand, Raphael and Moses Soyer, Louis Lozowick, William Gropper, Hugo Gellert, Chaim Gross, and Meyer Schapiro (the art historian).2 The previous year, in 1934, the John Reed Club of New York had proposed that works by American artists should be sent to the newly established Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Union, where they would constitute the core collection of the local museum. Eventually, works by 119 artists, of whom about half were Jewish, were accepted for shipment to that distant land.3 Several years after the end of the Second World War, the American branch of the World Association for Jewish Culture (Alveltlekher yidisher kultur farband [YKUF]), another organization under Communist control that had been founded in 1937, published a book in Yiddish and English titled One Hundred Contemporary American Jewish Painters and Sculptors. The selection committee noted with regret that many artists had been unavoidably left out, and announced its intention of remedying this situation by publishing an additional volume.4 All this provides ample evidence for the existence of large numbers of left-wing Jewish artists in interwar America. The substantial Jewish presence on the Left was, of course, nothing new—Jews had been prominent in the European and American socialist movements before the First World War, and in the wake of the Russian 99

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Revolution, many had joined the Communist movement. During the 1920s, the American Yiddish-language Communist daily newspaper, Di frayheyt (later Morgn frayheyt) had a larger readership than did the English-language equivalent, The Daily Worker, while at least one third of the members of the Central Committee of the party were Jews.5 Much more surprising is the large number of Jewish artists. After all, during much of the 19th century there were relatively few European and American artists of Jewish origin, and it was believed by many—Jews and non-Jews alike—that the anti-iconic bias of the Jewish Bible and Jewish tradition had made of the Jews a people without art.6 Convincing proof that this was far from the truth came in the late 19th century and above all in the interwar years, when there was a veritable explosion in the number of artists of Jewish origin, who were active in such disparate localities as Vitebsk, Kiev, Cracow, Paris, Jerusalem and New York.7 This impressive increase in the number of artists of Jewish extraction was an indication of the continuing process of Jewish acculturation to European and American high culture. However, in the American context, the location of many of them on the Left, even the extreme Left, was an evident sign that, politically speaking, these artists rejected integration into the American mainstream. The desire to “make it” in the American artistic world coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with the desire to remake America. One way to overcome this potential contradiction was to use art as a weapon in the political struggle, which is precisely what many of these artists chose to do. Beyond the issues of Jewish integration and its limits, does the emergence in America of a sizable group of left-wing, often Communist-inclined Jewish artists require the interest of the historian of modern Jewry? After all, in many ways this phenomenon was merely a part of a more general one, namely the influx of working-class sons and daughters of the “new immigration” from Eastern and Southern Europe—Jews, Poles, Italians, Russians, and the like (along with members of other marginal groups, such as Asian and African Americans)—into the worlds of American culture and radical politics.8 In the annals of American art, this was something new: American painting, after all, had traditionally been dominated by American-born men of North European origin and generally middle-class status. American art historians have made the point that the arrival upon the scene of these new elements strongly influenced the course of American painting in the 1920s and 1930s, since it was responsible, together with the tremendous impact of the Depression, for the rise of a new school of art that came to be known as “social realism.”9 Nonetheless, even if we keep in mind that the concentration of large numbers of poor immigrant Jewish artists attracted to left-wing politics in New York and a few other cities was part of a larger American story, we may still allow ourselves to search for specifically Jewish “subplots” or “angles.” Did they exist? What follows is an effort to provide an answer to this question. The first issue to consider is whether the Jewishness of these artists was a factor in propelling them into the Communist orbit. There can be no doubt that many of them experienced antisemitism, both in the “old home” in Eastern Europe (the vast

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majority of left-wing Jewish American artists of the interwar period were of East European origin, meaning the Russian empire and Galicia) and in the ghettos of America. William Gropper, probably the most influential of all Jewish artists active in the Communist movement, recalls in his autobiographical notes that his elementary school teacher on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, angry at one of her Jewish pupils, beat him soundly and then “sent the victim back to his seat and retreated, hissing between her teeth, ‘Kike.’ ”10 In a 1967 interview, Gropper declared that his experiences as a Jew lay at the root of his sympathy for the poor and exploited: “[I]f the Mexicans in Los Angeles were mistreated, I would feel Mexican. I react just as Negroes react, because I have felt the same thing as a Jew. Or my family has.”11 Similarly, Jack Levine, like Gropper a first-generation product of the American urban slums (in his case, Boston), attributed his radical political outlook to his Jewish heritage: “As America was going into the Depression, I began to realize the rich, full tradition in the labor movement that the Jews had had in terms of liberal and progressive thought, and I became involved in that. Furthermore, I began, in a dim way, to think in terms of a sort of humanism, which I believe, which I understand, had its Jewish, Hebraic antecedents. . . .”12 Other American Jewish artists were in agreement with Levine’s notion of the link between biblical Judaism and radicalism, a commonly held opinion within the ranks of Jews on the Left both in Europe and America.13 Who can say, however, how much of a role the Jewishness of these artists played in their choice of a political affiliation, as opposed to the weight of other factors such as childhood poverty and the devastating impact of the Depression? The cartoonist and artist Maurice Becker, another product of the New York tenements, does not mention his ethnicity when he says: “So you see, I didn’t choose to become a radical—did only what comes naturally”—what came naturally, that is, to a boy growing up in the slums.14 In the above-mentioned collection of works by one hundred Jewish artists, their brief “credos” are also included. These credos only rarely touch on specifically Jewish matters, and when they do, pains are taken to ascribe to antisemitic experiences a consequent hatred for prejudice against all minority groups. Thus the artist Lena Gurr, writing about her deceased artist husband, Joseph Biel, reports that he had witnessed a pogrom when still in Russia and “was burning with hatred of oppressors of all kinds, for all who treat their fellow beings unjustly.”15 Abraham Manievich alludes to his Jewishness, but is careful to speak in universalist terms: “Give me the slums, the ghetto, the poor districts. I have lived among the people of these sections, and there is a sympathy I feel for them.”16 The subsuming of Jewish particularism within a discourse of universalism is to be expected of anti-nationalist Jewish leftists in general, and of Communists in particular. At the same time, one might argue that this very attribute—this universalism—was itself a hallmark of secularized Judaism, so that even if the “text” does not usually reveal a link between Jewishness and radicalism, a Jewish “subtext” may nevertheless be postulated, if not proven.17 What of the question of subject matter? Did Jewish artists affiliated with or sympathetic to the Communist party create works that related to the Jewish experience either covertly or overtly? In order to deal with this question, we must consider the reigning Communist attitude toward art and its uses in America. As

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pointed out by Andrew Hemingway in his superb study of “artists on the left,” U.S. Communism never sought to impose on its members and fellow travelers one particular artistic style or language.18 This was not, after all, the Soviet Union, and even there considerable artistic diversity prevailed until the imposition, in the mid1930s, of socialist realism as the only acceptable form of artistic expression. Searching for a term to define the style of the left-wing artists of the interwar period, Bram Dijkstra suggests “expressionism,” by which he means not a specific style but rather the employing of techniques that convey a heightened emotionalism, “which makes us confront the harsher realities of existence.”19 At any rate, it should be borne in mind that among the left-wing artists, Weber and Lozowick were distinguished modernists, using cubism and other new European artistic languages; so was one of the most politically active artists in the 1930s, Stuart Davis, a (nonJewish) leader of the Communist-leaning New York Artists’ Union, who was a pioneer abstract artist.20 Despite this artistic pluralism, it was generally agreed within the pro-Communist artistic world that art must reflect aspects of social reality, convey a social message, and be intelligible to the “masses.” The radical artists of the 1920s and 1930s were viewed as maintaining a tradition that reached back to Goya, Daumier, and van Gogh—the last was praised by the celebrated left-wing critic Harold Rosenberg for his efforts “to develop an art for the poor.”21 In the American artistic context, the left-wing artists of the interwar years were clearly linked to the “Ashcan” school of the pre-First World War period, whose members (John Sloan being the most prominent) specialized in realistic and caustic depictions of the urban scene. The interwar artists were also much influenced by Mexican mural painters, and above all by the works of the Mexican Communist Diego Rivera. In 1932, the John Reed Clubs published a draft manifesto that rejected “the treacherous illusion that art can exist for art’s sake, or that the artist can remain remote from the horrible conflicts in which all men must take sides.” It called on creative artists “to join with the literary and artistic movement of the working class in forging a new art that shall be a weapon in the battle for a new and superior world.”22 The following year, Meyer Schapiro (writing under the pseudonym “John Kwait”) sharply criticized some of the works shown at an exhibition sponsored by the John Reed Club of New York for failing to follow this directive: More than half the objects shown express no revolutionary ideas; and of the rest, only a few reenact for the worker in simple, plastic language the crucial situation of his class. . . . The good revolutionary picture is not necessarily a cartoon, but it should have the legibility and pointedness of a cartoon, and like a cartoon it should reach great masses of workers at little expense.23

Jacob Burck, a Chicago-based cartoonist (of Jewish origin) did not accept Schapiro’s negative verdict, but he too believed that the left-wing artist must devote himself to the “developing of new plastic revolutionary expressions which are an outgrowth of the class struggle and which embody the aspirations of the working class for the desired classless state.”24 Writing in early 1935, Lozowick went so far as to approve of Soviet-style socialist realism, since the more modern variety of Soviet art had “lost its roots in


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popular soil and dried up. . . . Socialist Realism seeks to portray the Soviet reality, and is not forced on artists from above.”25 This did not mean that American artists would be obliged to paint in this official style; still, many would have approved of Lozowick’s remarks made in 1936: “In sum, revolutionary art implies open-eyed observation, integrated experience, intense participation and an ordered view of life. And by the same token, revolutionary art further implies that its provenance is not due to an arbitrary order from any person or group but is decreed by history, as a consequence of particular historic events.”26 What, exactly, should Communist and fellow traveler artists portray in their canvases, their murals, their cartoons and caricatures? One of their tasks, clearly, was to depict the harsh reality of American life—urban and rural poverty, the mass unemployment that characterized the Depression years, the wicked oppression of the Negro, police brutality, and the like. Another was to create dignified and sometimes heroic portrayals of workers, of socialist martyrs, and of mass demonstrations for social justice and better working conditions. These images would convey to their viewers the cruelty and hypocrisy that characterized American capitalism, whereas images of the Soviet Union, the “first socialist state,” would demonstrate the existence of a successful alternative to the “American way of life.” A certain degree of realism and accessibility were required, but not all artists whose work bore these attributes were deserving of praise. Indeed, the artists of the so-called “regional school” of American art, such as Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood—non-socialists and, it might be added, non-Jews— were castigated for presenting a rosy and therefore false image of American life. Thus Benton was berated for painting patriotic murals in order to gain favor with “the flag-wavers who are demanding one-hundred percent American art.”27 Rather than glorifying America, the left-wing artists tore off its mask and exposed its blemishes. They did so, it must be said, while at the same time accepting commissions and wages from such government agencies as the WPA (Works Progress Administration), created by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in order to help keep people alive during the Depression.28 Was there room, within the general framework of “social” art as defined by the American Communists and their allies, for artistic work that depicted the lives and struggles of members of specific ethnic, religious, or “racial” groups, such as the Jews—work that might be regarded as constituting “Jewish art”? Given the strong universalist impulse within the party and among its front organizations, and its fervid opposition to the dominant strain of Jewish nationalism, one would imagine that the answer would be in the negative. In 1936, the young art historian Meyer Schapiro published an article in the organ of the New York Artists’ Union in which he denied the very existence of such a thing as “national” or “racial” art, while at the same time opposing the voluntary segregation of American artists according to national or racial criteria.29 Interestingly, Schapiro attempted to prove that there was no such thing as “Jewish art,” arguing that “Rothenstein is an Englishman, Pissarro a Frenchman, Soutine a Russian, Pechstein a German.” As for African Americans, a group that the Communist party made strenuous efforts to recruit, they too were enjoined to resist the temptation to create a segregated art based on “old world” African models. Rather, black artists in America should integrate into

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American culture by assimilating the various artistic styles prevalent in the country. To concentrate on creating “authentic” black art would be to retreat into the black ghetto, which, according to Schapiro, was precisely what American reactionaries wished the blacks to do.30 These rather extreme views on the subject of “national art” were not shared by everyone. The Polish-born (and Jewish) artist Jennings Tofel, reacting to these sentiments, wrote: “Mr. Schapiro holds that nationality is an illusion and nationalism a source of danger. I am not alone in thinking that nationalism can be a source of great good.” According to Tofel, the artist must be true to his own heritage: “[I]f he is authentic,” he noted, “and not merely a virtuoso or eclectic, or a trailer-along, the artist will not fail to reveal his identification with the national and cultural group he springs from. . . .”31 Schapiro answered by reminding his readers that much in traditional religious or national culture was highly oppressive; for instance, “[t]he traditions of China have been used to suppress the revolutionary zeal of the Chinese masses, not to encourage it.” And he again insisted that the “Negro” would do himself no favor by taking inspiration from Africa, for “such a return to a remote past would weaken the modern Negro in his struggle for equality and freedom.”32 Schapiro’s views were reiterated at the Congress of American Artists in 1936 by Lynd Ward, who debunked various racial and national theories and emphasized that the artist’s specific social situation, and not his racial or national affiliation, must determine the contents of his art. He viewed the calls for “authentic” American or German art as profoundly reactionary: “We have many appeals for an ‘American art’ in which the concept of America is very vague, usually defined as ‘a genuine American expression’ or ‘explicitly native art’ and sometimes [including] a separation of American painters into desirable and undesirable on the basis of AngloSaxon surnames.”33 These remarks were doubtless aimed at the “reactionary” regionalist school of Benton, Curry, and Wood. Schapiro and Ward were believers in ethnic assimilation, in the “melting pot” made famous by Israel Zangwill’s play. The new revolutionary art in America, they maintained, should not be divided into various “national” schools based on specific national or religious traditions. True, this did not necessarily rule out the portrayal, in left-wing art, of specific ethnic, racial, or national “types.” In fact, fellowtraveling black artists such as Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, and Aaron Douglas emphasized the condition of black Americans in their paintings, as did the white (non-Jewish) radical artist Robert Gwathmey.34 Numerous left-wing artists, white and black, portrayed scenes of lynchings, those terrible spectacles that symbolized the suffering of the blacks in racist, capitalist America.35 The Communist Party in America, by denouncing these “legal murders” and other manifestations of blatant discrimination, hoped to win the support of American blacks, whom it regarded (ever since a decision of the Communist International in 1928) as an oppressed nationality within the United States. This is the historical context that explains the many sympathetic portrayals of blacks by Communist-leaning artists, who were doing their bit in the campaign to make the party and its allies the unchallenged champions of black rights in the United States.36 What of Jewish artists and Jewish subject matter? The U.S. Communist party certainly tolerated Yiddish-language Jewish cultural activities, which included the


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publication of an important monthly journal. Nevertheless, during the interwar period, the “Jewish question” never assumed anything like the same importance as the “Negro question” within the party, and there are few Jewish equivalents to the many depictions of Negro suffering and heroism that were produced by artists on the Left. Opposition to “bourgeois” Jewish nationalism, and the Jewish artists’ own desire to abandon the ghetto and avoid accusations of parochialism, mitigated against this possibility. This is not to say that left-wing Jewish artists never produced work that contained Jewish texts, or at least Jewish subtexts. A few examples will have to suffice. Ben Shahn, who signed the 1935 Call for an American artists’ congress and was definitely a man of the Left (though never a card-carrying Communist), completed in 1931 a series of watercolors devoted to the infamous Dreyfus affair (fig. 1), works that were soon to be overshadowed by his much more famous rendition of what he and all American radicals regarded as another spectacular miscarriage of justice– the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.37 The American expressionist Ben-Zion (Benzion Weinman), who was linked to the Communist world in the 1930s, was praised in the pages of Art Front for his painting Friday Evening, which was described as “frankly Jewish in mood as well as subject matter, but this racial feeling is undoubtedly one of the effects Ben-Zion strives after.”38 (Meyer Schapiro, presumably, would not have approved.)

Figure 1. Ben Shahn, “Portrait of Captain Dreyfus,” 1931; Estate of Ben Shahn/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.

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The same issue of this pro-Communist journal also welcomed the work of the artist, Yiddish writer, and puppeteer Yosl Cutler, who was a well-known figure in the world of Yiddish theatre.39 Art Front later reproduced a highly interesting image by Ida Abelman, My Father Reminisces, which depicted scenes from the life of Jewish garment workers in New York.40 Louis Lozowick, a committed Communist, made in 1936 a lithograph of Jews at a Warsaw market (fig. 2). Max Weber, who in 1936 was elected chairman of the American Artists’ Congress, was well known for his inimitably modern depictions of Orthodox Jews, as in The Talmudists of 1934 (fig. 3). In such works, the Jewish content is obvious. In others, for example, the self-portraits and paintings of his family by Raphael

Figure 2. Louis Lozowick, “Warsaw Market,” 1937; Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Adele Lozowick. 1937, Lee Lozowick.


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Figure 3. Max Weber, “The Talmudists,” 1934; The Jewish Museum/Art Resource, N.Y., gift of Mrs. Nathan Miller.

Soyer, the Jewish content is less apparent, more a matter of subtext than text, although present nonetheless.41 The Yiddish Communist press occasionally praised artists who saw themselves as participants in the creation of a new Jewish secular culture. Both Boris (Baruch) Aronson, well known as a set designer for the Yiddish stage, and the Russian Jewish artist Solomon Yudovin received favorable mentions in Der hamer, the Communist cultural monthly.42 Marc Chagall was celebrated in the pages of the Frayheyt as a great Jewish artist, as was Max Weber.43 Finally, upon occasion Jewish artists on the Left took part in specifically Jewish activities; for example, in 1938, YKUF organized an exhibition of Jewish artists in New York, in which many leading Communist and fellow traveler artists took part. Several years later, the art department of YKUF opened its own gallery on the Lower East Side.44 Such examples notwithstanding, the number of Jewish “social” artists who placed emphasis upon Jewish subject matter was very small. Even at the YKUF exhibition of 1938, works depicting Jewish themes were in a minority.45 Of the works by

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Jewish artists selected for shipment to the art museum in Birobidzhan, virtually none had anything to do with Jewish themes—Max Weber, for instance, contributed a painting of an Italian peasant girl; Lozowick, the Birth of a Skyscraper; Gropper, a drawing of road workers; Gellert, an image of Lenin; Julius Bloch, a black Prisoner; and Minna Harkavy, a bust of Henri Barbusse.46 A higher percentage of works on Jewish subjects is to be found in the above-mentioned one hundred works by Jewish artists assembled by YKUF in 1947, but here too they are a distinct minority.47 Much more typical of the work of American Jewish radical artists in the interwar years were American, not specifically Jewish, images of the downtrodden and the oppressed. Good examples of this genre are Raphael Soyer’s The Mission (fig. 4), Lozowick’s Thanksgiving Dinner (fig. 5), and Gropper’s The Female Beggar (fig. 6).48 Like Gropper’s Beggar, Mitchell Siporin’s image of female Needle Workers appeared in the Yiddish-language Communist journal Der hamer (fig. 7). Although this might well be a depiction of Jewish women, Siporin included no specific ethnic markers.49 It is interesting to discover that the pages of Der hamer, a specifically Jewish journal, hardly ever feature artwork on Jewish subjects. This is true of the journal’s covers, created by Gropper and Lozowick, among others. The very first issue, for instance, features a cover and five additional illustrations of cityscapes and machines by Lozowick, executed in his Russian-influenced modern style (fig. 8).50 Other covers deal with strikes, demonstrations, and (especially in the 1930s) the struggle against fascism and Nazism. Highlighting the joint struggle of whites and blacks for a better world, Gropper’s cover for the October 1932 issue features a black man among those voting for the party in the presidential elections of that

Figure 4. Raphael Soyer, “The Mission,” 1934; from the collection of the author.


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Figure 5. Louis Lozowick, “Thanksgiving Dinner,” 1938; Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Adele Lozowick. 1938, Lee Lozowick.

year (fig. 9). A black figure also appears in another Gropper cover, which portrays a large number of worker militants holding rifles and signs bearing the following slogans: “For the Soviet Union,” “Against War and Fascism,” and “Long Live the First of May” (fig. 10).51 Whereas Jewish subjects were ignored in the iconography of Der hamer and blacks were the only minority group to be clearly identifiable in its pages, references to the glorious and heroic Soviet Union were very common. Prominent among the artists who praised the U.S.S.R. was Hugo Gellert, a Hungarian Jew by

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Figure 6. William Gropper, “The Female Beggar,” 1927; from Der hamer.

origin, an activist in left-wing American Hungarian politics, and a loyal Communist. As he himself put it: “Being a Communist and being an artist are two cheeks of the same face and, as for me, I fail to see how I could be one without being the other.”52 He demonstrated his loyalty to Marxism by illustrating Das Kapital and by creating many images of Lenin—one of which, done in the cubist style, appeared in Der hamer in 1927 (fig. 11).53 Gellert also created a large mural for a cafeteria on Union Square in New York whose subjects included black workers, miners, Sacco and Vanzetti, John Reed, and, naturally, Lenin.54 Not to be outdone, Gropper also produced images of the sainted founder of the Soviet Union; one of them, appearing on the cover of Der hamer, portrays a shadowy Lenin and a stack of his writings in Russian, English, German, and Yiddish (fig. 12).55 In 1933, the same journal published a drawing by Yosl Cutler that shows a heavenly Lenin supervising the industrialization of the U.S.S.R. (fig. 13).56


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Figure 7. Mitchell Siporin, “Needle Workers,” 1931; from Der hamer.

As already mentioned, the iconography of Der hamer in the 1930s concentrated on the dangerous upsurge of right-wing extremism in Europe. The anti-fascist and anti-Nazi cartoons naturally contained a Jewish subtext, but there were no explicit references to the plight of the Jews. Thus Gropper’s cover of April 1935 depicts Hitler as a fearful skeleton with black wings and a revolver in his hand (fig. 14), while the same artist in 1937 renders a powerful worker’s hand strangling the Nazi snake, whose face bears a resemblance to Stalin’s main adversary, Trotsky (fig. 15).57 The October 1935 issue of the New Masses included a special section devoted to art. The pro-Communist journal took pleasure in the rise of what it called “American revolutionary art,” produced by artists whose subject matter was social reality and who worked not for the elite, but for a mass audience.58 Among the artists whose work was reproduced were Gropper (a depiction of Union Hall); Selma Freeman (a strike); Lil Adelman (a demonstration); Raphael Soyer (the Bowery); Mitchell Siporin (the Haymarket affair); and Peter Blume (fascism). Other images

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Figure 8. Louis Lozowick, “New York,” 1923; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase. 1923, Lee Lozowick.

included a portrait of a black boy, a lynching, a demonstration against racism being dispersed by the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and capitalist warmongers. As usual, the only ethnic group to be singled out for special attention was the black community. Even in the 1930s, as the Jewish situation sharply worsened in Central and Eastern Europe, there seems to have been little if any room in the world of leftwing art for special consideration of the “Jewish question.” The Jewish “subplot” here—if one exists—is the general tendency on the part of most Jewish artists on the Left to ignore Jewish issues. Throughout history, Jews have tended to play the role of middlemen, most famously in the economic sphere but also in the realm of culture. Consider, for example, their role in making black music available to white audiences in 20thcentury America.59 In this context, it is interesting to point to the important role of Jewish Communists (some of whom had been born in Russia and knew the


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Figure 9. William Gropper, no title, 1932; from Der hamer.

language) in introducing Americans to the new culture developing in the Soviet Union, and to Soviet life in general. In 1930, three young Communists published Voices of October, a book designed to explain the intricacies and achievements of Soviet culture to those Americans interested in the Soviet experiment. One is tempted to write that it was no accident that all three were of Jewish origin— Lozowick wrote on art, Joseph Freeman on literature and music, and Joshua Kunitz on literature.60 Kunitz, who covered the Soviet scene for the New Masses, informed the readers of that journal in 1933 that “[t]he truth is that there is no other country in the contemporary world where the arts are so vital, so earnest, where the creative artist, even the beginner, enjoys such prestige and economic security as in the Soviet Union.”61 Two years earlier, Freeman published in the same journal his translation of a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky.62

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Lozowick, who was at home in modern Russian culture, was probably America’s leading authority on Soviet art, having published a small book on the subject as early as 1925.63 In this work, Lozowick praised the Soviet attitude toward art, which had resulted in an unprecedented flourishing of this branch of high culture. “The Soviet government,” Lozowick reported, “acted under the assumption that a new art can be the work of a new man, himself the product of the new social system.”64 He repeated these sentiments in his essay in Voices of October, which included a detailed analysis of the various schools of art to be found in the U.S.S.R. In 1927, Gropper visited the Soviet Union, and upon his return published a volume (in Yiddish) of 56 drawings he had made there.65 These drawings present a largely cheerful view of Soviet reality in the 1920s, and it is not surprising that they received a rave review in the New Masses; the images, this journal informed its readers, provide “a real glimpse into a revolutionized society, where the line


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Figure 11. Hugo Gellert, no title, 1927; from Der hamer.

between literate and illiterate is being snubbed out, the line between east and west doesn’t exist, and a big eraser makes fun of the line between Jew and gentile, and gives the young more than an even break along the line that used to separate the generations.” According to the reviewer, Gropper’s images were proof that the artist practiced art not for art’s sake, but “for life’s sake.”66 Among the figures and scenes depicted in Gropper’s pictorial collection are a jolly accordion player (fig. 16); a cheerful “youth” (fig. 17); and a happy homeless boy (bezprizorny) (fig. 18).67 Also included are some less positive images, such as Nepman (referring to the era of the New Economic Policy) and Beggars near the Monastery (fig. 19). Nonetheless, as reported in the New Masses, the general impression is of a new, promising, and democratic society being born out of the misery and chaos of the old, as can be seen in his drawing of a Conference (fig. 20). Lozowick, too, made drawings of Soviet life. In 1931, his travels in the country took him to Central Asia, and the following year, he produced some lithographs depicting how life in the primitive Soviet East was being transformed by the new, energetic, and modernizing state.68 Among his works are Collective Farmer (Reclaiming the Land—Soviet Tadjikistan) (fig. 21) and Steam Shovel in the Desert (fig. 22). In these images, Lozowick returns to one of his favorite themes, the inevitable and positive impact of industrialization and the relentless triumph of modernization. The writings and artwork of Lozowick and Gropper, playing the

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time-honored Jewish role of intermediaries, contributed to the Communist campaign to convince Americans that the U.S.S.R. was a country that was energetically solving its basic social problems, unlike the Depression-ridden United States. Finally, a few words about Gropper’s Jewish iconography in the Yiddish-language Communist daily Morgn frayheyt.69 In contrast to the New Masses and to the Yiddish-language cultural and political monthly Der hamer, the pages of the Frayheyt often ran cartoons—virtually all of them the work of Gropper—on matters of Jewish interest. In 1929, for example, the paper closely covered events in Palestine, where the Jewish community (yishuv) was subjected to numerous Arab attacks, the most infamous one occurring in the holy city of Hebron. The first reaction of the Frayheyt was to condemn these attacks as Middle Eastern versions of Russian pogroms, but it soon changed its line in accordance with directives issuing forth from Moscow, which declared the attacks to be a justified Arab response to Zionist-


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Figure 13. Yosl Cutler, no title, 1933; from Der hamer.

British colonialism. Thus the Frayheyt’s headline of August 27 announced: “An Arab mass revolt against England all over Palestine.” A few days later, the Frayheyt’s readers were informed that “[t]he English military and Jewish legionnaires are slaughtering the Arabs; a thousand dead and wounded; Haifa is in flames.” Later articles referred to “Jewish fascism” in Palestine and declared that “the blood is on your hands, Zionists and Zionist helpers.”70 Gropper contributed to this virulent anti-Zionist campaign by creating a number of vitriolic cartoons that revealed his absolute loyalty to the Communist line and his visceral hatred of Zionism. One leading image was that of the “bourgeois” Zionist Jew wearing a prayer shawl on which can be seen a magen david and, within it, a dollar sign. In the September 19, 1929 issue of the paper, he contributed a cartoon depicting a Zionist wearing such a talit who holds a pushke (alms box) in one hand and a whip in the other. In the background, we observe workers bent over their machines. The caption reads: “The Zionist philanthropist.”71 In another

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cartoon (fig. 23), Gropper depicts a number of grotesque-looking Jews attacking a wounded man: the caption reads: “He’s no cripple—he’s only pretending—he is an Arab! Beat him, Jews.”72 Even more horrific is Gropper’s depiction of a fat Jew with a huge nose, whose hands are dripping with blood (fig. 24).73 On his garment he bears the inevitable Jewish star and dollar sign, the Yiddish-Hebrew word kosher, a swastika, a fake union label, a pistol and sword, and a hand holding up a torch (an ironic reference, presumably, to the Statue of Liberty). The caption reads: “He brings light.” In this case, all further commentary is superfluous. These cartoons bring to mind the antisemitic Jewish caricatures of Nazi provenance and illustrate as well the unbelievably bitter internecine warfare between Jews on the extreme Left and the “bourgeois” Jewish world as represented by elements within the Zionist movement.


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The Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of the summer of 1939, whose secret protocol called for the division of independent Poland in the event of war, was supported by Communist parties throughout the world, including the American party and its Jewish affiliates. This radically new situation also found expression in Gropper’s iconography. On September 9, 1939—after the German invasion of Poland, but before the Soviet Union entered Polish territory from the East—he published a cartoon (fig. 25) expressing the sad plight of Poland, with the caption “Poland calls.” (Let us note that there is no specific reference here to the suffering of the huge Jewish population, which now came under Nazi domination.) Ten days later, following the Soviet invasion, Gropper published a triumphant cartoon showing a Red Army soldier embracing an inhabitant of eastern Poland, while in the background we see a crowd of jubilant citizens—including a Jew in the front row— cheering their new rulers (fig. 26).74 This cartoon expresses the official party line,

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Figure 16. William Gropper, “The Accordionist,” 1928; from 56 tseykhnungen fun ratnfarband (Paris: 1928).

according to which the Soviets entered eastern Poland as liberators of the local (largely non-Polish) population, which had long languished under the yoke of the Polish landlords and the bourgeoisie. The caption reads: “A hearty and moving encounter.” The old Jew, holding a flag and wearing a traditional Jewish hat, represents Jewish joy at being freed from “Polish fascism.” We might add that, from the Polish perspective, such Jewish behavior—which Gropper did not entirely make up—was nothing short of treason, and it reinforced the views of Polish antisemites that all Jews were Communists and therefore enemies of a free Poland. This, however, is another story, told elsewhere in this volume. After the Second World War, and particularly after the 1950s, Communist influence among American intellectuals and creative artists waned, in part because of persecution (McCarthyism), but also in the wake of revelations about Soviet practices. Moreover, “social art,” while not disappearing altogether, was marginalized; the reigning style became that of the New York-based school of abstract expressionism which, whatever it was, was certainly not overtly concerned with social issues. As it happened, artists of Jewish origin were also prominent among the


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Figure 17. William Gropper, “A Youth,” 1928; from 56 tseykhnungen fun ratn-farband (Paris: 1928).

abstract expressionists, but these artists were not associated with the increasingly moribund Communist party and its front organizations.75 Among the social realists of Jewish origin, the postwar years witnessed a new show of interest in matters of Jewish concern, resulting no doubt from the impact of the Holocaust, the founding of the state of Israel, and disillusionment with Communism in general and with Soviet policies in particular.76 In 1948, Gropper attended the unveiling of the Warsaw ghetto monument in Poland. In an interview conducted some years later, he said: “I’m not Jewish in the professional sense but in a human sense, here are six million destroyed. There is a ritual in the Jewish religion of lighting a candle for the dead, but instead of doing this I decided to paint a picture in memory, every year. In this way I paid tribute rather than burning . . . candles.”77 Lozowick traveled to Israel several times and made lithographs of the Kotel (the Western Wall), the gates of the Knesset, and the synagogue of the Hebrew University at Givat Ram.78 In 1947, he also contributed an essay on “Jewish Art” to One Hundred American Jewish Artists and Sculptors. Another artist, Jack Levine, took part in a symposium in Israel, at which he explicated the Jewish roots of his world outlook.79 Raphael Soyer painted a large portrait of Golda Meir (1975)

Figure 18. William Gropper, “A Homeless Boy,” 1928; from 56 tseykhnungen fun ratnfarband (Paris: 1928).

Figure 19. William Gropper, “Beggars Near the Church,” 1928; from 56 tseykhnungen fun ratn-farband (Paris: 1928). 122

Figure 20. William Gropper, “A Conference,” 1928; from 56 tseykhnungen fun ratn-farband (Paris: 1928).

Figure 21. Louis Lozowick, “Collective Farmer (Reclaiming the Land— Soviet Tajikistan),” 1932; Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Adele Lozowick. 1932, Lee Lozowick. 123

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Figure 22. Louis Lozowick, “Steam Shovel in the Desert, Tajikistan,” 1932; Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Adele Lozowick, 1932, Lee Lozowick.

and illustrated the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s memoir, Lost in America.80 In a similar manner, other distinguished left-wing American cultural figures of Jewish descent demonstrated a new willingness to consider Jewish themes as proper subjects for their creative energies. The choreographer Jerome Robbins, who joined the Communist party in 1943, went to Israel in 1953 and worked with the Israeli dance troop Inbal. Later he directed and choreographed the Broadway hit Fiddler on the Roof.81 Marc Blitzstein, the composer who created one of the most notable of all left-wing “musicals” of the interwar years, The Cradle Will Rock, went to Israel in 1962 and spent some time on a moshav, Beit Yannai, where he worked on his opera on the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. Back in America, he met Bernard Malamud and agreed to write an opera based on several of Malamud’s celebrated short stories on Jewish subjects.82 Howard Fast, who remained in the party until 1957, published in the following year a novel based on the life of Moses.83 If all this does not qualify as a full-fledged “return to their people” on the part of these talented figures, it does indicate that the waning of the Jewish-Communist alliance in America was accompanied by the emergence among them of a more positive attitude toward certain aspects of their Jewish heritage. What is the historian to make of the support lent by so many American artists of Jewish origin to the Communist movement in the interwar years? Was it a sign of


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Figure 23. William Gropper, no title, 1929; from Morgn frayheyt.

their idealism, their sincere desire to place their art at the service of the struggle for social justice at a time of economic collapse, rampant racism, and the rise, in Europe, of fascism and Nazism? Or should it be read instead as an indication of their moral blindness, an unforgivable willingness to support wholeheartedly a regime based on terror and mass murder? Was their alignment with the party, either as card-carrying members or as fellow travelers, the result of a laudatory (if utopian) universalism based on certain secularized Jewish values and the result of Jewish experience with intolerance—or should the unwillingness of most of them to highlight Jewish issues be interpreted as an indication of their unease with their Jewishness? Are Gropper’s lurid cartoons a defensible way of revealing the contradictions of Zionism, or are they an undeniable sign of his evident self-hatred at this period of his life?

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Figure 24. William Gropper, “He Brings Light,” 1929; from Morgn frayheyt.

In truth, these artists, like other intellectuals and creative people of Jewish origin active in or supportive of the Communist movement, expressed contradictory impulses in their lives and work. It would be mean-spirited to doubt their sincere hatred of the oppression of black Americans as expressed in so many of their canvases; and who can doubt the genuineness of their efforts to expose the terrible poverty and hopelessness so common during the Depression years, as well as the heroism of American workers? The problem is to understand how they combined their evident desire to work for a better world with their unconditional, uncritical support of the U.S.S.R. and their readiness to follow the Comintern line even if it meant turning a blind eye to Jewish suffering (as in the case of the 1929 Arab attacks on Jewish settlements in Palestine, and of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939).84 The historian may lack the tools to deal adequately with this question. What he or she can do, and what I have attempted to do here, is to make a case for the existence of various Jewish “subplots” in the story of left-wing Jewish artists


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Figure 25. William Gropper, “Poland Calls,” 1939; from Morgn frayheyt.

and Communism in America. Above and beyond these “subplots,” the alliance of some Jews with Communism has much to tell us about a central dilemma in modern Jewish life: that of finding one’s way between the utopian, messianic, and often dangerous urge to change the world, on the one hand, and the natural wish to identify with one’s own people, with its sufferings and its achievements, on the other. Whether or not they explicitly acknowledged it, American Jewish artists’ choice in favor of the former alternative was, at least in some ways, a Jewish choice.

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Figure 26. William Gropper, “A Moving and Heartfelt Meeting,” 1939; from Morgn frayheyt.

Notes 1. John Reed, author of the famous book Ten Days that Shook the World, was one of the founders of the American Communist movement. 2. On the plans for the Congress, whose official name was the American Artists’ Congress against War and Fascism, see Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven: 2002), 122–123. For the list of New York artists, see Stuart Davis, “Introduction,” in Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick: 1986), 53. The list of those who signed the Call is in ibid., 49–52; the estimate of the percentage of Jews is my own. Throughout this article, I do not distinguish between “card-carrying Communists” and artists who participated in organizations and publications close to the party, such as Communist front groups. 3. Nicholas Borodulin, “American Art for Birobidzhan,” Jews in Eastern Europe (Winter


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2002), 99–108. This project was sponsored by ICOR (an organization founded to support Jewish colonization in the Soviet Union). A list of artists whose work was selected for inclusion in the shipment is to be found in Biro-Bidjan: Exhibition of Works of Art Presented by American Artists to the State Museum of Biro-Bidjan (New York: 1936). I am grateful to Arkadii Zeltser of the Hebrew University for making this publication available to me. 4. One Hundred Contemporary American Jewish Artists and Sculptors (Hundert haynttsaytike amerikaner yidishe molers un skulptorn) (New York: 1947). 5. Harvey Klehr, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York: 1992), 55. Klehr notes, in his The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: 1984), that “[t]he most decided disproportion . . . was the Jewish presence in the Party” (p. 163). 6. Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: 2000). 7. Arkadii Zeltser, “Jewish Artists of Vitebsk in the Interwar Period: Between the National and the Universal,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe (Summer 2003), 77–108; Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe (eds.), Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York 1900–1945 (New York: 1991); Hillel Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-lige (Khudozhniki kultur-ligi) (Jerusalem: 2003); Jerzy Malinowski, Malarstwo i rzez´ba Z˙ydo´w polskich w XIX i XX wieku (Warsaw: 2000); Romy Golan and Kenneth E. Silver, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945 (New York: 1985); Gideon Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel (Boulder: 1998). 8. Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876–1976 (Washington, D.C.: 1976). 9. Bram Dijkstra, American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920–1950 (New York: 2003), 12–13; David Shapiro (ed.), Social Realism: Art as a Weapon (New York: 1973), 20–21; Patricia Hills, Social Change and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s (n.p.: 1983), 16. 10. As quoted from Gropper’s autobiographical notes in Louis Lozowick, William Gropper (East Brunswick: 1983), 16. 11. From August Freundlich’s interview with Gropper as published in Freundlich, William Gropper: Retrospective: An Exhibition Catalogue by August L. Freundlich (n.p.: 1968), 28. 12. Levine’s remarks, made at a symposium organized by the American Jewish Congress in Israel in 1962, are quoted in Jack Levine, ed. Robert Frankel (New York: 1989), 93. 13. Consider, for example, Raphael Soyer’s 1960s drawing of a white woman holding a black child, which features a quotation from the Book of Amos: “Are you not as the Children of Ethiopia unto me, O Children of Israel.” See Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: 1991), 33. 14. Quoted in Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport: 1973), 193. 15. One Hundred Contemporary Jewish Artists and Sculptors, 24. 16. Ibid., 128. 17. I have argued elsewhere for the existence of a universalist tradition in “Jewish art.” See my article “Jewish Universalism: Some Visual Texts and Subtexts,” in Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, ed. Jack Kugelmass (New Brunswick: 2003), 163–184. 18. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 2. He remarks on the artwork published in the Communist-leaning cultural journal the New Masses: “No single stylistic mode was ever dominant” (p. 12). 19. Dijkstra, American Expressionism, 12. 20. On Davis in the 1930s, see Patricia Hills, Stuart Davis (New York: 1966), 74, 107ff. 21. Art Front (9 Jan. 1936), 3. 22. New Masses (12 June 1932), 4. 23. John Kwait, “John Reed Club Art,” New Masses (7 Feb. 1933), 23. Hemingway identifies “John Kwait” as Meyer Schapiro’s pseudonym (Artists on the Left, 59). 24. New Masses (8 April 1933), 26.

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25. Louis Lozowick, “Aspects of Soviet Art,” New Masses (29 Jan. 1935), 23. 26. Louis Lozowick, “Towards a Revolutionary Art,” Art Front (July–August 1936), 12– 14. This is the text of an address given by Lozowick at the Artists’ Congress of 1936. 27. The quotation is from Stephen Alexander’s article in the New Masses (23 April 1935), 28; see also his article on Grant Wood in ibid. (8 May 1935), 28, and Lincoln Kirstein, “An Iowa Memling,” Art Front (July 1935), 6. There is no doubt that the “Jewish question” played a role in the polemics between the regionalists and the left-wing “social artists.” On this, see Erika Lee Doss, Benton, Pollack, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: 1991), 97–98; 118–126. 28. On the various government institutions that supported artists during the New Deal, see Bruce I. Bustard, A New Deal for the Arts (Seattle: 1997). 29. Meyer Schapiro, “Race, Nationality, and Art,” Art Front (March 1936), 10–12. 30. Ibid. 31. Art Front (May 1936), 11. 32. Ibid., 12. 33. Baigell and Williams, Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, 119. See also Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 124. 34. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 172–173; 264–269; Michael Kammen, Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (Chapel Hill: 1999); Amy HeleneKirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: 1995). 35. Some of these images can be seen in Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 64–67. See also Milly Heyd, Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art (New Brunswick: 1999), 86–116. 36. Heyd, Mutual Reflections. On the attitude of the Communist party toward blacks, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: 1983). 37. Susan Chevlowe, “A Bull in a China Shop: An Introduction to Ben Shahn,” in Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, ed. Susan Chevlowe (New York: 1999), 9–10, 26. 38. Herbert Lawrence, “The Ten,” Art Front (Feb. 1936), 11. On Ben-Zion, see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 114–115. 39. Louis Bunim, “The Pictures and Puppets of Yosl Cutler,” Art Front (Feb. 1936). 40. This work is reproduced in Art Front (May 1937) and discussed in Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 131–132. 41. Milly Heyd and Ezra Mendelsohn, “Jewish Art? The Case of the Soyer Brothers,” Jewish Art 19–20 (1993–1994), 194–211. A good example is Soyer’s Dancing Lesson of 1926. 42. David Burliuk on Aronson in Der hamer (Jan. 1928), 60; B. Levin, “Der kinstler Yudovin,” in ibid. (Aug. 1928), 55–57. 43. Dovid Grinshpon, “Der idisher moler Marc Chagall,” Frayheyt (22 Oct. 1922); Minna Harkavy on Weber in ibid. (10 March 1922). 44. Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe, “Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945,” in Kleeblatt and Chevlowe (eds.), Painting a Place in America, 135–142; Yidishe kultur (Feb.–March 1941), 56–57. 45. Ibid., 141. IKUF’s Yiddish-language American journal, Yidishe kultur, carried no reproductions of artistic work in its first two years of existence (1938–1939). In 1940, a few reproductions were included, the majority having nothing to do with Jewish subject matter. 46. Biro-Bidjan: Exhibition of Works of Art (see n. 3). 47. Striking exceptions are Aaron Goodelman’s sculpture Majdanek, Minna Harkavy’s The Last Prayer, William Meyerowitz’s The Ram’s Horn, and Max Weber’s Adoration of the Moon. 48. According to Janet Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick: A Catalogue Raisonne´ (New York: 1982), 130, Lozowick’s lithograph depicts “a soup kitchen in the Bowery.” Soyer’s lithograph is reproduced in Sylvan Cole, Jr., Raphael Soyer: Fifty Years of Printmaking 1917–1967 (New York: 1978), no. 27. Gropper’s etching appears in Der hamer (March 1927).


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49. Published in Der hamer (June 1931). 50. Ibid. (March 1926). This issue includes an article by one of the Communist party’s most influential writers, Joseph Freeman, titled “L. Lozowick—der revolutsionerer moler” (pp. 12–14.) On this lithograph, see Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick, 54–55. 51. Published in Der hamer (May 1934). 52. As quoted in James Wechsler, “From World War I to the Popular Front: The Art and Activism of Hugo Gellert,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 24 (2002), 198. 53. Der hamer (Feb. 1927), 51. 54. New Masses (Jan. 1929), 4. 55. Der hamer (Jan. 1935). 56. Ibid. (Jan. 1933). 57. Ibid. (April 1935 and March 1937). 58. Thomas Wilson, “Revolutionary Art Today,” New Masses (1 Oct. 1935), 17. 59. Jeffrey Paul Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, Mass.: 1999). 60. Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, and Louis Lozowick, Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia (New York: 1930). On Freeman’s prominent role in the Communist movement, see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: 1992), 68–72, 80–84, 130–139, 365–375. Kunitz had published a book on the Jew in Russian literature in 1929. 61. New Masses (1 Sept. 1933), 13. 62. Ibid. (6 Nov. 1931). 63. Louis Lozowick, Modern Russian Art (New York: 1925). 64. Ibid., 59–60. 65. William Gropper, 56 tseykhnungen fun ratn-farband (Paris: 1928). 66. E. E., “Gropper on Russia,” New Masses (Feb. 1929), 21. 67. There were numerous such children in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, a result of the ravages of the war years. 68. Flint, The Prints of Louis Lowowick, 93. Kunitz traveled with Lozowick to Tadjikistan and wrote of his experiences in the New Masses (6 Nov. 1931), 12–14. Kunitz eventually wrote a book lauding Soviet efforts in this region titled Dawn Over Samarkand: The Rebirth of Central Asia (New York: c. 1935). 69. Thomas Glick has kindly brought to my attention the existence of a dissertation on Gropper’s cartoons: Patricia Phagan, “William Gropper and Freiheit: A Study of his Political Cartoons (1924–1935),” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2000). Unfortunately, I have not read this work. 70. Morgn frayheyt (27 Aug. 1929; 30 Aug. 1929; 5 Sept. 1929). 71. Ibid. (19 Sept. 1929). 72. Ibid. (2 Oct. 1929). 73. Ibid. (21 Sept. 1929). 74. Ibid. (19 Sept. 1939). 75. For an interesting analysis of the politics of the new abstract expressionist school, see Dijkstra, American Expressionism, 25–39. 76. On the impact of the war and the Holocaust on some of the artists discussed here, see Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (New York: 1993). The author shows that some artists did not wait until after the hostilities to portray the tragic situation in Eastern Europe during the war. See also Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: 1997). 77. Freundlich, William Gropper, 29. 78. Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick, 198–202. 79. See n. 11. 80. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lost in America, paintings and drawings by Raphael Soyer (Garden City: 1981). 81. Greg Lawrence, Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins (New York: 2001), 56, 216, 285, 336–350.

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82. Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York: 1998), 505–511, 513–514, 543. 83. Howard Fast, Prince of Egypt (New York: 1958). While still a Communist, Fast had published, in 1947, My Glorious Brothers, a paean of praise to the heroic Maccabees. The book was published at a time when the Soviet Union was supporting the Jewish cause in Palestine. 84. For Max Weber’s unconditional support for this pact, see his remarks in The Jewish Survey (Aug.–Sept. 1941), 3: “The only safe and logical move left open to Soviet Russia on the international political chessboard in 1939 was the signing of the pact with Hitler.”

Between Insularity and Internationalism: The Lost World of the Jewish Communist “Cultural Workers” in America Alan Wald university of michigan

In his dazzling 1985 study, “The Lost World of British Communism,” the late Raphael Samuel, a junior associate in the tradition of British Marxist historians, recalls his upbringing in a Jewish Communist family in the 1930s and 1940s. Samuel writes: To be a Communist was to have a complete social identity. . . . Like practicing Catholics or Orthodox Jews, we lived in a little private world of our own . . . “a tight . . . selfreferential group.” . . . We maintained intense neighbourhood networks and little workplace conventicles. We patronized regular cafe´s. . . . We went out together on weekend and Sunday rambles. We took our holidays together, at Socialist Youth Camps. . . . We had our own particular speech. . . . Like freemasons we knew intuitively when someone was “one of us,” and we were equally quick to spot that folk devil of the socialist imagination, a “careerist,” a species being of whom I am, to this day, wary. Within the narrow confines of an organization under siege we maintained the simulacrum of a complete society, insulated from alien influences, belligerent toward outsiders, protective to those within.1

Some years ago, the late poet Aaron Kramer, who was affiliated with the Communist party for two decades, conjured up a similar “lost world” when he described the milieu of his own youth.2 Kramer was born in 1921 to working-class Communist parents in New York. Hyman, his father, was a bookbinder; his mother, Mary, stamped laundry tickets during the Depression. The Kramer family idolized Moissaye (Moyshe) Olgin (1878–1939), who for many years was both the party’s leader in Jewish affairs and the most notable figure in the party’s Yiddish-language daily newspaper, Freiheit.3 In 1931, Kramer was sent to the ultra-Bolshevik Yiddish School, which offered classes after regular school hours, where his instructor was a recent arrival from the Soviet Union. In Kramer’s public elementary school, the teachers would ask the students for the “news of the day”; most read from the New York Times, but young Kramer would leap to his feet with the Daily Worker in hand. In 1990, 133

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Kramer recalled to me that his favorite “newsday” was always the day after May 1st, when he could make an announcement: “ ‘A million people marched in this city, a million people marched in that city, fifty thousand here.’ . . . That was my text, and it remained my text for a very long time.”4 Kramer’s impulse to write poetry emerged independently. According to his mother—who remained a party stalwart to the end—Aaron was reciting rhymes at the age of two, many of them inspired by the Yiddish, folk, and labor songs she sang. In first grade at Public School 174 in the Bronx, Kramer wrote his first poem, a Mother Goose–inspired verse about a boy in a haystack. This came at the urging of Pearl Bynoe, who, in 1927, was the only African American teacher in the school, and probably the only black person known to the all-Jewish group of pupils. Kramer felt such gratitude toward Miss Bynoe (as well as developing a mad crush on her) that, 47 years later, he established a poetry prize in her name for the student population of P.S. 174, now entirely African American and Latino. With Bynoe’s encouragement, the six-year-old Kramer was launched into an outpouring of nature poems. Initially, he recollected, he did not realize that he was highly unusual in the intensity of his reactions to nature, to the sound of a train, or to the sight of the bricks on a building in an old town in Connecticut that he once passed by: “I thought all children reacted that way and had a sort of romantic haze around the things that they saw.”5 The “nature phase” lasted through fourth grade. At that point, he experienced a culture clash between the self-indulgence he associated with his nature-immersion and the seriousness he felt demanded of him by his Marxist political environment. The resulting transformation was no doubt assisted by a new acquaintance, Martha Millet, the poetry editor of the Communist children’s magazine, New Pioneer, who was somewhat older than Kramer and, in addition, “an absolutely gorgeous creature.”6 Overnight, Kramer tore up his notebook of nature poems and issued a ringing manifesto of socially conscious art: Now is not the time for nature poems When thousands upon thousands Are losing their homes. Not ballads of how princesses wed When the problem is, “Where shall I find bread?”7 This annunciation of a new direction was promptly submitted to the New Pioneer, where Kramer became the chief contributing poet for several years, until he graduated to the children’s page of the Sunday Daily Worker. Although Kramer was raised in an atmosphere of yidishkeyt, a chief theme of his poetry through the 1940s and early 1950s—and a strong presence even after that—was African American history and culture. Indeed, his most impassioned poems in New Pioneer included one on the topic of the Scottsboro case and another addressed to imprisoned black Communist Angelo Herndon. The latter begins: You youthful proletarian, Of an oppressed and starving race;

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Your hardships are the hardships That all working youth must face. . . . and is signed, “Aaron Kramer, 121⁄2.”8 The choice of a black, more than a Jewish identity, to the extent that Kramer would later insist that he “felt black” and glowed with pride when a black writer once said, “Kramer—you have a black soul,”9 is partly explained by personal factors. These encompass his youthful infatuation with Pearl Bynoe and the Communist political education he received while supporting the party’s defense of Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro Nine. Facilitating this cross-ethnic identification may also have been his parents’ decision to identify themselves as “Yiddish” rather than “Jewish.” Such a perspective was a point of principle in his family, as it was for many of the pro-Communist Freiheit readers and for the popular Proletpen writers—Jewish Communist working-class poets writing only in Yiddish, among them Yuri Suhl and Ber Green—who took the adolescent Kramer under their wing.10 The Kramer parents spoke Yiddish, sang in Yiddish, ate Jewish foods (which they called Yiddish foods), but were not merely irreligious or nonreligious—they were actively antireligious. Living in a ground-floor apartment, they made a point of leaving their shades up so that Orthodox Jews en route to the synagogue could see them eating on fast days. Although the Maccabees were worshipped as national liberation fighters, Chanukah, celebrating the “miracle of lights,” was not observed. In fact, Kramer never missed a single day of school because of Jewish holidays; in many classes he was the only child, staying all day and insisting on being taught, as an act of defiance. Yet the Kramer family was not “assimilationist.” Like the Proletpen writers and like other Freiheit readers, the Kramers had no interest in taking on the dominant Christian bourgeois culture. Instead, they wanted to be internationalist and workingclass. The distinction to them was between dragging themselves back to childhood memories and shtetl culture, or else looking forward to the future by fighting the oppression they faced today and would face tomorrow. From this perspective, the paramount issue in the United States became Jim Crow, anti-black racism, and the struggle for the liberation of black Americans. Apart from being indubitably working-class and the bearers of a rich and inspiring folk culture, black Americans were the targets of a white supremacism that bore a striking resemblance to the ideology of those who carried out pogroms under the tsar and, later, fascist assaults under Hitler. In this context, “Yiddish but not Jewish” translated into a Jewish identity integrated into an internationalist outlook; a standpoint scornful of Judeocentrism or Jewish chauvinism, yet comfortable with Jewish secular traditions and history.

The Appeals of American Jewish Communism This brief portrait of “The Education of Aaron Kramer” dramatizes some of the salient features of the American Jewish encounter with Communism, especially

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that of first- and second-generation Jews of East European origin. Communism in the United States must be understood as a social movement of hundreds of thousands of people variously led by a political party of some 20,000 to 80,000 members. Moreover, Communism was unique in American history for the manner in which cultural production sprang up in its ambience, with literature and other art forms (created by “cultural workers,” as they were called) pressed into the service of the Left. Both the inordinate numerical presence of Jews in the intellectual apparatus of the party, and the panoply of cultural networks that appeared as part of the broader social movement, are curious features of the U.S. Left. How large was the Jewish participation in the U.S. Communist party? Reliable statistics are difficult to obtain, but my own research on the party rank and file as well as on secondary leaders of the Communist-led literary movement in the midcentury indicates that nearly half of those who published persistently in partyaffiliated venues or who joined party-led organizations such as the John Reed clubs, the League of American Writers, and the Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions were of Jewish origin. This is a remarkable aggregate, considering that Jews constituted a mere 2–3 percent of the U.S. population at the time. Manifold circumstances account for such an inordinate Jewish presence. Most compelling, the American Communist movement had a solid foundation in East European immigrant families who brought to their new country not only an abhorrence of tsarist autocracy, but also working-class and socialist loyalties. The Communist movement, moreover, exhorted its members to adhere to a pluralist and internationalist universalism. This stance was attractive to young Jews emerging from families still shaped by the experience of shtetl and ghetto isolation. In contrast to the strict faith of their Orthodox elders, Marxist doctrine furnished the option of a moral life justified by allegedly scientific arguments and analysis. Jews nurtured in an atmosphere influenced by the study of holy books and ardent debates about portions of the Bible were well-equipped for a political movement whose hallowed writings by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin were fervently disputed as guides to political intervention. Most of these intellectually passionate Jews were excluded from established professions because of antisemitism or the constricted economy of the Great Depression, whereas Communist institutions and organizations afforded them a place to write, speak, teach, and interact on equal terms with non-Jews. Beyond this, the Depression-era Communist movement was the most aggressive of the political organizations in its striving to prepare a response to the march of fascism across Europe. A disproportionate number of American Jewish youths volunteered to battle the combined military might of Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini in Spain in 1936 by joining the party-led Abraham Lincoln Brigades. Once overseas, they joined thousands of other Jewish internationalists from Europe and the Middle East to aid in the creation of a “people’s army” under the Communist International. The largest single ethnic group in this initial armed campaign against fascism was probably that of the Jews, drawn from their various countries of origin. Jews in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, however, regarded themselves in the first place as antifascists, which was also representative of the frame of mind of American Jewish Communist cultural workers. Of course, when a nonaggression pact was suddenly


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signed between Hitler and Stalin in August 1939, the party endured profound embarrassment. This awkward state of affairs persisted until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, when antifascism returned as a major Communist theme. As the party leaped to the forefront in support of the Allies in the Second World War, a younger generation of American Jewish cultural workers emerged on the scene. Apart from antifascism, left-wing Jewish cultural workers adhered to other convictions that comprised an interlocking worldview. For example, there was an exorbitantly romanticized assessment of the U.S.S.R., a zealous advocacy of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and a burning abhorrence of white supremacy. From 1936 to 1939, belief in the Soviet Union’s steadfast antifascism probably allowed many Jews to blind themselves to the criminal nature of the Moscow trials. Similarly, belief in the ultimate goodness of the Soviet Union was no doubt an important factor in allowing many Jews to rationalize the 20 months of the Stalin-Hitler pact as a temporary tactical maneuver. What was perhaps singular in American Jewish left-wing antifascism was the political form it took, whereby Jewish nationalism or any identification with powerful Western states were eschewed. Instead, American Jewish cultural workers, highly sensitive to issues of persecution, called for unified armed resistance among all the oppressed, especially those suffering under colonialism or white supremacism. (Their blind spot with regard to antisemitism in the U.S.S.R., when it became glaringly obvious in the late Stalin years, should be taken not as a sign of insensitivity to Jewish suffering, but rather as the natural outcome of adopting the Soviet Union as a metaphor for social justice.) The appeal of Communism to American Jewish cultural workers profoundly shaped mid-20th century intellectual life in the United States. Prior to the 1930s, the foremost authors in radical literary circles were the non-Jewish Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Floyd Dell, John Reed, and Max Eastman. But during the Depression, when Communism displaced reformist socialism as the leading force on the Left, the Jewish presence became increasingly dominant. A former playwright and journalist, Michael Gold (1893–1967), achieved international renown when Jews Without Money was published in 1930. Clifford Odets (1906–1963) revolutionized American theater with Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing (1935), and Golden Boy (1937). Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) promoted anticapitalism with The Little Foxes (1939) and antifascism with Watch on the Rhine (1941). A legion of radical American Jewish poets also emerged at this time, including Stanley Burnshaw, Joy Davidman, Sol Funaroff, Kenneth Fearing, Alfred Hayes, Edwin Rolfe (born Solomon Fishman), Louis Zukofsky, and Muriel Rukeyser—all of whom were born within the first two decades of the 20th century. By the 1940s, the initial group of left-wing American Jewish writers was augmented by a younger group influenced by the Communist-led cultural milieu. With his novels of the Chicago urban underclass, Never Come Morning and The Man With the Golden Arm, both published during the 1940s, Nelson Algren (born Nelson Abraham) gained acclaim as bard of the lumpenproletariat. Irwin Shaw (born Irwin Shamforoff), who started writing left-wing plays and stories during the Depression, published the best-seller The Young Lions in 1948. Jo Sinclair (born Ruth

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Seid), who likewise began with radical fiction and drama, brought out a prizewinning attack on homophobia and antisemitism, Wasteland, in 1946. Howard Fast, the well-regarded historical novelist, publicly joined the party in 1943. Arthur Miller, a struggling Marxist playwright since the late 1930s, won the Pulitzer prize for Death of a Salesman in 1949. Norman Mailer, a Communist fellow traveler younger than the others mentioned here (he was born in 1923), achieved both popular and critical success with his masterpiece of battle on the Pacific front, The Naked and the Dead (1948). Of the ten leading Communist screenwriters and directors singled out by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (and eventually imprisoned, in 1950), six were Jews: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole (born Lester Cohn), John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, and Samuel Ornitz. Finally, Jews had a remarkably salient organizational presence in the cultural institutions of the Communist movement. Alexander Tractenberg served as editor of the party’s publishing house, International Publishers; other Jews included the chair of the party’s cultural commission (V.J. Jerome; born Isaac Jerome Romaine) and the head of the party’s Hollywood section (John Howard Lawson). There was a substantial Jewish literary presence on the editorial board of the party’s New Masses, as well as on the boards of its successors, Mainstream and Masses & Mainstream. In addition to chairing the cultural commission, V.J. Jerome edited the party’s theoretical organ, The Communist (later, Political Affairs) in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

“Not a Real White Man” Yet what did it mean to be an “American Jewish Communist” if so many declared themselves to be, above all, “internationalists”? The Aaron Kramer paradigm offers a perspective on how identities—Jewish identity, an identity of solidarity with African Americans, proletarian identity, or Communist identity—could serve as the basis for political activity. On the one hand, the insularity of the Jewish Communist cultural milieu often facilitated inculcation with a fairly specific Communist outlook that was unaffected by the dominant and hegemonic culture of the country or region. Thus many Jewish Marxists felt no temptation to adapt to middle-class Christian culture, to separate themselves from Jewish folk culture, or to succumb to self-hatred or the various forms of ethnic prejudice that were widespread in the dominant cultural ethos of the United States. Many (although not all, especially if their families were already educated and secularized) retained a special affection for earthy Jewish humor, ethnic songs and foods, and the Jewish tradition of heretical thought and resistance to oppression. On the other hand, Communist culture included a selective outward-looking component that emphasized internationalism, antifascism, anticolonialism, and a strong sense of identification with other groups on the bottom. The resulting stance, a product of both insularity and internationalism, was expressed by Kramer in his life and in his poetry—and a similar balance between a non-chauvinist Jewish pride and a cross-over identity with black Americans was diversely exemplified in the works of other Jewish Marxists who


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were shaped by the specific problematic of the 1930s, and who continued their artistic production in the 1940s and 1950s. In examining a range of cultural workers and intellectuals, one finds that patterns of identity selection and construction could be constituted differently in different contexts; as we are reminded in a recent study, “identity categories are neither stable nor internally homogenous.”11 In other words, while the Jewish presence in the Communist cultural movement may lend itself to generalizations on a broad plane, these generalizations cannot in turn be imposed top-down on the individually complex people who comprised the movement. Thus some Jews who took on the role of spokesperson for the party muted all forms of identity apart from the Communist. James Allen (1906–1991), for instance, a University of Pennsylvania doctoral candidate, author of many of the party’s scholarly tomes on “the Negro Question,” and eventually president of the party’s International Publishers, left the posthumously published A Communist’s Memoir: Organizing in the Depression South.12 Although the memoir exemplifies the characteristic sense of solidarity with African Americans, there is no expression of Jewish identity in all of its 130 pages, not even when Allen reports blatantly antisemitic remarks that were made during the Scottsboro trial. His change of name from “Sol Auerbach” to “Jim Allen” is explained as a desire for anonymity. (In contrast, when writer Irwin Granich chose to mask his own identity, he became “Mike Gold”—another common name but one that affirmed his Jewish background.) On a spectrum ranging between Kramer and Allen, another American Jewish Communist, Ben Burns (1913–2000), falls roughly in the middle. In 1945, Burns (born Bernstein) became the founding editor of the famous African American magazine Ebony. His political convictions were what led him to anti-racist journalism, which in turn placed him in contact with many African Americans on two other black publications, The Chicago Defender and Negro Digest. In his 1996 autobiography, Nitty Gritty, Burns recalls frequently being told that he was “not a real white man” by the black owner of Ebony and other staff members.13 On occasion, curious visitors to Ebony’s offices would query, “Say, Burns, what are you anyway, Negro or white?” His response—“Neither—I’m Jewish”—was significant, given that most Jews in the postwar era identified themselves, in terms of race, as white.14 Burns, Kramer, and hundreds of other journalists, editors, fiction writers, playwrights, scholars, screenwriters, and poets belonged to this generation of midcentury, left-wing American Jewish cultural workers whose sense of Jewish identity was largely informed by the belief that they shared common goals and common enemies with African Americans. Although anti-segregationist in principle, their perspective for the most part cannot be understood as “integrationist” in the sense of liberal integrationism. The utopia of racial harmony for which they longed was not to be forged through the process of “integrating” into a racist capitalist system, but rather through the overthrow of the inegalitarian social order; it would be realized only in a world in which the underlying causes of racial domination had been purged by collective action. For the most part, the meeting ground for black and Jew was envisioned in the imagined narratives of left-wing plays, novels, and poems. In some cases, however, it occurred in practice: on the battlefields of Spain;

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in clandestine meetings of self-organized and armed black sharecroppers with Jewish union and party organizers in the deep South; and on the picket lines of industrial union struggles in the North. The personal, political, and cultural commitments growing out of this orientation were indissolubly linked to an ideology of anti-racist radicalism as it evolved through two stages: first, in the context of the Great Depression; and second, during the Second World War and the Cold War. The view that anti-black racism was the symptom of an inegalitarian capitalist economic order dangerous to Jews (as to all subaltern groups) was thus doubly reinforced. The rise of fascism taught that the targeting of Jews in Europe resembled anti-black racism in the United States, whereas the era of McCarthyite anti-radicalism demonstrated the way in which racism, antisemitism, and Communism were all linked in an overall assault on the Left. Although American Jewish cultural workers and political activists of the generations of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were passionate in their intellectualism, their basic worldviews were more likely to be founded on life experiences, including, of course, political activism, rather than on party texts. As reported in the memoir In My Mother’s House, Rose Chernin, a Jewish Communist imprisoned during the McCarthy era, first became radicalized during the Great Depression in the course of a demonstration of unemployed workers that was violently broken up by the police: Then I looked up and I could see those horses coming. It was a nightmare. And we were paralyzed. They were riding straight toward us, riding us down. Suddenly someone screamed. It was, how can I tell you? Never in my life, before or since, have I heard anything like that shriek. I heard, in that cry . . . to me it seemed we were standing in a village and the cossacks were riding down. You could go so far back in Jewish history and always you would find that cry. Always, in the history of every people. And then people were running all around me, racing for the subway, screaming, crowding together. And I ran with them, and I was thinking, this, this is the answer they give to the demands of the people. I will never forget it. I stood there, looking out at the crowd. My fear was gone. I felt angry, I felt exhilarated, and I felt purposeful. That was the day I joined the Communist party.15

Clearly, Rose Chernin’s seeing herself as a Jew in a long line of Jewish victims was not an instance of what is called a “wounded attachment.” On the contrary, to quote theorist Paula Moya, it can be seen as one of the “enabling, enlightening, and enriching structures of attachment and feeling.”16 Yet, like the Kramer family, Rose Chernin was militantly opposed to Jewish theology. Regarding the Freiheit, she recalled: It was against religion and never lost an opportunity to attack the tradition. I admired this. In New York at that time it was generally agreed that Yiddish papers would not be published on the holidays. But the Freiheit you would see even on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. To you this may not sound like anything very much, but to us it was the world turning upside down.17

Of course, despite their official anti-religious stance, Chernin and other Jewish Communist militants constructed an alternative ethics in the course of their political


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struggles that resembled the humanist and collectivist strains found in Judaism, Christianity, and many other theologies. Commenting on the efforts of the partyled Unemployed Councils to get milk for the children of Harlem and elsewhere in New York, Chernin observes: This struggle of people against their conditions, that is where you find the meaning in life. In the worst situations, you are together with people. If there were five apples, we cut them ten ways and everybody ate. . . . Life changes when you are together in this way, when you are united. You lose the fear of being alone. . . . When you are standing, one to one, with an employer, he has all the power and you have none. But together, we felt our strength, and we could laugh. Someone who knew how to sing would start singing. Others would know how to dance. There we were, unemployed people, but we were dancing.18

One does not need to master “dialectical materialism” to hold such humanistic values. At the same time, the predominant pro-Communist form of radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s was marked by its own illusions, oversimplifications, and selfdeceptions. Perry Anderson has stated the dilemma aptly: In the USSR itself . . . Stalin’s victory within the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], based on the promise that it would be possible to build “socialism in one country,” crystallized a new form of nationalism, specific to the autocracy rapidly being constructed by the Soviet Union. In short order the activities of the Third International were utterly subordinated to the interests of the Soviet state, as Stalin interpreted them. The upshot was the arresting phenomenon, without equivalent before or since, of an internationalism equally deep and deformed, at once rejecting any loyalty to its own country and displaying a limitless loyalty to another state. Its epic was played out by the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, shadowed by Comintern emissaries—Codovilla, Togliatti, Gero¨, Vidali and others—recruited from across all Europe and the Americas. With its mixture of heroism and cynicism, selfless solidarity and murderous terror, this was an internationalism perfected and perverted as never before.19

Nevertheless, my own research into particular case histories of American Jewish Communist cultural workers in the 1930s through the 1950s indicates that their anti-racist radicalism grew from heartfelt convictions and local conditions; it was neither imported from the U.S.S.R., nor were their convictions decisively corrupted by changes in Soviet policies, even if the tactics of the party changed dramatically on various fronts. An examination of the careers of two popular American Jewish pro-Communist writers discloses the life-long and all-encompassing—albeit sometimes contradictory—impact of this cultural tradition as it was disseminated through mass culture in the United States over a 40-year period.

Non-Jewish Jews in Mass Culture Leonard S. Zinberg—later to be better-known by one of his several pseudonyms, Ed Lacy—was born in upstate New York, and lived in Manhattan from the age of 10. In the early 1930s, he traveled around the country working at odd jobs. At

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some point he began writing, and over time, his work started to appear in massmarket and Communist publications, such as the New Masses. In 1940, as “Len Zinberg,” he published a novel titled Walk Hard—Talk Loud, about a black boxer in love with a black Communist activist. (The book was produced as a play in 1944 by the American Negro Theater Company in Harlem, scripted by Abram Hill, an African American veteran of the Federal Theater Project.) During the Second World War, Zinberg was a correspondent for Yank magazine. Afterwards, married to a black woman named Esther who worked as a secretary at Freiheit, Zinberg became active in the Communist-led Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions, which replaced the League of American Writers. He also published two more novels under his given name. One of these novels, titled Hold with the Hares (1948), deals with the 1930s Left. The central character in Hold with the Hares is Steve Anderson (the name anticipates one of Zinberg’s later pseudonyms, “Steve April”), a working-class WASP who aspires to become a journalist. Although Steve’s heart is with the Left, he makes a series of opportunistic choices in the years between the Great Depression and the Second World War, rationalizing all the while that, once he really makes it, he will have the power to say what he “truly” thinks. Among Steve’s friends are several Jews who respond differently to their identity. One has assimilated, simply to remove an obstacle from his career; he frequently uses racist epithets. Another friend, a southern Jew, affirms his Jewishness—but, in so doing, refuses to fight the Jim Crow system because he doesn’t want to reinforce the southern stereotype of Jews as radical troublemakers. Both of these characters reflect on Steve’s own political opportunism. Whereas Steve likes these fellows since their behavior confirms rather than challenges his own, the author clearly holds the opposite view. What turns Steve around is the influence of Pete Wormser, a revolutionary white sailor (of unstated ethnicity) who fights first with the International Brigades in Spain, and then with anti-fascist partisans in the Second World War. At war’s end, Pete signs on with the CIO’s Operation Dixie and goes to the Carolinas to organize black mill workers. In a shootout with a racist, anti-union lynch mob, his black comrade Oliver (the name suggests the African American martyr of the Lincoln Brigade, Oliver Law) is killed. Pete is spirited away to New York. Although the Communist party wants him to return to stand trial, Pete feels that he has no chance of acquittal, and he decides to escape to Europe. (The events here are somewhat based on Fred Beal and the 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, although Beal fled to the Soviet Union.) At this climatic point, Steve quits his big-time journalism job and, breaking with his past, sneaks Pete out of the country. At the book’s conclusion, Steve has launched a new life as a radical writer, taking over a small-town newspaper formerly run by an aged member of the International Workers of the World and planning to fight a kind of guerrilla warfare against the system. Hold with the Hares can be read as something of a psycho-history of Zinberg, and, to some extent, of a significant trend within the American Jewish cultural Left. Using the issue of anti-black racism as a litmus test for one’s morality, Zinberg rejects the possibility of a protagonist who finds self-realization as a Jew through success within the existing order, because he feels, and the novel suggests, there


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can be no such model in the vanguard of the anti-racist struggle. Two alternative types of Jews, assimilationists and Jewish nationalists, both act selfishly, in Zinberg’s view; and thus the author (through his surrogate, Anderson), opts for the proletarian internationalist identity. In addition, however, he has Anderson support Pete’s flight—which suggests Zinberg’s own preference for acting as a secret, free agent rather than as a member of a disciplined party cadre. Zinberg’s life was marked by a similar “guerrilla strategy.” With the publication of his paperback crime novel The Woman Aroused in 1951 (the year that the Communist party leadership was jailed under the Smith Act), Zinberg was reborn under the literary pseudonym “Ed Lacy” to protect himself from blacklisting and harassment. During the next two decades, Ed Lacy never referred to his earlier career or novels; by the same token, very few of Zinberg’s left-wing friends were aware of his double identity. Zinberg continued to attend literary workshops and discussion groups hosted by editors of the Communist journal Masses & Mainstream throughout the Cold War. During this same period, his reputation as a mystery writer became solidly established. One of Lacy’s distinguishing characteristics is his use of African American characters, notably as the protagonists in two series of books: those featuring Toussaint Marcus Moore and Lee Hays. The former, a private eye, appears in Room to Swing (1958), which won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe Award, and Moment of Untruth (1965). Lee Hays, a police detective trying to deal with urban violence, has the leading role in Harlem Underground (1965) and In Black and Whitey (1967). Yet a third protagonist, Dave Wintino, who is both Italian American and Jewish (he has a black partner), is the key character in Lead with Your Left (1959) and Double Trouble (1965). In the hardboiled mystery genre, Lacy stands in radical counterpoint to the ultrareactionary author Mickey Spillaine and the latter’s Red-baiting private eye, Mike Hammer. Lacy’s second novel, Sin in Their Blood (1952), depicts a rightwing organization blackmailing an African American who is trying to “pass,” and Go for the Body (1954) tells of the interracial marriage of a black boxer who lives in exile because of racism in the States. Sleep in Thunder (1964) takes racism against Puerto Ricans as a theme. The Napalm Bugle (1968) attacks the government’s involvement in Vietnam; and in Breathe No More, My Lady, a radical professor, now blacklisted, boxes professionally for a living. (One of the two most common motifs in Lacy’s novels is boxing; the other is blond women with big breasts.) In addition to these works, Zinberg also published hundreds of uncollected short stories in mystery, pulp, and popular magazines, often as “Steve April.” These, too, often displayed a leftist slant. Another example of a successful American Jewish pro-Communist writer who focused on African American characters and issues was Earl Cohen (1912–1986), who wrote under the name Earl Conrad. In contrast to Zinberg, who was eventually ignored (apparently by mutual agreement) by the party cultural movement in which he was nourished, Conrad was abruptly and unjustly denounced as a white chauvinist by black and Jewish Communist reviewers of his novel Rock Bottom (1952). As a result, Conrad was driven unwillingly out of party circles. Although he had started out as an activist member of the Communist party,

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Conrad was a fellow traveler by the 1940s. At this time he was also an established authority on Harriet Tubman, initially through a pamphlet (published by the party) and then as the author of a full-scale biography published in 1943.20 Conrad also gained a certain renown as the New York bureau manager of the African American newspaper Chicago Defender—at that time, he was the only non-black employed full-time as a bureau manager and columnist by what was then known as “the Negro press.” Conrad’s first arraignment of U.S. racism appeared in his nonfiction work Jim Crow America in 1947. Then came the best-selling Scottsboro Boy in 1950, which he wrote in partnership with one of the trial defendants, Haywood Patterson. Unfortunately, this collaboration came about without Conrad’s fully taking into account the wishes of the Communist party’s black attorney, William Patterson (no relation to Haywood). The friction that ensued was at least partly responsible for what later became a prolonged attack against Rock Bottom in the pages of the Daily Worker.21 In Rock Bottom, a first-person narrative about the brutally oppressive experience of a black woman in the South and in Harlem, Conrad sought to do what he had always done as a radical journalist—to “give voice to the voiceless,” as his journalist friend I. F. Stone put it.22 Today such a statement may sound paternalistic, but half a century ago, Conrad’s uncompromising indictments of racism provoked scorn, outrage, and threats of violence from individuals on the Right. With the appearance of Rock Bottom, Conrad for the first time was exposed to harsh criticism from the Left, accused of depicting his black heroine as being brutalized into an animal-like state. In the May 22, 1952 issue of the Daily Worker, Jewish Communist journalist Robert Friedman called the novel “virulently insulting to the Negro people.” True, Friedman acknowledged, “it would be possible to select a phrase here, or an incident there, in which the struggle of the Negro people is for a moment properly focused. But these moments are swallowed by the overwhelming atmosphere of decay.” Friedman held that, even if Conrad blamed white racial capitalism for the state of black peonage in the South and lumpenization in the North, the degraded condition depicted in his novel served to reinforce white supremacist claims regarding black inferiority. Moreover, by using a black woman as his first-person narrator, Conrad was guilty of narrative trickery; rather than the truth, “what the reader gets is Conrad’s own conception of the life, attitudes and character of the Negro people. . . .”23 Such a reading of Rock Bottom can certainly be extracted from the text, although, as Friedman briefly hints, there are other possible readings. In fact, most readers at the time regarded Rock Bottom as a virulent attack on whites. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, for instance, issued a critical statement saying that, while the events depicted in the book were certainly true for a small number of “super-oppressed” blacks, the real purpose of Rock Bottom was to anger people so much about white racism that they would be converted to Communism as an alternative.24 Conrad, for his part, was taken aback by the response of the Daily Worker; all of his connections with the party were ended, although he never wrote or spoke against it. Paraphrasing Lincoln Steffens’ famous declaration on Communism, “I


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have seen the future and it works,” Conrad quipped to his friends: “I have seen the future and it worked me over!”25 Nonetheless, he continued to deal with the African American experience in much of his later work. His most accomplished novel was Gulf Stream North, published in 1954, about black American fishermen, in which black dialect is rendered with far more sophistication than in the earlier Scottsboro Boy or Rock Bottom. After refashioning his career somewhat with several historical novels and a ghost-written autobiography for Errol Flynn titled My Wicked Wicked Ways, Conrad returned to African American issues with The Premier, a novel of 1963 about black nationalism; The Invention of the Negro, in 1966, a popularized history of the origins of racism in the United States; and, in 1970, Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy, written with the black actress in his old collaborative style. Although Conrad sporadically spoke before Jewish organizations on the issue of anti-black racism among Jews and was himself generally regarded as Jewish, he never portrayed Jewish characters in his novels or dealt with Jewish themes in any of his journalistic work. However, in an unpublished note for the autobiography on which he was working at the time of his death in 1986, Conrad did remark: “My interest in the ‘underdog,’ the submerged or oppressed, in particular the Blacks, had Judaic origins.” Conrad, it appears, was a representative “non-Jewish Jew,” as Isaac Deutscher famously termed it.26 On the one hand, he was no assimilationist: he never assumed the governing bourgeois Christian culture of the United States. On the other, unlike Kramer, he had no real connection with the “Yiddish” world, nor, for that matter, with any other form of Jewish culture. While fully aware that Jews had been (and still were) victimized by bigots—a fact that linked him to his Jewish heritage—he did not view Jewish consciousness per se as providing an effective response to bigotry. Rather, he followed the prevailing Jewish Communist course of opposing any form of particularism, including judeocentrism, in order to embrace an internationalist identity. In this role, he championed the cause of America’s most oppressed group, the African Americans. The Jewish-black experience of mid-20th-century America took place in the context of what is today defined as the Old Left. As such, it was far different from the more problematic “black-Jewish relations” of the mid-1960s and onward. In the more recent era, relations between the two groups have most often been characterized by ambivalence or hostility, as exemplified in such events as the ousting of nonwhites (many of them Jews) from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the Six-Day War of 1967 (which led not only to heightened Jewish assertiveness but also to growing black identification with the Third World); the 1968 strike in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district, which pitted mostly Jewish teachers against black community leaders; the controversial statements of black studies professor Leonard Jeffries; and the Crown Heights conflict between blacks and hasidic Jews. In the post-1960s era, the bestknown examples of Jewish literary portraitures of black Americans came to be Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (1970) and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1971)—novels that were widely regarded (both by African Americans and others) as racist. Sadly, the cultural work of the earlier generation of American Jewish radicals has been all but forgotten.

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Apart from Len Zinberg’s Walk Hard, Talk Loud, a number of other novels by Jewish pro-Communists, such as Howard Fast’s Freedom Road (1944) and Warren Miller’s The Cool World (1959), not only depicted black protagonists but were warmly praised for their “authenticity” by a number of African American radicals of the time, including Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. Nor were these the only novels of the African American experience to be written by American Jews of the Left. Many other Jewish authors—among them David Alman, Guy Endore (born Samuel Goldstein), Vera Caspary, Ben Appel, and John Sanford (born Julian Shapiro)—similarly employed black protagonists to dramatize the effects of (and often, resistance to) racism. Such works, moreover, were paralleled by influential interventions into African American music by Sidney Finkelstein and Bernard Wolfe (who was actually a Trotskyist); African American history, by Herbert Aptheker; and anti-racist painting, notably by Ben Shahn.27 The collective accomplishments of these overlapping generations of Old Left “cultural workers” constitute a signal moment in mid-20th-century cultural production. At this unique juncture, an activist, progressive, and constructive “identity politics” emerged, one characterized by solidarity with the oppressed and crossethnic alliances. This is what George Lipsitz, an American Jewish radical of the New Left era, calls “inter-ethnic anti-racism.” As he observes: Ultimately, the most important reason for inter-ethnic anti-racism is its epistemological value in enabling us to understand how power actually works. We will always misread our situatedness in the world unless we are able to view power from more than one perspective, unless we are able to look through multiple, overlapping, and even conflicting standpoints on social relations.28

From such a perspective, there is much to be learned from the practical cultural achievements of the American Jewish Communist Left, despite its Stalinist ideology and illusions. During the 1950s, the U.S. intelligentsia underwent a counter-conversion, moving away from interethnic antiracism to a narrow, Cold War narrative in which conspiratorial Communist propagandists were cast as the villains, cynically producing agit-prop to mobilize aggrieved minorities. In the 1960s, certain black nationalists, notably Harold Cruse, a former Communist, narrated the earlier Jewishblack association as merely paternalistic.29 Yet today, approximately 70 years after the Jewish anti-racist cultural tradition jelled under the impact of the Great Depression, neither the questions raised by the “cultural workers,” nor the spectrum of their responses evolving through the Second World War and the early Cold War, seem outdated or obsolete. Politically and conceptually, the conundrum of holding an affirmative view of one’s ethnic origins—especially in the face of persecution—while simultaneously expressing solidarity with other oppressed groups continues to be debated, even if the terms themselves have changed. In essence, what I have outlined in this essay is the practice that vindicates the theory of recent left-wing academic inquiries such as those of George Lipsitz and Paula Moya. For, much as we might venerate theory, it is still practice that must change the course of the world.

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Notes 1. Raphael Samuel, “The Lost World of British Communism,” New Left Review 154 (Nov.–Dec. 1985), 11–12. 2. See the brief sketch of Kramer’s career by Alan Wald in the second edition of Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: 1998), 677–678. The University of Illinois Press is currently preparing a large collection of Kramer’s poetry for publication, under the editorship of Cary Nelson. 3. This is the spelling used on the masthead; more commonly (as in other essays in this volume), the newspaper is known, in accordance with standard Yiddish transliteration, as Frayheyt. 4. Interview with Aaron Kramer, New York City, 15 Sept. 1990. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Aaron Kramer, “To Angelo Herndon,” New Pioneer (Sept. 1934), 6. 9. Interview with Kramer. 10. See Aaron Kramer’s superb entry on “Proletpen” in Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas (eds.), Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: 1988), 643–644. 11. Paula Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia (eds.), Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley: 2000), 3. 12. Allen’s memoir appeared as a special issue of Nature, Society, and Thought 13, no. 1 (2000). 13. Ben Burns, Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism (Jackson, Miss.: 1966), 113. 14. Ibid., 136. 15. Rose Chernin, quoted in Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story (New York: 1983), 91. 16. Moya and Hames-Garcia (eds.), Reclaiming Identity, 8. 17. Chernin, In My Mother’s House, 60–61. 18. Ibid., 95. 19. Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (second series) (March-April 2002), 15. 20. Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman (Washington, D.C.: 1943); see also idem, Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist, a pamphlet published in 1942 by the Communist party’s publishing house, International Publishers. 21. Interview with Earl Conrad’s widow, Alyse Conrad, Detroit, Oct. 1992. 22. Statement by I.F. Stone in an article, “Earl Conrad’s Rock Bottom,” The Compass, 18 May 1952, found in Conrad’s clipping book of notices and reviews, courtesy of Alyse Conrad. 23. Review of Rock Bottom by Robert Friedman, Daily Worker (22 May 1952), 4. 24. Article by Roy Wilkins, “Painted Black,” New York Herald Tribune, 18 May 1952, in Conrad’s clipping book of notices and reviews. 25. Interview with Alyse Conrad. 26. The phrase was coined by Isaac Deutscher in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York: 1968). 27. See the excellent study by Milly Heyd, Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art (New Brunswick: 1999). 28. George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: 2001), 126. 29. See, for example, Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: 1967); for a recent discussion of Cruse’s book, see Alan Wald, “Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse,” Science & Society 64, no. 4 (Winter 2000–2001), 400–423.

Party Recruitment: Jews and Communism in Britain Jason L. Heppell university of warwick

Throughout the era of Communism, Jews were both influential and disproportionately represented in Communist parties. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) was no exception to this. By the 1960s, two out of the three most important positions in the party were held by Jews: Bert Ramelson as industrial organizer and Reuben Falber as head of the organization department. In the 1940s, nearly a third of all district party secretaries were Jewish. By the early 1950s, between 7 and 10 percent of the Communist party’s activists (its cadres) were Jewish, even though Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of Britain’s national population.1 The party organization in (mainly poor) Jewish areas was always very solid. Stepney, in the heart of the Jewish East End, was the party’s strongest urban base in the country. In the general elections of 1945, the East London constituency of Mile End, largely Jewish in population, returned a (Jewish) Communist as one of the party’s two MPs. Jewish Communists played a prominent role in all areas of CP activity. Ivor Montagu was the leading journalist on the party’s paper, The Daily Worker; Jack Cohen was in charge of education for the party; James Klugman was its official historian; and Eric Hobsbawm was one of its most prominent intellectuals. In addition, the party received substantial funding during the 1940s from the “Commercial Group,” a secret body composed entirely of wealthy Jewish businessmen. Why were so many members of the Communist party Jewish? This is an especially complex question when one also considers what has been called the “riddle of Jewish radicalism”: many Communists may have been Jews but very few Jews were ever Communist.2 This essay will present one answer to the riddle by undertaking a case study of Jews who joined the British Communist party from its creation in 1920 to the crisis of 1956 (when many left, largely in response to the revelations of Soviet antisemitism and the invasion of Hungary). In considering why Jews joined the Communist party, one should understand the process as a dynamic interaction between the party and its members. No single thematic factor is a sufficient explanation. One must instead see the question within a multidimensional framework in which the role of the political party is perhaps the key—but not the only—factor. It is not just a question of understanding the 148

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development of Communist ideology. Rather, party systems, organizational structures, local and national politics, and the role of coercion and persuasion as well as choice must also be considered. Above all, it is crucial to understand how parties, the most significant agents in modern political history, act in relation to society—in particular, how they recruit and retain a membership. A primary source for the research presented here is the biographical collection in the recently opened archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This collection consists of more than 2,500 files pertaining to Communist cadres that were compiled in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the party’s central organization department. Almost all of the people represented in these files address the question of why they became members. My research concentrated upon the Jewish cadres in these files and was supplemented by personal interviews, biographies, autobiographies, and responses to questionnaires.3 In total, nearly 300 Jewish Communist biographies were studied. The Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1920 out of a handful of small Marxist and socialist political parties and societies. In contrast to the situation in continental Europe, the party failed to split the Left, finding it impossible to attract large segments away from the reformist Labour party. Under Comintern influence, the Communist party was also hostile to the Independent Labour Party (ILP) because of the latter’s commitment to the parliamentary, rather than revolutionary, road to socialism. Thus, the CP was at the outset confined to the periphery of working-class politics. In consequence, and despite its being a legal party (unlike the situation in several East European countries), it remained particularly small, its membership in 1921 being only 2,500.4 One of the many paradoxes about the Communist party was that, whereas it never became a large party (it barely managed 17,000 members at its height in the interwar period), it was fairly good at recruitment. Its problem was how to retain its new members. In 1937, for example, the party’s youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL), gained 100 new recruits. Of these, however, 70 left within 12 months.5 Here it is worth noting that, at the point at which membership figures were collected, about 10 percent of CP cadres were Jewish. However, because of resignations or lapsed memberships, the number of Jews who had ever been cardcarrying Communists was much higher than the number of Jews who were in the party at any given moment. The Communist Party of Great Britain was a national party, at least in theory. In practice, its presence on the ground was largely confined to the main urban areas (though its relative strength varied from place to place) and to certain areas of industrial activity such as the Scottish and Welsh coal fields. The CP was a distinct part of the political scene in all of the main centers of Jewish life: London, Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow. All of these cities were also centers of industry with a large working-class population, which made them natural targets for a party aiming to base its support on the urban proletariat. With its Soviet funding and high membership subscription rates, the party had the resources to construct a basic organization in these areas, including a coterie of paid full-time officials whose job, among other tasks, was to oversee recruitment.6

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Starting in 1933, a policy shift developed within the Communist world. The success of the Nazis in the German elections of January 1933 necessitated a change in the “class against class” policy introduced in 1928, which had categorized all social democratic parties as “social fascists.” In what became known as the “popular front period,” Communists sought allies among the social democrats in a joint struggle against fascism. Aspects of the policy appeared soon after Hitler’s success, although formal approval came later, beginning with the 13th plenum of the Comintern in 1934 and concluding with the policy’s official inauguration at the Seventh Congress in 1935. As the British party leadership noted, the focus of the alliance was to be “not on the recruitment and the strengthening of the Labour Party but on the recruitment and the strengthening of the Communist Party in order to carry out its main political aims.”7 This meant an extension of the party’s base of support. As Harry Pollitt, the party leader from 1929 to 1956, noted in his address to the party’s Central Committee in August 1934: “Not only the working class, but the intellectuals, students, liberal elements, and Jewish people” were to be involved in building the party into a mass organization in accord with the new anti-fascist line.8 The antifascist emphasis helped consolidate the party’s position in Anglo-Jewry, thus setting the stage for the CP’s most successful period of recruitment from within that community.9 Party membership now rose sharply before falling away in the postwar years. From 11,500 members in 1936, the numbers increased steadily to 17,756 in 1939. The party maintained that number and even added to it during the difficult period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and then experienced a much more dramatic rise following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Peak membership (56,000) was reached in 1942. Six years later, in the early postwar period, the party still claimed an impressive total membership of 43,000. On the eve of the cathartic events of 1956, it had around 34,000 members—double its highest interwar total. The increase was particularly prominent in the Jewish areas of urban Britain. An upbeat report on the county of Lancashire presented to the party’s political bureau in November 1937 stated that in the previous month, total membership stood at 1,499, of whom 567 came from the cities of Manchester and Salford. Manchester alone had five party branches; significantly in terms of Jewish support, there was also a specialist group operating in the clothing industry. The report concluded that Lancashire was ready “to make a big leap forward.”10 Actually, Lancashire membership increased only from 1,662 in 1938 to 1,781 in the following year,11 with Manchester accounting for 650 party members in 1939.12 At the same time, however, the Cheetham branch of the Young Communist League became the largest in Lancashire, with around 200 members.13 This rate of progress continued in the early years of war despite the CP’s support for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and its condemnation of Great Britain’s role in the war as “imperialist.” Following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, however, membership rates soared: in Lancashire, membership grew to 4,800 in 1942 and 6,830 in 1943, before falling back to 5,541 in 1944.14 On the local level, Cheetham was the Manchester branch that prospered above all. In 1942, it had a membership of 67, a figure lower than South Manchester


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(109) but higher than Salford (55). Given that Cheetham covered a small area with a limited population, its membership level was proportionately very high. Due to losses through conscription, the branch was reorganized in April 1943 under the effective stewardship of its secretary, Jack Gershman. New premises on Cheetham Hill Road were found and a membership organizer was appointed.15 Shortly thereafter, the party’s local newsletter was able to report a doubling of membership to 120, which probably made it the largest branch in the city.16 It maintained its size into the immediate postwar period, even increasing to 130 members by February 1947.17 A similar pattern can be detected in East London, home to a high concentration of Jews in the interwar and wartime periods. The Young Communist League in London had some 1,867 members, with the largest branch (not just in London but in all of England) being Stepney, with 246 members. The next in size was Limehouse (116), followed by St. Pancras (113), North Kensington (88), and Stoke Newington (70). Most of the members comprising the East London YCL were shop assistants, office workers, typists, and clothing workers.18 The London district as a whole had a membership in 1922 of 1,500,19 which rose only slightly to 1,560 in 192620 before expanding rapidly during the “popular front” and “Red Army” periods. By November 1937, London had 5,705 members in 76 branches and was by far the party’s largest district. The metal and building trades were the industries from which the highest number of party members came. Not far behind were the distributive (wholesale and retail) and clothing industries, with the cab trade contributing as well. However, the largest single concentration of party members in London was to be found among students and professionals. Among the local branches that showed the highest increase in 1937 were Stoke Newington and Shoreditch, both centers of the Jewish population. Total membership in London increased to 6,180 in 1938 and to 8,000 in 1940. Two years later, membership had more than doubled (16,500). Peak membership (17,537) was attained in 1944, and even in 1949, membership remained at the high level of 16,500.21

Economic and Social Conditions Almost all Jewish Communists came from an East European immigrant background. In all, some 150,000 Jews had come to Great Britain after fleeing poverty and pogroms in Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. Most settled initially in deprived urban areas close to the docks or to railway stations, which were generally notorious for their poor living conditions. Thus, they lived separately from the often well-established Jews whose ancestors had arrived in earlier periods, and they were also more traditional in their religious orientation.22 Members of the Jewish working class suffered some of the worst forms of social deprivation in the early part of the 20th century. The majority lived in the most densely populated regions in Britain, and their lives were marked by high mortality rates, poor housing conditions, and a lack of basic amenities. Local council flats brought a higher level of accommodation to a lucky few, but these, as one Jewish

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Communist recalled, were “an oasis in a desert of slums.”23 The New Survey of London Life and Labour, which was conducted just before the start of the worldwide depression of 1929, estimated that 13.7 percent of East London Jews were living in poverty, a figure that was higher than the average for the district as a whole (12.1 percent).24 The vast majority of Jewish Communists were born into this environment; not surprisingly, childhood poverty and ill health are common themes in their biographies. For instance, Max Druck’s reasons for joining the Cheetham YCL were “mainly economic,” a “result of poverty and hardship” and the “economic crisis which had affected [the] family.”25 Sam Aaronovitch gave his reason for joining the CP as “hatred of [the] capitalist who squeezed the blood out of my father, and made Stepney the slum it is.”26 Unemployment throughout the 1920s and early 1930s never fell below 10 percent and averaged around 14 percent. The typical Jewish trades of clothing, waterproof garment manufacture, and furniture and cabinet-making were not as devastated as other industrial sectors by the economic depressions and loss of markets following the First World War, but they certainly did not escape their effects. In addition, they were poorly paid and often had atrocious working conditions. Above all, they suffered from the seasonal nature of the demand: waterproofing, for example, had a busy season of just two months, with an additional three months of reasonably normal economic activity. Only the best workers, or those most well connected, were kept on outside of the busy period. The interwar years were an age before the National Health Service or comprehensive or even limited state pensions and benefits. The death of the main breadwinner in the family, usually the father, could push a working-class family into a desperate situation. This is often mentioned as a causal factor of radicalization in Jewish Communist biographies. Solly Kaye’s father, for example, owned a small boot-repairing shop in St. Pancras that helped to sustain a family of five. His death in the great influenza epidemic immediately after the First World War led to a “bitter struggle to live,” “teaching many lessons” in the process.27 This family and others survived through a combination of thrift and unity, but the word “struggle”— a popular term in the anti-capitalist Communist discourse—most often appears in biographical accounts in reference to all-too-real economic hardships. It is not surprising that many future Communists left school at age 14, the earliest possible date, to help with the family’s finances. This exposed the young to the world of work and all that this entailed. It was quite a shock for some. The party’s future educational organizer, Jack Cohen, was only 13 years old when he began his first job in a furniture workshop in a slum area of Ancoats (in north Manchester) in the 1920s. He started work at 7 a.m. and finished at 8 p.m., enduring appalling conditions and backbreaking work. After a few weeks, he suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown. Not surprisingly, he developed an intense loathing for the economic system.28 Many other unskilled and semi-educated Jews were cast into this harsh world of work, moving from one job to another and never earning more than a few shillings a day—drifting, as one Communist recalled, “from one blind alley job to another.”29 From the mean terraced streets of Manchester to the grim primitive tenement blocks of Stepney, conditions rarely surpassed those required for mere existence.


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Jews who joined the CP in the 1920s and even more so between 1930–1933, when the economic depression was at its height, usually gave economic factors as their main reason for membership. They often noted in particular the party’s emphasis on scientific planning and control and its vision of a better world for the working man and woman. In analyzing the development of an anti-capitalist perspective, the role of class divisions within the Jewish community should not be underestimated. Points of conflict existed in the synagogue, in schools, and especially in the workplace. The relationship between the employer and employee varied from job to job, industry to industry. The Burton’s factory in Leeds, possibly the largest clothing factory in Europe, had apparently very good labor relations; nevertheless, it had a most active Communist group among its workforce.30 In contrast, in the small East End tailoring workshops, there was often little difference between employer and employee, with roles easily becoming reversed. Struggles over pay, conditions, hours, contracts, and apprenticeships were endemic in the cut-throat world of the sweatshops. For those who secured a job, the workplace was a formative experience: “It was here that my real education began. The factory was my university. Officially my childhood had ended.”31 Not surprisingly, the “Jewish” trade unions were particularly militant in character. Distinctly Jewish trade unions were in decline throughout the interwar period as they merged with their larger non-Jewish equivalents. Even so, they maintained their identity through predominately Jewish memberships in the various branches of the United Ladies Tailors’ Trade Union (which merged with the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers Union in 1938); in the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association; the Waterproof Garment Makers’ Trade Union; and the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union, as well as many others in specialized areas of employment. Some of these unions suffered seasonal loss of membership, and they never covered a majority of workers in the entire industry, but they were rarely anything less than militant both in their demands and in their willingness to strike. The Communist presence in all these unions was considerable, though often subject to severe opposition from socialist rivals. The Jewish Communists Mick Mindel and Ben Rubner were, respectively, chairman of the United Ladies Tailors’ Union in the late 1930s and general secretary of the National Union of Furniture and Timber Operatives in the 1950s. The United Clothing Workers’ Union, based in the East End, was one of two unions (the other being the United Mineworkers of Scotland) that were formed as breakaway organizations by the party in order to represent Communist employees during the “class against class” period. Second-generation working-class British Jews generally had the means to move into an era of relative stability and out of the old slums. This process was to accelerate in the postwar years, especially with the emergence of the third generation, whose members were increasingly likely to be employed in more secure occupations outside the traditional Jewish trades. Within the major areas of Jewish settlement, differences in social conditions existed. In interwar Manchester, for instance, a north-south axis cut through the Jewish community. Strangeways and Red Bank, the most southerly spheres of Jew-

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ish life in north Manchester, were considered the most deprived areas, with Cheetham (to the north) being somewhat less destitute. Further north and to the west, Hightown was almost genteel in comparison. Such generalizations, of course, mask a wealth of difference on the neighborhood level, since streets or parts of streets or even individual houses within streets could differ markedly in poverty or prosperity from those around them. There does not appear to be a pattern relating Jewish Communists simply to particular streets in the immigrant areas, although there was probably a slight bias toward the very poorest areas. The well-known Jenkins family (with both socialists and Communists), for instance, came from Mary Street, reckoned to be one of the most poverty-stricken points in the Jewish area of Manchester. Although, as noted, poverty is a main theme apparent in the biographies of British Jewish Communists, it is not usually cited as the main reason for joining the CP. Rather, it appears to have acted within a general context of “economic factors” whose impact was intensified by additional factors. For instance, the bombing of East London during the Second World War further exacerbated socioeconomic conditions. The blitz indirectly contributed to an awareness of deprivation among some of the young Jews who were evacuated. Previously, their horizons had been confined to their local area or, at most, to its peripheries. With their evacuation out of London, however, many saw for the first time how “the other half ” lived. The contrast with their own homes was stark. Born and raised in a poor Russianimmigrant tailoring family in Stepney, Monty Mazin was evacuated to several places along the south coast of England, eventually ending up in Devon. The experience profoundly shocked him: “It was the contrast between life in Stepney and that of Torquay that really opened my eyes. It was my hatred of the system that caused this and the misery that goes with it that made me join the party and be the proud possessor of a card dated January 1 1946 at the age of 19.”32 The actual cycles of economic prosperity and depression do not coincide particularly well with levels of Jewish recruitment to the party. The late 1920s and early 1930s were marked by only a small increase in Jewish membership despite the depression of 1929 and after. The highest level of recruitment was from the mid1930s to the early 1940s—a period of relative improvement in living standards, employment opportunities, and even, to a limited extent, in social mobility. Moreover, during the “boom years” of the British economy in the 1950s, there does not appear to have been a substantial fall in Jewish recruitment to the CP. There are further difficulties with economic causation as an explanation, particularly if one tries to link it with an acknowledgement of “class interests.” As opposed to those from the working class, there was a sizable and in fact disproportionate element of Jews with middle-class and lower middle-class backgrounds within the party—and even a handful who came from the very wealthiest families of Anglo-Jewry. Perhaps the middle-class element is not so surprising, given that the middle class also suffered economic instability during the depression. Moreover, in many cases the parents of middle-class Jews had grown up poor, and that memory was often passed on to their children. Further, many still lived or worked (or both) within working-class areas, so that the specter of deprivation was never far away. Some Jewish Communists came from homes of failed businessmen and hence grew up with a well of bitterness toward the capitalist system and a feeling of


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cynicism regarding the chances of completely working one’s way out of the “ghetto.” Comparatively speaking, middle-class Jews were, of course, better off than their working-class cousins. However, affluence could also lead to problems: a reaction to a bourgeois lifestyle was not uncommon. For example, the family pressures upon young middle-class women to accept genteel values could not be borne by some. Rose Grant moved from a working-class quarter of Sheffield to leafy suburban Hampstead when her parents became prosperous. She grew up in an environment of “Jewish middle class affluence,” a situation she abhorred. As she recalled, “enjoyment and social snobbery were its motivating forces and I grew up in an atmosphere totally lacking in political, cultural or average educational influences.” She later left her Jewish boarding school in Leicester to “escape from the ‘early marriage’ convention around me” and to “earn my own living.” In her case, relative prosperity and all it entailed was a key factor in her political radicalization.33 In sum, economic and social conditions should not be underestimated in accounting for Jewish participation in British Communism. What should be questioned is any sense of “determinism” to be attributed to such conditions. The range of responses to poverty, unemployment, class, and exploitation is so great that identifying causation in simple terms is meaningless. Defining the relationship between the factor of class and revolutionary politics requires a clear contextual analysis that also considers the national, international, and ethnic dimensions.

The Jewish Historical Legacy Because Jews were often disproportionately represented in Communist parties, it is generally assumed that some kind of Jewish historical legacy—broadly defined to include cultural and social as well as religious elements—played a major role in the “riddle of Jewish radicalism.” In his analysis of American Jewish radicals at the turn of the 20th century, Gerald Sorin, for instance, has argued that they formed a prophetic minority driven by biblical and post-biblical norms of social justice as interpreted in a modern context.34 Regarding Russian Jewish radicals, Robert Brym has suggested that it is the extent of each individual’s “embeddedness” within the Jewish community that determined his or her particular political affiliation. Those who had little contact with a Jewish way of life were more inclined, he argues, to the “internationalist” revolutionaries, while those with a stronger Jewish affinity turned either to the Bund or to the socialist Zionists.35 How do British Jewish Communists fit into this picture? Not particularly well. The majority grew up as members of both the Jewish community and of British society. On the whole, they belonged to the second generation of immigrant Jews. Very few of them came from the ultra-Orthodox community, but not many grew up in assimilated or atheist homes, either. Most can be found within a spectrum ranging from moderate Orthodoxy to minimal observance. However, positive religious references are almost completely absent in Jewish Communist biographies. It is one thing to affirm a general level of Orthodoxy within the home, but quite another to develop this into a thesis positing Judaic-Communist affinity.

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The only evidence for a clear link between the religious dimension of Judaism and Communism is negative: the rejection of religious belief often served as a catalyst for radicalism. This is certainly a common theme among the British-born second generation of Jewish Communists. The dynamics of integration created tensions within the community and raised difficult questions concerning the continued rule of traditional religious authorities. Some Jews early on questioned the religious dimension of their lives. S.J. Singer, for instance, demonstrated from “very young years” an “intense resistance to religious teaching.”36 A Manchester Jewish Communist, Benny Segal, spent a week at a yeshiva but soon left. “I was having none of it,” he later noted. “I was too inquisitive . . . instead of becoming a rabbi I became a rebel.”37 Nevertheless, religious rejection per se was not usually the main reason given for joining the CP. What is noted more often is a withdrawal from certain facets of religious life, a feeling of being uncomfortable with Judaic practices, a lack of commitment regarding traditional observance. Most often there was a gradual and often complicated passage into minimal observance and secularism. Into this mix stepped the Communist party: atheist, materialist in its ideology and yet imbued with its own sense of historical destiny—not necessarily an alternative home or a spiritual haven, but a safe and satisfying harbor both protecting and offering new routes to explore. Within the home, what caused tension was not simply the reaction against religious belief but often the rejection of the family unit itself. The two factors intertwined in a variety of ways. The number of Jewish Communists who mention their “rebellion” against their parents or the fact that they were the “black sheep” of their family is considerable, and this raises the important question of generational divergence, of youths struggling to develop their individuality within the constraints of Jewish family life. As one Jewish Communist put it: “Kids were bursting to get away from this family life.”38 Rejection of religion was often just one manifestation of rebellion, or as another Jewish party member recalled: “At a very early age I was sent to Hebrew school, but I was afraid I caused much pain to my parents by being expelled from every Hebrew school I attended. Along with some other lads we had great fun organising strikes at Hebrew schools, and I don’t think we had many scabs.”39 The decline in religious belief and generational divergence both interacted with and were exacerbated by a more deep-rooted and far-reaching process: the integration of second-generation Anglo-Jewry into British society. Todd Endelman has suggested a link between Communist identification and a movement away from Jewish life in his research on “radical assimilation,” and indeed there is no doubting the profound impact caused by anglicization upon the young Jewish generation of the interwar period.40 To be sure, parents did not resist this process, but rather actively encouraged it, since the command of English and Englishness meant jobs and security. Similarly, the established Anglo-Jewish elite, desperate for their East European co-religionists not to stand out as an alien element (and so reflect negatively upon themselves), both instigated English classes and financed youth clubs based on the best of British traditions. Their actions were not intended to lead to complete assimilation but rather to the immigrants’ becoming good British citizens


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of the Jewish faith. However, acculturation was a process that could never quite be controlled. Other influences soon jostled for the attention of young minds. Football, cycling, cinema, scouts, libraries, concerts, dog racing, camping—even the YMCA—represented only a partial list of opportunities available to Jewish youth, some of which could eventually lead to Communist membership. Rambling, for example, became an important pastime for Manchester Jewish youth in the early 1930s. The contrast between the right to roam and the legal restrictions on trespassing, between the fresh air of the Derbyshire countryside and the grim streets of Manchester, between Englishness and yidishkeyt, friendships and family life was tangible and stimulating. A new world was being revealed to the second generation at the very time that their youthful energy was at its peak: when they were most open to new ideas, new ventures, new hopes, and new dreams. Thus, the “rambling movement” in Manchester was to lay the basis for the “Challenge Club”—a glorified Communist youth club connected through membership and organization to the Cheetham Young Communist League (which, as will be recalled, was one of the largest branches in the country). It is not surprising that the vast majority of Jewish Communists—some 90 percent of those whose biographies are on file—joined the party either as teenagers or shortly thereafter. Their turn to Communism and away from the Jewish community was just one echo of the impact exerted by modernity. These young Jews were British and Jewish, drawing strength and inspiration from both cultures. They may not have had much depth of understanding either; their roots were shallow, yet they were established. They were secure but not settled, adrift but not alienated. They had moved away from the anti-Communist stance of the traditional immigrant Jewish community but had taken with them its militant elements. They were not yet part of the essential anti-Communism of British society but had adopted its openness and relative freedoms. One can find other, more positive, aspects of the Jewish historical heritage that played a significant role in the radicalization of young Jewish lives—in particular, the importance of learning within the Jewish community. An emphasis on education is commonly associated with Jewish immigrant life. Indeed, about a quarter of Jewish Communist activists went on to college or university, a figure far in excess of that found in the non-Jewish population, among which only 2 percent of all 19year-olds were studying full-time in 1938.41 An environment of learning in the home is mentioned time and again in Jewish Communist biographies, regardless of whether the home was working-class or middle-class, religious or nonreligious. Many Jews who became Communists state that their thirst for literature played a part in their initially joining the party. However, the relationship between learning and Communist commitment is not always so evident. Most working-class Jews, it will be recalled, were not in school past age 16 or even 14, sometimes because of financial reasons but also because of a lack of parental interest. For those who did progress, there was no educational equivalent of New York’s City College, the dynamo for American Jewish radicalism (and indeed, for much of American Communism). Religious families supported, even demanded, knowledge of Scripture, but not necessarily any forms of secular knowledge, which were looked on with suspicion, if not fear. For working-class

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parents, a formal education and an interest in arts and science was all well and good; but would it lead to a job, a career, or a trade? An appetite for reading was certainly evident among the Jews who went on to become Communists, but this did not necessarily lead directly to CP membership, particularly where the influence of dry theoretical Marxist texts was concerned. Phil Piratin, later to become the CP’s first councillor, second MP, executive and political committee member, and leading Communist figure in the East End, recalls that “the first book I attempted to read by Lenin was Empirio-Criticism. I remember reading a chapter and then wondering what I had read—I didn’t understand a word of it.”42 Perhaps fortunately for the Communist party, few attempted to wade through such tomes at an early age. Monty Mazin, in common with the vast majority of Jewish Communists, had never read any Marx, Lenin, or Stalin before joining the party.43

Antisemitism Antifascism was the cause that furnished the rising generation of anglicized Jews with political purpose and meaning. The emergence of the Nazi party in Germany and the formation of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) by Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1932 instigated the most militant phase of Jewish political activity in Britain: fully three quarters of Jewish Communist activists in the 1950s joined the party between 1933 and 1945. British Jews were aware that antisemitism was at the forefront of their parents’ migration from the Continent. Yet antisemitism was not merely part of the continental past. Prior to the First World War and following the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, a particularly aggressive form of it, often indistinguishable from xenophobic “anti-alienism,” had made an appearance, concentrated in London’s East End. Both economic resentment (especially regarding housing and employment), and, to a lesser extent, racial antagonism, had at times barely been kept in check by traditions of British liberalism. These pressures had constituted the main reasons for the increasing limitation and eventual prevention, in 1919, of Jewish immigration into the UK. In the interwar years, various antisemitic groups came into being, although it was only in late 1934 that the BUF launched a more explicit antisemitic campaign that built on its previous activities in and around Jewish areas in Manchester, Leeds, and, in particular, East London.44 High levels of anti-Jewish hostility continued throughout the Second World War, with one scholar even arguing that a “resurgence” of antisemitism took place during this period.45 Accusations of black-market profiteering, draft dodging, and questions of loyalty proliferated. As Tony Kushner notes: “The most remarkable aspect of the Jewish image in the war is the lack of change that took place, despite the background of Jewish persecution in Europe.”46 The threat of British Fascism demanded some response from leading AngloJewish institutions. The Board of Deputies and its affiliated provincial committees pursued a policy of not supporting direct action against the Fascists, preferring instead a public propaganda campaign that, on the one hand, opposed antisemitic


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prejudice and, on the other, inveighed against various aspects of Jewish life that could incite non-Jews, particularly unethical business activities. Private channels of communication with the government were also opened. For Jewish youth, this response was seen as indicative of the community leaders’ passivity and weakness. Accordingly, they looked to more radical solutions, especially that offered by the Communist party, which had entered into its “popular front” phase by the mid-1930s. This strategy was essentially geared toward building the largest possible coalition (including Jews) in the fight against fascism. Each Jewish community would have its defining moment of anti-fascist activity. In Manchester, it was the protest march against Mosley (speaking at Belle Vue in 1934); in London it was the “battle for Cable Street,” in which Fascists attempting to march through the Jewish East End were successfully repulsed on October 4, 1936. In each of these events, the Communist party played a significant role. The Second World War put an end to the BUF as an active political force when the government, as part of its internment policy, put most of the Fascist leadership in jail. Male Jews were conscripted and fought fascism abroad rather than in its British form. However, following the end of the war, the British Fascists staged a revival, concentrating again on East London—especially Hackney, an increasingly important center of Jewish life. Demobbed British Jews formed the backbone of opposition. They were often mobilized by ex-servicemen’s organizations, including the 43 Group, which was under considerable Communist influence. At the same time, the sources present a far from clear picture of the extent to which antisemitism was experienced by Jewish Communists in their pre-party youth. There is little doubt that young Anglo-Jews felt different and that such difference was a cause of discomfort, whether at work, in school, or in the street. This sense of otherness, however, was not necessarily accompanied by overt antagonism. Consequently, British antisemitism as a causative factor in the attraction of Jews to a party preaching resistance to racism is far from a straightforward issue. The foundation of the Manchester Young Communist League was laid before the great anti-fascist struggles of the mid 1930s. Many Jewish Communists reported not having experienced antisemitism while growing up in Britain; only a few stated that they had ever been physically attacked. Where instances of assault did occur, these tended to be confined to those who chose to physically challenge the Fascists on the streets. As one Jewish Communist, Frank Lesser, summed up: I think most Jews have the experience, certainly in my generation, of regarding antiSemitism as being a sort of general background that you might be able to ignore most of the time but every now and again you know, the thing hits you in the eye. It never hit me in the eye literally, physically.47

Concerns over discrimination, whether real or imagined, are perhaps more important in revealing a deeper uncertainty among Jews over their position in British society—a fear that tolerance was only skin deep and racism a latent force. While there are difficulties in assessing the impact of British antisemitism on Jewish radicalism, the link is much clearer with regard to events on the international scene. To be sure, the national and international contexts were not separate; events in one sphere compounded the fears and insecurities produced by the other. But

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the events on the Continent were certainly the catalyst: it was the fear of what might happen in Britain, compared with the reality of persecution in Europe, that drove many Jews to seek a way to express resistance. The Nazis’ electoral success in Germany (a hitherto democratic and highly cultured European country), coupled with the appearance of German Jewish refugees in Britain, radicalized many Anglo-Jews. Frank Lesser was a religious teenager growing up in Hackney. At first largely divorced from any direct political activity, he underwent a transformation during the mid-1930s: Hitler had already been established in Germany and we began to see in the synagogue the first Jewish refugees from Germany and descriptions of what had happened to them from children in the synagogue. . . . So there were kids describing parents being beaten up, thrown down stairs and that kind of thing, physical brutality.48

Similarly, in the small Jewish community of Middlesbrough, it was the arrival of refugees that brought home the real threat that existed across the North Sea.49 The unity of antisemitism with fascism convinced many Jews to fight back, whether through boycotting German goods50 or active protest against the Nazis’ British allies in the BUF. Those who came from socialist, militant, and left-wing contexts were also concerned with the destruction of trade unions and the imprisonment or execution of German Social Democrats, although the fundamental issue for them remained racism. The Jewish community was given its first opportunity to respond with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Although this conflict was preceded by the Italian Fascist invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, the Spanish crisis hit much closer to home. Spain’s proximity to Britain, the involvement of German Nazis as well as Italian Fascists, the overthrow of a democratically elected government with leftwing credentials, and the formation of the Communist-dominated International Brigades were factors that merged the glamour of battle and youthful idealism into a nearly irresistible call to action. The Spanish Civil War cut across many divisions within the Jewish community, religious and economic, producing an unparalleled response in terms of financial donations and public backing. And with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist party had a still more effective cause with which to rally Jewish support. In sum, for the interwar generation, fighting fascism was a way of expressing (though with varying degrees of emphasis and consciousness) their Jewish, British, and generational identities. An almost continuous chain of events—the emergence of the British Union of Fascists, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and the rebirth of the fascist movement in the postwar years—imposed their stamp on this generation’s political beliefs.

The Role of the Communist Party The basic problem with selecting individual causes (poverty, education, and so on) in order to explain why Jews joined the Communist party is that, for every claim put forward, an opposite claim is possible and another, quite different, interpre-


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tation is also feasible. For example, experiencing antisemitism may have led to Communist commitment; then again, many Jews who did not suffer discrimination also joined the party, and indeed many apparently joined because of economic factors. There may be evidence to assign some weight to one particular factor rather than to another, but rarely enough to permit the exclusion of others. I would like to suggest that a key to understanding the connection between British Jews and Communism is the Communist party itself. Jews, no matter how favorable the circumstances, were not “predisposed” toward Communism. Predisposition assumes an a priori connection with the party. But I would argue that there were factors of susceptibility rather than of predisposition in the Jewish context— that is, some Jews proved ready to respond to the party’s approach. The key direction was from the party to the individual, not from the individual to the party. Individuals may have made a “choice” in deciding to join the CP, but they did so within an environment that the Communists did much to control. The party-recruit relationship was never an equal one. Moreover, there is little indication given in the biographies that joining the party was a collective experience; it was as individuals that people joined the party, not in pairs or groups or as families. “The party,” however, is not merely another factor to rank alongside those of antisemitism or socioeconomic conditions. The party’s strategies of recruitment, its resources, its experience, its position within society, the role of its membership, and its place in historical events all rendered it different from other relevant factors. The crucial connection between the Jew and Communism was the Communist party’s strategies of recruitment, on the one hand, and the degree of susceptibility to these strategies to be found within the Jewish community, on the other. The Communist party leadership largely understood this. It attempted to bring in people as efficiently as possible, and this meant adopting strategies that concentrated on certain people, localities, and workplaces. The party’s very marginality within British politics meant that it had little option but to recruit; no one else was going to do it any favors. The Communist party leadership was continually frustrated by the fact that more copies of the party newspaper, The Daily Worker, were sold, and more people voted for the party, than ever became members. The great hope of the party was that it could turn fellow travelers into members and in this way become a mass organization on the order of its sister parties on the Continent. The failure of a European-wide revolution in the immediate post-First World War years caused the CP to turn inwards, focusing on domestic industrial and social struggles. It also began a process of improving its organizational structures. It turned itself into a political party constructed in order to ensure strict leadership control over its membership. It was believed by those in the party that its inability to grow was due to ineffective organization rather than ineffective policies.51 Centralization was designed not only to instill discipline, but also to increase the party’s size, essentially through recruitment—a theme that was to be continually reiterated throughout the years. As Harry Pollitt maintained in 1932: “The question of recruiting is all important for our Party.”52 Although it appears to be an accepted assumption that parties will simply recruit whoever turns to them, the process of recruitment is actually a complex and often contradictory interaction between the individual and the party. Indeed, the CP rested

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on two foundations—ideology and organization—and both were required for recruitment, whether through Marxist classes (to attract the intellectuals and autodidacts), through the infiltration of the clothing unions (to stress the nature of class conflict and attract the exploited), or through the party’s stance against fascism (appealing specifically to Jews as Jews while simultaneously stressing that ethnicity was of little concern to the party). How, then, did the Communist party recruit its members? It had three main methods: personal (sometimes also called individual or selective) recruitment; mass recruitment, which involved recruitment drives and media appeals; and institutional recruitment, that is, activity through youth sections, trade unions, and front groups. Of these, the personal approach was the most important. Indeed, a key question on the biographical questionnaire form that cadres were asked to complete was: “By whom were you introduced to the party?” It was believed that the presence and actions of individual Communists could influence those who were close to them. Personal recruitment, then, was an indirect process of the assimilation of ideas and values, rather than a deliberate “hard sell.” The most effective form of such recruitment was through family and friends. In most instances, the recruiter had personal knowledge of the individual, was in regular contact with him or her, and was often in a position of trust or authority. Family recruitment took one of two forms: vertical recruitment (from parents to children) or lateral (between spouses, among children, or within the extended family). Of these, lateral recruitment was far more prevalent. There were only a few Communists among first-generation British Jews and even fewer all-Communist Jewish families. Thus, while first-generation parents may not have greatly influenced their children where Communism was concerned, brothers recruited their sisters, uncles their nephews, aunts their nieces, and husbands their wives. Apart from the generational dimension, much depended on the actual nature of family relationships. Gender was also important: the influence of fathers, husbands, and brothers was more evident than that of mothers, wives, and sisters. There were exceptions, of course. The impeccably bourgeois-Hampstead Jewish lifestyle of Rose Grant may at first have led her to conceal her Communist membership from her parents, but it did not later stop her from recruiting both her mother and sister to the party.53 Recruitment quotas were a regular feature of party instructions to districts and branches, which ran courses titled “Why you should be a Communist.” The biographical files show how party members were very conscious of the need to recruit and were proud of the successes they had achieved, with many of them making it a point to state the numbers they had inducted and under which particular circumstances. Reflecting on his own experiences as a Jewish member of the party in the New Left Review, Raphael Samuel admitted that the only party activity he was ever any good at was recruiting.54 He goes further in describing how new members were drawn in: One started at the “level” of the sympathiser, emphasising common ground, “building” on particular issues, while at the same time investing them with Party-mindedness. Plied with Party literature, invited to Party meetings, above all “involved” in some species


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of Party work—a petition, a campaign, and in the old days of mass action, marches and demonstrations, the sympathiser was drawn into the comradeship of the Party by a hundred subtle threats. . . .

Joe Jacobs became the secretary of the Stepney branch of the party in the late 1930s. Before becoming a party member, he was merely a working-class Jewish youth hanging around on street corners with little to do. He began, though, to mix with a group of young men older than himself, who nonetheless were keen to talk to him: The subject we discussed at length was the Russian Revolution. The names and places talked about were familiar to us because many of our parents had come from Russia and Poland. Religion was also a great favourite. In addition there were all the current events, local as well as national, chief among these being unemployment and of course the clothing trade. Then there was History of all kinds. You name it, we talked about it.55

Here we can detect the combination of Jewish cultural memory and the partial integration of the second generation into British society—common themes in Jewish Communist biographies. However, what made the difference between a sympathizer and a recruit was the active role played by the Communist party, as Jacobs confirmed: They were all members of the Young Communist League or Communist Party. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was what is known as a “contact.” I would be invited to meetings, classes, demonstrations, etc. all of which I was only too pleased to attend. I know how we did all these things when I eventually joined in organised activity as a full member of such organisations. My “education” was being attended to in a more or less deliberate way. I was given pamphlets and books and told what to get from the public library.56

As Raphael Samuel again reflected: “Recruiting . . . involved, I now realise, a tutor-pupil relationship, not least in its elaborate pretence of equality between the teacher and the taught; it was a learning process which demonstrated the power of knowledge.”57 Literature sales, demonstrations, special events, open branch meetings, recruitment courses and recruitment drives, Marxist classes: all these were outreach strategies designed to bring non-party individuals closer to the CP. Employing these methods, the London district was able to gain 800 new members in a single year, 1936.58 Similarly, a countrywide recruitment drive was launched shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.59 However, as previously noted, the party usually preferred to concentrate its limited resources on selected workingclass regions such as the coalfields of South Wales and central Scotland and London’s East End. Apart from the issue of Jewish “susceptibility,” there were practical reasons for concentrating on places such as the East End. Above all, it was far easier to do a mass canvass among the closely packed population of Stepney than in a rural or suburban area. Certainly Stepney was seen as a key constituency, and there was even talk of establishing it as the main electoral base for the party leader, Harry

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Pollitt, following the party’s “success” in the 1930 by-election in nearby Whitechapel.60 Historically, the party had always had a presence in the East End: Marxist groups had established themselves there even before the First World War. In 1930, Rajani Palme Dutt, the party’s chief strategist, acknowledged that East London was now “the strongest district of the Party,”61 and a recruitment drive of 1933 in London concentrated on East London, above all in the East End, achieving a “definite advance” in the area’s clothing industry and a doubling of party membership there.62 The CP also exploited the strong tendency of Anglo-Jewry to organize. The Jewish areas of Manchester, Leeds, and London contained many youth clubs, cultural societies, and young Zionist associations—all of which were targets for the Communists. Most of these groups had Communist cells hidden within them, whose primary purpose was to influence and recruit. The Oxford and St. George’s Club, probably the most famous Jewish youth club in the East End, had Young Communist League members actively recruiting within it well into the 1950s.63 Part of the rationale for the various Boys Clubs set up by Anglo-Jewish “grandees” was to offer an alternative to radical politics. However, because of their success in attracting young Jews, they too became centers for clandestine Communist activity. Following the Second World War, the party even launched a monthly journal aimed specifically at gaining support among the Jews: The Jewish Clarion, under the auspices of the National Jewish Committee, a branch of the party whose primary role was to engage in political activity among the Jewish community.64 The Young Communist League became increasingly important as a conduit bringing Jews into the party. A mere handful of Jewish Communists had gained positions in the YCL during the 1920s, but in the 1930s, they entered the organization in considerable numbers.65 By the late 1930s, the Stepney and Cheetham branches of the YCL were the two largest in the country. Thus, generational divergence and societal integration of second-generation Jews coincided with, were reinforced by, and grew out of Communist organizational development within an urban locality. Other institutions targeted by the Communists included the trade unions, socialist political parties, sports and social clubs with left-wing tendencies, various workingclass educational organizations, and student bodies. The CP, inter alia, also set up front groups—organizations that were supposedly separate from the party but in reality were closely tied to it, such as the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. These groups were aimed at drawing in sympathetic individuals who otherwise could not bring themselves to join (or were not aware of how to join) the CP. As Joe Jacobs noted: “Individuals would be selected for special treatment by the ‘faction’ and carefully nursed. When it was thought appropriate they would be invited to join us. In short, the mass organisations were a reservoir in which we fished.”66 Two further points need to be made. First, the model of interaction between party and individual presented here is dynamic; that is, it was subject to various forces, including countervailing factors. Thus, potential recruits could be repelled by the party’s militant atheism or by its marginality in British life. Many Jewish Communists were actually anti-party in their early pre-party lives, and it took a


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great deal of effort and persuasion before they finally joined. At the same time, CP branches did not always recruit as vigorously as they could have, simply because their members preferred to keep their ranks limited, either because they enjoyed the close-knit nature of their group or because they believed that not just anybody should be allowed to join the CP. The result was often a range of restrictive and exclusivist practices to deter the less than enthusiastic. Joining the party could involve a long period of apprenticeship or a rigorous interview in front of a committee. Jack Woddis, a future Jewish Central Committee member, had to undergo a tedious process in order to become a party member. His first application in 1936 received no reply. Three more applications to his local party also went unanswered. The next year he decided to take a more direct approach and went to the national party headquarters in London, on King Street. However, even then he had to be interviewed by a senior party leader before eventually being given a party card.67 Second, the Communist party was acting in a competitive environment: it had to fight for its own “market share” of a limited number of potential recruits. Even though the Labour party was not always better funded—the CP, after all, received funding from Moscow—it was many times larger and in some ways more attractive. For example, the Labour party, in contrast to the CP, was in general sympathetic toward Zionism. On the other hand, Labour’s record in the fight against fascism was poor. The CP, for its part, was dependent on the lottery of Soviet policy: with the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, it had a losing ticket, but with the German invasion in 1941, it became a winner. Such interparty competition was by no means insignificant. For about one in four Jewish Communists, the CP was not in fact the first party they joined; many other political alternatives could be and were chosen. These two points about counter-dynamics and party competition are important when one returns to the “riddle of Jewish radicalism.” The CP was able to recruit individual Jews susceptible to the various messages that it could provide through its recruitment strategies. However, its overall strength within the Jewish community was limited: it had to compete with various organizations among the relatively small numbers of politically motivated youth, and overcome its own internal conservatism. It also faced powerful anti-Communist forces within the Orthodox world and in the wider British society. With only a small percentage of Britons ever turning to Communism, even a modest increase in Jewish membership sufficed to produce a distorted picture of their importance.

Notes 1. Figures are calculated from the CP’s biographical collection of 2,762 individuals, found in the Communist Party Archives, Labour History Museum, Manchester (hereafter: CPA). Of these, 205 have been identified as definitely Jewish (defined as either mother or father being of Jewish origin), with another 50 who are possibly Jewish. 2. See Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Oxford: 1991), 13. 3. Supplemental information was obtained from 30 in-depth interviews; 25 CP personal membership archival files (of which 14 belong to Jewish party members) from the biographical collection of the Working Class Movement Library, Salford (hereafter: WCML); 16

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recorded interviews housed at the Manchester Jewish Museum (hereafter: MJM), 11 of them conducted with Jewish Communists; eight detailed questionnaire responses; 10 published and unpublished autobiographies/biographies; six published and unpublished interviews; and information on a further 29 Communists that was collected from various sources including obituaries, letters, and personal contacts. 4. For the origins of the Communist Party of Great Britain, see Leslie J. Macfarlane, The British Communist Party: Its Origin and Development until 1929 (London: 1966); Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain (London: 1969); Willie Thompson, The Good Old Cause: British Communism 1920–1991 (London: 1992), 16–41. 5. CPA, CI reel 16 (see under “political bureau,” 12 Nov. 1937). 6. See Andrew Thorpe, “Comintern ‘Control’ of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920–43,” English Historical Review (June 1998), 648–650. 7. CPA, CI reel 15 (political bureau, 21 Nov. 1935). 8. Ibid., reels 5–6 (Central Committee, 10 Aug. 1934). 9. Though it did lead to a greater awareness of Jewish issues in the party, this turn to ethnicity by the CP and its impact among Jews in the CP should not be exaggerated. See my article “A Question of ‘Jewish Politics’? The Jewish Section of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1936–45,” in Jews, Labour and the Left, ed. Christine Collette and Stephen Bird (Aldershot: 2000), 93–121. 10. CPA, CI reel 16 (political bureau, 12 Nov. 1937). 11. Ibid., reel 17 (political bureau, misc. document). 12. Ibid., reel 10 (Central Committee, 19 March 1939). 13. Sharon Gewirtz, “Anti-fascist Activity in Manchester’s Jewish Community in the 1930s,” Manchester Region History Review 4, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 19. 14. Kenneth Newton, The Sociology of British Communism (London: 1969), 177–178. 15. See the district party’s newsletter, Lancashire News 6, no. 17 (24 April 1943), 2. 16. Ibid. 6, no. 8 (1 May 1943), 3. 17. Ibid. 10, no. 2 (1 Feb. 1947), 3. 18. CPA, CI reel 17 (London district committee report to political bureau, 1938). 19. CPA, 1995 Moscow reel 495/100/63 (1922). 20. Newton, The Sociology of British Communism, 176. 21. Ibid., 175, 177–178; CPA, CJ reel 17 (political bureau, misc. document). 22. Apart from East European Jews, the British Communists drew members from the ranks of other refugee groups as well as from British empire (and later, commonwealth) citizens and those on the periphery of mainstream Jewish life. Sephardim—those descended from the Spanish and Portuguese Jews exiled in the late Middle Ages—had only a very minor presence in the CP. 23. Hymie Fagan, Childhood Memories (unpublished work located in the Marx Memorial Museum, London), ed. H. Fagin and M. Cohen, 21. 24. Figures taken from Harold Pollins, Economic History of the Jews in England (London: 1982), 185. 25. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/2/4 (Max Druck). 26. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/1/1 (Sam Aaronovitch). 27. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/4/2 (Solly Kaye). 28. MJM, J-63 (Jack Cohen). 29. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/3/1 (Dennis J. Goodwin). 30. Anne Kershen, Uniting the Tailors: Trade Unionism amongst the Tailors of London and Leeds (Ilford: 1995), 185–190. 31. Fagan, Childhood Memories, 43. 32. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/5/3 (Monty Mazin). 33. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/3/1 (Rose Grant). 34. Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals 1880– 1920 (Bloomington: 1985), 3. 35. Robert Brym, The Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism: A Sociological Study of Intellectual Radicalism and Ideological Divergence (London: 1978), chs. 1–2.


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36. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/6/7 (S.J. Singer). 37. MJM, J-214 (Benny Segal). 38. MJM, J-9 (Ben Ainley). 39. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/4/3 (A. Kelner). 40. Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656–1945 (Indianapolis: 1990), 189–190. 41. John Stevenson, British Society 1914–45 (London: 1984), 252. It must be noted, however, that the sample of Jewish Communists used is of party activists and those who gained positions within the Communist party. The CP preferred to promote not just those with good militant credentials but those with an education, too. A sample of ordinary Jewish branch members may have produced a lower percentage of educational attainment. 42. Phil Piratin, Our Flag Stays Red (London: 1948), 4. 43. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/5/3 (Monty Mazin). 44. For a detailed study of antisemitism in Britain during the 19th and 20th centuries, see Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society 1876–1939 (London: 1979). 45. Aaron Goldman, “The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism in Britain during World War II,” Jewish Social Studies 46 (1987), 37–50. See also Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester 1989); Todd M. Endelman, “Anti-Semitism in War-Time Britain: Evidence from the Victor Gollancz Collection,” Michael 10 (1986), 75–95. 46. Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice, 133. 47. Interview with Frank Lesser by Kevin Morgan, 6 Feb. 1990. I am grateful to Dr. Morgan for providing me with a copy of the transcript of the interview. 48. Ibid. 49. Dave Goodman, reply to questionnaire, 9 Sept. 1996. 50. See Sharon Gewirtz, “Anglo-Jewish Responses to Nazi Germany 1933–1939: The Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Board of Deputies of British Jews,” Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1991), 255–276. 51. For further discussion on the CP’s early years, see Macfarlane, The British Communist Party, 73–93. 52. CPA, CI reel 13 (political bureau, 3 Aug. 1932). 53. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/3/1 (Rose Grant). 54. Raphael Samuel, “Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism, Part Three,” New Left Review 165 (Sept.–Oct. 1987), 78. 55. Joe Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto, My Youth in the East End: Communism and Fascism 1913–1939 (London: 1979), 37. 56. Ibid., 37–38. 57. Samuel, “The Lost World of British Communism,” 78. 58. CPA, CI reel 8 (Central Committee, 10 Sept. 1937). 59. Lancashire News 6, no. 36 (11 Sept. 1943), 2. 60. Although the CP gained 2,106 votes, the Labour party won, with 8,544 votes (CPA, CI reel 11 [political bureau, 12 Dec. 1930]). In the general election of 1931, the Communist vote went up by a further 500. Pollitt, though, shifted his candidature from Stepney to Rhondda, South Wales, for subsequent elections. 61. CPA, CI reel 11 (political bureau, 12 Dec. 1930). 62. CPA, CI reel 14 (political bureau, 18 May 1933). 63. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/2/7 (Monty Franks). 64. For a detailed history of the National Jewish Committee, see Heppell, “A Question of ‘Jewish Politics’?” 65. James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Volume Two: 1925–1927: The General Strike (London: 1969), 363–364. Among the Jewish leaders in the YCL were Jack Cohen, David Ainley, Andrew Rothstein and E. Rothstein. 66. Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto, 45. The fishing analogy was frequently used by the party. 67. CPA, CP/CENT/PERS/8/2 (Jack Woddis).

On Jews, Frenchmen, Communists, and the Second World War Reneé Poznanski ben-gurion university

“I would like . . . to speak of my great Communist Party. . . . [D]espite everything, our dear party—the party of those who have been executed—will reach its goal, which is the French Soviet Republic, the regime desired by a majority of the French because it is the most just regime for the people of France. . . . I am overjoyed today, feeling myself free and at home and working with all my strength . . . for the arrival of the Soviets in France.”1

Such were the thoughts recorded by Albert Grunberg in his diary on October 2, 1944, slightly more than two months after the liberation of France. Albert Grunberg had left Romania in 1912. He remained attached to what was then often referred to as the “Jewish race,” but he rejected all religious affiliation. He had married a non-Jewish woman and had raised his two sons to be French patriots. On September 24, 1942, the universe of this Parisian hairdresser was upended. That was the day the police arrived to arrest Grunberg, who had registered as a Jew only when forced to do so by a summons to the Prefecture of Police. Taking advantage of some momentary confusion to get away, Grunberg took refuge in a hiding place already prepared on the sixth floor of the building next door. There, protected by the concierge, he remained in seclusion until the liberation. During those long months he kept a diary in which he daily recorded his deeds and thoughts. Albert Grunberg’s Communist convictions were not born with the war. An immigrant Jew, he had been active during the 1930s in one of the cells in his neighborhood, alongside French-born Communists. When the Germans occupied the capital, however, he did not join one of the clandestine groups set up by the party. Instead, aware of the danger he faced, he prepared for the eventuality of arrest. From then on, his safety depended on many accomplices, notably the concierge and his neighbors (there is no mention of his prewar comrades in his diary), and daily concerns took precedence over political stratagems. In many respects, Grunberg’s life during the occupation was atypical. Nonetheless, this brief account invites us to reconsider the sometimes simplistic conclusions that can emerge from a purely political analysis of French society in the prewar and wartime years. It is important to take into account the complexity of identities 168

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among French Jewry—a group that comprised not only French citizens whose families had been fully integrated into society for generations but also immigrants of more or less recent date, originating in diverse places, some of them naturalized, others still resident aliens. Grunberg, a proud French citizen, was also an immigrant—and a Communist. What were the relationships between the different groups within French Jewry, and how did French society in general, and French Jewry (in all its constituent parts) respond to the Communists’ attempt to gain political support and legitimacy?

Before the War The composition of the Jewish population of France changed gradually between the two world wars. In 1918, following the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France, the country was home to some 150,000 Jews. That number had doubled by 1939, thanks to successive waves of immigrants, most of them from Eastern and Central Europe. Coming from countries whose repressive and/or antisemitic policies intensified during this period, the Jewish immigrants had been attracted by the image of France as heir to the French Revolution; as the homeland of the Rights of Man; and as a state with a strong revolutionary identity.2 The Jewish immigrants were naturalized in droves once they were permitted to do so in the wake of legislation passed in 1927, and their children attended French schools. In this respect, they were hardly different from the thousands of Jews who had earlier selected France as their destination, starting in the last quarter of the 19th century. Ideologically, the immigrant population was sharply divided. However, composed for the most part of small craftsmen and “home-based workers” (ouvriers a` domicile),3 it shared the belief that Jewish collective action should not be limited to the philanthropic and religious domains. Some of the immigrants had a rich past as political militants and had known the inside of prisons in their countries of origin. “France, for political e´migre´s, is almost synonymous with revolution,” observed Leopold Trepper, who became the head of the most important Soviet espionage network in wartime France, the so-called Red Orchestra.4 Militancy and marginality were frequently at the core of their political experience. Jews of the long-settled French community, some 90,000 in 1939, had inherited a very different political culture. Beneficiaries of the social mobility accorded them ever since the Emancipation, their loyalty to the revolutionary ideal was just as absolute as that of the immigrants; but they rarely drew a parallel between the revolution of 1789 and the militant radicalism of their own day. They were deeply integrated into French society, whose cultural values they had enthusiastically assimilated, and thus their political activism could scarcely be imagined on other than a strictly individual basis—motivated by what could be seen as French and national interests. Their commitment was to the solidly mainstream political parties that enjoyed an unchallenged legitimacy in French political discourse. During the prewar years, the French Communist party did not fall into that category. Shortly after the great schism within the world socialist movement that came about with the establishment of the Communist International (Comintern) in

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1919, the French Communists enjoyed an initial victory when, at the congress of the still-united French Socialist Party held in Tours in 1920, three quarters of the delegates voted to affiliate with the new Communist body. However, most of the leadership opted to stay with the Socialists. The Communist party’s initial failure to consolidate its potential strength was followed by what became a longstanding policy, directed from Moscow, of rejecting political alliances. By the early 1930s, this policy had led to both extreme isolation and a precipitous decline in membership. Meanwhile, the Socialists proved able to regain their standing among the French population.5 The Nazi ascent to power in Germany in 1933 ushered in a new era in the history of the Communist movement generally, and of the French party in particular. This fact was not immediately apparent; but by the time of its Seventh Congress in 1935, it was clear that (rhetorically, at least) the Comintern had opted for a radically new line, calling for united action by all “progressive forces” in order to combat fascism and to maintain the peace in Europe. The “outstretched arm” policy promulgated by the Comintern led to a “nationalization” of the French Communist party (rallying to the French flag, to the “Marseillaise,” and to national defense), as well as to a rapprochement with the Socialists and the Radicals. The French Communists were integrating into the French people, while the Soviet Union, having been admitted to the League of Nations, had itself obtained an entry permit to the international community. After the victory of the Popular Front (see appendix) in the elections of April and May 1936, the Communist party, having almost doubled its share of the vote (from 8.4 percent in the previous elections of 1932) to 15.3 percent, became a major parliamentary faction and a legitimate player in the French political game. Furthermore, the Spanish Civil War augmented the party’s prestige in the eyes of intellectuals and artists committed to the antifascist struggle. Hitherto, they had been for the most part far removed from Communism, but now, in reaction to the policy of nonintervention proclaimed by the Popular Front government headed by León Blum, many of them joined forces with the Communist party or with its fellow travelers. It was during this period that the Communist movement also made some headway among the native-born French Jewish intelligentsia, at least on the individual or familial level. Some Jewish intellectuals, horrified by the way in which France was being hemmed in by the triumphant fascist forces in Italy, Germany, and Spain, were seduced by the (apparent) firmness of the Communist message as well as by the party’s outsider status, which seemed to echo their own avant-garde values. One such party supporter was the architect Pierre Villon (Pierre Ginsburger), a rabbi’s son born into an Alsatian Jewish family, who joined the Communist party in 1932.6 Similarly, it was antifascism that brought Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont to the Communist movement.7 A number of French intellectuals born to Jewish families— writers and journalists such as Andre´ Wurmser and Pierre Abraham (along with the latter’s brother, Jean Richard Bloch), and university professors such as Francis Cohen (following in the footsteps of his father, Marcel)—also joined the party during the Popular Front period.8 These intellectuals, as noted, were not out of step with the general intellectual


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milieu in France. Before the war, they were more likely to be fellow travelers than party members, associated with satellite organizations rather than members of a party cell. And while some, together with French intellectuals in general, were attracted to Communism in the 1930s, others, such as the author León Werth, soon turned their backs on it, particularly in the wake of the Victor Serge affair.9 The bottom line is that Communist recruits drawn from within the old-line French Jewish families were few and far between. A more significant number of adherents to the Communist and pro-Communist intelligentsia was supplied by those Jews who, though unquestionably French, were of immigrant origin—for instance, Georges Politzer, born in Hungary in 1903; or Jacques Solomon, born to a Romanian father in 1908. These two became especially prominent when they began editing the underground paper L’Universite´ libre during the occupation, for which they were arrested and shot at Mont Vale´rien on May 23, 1942. Of course, no discussion of French Communism and the Jews can overlook the role played in the party by foreign agents sent into the country by the Comintern. Despite fluctuating popular support, the Communist party leadership installed at the start of the 1930s maintained itself for more than 30 years. Composed of men who were “competent, but obedient, of working-class origin and relatively scanty education,”10 its top posts did not include a single Jew. Nevertheless, the leadership was essentially nominated by Eugen (Jeno¨) Fried, in direct contact with the highest political echelons in Moscow. Born to a Jewish family in eastern Slovakia, a Hungarian-speaking region of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Fried started out as the representative of the Czechoslovak Communist party to the Comintern executive in Moscow. In 1930, he was dispatched to represent the Comintern vis-a`-vis the French Communist party.11 Once installed in Paris, Fried arguably became the behind-the-scenes leader of the French Communist party until the war. His path was far from atypical; as Annie Kriegel and Stephane Courtois have shown, many of the roving agents sent by the Comintern to supervise other Communist parties were Jews from Central or Eastern Europe.12 On the rank-and-file level, it was the immigrant working class and the immigrant poor that provided the French Communist party with its most favorable recruiting grounds among French Jewry. After the First World War, France had become a country of immigration because of its need to cope with a longstanding demographic deficiency aggravated by the war. Encouraged by a pragmatic official policy and liberal legislation, some 200,000 foreigners arrived in France each year between 1921 and 1926.13 In 1925, immigrants actually made up one-quarter of the working class in France. Most French workers, however, were staunchly xenophobic. What is more, some groups of immigrant workers—notably the Italians—tended to organize independently, outside the French political and union structures. To deal with these problems, the Fifth Congress of the Communist party, held in Lille in June 1926, resolved to set up a special section to deal with foreign laborers, known as the Main d’oeuvre e´trange`re (MOE). Immigrant Communists were permitted to organize in subsections by nationality or language as well as being affiliated with a party cell.14 The first MOE pamphlet, published in five languages (French, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Russian), Fraternite´, was distributed in October 1926, and a police

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report mentions the founding meeting of a working group of Jewish Communists on July 1, 1927.15 The tradition of separate Jewish political and trade union activity had deep roots in the history of Jewish immigrants to France. The first mutual-aid societies, founded in the early 1880s by the cap-makers and then by other professional guilds to provide for funerals, often served as the basis for the formation of union locals.16 In December 1910, the Yiddish-speaking locals that were affiliated with the Confe´de´ration geńe´rale du travail (CGT) created a coordinating body, the Intersektsionen Byuro. The first issue of a Jewish workingman’s paper, Der yidisher arbeter, appeared on Oct. 9, 1911. Although most union activists in France as a whole did not join the new Confe´de´ration geńe´rale du travail unitaire (CGTU), which became affiliated with the Communist party following the labor movement split in 1920, a majority of the organized Jewish workers opted to do so. In 1923, the Comite´ intersyndical juif, the heir of the Intersektsionen Byuro, was created within the CGTU, and from then on, Communist influence among Jewish immigrants increased until it overshadowed that of the Bundist-oriented socialists who had enjoyed a majority until the end of the First World War.17 Reflecting this change, in the fall of 1925 the Jewish Communists won a majority on the executive of the Kultur-Lige, a cultural institution founded three years earlier. (The Bundists withdrew and created a breakaway organization, the Medem Club.18) As with other ethnic groups, only a minority of the Jewish immigrants were politically active. In contrast to other immigrant groups, however, the Jewish working class—made up of craftsmen and small shopkeepers—was not favorable to permanent union organization. Except for the period of the Popular Front, Jewish union membership never surpassed 2.5 percent to 3 percent of the Jewish immigrant labor force in Paris.19 So it was through a dense network of social, cultural, and sports institutions that the Communists primarily influenced the Jewish immigrants. Such activities preserved the Yiddish-speaking milieu, which was in any case reinforced by the concentration of immigrants in a number of traditional Jewish trades and crafts. French public opinion regarding immigrants changed significantly during the 1930s. Although there had never been a time free of anti-alien agitation, between 1931 and 1939, a “surge of xenophobia”20 accompanied the succession of economic and political crises that overshadowed the period. In those years of hardship, foreigners were naturally blamed for contributing to the massive unemployment. The French Communist party adapted itself to these new popular currents. In 1932, the MOE changed its name to the Main d’oeuvre immigreé (MOI), since “immigrant” had a less overtly negative political connotation than “foreigners.” Its leader, Giulio Ceretti, together with the head of the Polish group, were co-opted to the party’s Central Committee. Despite growing repression, the 12 language sections experienced major growth during these years, especially during the period of the Popular Front.21 The Italian and Jewish groups were the most dynamic. No fewer than 600 Jews were enrolled in the different language sections of the Communist party in Paris in the mid-1930s, including 250 affiliated with the “Jewish subsection,” so named because its dominant language was Yiddish.22 Its importance can be measured by


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the fact that its secretary was, ex officio, one of the five members of the “collective” of the MOI that oversaw all the language groups. Furthermore, about 700 Jewish craftsmen and laborers were enrolled and active in the CGTU.23 The only Jewish Communist daily published in Europe, the Naye prese (founded in January 1934), was funded entirely by contributions and subscriptions and initially had 10,000 readers; its vitality was cited as an example to other language groups in the MOI. When the Popular Front government was set up in 1936—after an election campaign in which Jewish committees were especially active among the Jewish immigrants, naturalized or not—Naye prese’s readership doubled, as did the number of Jews affiliated with the Yiddish language group.24 Starting in 1936, in an attempt to counter the growing anti-alien sentiment prevalent in working-class circles, a mass movement was launched at the Communist trade union congress to demand a law to regulate the legal status of immigrants. To that end, a coordinating committee, the Centre de liaison des travailleurs immigre´s, was established. Emulating this “veritable Popular Front of immigrants,” a Jewish popular front that focused on the struggle against antisemitism was also promoted to facilitate cooperation among Communists, Bundists, and left-wing Zionists.25 In this same period, the Spanish Civil War provided the MOI with an opportunity to diversify its activities: it played a key role in organizing clandestine assistance to Spain. On April 15, 1937, the France-Navigation company was set up to handle undercover arms supplies to Republican Spain. The person in charge of procuring and transporting the weapons was Jean Je´roˆme (Michel Feintuch); another Jew, Joseph Epstein, supervised armed operations.26 Paris was also the headquarters from which the International Brigades were organized, based mainly on the MOI language groups. France, and especially Paris, had become the linchpin of Communist activity in Europe, as many party activists who had fled Germany, the Saarland, Austria, Italy, Romania, and Poland found refuge in France. Its territory sheltered the operational headquarters of most of the outlawed Communist parties of Europe: the German, Austrian, and Czechoslovak Communist parties, the Hungarian and Polish Communist parties as they sought to rebuild themselves on the eve of the Second World War, and also the French office of the Italian Communist party.27 In addition, several front groups, including the European offices of the Secours rouge international, the Internationale syndicale rouge, the Internationale des jeunes, and the Bureau colonial international were all transferred to Paris. Thousands of foreign Communist cadres and activists who had fought in Spain also found temporary asylum in France. Thus the MOI and its language groups offered a comfortable refuge for a broad spectrum of Communist exiles. Not surprisingly, given the zigzags so characteristic of Communist policy in the Stalin era, the conciliatory and latitudinarian line proclaimed in the mid-1930s was not easily reconciled with the hyper-centralist traditions of the party. The party leadership found the autonomy enjoyed by the immigrant groups to be extremely unpalatable. In March 1937, at a national conference of MOI cadres of all nationalities, Giulio Ceretti noted that 70 percent of the members of the MOI had failed to join the Communist party, and he complained about the further relaxation of already loose ties between the various immigrant groups and the party.28 On paper,

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at least, the language groups were then dissolved. The only real effect of this mysterious dissolution seems to have been an intensified purge of alleged Trotskyites then in progress in all the language groups. But it also coincided with the breakup of the Jewish popular front and the end of collaboration with the other Jewish parties. From then on, the Jewish socialists never ceased to reproach the Communists for ignoring the specific problems of Jewish workers. In reality, the language groups of the MOI remained in existence (or were quickly restored). What is more, in the late 1930s, the Jewish Communists set up a new mass organization among the Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the Farband, which brought together various hometown associations (landsmanshaftn) and functioned as a rival to the Zionist-oriented Fe´de´ration des socie´te´s juives de France (FSJF). Among the immigrants, the prewar years were marked by a decline in the influence of the Zionist organizations, which previously had stronger roots in that sphere than did the Communists. “[Our] Freiheit youth group has lost 40 percent of its members,” wrote Joseph Fisher, the French director of the Jewish National Fund, the leading Zionist organization of those years, in January 1937. He added that some of those who had left had joined the Socialists and others, the French Communist party.29 The continued strength of the party among the Jewish immigrant working class during the late 1930s stood in marked contrast to its simultaneous decline in French society at large. Growing disillusionment with the Popular Front was combined with the repellent effect of the purges and the Moscow trials of 1936–1938 to undercut the popularity of the Communists in France. But until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, the same trend hardly made itself felt among the immigrant population, or even, in some cases, among the children of immigrants and those who had arrived as children. So, for example, Henri Krasucki, who after the Second World War became the head of the Confe´de´ration geńe´rale du travail, the largest Communist union, saw this as a period marked by a “community commitment to Communism.” Motivated by a family tradition of activism, he found himself associated with the Jewish youth organization of the MOI. “I felt more comfortable because they were young people like me. They were French, they weren’t immigrants, they were the sons of immigrants! . . . We all thought of ourselves as French. But we knew we were the children of immigrants,” he commented in an interview conducted in the 1990s.30 By creating the MOI and its affiliated organizations, the Communist party offered him and his kind a path of collective integration into French society, by means of political action. This form of organization along ethnic lines was supposed to be temporary. But the circumstances of the war, the defeat, and then the German occupation perpetuated and even extended its field of application.

The Upheavals of War and Occupation “The Second World War produced a rupture and a miracle in the history of the French Communist Party,” wrote Jacques Fauvet in the preface to the second of his two-volume history of that party. “Dissolved and fallen into disrepute in 1939–


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1940, it returned, reborn and triumphant, in 1944–1945. . . . Born of the First World War, the party was truly reborn of the Second.”31 However, for both Communists and Jews, the war was at first synonymous with marginalization. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact led to the official closure of all Communist publications on August 26, 1939,32 followed a month later by the outlawing of the party. Subsequently, following the French defeat in 1940, government repression was intensified by the Vichy regime. The marginalization of the Jews— the first step before the later roundups, internment in one of the French camps, and finally, for close to 80,000 men, women, and children, deportation to an “an unknown destination”—followed upon the German occupation and affected every aspect of their day-to-day lives. The editors of the Naye prese had been embarrassed by news of the Nazi pact with Soviet Russia. “A Decisive Day for Peace,” ran the headline (of August 23, 1939) over an article by G. Koenig, who argued, in a somewhat defensive tone, that the Soviet Union had been isolated by the democracies—notably at Munich (still, he felt constrained to add: “It is indeed difficult to understand the course of these events”).33 Four days later, in a “last minute” editorial, Koenig took the view that France, England, and Poland had to resist the Nazi aggression: “The immigrants, among them the Jewish immigrants, must join their forces in this war with the French people.”34 Another editorialist, Adam Rayski, denounced Hitler’s aggressive policy and threats to the integrity of Poland, after first blaming the “shifty policy of France and England.” By September 4, however, there was no longer any ambiguity: “Hitlerism, which from the start has built its existence on the massacre of Jews, has now taken to the road of a worldwide massacre. . . . We enter this war at the side of the French people. . . . For France and for our people.”35 From the German blitzkrieg against Poland until the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, the situation remained rather confused. The party’s underground publications pictured the pact as a peace offensive; the tone remained antifascist; the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland was heralded as the liberation of all oppressed people by socialism; and the English and French capitalists were deemed responsible for the “imperialist” war. Nevertheless, the party press was solidly in favor of full mobilization of the French army in September 1939, before desertion became widespread in response to the government’s increasingly repressive antiCommunism.36 Jewish Communists, like most Jewish immigrants, enlisted en masse and even volunteered for service. Yet a Comintern directive of September 22, 1939 referred to the “imperialist character” of the war and instructed comrades to evade (non-compulsory) mobilization.37 Thereafter, the line adopted by the party followed Comintern instructions to the letter. The party focused its attacks on the Vichy government; during the years 1939–1940, the Anglo-German war was described as imperialist. Not until the early months of 1941 did characterization of the war as “anti-fascist” creep back into the publications of the party, much to the relief of the rank-and-file membership. In any case, outside of union circles, which were the focus of a concentrated organizing effort, Communism had little attraction for the French public during this period (when Marshal Pe´tain’s prestige was at its height and France remained in the grip of a general apathy caused by the trauma of defeat).

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The German offensive against the Soviet Union, launched on June 22, 1941, instantly transformed the Communist party’s standing. Its activities and propaganda efforts were expanded, and its influence with the population was enhanced. From this date on, the Communist party gradually found legitimacy in French political society—a legitimacy that was nourished both by its anti-German political activism and by the highly repressive measures directed against it. The Communist antifascist hero was also touted as a martyr (whether actual or potential). So powerful did this hero/martyr image become that it dispelled the public fear of an eventual Communist takeover. On August 15, 1941, the Communist organ L’Humanite´ published an official call for armed struggle. A few days later, an attack in a Paris Me´tro station organized by Pierre Georges (Colonel Fabien), an active Communist, cost the life of a German officer. Fabien’s action was a gesture of revenge for the first execution, on August 19th, of a Communist resistance activist, Szmul Thyszelman. On September 16, 1941, by way of reprisal, the German authorities inaugurated a policy of executing hostages.38 Communists and Jews alike were the victims of these executions, which were given wide publicity in posters. Not wanting to offend a population whose favor it sought, and anxious for the lives of its many members who were held by the German or French authorities, the Communist leaders were hesitant to take clear responsibility for attacks on the occupation troops. It soon became obvious, however, that the population’s hatred of the Germans grew following each execution of hostages, with the prestige of the Communists rising in parallel. So now was the time to turn all the victims of German repression into Frenchmen. Whereas in August 1941, L’Humanite´ had denounced the executions of “the Jew Szmul Thyszelman and the Communist Henri Gautherot,” a month later the Communist organ recognized only one category of victims, which included “Simon” (as his name was reported) Thyszelman.39 Even as General Charles de Gaulle, speaking on the BBC on October 23, 1941, disavowed the attacks against the occupation forces (because it was too easy for the Germans to respond by the mass slaughter of resisters) the Communist leadership set up a single military organization, the Organisation spećiale, merging three existing groups that had previously lacked clear political support. From then on, the Communists were responsible for most military actions, whether ambushes or sabotage. In February 1942, they created the Franc-tireurs et partisans (FTP), whose newspaper, France d’abord, declared, on that date, that “French patriots proclaim that it is not enough to resist in order to save our honor; we must fight to save France.” The wait-and-see policy of the other resistance movements, gearing up for D-Day, was constantly denounced by the underground Communist press, which greatly bolstered its activist image. As early as December 1941, León Blum noted that “the French Communists are risking their lives; they are in the forefront both of the repressed and of the resistance. It is from them, as from the Jews, that Hitler selects his hostages and his victims. The day after victory it will be evident that the new national unity was in part cemented with their blood.”40 But in a letter addressed to de Gaulle several months later, he wrote, “it is believed—wrongly—that they are the only organized force in France.”41 Certainly the Communists were not the only ones to take up


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armed resistance. Theirs, however, was the only political party that made the switch to resistance as a party, whereas the Socialists, for example, were dispersed among several movements. Another factor increased the party’s prestige even more: the victories of the Red Army, which reversed the French perception of Stalin and the Soviet Union. The turning point was clearly the victory in the battle for Stalingrad, which raged for many months in late 1942 and early 1943. No one expressed this better than the sociologist Edgar Morin: For me and undoubtedly thousands more like me, Stalingrad swept away all the criticisms, doubts, and reservations. Stalingrad cleansed all the doubts of the past. . . . The cruelty, the trials, the purges, all found their end in Stalingrad. The retreat of 1941, the agonies, all of that had led to Stalin’s brilliant trap. Stalin was identified with the city that bore his name; and the city with the Red October factory, the factory of the 1917 revolution, and its arms-bearing workers, and all of that with world freedom, the victory finally on the horizon, all of our hopes for a radiant future.42

From then on, the Red Army’s advances were reported at length throughout the underground press. Albert Grunberg’s diary is significant in this respect. He notes every town retaken by the Red Army as he heard about it in his hiding place. His profession of Communist faith becomes more and more explicit as the list of Soviet victories lengthens, as if what had formerly been an almost secret affiliation could now be displayed in public. The political consequence of this transformation was not long in coming. The various resistance movements learned to reckon with the Communists. From the start of the German offensive in June 1941, one of the key themes in the Frenchlanguage broadcasts of the BBC from London was the call to oppose “the trap of anti-Communism, the alibi of fascist propaganda,” and to support “the unity [and] solidarity in action with patriots of every stripe.”43 What was recommended from on high was carried out directly by the grass roots, if we accept the following testimony by a Catholic member of the resistance: “Taught to fight by the Communists, we came to want to do as well as they did, and in the end we worked with them, if not under their direction.”44 The party tried to bring together under its leadership all the forces of the resistance. A first attempt to create such a national front45 failed in May 1941, but the second attempt, in late 1942 (after the Allied landing in North Africa), was more successful, enabling the party to attract a broader following and thereby increase its influence. As early as June 27, 1941, de Gaulle’s legal adviser in London, Rene´ Cassin, had approached the Soviet ambassador about the establishment of military relations between the Soviet Union and Free France. Soviet recognition of de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French was granted on September 26, 1941. Relations between Free France and the Soviet Union grew closer after the Allied landing in North Africa, with the French Communist deputy, Jean Grenier, being sent in January 1943 to London as the party’s official representative in de Gaulle’s circle. Finally, Jean Moulin’s establishment, in May 1943, of the Conseil national de la re´sistance (CNR), which brought all of the resistance movements and political parties under the authority of de Gaulle, created an institutional bond between Communists and

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non-Communists. This process reached its culmination on April 4, 1944, when two Communist ministers were added to the Algiers-based Comite´ français de libe´ration nationale (CFLN), which two months later proclaimed itself the provisional government of France. The progressive legitimation of the party in French society and its entry into the official bodies of the resistance and then into the government had a direct impact on the relations between Jews—both French- and foreign-born—and Communism. The tactical choices made by the Communist leadership, notably with regard to the persecution of the Jews, added another dimension to these relations. These tactics were expressed chiefly in the party’s underground publications. From the outset, the Communists condemned the series of antisemitic measures adopted by the collaborationist Vichy government. The Comintern issued a specific directive about the matter in January 1941.46 Even before that date, on September 10, 1940, the underground L’Humanite´ explained, in a short item, that “antisemitism was invented by the reactionaries to prevent the workers from uniting against their class enemies, the capitalists.”47 All references to the now-official antisemitism in France held to the traditional Marxist interpretation of antisemitism as a function of the class war, and hence as directed exclusively against the Jewish workers and poor, sparing the Jewish capitalists and aimed at sowing division among the French people. “Naturally they have arrested the poor Jews and especially, note well, those who were committed to fighting [for] France, because the Nazis cannot forgive them for having fought for their adopted country,” reported L’Humanite´ of May 14, 1941, which also referred to “the deportation of Jewish workers.”48 Even though it was not stated explicitly, the newspaper’s reference to “their adopted country” made it clear that immigrant Jews were at issue. Indeed, a few lines later, there was a distinction drawn between the “Jewish workers” who were deported “amid the tears of their relatives” and the French people who were incensed by the spectacle they had witnessed. In June 1941, a widely circulated pamphlet of the Paris sections of the French Communist party launched a frontal attack on specific consequences of the antisemitic laws.49 It was not the first such clandestine pamphlet. Others had appeared in November–December 1940 and in March 1941, denouncing the “campaign to degrade the Jews.”50 The party’s propaganda efforts specifically targeted the Jewish neighborhoods of Paris, where artisans and small shopkeepers could be won over to the Communist cause. Over time, the denunciations of antisemitism as an aspect of the class war became increasingly pointed, culminating in May 1942 in a fullscale attack on the Jewish capitalists, who were denounced as collaborators: While the shops of the Jewish shopkeepers and artisans are being liquidated, the Jewish industrialists and capitalists are escaping the aryanization decrees. . . . The people of France stand by the Jews who are persecuted in the name of an odious racism. The Jewish capitalists who collaborate with the Nazis against France will have to render an account tomorrow, like the other traitors.51

Behind this argument—in an article in which the name of the Rothschilds occurred several times—lay a scarcely veiled attack against French-born Jews.


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L’Universite´ libre, another Communist journal, had a different readership. This publication, one of the most constant and consistent in its condemnation of antisemitism, laid particular emphasis on the victimization of Jewish faculty members and on the solidarity demonstrated by their colleagues. Although its main emphasis was on denouncing the “maneuver to divide the teaching profession,”52 the journal also condemned the racist ideology, whose “introduction to the schools is part of the program to force the university to fall in line.”53 The imposition of the yellow star in early June 1942 was attacked in similar terms by both L’Humanite´ and L’Universite´ libre, as was the arrest and deportation of foreign Jews later that summer. But L’Humanite´ made sure to underscore that “the Jewish millionaires with whom the Nazis do business . . . are being spared, while the unfortunate poor are the victims of the Nazis’ cruelty.” That same summer, the agents of the Renseignements geńe´raux (the Vichy domestic intelligence service) concluded that the tactics employed by Communist propaganda aimed at “creating a rift within the Jewish community in order to attract the proletariat to its activity and to fight against the rich Jews whose sympathies tend more toward Gaullism.”54 The article in L’Humanite´ pursued an additional line. Denouncing the deportations as an “odious display of racist hatred,” it reached the following conclusion: “What is being done to the Jews today will be done to us tomorrow. That is why the French must make preparations to counter any attempt at a roundup.” Making a clear distinction between “the Jews” and “us,” it encouraged the French to resist on the day when they themselves became the target of Nazi persecution. Published in a special issue of August–September 1942, the article marked the last time L’Humanite´ noted the fate of the Jews in France—or anywhere else, for that matter. From then until the liberation, the subject simply vanished from the paper’s columns. By contrast, in June 1942, L’Universite´ libre wrote of the need to organize “effective and collective” countermeasures against the mounting antisemitic policies and went so far as to propose a boycott of places that would not admit Jews.55 On July 5, 1942, several days before the major roundups, it published the following notice: Warn the Jews: the French police have just delivered to the boche authorities, at their request, the files of 30,000 Jews. Tell this to those you know. They should act, they should fight. They must not allow themselves to be arrested and deported and killed like sheep being led to the slaughter. Help them defend themselves.56

Until the end of the occupation, L’Universite´ libre continued to devote at least some discreet attention—a few lines here and there—to the struggle against antisemitism and racism in occupied France. These differences between the newspapers require an explanation. L’Universite´ libre, as noted, was edited by two Jewish Communist intellectuals, Georges Politzer and Jacques Salomon. Could this be the source of its greater sensitivity to the Jews’ fate, as Annie Kriegel suggests?57 Or was it rather a reflection of the differences between the readerships targeted by these two publications? University circles, the target audience of L’Universite´ libre, had direct contact with the expulsion of Jews

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and were presumably open to a more ideological language. Moreover, as Paris police reports noted, intellectual circles were the most hostile to the “racial policy.”58 The denunciations of antisemitism and racism published in L’Universite´ libre focused either on the ideological plane or on the concrete application of the policy in the schools and universities—a fact that seems to lend weight to the second interpretation, that L’Universite´ libre’s message was directed to a specific target audience. Indeed, shaping the message to fit a given audience has always been a major characteristic of Communist propaganda. A similarly utilitarian approach could be observed in the way that the Comintern promoted its own objectives through a subgroup within the Jewish Communist section of the MOI. This was the so-called Palestinian group, referring to Jews who had cut their political teeth in Palestine and who, in many cases, had been expelled by the Mandatory authorities. The “Palestinians” founded anti-Nazi fighting units that, while making use of structures set up by the party or the MOI, operated autonomously (but in direct contact with Moscow). The best-known example was the Red Orchestra, whose leader, Leopold Trepper (alias Alexandre Domb, or the Big Chief), was arrested in November 1942, but who survived the war and later wrote his memoirs. Other Comintern-associated espionage networks in France included that of Robert Beck, which was broken up during the first two weeks of 1942. Like the Red Orchestra, Beck’s group comprised Polish- and Russian-born Jewish Communists who had immigrated to Palestine and had later been deported for Communist activity; some of them had also fought in the International Brigades in Spain and had then been sent to France.59 For most of these Jewish Communists, the national question—and specifically their Jewishness, which condemned them to marginality—had been a catalyst in arousing their social consciousness; this initial Jewish activism had served as a stage on the path to Communist activism. While in Poland or Russia, their foremost commitment had been to their Jewish identity, but once in Palestine, they felt free to join the cause of international revolution. Later, because of its geopolitical situation, France (along with Belgium) became the ideal arena for activism. The case of Leopold Trepper is paradigmatic in this respect. “Palestinians” were not the only Jews to be engaged in Communist resistance activities outside the framework of the French Jewish community. There were also a number of Jewish women, most of Austrian origin, who were prominent in what was called the Travail allemand (TA). Created in the summer of 1941, its objective was to mix in German circles, to distribute propaganda material there (especially a newspaper aimed at undermining Wehrmacht morale, Soldat im Westen), and to recruit deserters.60 In contrast, the Jewish Communists of the MOI directed their activities mainly at Jewish circles. Their mission was to be directly responsive to the unique situation of the immigrant Jews, while applying party strategies and goals in the Jewish milieu. In the face of the antisemitic laws that condemned all Jews, and especially the immigrants, to increasing destitution, MOI activists in Paris immediately launched a mass solidarity campaign, in parallel with similar campaigns conducted by other Jewish organizations. Indeed, Solidarite´ was the name selected for a new organization, established in September 1940. Within three months, Solidarite´ com-


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prised 130 street committees, 50 women’s groups, 20 union locals, and a number of youth groups, all of which were collecting money from those who were better off.61 Such activities were in line with a general directive from Moscow, as, for example, in the following telegram sent in January 1941: “As long as aforesaid conditions [for the liberation of the French people] not ripe, central task remains work to rally forces on basis of deploying mass movements to defend their interests and daily claims.”62 Thus, for example, a soup kitchen on the rue de Saintonge in Paris and a medical clinic served as the legal cover for more ramified political activity. In some of its social welfare activities, Solidarite´ cooperated with the Jewish organizations that ran five other soup kitchens. Negotiations were even begun between the Communists and the Comite´ Amelot, the umbrella group of most of the (Zionist and Bundist) immigrant Jewish organizations, to cooperate in running soup kitchens. But when the Communists decided to reopen their soup kitchen in a neighborhood where two such facilities of the Comite´ Amelot were already operating, the negotiations were broken off.63 The Comite´ Amelot wanted to extend assistance to neighborhoods that were less well served, whereas the Communists’ primary goal was to expand its influence. Viewing all of their welfare activities from a political perspective, they refused to join with the other organizations when the occupation authorities demanded the coordination of Jewish philanthropic activities. Hence, when the Vichy government decreed the establishment of the Union geńe´ral des israe´lites de France (the UGIF) to oversee all Jewish welfare activities, the Communist soup kitchen immediately shut its doors: political calculation outweighed every other consideration. In fact, Solidarite´’s political activity was directly inspired by the modus operandi of the Communists in French society. The clandestine publications of the Jewish Communists expressed this clearly. Undzer vort, which succeeded the banned Naye prese, denounced Vichy antisemitism, but in equally vehement manner castigated the French authorities’ persecution of Communists. Similarly, its vociferous support for the Jewish internees was reminiscent of articles in the French-language Communist underground press that railed against the status of French prisoners of war in Germany.64 On behalf of the internees, Solidarite´ organized demonstrations by women throughout France, outside prefectures and city halls, calling for the better organization of food and coal supplies. Other demonstrations were held to demand information about relatives who had been taken as prisoners of war, or else called for their release. Applying this model, a demonstration was organized in late June 1941 by L’Union des femmes juives, a Communist front organization, outside the gates of the Pithiviers camp in north-central France. Dozens of wives whose husbands had been arrested the previous month—all of them were Jewish, mostly from Poland—demanded that they be granted visiting rights and that their husbands be allowed to receive parcels.65 Together with other women, Jewish women were also instructed to inundate members of the Vichy government (and its representatives in the occupied zone) with protest letters and demands for the release of the war prisoners and internees.66 A Solidarite´ publication in late 1941 declared: “All children should write letters to

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their teachers, their doctor, and their dentist. All families should write to the prefecture, to the Red Cross, to the German officer Dannecker, to various French personalities and in general to all the French people.”67 In all such cases, the ultimate addressee was the Vichy government. Yet much of the Jewish Communists’ energy was also invested in intracommunal rivalries. For instance, when an early issue of Undzer vort reported on the establishment of concentration camps on French soil, in which “thousands of Jews, men, women, and children, were interned,” it did not fail to attack the attitude of French Jewish leaders—whether rabbis or activists of competing organizations, Bundists or Zionists—who allegedly remained indifferent to the Jews’ fate.68 Between July 20 and July 31, 1941, several hundred wives of internees demonstrated their anger every day outside the office of the coordinating committee of Jewish organizations in Paris, which they accused of failing to work vigorously enough to obtain their husbands’ release. The increasingly violent altercations led to intervention by the police, who were called in by one of the heads of the committee, a Viennese Jew whom the Germans had brought to Paris.69 Jewish leaders who had been providing assistance to the population impoverished by French and German legislation thus became identified with the authors of those laws, and were accordingly blamed for the internments. From then on, attacks against the coordinating committee (and later, the UGIF) escalated in the underground press, especially that in Yiddish, with the UGIF being denounced as a collaborationist body, a Gestapo agency, and a Nazi Jewish kehile.70 Whereas the Zionist organizations placed the emphasis on communal solidarity, the “solidarity” featured in all Communist writings was that between Jews and Frenchmen, the latter being described as impervious to racist propaganda of the sort found in fascist countries. Thus, in October 1940, the internment of Jews was described as a first step on the road to the internment of “thousands of French workers,” or of “a large part of the population”; this justified the call for an alliance “with the French proletariat led by the Communist party, to fight for liberty and against fascism and slavery.”71 Furthermore, “the people of Paris have protested the measures against Jewish businesses” and “only the Communist party has called on French shopkeepers to work against this barbarity of depriving Jewish shopkeepers of their property.” And according to a Communist pamphlet of 1942, the hostages who had been shot had “died for France and liberty, victims of the Nazi barbarism.” Hence the Jews were urged “to fight alongside French patriots for the liberation of the country and the defeat of fascism.”72 At the same time, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, unity with left-wing Jewish immigrant organizations was likewise encouraged for a while, echoing the strategy of alliances that prevailed in the general resistance. This line was supported by intensive propaganda centered on the call to the Jews of the world by the Soviet Jewish poet David Bergelson, which was first broadcast over Radio Moscow on August 24, 1941 and then reproduced in local publications. “Jewish brothers throughout the world, . . . the very existence of the entire Jewish people is in question today,” Bergelson proclaimed, referring to the Nazi project for the total extermination of the Jewish people. Bergelson’s basic demand was for


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world Jewry to “help the Soviet Union in its sacred struggle against the fascist beast.”73 A joint committee of Jewish workers’ parties, the Union nationale juive, was accordingly set up,74 publishing late in 1942 a single number of a newspaper in Yiddish, Undzer shtime (Our voice).75 But the strategies of the constituent parties were too diverse. For some, mutual assistance and rescue were the priorities, whereas for others, armed struggle in the resistance was most important. The united perspectives vanished as quickly as they had appeared. The class struggle within the Jewish population was soon revived in full force. Among the Jews who had been able to survive in occupied Paris were some 3,000 makers of knitted or fur gloves who possessed an Ausweis (identity card/work permit) issued by German authorities who had taken a fancy to their product.76 In the fall of 1941, the Jewish Communists turned against these glovemakers, ordering them first to down their tools and then to sabotage their production. “Working for the Nazi war machine is disgraceful,” proclaimed Undzer vort, adding that a broad solidarity campaign must be conducted to support those workers who choose to suffer hunger rather than work for the Nazi gangs. There are, however, some entrepreneurs who, in their lust for gain or blinded by the illusion of escaping arrest and internment in a camp, refuse to turn down the work. . . . The Jewish masses will remember these individuals and will not let pass the occasion to settle accounts with them, as with [other] scoundrels and traitors.77

In May 1942, the workshop of a clothing and fur gloves manufacturer was set on fire by Communist activists.78 Before going to that extreme, groups of Jewish Communists had paid visits to the Jewish workshops, demanding contributions to help the families of internees or calling for workers to sabotage the machines.79 The call for a boycott was largely ignored by the Jewish immigrants, who had no other means to support themselves and their families. Although sabotage and strikes did occur and had some initial success, first among the glovemakers and then in the knit shops, these lasted for only a limited time.80 As the antisemitic persecution increased, the Jewish Communists within the MOI expanded their action in another direction by establishing a French organization to combat racism. The first step was the publication, in April 1942, of a newspaper named J’accuse. In May–June, this publication was the self-proclaimed “newspaper of the struggle against racism and antisemitism”; by October, it had become the “organ of the French forces united against racist barbarity.”81 The end of December 1942 saw the creation of the Organe de liaison des forces françaises contre la barbarie raciste, which in February 1943 renamed itself the Mouvement national contre la barbarie raciste (MNCR). The vacillation regarding the name of the new organization attested to uncertainty about how the French public viewed the antisemitic persecution. The word “antisemitism” vanished almost as quickly as it had first appeared in J’accuse, and the activism implied by the term “struggle” did not last much longer. In fact, the very name of the organization, the National Movement, suggested that it was a patriotic organization. This was clearly an important point to underscore—given that the enemy was racism—and all the more so because the founders and moving spirits were Jewish Communist immigrants.

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The MNCR invested its resources mainly in propaganda geared to the general public. It attracted a number of non-Jewish intellectuals who, working with the Jewish activists, were able to save several hundred Jewish children from deportation. It also provided a cover for Jewish Communist activists and their families, as well as offering assistance to Jews who contacted it. Running parallel to the reinforcement of the Jewish apparatus within the MOI, the establishment of the MNCR again reflected the continuity of the party’s twofold institutional strategy with regard to immigrants: encouraging processes within the community that could expand Communist influence, while at the same time setting up organizations to link the immigrants (in this case, Jews) and the public at large, in order to discourage immigrant groups from becoming too autonomous. The underground press put out by the Jewish Communists (which kept growing and diversifying right up to the end of the occupation) provides a good illustration of this twofold approach. From the occupied zone, where its scope was considerable, the underground press expanded to the zone that remained under the authority of the Vichy government, which witnessed a growing influx of Jewish refugees after the roundups of the summer of 1942. Whether published in Yiddish by Solidarite´ (Undzer vort) or in French by the MNCR (J’accuse in the northern zone, Fraternite´ in the south), or, starting in June 1943, by the organization of young Jewish Communists (Jeune combat), all of these papers, along with numerous pamphlets, addressed the same themes, albeit adapted to their target readerships (Jewish immigrants, native-born Jews, or the French public at large, as the case might be). Solidarity with the Soviet Union; the victories of the Red Army and the heroism of its soldiers; and the need to open a second front in Europe were major topics that recurred, alongside denunciations of the Germans, of the “deportation” of French workers to Germany, and of the wait-and-see attitude of rival political movements. In addition to these themes, however, the Communist Jewish press also carried detailed descriptions of the antisemitic persecutions in France as well as an immense amount of information about the Nazi extermination of Jews in “the slaughterhouse of Poland.” The frequency and scope of such reports was quite unusual in light of the fact that the mainstream underground press—including the general Communist papers—maintained a total silence, from late 1942, on these subjects. Evidently the leaders of the various resistance movements did not consider the ongoing extermination of the Jews to be a topic suited to rallying support among the French population. The Jewish Communist leaders, however, acted as if such support did exist. Thus, the solidarity of all peoples, and especially the solidarity of the French people directed against the persecution of the Jews, was underscored throughout that part of the clandestine press that was under their control. A common destiny, it was argued, united the Jews and the French: had not the deportations of Jews preceded the “deportation” of French workers, which had as its object the reduction of the entire French nation to slavery? Illustrating this theme, the Jewish Communist press devoted much of its space to accounts of Jewish children taken in by French families, and similar acts of solidarity.


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For Fraternite´ and J’accuse, reports on the extermination of the Jews, on the one hand, and on the assistance offered by Frenchmen to Jews, on the other, were meant to encourage that very solidarity and broaden its base of legitimacy. The French were called on to help Jews who were being hunted by the police, to take in Jewish children, and generally to lend their assistance in every way possible. In the publications addressed specifically to Jews, they were encouraged to resist arrest, to conceal their children, to go underground, and to join the armed struggle. This duty-bound battle was depicted as a new chapter to be added to the historical legacy of the Jewish people, whose heroes had fought in the past to preserve “their existence as an independent nation.”82 This time as well, “the entire Jewish people was targeted,” wrote the Jewish Communists.83 These quasi-nationalist accents were accompanied by calls for revenge, which became a primary motif in the campaign for armed struggle: “The blood of thousands and tens of thousands of Jews, the blood of our brothers, of our children, summons us to stand by the side of the peoples who are in combat. . . . This holy sentiment of sacred vengeance must unlock our energy, resolution, and heroism for the fight.”84 The first arrests of Jewish Communists took place in April 1941. All Jewish circles were under close surveillance by the Renseignements geńe´raux: during the month of April alone, patrols had combed almost 200 public places to detect the least signs of secret meetings; the activity of some 50 organizations had been carefully tracked; and no fewer than 500 investigations had been launched.85 Individuals who were arrested ended up under the guillotine (for example, Abraham Trebucki on August 28, 1941), in front of a firing squad as part of the hostage policy, or, after the Final Solution was extended to France in 1942, in the extermination camps. Although relief work continued to be a major task—close to 3,500 families were receiving financial support from Solidarite´ before March 194286 —the emphasis increasingly shifted toward armed struggle. Young Jews played an active role in the underground Communist Organisation spećiale (which focused on sabotage) even before the organized military units of the FTP-MOI were set up in the spring of 1942.87 Jews who followed the military path (many of them veterans of the International Brigades in Spain) were a minority within the Jewish Communist organizations, which found it difficult at first to comply with the party directive that they should allocate 10 percent of their membership to the FTP fighting units. Yet in the course of time, they accounted for 90 percent of those belonging to the Romanian and Hungarian Unit and constituted the entire Second Jewish Unit (Daeuxie`me de´tachment juif ) of the FTP (which in Paris had four units in all). In addition, a group composed exclusively of Jewish women (under the orders of a central logistics department) transported the arms intended for the various units. The intelligence service that drew up the plans for all the FTP-MOI actions was also staffed by Jewish women organized under the umbrella of the MOI.88 Jews were among the first FTP-MOI fighters to go into action. On April 25, 1942, two Jewish Communist activists were killed by the premature explosion of a bomb intended for a German barracks. In the wake of this fiasco, Munie Nadler, the editor in chief of the Naye prese before the war, was arrested along with five

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other party members; together with 85 others, they were executed at Mont Vale´rien in August 1942.89 In the meantime, the party leadership had come to a somewhat astonishing decision. Beginning in early 1942, young Jewish Communists who had previously been scattered throughout the movement were thenceforth concentrated in distinctly Jewish groupings, even if they were French citizens and fully integrated into French society.90 Although this move affected primarily the children of immigrant families, many young Jews from established French families were also directed to a specifically Jewish unit or group. There is no doubt that this policy facilitated the recruitment of new members. Still, whatever the underlying motives, the result was the preservation (or creation) of a Jewish political milieu—one that could hardly be explained simply as a response to persecution or to language differences. After the large-scale roundups during the summer of 1942, the ranks of the Jewish partisans within the MOI were abruptly reinforced. And over the subsequent months, the number of missions assigned to FTP-MOI units increased steadily, as did the importance assigned by the party leadership to these actions. In part, this was because the party’s only other armed group in the capital had been rendered inactive after the capture of one of its key members in October 1942, and this setback was followed by arrest of the entire leadership of the FTP in the Paris region in January 1943.91 From then on, the young Jews constituted the vanguard of military action in Paris. Of the 162 attacks claimed by all the units of the MOI between July 1942 and July 1943, the Jewish (Yiddish-speaking) unit of the FTP-MOI, reinforced to 40 members, conducted 59 operations; another 38 were carried out by the Romanian and Hungarian Unit.92 This activity peaked during the first half of 1943, before the break up in July of the Jewish unit. Moreover, by November 1943 the “railway” unit, in which Jewish partisans constituted an overwhelming majority, had carried out 39 operations.93 Reinforced by special squads in August 1941, the police hunted down these “terrorists,” and over time, the Jewish Communists suffered grievous losses. The first surveillance operation led to 38 arrests in December 1942,94 after which the primary MOI unit had to be reorganized. Three more disasters followed in 1943. The first group to be dismantled was an organization of young Jews in Paris: nearly 60 arrests in March, followed by the capture of an additional 21 fighters in April 1943.95 Next came the turn of the Second Jewish Unit: 77 of its activists were arrested between June 29 and July 9. On July 19, 1943, after a final grenade attack on a German truck at Vanves, the unit was dissolved. Only the special team and the railway unit remained. Finally, in November 1943, the remnants of the FTPMOI in Paris, headed by Missak Manouchian (who had replaced Boris Holban in August 1943), fell into the net, along with Joseph Epstein (a.k.a. Colonel Gilles), the military commander of the Paris region.96 This disaster marked the end of the FTP-MOI in Paris and the starting point of the “Trial of the 23” as well as of the propaganda campaign against the “criminal army”—a trial rendered infamous by the red placards plastered all over Paris that presented the entire Resistance as a bandit crew, all of them foreigners, most of them Jews. In the face of this direct attack, the Jewish Communists felt


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compelled to respond, proclaiming in one of their pamphlets, distributed in March 1944: Yes, the Jews, French-born and immigrant, are participating side by side with the entire French nation in the struggle to liberate France. . . . In the broad front of French resistance, they necessarily occupy only a modest sector. . . . But they do their duty, their full duty. Frenchmen, they serve as an example to their fellow citizens; immigrants, they pay their debt of gratitude.97

Insisting on the essential contribution to the Resistance that was made by immigrants and Jews, while at the same time keeping the movement from being stigmatized as Jewish, was no easy task. In the spring of 1943, the Jewish fighters of the MOI in Paris realized that they were being marked by the police. Arguing that the Jewish masses had fled to the southern zone, they asked the party leadership to relocate them there. The request was turned down on May 24.98 For the party leaders, it was essential to continue military action in the capital, since this could have direct political consequences on the division of power immediately following France’s liberation; removing the Jewish fighters would have totally undermined the combat capabilities of the organization in the north of the country. Since the Jewish groups of the FTP-MOI were units in a Communist army, they were subject to a central command that pursued its own political objectives, without regard for the special situation of the Jews. The Jewish fighters accepted the verdict of the party and continued to fight in the locations assigned to them. South of the demarcation line, the German occupation of the Vichy zone in November 1942 lit the spark of guerrilla activity. But here, in contrast to Paris, Jews in the FTP-MOI did not belong to distinctly Jewish units, even though they often predominated. In Lyons, as in Grenoble and Toulouse, they fought side by side with Italians, Spaniards, Poles, anti-Nazi Germans, and others. As part of the Carmagnole and Liberte´ units, Jewish fighters delivered the main blows in Grenoble between September 1943 and March 1944 and in Lyons after May 1944. In the Toulouse region, the 35th Marcel Langer Brigade (named for one of its founders, who, on the order of a Vichy court, had been guillotined on July 23, 1943, following his capture with a suitcase of explosives99) was the main perpetrator of armed attacks until it was broken up in the spring of 1944. Veterans of the International Brigades occupied the leading positions everywhere. In Toulouse, the 35th Marcel Langer Brigade was unusual in two respects. First, it included a group of internationalists who (like Leopold Trepper) had been born in Russia or Poland, had immigrated to Palestine, and had been expelled; they had then fought in Spain before being interned in France, and had finally joined the armed resistance of the MOI. Among them were Yacov Insel, Marcel (Mendel) Langer, Joseph Waschpress, and several others.100 The MOI combat forces in Toulouse included another unusual group whose most prominent members were Claude Le´vy, Catherine Varlin,101 and Yehuda Leib Gorzyczanski (Gorans), newcomers to the revolutionary cause, whom the antisemitic persecutions and sheer chance had attracted to the camps organized by the Eclaireurs israe´lites de France (the French

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Jewish Scouts). Their determination to bear arms had later directed them to the military units of the MOI. In February 1944, the Jewish Communists of Paris, obeying party directives, organized a Jewish patriotic militia. During the fighting that accompanied the transfer of power and the liberation, its forces chose in various places to occupy the offices of the UGIF, applying to the Jewish establishment the same resistancecollaboration dichotomy that was then being enforced in French society as a whole, while the partisans of the Zionist Organisation juive de combat (OJC) similarly took over the Commissariat geńe´ral aux questions juives, a department of the Vichy government. The fight within the community continued until the end of the war, even though the generally accepted line was to call for the unity of all Jewish forces, including the Jewish Communists. Bolstered by the record of resistance they could present, the Jewish Communist leaders attempted to win for themselves a dominant role in the French Jewish community. Echoing the French Communist party’s National Front policy, a unified organization, the Union des juifs pour la re´sistance et l’entraide (UJRE), was set up in Paris in late April 1943 to bring together all of the illegal Jewish Communist organizations: Solidarite´, L’Union des femmes juives, l’Union de la jeunesse juive, Secours populaire, the Comite´ intersyndical juif, and all the military groups.102 This first step marked a change in strategy vis-a`-vis French Jewry. There was a need to “expand [our] influence among the French Jews” with the goal of “achieving the total unity of the Jewish population of France,”103 declared an internal report in December 1943. It was in fact the first step in a political strategy aiming to carry the Jewish Communists—bolstered by the military and political activity they could boast of—to the very pinnacle of the organized Jewish community in France. In late July 1944, in Grenoble, all of the organized Jewish “political” forces that called for Jewish resistance agreed to set up the Comite´ geńe´ral de defense (CGD), which brought together Communists, Zionists of all stripes, and Bundists. To some extent this development at the Jewish level paralleled the establishment at the national level of the Conseil national de la re´sistance, founded in May 1943, which had legitimized the Communists’ admission to French political society. The Bundists understood this quite well but resigned themselves to granting the Communists “an entry pass into Jewish society.”104 Still, it is important to note that this remained a step involving mainly the immigrant Jews. Although the native-born Jews had also rallied to the various resistance movements, they had done so on an individual basis, in keeping with the longstanding political tradition of the established French Jewish communities. Facing a society that had rejected them, the French Jews saw the resistance movements as a “counter-society” that had accepted them fully; they were among the first to sign on and could be found in every movement, where they often held key positions.105 Yet, as individuals, they were diluted in resistance society and generally had no contact with Jewish organizations. For most, this nonidentification with Jewish political organizations continued after the liberation. Some native French Jews joined cells of the Communist party. Only a minority chose this route at first; but as the party gained legitimacy in French society, it increased its influence among the Jews. For instance, it was the choice of some young Jews who had first found a home in the Jewish Scouts, but who later decided


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to give up the warmth of that comfortable social milieu for the perils of combat—a move that integrated them with the section of the French population that opposed their persecutors. As has been seen, party directives often channeled them to specifically Jewish units, for whom they provided new recruits. In this case, while their commitment was originally individual, their affiliation with a Communist organization brought them to a Jewish organization. The Communist leadership was well aware of the dichotomy in the French Jewish population between native and immigrant groups. According to one internal document: “We must work indefatigably for the creation of a broad representative body of French Jews, embracing all the organizations of immigrant and French Jews.”106 Some months later, negotiations were initiated between the Comite´ geńe´ral de defense and the Consistoire central (the institution established by the regime during the time of Napoleon to represent French Jewry). These negotiations culminated in the establishment, in January 1944, of the Conseil repre´sentatif des israe´lites de France (CRIF), its charter being signed in July 1944.107 The establishment of CRIF officially admitted the Communists into the organized Jewish community. Recognition of the legitimacy of the Jewish Communists by the Consistoire central was the inevitable result of the new status won by the Communist party in French society and political circles—that is, it was the result primarily of external pressure. The Zionists, too, were admitted at the time to this new umbrella organization, and the CRIF charter even enshrined the official support of the non-Zionists in France for the Jewish Agency’s demands regarding Palestine.108 But the Zionist organizations had attained this status through their wartime welfare and rescue endeavors within the Jewish community. In their case, the Consistoire was forced to bow to a new internal situation. As the liberation approached, both Communists and Zionists made efforts to buttress their standing in the CGD, and later in CRIF, trying to win admission for representatives of the organizations that they controlled. However, their efforts had little practical result because the two movements cancelled each other out. The Communists hoped to achieve their goal by strengthening their combat forces. As the liberation approached, they felt increasingly compelled to justify the existence of separate Jewish fighting units, rather than merging them with the movements of the Resistance at large. As noted in one of the pamphlets: “By fighting today, [the Jews of France] are acquiring the right to demand that tomorrow’s France grant them their rights as human beings and as citizens.”109 Thus the French-born Jews would earn the restoration of their rights and the immigrant Jews would earn recognition as full citizens of a liberated France. Maintaining Jewish fighting units was a way to attain these rights. Their expansion would increase their weight with the new French authorities, for whom combat service with the Resistance was an unquestionable recommendation. At the same time, it would also increase Communist influence within the organized and now united Jewish community. As far as the party was concerned, though, these groupings manned by immigrants and reinforced by young French-born Jews were to be a temporary phenomenon.

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The Initial Postwar Years Until the Second World War, republican legitimacy in France was rooted in the secular laws first set down during the revolution of 1789. Following liberation, however, it was membership in the Resistance or Free France that served as the primary measure of one’s republican commitment.110 This fact added to the prestige of the Communist party, the archetypal party of resistance, and it also increased its political clout. Thus, on October 24, 1945, after the Communists had garnered more than half a million votes more than the Socialists, L’Humanite´ could run a banner headline proclaiming: “The Communist Party, the First Party of France.” In June 1946, it won more than 30 percent of the seats in the National Assembly. Between June and November 1946, the French government included as many as 10 Communist ministers and undersecretaries of state. Its membership surged to three times what it had been at the time of the Popular Front.111 What is more, wearing the halo of the “transcendent force and glory of Stalin’s Soviet Union, victorious in its titanic struggle against Nazi Germany,”112 it exercised a definite hegemony over all left-wing thought. Of all of the parties that emerged from the war, the Communist party was held in the most prestige by the intellectuals. Armed with these new assets, the party continued to highlight itself as an embodiment of French patriotism, all the more so as the Socialists kept harping on the theme of the umbilical cord that tied the Communists to Moscow. Hence there was no further incentive to maintain separate immigrant organizations. The central committee of the MOI disappeared from the party headquarters before being dissolved in June 1945; its members were dispersed among the party’s French cells. The immigrant members were counseled to return to their newly liberated countries of origin, where the local Communists were desperately short of cadres. Some seasoned veterans followed this route: Rayski, for example, went back to Poland, and Holban returned to Romania.113 During this same period, the memory of the MOI fighters in general and of the Jewish resistance fighters in particular was totally eclipsed within the mainstream Communist party. In the 215 pages of the Central Committee’s report to the Tenth National Congress of the French Communist party in May 1945, not a single word, allusion, or name of someone executed or deported suggested that there had been a Jewish Communist resistance.114 In contrast, the UJRE, henceforth directly attached to the Communist party’s Central Committee, continued to pursue its activities, cultivating the memory of the Jewish resistance, which it treated as exclusively that of Jewish Communists. In the agencies of the rebuilt community, the positions that the UJRE defended were often the most militant, particularly when it came to “Jewish” claims—those based on recognition of the uniqueness of the Jews’ fate during the war. But the vast semi-autonomous political organization that had supported Jewish Communist activity during the war no longer existed. Henceforth, Communist militancy had to channel itself through the French agencies of the party, and the attachment to Communism of the immigrant Jews lost its collective character. It became an individual matter, just like the Communism of the French Jews. The change was smooth. It was natural for young Frenchmen and women, some of whom had never understood the decision to assign them to a Jewish fighting


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unit. Furthermore, the immigrant Jews who had fought in a unit of the MOI had nothing to be ashamed of vis-a`-vis the French-born Jews. Their French patriotism had been tested and proved: “Long live France” was the message inscribed in final letters written by Henri Bajsztok on October 1, 1943, by León Goldberg on February 21, 1944, by Joseph Epstein on April 11, 1944, and by many others only hours before being shot.115 Such letters were marked by patriotic pathos and reflected a deep attachment to France, which Albert Grunberg described in his diary as “the most beautiful, the most gentle, the most tolerant country in the world, and also the most generous.”116 “The most generous” country in the world restored the Jews’ rights after the liberation. Nevertheless, faithful to the republican principle that it was inappropriate to make distinctions between different categories of citizens, French leaders refused to recognize anything unique about the fate of the Jews during the war. They saw no need to find special solutions to a problem—the Jewish problem—which, they affirmed, no longer existed after the repeal of the discriminatory legislation. In consequence, the writer Wladimir Rabinovitch (Rabi) concluded his article on “the state of French Judaism” in September 1945 (intended for a French publication) as follows: “I want to add something serious and I say it in all seriousness: within the French community today, we feel terribly isolated.”117 In the mute pall that enwrapped the victims of Nazi persecution, the Communists’ silence had its own distinct timbre. The antifascist rhetoric that was predominant in the discourse of the French Communist party assigned a place of honor to its martyrs; after all, it presented itself as the party that had lost 75,000 members to German and Vichy executioners. As Pieter Lagrou has written, “all of the political opponents of fascism and even more, all of the victims of fascism could subscribe to it and become part of an antifascist family in which the party played a central role . . . and in which martyrdom and heroism, victims and veterans mingled together, fraternally sharing the heritage of victory.”118 Many Jews—immigrant and native-born—found their place in that family. As for the immigrant Jews who had preceded their French-born coreligionists on the Communist path, their marginal status had started them on the road to internationalism. The institutional strategy of the Communist party, which had created specific units for them, as for other immigrant groups, had provided them with the means to increase Communist influence in Jewish circles. The party policy that had directed all young French Jews from immigrant families to specifically Jewish units, euphemistically known as “language groups,” reinforced Communist influence among French Jews, especially those who were the children of immigrants. Thus the war had provided the Communist party with twin columns for breaking into the Jewish world. The “premier party of France,” which enjoyed great prestige among intellectuals and which presented itself as the champion of antifascism, attracted many Jews from longstanding French families to its ranks immediately after the war.119 The organized French Jewish community, for its part, was forced to deal with the Jewish Communist organizations. For Jewish Communists, it was only later that disillusionment set in.

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Appendix Parties and Organizations Comite´ intersyndical juif: succeeded the Intersektsionen byuro; organization of Jewish immigrant workers within the CTGU. Confe´de´ration geńe´rale du travail (CGT): a large labor union founded in 1895. In 1922 the Communists left the CGT and established the Confe´de´ration geńe´rale du travail unitaire (CTGU). In 1936, following the formation of the Popular Front, the two unions merged, and the name reverted to its original form. Farband (Union des socie´te´s juives de France): Communist counterpart to the FSJF, formed in 1938. Fe´de´ration des socie´te´s juives de France (FSJF): Zionist-oriented umbrella group composed of landsmanshaftn. Main d’oeuvre e´trange`re (MOE); later Main d’oeuvre immigreé (MOI): a section within the French Communist party that dealt with immigrant workers. Popular Front: coalition consisting of the Communist party, the Socialist party, and the Radical party, which won the April 1936 elections. The government headed by socialist leader León Blum comprised socialists and radicals and was supported by the Communists; it remained in power until June 1937.

Wartime and Resistance Groups Comite´ Amelot: Organization of Jewish social welfare organizations (Zionists and Bundists) in Paris, established in June 1940. Comite´ français de libe´ration nationale (CFLN): formed in June 1943 in Algiers, initially under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud; in June 1944, it was declared the provisional government of France. Comite´ geńe´ral de de´fense (CGD): coordinating committee of Jewish resistance groups, mostly composed of immigrant Jews (Communists, Zionists, and Bundists). Conseil national de la re´sistance (CNR): coordinating committee of organizations and political parties involved in the Resistance, founded in May 1943 and headed by Charles de Gaulle. Conseil repre´sentatif des israe´lites de France (CRIF): established in January 1944; in the postwar period, it became the representative body of French Jewry. Franc-tireurs et partisans (FTP): guerilla groups of the clandestine Communist party, formed in February 1942. Organe de liaison des forces françaises contre le racisme—later the Mouvement national contre le racisme (MNCR): clandestine “French” organization dedicated to the fight against antisemitism and racism; in reality, a Communist organization run by Jewish activists of the MOI.


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Organisation spećiale: Communist military organization formed in October 1941 by the merger of three groups, the Organisation spećiale, the Bataillons de la Jeunesse, and the MOI. Solidarite´: Communist social welfare organization focused on the needs of the immigrant Jewish community in Paris. Travail allemand (TA): group of German-speaking Communist activists whose mission was to distribute anti-Nazi propaganda among German soldiers in order to encourage their desertion. Union des juifs pour la re´sistance et l’entraide (UJRE): umbrella Jewish Communist group created in Paris in late April 1943, incorporating Solidarite´, L’Union des femmes juives, l’Union de la jeunesse juive, Secours populaire, the Comite´ intersyndical juif, and the various military groups. Union geńe´rale des israe´lites de France (UGIF): established in November 1941 by the Vichy government to replace all existing Jewish welfare organizations.

Periodicals Fraternite´: journal published by the MNCR in the southern zone of France. France d’abord: publication of the FTP. J’accuse: publication of the MNCR in occupied France. Jeune combat: published by the organization of young Jewish Communists. L’Humanite´: Communist organ. L’Universite´ libre: Communist journal published by Communist students and university professors. Naye prese: Yiddish-language Communist daily newspaper, published (legally) before the war. Undzer vort: Yiddish-language publication of Solidarite´; the clandestine continuation of Naye prese.

Notes This article was translated by Lenn Schram. 1. Albert Grunberg, Journal d’un coiffeur juif a` Paris sous l’Occupation, introduction by Laurent Douzou, annotated by Jean Laloum (Paris: 2001), 352. Thanks to Laurent Douzou, whose assistance I would like to acknowledge here, I was also able to examine the manuscript of Grunberg’s journal. 2. Nancy Green, “La re´volution dans l’imaginaire des immigrants juifs,” in Histoire politique des juifs de France: entre universalisme et particularisme, ed. Pierre Birnbaum (Paris: 1990), 153–162. 3. On the influence of the terminology used in the union struggle, see Nancy Green, Ready-To-Wear and Ready-To-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: 1997). 4. Leópold Trepper, Le Grand jeu (Paris: 1975), 38–39; English version: Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: 1977).

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5. Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza note: “The 120,000 members of 1920 had fallen to 60,000 in 1925, 39,000 in 1930, and 29,000 in 1933” (Histoire de la France au XXe`me sie`cle [Brussels: 1995], 360). At the same time, the Socialists had nearly 140,000 members and garnered more than 20 percent of the vote in national elections. See also Annie Kriegel, “Naissance du Parti communiste,” in Le Congre`s de Tours, decembre 1920: naissance de Parti communiste français, ed. Annie Kriegel (Paris: 1964), xxix–xxx. 6. Pierre Villon, Re´sistant de la premie`re heure (conversations with Claude Willard) (Paris: 1983). 7. Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Me´moires rebelles (Paris: 1999), 15ff. 8. Jean Maitron (ed.), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français. For the names mentioned in the text, see esp. vols. 17 (1982), 23 (1984), 43 (1993), and 44 (titled Biographies nouvelles, ed. Michel Cordillot, Claude Pennetier, and Jean Risacher [Paris: 1997]). 9. Michel Winock, Le sie`cle des intellectuels (Paris: 1999), 312ff. Victor Serge, a veteran Belgian anarchist who wrote in French, had settled in Moscow, seduced by the Bolshevik revolution. There he joined the Trotskyite opposition. In 1928, after he requested a passport so that he could return to France, he was arrested and sent to a camp for his “counterrevolutionary tendencies.” Serge’s fate was a major issue at the writers congress of 1935 organized by Willi Munzenberg, a leading member of the Comintern who was primarily responsible for the dissemination of propaganda. Following intervention by Andre´ Gide and then Andre´ Malraux (among others), Serge was released, and he returned to Brussels in June 1936. See Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, 43:367–369. It seems likely that Gide’s eventual break with Communism can be dated back to the Serge affair. 10. Marc Lazar, “Forte et fragile, immuable et changeante . . . La culture politique communiste,” in Les cultures politiques en France, ed. Serge Berstein (Paris: 1999), 240. 11. Annie Kriegel and Ste´phane Courtois, Eugen Fried: Le grand secret du PCF (Paris: 1997), 101. 12. Among other things, Kriegel and Courtois underscore the agents’ use of dialect and local jargon alongside their fluency in the major cultural languages (French, German, and English) (ibid., 111); their incomplete schooling in a social context that did not permit them to study subjects that could provide them with a living; their inability, after their renunciation of Zionism, to rally to the ethnic and religious nationalism of their countries; and their consequent and almost natural adherence to the internationalist project. Jean Je´roˆme, relating his impressions of the first illegal meeting of Communist activists he attended in February 1923, in Stanislawow (then in Poland), wrote: “I appreciated above all the sense of internationalism evident in the presentation. I felt myself instantly transported into a large family without borders, in which Russians, French, and Germans, along with the rest of us, were united in the same struggle” (Jean Je´roˆme [Michel Feintuch], La part des hommes: souvenirs d’un te´moin [Paris: 1983], 65). 13. Ste´phane Courtois, Denis Peschanski, and Adam Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger: Les immigre´s de la MOI dans la re´sistance (Paris: 1989), 18. 14. Ibid., 21ff. 15. Ibid., 25. 16. Nancy L. Green, Les travailleurs immigre´s juifs a` la Belle E´poque (Paris: 1984); in English, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the “Belle Epoque” (New York: 1986). 17. Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: 1979), 102. 18. Ibid., 84. 19. David H. Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s (Chicago: 1977), 35. 20. Ralph Schor used this phrase as a chapter title in his L’Opinion française et les e´trangers en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: 1985), 553ff., which deals with this period. 21. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 29ff. At the time, the MOI


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had 12 subsections: Italian, Polish, Spanish, Jewish, Armenian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Yugoslav, Czech, Romanian, Russian, and Bulgarian. See the archives of the Russian Center for the Storage and Study of Documents of Contemporary History (henceforth: RCSSDCH) (Moscow), 517/1/1521 (organizational report on the MOI in France) (Jan. 1933), which also mentions Greek and Albanian immigrant groups. 22. As of December 31, 1935, the MOI had a total of 1,963 members, affiliated with 223 cells and organized into 15 language sections based on countries of origin. See ibid., 517/ 1/1811 (report on the problems of cadres in immigrant groups, 20 June 1936). 23. Ibid., 517/1/1523. 24. Ibid., 517/1/1811. As of June 1936, 495 of the party’s 6,635 immigrant members were affiliated with the language groups. 25. Weinberg, A Community on Trial, 119. 26. Kriegel and Courtois, Eugen Fried, 264–265; Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 42. 27. Kriegel and Courtois, Eugen Fried, 266ff; Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 55–56. 28. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 45. 29. Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem (hereafter: CZA), KKL 5/8015 (letter from Joseph Fisher to the heads of the Jewish National Fund, 29 Jan. 1937); quoted in Michel Abitbol, Les deux terres promises: Les juifs de France et le sionisme, 1897–1945 (Paris: 1989), 208. 30. Quoted in Je´roˆme Pelisse, “Le´gitimation et disqualification du personnel politique ouvrier: une socio-biographie de Henri Krasucki” (Master’s thesis, Universite´ de Paris XNanterre, 1996–1997), 89–90. 31. Jacques Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français, vol. 2, Vingt-cinq ans de drames, 1939–1965 (Paris: 1965), 7. 32. They were shut down despite the fact that L’Humanite´’s headline on August 26, 1939 read “Union of the French Nation against the Aggressor,” and despite the fact that the Communist delegates in the National Assembly voted five days later in favor of war credits. See Bernhard Bayerlein, Mikhail Narinski, Brigitte Studer, and Serge Wolikow (eds.), Moscou-Paris-Berlin: Te´le´grammes chiffre´s du Komintern (1939–1941) (Paris: 2003), 54. 33. G. Koenig, “Detsidirendike teg farn sholem,” Naye prese (23 Aug. 1939); idem, “Der goyrl fun sholem” (ibid., 24 Aug. 1939). 34. Ibid. (editorial), 28 Aug. 1939. 35. Adam Rayski, “Tsvishn sholem un krig,” ibid. (29 Aug. 1939); ibid. (editorial, 4 Sept. 1939). 36. On all these questions, see Ste´phane Courtois, Le PCF dans la guerre (Paris: 1980), 19–23. 37. See the telegram, dated 22 Sept. 1939, sent by the secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Comintern to France and Sweden, in Bayerlein et al., Moscou-Paris-Berlin, document 16 (p. 77). 38. Serge Klarsfeld and León Tsevery, Les 1007 fusille´s du Mont Vale´rien parmi lesquels 174 juifs (Paris: 1995). More than a thousand hostages were shot. Starting in the summer of 1942, the proportion of Jews among those executed dropped sharply because of the deportations to Auschwitz. After October 1942, a systematic policy of deporting resisters replaced execution. 39. L’Humanite´, no. 125 (21 Aug. 1941), 126 (28 Aug. 1941), 127 (4 Sept. 1941), and 130 (25 Sept. 1941), found in Bibliothe`que nationale (henceforth: BN), Res. G. 1470 (175); microfilm at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (henceforth: YV), 9/18. ` l’ećhelle humaine” (which he completed in December 1941), in 40. León Blum, “A L’Oeuvre, 1940–1945: Me´moires, la prison et le proce`s, a` l’ećhelle humaine (Paris: 1955), 458; English version: León Blum, For All Mankind, trans. W. Pickles (Gloucester, Mass.: 1969 [1946]). 41. Blum, L’Oeuvre, 351 (note dated 15 May 1942, addressed to the French exiles in

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London and entrusted to E´douard Froment, a deputy from the Arde`che region who was about to leave for London). 42. Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris: 1959), 46–47. 43. Jean-Louis Cre´mieux-Brilhac, “La France Libre: E´viter le pie`ge de l’anticommunisme,” in Le Parti Communiste Français des anneés sombres, 1938–1941, ed. Jean-Pierre Aze´ma, Antoine Prost, and Jean-Pierre Rioux (Paris: 1986), 174–184. 44. Yvon Tranvouez, “Les catholiques: se´parer le bon grain de l’ivraie,” in ibid., 83. 45. See cable of 26 April 1941 from Georgi Dimitrov, Maurice Thorez, and Andre´ Marty in Moscow to Eugene Fried: Fighting for creation of this large national liberation front, party is ready to support any French government, all organizations and all men in the country whose efforts tend to a genuine struggle against invaders and traders. Starting from this point of view, it does not take a hostile position toward partisans of de Gaulle’s movement while criticizing in moderation reactionary colonialist positions (Bayerlein et al., Moscou-ParisBerlin, 402–404). 46. In the words of a cable of 27 Jan. 1941 sent by Thorez and Marty to Jacques Duclos in Paris: “Deploy energetically a campaign against antisemitism and unmask regime and occupiers’ racist theory” (ibid., 370–371). 47. L’Humanite´ (northern zone), no. 75 (10 Sept. 1940). 48. L’Humanite´, no. 114 (May 25, 1941); note the use of the word deportation for the mass roundups. The Jews arrested on May 14, 1941 were interned in the Loiret camps before being deported to Auschwitz in June 1942. ` bas les mesures racistes prises contre les petits et moyens commerçants juifs,” 49. See “A in La Presse antiraciste sous l’occupation hitle´rienne (Paris: 1950), 267–268. This pamphlet is mentioned on June 9, 1941, in reports of the Renseignements geńe´raux, Archives of the Pre´fecture of Police, Paris (henceforth: PP), “Situation a` Paris.” 50. Fried to Dimitrov, 6 May 1941 (Bayerlein et al., Paris-Moscou-Berlin, 408–409). 51. In an article with the title, “Les dessous du racisme—les Nazis traitent odieusement les juifs de´munis de fortune mais ils collaborent avec les capitalistes juifs,” L’Humanite´ (northern zone), special issue (May 1942). On this subject, see Annie Kriegel, “Re´sistants communistes et juifs persećute´s,” in idem, Re´flexions sur les questions juives (Paris: 1984), 29–58. 52. L’Universite´ libre, no. 1 (Nov. 1940), found in BN, Res. G. 1470 (393); YV, 91/13. 53. L’Universite´ libre, no. 4 (28 Dec. 1940). 54. PP, PC no. 13, “Rapports hebdomadaires sur re´pression des meneés communistes” (6 July 1942). 55. L’Universite´ libre, no. 60 (late June 1942). 56. L’Universite´ libre, no. 63 (5 July 1942), Archives of the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation (Champigny), David Diamant collection (henceforth: MRD-DD). 57. Kriegel, “Re´sistants communistes et juifs persećute´s,” 29–58. 58. PP, BA-1918 (misc. correspondence and reports about Communist propaganda among the Jews, 6 March 1941 to February 1943); see also report dated 28 Jan. 1942. 59. PP, “Situation a` Paris” (6 and 13 July 1942). 60. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 130; see also the evidence of Irma Mico, in Louis Gronowski-Brunot, Le dernier grand soir (Paris: 1980), 156. 61. Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York: 1987), 174. 62. Bayerlein et al., Moscou-Paris-Berlin, 370–371. 63. Jacques Bie´linky, “Colonie scolaire, Comite´ de coordination,” in idem, Journal 1940– 1942: Un journaliste juif a` Paris sous l’occupation, ed. Reneé Poznanski (Paris: 1992), 278. 64. On July 20, 1940, Dimitrov and Thorez in Moscow sent the following instructions: “Necessary to encourage open demonstrations of popular discontent if carefully prepared, appropriate orientation, and participation of large numbers, especially women” (Bayerlein


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et al., Moscou-Paris-Berlin, no. 151, 265–266). On this subject, see Reneé Poznanski, “Women in the French Jewish Underground: Shield-Bearers of the Resistance?” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Lenore J. Weizman and Dalia Ofer (New Haven: 1998), 234–252. 65. Jacques Ravine, La re´sistance organiseé des juifs en France, 1940–1944 (Paris: 1973), 55. 66. PP, “Situation a` Paris” (18 May 1942). 67. Reprinted in La Presse antiraciste, 39–40. 68. Undzer vort, no. 23 (20 Oct. 1940), found in BN, Res. G 1470 (1020 bis); ibid., no. 28 (30 Jan. 1941), BN, Res. G 1470 (1020 bis). 69. “Note sur les manifestations des femmes des interne´s civils,” YIVO Archives (New York), UGIF I-13; Bie´linky, Journal, 134 (entry for 1 Aug. 1941). 70. Solidarite´, no. 3 (1 April 1942); French translation by Annette Wieviorka, Le Monde juif, no. 125 (1987), 32–33. 71. Undzer vort, no. 23 (20 Oct. 1940). 72. PP, “Situation a` Paris” (4 May 1942). 73. Reprinted in La Presse antiraciste, 37–38. 74. Adler, The Jews of Paris, 182. 75. The issue was dated 29 Nov. 1941; reprinted in Das vort fun vidershtand und zig (Paris: 1949), 59–60. 76. Adler, The Jews of Paris, 202. The figures are for 1943. 77. French translation by Annette Wieviorka in Le Monde juif, no. 125 (1987), 29. 78. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 155. 79. See descriptions in Annette Wieviorka, Ils e´taient juifs, re´sistants, communistes (Paris: 1986), 124ff. 80. Adler, The Jews of Paris, 185–186. 81. The counterpart of J’accuse in the southern zone, Fraternite´, called itself “the organ of the movement of solidarity and resistance to racist persecutions and deportations” (Feb. 1943). Many issues of these two publications can be found in BN, Res. G 1470 (186) or in the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (Paris) (henceforth: CDJC), under various classifications. 82. Notre voix (20 June 1943), CDJC, CDLXXI-42. 83. “Qu’est-ce que l’Union de la jeunesse juive?,” La Presse antiraciste, 121–123. 84. Undzer vort, Paris, dated 20 Nov. 1942, but written and distributed a month later. Translated into French by Annette Wieviorka, Le Monde juif, no. 127 (1987), 125–127. 85. Section des renseignements geńe´raux et des jeux, surveillance des milieux juifs (8 May 1941), CDJC, LXXVII-7. The 10th, 11th, and 20th arrondissements were kept under particularly close surveillance in May and June 1941. See PP, BA-1918 (29 and 31 May 1941 and 14 June 1941). Dozens of arrests were carried out on May 14 and June 13. 86. David Diamant, Les juifs de Paris dans la re´sistance; manuscript found in MRD. 87. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 145ff. 88. Abraham Lissner, Un franc-tireur juif raconte . . . (Paris: 1969), 21; Poznanski, “Women in the French Jewish Underground.” 89. PP, “Situation a` Paris” (27 April 27, 1942); Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 155. 90. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 160–161. 91. Ibid., 164–165. 92. See the communique´s and “Bilan des actions jusqu a` la grande chute de novembre, par de´tachement et par pe´riode” in Boris Holban, Testament (Paris: 1989), 296ff. For actions carried out by the second unit between March 1942 and April 1943, see MRD-DD. Some of them are corroborated by the reports of the Renseignements geńe´raux, PP, Paris region (June 1942 to August 1944) (CDJC, Urman collection). 93. Holban, Testament, 283–295, personnel of the Parisian FTP-MOI groups, June 1942– August 1944. 94. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 178.

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95. Ibid., 250. 96. Ibid., 352. 97. “Pourquoi ils luttent, pourquoi ils meurent,” CDJC, XXII-12; also in the Archives nationales (Paris), AJ 38/1097. 98. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 278–279; Adam Rayski, Nos illusions perdues (Paris: 1985), 144ff. 99. Claude Le´vy, Les parias de la re´sistance (Paris: 1970). 100. Jean-Yves Boursier, La guerre de partisans dans le sud-ouest de la France, 1942– 1944, La 35e`me brigade FTP-MOI (Paris: 1992), 67ff. 101. Catherine Varlin, “Une ville engloutie: la re´sistance des femmes juives,” in RHICOJ, Les juifs dans la re´sistance et la libe´ration: Histoire, te´moignages, de´bats (Paris: 1985), 101–103. 102. David Diamant, Les juifs dans la re´sistance française (Paris: 1962), 174–175; Adler, The Jews of Paris, 209. 103. Internal report drafted by Adam Rayski, CDJC, CDLXXIII-93 (Dec. 1943). 104. Fayvel Shrager, Un militant juif (Paris: 1979), 139. 105. Reneé Poznanski, “Reflections on Jewish Resistance and Jewish Resistants in France,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 1 (1995), 122–158. 106. MRD-DD. 107. On the founding of the CRIF, see Adler, The Jews of Paris, 230, and the evidence of Adam Rayski, “La Fondation du Conseil re´presentatif des juifs de France,” Le Monde juif, no. 24 (51) (1968) 32–37. 108. See the various drafts of the CRIF charter, MRD-DD. 109. “L’Union des juifs pour la re´sistance et l’entraide, son action, ses buts” (April 1944), reprinted in La Presse antiraciste, 157. 110. Winock, Le sie`cle des intellectuels, 527. 111. Annie Kriegel, Les communistes français (Paris: 1968), 294 and 31ff; Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français, 165ff. 112. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: 1992), 38. 113. Courtois, Peschanski, and Rayski, Le sang de l’e´tranger, 413–415. 114. Annie Kriegel, “La me´moire occulteé,” in Re´flexions sur les questions juives, 72. 115. La vie a` en mourir: Lettres de fusille´s (1941–1944), preface by François Marcot; letters selected and edited by Guy Krivopissko (Paris: 2003), passim. 116. Grunberg, Journal d’un coiffeur juif a` Paris sous l’Occupation, 319 (entry for 30 June 1944). 117. Wladimir Rabinovitch, “E´tat du judaïsme français,” Esprit 10 (Sept. 1945), 490. 118. Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: 2000), 43. 119. Interviews conducted more than 50 years later placed the Holocaust at the top of the list of motives for joining the Communist party immediately after the war. See Jacques Fre´montier, L’e´toile rouge de David: les Juifs communistes en France (Paris: 2002), 219.

After Auschwitz: The Reality and Meaning of Postwar Antisemitism in Poland Jan T. Gross princeton university

Wars in Europe, as a great French historian pointed out in 1929, have simultaneously been periods of social revolution.1 The Second World War offers no exception to this rule. One could argue that, in Eastern Europe, the decade from 1939 to 1948—despite the clear divide of 1945, which saw the defeat of the Third Reich— was one continuous epoch of radical transformation toward a totalitarian model of society.2 In each of the German-occupied countries, local political actors engaged in a fierce and sometimes violent jockeying for position even as they offered competing strategies for resisting, or collaborating with, the Nazis. In Poland, a vast anti-Nazi patriotic resistance movement found itself ensnarled in a complicated political endgame by 1943. The ultimate winner was the Communist party, which, although a latecomer originally insignificant in organizational terms, succeeded in sponsoring the underground organizations and later, in the immediate postwar years, in taking control of the country. Thus the gist of the story presented here, about the mutual relationships between the Poles, the Jews, and the Communists “after Auschwitz,” plays itself out in the immediate postwar years, during a period of quasi-civil war and the consolidation of power by the Polish Communists. The years of the Second World War were, without exaggeration, among the most extraordinary in all of Polish history. The war, it is true, had an enormous impact on every European society, producing both a new map of Europe and a new paradigm of European politics. Still, Poland’s case was unique among the belligerent countries because of the scale of devastation and upheaval experienced under the impact of the Nazi occupation from 1939 until 1944 (supplemented by the Soviet annexations of eastern Poland from September 1939 until June 1941). As a result of the war, the country suffered an unprecedented demographic catastrophe. It lost its minorities—Jews in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians and Germans following border shifts and population movements after the war. A third of its urban residents were missing at war’s end. Poland’s elites were wiped out in all walks of life. Fifty-five percent of its lawyers were no more, along with 40 percent of its medical doctors, and one third of its university professors and Roman Catholic 199

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clergy alike. It lost its choice civil servants, army officers, and sportsmen. Several million people were displaced, either because they were deported, their domiciles were destroyed, or the frontiers were changed. Perhaps as many as 4,500,000 Polish citizens lost their lives during the war (including 3,000,000 Polish Jews), and several millions more experienced imprisonment, slave labor, or forced resettlement. The scale of material devastation matched the volume of population loss and trauma. Virtually every family in Poland fell victim in one way or another, many suffering losses of catastrophic proportions. Despite the violence of the foreign invaders, it will be noted in the historical annals that Polish society confronted the horrors of the Soviet and Nazi occupations with heroism and resilience. It mounted the most formidable and complex resistance movement that the Nazis had to face. In addition to an underground military organization, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa [AK]), which at its peak boasted more than 300,000 sworn-in members, an elaborate network of institutions was set up in occupied Poland, which together came to be known, justifiably, as the “underground state” (Pan´stwo Podziemne). This “state” included clandestine versions of the prewar political parties and a shadow government administration (the Delegatura) headed by a representative of the legal Polish government-in-exile, which resided first in Angers and then, after the defeat of France in 1940, in London. Money was regularly sent from London in order to sustain the budget of the underground state. Apart from funding clandestine military and political organizations, such financial support was also used to sustain civil society, including, for example, an illegal school system; a welfare network; and an organization, Z˙egota, that was set up in 1942 in order to aid Jews who were hiding from the Nazis. Henri Michel, the doyen of French historians of the re´sistance, could hardly be suspected of playing to a domestic audience when he concluded that the Polish underground had enjoyed a strength and a scope unparalleled in Europe.3 The story first became known in the English-speaking world when one of the most courageous couriers of the underground, Jan Karski (who brought direct evidence to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Nazis were exterminating European Jewry4), wrote his slightly fictionalized Story of a Secret State, which became a bestseller soon after its publication by Houghton Mifflin during the winter of 1944–1945.5 One could have expected that such a remarkable collective achievement would provide a good institutional foundation for postwar reconstruction. But it was not to be. All of the efforts and sacrifice that had gone into the creation of this contested realm, this civil society that had defied a ruthless regime of occupation, were soon dismissed as a misguided and wrongheaded enterprise. Once Poland had been liberated by the Red Army in 1944, any earlier association with the so-called “London underground” was labeled a stigma and a liability by the emergent Communist organizers of the public order. Soon after the liberation, for instance, the Home Army was portrayed in propaganda posters as a “spittle-bespattered dwarf of reactionary forces” (“AK—zapluty karzeł reakcji”) and its veterans had to either hide their past or else risk arrest, internment, censure, or humiliation.6 How did this situation—which led to a pervasive sense of historical injustice among a significant majority of the Polish population—come about?

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In the concluding stages of the Second World War, the German forces were being expelled from Poland by the rapid advance of the Red Army. For the leaders of Poland’s underground state, this situation was far from desirable. The Soviet Communists, after all, were regarded as the historic enemies of Polish independence. Twice since the October revolution of 1917, they had asserted their ambitions for westward expansion in military terms. In 1920, the course of the Polish-Soviet war was “miraculously”7 reversed at the outskirts of Warsaw, with fighting continuing until the eventual peace treaty of Riga. And in 1939, the Red Army invaded Poland in collusion with Hitler, resulting in Soviet occupation of approximately half of Poland until June 1941. Matters changed dramatically when Nazi Germany launched its assault on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. The Polish government-in-exile renewed diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R., a treaty was signed between the two governments, and several hundred thousand Polish citizens were released from imprisonment in the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski signed this treaty with the Soviet Union in the face of vigorous protests from leading Polish politicians in London. The reason for their opposition was Stalin’s refusal to guarantee Poland’s territorial integrity in its prewar borders by renouncing the territorial acquisitions made by the Soviet Union in 1939.8 As the U.S.S.R. initially buckled under the onslaught of the Nazi war machine and welcomed all the assistance and allies it could muster, a period of intense Polish-Soviet engagement ensued. But as the fortunes of war gradually turned around and as the Soviet Union proved itself to be a formidable member of the anti-Nazi coalition, Churchill and Roosevelt came to an ever greater understanding for Soviet claims to territorial expansion and security guarantees in postwar Europe. During their Big Three meeting with Josef Stalin in Teheran late in 1943, they agreed that the Soviet Union’s border could be moved far to the west, at Poland’s expense, roughly to the Curzon Line. In this manner, without consulting or informing the Polish government-in-exile in London, they sanctioned a territorial expansion reminiscent of what the Soviet Union had acquired as a result of the MolotovRibbentrop pact. As an emboldened Stalin began to maneuver for a postwar settlement that would eventually lead to Communist subjugation of Eastern Europe, Polish-Soviet relations soured. Indeed, the deterioration had begun even before the Teheran conference: in the spring of 1943, the U.S.S.R. severed relations with the Polish government following the discovery of mass graves in Katyn´. Early in 1943, in the vicinity of a little hamlet called Katyn´, inside a former Soviet secret police (NKVD) compound, a German communications unit disinterred from a mass grave the remains of executed Polish officers. They were all buried in uniform, with bullet holes in the back of their skulls, some with hands bound behind their backs, and personal documents and letters stuffed in their pockets. It is now known that on March 5, 1940, the Soviet Politburo had issued the order to have these men executed. Stalin’s signature, together with those of Molotov, Voroshilov, and Mikoyan, figures on the document.9 On the basis of this decision, 21,857 people (some 15,000 of them POWs) were put to death. Of this number, 4,421 were buried in the mass grave at Katyn´. All of this story remained a closely held secret by the Soviet leadership, which for decades denied any complicity in

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the crime—until finally, on October 14, 1992, Boris Yeltsin made the admission and passed on copies of the requisite documents to Polish president Lech Wałe¸sa. Back in 1943, the Nazis used the discovery as a scoop in their anti-Bolshevik propaganda campaign. The Polish government-in-exile called on the International Red Cross to appoint a commission to carry out an exhumation and to issue an expert opinion about when, and therefore by whom, the crime had been committed. But no one really doubted that for once the Nazi regime was telling the truth. The Soviet government, which all along decried the purported German discovery as a hoax contrived by the Germans to mask their own war crimes, broke off diplomatic relations with Poland. From that point, the Soviets played an intricate game in order both to change postwar Polish frontiers and to install a regime in Poland to their own liking. On the one hand, they used diplomacy and the Big Three consultative process to achieve the desired results. On the other, they carefully scripted the moves of the Communist-sponsored underground in Poland. Soon after the Red Army, in pursuit of withdrawing Germans, crossed the prewar Polish-Soviet border in early January 1944, the Polish government-in-exile found itself deprived of the ability to assert its authority over the liberated areas of Poland. Instead, a Soviet-sponsored National Council for the Homeland (Krajowa Rada Narodowa [KRN]), soon followed by the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego [PKWN]), were given a free hand to fill the vacuum. The KRN was established by the underground Polish Communist party on December 31, 1943. This was the first in a series of institutions duplicating the London-affiliated underground state and, allegedly, representing a broad spectrum of Polish society. In reality it was a “Potemkin village,” a national council entirely controlled by the Communist party. Several months later, on July 20, 1944, the PKWN was established in Moscow and the Soviets authorized it to organize the administration of the liberated Polish territories. And finally, on December 31, 1944, the National Council, as it celebrated its first anniversary, transformed the PKWN into a provisional government, which was immediately recognized by the Soviet Union. In this manner, a series of faits accomplis was carried out in Poland while the legitimate government was still far away in London. The independence of Communist-ruled Poland dates symbolically from July 22, 1944. In the “People’s Poland,” this was the most important national holiday celebrated in commemoration of the so-called “July 22nd Manifesto,” which, issued by the PKWN in the city of Lublin, had proclaimed the country’s independence. To be sure, the war was still going on, and more than half of Poland’s territory was still under German occupation. But Lublin was free. And it was in the city of Lublin, some two weeks later, on August 10th, that a group of Jews assembled at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and established a “committee”—this was the word in fashion at the time—to assist the remnant of Polish Jewry that had survived the war. What would soon become the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Z˙ydo´w w Polsce [CKZ˙P]), an umbrella organization put together by representatives of prewar Jewish political parties, was at first called the Jewish Aid Committee (Komitet Pomocy Z˙ydom). In its first protocol, produced on August 11, 1944, it was noted that the Jews of


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Włodawa needed help because they were being “attacked by destructive elements.”10 The committee’s second meeting, two days later, was devoted to a general discussion about “security.” Should both the Polish and the Soviet (military) authorities be alerted to the fact that there were “elements inimical toward the Jews” in the regions under Red Army control, or should this be kept en famille, with only Polish officials so informed? Should the mayors of the liberated towns be asked to issue proclamations addressed to the Polish population that would call for the establishment of friendly relations with its Jewish co-citizens? Should the Catholic clergy be informed about the threats and the lack of security experienced by the Jews? And how was any of this to be done without making matters worse for the Jews and without creating an atmosphere of excessive panic?11 Protocol number 3, from August 14th, begins with a Dr. Gelbart reporting on a conversation he had on this matter with a member of the KRN, the newly established National Council. Gelbart notes reassuringly that “for the moment Jews are not being threatened in Lublin,” but adds that “loud conversations [presumably in Yiddish] and gathering in groups in the street should be avoided.”12 In the protocol of the next day, it is again reported that there is a constant stream of pleas for help from Jews in the provinces. The war was still going on; Germany had not yet been defeated; these territories had just been liberated from under the yoke of a long and exceedingly brutal occupation—and already the few Jewish survivors found themselves under threat. How are we to understand these episodes? Can they be placed in the context of a well-established frame of reference according to which the Jews had a particular fondness for Communism, that indeed they were the ones who brought Communism (or Bolshevism) to Europe, and that they were therefore hated by the local populations in Eastern Europe that were anti-Communist? Was it indeed the case that the dominant role of the Jews in postwar Poland was participation in the policies that imposed both “scientific socialism” and its attendant persecution on the ethnic Poles? Did the postwar manifestations of antisemitism flow from the realization that Jews were now in the driver’s seat, and that by striking at the Jews one was in effect delivering a blow at the Communist regime? I do not think so. Rather, I would argue, first, that the dominant Jewish experience in Poland after the war was fear; and second, that the Communist authorities in Poland, together with large segments of the Polish society, actually shared a platform with respect to “solving the Jewish problem.” The society pushed for, and the authorities tolerated, getting rid of the Jews. In the Communist-controlled media, the Jewish experience during the war was not treated as exceptional. The history of Polish-Jewish relations under the German occupation was not revisited. The courts did not look favorably on the efforts of returning Jews to retrieve property they had left for safekeeping with their neighbors. Few were prosecuted for having directly assisted the Nazis in the mass murder of Polish Jews. And the Jews were given tacit permission, bordering on encouragement, to leave the country. Apparently, it was mutually acceptable—and few other things were mutually acceptable to Polish subjects and their Communist rulers at that time—to close that chapter of Poland’s history, in this way disposing of the “Jewish problem.” Or so it was hoped.

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Of course the story is more complicated than that, and it is wrapped in ideological langue de bois. Yet the general thrust of Jewish experience in postwar Poland was in fact according to these lines. It is well known that government bureaucracies tend to act rather slowly, rarely sending out general circulars in response to a few individual appeals. Thus it is fair to assume that the Ministry of Public Administration must have received a good number of complaints before circulating a memorandum (“In the Matter of Attitudes toward Citizens of Jewish Nationality”) to voievods (the chief administrators of Poland’s largest territorial units), district plenipotentiaries, and the presidents (mayors) of Warsaw and Lodz. Dated June 5, 1945, this memorandum was issued barely one month after the capitulation of Nazi Germany. It noted that the ministry has been apprised that voievodship and county authorities, as well as offices of general administration, do not always apply the necessary objectivity when dealing with individuals of Jewish nationality. In the unjustifiably negative attitude of the said authorities and offices when handling such cases, and especially when making it difficult for Jewish returnees to recover apartments that are due to them, a highly undemocratic, antisemitic tendency rather clearly comes to the fore. The Ministry of Public Administration calls attention to this undesirable phenomenon and emphasizes that all loyal citizens of the Polish Republic, irrespective of nationality and religious denomination, should be treated in the same way, and they ought to be assisted in accordance with existing law. Therefore the Ministry of Public Administration implores you to make sure that authorities and offices within your jurisdiction abide by the recommendations of this memorandum.13

One cannot help but note a certain discrepancy between the mild tone adopted in this memorandum and the scandalous reality that it addressed, given that the developments it alluded to were taking place in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. How did this “undemocratic, antisemitic, tendency” actually manifest itself in the lives of ordinary people? From a note in the state archives, we learn, for instance, that at the beginning of July 1945, in Chrzano´w (a town in the Cracow region): a registration clerk at the citizens’ militia [police] station requested that citizen Gusta Schnitzer, who had returned from a camp, prove her identity by bringing a witness to testify as to her identity, and to her claim that she had lived in Chrzano´w before the war. When citizen Gusta Schnitzer presented . . . as her witness the chairman of the County Jewish Committee in Chrzano´w, citizen Bachner Lesser, the said clerk stated in the presence of the witness that he had no confidence in the presented witness; that he would trust only a witness of non-Jewish extraction, and that he would register citizen [Schnitzer] only when she presented such a witness.14

This episode was indicative of a trend. It typified attitudes prevalent in some segments of the state administration that adversely affected both individuals and institutions. For instance, Jewish cooperatives routinely experienced delays and difficulties in attaining registration from the Społem, the central cooperative admin-


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istration.15 Individual Jews were occasionally branded by zealous local bureaucrats and then discriminated against when they sought gainful employment. One of the best weeklies of this period, Kuzńica, carried the following item on October 14, 1945: The Third Reich is no more. Nobody knows what happened to Hitler; Himmler and Goebbels took poison. But Jewish identity cards have reappeared—in the reborn, democratic, Poland. Let’s be precise. It’s not so much identity cards as labor certificates issued by the Regional Labor Office in Da¸browa Go´rnicza. One such document lies in front of us—certificate no. 102466, issued on July 5, 1945. One month after the mysterious disappearance of Adolf Hitler, on this certificate, right next to the Polish seal of the Da¸browa Go´rnicza City Government, a round stamp is visible with the letter “J”—Jew. The Labor Office explains this original manner of stamping certificates by noting “technical reasons” pertaining to registration. What kind of reasons could these be? As far as we know, the same rules for registration apply to Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. As far as we know, the same principles are binding in the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare as in the rest of the country, and they stipulate the complete equality of citizens, including the Jews. . . . Who are the people responsible for this horrendous Hitlerite scandal in a Polish state institution?

At the other end of Poland, in Szczecin, during a high-level conference with the voievod and the managers of all the main enterprises in town, the representative of the Jewish Committee read a long list of complaints concerning job discrimination. The most glaring case, he said, involved the city tramway system, “where, despite our intervention, no Jews were given employment.”16 In yet another region of the country, as described in a recent article by the historian Ewa Koz´min´ska-Frejlak, the Ministry of Public Administration sent a reprimand to the Kielce voievodship in which it noted that “in Je¸drzejo´w, the county starosta [administrator], Feliks, turns down all cases brought to him by Jews. The same situation prevails in Che¸ciny and Chmielnik. The city council in Ostrowiec called representatives of the Jewish Committee and requested that all Jews be sent to work in a mine.”17 Thus state bureaucracies at the local level frequently made categorical distinctions between Jews and non-Jews, which in turn triggered highly emotional responses from the Jewish communities so affected. For instance, the town office in Chrzano´w began sending daily demands for laborers to the Jewish Committee (one of these, sent on July 5, 1945, called for “12 persons of the female gender . . . for washing the dirty linen of Red Army soldiers”). According to the complaint subsequently filed by the Jewish Committee, the fact that the town office never honored its promise to pay for the work was of less import than the order itself, which had been made in a manner emulating the methods of the occupiers, in which the Jewish Committee was held responsible if the labor contingent did not appear at the designated time and place. Such demands are issued only to the Jewish population, via the intermediary of the Committee. In this manner, the town office in Chrzano´w perpetuates the traditions established by the occupiers, who communicated with the Jewish population with the help of the “Judenrat.”18

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At times, the tense relationships between the two ethnic groups were so badly mishandled that outside intervention was necessary in order to help keep the peace. In its plenary meeting on April 15, 1945, for instance, the Jewish Committee in Lublin discussed the situation in Mie¸dzyrzec, where about 200 Jews resided at the time: So as not to inflame the situation, the local Jewish Committee restrained the Jews from trying to regain property that had been robbed from them by some of the local Christians. . . . At the beginning, the mayor was unfriendly toward the Jews. He did not allow a Jewish doctor to establish himself in town. The militia did not respond when Jewish houses were devastated. Following some complaints, a representative of the security service [Urza¸d Bezpieczen´stwa (UB), the secret police] came to town and smoothed things over between Jews and Poles. Even a so-called “agreement” [ugoda] was signed. Now things have quieted down.19

The use of the word “ugoda” is particularly significant here. Ugoda most often means a treaty, as between two foreign entities, and its use in this instance signifies the vast social distance between the two parties involved. Clearly, in the perception of local authorities in such places, the Jews constituted a distinct category of the population, which existed in an adversarial relationship with the rest of local inhabitants and had to be dealt with accordingly. Banal as it may seem, money—or more precisely, property—was at the root of much of the tension between Jews and Poles. Polish society was uniquely affected by the Holocaust in that the massive destruction of the Polish Jewish community created a social vacuum that was promptly filled by the native Polish petty bourgeoisie. In sociological terms, this was a natural process. There had been more than three million Jews in prewar Poland, most of them of the lower middle class; when they were wiped out by the Nazis, the local population moved in to occupy their social space. The new incumbents comprised a vulnerable social stratum (if only because a Communist revolution was in the offing); they were also traditionally antisemitic in outlook, politically conservative, and, by and large, full of resentment. Indeed, many contemporaneous Polish observers noted this group’s “reactionary” mental outlook.20 Whether one frames this process in the sociological terminology of social mobility or in some other objectivizing rhetoric, the long and short of the matter is that before the Jews were killed during the German occupation, they had been plundered by the Nazis, and the local population had benefited in various ways—often by foul play. Again the archives of the Jewish Committee may be harvested for illustration. Its legal department kept records of numerous suits filed in court by Jewish survivors for the restitution of property and other possessions. Much of their prewar property, especially large-scale items or businesses, was unrecoverable because Polish authorities had promptly “socialized” it as enemy property taken from its last owner—the German state. But it was the bread-and-butter issues that directly affected the lives of many. “During the occupation in 1942,” writes Jochweta Rozenstein, in a characteristic example, “I left for safekeeping with citizen Ludwika Chrapczyn´ska in Oz˙aro´w, two eiderdowns and four pillows. Citizen Chrapczyn´ska refuses to return my property. . . .”21 This complaint ends with a sentence that re-


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peats itself in numerous filings of this sort: “Please, adjudicate the case, even if I am absent.” For already in May of 1945, when this complaint was lodged in the city court, Jews were fleeing from Poland to, of all places, Germany.22 Regardless of how personal disputes over bedding or furniture were resolved by the courts, it is telling that the few returning Jews had to use the courts to press such claims. One would have hoped to find a climate of compassion toward the returnees, whose communities and families, as a rule, had just suffered an unspeakable calamity. But such compassion was absent. Indeed, there was no social norm mandating the return of Jewish property, no detectable social pressure defining such behavior as the right thing to do, and no informal social control mechanism imposing censure for doing otherwise. Apparently Jewish property was for the taking. In any case, it had been taken by people all around. (Heda Kovaly recounts the same phenomenon in a moving book about Czechoslovakia.23) A courageous miller’s wife from Radziło´w, Chaja Finkelsztajn, left a searing memoir in Yad Vashem about the mass murder of Jews in her hometown on July 7, 1941, and about the subsequent years when she lived in hiding with her family among the peasants. On several occasions (in one instance just as the mass killing was unfolding in Radziło´w) the so-called good local women came to her with the request that she turn over whatever possessions she still had, since she and her family would surely be killed. This was only right, her interlocutor argued (without any malice), since otherwise the killers would be rewarded for their murderous efforts.24 In another instance, a Jewish man was trying to find a hiding place with a peasant acquaintance near We¸gro´w. The peasant’s son-in-law said matter-of-factly: “Since you are going to die anyway, why should someone else get your boots? Why not give them to me so I will remember you?”25 At war’s end, communal Jewish property, notably cemeteries and synagogues, was literally taken apart when the local population carted away tombstones, bricks, roofs, and anything else that could be used for construction projects. Imagine the sense of bad luck among people such as Ludwika Chrapczyn´ska (the woman being sued for the return of an eiderdown and two pillows in Oz˙aro´w): why did her Jew have to come back from the dead, whereas nearly all of the others had disappeared and thus would not be bothering those who had stocked up on former Jewish belongings? The pronounced tension, invidious comparison, and envy among lower-middleclass Poles concerning which family had enriched itself at the expense of the Jews—and to what extent—is one explanation for the reluctance of many “righteous among the nations” (h asidei umot haolam) to later acknowledge their wartime assistance to Jews. They feared being identified as recipients of Jewish largesse: it was assumed that people who had harbored the Jews had, in so doing, enriched themselves handsomely (this in fact was often the case). Were they to be “found out,” they would not only be stigmatized as “Jew-lovers” but would also become targets for robbery. Moreover, the presumption of Jewish wealth and cunning was so pervasive that they risked being tortured by bandits to reveal the hiding place of their putative Jewish treasures. Chaja Finkelszajn recalls that when one village head learned about her family’s whereabouts, he requested that the Finkelszajns move on—not because he feared German reprisals against the village but

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rather because the peasant who was hiding them was apt to excessively enrich himself.26 It was only natural, then, that those few Jewish survivors returning to their former homes were most often met with hostility. On October 11, 1945, Irving Heymont, a major in the U.S. army who ran the Landsberg DP camp in Germany, wrote to his wife: It seems that many Jews from Poland are drifting into the camp. Most of them, I am told, returned to Poland after being liberated from concentration camps to meet persecution again. Their attempts to repossess their pre-war property met with violent opposition from the present owners. The local police forces, according to new arrivals from Poland, often take no action and even join in preventing former owners from regaining their property.27

Time and again, returning Jews were greeted on arrival with an incredulous: “So”—followed by their first name (they were usually on a first-name basis with their Polish neighbors)—“you’re still alive?” Before long, the survivors were treated to an unambiguous hint (a piece of good advice, one might call it): clear out, or else. As H.J. Fishbein, the director of an UNRRA team in Berlin in the spring of 1946 noted: “The story of their experiences during the past six months is a monotonous one. . . . [The refugees] tell of letters received from a Polish organization known as AK, . . . [which] threaten the Jews with outright murder if they continue to live in that locality.”28 “After the war, people lived here in fear,” recalled Stanisław Ramotowski, a Pole who had married a local Jewish woman: On one occasion about two years after the war, my wife wanted to buy back an oak family dresser. She could have found a better one, but this was a family heirloom. And somebody didn’t like it. We found a piece of paper stuck to our house door saying that we were sentenced to death. At that time the NSZ [Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (National Armed Forces)] gave out a lot of such sentences in our area. They stole, they beat people up, they killed. I went to my own people, because I [had been] a member of the AK [Home Army]. And then the AK made them take the sentence back. And so we survived.29

There was no high politics behind such hints, “good advice,” and threats. Jewish survivors who returned to their hometowns in a usually vain search for relatives or for family belongings clearly had nothing to do with the establishment of Communist rule in postwar Poland. If they had, Communism would have collapsed long before 1989, since the great majority of them promptly fled the villages and small towns for a few large cities; soon thereafter, in the mass exodus that has already been mentioned, most of Poland’s surviving Jews left the country altogether.30 Instead, in many cases, the opposition to the Jews’ return to their former towns and villages was linked to economics or sheer greed. Other factors, of course, also played a part—notably Polish society’s prewar socialization into antisemitic ideology on the part of both the largest political parties and the Catholic church, and the wartime demoralization. All of this would have sufficed to produce a complex legacy of Polish-Jewish relations in the postwar period.


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Unfortunately, the reality of Polish-Jewish relations was even more complicated and tragic. It has now been acknowledged in Poland that the extent of direct local involvement in the Nazi persecution of the Jews was significantly greater than previously recognized. When the Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamie¸ci Narodowej [IPN]) began its two-year investigation into the Jedwabne murder, researchers combed through the Institute’s extensive archives (the Institute had taken custody of documents from various other organizations, including the Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes [Głowna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich]). Among the examined documents were court files of many cases that had been tried in the late 1940s and early 1950s under the so-called “August” laws (adopted in August 1944), which made collaboration with the German occupiers during the war a crime. Until recently, scholars assumed that the sierpnio´wki (“August cases”) mostly involved individuals who had declared themselves to be ethnic Germans or who had served in the so-called “dark blue” (Germancontrolled) police formations during the occupation. After the Jedwabne investigation began, however, IPN researchers discovered that 61 cases from the Białystok district court alone had been brought against Polish citizens who were accused of participating in the killing of local Jews. Since the IPN investigation, new files have continued to emerge from the Commission’s archives.31 In the context of postwar relations between Poles and Jews, what is of most interest is not that Poles killed Jews during the war, but how and to what extent the courts of Communist Poland dealt with the matter. Among the sources shedding light on this issue are the recollections of Jewish survivors who, after the war, attempted to have murderers brought to justice. A different source is that of a leading legal scholar from Warsaw University, Andrzej Rzeplin´ski, who was asked by the IPN to provide a legal evaluation of the Jedwabne murder trial of 1949. In an interview with the Gazeta Wyborcza on July 19, 2002, Rzeplin´ski first described the circumstances that had led to the indictment of the Jedwabne murderers: In December of 1947, a Jew from Jedwabne who had emigrated before the war to Montevideo wrote a letter to the Central Committee of Polish Jews in Warsaw. “We have information that [the Jews of Jedwabne] were killed by the Poles, not by the Germans. And we know that those Poles have not yet been brought to justice, that they still live in the same village. . . .” This letter somehow reached the Ministry of Justice, which in February 1948 ordered the prosecutor in the Łomz˙a district court to investigate the matter. The prosecutor’s office in Łomz˙a did not react for the next three weeks. And during the following ten months nothing was done in the judicial sense, though probably there were some behind-the-scenes negotiations. Suspects in the case were arrested only in January 1949. The Łomz˙a law enforcement apparatus—the prosecutor’s office, the police, the secret police—the Łomz˙a county committee of the Communist party, the Catholic diocese, all of them must have known about the events in Jedwabne. But the investigation started only after [the Ministry of Justice in Warsaw] made the request. Eight functionaries from the secret police office in Łomz˙a conducted the investigation. They were very young, . . . without professional qualifications. Only one had a high-school diploma. . . . From the beginning, investigators were trying to limit the case

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as much as possible. For example, a witness said, “the following people took part in the murder of the Jews,” but only one name is written in the protocol. Most likely, when the witness began to enumerate other names, the investigator changed the subject. During questioning, witnesses specifically identified more than 90 people as participants in the crime. For the most part they no longer lived in Jedwabne or else were deceased. But not one of those who were still alive was interviewed as a witness. . . . The local priest was not interviewed, either. And he should have been asked why he had not appeared during the pogrom with a cross and the sacraments—he knew very well what needed to be done in order to convert this mob into a controllable crowd that could be dispersed. Poles who had saved some Jews, Antonina Wyrzykowska, for example, were not deposed either. . . .

Responding to a question from the interviewer concerning the extreme brevity of the trial—the defendants were convicted and sentenced a mere day after the trial began—Rzeplin´ski responded as follows: This, frankly speaking, is utterly unimaginable to me. During two days of deliberations (about 16 hours altogether) the court heard testimony from 22 accused and 56 witnesses: 78 people! If you subtract the time needed for various necessary procedures in a court of law, such as the recital of the indictment and other documents, and final speeches, this leaves about six minutes per person. This was a deliberate ploy on the part of the judge to make sure the witnesses said as little as possible. Prosecutors agreed to this procedure, and defense counsels certainly thought it advantageous to their clients. Neither the prosecutors, nor the lawyers for the defense, nor the auxiliary judges [a three-judge panel sat on the bench] asked any questions! The defense counsels recognized that if they remained silent the trial would end sooner and their clients would receive lighter sentences. Witnesses in the courtroom usually repeated the same line—“I saw almost nothing”—even though they had given copious depositions during the preliminary interrogations. The vast majority of witnesses appearing in court testified for the defense. They usually stated that they had seen a given defendant far from the scene of the crime. One woman who described, during the pretrial interrogation, how the accused, Laudan´ski, had boasted about killing two or three Jews retracted her testimony in court. She probably feared the Laudan´ski family more than she feared the secret police. Not one among the people prosecuting and involved with the case knew the topography of Jedwabne. There was no court visit to the crime scene. This fact was exploited by the accused and their witnesses, who spun tales about what was located where. A distance that in reality could be walked in five minutes took, in their testimonies, 20 to 30 minutes to be covered. No exhumation was ordered. In a sense, in this trial, there were no victims. The crime allegedly consisted of the local inhabitants’ chasing the Jews out into the market square, and there guarding them for a while. There was nothing about the burning of the Jews in the trial sentencing. The sentencing and the arguments behind it were embarrassingly unprofessional. Not because of the judge’s lack of legal qualifications, but because of the tactic he adopted—which was to limit as much as possible the scope of the case, the number of the accused, and the accusations against them. The presiding judge of the three-person panel, Antoni Małecki, was of peasant background. He came from the area and probably shared the prejudices of the local people. I am particularly critical of the presiding judge. Prosecutors in the case were very young, having just finished their remedial legal tutorials, which was typical for the


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Stalinist judicial system. But Małecki was a prewar judge, with 20 years of experience on the bench. He had to know what he was doing.

According to Rzeplin´ski, the Jedwabne trial was a political rather than a criminal trial: It was a political trial in the sense that the whole case was deliberately scaled down— some people had beaten up some other people, but in the end it was not entirely clear who, whom, and for what reason. I believe that the decision to so limit and circumscribe the case was made somewhere in the voievodship offices of the Communist party. A major trial could not have brought any political benefits [since] there was no way to demonstrate that the Germans had killed the Jews in Jedwabne. Indicting a large group of Poles for the murder of Jews could have resulted in a political scandal. Well over a hundred people should have been brought to justice according to my calculations. I firmly believe that the ten Poles who were found guilty drew convictions for only a fraction of what they had actually done. And all of this after a glaringly unprofessional trial—not because legal know-how was lacking, but as a result of a reluctance to bring to light all of the circumstances of the crime, out of antisemitic prejudice.

Having read this, we can understand why Rzeplin´ski prefaced his interview with these words: “During my lifetime, I have analyzed some 1,500 criminal cases, and none has made such a deep impression on me as the trial connected with Jedwabne.”32 In reality, the Jedwabne trial was by no means a unique miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, it can be considered a jurisprudential masterpiece, a paragon of integrity and thoroughness—at least as compared with dozens of other trials, held in courts of the Białystok region until well into the 1950s, where the issue of Jews being murdered by their neighbors came up. This phrase, “where the issue of Jews being murdered by their neighbors came up,” is used quite advisedly, since in all of these trials (as in the Jedwabne trial) it was often treated as a tangential matter, disposed of en passant, with the main accusation and investigation focusing on some other transgression. The two volumes of IPN documents and reports that were earlier noted offer ample proof of this phenomenon.33 Such was the lingering antisemitic inertia of both the local administration and the judiciary in postwar People’s Poland. Not so much actively persecuted, the Jews were instead treated in a prejudicial manner whenever they came into contact with the various bureaucracies—which is to say, very frequently, as this was a regime marked by the most extensive e´tatism. Antisemitism, of course, was not a part of Communist ideology; in the ideal world envisaged by Communism, there would no longer be any antisemitism, if only because the Jews would no longer constitute a religious or ethnic group. Ethnic identification was an epiphenomenon, to use Marxist vocabulary, a thing of the past that was bound to wither away. Alternatively, to the extent that it became politically articulated or coalesced into an organized movement, it was to be promptly denounced and eliminated as “nationalism”—the anti-Zionist campaign launched by Stalin in his last years being a case in point. But Communists (and this factor was deeply ingrained in Lenin’s contribution to the Bolshevik tradition) were also paramount pragmatists when it came to issues

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of power. Given the wartime experiences of the U.S.S.R., they had come to a full grasp of the fact that the patriotic, indeed the nationalist, sentiments of the population had to be tapped in order to safeguard the rule of the Communist party. If such sentiments (among the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Romanians, or the Poles) came with an admixture of xenophobia or antisemitism, so be it. Moreover, despite the official ideology, antisemitism was far from unknown among Communist leaders. There seems little doubt that Stalin exhibited a crass antisemitism in his later years. Others may have acted more out of opportunism, in a variant of what Ian Kershaw has felicitously termed “working towards the Fu¨hrer.” In any event, the underlying antisemitic impetus of the Rajk trial in Hungary in 1949, and especially the Slańsky´ trial in Czechoslovakia in 1952, was unmistakable. These two events, it is true, belonged to the later phase of the Stalin era. But even during the earliest period of the Communist reach for power in Eastern Europe, between the years 1944 and 1948, the party made clear-cut choices between the Jews and their local enemies, in favor of the latter. In Hungary, for instance, former Iron Cross fascists were allowed into the Communist party after taking the following pledge: I, the undersigned, hereby declare that I was a member of the Arrow Cross Party from to . I now realize that my activities were directed against the interests of the people and that my conduct was faulty. I am resolved to atone for what I have done. I promise to support the fight for a people’s democracy with everything in my power and to devote my entire energy to the achievement of this task. I hereby solemnly pledge myself to be a faithful fighting member of the branch of the Hungarian Communist party.

As Hungarian Communist leader Ma´tyas Ra´kosi explained to an American journalist: “Look, these little fascists aren’t bad fellows, really. They were forced into fascism, see. They were never active in it. All they have to do is sign a pledge, and we take them in.”34 Similarly, in Romania, Foreign Minister Ana Pauker—the quintessential Jewish Communist of Eastern Europe—struck a deal with former Iron Guardists immediately after her return to Bucharest, with the result that they were admitted en masse into the Romanian Communist party. At the same time in Poland, the leader of the prewar fascist group ONR-Falanga, Bolesław Piasecki, was released from jail on orders of the top NKVD operative in the region, Ivan Serov, and was allowed to set up an organization of “progressive” Catholics (known as PAX) in order to neutralize the influence of the Catholic church. Two days after he was freed, Piasecki was received by the first secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party (as the Communist party was known at the time), Władysław Gomułka.35 Serge Moscovici has noted the complementary predicaments of the radical Right and radical Left in East European (in his case, Romanian) politics. The rightists had ample social backing before the war but did not have power. The leftists, in contrast, had power but no social base to speak of in the immediate postwar years.36 Hence the carefully orchestrated fusion between Communists and fascists in postwar Eastern Europe, in a literal exemplification of the principle les extreˆmes se touchent. In this context, it seems less absurd that Zygmunt Laudan´ski, one of those convicted in the Jedwabne trial—who had been a


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rabid nationalist before the war, but who had managed to join the Communist party immediately thereafter—could write in his jailhouse plea for clemency: “I believe that on shoulders like mine our workers’ regime may safely rest.”37 This is not to say that the central authorities in Warsaw (or Bucharest or Budapest, as the case might be) were happy about this state of affairs. To some extent they even gave vent to disapproval, as was the case with the memo sent out by the Polish Ministry of Public Administration in which local officials were asked to accord Jews and Poles equal treatment. Yet, at the same time, East European Communists had their hands full in seeking legitimacy and popular support. They had to pick their fights: making sure that Jews were treated fairly was not a prioritiy. Thus the issue was never pressed, whether in Poland or elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In a long piece published in the January 1946 issue of Commentary, Hal Lehrman, reporting on Hungary, noted that “neo-antisemitism is not the Jews’ chief complaint here. Its existence is obscene, to be sure, after the price paid in lives but it could have been expected. . . . What is startling and, in the opinion of Hungarian Jews, the most shocking element in their present position is the cool indifference of the new anti-fascist regime.”38 In a few sad paragraphs in his beautiful memoir of 1997, Serge Moscovici expressed similar sentiments about postwar Romania.39 The Communists in Poland found themselves confronted with an overwhelming popular sentiment on the “Jewish issue,” and they could choose to fight it only at their own peril. On August 19, 1945, in the Raj (Heaven) cinema in Bochnia, a thousand delegates assembled for a county meeting of the Peasant Party. The gathering, by invitation only (za zaproszeniami imiennymi), brought together local activists—the elite of party leader Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s political opposition (he had just resigned as prime minister of the government-in-exile in London, and had returned to Poland). An anonymous rapporteur submitted an account of the meeting to the Cracow voievodship office, which includes the following: The third speaker (his name unknown) took his turn at the rostrum, and by analogy to a thesis from [Minister of Public Administration Władysław] Kiernik’s speech that Poland must be a monoethnic state [the matter previously discussed concerned the expulsions of the German population from the newly incorporated territories], put forward a resolution that Jews should also be expelled from Poland, and he also remarked that Hitler ought to be thanked for destroying the Jews (tumultuous ovation and applause).40

The regular police force, known as the citizens’ militia, was also unwilling to go against public sentiments regarding the Jews. Indeed, the force itself was marked by pervasive antisemitism, as indicated by the numerous complaints filed by Jewish Committees throughout the country. In some areas, local people even perceived the police as their natural ally in the anti-Jewish struggle.41 Thus, a Jewish woman fleeing from the scene of the Kielce pogrom two days after the event found herself pulled from a train by fellow passengers, who first attempted to lynch her and then delivered her (“to be shot”) into the hands of the citizen’s militia. In fact, this happened to her twice on the same journey. In the first instance, a militiamen took a bribe and let her go. She then boarded another train, was once again identified as a Jew by fellow passengers and was then delivered to an outpost of the railroad police, where she was threatened with execution

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and where she witnessed a beating of another Jew pulled off the train. A group of schoolchildren pelted her with stones through an open window while she was in police custody. Finally, she was taken to the town’s central militia station, where her documents were checked and she was released.42 In this particular case, the actions of the citizens’ militia are of less significance than the perceptions of the populace concerning what it was supposed to do, and presumably was often ready to do. Similarly, the archival records of the Jewish Committee in Tarno´w describe repeated assaults by uniformed soldiers against Jews, and the futility of lodging complaints with the authorities.43 Scores of militiamen were implicated in the Cracow pogrom; soldiers and militiamen, as is well known, participated in the infamous Kielce pogrom. Finally, there was the secret police, the most politicized organ of the administration. In October, 1945, a high NKVD official who was advising the Polish Ministry of Public Security sent a lengthy “Report on the Situation of the Jewish Population in Poland” to his boss in Moscow, Lavrentii Beria. Among other issues, he described the antisemitic attitudes among employees in the Warsaw headquarters of the security service. At the other end of the socio-cultural spectrum is a memorandum regarding a theatrical “revue” put on by a sports club in, of all places, Os´wie¸cim—Auschwitz—on January 24 and 25, 1947. The main thrust of this revue, it noted, “was to make fun of the Jews in various sketches and songs. We want to stress that the main role in presenting these anti-Jewish gimmicks was played by the commander of the security police in Os´wie¸cim.”44 Government files contain numerous accounts about physical attacks, windows being broken in Jewish houses, offensive graffiti, and verbal threats in various provincial locations. “It is an undeniable fact,” wrote Jan Kowalczyk, the commissar for the productivization of the Jewish population in the Cracow region, to the presidium of the District Commission of the Labor Unions (an entirely “Polish” venue, if you will), “that the living conditions of the Jewish population in the county towns are extremely difficult. Out of terror in the face of reactionary elements, the Jewish population flees these locations in order to save their lives, and concentrates in the larger towns.”45 Indeed, county and voievodship Jewish Committees generally urged the Jewish population to move to the major towns and cities—though even there, Jews were not safe. The pogroms of August 1945 in Cracow and of July 1946 in Kielce were cases in point. It is difficult to estimate how many Jews were killed as a consequence of antiJewish violence in Poland in the initial postwar years. One historian puts the total at around 1,500.46 Of course, many other people were also being killed in Poland at the time, since a civil war of sorts accompanied the Communists’ gradual consolidation of power. But what made the murder of Jews a unique phenomenon was the fact that it was anticipated, almost in the way that punishment is anticipated as the logical outcome of a crime. As I have noted elsewhere, Jews would frequently receive public or private warnings of impending violence.47 Among the townspeople, there was apparently a diffused prior knowledge concerning murderous intentions vis-a`-vis the Jews, even among those who were not part of any conspiracy. Likewise, it was public knowledge that Jews traveling by rail might be


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pulled off a train and killed. The murder of Jews, in other words, was not a secret cloak-and-dagger operation. It was, instead, a form of social control. If Jews remained in their hometowns despite being told to leave, if they traveled by train knowing the risks, they had nobody to blame but themselves. The following tragic episode illustrates this moral apathy: On the 3rd of October [1946] at 7 in the evening I boarded a train from Warsaw to Cracow. I was accompanied by my husband, Henryk Liberfreund, and by Amalia Schenker. We rode in a compartment with a few other passengers, including a nun. A candle was burning. We traveled peacefully until we reached the Kamin´sk station near Radomsko. In the meantime, the candle had burned out and passengers were sleeping in darkness. During the train stop in Kamin´sk, a man in civilian clothes, wearing a cap with an eagle sign and toting a submachine gun, entered the compartment. He checked the passengers one by one with a flashlight. When he reached my sleeping husband, he pulled down the coat covering him and said, “I got you, kike, heraus, heraus, aussteigen.” My husband drew back, unwilling to get off the train, and the man pulled him by the arm but could not budge him. Then he whistled, and immediately another man appeared, whom I did not see very well, accompanied by the conductor. I started screaming terribly, and then the first assailant began to push and pull me using the words heraus, aussteigen. I pulled myself away; in the meantime the train took off, and the assailant pushed my husband off the train and jumped after him. I continued to scream, and I don’t know what happened afterwards. I wish to add that nobody’s documents were checked, not even my husband’s. Other passengers and the conductor did not pay much attention to the whole episode, on the contrary, they laughed and behaved rather improperly.”48

The only silver lining in the generally bleak story outlined here is the attitude displayed by many within the Polish intelligentsia. There were a number of outstanding literary and public-interest weeklies and periodicals at the time—Kuzńica, Odrodzenie, Warszawa, Two´rczosć´, Tygodnik Powszechny, to name the most important—and a climate that, in 1947, was still sufficiently unfettered by censorship to allow people to speak their minds. Speak they did about antisemitism, especially after particularly vicious outbursts of anti-Jewish violence, for example, in the aftermath of the pogroms in Cracow and Kielce. The moral pitch of these articles is so high, so dramatic, and so full of exasperation that one reads them almost as prayers of mourning, such as were never uttered by Poland’s clergy and population at large. Kazimierz Wyka, Jan Jo´zef Szczepan´ski, Jerzy Zago´rski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Stanisław Ossowski, Mieczysław Jastrun, Zofia Nałkowska, and Adolf Rudnicki were among those who spoke in print. Here was the re´publique de lettres, the humanist core, of postwar Poland. Some in the chorus of lamenting and warning voices, but probably no more than a third, were assimilated Jews whose identity was as Polish as Heine’s was German. And no few were Catholic, including the distinguished contributors to the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny and its milieu in Cracow. Jerzy Turowicz, the long-time editor-in-chief of this extraordinary journal, must be noted in particular: a most literate “clerk” who never betrayed his calling.49 Perhaps his greatest act of daring was his refusal, after Stalin died, to publish an obituary in Tygodnik Powszechny. As it happened, this unprecedented act of defi-

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ance—there may not have been a similar case in the entire Stalinist bloc—resulted in nothing worse than dismissal of the editorial board (they were eventually reinstated, in 1956). Throughout his career, Turowicz is said never to have discarded a scrap of paper: visitors to his apartment had to walk carefully between mounds of books, manuscripts, letters, and newspaper clippings that reached almost to the ceiling. He never left a letter unanswered, and he kept a diary noting, however briefly, every day’s interesting items of conversation. Following his death in 1999, family members and colleagues began to sift through the accumulated treasures. Among other things, Turowicz’s papers have yielded previously unknown poems by Tadeusz Borowski, the former Auschwitz inmate who testified in his own way, as a writer, to man’s inhumanity in his This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. No reflections on postwar Polish antisemitism can leave aside the Kielce pogrom, the most deadly assault on European Jews in the postwar period. Lasting for an entire day (July 4, 1946), the pogrom involved the participation of thousands of Kielce inhabitants and resulted in the murder of 42 Jews. The catalyst was a fabricated accusation by a young boy who, apparently at the instigation of his father, declared that he had been held captive for several days in the basement of a building where Jewish survivors and returnees were living (presumably in order to have his blood harvested in a ritual murder). In fact, the building in question did not even have a basement, although this did not prevent the citizens’ militia from immediately dispatching a squad to conduct a search. As the killing commenced, militiamen and soldiers on the scene joined civilians in the bloodshed. The event itself, and even more the public reactions to it, were very revealing about attitudes toward the Jews in the different strata of Polish society. The first item worthy of note is the non-reaction—the absence of curiosity, as it were— among the highest circles of state. At a conference on the historiography of the Kielce pogrom held at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in March 1996, Andrzej Paczkowski presented findings based on extensive research in Polish state and Communist party archives: “I looked over all the protocols, even though some were incomplete, from the regular meetings of the leadership of the Ministry of Public Security with chiefs of the Voievodship Security Offices. . . . The issue of the Kielce pogrom was never addressed in this forum.”50 Paczkowski went on to explain that this was a busy time for the party leadership and members of the security apparatus, all of whom were hard at work falsifying the results of the referendum held on June 30, 1946, which was construed as a vote of confidence in the Communist rule of the country.51 It is unlikely that files pertaining to the Kielce pogrom once existed but were then purged so successfully that no trace of them remains, whether in the archives of the decision-making bodies of the Communist party or in those of the Ministry of Public Security. Speaking at the same conference of March 1996, a more plausible explanation was offered by Jerzy Tomaszewski, who suggested that the absence of relevant documents reflects a lack of interest shown in the matter: “Whether five Jews had been killed or 100, either way, the grip on power by the regime was not threatened by this event. And therefore it was not of interest to the authorities. Other things were much more important.”52 True, the issue was raised by Bolesław Bierut on July 5, 1946 at a meeting of


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the presidium of the country’s National Council (KRN), and his statement was followed by a report of the Minister of Public Security, but that was the extent of high-level documented interest in the matter.53 Six weeks later, the KRN shelved a proposal to issue a decree to “combat antisemitism.” Its chief legal expert, Itzak Klajnerman, argued that all the requisite laws were already on the books, and that therefore it seems unnecessary to issue a new decree specifically devoted to combating antisemitism. It is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive (wre¸cz niecelowe), perhaps even harmful, as such a decree would certainly become an excellent pretext for more energized agitation against the Jews and against the government. The reactionary underground will put forward arguments about the privileged position of the Jews, and the government will be accused of devoting special efforts to protecting the Jews.54

Klajnerman’s words bring to mind a quote by Rosa Luxemberg—a heroine in the Polish Communist pantheon—quoted, inter alia, in Amos Elon’s recent book, The Pity of It All: In a letter from prison on February 16, 1917, [Rosa Luxemburg] wrote her friend Mathilde Wurm: “What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations. . . . I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.”55

Many a Jewish Communist would have said the same. But personal views aside, the Communists in Poland, as a matter of policy, were distancing themselves from the alleged association of Jews and Communism that was very much in the public mind. This was evident, for instance, in the phenomenon that Jewish Communists were routinely ordered to change their names. There was even a commission in charge of the matter, run by Zofia Gomułka, the Jewish-born wife of the Polish Communist party head. “He looks okay, but what a name!” she is said to have frequently commented about Jewish Communists who had not yet changed their names (hence the cynical rejoinder that, with regard to Zofia Gomułka, “the name’s okay, but what looks!”)56 In any event, it is noteworthy that the compromised security of the Jewish population that was so frequently noted by the various Jewish Committees was never mentioned, except in passing, at any of the periodic high-level meetings at the Ministry of Public Security.57 Tadeusz Zawadzki (Norman Salsitz), who was in charge of the secret police for the county of Cracow until August 1945, never heard the issue of anti-Jewish violence being raised during the meetings held every ten days at the UB’s voievodship headquarters. Whatever affinity the Communists (including the Jewish Communists) may have had for the Jews in Poland after the war, they certainly did not share Polish Jewry’s concerns. There remains one major element in Polish society whose attitudes and behavior vis-a`-vis the Jews has yet to be discussed: the Catholic church. In the files of the legal department of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, we find a memorandum reporting on the conversation between the bishop of Lublin, Stefan Wyszyn´ski, and a delegation of local Jewish leaders some two weeks after

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the Kielce pogrom. The Jewish Committee was desperately trying to persuade influential members of the Catholic hierarchy to condemn both the event and the antisemitism that had made it possible. However, the bishop did not agree with [our] assessment [of the events in Kielce]. He argued that the causes are much deeper, that they are rooted in the general dislike of the Jews who are playing an active role in current political life. The Germans wanted to destroy the Jewish nation because it was an advocate of Communism. According to the bishop, the Jewish input into the life of Poland is minimal. The Polish nation is grateful to the Jews for Fitelberg [a renowned conductor and composer] and some others, but for many other things it cannot be grateful. The bishop stressed that the horrors of Hitlerite camps had their model in the camps of Siberia. They were the primary school of the Hitlerite barbarism . . . which has its follow-up at the present time. The Jews, according to the bishop, should work hard to get a state in Palestine, or else some colonies in South America. . . . In Poland, the Jews are not the only ones being murdered; Poles are also suffering that fate. Many are in prisons and in camps. The bishop condemns every kind of murder from the point of view of Christian ethics. In the specific case of Kielce, the bishop has nothing to add or specifically condemn, because the idea of condemning evil is always spread by the church. During the discussion about inciting the crowd with the false legend that Christian blood is necessary to make matzoh, the bishop clarified that during the Beilis trial, many old and more recent Jewish books were assembled, and the story concerning blood was not definitively resolved. In the end, the bishop declared that he could not issue an official statement about the Kielce events, but that during a meeting of priests, soon to be held, he would explain the matter in a spirit calculated to calm down the faithful.”58

Given this perception of the blood libel by one of Poland’s most distinguished clerics—Wyszyn´ski is today hailed as “the primate of the millennium” and his beatification process has just begun in Rome—one should not be surprised that medieval prejudice remained powerful enough to bring people into the streets not once but on many occasions, and in many different towns: in Cracow, Kielce, Bytom, Bialystok, Szczecin, Bielawa, Otwock, and Legnica. At times the matter was treated with an almost disarming simplicity: on October 19, 1946, for instance, a few tipsy fellows were looking for a lost child in a building where Jewish returnees lived in Cracow. A small crowd began to assemble in the street, and when guards of the building proceeded to disperse it, “the head of the militia patrol [which in the meantime had been called by alarmed residents] told one of [them] that ‘if your child got lost, citizen, you would also be searching.’ ”59 Jews in those days could not appreciate this militiaman’s earnestness (or dry sense of humor, as the case may be). They would instead be paralyzed by fear. The chairman of the Jewish Committee in Cze¸stochowa, a man named Brenner, wrote of a different episode in the first issue of Głos Bundu (The voice of the Bund), in August of 1946. “Recently, an 11-year old Christian child, accompanied by his mother, walked on Garibaldi Street, where many Jews are living, and pointed to a house where Jews had allegedly held him for two days,” he wrote. “This time the Christian neighbors merely laughed at the boy and chased him away.” And yet, he continued, even though the incident had ended without violence, “this episode has had a terrible impact on our neighborhood. People have started to close up


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apartments and businesses, dropping whatever they were doing, and fleeing. But where to? Nobody knows and nobody can give a clear answer.” With regard to the pogrom in Kielce, there were some Poles who did convey publicly their sense of deep pain and shame over what had happened. Among them was a prominent churchman—Teodor Kubina, the bishop of Cze¸stochowa—who came out with a forceful statement condemning the perpetrators.60 Moreover, as already noted, a panoply of Polish intellectuals expressed their outrage in the periodical press. Yet the general thrust of contemporaneous commentary (which later came to dominate both public consciousness and historiography) sought neither to denounce nor to examine the root causes of the violence, preferring to place the matter in a far more instrumental context. Hence the widely accepted notion that the Kielce pogrom was no more than government-sponsored provocation—presumably, according to this belief, the Communists provoked the violence in order to divert attention abroad from the way in which they had falsified the results of the previous week’s nationwide referendum. This hypothesis allowed various journalists (and later historians) conveniently to forget about the participants in the pogrom. Instead, they speculated about who was behind it, and why. Numerous condemnatory comments published in the daily press and during public meetings held at the time also put a utilitarian spin on the tragic events. As noted at the time by the Warsaw Jewish weekly Opinia: “During protest meetings held after the Kielce pogrom, Polish speakers often asked: ‘What about worldwide public opinion? What will they think of us?’ How one would prefer to hear instead the simple and pleasant-sounding words: ‘What will our Jewish fellow citizens think?’ ”61 As the Kielce pogrom demonstrates, postwar antisemitism predated any Communist attempts to take power in Poland, being firmly rooted, among other things, in the medieval prejudice relating to ritual murder. This ancient canard made its rounds after the war in an updated version, which posited that the blood of Christian children in Poland was drunk by Jews in order to fortify themselves after they returned, emaciated, from the concentration camps. For the true believers in Communism, among them the leaders of the Polish Workers’ Party who launched their takeover in 1944, the Holocaust was not a real issue. For lack of a requisite vocabulary, it could not be told as an autonomous story. Rather than invent new terms or concepts, the Communists preferred to work with what they had. Therefore, even though the genocidal destruction of the European Jews (in this case, the Polish Jews) did not really fit into the conceptual categories employed by the Communists—being something far different, greater, and more significant—it was subsumed under any of a number of categories: the outcome of fascism, the colonial expansion of Nazi Germany, or the racist imperialism of the Third Reich; an aftershock; yet another manifestation of class conflict; a tremor registered during the last “dying” stages of capitalism. Any of these were proper, universal categories covering all facets of the murderous conflict known as the Second World War. Such a weltanschauung was not espoused solely by unimaginative party bureaucrats but was rather integral to the emerging cultural paradigm propagated by so-

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phisticated intellectuals. A foremost Marxist literary critic of this epoch, Jan Kott, commented on a novella whose action takes place at the time of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943. The novella, Easter Week (Wielki Tydzien´), was written by a foremost contemporary Polish writer, Jerzy Andrzejewski. Kott noted: I know both versions of Andrzejewski’s novella. . . . In the first version, the Jewish tragedy was one of a people deprived of any empathy and condemned to a hopeless struggle. . . . In the second version, a rich, correct, and differentiated analysis of the social context in which all the protagonists are situated restores a world that was previously turned upside down. The Jewish struggle in the ghetto ceases to be the mystical drama of the chosen people, and becomes instead an element within the general struggle against the German occupation. In the second version of The Easter Week, the word “fascism” for the first time makes an appearance. . . . 62

Of course, it is important to properly historicize this discussion by pointing out that, at the time in question, nobody was talking about the Holocaust. Jews themselves were not able to articulate the issue for quite some time. But the momentary silence of Communism was of a different nature than the silence of the Jews, the Germans, the French, the Dutch, or the Poles. All, except the Communists, were rendered speechless because of their perceived sense of varying degrees of collusion with the Nazi-organized crime. Even the Jews, as is known, shared in the sense of guilt. As individuals, they experienced it in the form of the survivor complex: why have I (you!) been spared the horrible fate which befell all my (your!) relatives and co-religionists? And, on the communal level, there was the deeply ambiguous issue of the Judenra¨te, which to this day awaits its definitive historian. The Communists, by and large, were not implicated in this wartime crime, which is another feature setting them apart from the East European societies in which they operated. But this fact did not facilitate the legitimization of their postwar rule. Therefore, wanting above all to authenticate themselves as the only organizational embodiment of the true national interest, the Communists did not shy away from tapping into xenophobia and ethnic prejudice in order to mobilize support. For instance, just before the referendum in which voters were urged by the Communists to vote “three times yes,”63 Gomulka (who would soon be shunted aside for his “nationalist deviation”) deliberately used a German phrase in labeling “drei mal nein” the legal anti-Communist opposition. (When Khrushchev was reinstated as the first secretary of the Communist party in Ukraine, he said to a Jewish veteran who wondered why the destruction of Ukrainian Jewry was not properly commemorated: “Here we are in the Ukraine, and it is not in our interest to associate the return of Soviet power with the return of the Jews.”)64 The tone of patriotic rhetoric deployed in the immediate postwar years by the Polish Communists replicated the message of right-wing nationalists in many important respects. Anti-German hysteria combined with a vague pan-Slavism to produce a nationalistic tone reminiscent of Roman Dmowski. And the key message— the call for “national unity” and for the exertion of the “national will”—was even more on target. The “nation,” in all its forms and linguistic variations, was the most frequently enunciated word in public speeches and party documents of this period. A young


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Polish historian, Marcin Zaremba, provides an excellent analysis of this phenomenon in a recent study.65 Nationalist terminology—the metaphors of Blut und Boden, or rather of “blood and bones” [z krwi i kosći]—was employed to emphasize the purported lineage of the Communist movement as part and parcel of the historic struggle for the national liberation of Poland. Such terminology replaced class analysis and the Marxist arguments regarding historical inevitability. The word “Communism” was rarely to be seen, to the discomfort of some veteran party members. These veterans must also have frowned at the spectacle of a seasoned party operative—“Comrade Tomasz” to those who knew him, but who now called himself Bolesław Bierut—identifying himself as a man without party affiliation (bezpartyjny), and soon thereafter taking an oath of office that concluded with the formulaic “so help me God.” Even the party name avoided the word “Communist.” Previously known as the Polish Communist Party (Komunistyczna Partia Polski [KPP]), it reconstituted itself in 1942 as the Polish Workers Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza [PPR]) and later, in 1948, after its merger with the Polish socialist party, the Polish United Workers Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza [PZPR]). All these disguises notwithstanding, the public was not fooled, as a popular reading of the acronym PPR— Płatne Pachołki Rosji (Russia’s mercenary knaves)—clearly demonstrated. But the Communists were not dissuaded. Knowing well that repetition was the cornerstone of successful propaganda, they made every effort to adopt a whole range of traditional vocabulary from their political opponents. At Stalin’s insistence, a core of Communist activists then being groomed to play leading roles in postwar Poland had banded together in the Soviet Union in 1942 to form an organization called the Association of Polish Patriots (Zwia¸zek Patrioto´w Polskich [ZPP]). Wanda Wasilewska, an eminence grise of this association, was initially somewhat nonplussed.66 The word “patriot,” she pointed out to Stalin, had a negative ring in the ears of Polish Communists. To which he replied that “every word can be given a new meaning, and it is up to you what meaning it will be endowed with.”67 The Soviet Communists had long since come to the realization that suffusing language with new meanings was a most effective mechanism of social control, next only to the direct application of police terror. Behind this screen of “Polish patriotism,” “national unity,” “national will,” “blood and bones,” “raison d’e´tat,” “so help me God,” and pan-Slavist sentiment, the sovietization of Polish society was energetically pursued. To quote Jakub Berman, one of the most influential Politburo members at the time: “The history of the workers’ movement acquires blood and body [nabiera krwi i ciała] when we manage to situate the movement in the wholeness of national history. It is time to tie together, to organically unify the history of our party and of the workers’ movement with the history of the nation. . . .”68 Given these Communist efforts to attain legitimacy, it is no wonder that it did not have much room (even if it had any will) to defend Jewish interests, however these may have been construed. Thus, their benign neglect of the Holocaust, and its inclusion with other unmentionable themes, did not necessarily exemplify bad faith on the part of the new rulers. Their stance was a natural outcome of the leading ideology and the practicalities of the moment. When Stalin’s increasingly aggressive antisemitism was

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factored in, an implicit social contract between the Communist authorities and the newly subjugated Polish society became more solidly cemented. According to this contract, it was of mutual benefit both to treat the wartime fate of Polish Jewry as a non-issue and to encourage the exodus of the remainder of Polish Jewry. This, in a sense, was the “give” in exchange for the “take”—the latter being the monopoly of power that the Communists had grabbed on the Soviet Union’s urging and at their own behest. Accordingly, when the Auschwitz museum was opened, dedicated to the commemoration of the international anti-fascist struggle and martyrology, the word “Jew” could hardly be found there. This situation lasted throughout the Communist period of rule. During the brief span of five years following the end of the war, as a constitutive part of the process of consolidation of Communist rule, Poland was rendered, in effect, Judenrein. The final cleansing took place with two subsequent waves of Jewish emigration, both of them permitted and induced by the Communist authorities, in 1956–1957, and in 1968–1969. Thus, quite appropriately under the stewardship of Władysław Gomułka, who had been accused of “nationalist deviation” in 1948 and who had come back into power in 1956 as a patriotic Communist, what had begun proudly as the “national road to socialism” ended two decades later, in 1968, toute proportion gardeé, in national socialism, plain and simple. Rather than bringing Communism to Poland, as a facile historiography of this period maintains, the Jews, after a millennial presence in these lands, were finally driven out of the country under the Communist regime. In the words of the Nobel prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz, Poland’s Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of the Polish nationalists: they were the ones who brought into existence an ethnically pure state.

Notes This essay is the revised version of a talk originally delivered at a plenary session of the 7th Lessons and Legacies Conference held at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1–4 Nov. 2002. 1. Elie Hale´vy, “Une interpre´tation de la crise mondiale, 1914–1918” (lecture delivered at Oxford in 1929), in his L’E`re des tyrranies: e´tudes sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris: 1938), 173. 2. Jan T. Gross, “Themes for a Social History of War Experience and Collaboration,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. Istvań Dea´k, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton: 2000), 15–36. 3. Henri Michel, The Shadow War: European Resistance 1939–1945 (New York: 1972). 4. Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) features a lengthy interview with Karski in which he describes the circumstances of his mission. 5. See also E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Genocide (New York: 1994), 223–238. 6. On September 15, 1944 the political bureau of the Polish Workers’ Party (as the Communist party was known at the time) adopted the following declaration, which Home Army soldiers were supposed to sign: I, [name], having been sent to an internment camp on suspicion of having a negative attitude toward the only legal organizations of the Polish state—the KRN, the PKWN


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[both organizations, as discussed later in this essay, were sponsored by the Communist party] and the supreme command of the Polish Army, declare from my own unforced and free will the following: 1) I appreciate the activity of the KRN and PKWN as indispensable for our nation and in my further work I will remain loyal and obedient to all their regulations, as befits a Polish soldier; 2) I understand and condemn the abominable activity of the leaders of the AK and other affiliated organizations, which helped the Hitlerite occupier, and weakened by their diversionary activity the Polish army and the unity of the Polish nation. . . . and so forth in the same spirit for two additional paragraphs, ending in a promise to aid the KRN and the PKWN in combating these “pernicious influences.” Krystyna Kersten, “Rok pierwszy,” Wydawnictwa szkolne i pedagogiczne (Warsaw: 1993), 49. 7. In Polish folklore and historiography, Jo´zef Piłsudski’s counteroffensive pushing the Bolsheviks back from Warsaw has been referred to as “the miracle on the Vistula” (cud nad Wisla). August 15th, the day on which he began his maneuver in 1920, was celebrated during the interwar years as a Polish national holiday. 8. The pretext used to justify this refusal was that the local population had allegedly expressed a sovereign wish to join the Soviet Union in a referendum organized in the occupied territories on October 22, 1939. On the manner in which this “referendum” was conducted by the Soviets, see my Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: 1988), ch. 2. 9. Katyn´—Dokumenty ludobo´jstwa: dokumenty i materiały archiwalne przekazane Polsce 14 pa´zdziernika 1992r. (Warsaw: 1992), esp. 34–46. 10. Centralny Komitet Z˙ydo´w w Polsce (Warsaw) (hereafter: CKZ˙P), wydział organizacyjny, 304/3. For full identification of the source, one needs to know the date of the document. If the date appears in the text, I do not note it again. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. State Archive in Cracow (hereafter: SAC), Urza¸d Wojewodzki (hereafter: UW) 2/1073. 14. Ibid. (memo from the County Jewish Committee in Chrzano´w to the Sociopolitical Department of the Cracow Voievodship, 11 July 1945). 15. CKZ˙P, wydział produktywizacji 303/XII/6 (25 April 1945). 16. Ibid., 18/VI–VII/46. 17. Quoted in Ewa Ko´zminska-Frejlak, “Polska jako ojczyzna Z˙ydo´w—z˙ydowskie strategie zadomowienia sie w powojennej Polsce (1944–1949),” in Kultura i Społeczen´stwo 43, no. 1 (1999) 131. 18. SAC, UW 2/1073. 19. CKZ˙P, wydział organizacyjny, 304/3. 20. See, for example, Wincenty Bednarczuk, “Dwie waz˙ne sprawy,” Odrodzenie, 9 Sept. 1945. The same point is made by Jerzy Putrament (“Odbudowa psychiczna,” ibid., 1 Oct. 1944), Kazimierz Wyka (“Pote¸ga ciemnoty potwierdzona,” ibid., 23 Sept. 1945) and other authors. 21. CKZ˙P, wydział organizacyjny 304/5 (2 May 1945). 22. On Polish Jews who wound up in German D.P. camps, see Ruth Gay, Safe Among the Germans. Liberated Jews After World War II (New Haven: 2002). 23. Heda Margolius Kovaly, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941–1968 (New York: 1986), 46–47. 24. Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak (eds.), Woko´ł Jedwabnego, 2 vols. (Warsaw: 2002), 2:305. A normative order of sorts regulated access to plundered Jewish property. The governing rule was simple: those who participated in the killings had a better claim than anybody else. Thus, when Helena Klimaszewska, from the village of Gonia¸dz, went to nearby Radziło´w to get an apartment for her in-laws, knowing that apartments were available after the Jews there had been killed, she was rebuffed by a certain Feliks Godlewski (she

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told the story during a deposition at his trial after the war), who reproached the claimants for not having been there when they were needed—that is, needed to kill the Jews. “You could have killed 10 Jews and you would have gotten a house,” she quoted him as saying at the time. Her mother-in-law protested that the family had in fact made their contribution to the cause, as her grandson, Jo´zef Ekstowicz, was the one who had climbed on the barn where the Jews were assembled and had doused its roof with gasoline. It is not clear from the transcript how persuasive this argument proved to be (ibid., 1:41, 246; 2: 932, 954). 25. Shraga Feivel Bielawski, The Last Jew From Wegrow (New York: 1991), 72. 26. Yad Vashem, 03/3033-1636/255; also found in Woko´ł Jedwabnego, 2:263–317. The original of Chaja Finkelsztejn’s testimony was only partially translated by the Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamie¸ci Narodowej [IPN]); the segment recounting her family’s peregrinations after the Radziło´w Jews had been killed is not included. A similar exchange is recounted by Bielawski, writing about the vicinity of We¸gro´w where he was trying to find a hiding place at a peasant’s house with whom he used to do business: He thought for a moment and replied, “this is a time when everyone is paying attention to everyone else’s business. If my neighbors or friends knew that I was hiding Jews, I would be in big trouble. They would think I had made much money from the Jews and would report me to the Germans” (Last Jew from Wegrow, 72). Yet another conversation along the same lines was overheard by a Jewish boy, Emanuel Kriegel, hiding in a peasant’s house near Buczacz: Our landlady was visited by a banderist [a member of a Ukrainian nationalist organization] . . . [who] boasted that he had killed 40 Jews in the forest, and he pressed our landlady to confess that she keeps Jews at her place because she has money. And it is known that who has money must be keeping Jews. But our landlady did not confess (Z˙ydowski Instytut Historyczny, 301/196). 27. Irving Heymont, Among the Survivors of the Holocaust, 1945: The Landsberg DP Camp Letters of Major Irving Heymont, United States Army (Cincinnati: 1982), 49–50. 28. Gay, Safe among the Germans, 183. 29. Gazeta Wyborcza, 1 April 2001. 30. In many instances, the flight was organized by the illegal (but officially tolerated) Zionist movement known as berih ah. The subject was introduced into Polish-language historiography by Natalia Aleksiun-Ma¸drzak in a series of three articles published in 1996 in the Biuletyn Z˙ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego. Aleksiun is also preparing a translation of David Engel’s Bein shih rur livrih ah: niz olei hashoah befolin vehamaavak al hanhagatam 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv: 1996) into Polish. 31. See Paweł Machcewicz’s introduction to Woko´ł Jedwabnego. 32. Andrzej Rzeplin´ski, “Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej? Sprawy karne oskarz˙onych o wymordowanie Z˙ydo´w w Jedwabnym w s´wietle zasady rzetelnego procesu,” in Woko´ł Jedwabnego, 1: 353–459. 33. See, especially, Andrzej Z˙bikowski, “Pogromy i mordy ludnosći z˙ydowskiej w Łomz˙yn´skim i na Białstocczyznie latem 1941 roku w s´wietle relacji ocalałych Z˙ydo´w i dokumento´w sa¸dowych,” in ibid., 1:159–271; Jan J. Milewski, “Wybrane akta proceso´w karnych z lat 1945–1958 w sprawach o udział w zbrodni na ludnosći z˙ydowskiej w Radziłowie,” ibid., 2: 863–983. 34. Hal Lehrman, Russia’s Europe (New York: 1947), 187. 35. Antoni Dudek and Grzegorz Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki: pro´ba biografii politycznej (London: 1990), 156–162; Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Los Angeles: 2001), 75–77. 36. Serge Moscovici, Chronique des anneés e´gareés (Paris: 1997), 360. 37. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: 2001), 116. For a full text of Zygmunt Laudan´ski’s petition, see Woko´ł Jedwabnego, 2:607–609.


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38. Hal Lehrman, “Hungary: Liberation’s Bitter Fruit,” Commentary (Jan. 1946), 30. 39. Moscovici, Chronique des anneés e´gareés, 359. 40. SAC, UW 2/91, “Sprawozdanie z powiatu bochen´skiego” (21 Aug. 1945). 41. CKZ˙P, Prezydium, 303/3. 42. Ida Gertsman, “Zajsćia w Kielcach,” Biuletyn Z˙ydowskiego Instytutu Historyznego (Warsaw) 4 (1996), 23–24. 43. CKZ˙P, wydział organizacyjny, 304/35 (29 June 1946). 44. CKZ˙P, Central Special Commission, box 1–2, “Komisja Specjalna w Krakowie, Os´wie¸cim” (27 Jan. 1947). 45. SAC, Jewish voievodship committee, 14/87. 46. This is the estimate given by the late Lucjan Dobroszycki. 47. See Gross, Neighbors, 129–131. 48. CKZ˙P, Central Special Commission, box 1–2, 156–158, emphasis added. 49. Cf. Julien Benda’s famed attack on corrupt intellectuals, “La Trahison des clercs” (1927). 50. Andrzej Paczkowski, “O stanie badan´ nad pogromem kieleckim: Dyskusja w Z˙ydowskim Instytucie Historycznym (12. III. 1996) z referatem wprowadzaja¸cym prof. Krystyny Kersten,” Biuletyn Z˙ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 4 (1996), 11. 51. Ibid., 12. 52. Ibid. 53. Jerzy Kochanowski (ed.), Protokoły posiedzen Prezydium Krajowej Rady Narodowej, 1944–1947 (Warsaw: 1995), 200. 54. Ibid., 302. 55. Quoted in Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: 2002), 346. 56. While Jews were literally running away from Communism, the Communists were politically running away from the Jews. What of the “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” (z˙ydokomuna) conflation, then, which had taken on many lives and, judging from considered opinions of various historians and public personalities in Poland, has currency even today? Its epistemological status, it seems to me, is about the same as that of a proposition which identifies Jews as vampires. That many people believed in both (many of the same people, one could add), and that many people acted on them, unfortunately, for all concerned, does make them “real in their consequences,” but does not make either myth true. Jews were not drinking Christian blood, just as they were not using it in their religious rituals, and they were not responsible for bringing Communism to Poland. In other words, Jews were perceived as a threat by their neighbors not because they were vampires or because they were Communist, because they were neither. I will leave the accounting for actual reasons to another study. Here let me simply add that there are not even reliable statistical data to support claims of predominant Jewish presence in the security police (see Andrej Paczkowski, “Z˙ydzi w UB: pro´ba weryfikacji stereotypu,” in Komunizm: ideologia, system i ludzie, ed. Tomasz Szarota [Warsaw: 2001], 192–204). The presence of Jews in the higher echelons of the Communist party and security service apparatus in East Central Europe after the war deserves serious study, including an evaluation whether they acted their roles qua Jews or qua Communists, and what their options and survival strategies were, given the mounting antisemitism emanating from Moscow. 57. Paczkowski, “O stanie badan´ nad pogromem kieleckim,” 11. 58. CKZ˙P, wydział prawny, 303/XVI/408. 59. CKZ˙P, Central Special Commission, box 1-2, folder 1, 114 (6 Nov. 1946). 60. See his statement in Gazeta Wyborcza, 3–4 March 2001. 61. Opinia, 15 (25 July 1946). 62. Kuz˙nica 8 (1946). 63. That is, they were asked to approve proposals concerning land reform, the new state borders, and abolition of the Polish senate. 64. Quoted in Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: 2001), 212.

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65. Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warsaw: 2001), esp. chs. 4 and 5. 66. A fascinating political biography of Wasilewska remains to be written. The daughter of Leon Wasilewski, Piłsudski’s close friend and interwar Poland’s first minister of foreign affairs, she was a writer and an activist in the Polish socialist party. Later, meeting Stalin, she promptly gained his confidence and friendship—she was possibly the only woman who wielded political influence with the Soviet ruler. Wasilewska later married a prominent Communist Ukrainian party activist and writer, Alexander Korneichuk, and remained in the Soviet Union after the war. 67. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 131. 68. Berman’s speech of 15 Sept., quoted in ibid., 168.

Jews and Communists in the Islamic World: A Note on Abraham Serfaty and Henri Curiel Walter Laqueur

A great deal has been written about Jews and socialism up to the period ending with the Second World War, in particular the role Jews played in the radical movements of 19th-century Europe and the reasons they were attracted initially to socialism and later to Communism. Much less attention has been given to the period after 1945, when the Soviet Union emerged as one of the two superpowers. Jews surviving the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe felt a debt of gratitude to the Red Army. The war years and the immediate postwar period, therefore, witnessed a rise in Jewish membership in Communist parties in various parts of the world. But the attitude of the Soviet regime toward Jews (including Communist Jews) had been ambiguous, to say the least, since the 1930s, and most Jews had been purged from the upper reaches of the Soviet party and state apparatus even before the Second World War. In the “People’s Democracies,” particularly Poland and Hungary but to a certain extent also in Czechoslovakia and Romania, Jews initially constituted a large part of the supreme party leadership. In the wake of Stalin’s antisemitic campaign in the early 1950s, though, most were dismissed and many were executed or imprisoned. It was for this reason (among many others) that Jews, in increasing numbers, began to leave the Communist movement—and the phenomenon of Jewish “fellow travelers” similarly went into decline. The fascination with radical political movements persisted, however, even if not on the same wide scale, finding its expression in support for other causes such as the New Left, the third-world liberation movements, and Trotskyism. There were also cases in which Jews outside the Soviet bloc opted to remain within the Communist movement in the post-Stalinist period despite the sense of shock that undermined the faith of so many in the wake of Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956 and subsequent revelations regarding the years of the terror; the invasion of Hungary in 1956; and that of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even though such instances are now of marginal interest in socio-historical terms, they provide fascinating studies in biography and psychology. What follows is a brief discussion of two cases, drawn not from Europe but from the Islamic world, that have rarely been discussed in the historiographical literature. 227

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The Arab-Israeli conflict played a central part in the lives of Abraham Serfaty and Henri Curiel, two Jewish Communists who dreamed of revolution in the Middle East and who believed that Jewish militants could play an important role in this struggle. Both became legends in their own lifetimes. Abraham Serfaty was born in Casablanca in 1926 into a middle-class Jewish family. From his boyhood, he remembers debates about the Spanish Civil War, and he was an adolescent during the Second World War, when power in Morocco passed to the Vichy authorities. After the war, he studied geology, mineralogy, and mining in France. Returning to Morocco in 1951, Sefarty began to work for the government as head of a phosphate mine in the north of the country. While still a student in France, Serfaty had joined the Communist party. Back in Morocco, his activities on behalf of the party caused him to be exiled, together with other members of his family, to France. Serfaty returned to Morocco when the country gained its independence in 1956. He resumed his work for the Ministry of Mines until he was dismissed in 1968. After years of political activity, partly underground, he was arrested in 1974. He spent the next 17 years in Moroccan prisons, mostly in the Saharan desert. At first, Serfaty was tortured in prison, as was his sister (who died in 1976). His son was also arrested for a while; directly or indirectly, the whole family suffered. By the 1980s, however, Serfaty’s situation had improved. He was permitted to conduct a wide correspondence from the camp in which he was detained, and he received all the books and newspapers he wanted. From prison, he wrote articles and books that were published outside Morocco. On one occasion Serfaty said that he and his comrades were perhaps the freest people in the whole country. No one bothered about what they were doing so long as they did not attempt to escape. In 1991, Serfaty was deprived of his Moroccan nationality (the family held dual Brazilian and Moroccan citizenship) and was once again deported to France together with his French wife, Christine, who had been very active in mobilizing world public opinion in the fight for his release. A widely educated man of undoubted courage, imposing stature, and presence, Serfaty had attracted much attention among left-wing circles, above all in France. The Moroccan authorities, viewing him as a troublemaker, were only too happy to be rid of him. Several years later, however, following the death of King Hassan II and the ascension to the throne of King Mohammed VI, a more liberal policy prevailed in Morocco. Serfaty, by now a well-known writer and political celebrity, was not only permitted to return to Morocco but was given a reception befitting a national hero. He was given employment in the government, a villa was put at his disposal, and he was permitted to tour the country and familiarize himself with the changes that had occurred during his absence. What makes the case of Serfaty so interesting is the fact that he spent much of the time in his desert prison (and later in his French exile) thinking and writing about Moroccan Jews—in particular, lamenting their sad fate in Israel, whither most of them had emigrated. Serfaty wrote a series of books against Zionism and Israel. This was no mean achievement, considering that he had never been anywhere near Israel, and that the books and newspapers supplied by his friends and well-wishers could provide only partial information about the state of affairs there. Serfaty’s

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passionate involvement with the issue and hostility to the state of Israel were second to none: when a Moroccan government minister once called him a Zionist, Serfaty brought a libel suit against him.1 That a Marxist-Leninist should have opposed Zionism and Israel is not particularly surprising. What is fascinating is that this became such a central issue for an inmate of a prison located two thousand miles from Jerusalem. Should not Serfaty have been preoccupied with affairs nearer home? He certainly did regard Morocco as his home; he was a patriot who always defined himself as a Jewish Moroccan. The case reminds us of Viktor Klemperer, who became famous following the posthumous publication of his diaries. During the Second World War, Klemperer had been confined to a so-called “Jew house” in the city of Dresden, where he underwent all the humiliations and persecutions that were the lot of the German Jews. He witnessed how Jews all around him were deported to the camps in Poland, and he knew that they would be murdered there. Klemperer expected to be arrested by the Gestapo at any hour and to share the fate of other Jews. And yet, in the middle of the war, he confided in his diary that the most urgent challenge facing him was to write a book refuting Herzl and Zionism. Strange are the ways in which humans react to extreme situations. In the case of both Serfaty and Klemperer, it may be that psychology rather than politics is where an explanation is best sought. Two of the questions that particularly preoccupied Serfaty were the correct strategy to be followed by the Palestinian revolution and the fate of his fellow Moroccan Jews. When Serfaty joined the Communist party soon after the end of the war, many young Moroccan Jews from the intelligentsia and the middle class had been party sympathizers. In fact, the very founder of the Moroccan Communist party, Leon Rene´ Sultan, was a Jew from Tunisia. But over the next few years, most of the Jews dropped out, whereas Serfaty remained a militant. He was aware of the fact that the presence of Jews in the party was an embarrassment and that they were to keep a low profile. As Nasser-style pan-Arabism and, later, Islamism grew stronger in the country, the problem of Jews in Moroccan politics became ever more acute; the Communist party needed above all native—that is to say, Muslim— militants. Thus, to give but one example, it was pointed out to Serfaty that he should not sign articles for the party press with his real name. Of course, this syndrome was not specifically Moroccan; “Trotsky,” “Kamenev,” “Zinoviev,” and “Radek” were not, after all, their original names. Although this directive annoyed Serfaty, it did not at the time undermine his belief in the party or in its leader, Ali Yata. Yet he never made a secret of his Jewish origins. In any case, it would have been difficult to deny them, but beyond that, he was not ashamed of his family, his ancestors, or, generally speaking, Moroccan Jewry. What did pain him greatly were the reports he received concerning the horrible fate of his brothers and sisters who, seduced by fraudulent Zionist propaganda, had foolishly emigrated to Israel. These Jews, he firmly believed, were oppressed and exploited: the women were compelled to work as prostitutes or domestics, whereas the men were considered the lowest of the low in that colonialist country. The entire country was rotten—David Ben-Gurion had wanted to establish an empire reaching from the Nile to the Euphrates, and the military clique of fascist generals such as Motta Gur were the real masters of Israel. Moreover,

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the kibbutzim were not at all socialist in inspiration and practice but were rather fortresses of imperialism. The whole Zionist endeavor was based on deception, inasmuch as there was no Israeli people. And the so-called Sefaradim in Israel, such as Yitzhak Navon, Israel’s president from 1978 to 1983, were not really Sefaradim. But why, then, had the misguided Moroccan Jews gone to Israel in the first place? Serfaty put some of the blame on himself and his comrades. As a Communist militant, he explained, he had focused on the class struggle and had not taken account of ethnic identities. The first few years of Moroccan independence had been a failure. Moroccan Jews thought they were facing a dead end; emigration to Israel seemed to be the only way out. Instead of trying to persuade them to remain in their native country, Serfaty and his friends had tacitly accepted the exodus. In retrospect, he believed, this was his great and tragic failure. When the friend interviewing him argued that the economic position of Moroccan Jews in Israel was better than it would have been in Morocco, Serfaty agreed (this was more than 15 years after he had maintained that Moroccan women were compelled to work as prostitutes), but he stressed that the crux of the matter was moral rather than economic. Moroccan Jews, he said, were living in Israel on the basis of an injustice committed against the Palestinians in 1948.2 Another issue Serfaty grappled with was the strikingly right-wing and anti-Arab stance espoused by Moroccan Jews in Israel. Why had Moroccan Jews overwhelmingly voted for Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benyamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon rather than for the forces of peace? These questions bothered Serfaty, as they troubled the post-colonialist intellectuals in Israel. Was it a case of what Marxists would call “false consciousness”? Serfaty’s explanation, in brief, was that the Moroccan Jews were essentially not nationalist at all. Rather, their opting for the Likud and other right-wing parties was primarily a protest vote against the Ashkenazic establishment as represented by the Labor party. Serfaty found some comfort in the emergence of the Sephardic-oriented Shas party and in the declaration made in 1996 by the party’s mentor, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (the spiritual leader of Moroccan Jews even though he was of Iraqi origin), that it was permissible and even desirable to exchange land for peace—a position that was contrary to the Likud ideology. But Ovadia was an uncertain ally for a Marxist internationalist, and many of his subsequent declarations, widely criticized for their apparently racist character, must have come as a shock. In the pre-1948 era, anti-Zionists could oppose the very idea of a sovereign Jewish state. Serfaty and others, however, had to deal with the state of Israel as a given. What was the correct position for a revolutionary vis-a`-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict? For many years, Serfaty supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an organization that, led in the main by Christian Arabs, supported a secular rather than a religious (Islamic) policy. But this organization was weak and its Marxism did not go very deep; like erstwhile Communists in other Arab countries, many of its supporters drifted into the Islamic camp. Serfaty, for his part, left the Communist party in the 1970s and became a free-floating member of the extreme Left. As far as Palestine was concerned, he placed his hope in the “progres-


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sive, non-capitalist wing” of Fatah, which in his view was still the most democratic of all Arab movements and—from the 1990s—governments. Serfaty, as noted, was a Moroccan patriot: he loved the country and its people, its culture, language, and customs. At the same time, he felt equally rooted, especially in his later years, in the Moroccan Jewish cultural tradition. Reminiscing about his youth, he would often mention festivities such as Mimouna (immediately following Passover), although never attributing any religious significance to them. But was a Moroccan-Jewish synthesis at all realistic? True, fond memories of Morocco could also be found among many of those who had emigrated to Israel, and by the 1980s there was a steady stream of Israeli tourists visiting the sites of their origin. Yet even before Islamism took stronger hold in Morocco, there were many Muslims who thought that, while Jews had the right to live in their country, they had no business to interfere in public affairs or politics. Historically, Morocco had shown more tolerance toward Jews than any other Arab country—there had been Moroccan Jewish ministers and ambassadors well before there were Jewish ministers in Europe. But there also had been persecutions and pogroms.3 Moreover, the country was by no means wholly secular. Intermarriage, for instance, was almost nonexistent. And a case such as Serfaty’s, in which a Jewish “prodigal son” returned home from abroad, was the exception, not the rule, even in this most liberal of North African countries. Serfaty, of course, had mellowed over the years. He understood the reasons for the downfall of the Soviet Union and its satellites and the decline of Communism. He still believed in the struggle for a better world, but this belief he shared with many others, not only with Marxists. He accepted the changes for the better in Morocco and the likelihood of further liberalization. (He might, in fact, have been too sanguine in this respect.) He realized that his earlier enthusiasm for the cause of the Polisario in the western Sahara had been excessive; were he forced, in the 1990s, to chose between an Algerian-dominated western Saharan independent state and one in which Moroccan influence was preeminent, Serfaty would no longer opt for the former. Even with regard to Israel, his views underwent certain changes. Initially he had been against the existence of the Jewish state tout court. Later he had accepted that until such time as a bi-national state would emerge, two separate states would have to exist side by side. In an interview in 1999, he said that he thought it beneficial for mankind if there were an Israeli state with a Jewish majority, provided such a state was secular and represented all its citizens, Arab as well as Jewish. Just as a future democratic state in Morocco should not adopt Islam as the state religion, so Judaism should not be the state religion in Israel. This was a far cry from the views he had voiced 20 years earlier, and Serfaty’s more extremist comrades were not particularly happy with the way in which the older revolutionary was now willing to make concessions to political reality. Nonetheless, Serfaty still kept his distance from Israel, despite its huge Moroccan Jewish population so dear to him. Invited by some of the “post-Zionists” at BenGurion University to attend a conference, Serfaty declined. His refusal recalled Oswald Spengler, the famous prophet of the decline of the West, who, in the 1920s,

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was invited by Harvard University to attend a university jubilee. Although Spengler had never visited the United States, this had not prevented him from delivering a greatly detailed ex cathedra judgment about the place. In declining the invitation, he explained that, having just written about America, he thought it wrong to expose himself to a wealth of new impressions that might well affect his thinking on the topic. Similarly, although Serfaty’s refusal to visit the country about which he had written so much was no doubt influenced by a number of considerations, he may also have been thinking along Spenglerian lines. (Serfaty was also invited by a group of left-wing Palestinians to visit Beirut, but terrorists threatened to kill him and the visit did not take place.) Abraham Serfaty’s story has a happy ending in that, after many years of imprisonment and exile, he was able to return to his home country as a free man. An open question is whether all of the courageous sacrifices he had made (which also affected many of those close to him) were necessary and justified. Would not developments in Morocco have proceeded along much the same lines even if Serfaty and his comrades had never been politically active? Had he perhaps fought and suffered for a cause that was in many respects dubious—a cause, after all, that elsewhere had led to Stalinism and the imposition of repressive regimes? It is understandable that for Communist militants far away from the Soviet Union, such matters may have appeared less important, given their preoccupation with local conditions and the local struggle. But here another question arises: how could Serfaty, as a Jew (and thus, despite his own feelings on the matter, an outsider), ever hoped to have had a significant impact on Morocco’s political life? It seems to have occurred to Serfaty in later years that he had accepted a heavy responsibility not just insofar as his own life was concerned, but also in the sense that he had caused a great deal of pain to those close to him.4 In May 1998, Abraham Serfaty served as honorary chairman of a gathering of leftwing French intellectuals that was held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the murder of Henri Curiel on a Paris street. The story of Curiel is in many ways a counterpoint to that of Serfaty: an enigmatic tale of a young, idealistic intellectual of many talents who wanted to fight for the revolution, but who had the misfortune to be born a Jew in an Arab country. Curiel thought of himself as an Egyptian, a belief rarely shared by his fellow Egyptians. The Curiels had come to Egypt at the time of Napoleon. His grandfather had been a moneylender and his (blind) father a successful banker. Although by no means among the very richest of Egypt’s Jews—the Curiel house in Zamalek, a Cairo suburb, was not one of the grandest—the family still had some fifteen servants working for them. Born in 1914, Henri went to a French Jesuit school. In fact, French was his first language, his knowledge of Arabic remaining scanty throughout his life. Whereas Curiel’s brother went to France to study, eventually becoming a wellknown archaeologist who specialized in numismatics, Henri was groomed to become his father’s successor in the bank—a prospect he loathed. Tall and very thin, the young Curiel developed pre-tubercular symptoms. His interests at the time, and for years to come, were divided between radical politics and avant-garde literature


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and the arts. As his biographer, Giles Perrault, put it, he “sought consolation in books and women, sharing his time equitably between the young ladies of his acquaintance and Cairo whores. The former he gave Proust to read, and the latter Dostoevsky.”5 Curiel’s cultural interests were shared by other young Jewish intellectuals in Egypt and Iraq. In 1943, he founded (or rather refounded) the Communist party of Egypt, a small sect that had been in existence in the 1920s under a suitably inoffensive name: the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation. A few years later, Arturo Schwarz helped to found the Egyptian branch of the fourth (Trotskyite) International. But whereas Curiel, after some initial hesitation, stayed in politics, Schwarz, having been deported from Egypt, became a leading expert on surrealism and Dadaism, an art dealer, and the author of many studies, among them works on Andre´ Breton, Marcel Duchamp, alchemy, the kabbalah, and Far Eastern religions. (In 2001, he donated part of his unique art collection to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.) After the end of the war, Curiel was arrested, and he spent more than a year in a detention camp. In 1950, he too was deported to France, where he became the head of a group of Communist sympathizers (the Rome group) that supported the coup of the young officers in Cairo led by Gamal Abdul Nasser. The Paris-based group remained in existence for a number of years and for a time was known as the “Egyptian Democrats of Jewish Origin”—an accurate name, given its composition. Eventually it was dissolved, as was the Communist party in Egypt, which became part of the semi-legal Arab Socialist Union. From the mid-1950s, Curiel’s interests were focused on national liberation movements in the third world. Among the French Communist leadership, he was always regarded with a certain amount of suspicion: considered useful in some respects, but kept at arm’s length. (He was rehabilitated by the party only in the 1990s, long after his assassination.) Curiel’s main passion during the late 1950s was support for the struggle of the Algerian rebels against the French colonial authorities. Subsequently he supported the Communist cause in Vietnam, Cuba, and China, as well as various Latin American radicals, including those advocating guerrilla warfare and terrorism. He was also the founder and coordinator of the French anti-colonial movement (later known as Solidarite´).6 For their part, the French authorities showed a great deal of tolerance toward him, considering that he was a stateless foreigner who had been driven into French exile on slender grounds. In 1960, however, Curiel was arrested and spent some 18 months in Fresnes prison. After his release, he continued his activities as before; apparently Curiel had some powerful protectors on the French political scene. It is hard to say what was more striking about Curiel: his courage and idealism, or his political naivete´. How, by the 1960s, could he have failed to realize that something had gone very wrong with the Communist countries of Europe? How could he have had illusions about the kind of regimes that were emerging in the third world after their liberation from the colonialist yoke? Algeria should have been a warning sign—but such was his loyalty to the ideals of his early years that Curiel refused to accept the sad reality. Apart from admirers, Curiel had many detractors and enemies. Questions were

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asked about his activities in Paris. Who, exactly, did he support—radical political movements, to be sure, but perhaps also terrorist groups and figures such as the notorious Carlos? Who funded his activities? And what kind of assistance did he provide: moral support, or also false papers, safe houses, and other logistic backup? Or perhaps even weapons funneled through various foreign intelligence services? Was it not true that one of the most important Soviet spies of the cold war period, Georges Blake (Behar), was his younger cousin? (It was true; but BlakeBehar had stayed with the Curiels in Cairo only when he was a schoolboy, and it is most unlikely that Henri paid much attention to him.) Curiel’s activities remain shrouded in secrecy. For all one knows, the importance of Solidarite´ was greatly exaggerated. But he was treading on dangerous ground and thus became a victim, gunned down at the entrance to his Paris home on May 4, 1978. Who killed him? Some suspect the Mossad, but this seems most unlikely. Curiel was not considered an enemy of Israel; he had not opposed Israel’s establishment in 1948 and, at the time of his death, he had been involved in arranging unofficial peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. A more likely possibility is that that Palestinian extremists were behind the assassination, a theory that is supported by the fact that others involved in negotiations with Israelis (for instance, Issam Sartawi) were killed at about the same time. Finally, it is possible that Curiel’s murder was engineered by intelligence agents belonging to one of the regimes opposed by Curiel and his associates. But this is a less likely theory. What drove young Jews in modern times to join revolutionary movements? Various explanations have been adduced, notably those that refer to the messianic elements in Judaism or to the marginal status of the Jews in society, which made them particularly sensitive to questions of social justice. In Morocco, as elsewhere, membership in the Communist party was also seen by some Jews as a path leading to integration into the broader society, but in Egypt, there could be no illusions on this score. One can think of a single case in which individual Jews earned some gratitude; this was South Africa under Nelson Mandela, where Joe Slowo and his Communist comrades served the new regime for some time after the end of apartheid. But this was a rare exception, just as Mandela was an exception. Given the power of nationalism and religion in the Arab world, Henri Curiel and his fellow Jewish Communists in Cairo and Alexandria were in a more precarious position than that of the European Jewish Communists. In Europe, Jews were far more integrated in the surrounding society—Trotsky, for example, had an excellent knowledge of the Russian language and was steeped in Russian culture, and the Russian intelligentsia during his time was essentially liberal in orientation. But in the Arab countries, and in the third world in general, the intelligentsia was not particularly tolerant or cosmopolitan in outlook. Although some Arab and third-world intellectuals had played for a while with Marxism-Leninism in the early postwar years, their ideology was seldom more than skin-deep. Over time, almost the entire generation of left-wing radicals joined the Arab nationalist camp and, later, in many cases, Islamic fundamentalist movements. For years, Curiel and some of his close associates were accused of “Zionist


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deviationism” by other Communists—a charge that was far from the truth. In supporting the U.N. resolution of 1947 that favored the establishment of a Jewish and a Palestinian Arab state, Curiel was in line with the official policy of the Soviet Union and most Arab Communist parties. Over time, however, the Communist establishment came to regard Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism as the main “progressive” forces in the Arab world. Whatever the reasons for this trend away from secularism and democracy—and, for that matter, from Marxism and internationalism—it resulted in a situation in which Jews had no place in Arab politics. Abraham Serfaty, the rare exception to this rule, came from the most tolerant of the Arab countries. Both he and Curiel, products of the old Marxist Left, appear today to be relics of a heroic past—romantic revolutionaries who, firmly believing in social justice and a more just society, were willing to sacrifice their lives for the poor and oppressed.

Notes 1. Moroccan authorities had no objections to Serfaty’s campaign against Israel. It was his opposition to the Moroccan occupation of the western Sahara and its struggle against the Polisario (an independence movement subsidized and supported by Algeria) that was considered not merely unpatriotic but downright treacherous. 2. On Serfaty’s views on the Moroccan Jews, their emigration to Israel, and their role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see Abraham Serfaty and Mikhae¨l Elbaz, L’insoumis: juifs, marocains et rebelles (Paris: 2001), 191–241. 3. See Daniel Schroeter, “From Dhimmis to Colonized Subjects: Moroccan Jews and the Sharifian and French Colonial State,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 19, Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 2003), 104–123. 4. Other works by and about Serfaty include a memoir written by Serfaty and his wife, Christine Daure, Memoire de l’autre (Paris: 1993); Abraham Serfaty, Dans le prisons du roi (Paris: 1992); idem, Ecrits de prison sur la Palestine (Paris: 1992); and, most recently, his impressions of Morocco after his return, Le Maroc: du noir au gris (Paris: 1998). I am grateful to Simon Serfaty for providing additional information. 5. See Giles Perrault, A Man Apart: The Life of Henri Curiel (London: 1987); the quote can also be found at http://mondediplo.com/1998/04/13curiel. Perrault’s somewhat hagiographic book focuses on Curiel’s early life. His later life, as will be seen, was largely shrouded in mystery. 6. Some of Curiel’s political writings during this period appear in a collection titled Pour une paix juste au Proche-Orient (Paris: 1979); a Hebrew version appeared as Al mizbah hashalom (Tel Aviv: 1982). See also Rauf Abbas (ed.), Hinri Kuryil wa-al-haraka al-shuyuiya al-misriya (Cairo: 1988), which deals with Curiel’s political activities in Egypt. Recently, other publications about Curiel have appeared, including a work by Husein Kafafi, Hinri Kuryil, al-ustura wa-al-wahj al-akhar (Cairo: 2003), which was not, however, at my disposal at the time this essay was written.

From Zionism to Communism and Back: The Case of Moshe Sneh (1948–1967) Pinhas Ginossar jerusalem

It was in January 1948, at the inaugural conference of Mapam, the United Workers’ Party (Mifleget Hapoalim Hameuhedet), that the Zionist public learned to its surprise that Dr. Moshe Sneh (1909–1972) had crossed the lines to join the left-wing opposition to the Zionist Executive. Shortly before the conference, Sneh was still known as one of the outstanding personalities in the mainstream Zionist leadership—a member of the executives of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Moreover, in the years before Israel’s independence, he had filled two sensitive and responsible roles: that of chief of the national command of the Haganah, the organized military force of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine); and later, that of commander of the resistance movement (tenuat hameri), which in 1946 coordinated the heretofore rival forces of the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi resistance groups. In this regard, Sneh could be regarded as a “minister of defense” of the state-in-the-making, which from time to time had engaged in a violent struggle against the British Mandatory authorities. Why did Sneh choose to break from the mainstream and join a radically leftwing party? At the inaugural conference, he offered the following explanation: I was motivated to adopt a pro-Soviet orientation [in the years 1945–1948] for the following reasons: a) the decisive role of the Soviet Union in crushing Hitlerism and in the rescue of the Holocaust survivors; b) the absolute repudiation by the Labour British government of the obligation made to the Jewish people in relation to Palestine; and the unfavorable impression and negative conclusions gained from direct contact with government circles in France and the United States; c) an analysis that indicated that Soviet support for Jewish independence in Palestine would be forthcoming, that indeed there were already signs pointing to such support.1

These motivations, as he formulated them, were of a Jewish and Zionist nature. Sneh did not “see the light”; he was not convinced by Marxist theory regarding the necessity to join the class struggle, nor was he influenced by universalist con236

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cepts. His reliance on future Soviet support for the Zionist endeavor in Palestine was clearly linked to disillusionment with the Western powers—first and foremost Great Britain, which had turned from friend to foe. Whereas Sneh in this passage provides us with the specific reasoning that led him toward a pro-Soviet position, it is also worthwhile to examine his move in a wider perspective. Sneh was greatly respected and much beloved by the Jewish youth in Eretz Israel even though he had neither grown up in the ranks of the pioneer settler movement nor was in any way connected with it. But several things made him “one of ours”: on the one hand, he was partner to the aspirations, likes, dislikes, and reservations of the younger generation, while, on the other, thanks to his intellectual capabilities and oratorical skill, he became an outstanding spokesman for their hopes and fears. Just as important, Sneh—originally a physician— was also a doer who knew how to mobilize others in settlement projects, military efforts, and political work. Mapam, the party that became Sneh’s political home in 1948, represented the ethos of the radical pioneer movement—the most left-leaning kibbutzim and their paramilitary offshoot, the Palmach. It was also committed to Moscow as the headquarters of genuine “revolutionary” (as opposed to “reformist”) socialism. Nonetheless, Mapam was a strongly Zionist party that was ideologically independent from the world Communist network, remaining an integral part of the Yishuv. In the sphere of international politics, the Yishuv grew increasingly hostile toward Great Britain, particularly after the end of the Second World War. This hostility was exacerbated by every political statement declaring support for the White Paper policy that greatly limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, and by every immigrant ship apprehended by the Royal Navy. By late 1946, Sneh had already concluded that the old alliance between the Zionist movement and Great Britain had come to an end, a conclusion that fit in well with public opinion in the Yishuv. Jewish public sympathy with the U.S.S.R. had become total with the Nazi attack against its borders in the summer of 1941. To all Jews it was clear that every Soviet retreat was a death warrant for tens of thousands of Jews, and every Soviet success meant that Jews would be rescued. Later, both during and after the war, it became increasingly clear that there were prospects for Soviet support for the efforts to establish an independent Jewish state in Palestine. This change of policy was manifested in direct and indirect help to the berih ah (flight) and the haapalah (illegal immigration) movements that brought Holocaust survivors to Palestine, and also in Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s speech at the UN on May 14, 1947, which implicitly pledged support for the establishment of a Jewish state. At that time, a pro-Soviet orientation was thus to a great extent compatible with the consensus in the Yishuv. Moreover, there were important organizations within the Yishuv that sought a synthesis between Zionism and Communism: Hashomer Hazair, Hakibutz Hameuhad, and Left Poale Zion. Sneh, however, had not been counted among their ranks until the founding of Mapam. In the wake of the Second World War it was believed that the “people’s democracies”—Communist regimes established as satellites of the Soviet Union—would present a somewhat more liberal version of Communism. Support for this belief was to be found in the establishment of coalition governments in some states (Po-

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land, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, for instance) and also in the fact that proSoviet parties in the West, enjoying a degree of ideological independence from the Moscow line, were allotted at least a limited degree of legitimacy by the world Communist movement (the party of Pietro Nenni in Italy is a case in point). With respect to the Jews, it was expected that the U.S.S.R. might therefore accept Zionism as one legitimate solution to the Jewish problem. Such reasoning, though not explicitly expressed, lay at the foundation of left-wing Zionism’s pro-Soviet orientation. Sneh was expressing more than his own opinion when he wrote in 1951: It is a completely false claim that the Communist world absolutely rejects the process of the territorial concentration of the dispersed Jewish people and its transformation into a normal nation in the state of Israel. True, there is as yet no absolute acceptance, whether in thought or deed, of the Zionist solution to the Jewish national problem, but there is also no absolute rejection of this solution, either in some ideological declaration or in the practical arena. Dialectical changes in [the sphere of] reality also bring in their wake changes in how one relates to [that] reality.2

This last sentence seemed to imply that as Mapam grew closer to Communism, it was quite possible that there would be a favorable change in Soviet ideology toward Zionism. In his speech to the inaugural conference of Mapam in January 1948, Sneh maintained that differences of opinion between the Soviet Union and its allies were possible and legitimate, while not being detrimental to such alliances in the long run. “Certainly,” he noted, “even along the joint path of a nation [the Yishuv] and the international forces of progress and revolution, there may arise momentary misunderstandings and deviations that stem from the plethora of clashing interests and the multitude of problems, but in the final tally there is a joint path and a joint destiny.”3 However, in the very year in which Sneh made this statement, the era of coalition governments was already coming to an end in countries under Communist domination. The “people’s democracies” were actively suppressing any deviation from Stalinist Communism. Non-Communist cabinet ministers in Czechoslovakia were forced to resign in February 1948, and the body of one of them, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, was found three weeks later in the courtyard of his home. In Romania, the king had been forced to abdicate in December 1947, and the constitution of the Romanian People’s Republic was declared in April 1948. In June of that year, a split took place between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, bringing with it the struggle against “Titoist deviations” and the effort of the entire Communist bloc to eradicate every sign of independence from Moscow. As a leader of Mapam, Sneh at first had no hesitation in arguing for positions that were pro-Communist but also overtly nationalist. During the course of 1948, he made frequent references to “the Jewish people.” Use of this phraseology by Jews everywhere, he believed, was a victory for Jewish nationalism and an expression of Jewish solidarity. In August 1948, he applauded the fact that “[e]ntire sectors of our people, who for the past half century have utterly denied our being one nation, [regarding the Jews as] dispersed and divided among the Gentiles, have


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now raised the banner of our national unity and have pledged their faith to it.”4 Sneh made much the same point in 1951, in the course of a controversy within Mapam: In all official statements by the Soviet delegation to the UN, “the Jewish people”—and not solely the Jewish community that is in the country—is described as possessing the rights to Eretz Israel. Such statements explicitly refer to the historical rights of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel that exist “from ancient times.” They speak of the suffering of the Jewish people [and] of the state of Israel, “which the Jewish people has established for itself.” Therefore, there is no basis for the claim that Communism does not recognize the existence of the Jewish people.5

In order to understand the full significance of such declarations, it should be recalled that leading Marxist thinkers, including Marx himself, Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring, and Lenin, had always awaited and advocated the assimilation of the collective Jewish entity and its disappearance even before the age of socialism would dawn. Apart from a few exceptional moments, Communist leaders had been taught to believe that the separate collective existence of the Jews was in itself reactionary, and that the sooner the Jews assimilated, the better for the world and for themselves. Now, however, Sneh and like-minded members of Mapam believed that in the post-Holocaust period, world Communism seemed to be putting aside the ideology of assimilation. So long as relations between the Soviet Union and Israel continued to be at least minimally civil—and the sweeping arrests of Jews accused of “bourgeois nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism” in the years 1948 and 1949 remained partially hidden from public view—Mapam was able to retain its strongly pro-Communist line essentially undisturbed. But starting in 1951, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the ever more hostile attitude of the U.S.S.R. to the Jewish state and (from 1952) the overtly anti-Jewish policies launched within the Communist bloc. The so-called Prague trials, which began in November 1952, saw an entire cadre of Communist leaders—11 out of 14 of them were of Jewish origin—accused of acts of high treason, including espionage contacts with Zionist organizations and with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Among the lesser figures arrested in the affair was Mordechai Oren, an emissary sent by Mapam to represent it in Czechoslovakia. And on January 13, 1953, Pravda, the leading Communist party newspaper, published an article accusing a group of prominent doctors (most of them Jews) of murdering Soviet leaders and plotting the death of others in the service of American intelligence agencies. The purge trials and the accusations against the physicians were marked by much anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric. Zionism was declared to be a criminal movement and any possibility of a synthesis between it and Communism was ruled out. Those who had previously sought such a synthesis now had to choose between Zionism and Communism. The overwhelming majority of Mapam’s membership opted to remain loyal to Zionism. But Sneh chose to comply with the Communist dictate concerning Zionism, an act that inevitably led to his being ousted from Mapam and from the Israeli consensus. Sneh appears to have taken this fateful step after much soul-searching. He knew, after all, that in choosing Moscow, he was casting his lot with a party that, among

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other things, supported Stalinist terror. Moreover, he was forfeiting his identification with Mapam. The party could not swallow his acceptance of the libelous charges against Mordechai Oren (which were also false charges against Mapam itself). In fact, anyone who was reasonably perceptive had long since realized that the Soviets had rejected Mapam as a “target party.” However, despite everything, Sneh concluded that his major historical postulates were still valid, and that one had to differentiate between major and minor considerations. As the divisions within Mapam became increasingly fierce, the minority, which accepted Sneh’s viewpoint, organized itself in 1952 as a self-proclaimed “leftist faction” (h ativat hasemol) within the party. Mapam’s leadership adopted a tough line against the faction, ousting it from the party in January 1953. Those of the faction’s adherents who were kibbutz members were forced to leave their kibbutzim. Upon their expulsion from Mapam, Sneh and his comrades established the Left Socialist Party (Mifleget Hasemol Hasozialisti), which was entirely devoid of any Zionist symbols and which cooperated with the Israeli Communist Party (Hamiflagah Hakomunistit Hayisreelit [known by its Hebrew acronym, Maki]). There were those who accused Sneh of establishing the Left Socialist Party simply as a halfway house on the way to Maki. However, as a former member of the Left Socialist Party’s central committee, I believe that Sneh truly intended to create a political body that would preserve some semblance of independence vis-a`-vis Communism; only when the party failed to attain any real political weight did he feel compelled to join Maki. During the final stage of the Left Socialist Party’s existence, Sneh wrote his Conclusions on the National Question in the Light of Marxism-Leninism (Sikumim basheelah haleumit leor hamarksizm-leninizm), in which he consolidated his position as the Israeli ideologue par excellence of anti-Zionism. This book also served as his entrance ticket into Maki, which Sneh joined in November 1954, along with several hundred members of the Left Socialist Party. By joining Maki, Sneh put an end to his former reservations about Communism in its blatantly Stalinist form. Additionally, he was forced to downplay his former role as a leader of the Haganah and the resistance movement. I believe that Sneh’s move into the Communist camp, while seemingly an attack on Jewish nationalism, was actually the outcome of his deep concern for the continued existence of the national Jewish collectivity. (This view is shared by two of those closest to Sneh, Yair Zaban and Raul Teitelbaum.) He was convinced that the Jewish people faced a fateful development, one intertwined with the fate of humanity at large. Already during the final stages of the Second World War, Sneh had come to believe that the human race was about to undergo a momentous transformation that could be defined, in short, as a changeover from the era of monopolistic capitalism (imperialism) to that of socialism. Regarding the Jewish people, Sneh believed that in every historical age (those of slavery; feudalism; emergent capitalism; and monopolistic capitalism), the Jews had been flexible enough to adapt their way of life in order to survive as a collective entity. He deemed it possible, and vital, to ensure that they would act similarly in the era that was about to dawn. (Such a view, as noted above, negated traditional Communist ideology that aspired to see the Jews assimilate with their neighbors.)


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Of one thing Sneh was certain: the existence of a flourishing Jewish state was the best guarantee for the survival of the Jewish people. This is why he was convinced that he had to make every effort to ensure that the hostility between the Communist camp and the Jewish diaspora, signs of which had already begun to appear in 1949, would not affect relations between the Soviet Union and the state of Israel. The historical record of 1947–1949, it is true, had troubling aspects: Jewish nationalism was persecuted within the U.S.S.R. by various means, including the shutting down of the Yiddish periodical Eynikeyt, the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and the arrest of leading Jewish writers. Yet at the same time, the U.S.S.R. had supported the establishment of Israel and had defended the new state. These latter actions encouraged Sneh to believe that, despite the antiJewish campaigns, a common parlance could still be achieved with the U.S.S.R., specifically in the sphere of Soviet-Israeli relations. To attain this end, he was prepared to defend the repression of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union and to waive the demand that Soviet Jews who wished to do so be allowed to emigrate to Israel. Sneh’s decision to adopt a pro-Soviet orientation rested on three basic assumptions. First, in the struggle between capitalism and socialism, the latter would emerge victorious. The Middle East, at least, would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence, so that the future of the Jewish people and the state of Israel depended on their siding with the winning side. Second, the Cold War might deteriorate into a nuclear conflict that would endanger the very survival of humanity. The Soviet bloc, controlled as it was by the proletariat, was doing everything in its power to prevent such a catastrophe, while the Western bloc, likewise by force of socioeconomic logic, tended toward military adventurism. Thus, anyone with a sense of responsibility vis-a`-vis the survival of the human race had to support those Soviet initiatives that could delay or perhaps even prevent nuclear war. Third, it was imperative that in the vital and sensitive dialogue between the Communist world and the Jewish people, the latter would be represented by leaders loyal to their nation, rooted in its culture and civilization, and of high intellectual and political stature, leaders who would be able—and would want—to defend its interests within the framework of the victorious political sphere. Sneh shared an opinion held by many others that, of all those in Jewish leftist circles, he was the best equipped to be such a leader. From 1954 until at least 1961 (and arguably until 1965), Sneh appears to have been convinced that, on the whole, he was not mistaken in his premises. No doubt he felt easier at heart when the Soviet Jewish doctors were cleared of the false charges against them a month after Stalin’s death in April 1953 and when, two years later, Mordechai Oren, who had been convicted in one of the Prague trials, was released from prison. Sneh may have persuaded himself that these two libelous events had been momentary deviations from the true path of socialism. In any event, he apparently remained convinced for many years that Communism and antisemitism could not go hand in hand. During this period, Sneh also believed that the stability of the Communist bloc had been proven beyond doubt, since it had persevered despite the upheavals that followed the death of Stalin. True, this stability was achieved at bayonet point (in

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East Germany during the uprising of 1953, and again in Hungary in 1956), but for various reasons it was simple at that time to accuse participants in the uprisings of being fascists and antisemitic puppets whose strings were being pulled by Western imperialism—which was itself seen as engaged in breathing new life into Nazism. Further, the economic and technological development of the Communist world (and, by inference, its military development as well) outwardly seemed more impressive than it really was, and so in these areas the gap between the “socialist world” and the most highly industrialized capitalist states appeared to have narrowed. Finally, the gradual disintegration of the colonialist system and the decrease in the number of territories still under imperialist rule did not come to a halt with the death of Stalin, and the international balance of power could be seen as increasingly turning against Western imperialism. (There was, however, a difference between the late Stalinist and the post-Stalinist era: in the first period, the scales were tipped against imperialism by the Communist takeovers in a series of countries, the most important of which was China; after Stalin’s death, the tipping of the scales took on a less rigid form—the formation of a neutralist bloc, with India as its most outstanding member.) One way or another, the West continued to lose strength. Most important for Sneh were developments in the Middle East, as country after country—Egypt, Syria, and then Iraq—broke away from Western domination. As far as Sneh was concerned, Soviet policy following Stalin’s death increasingly aspired to reduce tension in the world, and was even successful in doing so. Noteworthy efforts in this direction were the summit conference convened in Geneva during June–July 1954 with the participation of the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, France, and China, which put an end to the aftermath of the Korean War and also arranged a peaceful (albeit temporary) settlement in Indochina; and the agreement granting Austria its independence in 1955 (signed by the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and France). The peaceful conclusion of the Cuban missile crisis of October–December 1962 and the agreement of 1963 prohibiting nuclear tests in the atmosphere, on the ground, and in the sea was proof for Sneh that peaceful coexistence was the overriding tendency regulating the development of international relations. Sneh became ever more convinced of his being the leader who could best fulfill the mission of bringing the Jewish people and the state of Israel into the Communist camp. True, his joining Maki in November 1954 was viewed with suspicion by that party’s leadership. In fact, Sneh and his colleagues were not at first given full membership in the party, but were assigned the status of “candidates.” Even though Sneh commanded great respect—until his death, he was considered not merely a leading Israeli parliamentarian but perhaps the greatest of them all—he was not initially co-opted into Maki’s decision-making bodies. Nonetheless, he soon made his mark in the Israeli Communist party. His most conspicuous service to the party was embodied in the articles he contributed to its newspaper, Kol haam, and in his activity in the Knesset, where he was chairman of the party faction. In 1956, the restraints that curbed his influence in the party started to be removed. Early in February, he was appointed a member of the central


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editorial board of Kol haam. Several months later, after emerging as one of the leading spokesmen denouncing Israel’s participation in the Suez War—and after expressing support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary in response to the uprising of October 1956—Sneh was made a member of the plenum of the party’s Central Committee, though he still did not have a vote. On June 2, 1957, following the 13th congress of Maki (at which he defended the position of the party’s “orthodox” leadership), Sneh was elected a full member of the Central Committee; six days later, he was elected to the party’s political bureau and appointed chief editor of Kol haam. From that moment onward, Sneh was one of the most influential figures in Maki. In the wake of the famous 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party in 1956, controversies erupted within the Communist bloc between China and the U.S.S.R., on the one hand, and between these two titans and Yugoslavia (along with the Italian Communist party), on the other. One outcome was that the smaller Communist parties gained in stature as possible allies (or adversaries) of the giants engaged in these internecine conflicts. Sneh became involved in the interparty controversies, and as a result, Maki was afforded a place of honor at Communist conventions. In brief, conditions had been created for Maki and even for Sneh, as one of its senior leaders, to exert some influence in international Communist circles. Until the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist party in 1961, Sneh considered himself to be operating within the rather narrow confines of positions dictated by the Communist bloc leadership. As previously noted, he clearly differentiated between what he believed to be minor as against major objectives, the most important issue being to guarantee the continued existence of the Jewish people. Accordingly, when he realized in the wake of the Prague trials and the “Doctors’ Plot” that the Soviets demanded complete adherence to their line of thinking, Sneh penned an article—one of his first—in Kol haam, in which he argued the need to subordinate all other considerations to “the struggle by the international proletariat to crush monopolistic capitalism. This historic world struggle is for us a touchstone that determines our attitude to each and every social phenomenon, including every national question.”6 Like all important Communist leaders in capitalist countries, Sneh differentiated between the demands presented to his own government in the international arena and what was expected of himself and his party. He had only two basic demands of the Israeli government: that it conduct friendly bilateral relations with the Soviet Union; and that it refrain from any political, military, or economic policy that might be detrimental to the “socialist camp” and its allies. Sneh was much tougher when it came to his party and to himself, accepting nothing less than full support for every Soviet action and proclamation. Sneh maintained that the world was divided between Communists (the harbingers of progress) and those who lent their support to the “heirs of Nazism,” in which role he placed West Germany, supported and fostered by Western imperialism. Sneh saw every act in terms of a struggle between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness.” For this reason, he always supported whoever spoke for the “enlightened” camp—namely, those supporting the Soviet Union. In controversies between socialists and Communists, he vigorously opposed the former, “reformist” camp.

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As far as he was concerned, the socialists were not legitimate rivals within the labor movement but were rather agents of the monopolistic, capitalist enemy. And in the conflicts between the Soviets and their opponents in the Communist bloc (Yugoslavia and China), Sneh invariably supported the former, denouncing the others as “enemy agents.” He labeled as “agents” all oppositionists, whether past or present, within the party—Trotskyists, Bukharinists, and “nationalist deviationists.” As for the internal controversies in the Soviet Communist party, he always sided with the victorious faction (against the “anti-party group” that opposed Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, for instance, but in favor of the group that subsequently deposed Khrushchev in 1964). Sneh’s first moves toward Communism had come at the height of the Stalinist terror and personality cult (1948–1953), to which, as has been seen, he had managed to reconcile himself. Thus, the de-Stalinization campaign of 1956 came as a shock to him, as it did to Communist leaderships everywhere. The denunciation of Stalin’s crimes caused a seismic upheaval in the Communist world. Actually, the crimes exposed by Khrushchev were public knowledge before then; in 1937, they had even been the subject of an interesting analysis by Sneh himself.7 But until Khrushchev’s public disclosure, the Communists had rejected such accusations as no more than “lies and agitation by class enemies.” The fact that the leader of the Soviet Communist party then verified many of those “lies” was disastrous for the self-image that Communist propaganda had projected over the course of several decades. Each Communist party now faced a dilemma. Should it freely criticize the Stalinist past, which might lead to the collapse of the entire ideological, moral, and organizational structure of the Communist world? Or should it continue to follow the previous line of propaganda and thus face a speedy loss of integrity, both within and outside the party? The solution that was generally agreed upon was to seemingly engage in open criticism of the Stalinist period, but actually to limit such criticism as much as possible, in this way minimizing the damage of the exposures. Sneh quickly adopted this tactic. In a controversy with David Ben-Gurion, for instance, he argued: “First of all, it should be noted that the courageous, impartial criticism of Stalin . . . did away with his personality cult, but it did not cancel out or reduce his historical achievements.”8 Three years later, he once again implicitly justified the mass terror, show trials, and reign of lies that had influenced all facets of life in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s when he wrote: “In the line of battle at the time stood the loyal core [group] of the Central Committee headed by J.V. Stalin, who defended and forged the general Marxist-Leninist ideology of the party.”9 This attitude toward Stalinist teachings was still acceptable in the Soviet Union, for until the 22nd Congress in 1961, the authorities continued to publish Stalin’s theoretical works and to consider him an ideological authority, at least with regard to the “national question.” Sneh followed the extreme Stalinist reading of history in his own interpretation of 20th-century events. After Hitler’s rise to power, it had become obvious that the Communist movement had made a fateful mistake in directing its fire against the Social Democratic parties instead of cooperating with them to defend the Weimar


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republic and similar regimes. The move to the “popular front” strategy in 1934– 1936 had provided clear evidence that the Comintern had learned its lesson, after much soul-searching. This fact, however, did not prevent Sneh from reiterating (in the 1950s) the earlier noxious rhetoric regarding the “dissention and treachery of the rightist leaders of German Social Democracy.”10 Even more enlightening is an article published by Sneh on November 8, 1957, which was written in an emotional, personal, and even poetic vein. The impression one gains from the article—published when Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was already public knowledge—is that Sneh was doing all in his power to protect the official Communist facade from being shattered, and to protect his own belief in this facade. In this piece, Sneh described the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 as “the greatest of revolutions—the final, the socialist revolution—which was able to free one third of humanity, raising the poor out of the dust, lifting up the needy from the dung-hill, and extending a beacon of light to the toilers of the other two thirds of mankind.” Moreover, he continued: “The true history, the conscious and free history of human society, began with the victory of Communism in the world, and it was the October revolution that opened the portal to this new history. It was an act of Creation.” The revolution, for Sneh, thus bore an aura of sanctity. It was an expression of “the all-encompassing truth that explains everything, guides everyone, the truth of Marxism-Leninism.”11 He also tried to convince his readers that the crimes committed during the era of Stalin were not part of the system but were rather opposed to it (as if all the Soviet authorities had not supported them and the Soviet press had not applauded them). Given the exhortations with which his article ends, it seems as though Sneh felt a need to persuade himself of the truth of his own arguments: “There is no room for doubt. There is no room for reservations. There is only room for hope, for confidence, that the October banner, the banner of Marxism-Leninism, will be victorious and will celebrate its full victory throughout the entire world.”12 Within Maki, Sneh adopted the same line as in the international Communist arena. He vigorously opposed any attempt to question the policy adopted by the party leadership. When in 1956 (and again later), leading Arab members of the party criticized Maki’s support for Israel’s War of Independence, claiming that it had been one of Stalin’s mistakes, Sneh argued against their “anti-Stalinist” stance, clearly suspecting that their real aim was to delegitimize Maki’s historical support both for the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state and for Israel’s defensive war against the Arab armies’ invasion in 1948. Sneh also came to the support of Maki’s leadership when an influential group of Jewish members complained, prior to the party’s 13th Congress in 1957, that Maki had turned a blind eye to the murder of Jewish writers in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s last years and had generally ignored the suppression of Jewish culture in the U.S.S.R.—whereas the Communist parties of Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and France had spoken out on this matter.13 In 1962, when an opposition group (later known as Mazpen [Compass]) was formed within Maki, Sneh attacked it in the name of party norms and solidarity with the Soviet Communist party. In general, he tried to buttress party unity and to maintain a dialogue with the Arab members of Maki’s leadership (who, as a

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result, proved willing—temporarily, as it later proved—to withdraw their criticism of Maki’s support for the Yishuv during the War of Independence). From the point of view of the party’s ethos, Jewish-Arab unity was still regarded as extremely important. In contrast, Sneh aided in the expulsion of Jewish factions that were critical of the leadership, sharing the fear that such groups could cause dangerous unrest within the party. One of the many crucial areas in which Sneh had to transform his ideological stance following his departure from Mapam involved the correct position to be taken vis-a`-vis the nature of the Jewish people. Thus, just before joining the ranks of Maki, Sneh executed a volte-face and emptied the term “Jewish people” of whatever meaning it had held for him prior to mid-1953: The content of the term “Jewish people,” if it is to include all Jewish communities throughout the world, is thereby narrowed down to nothing more than common descent from the ancient Hebrew nation in the land of Israel and to a common historical past, to a few psychological qualities (expressed in its culture) that have survived from that common past, and to the Jewish religion. There is no connection at all between the concept of the Jewish people and that of the Jewish nation.14

Here Sneh was scrupulously following in the steps of Stalin, who in 1913 had maintained that all that Jews had in common was “religion, common descent, and certain vestiges of a national character.”15 Thus, as far as Sneh was now concerned, there was no longer a Jewish people “united by a common destiny.” Instead of the (virtually nonexistent) worldwide “Jewish people,” Sneh now called for identification with the “Israeli Jewish nation.” This switch in terminology was meant first and foremost to do away with any obligation to show solidarity with the Jews of the Soviet Union and the other “socialist countries,” and, to a lesser extent, with the Jewish communities in capitalist countries. He even admitted as much: The argument for and against defining Jews the world over as one nation is absolutely not an argument over terminology. Jewish bourgeois nationalism, which maintains that there is a world Jewish “nation,” is in need of this misrepresentation in order to allow for another misrepresentation: that the Jewish “nation” dispersed throughout the world shares a common fate, the same fate in all countries, under all regimes, in all socioeconomic forms of organization, in all historical periods.16

This stance was, of course, in keeping with that avowed by Communists in most countries once the honeymoon between Israel and the Communist bloc had come to an end. Following the authoritative definition, laid down by Stalin in 1913, of what factors were required to define a collectivity as a nation—among them, a common territory, language, and economic life—Sneh concluded that there was no “world Jewish nation” but rather a bourgeois Jewish nation in Israel. He drew a clear distinction between a “people” and a “nation” in a way that he had never done in the past. An important passage in an article published by Sneh in 1960 illuminates his nationalist aspirations: “The historical perspective of our nation’s future is: a socialist state of Israel, a society having equal rights within the socialist family of nations; and Jewish communities that live their new lives in fraternity and equality


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within the socialist nations in their own countries.”17 This passage can be analyzed according to two criteria—what it says and what it refrains from saying. On the one hand, it is important to note that it can be read as diametrically opposed to Leninist ideology, which sought (at least with regard to the “capitalist stage” of history) the assimilation of the Jews among their neighbors. On the other, there is not a word in it about the relationship among Jewish communities, nor about their relationship with Israel. This was no oversight; in another in the same series of articles, Sneh came out vigorously against the intention to foster close ties, particularly cultural relations, between diaspora Jewish communities and Israel: “The entire structure—the state of Israel as a political or spiritual center for all of world Jewry,” he wrote, “is built on sand. This ‘new content’ is not only unrealistic, it is essentially reactionary.”18 Sneh’s rejection of the concept of a worldwide Jewish nation during this period of his career was simply one aspect of his overall stand with regard to Zionism as an ideology. As the decision to join Maki drew near, Sneh’s rupture with Zionism became absolute. Adopting arguments that Communism and other left-wing movements such as the Bund had honed over several decades, Sneh portrayed Zionism not only as a mistaken ideology, but also as a loathsome evil. In his Conclusions on the National Question of 1954, he presented the history of Zionism as though he were a prosecutor reading out an indictment that ascribed criminal intent to every action of the defendant. Zionism’s objective, according to Sneh, was not the establishment of a Jewish state but rather the “ingathering of the exiles,” an ideology that legitimized Jewish territorial expansion at the expense of the Arabs and served as an incentive for Israel’s refusal to allow Arab refugees to return to their homes. Sneh claimed further that the failure of Zionism had become obvious with the establishment of Israel: “It is precisely the state of Israel as a fait accompli that proves beyond doubt the falsity of the Zionist concept that claims that the establishment of the state will be ‘the solution to the world Jewish problem.’ ”19 In his argumentation against the thesis of the “ingathering of the exiles” (a thesis that he presented in its most extreme and utopian manner, namely, the transfer of 11 million Jews to Israel), Sneh maintained that few Jews came to Israel “on the basis of a free, positive decision to live in a Jewish state.” The waves of mass immigration in the early years of Israel had been the outcome of unique conditions, and Sneh did not envision their renewal. Further, he argued, the three million Jews residing in socialist countries enjoyed equal rights with their neighbors and were in no need of help, certainly not from the Zionists. The other eight million Jews, those living in capitalist countries, did indeed suffer from discrimination and other problems, but the only realistic solution to their distress was to struggle—in cooperation with other underprivileged groups—to change the regimes in those countries in which they lived. The victory of socialism, in any event, was inevitable, and it was inconceivable that any discrimination whatsoever would exist under a socialist regime. The second ideological argument against Zionism was that it increased solidarity between the different classes of the nation, thus undermining proletarian solidarity across ethnic divisions (in Communist terminology, “bourgeois nationalism works against proletarian internationalism”). This argument was not relevant in the case

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of movements of national liberation struggling against Western imperialism, but in the case of Zionism, it did hold true. Thus, in Sneh’s words, “the true nature of Zionism is that it is the exact opposite of a movement of national liberation. Being a pro-imperialist movement, it cannot in any case be a liberation movement. It is also difficult to call it a national movement.”20 The claim that Zionism was a pro-imperialist movement was phrased, as noted, almost as a criminal indictment. In Conclusions on the National Question, Sneh devoted 37 pages to a detailed expose´ of the services that Zionism had allegedly rendered (and in some cases was continuing to render) to six different imperialist states, including Germany—even in the Nazi period, when Zionists, according to Sneh, had acted as agents of the Gestapo. He repeatedly made the accusation that “throughout its entire existence, the Zionist movement has both served and been dependent upon the imperialist camp.”21 Furthermore, Sneh insisted, the Zionist leadership had not only refused consistently to support the campaigns against antisemitism, but had actually chosen to cooperate with the most benighted antisemitic elements on a common platform that called for the removal of the Jews from their host countries. He did not describe the totality of the relations between Zionist and antisemitic leaderships, but rather provided examples taken out of context to support his a priori thesis. Together with the substitution of “the Israeli Jewish nation” for “the Jewish people” as an acceptable phenomenon came the replacement of “Zionism” (highly negative) with “Israeli patriotism.” Ironically, both of Sneh’s terms expressed a positive attitude toward the reality of Jewish life in Israel—immigration, settlement, Israel’s security—while at the same time utterly rejecting Zionism. “We shall easily prove,” Sneh wrote in 1954, “that it was not the Zionist ideal that ‘created’ immigration, settlement, security, and independence, but rather that the Zionist ideal was created by the class needs of a large bourgeoisie, and parasitically followed in the wake of objective processes.”22 By “objective processes,” Sneh meant: Immigration [aliyah] has absolutely nothing to do with the Zionist idea and is not dependent upon it. Jewish migration is the result of the oppression of Jews and the pressure applied against them, and immigration to Palestine [erez yisrael] was part of a general movement of migration, to the extent that the gates of other, developed countries were closed to Jewish immigrants. The Jewish immigrants who arrived in Palestine found there a primarily feudal country, sparsely populated . . . and they established a new capitalist economy here and, in the 1940s, also a new capitalist industry. It is this capitalist development of the Jewish Yishuv on part of the territory of Palestine that led to its development into a nation.23

On behalf of the Communists, Sneh promised that a future Soviet regime in Israel would remove all obstacles to “the assimilation of the new immigrants into the Israeli Jewish nation.” He even pledged to carry out Ben-Gurion’s three declared objectives: “Settling the desert; economic independence; and national unity will be achieved in Israel as a people’s democracy.” By drawing so sharp a line between Zionism, on the one hand, and immigration, settlement activities, and the creation of a Jewish community in Palestine that had developed into a nation, on the other,


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Sneh presented the entire process of the growth and development of the Yishuv as the outcome not of ideology, but of historical determinism and, as such, innocent of all the sins with which the Communists charged Zionism. At this point I shall present firsthand testimony that, I believe, can shed some light on Sneh’s motives. In the summer of 1954, I replaced Arieh Shmueli, who was then Sneh’s bodyguard, for a few days. I was at the time a member of the central committee of the Left Socialist Party. One night, Sneh and I discussed his Conclusions on the National Question, which was then in the final stages of writing. I clearly remember what he said to me: “They will say that I have become a Zionhater. They will not understand that in this work I salvaged what can be salvaged of Zionism.” What he meant was that soon, in one form or another, Communism would gain control of Israel. By means of his book, Sneh hoped to provide the Communists with some insights that would enable the continuation of what had been achieved by the Zionist undertaking. It is my assumption that it did not take long for veteran Communists to sense that the argumentation adopted by Sneh in his Conclusions on the National Question was too “pro-Yishuv.” He was forced to correct his views in an article published in December 1954, in which he wrote that Zionism had been “an accessory to British colonialism in Palestine and is now an accessory to American colonialism in the Middle East”; and that “Zionism has always opposed the Arab nation,” dispossessing Arab fellahin from their lands and expelling Arab hired labor.24 Not that these claims had been absent from his book, but there they had been balanced by denunciations of the Arab leadership in 1948 and by the emphasis that he had placed on the fact that the creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine had resulted from the oppression of the Jews in their host countries; that it had been obstructed by British imperialism; and that it had been the victim of colonialist exploitation. The articles published by Sneh in Kol haam in December 1954 contained no such balance. Of course, beyond the quintessentially ideological (or theoretical) issue of Zionism and its sociohistorical relationship to the pre-1948 Yishuv and to the state of Israel, there was also the harsh and ongoing conflict between that state and the Arab world. Given his natural tendency to situate local and regional problems within the global context, Sneh generally analyzed the Israeli-Arab dispute as a subdivision of the struggle between the socialist and the capitalist camps. The principle that Sneh enunciated for Israel’s international policy was that it had to take the side of the “rising forces” (a term that referred both to nations gaining their independence and to revolutionary social classes) and detach itself from the “declining forces” (the imperialist empires). No temporary tactical advantage could justify deviating from this principle. In concrete terms, this meant, first, that Israel had to conduct a foreign policy that would align it with the overwhelming majority of Asian and African nations, even if such a change of direction were to be spurned initially by the neutral bloc; and second, that Israel had to recognize the rights of the Palestinian nation: “Those who maintain that the Palestinian Arab nation has lost its rights to this country because it was defeated in the first and second rounds of the war, are pronouncing

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a verdict against the Jewish nation in Palestine, because it too might lose its right to an independent national existence if it were to suffer heavy defeat in one of the next rounds of this war.”25 Until Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, Sneh was suspicious of Gamal Abdul Nasser. In 1955, he was still portraying the Egyptian leader as one of the fascist dictators under American sponsorship, not significantly different from, say, the Spanish and Portuguese dictators Franco and Salazar. At the time, Sneh was not aware that the Egyptian government was secretly negotiating with the Soviets for arms. When the news of the Egyptian-Czech arms deal finally broke later in that same year, Sneh claimed that it was directed not against Israel but rather against the Baghdad Pact initiated by the imperialist powers (Great Britain and the United States), and that the Baghdad Pact was no less anti-Israel than it was anti-Soviet. With this statement, Sneh created a sharp gulf between Maki and all the rest of the political community in Israel, including Mapam. He maintained that the rapprochement between some of the Arab states and the Soviet Union would make the former more prone to arrive at a peaceful solution with Israel. Moreover, when Egypt decided to cancel the rights of foreign users in the Suez Canal in late July 1956, there was no doubt in Sneh’s mind that Israel should support Egypt. This would be a golden opportunity to put an end to the conflict with its Arab neighbors and to join the chain of nations freeing themselves from imperialism. He believed that in any case Israel had nothing to lose, for Western control of the Canal had not led to its being opened to Israeli shipping. Israel’s participation in the Suez War of October 1956 was, he insisted, a fatal mistake. Israel had not only directed a blow against world peace but had also endangered its own future by placing itself on the side of the declining imperialist states, France and Great Britain. Sneh reiterated that a policy of neutrality would enable Israel to maneuver and thus receive support from the U.S.S.R. without relinquishing its ties with the United States, just as Egypt had received aid from both sides. During this period—the mid- and late 1950s—he repeatedly reiterated the basic principles that were required for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict: Israeli neutrality; recognition of the Palestinian Arabs’ right to self-determination; and above all, recognition of the right of the Palestinian refugees to choose between a return to their homes and the receipt of compensation. Sneh also repeatedly mentioned Israel’s rights—the right to exist and to free passage through the Suez Canal. But the right he noted more than any other was that of the Palestinian refugees, since without settling that issue, he believed, there could be no solution to the conflict. On the ideological level, Sneh was primarily troubled by the fact that Arab antiimperialist circles did not recognize the legitimacy of Israel, and that the Soviets seemed prepared to view this attitude with indulgence. Though the Arabs were disappointed that the U.S.S.R. never openly supported their demand to wipe Israel off the map, they did gain a few ominous successes. Israel was banned from all Afro-Asian forums, whereas states such as Pakistan, Iraq, and Turkey—even when they were members in Western military alliances—were invited to attend. Even left-leaning international forums to which anti-imperialist, non-governmental


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groups were invited were not open to Israeli Communists (whether Arab or Jewish) simply because they were Israelis. Sneh was sharply critical of some of Maki’s leaders (Meir Vilner, Taufik Toubi, and Emil Habibi) because they tried to condone such exclusion. All of Maki’s efforts failed to persuade the Soviet Union to issue an official statement declaring that the principle of the peaceful settlement of international disputes also applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict. When Communist China began to conduct its own radical policy, Sneh feared that this would provide the Arab states with still greater political and material opportunities to try to eliminate Israel. One of the central roles of Maki, he believed, was to struggle incessantly against the ever-wider acceptance of Israeli delegitimization by the anti-imperialist camp. The party’s leading Arab members, who in 1956 had declared that Communist support for the establishment of Israel had been a “Stalinist error,” fiercely opposed Maki’s adoption of such a role. It was these weighty differences of opinion that finally led to the split in Maki in 1965. Maki, as a bi-national party, always had to maneuver between the needs and sensitivities of its Jewish and Arab members—and this during the lengthy, ongoing, and fierce confrontation between Israel and the Arab world. Toward the end of 1947, the Palestine Communist Party recognized the right of the Jewish nation in Palestine to a state of its own (thus totally reversing the policy previously upheld by the party, but in accord with Moscow’s own volte-face at the time). The party, renamed Maki in 1948, remained loyal to this decision even when the composition of its electoral support changed, with more Arabs than Jews providing it with votes in the Knesset elections. However, once the Soviet Union had adopted a strongly pro-Arab orientation—and following the shock engendered by the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party—both Toubi and Habibi demanded (in closed deliberations) that the Soviet support in 1948 for the establishment of Israel be declared a Stalinist deviation. This demand was rejected by all the Jewish members of the Central Committee, and the Arab members eventually agreed, as previously noted, to toe the line. In the long run, however, it proved impossible to sustain a unity that was based on a balance between large Jewish and Arab memberships. A significant landmark on the road to schism was the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist party. Following that congress, which carried de-Stalinization much further than ever before, Sneh began to express views on a variety of issues that were clearly in accord neither with accepted (Moscow-oriented) Communist orthodoxy nor with his own ideological statements from the previous period. The 22nd Congress thus smashed another link in the chains that bound him to Stalinism, and in its aftermath he felt less constrained from expressing what he truly believed. This was the case, for example, with regard to his stance vis-a`-vis the history of the Yishuv. In 1962, on the 10th anniversary of the death of Yitzhak Sadeh (one of the outstanding commanders of the Haganah and the Palmach and a leftist par excellence), Sneh published a lengthy article in his memory. The occasion provided him with a convenient opportunity to display publicly a positive attitude toward the historical development of the Palmach:

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The establishment of the Palmach in 1941 was a . . . manifestation of the deep political transformation that the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel had undergone. The nation at large and its youth began to see the foreign colonialist rulers—the British—as the enemy, and their expulsion from the country to be the major objective in the struggle for political independence.26

This article expressed outspoken identification with certain chapters in the history of Zionism. Sneh quoted Sadeh on the War of Independence: “We, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, fought a war of peace, not against the Arab nation but against our [colonialist] oppressors.” This and similar evaluations from the past were now recalled in order to play a role in the covert ideological controversy within Maki with regard to the retrospective evaluation of the War of Independence. In sum, Sneh was seeking with this article to counter the opposite interpretation of Yishuv history, widely accepted in the Arab anti-imperialist camp, which held that Israel had been conceived in sin. In this period, Sneh likewise published what amounted to a clear reassessment of his attitude toward the relationship between the state of Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Indeed, in an article of 1964 whose major message was a warning not to place Jews outside of Israel in a position of “dual loyalty,” he could also write that it is only natural that the framework embodying the nationhood of a certain nation arouses a relationship based on emotions and interest among the members of that nation living in other countries; no one denies that the American Irish have some ties to Ireland. Socialist countries, too, such as Poland or Hungary, maintain institutional ties with Poles and Hungarians living abroad.27

Such a statement was outright heresy from the Soviet point of view, for in principle it would clearly permit Soviet Jewry to maintain a relationship—even an institutionalized one—with Israel. However, the crucial issue threatening the unity of the Israeli Communist party was, of course, neither past history nor Israel-diaspora relations, but the IsraeliArab conflict. From the early 1960s, the Middle East appeared to be losing whatever short-lived stability had followed in the wake of the Suez War. Despite the trend in the Arab world toward outlawing the Communist movement, the Soviet Union threw its entire weight behind Nasser and other nationalist leaders, exhibiting such a degree of hostility toward Israel as to cast doubts upon the legitimacy of its very existence. West versus East was now a much stronger factor in the ArabIsraeli conflict. In every diplomatic confrontation and in the race for rearmament, the Soviets automatically adopted an anti-Israel stance. A manifesto was issued by Egypt in May 1962 in which that country pledged itself to serve as the vanguard in the pursuit of freedom, socialism, and Arab (as well as African and Muslim) unity. The Egyptian radio began to incite to antiWestern uprisings across the Arab world, among other things calling for a revolt against France in Algeria. On September 24, 1962, the pro-Soviet Ali Sabri became one of the most influential persons in Egyptian politics. All of this drew Egypt nearer to the Communist camp. In February and March 1963, military takeovers toppled the governments of


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Syria and Iraq, with the intention of creating a federation with Egypt. And in 1964, Egypt was able to organize an Arab summit meeting at which it succeeded, on the one hand, in restraining Syria’s trigger-happy tendencies while making the annihilation of Israel an officially avowed policy of the Arab world, on the other. Increasingly, Arab states were now able to persuade the leaders of the various Communist parties to issue declarations attacking the establishment of Israel and its right to exist. Sneh, Shmuel Mikunis, and Esther Vilenska demanded that Maki denounce these declarations, while leading Arab members of the party (Toubi and Habibi), together with the Jewish members who supported them (Vilner and Yaakov Hinin) rejected such demands. Sneh believed that the Arab declarations were not merely abstract or ideological but rather indicated a rapidly approaching war against Israel. And indeed, from 1964 onward, Arab summit conferences adopted resolutions calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Differences of opinion within Maki between those who called for a struggle against the elimination of Israel and those who saw no justification for such a struggle were bound to lead to a break-up. In 1965, the party split into two: Maki, made up of Sneh and his camp, and the New Communist List (Hareshimah Hakomunistit Hehadashah [Rakah]), comprising Toubi, Habibi, and their supporters. Sneh, who upon joining Maki in 1954 had undertaken not to oppose any policy of the U.S.S.R., could no longer stand behind this declaration in the face of increasing Soviet acquiescence in Arab demands to destroy Israel. He now demanded that in everything concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Soviet Communist party was obligated to take into account the position adopted by Maki. Sneh’s contacts with Soviet representatives during the weeks preceding the Six-Day War eradicated the last vestiges of his illusion that the U.S.S.R. would use its influence to moderate the Arab position. He soon realized that the Soviet Union supported Egypt’s aggressive policy against Israel all but unconditionally. On the eve of the war, in late May and early June 1967, Sneh did not anticipate Israel’s lightning victory. And, following the war, he was fearful that another round of fighting would erupt in which the U.S.S.R. would adopt an even stronger and more menacing stand against Israel. His public support of Israel on issues related to the Six-Day War led to a slander campaign launched against him by the Soviets and their satellites. At the same time, he was the object of a wave of empathy on the part of Jews in Israel. His statements aroused great interest in all deliberations conducted in the wake of the war and were given much attention in the print and the electronic media. Though freed of the need to placate the Soviets, until his death he was still careful to keep open a channel of communications with the Communist world. He was, after all, the leader of a Communist party, however rebellious. Sneh’s own conclusion from Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War was that it provided both an obligation and an opportunity to solve the conflict with the Palestinians through mutual recognition of the two nations’ right to self-determination. Accordingly, Sneh was among the most outspoken opponents of any annexation of lands across the 1949 armistice lines (the Green Line, as it later became known). He defined his position as being that of the leftist opposition within a front of national defense.

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In his political will and testament, Sneh included an evaluation of his political career during his “Communist years”: I devoted my entire life to the Jewish people, my central thesis being that the future of my nation would be guaranteed [as part of] the progressive future of humanity. But there is one period in my life—from 1953 to 1964—which has been interpreted incorrectly by organizations, circles, and individuals whose opinion I value. . . . I see no reason to apologize . . . because during that period I was loyal to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel no less than during all other periods of my life, albeit in a different fashion. . . . The only thing I regret is that I went too far in negating Zionism—a stance for which there is no practical or theoretical justification from any serious point of view. For that I express my regret.28

Notes This essay was translated by Yohai Goell. 1. Moshe Sneh, “Pirket edut al hahaganah,’ ” (1968), in idem, Ah arit kereshit, ed. Yair Zaban (Tel Aviv: 1982), 103. 2. Moshe Sneh, “Madua hiz tarafti lamaz ah shel heh azit lelikud hamiflagah?” (1951), in idem, Ketavim, vol. 3, 1948–1954, ed. Bracha Eshel (Tel Aviv: 1999), 192-193. 3. Moshe Sneh, “H eshbon-hador shel adam yehudi” (1948), in ibid., 50. 4. Moshe Sneh, “Lemoshav z iyoni rishon bamdinah,” (1948), in ibid., 66. 5. Sneh, “Madua hiz tarafti lamaz ah shel heh azit lelikud hamiflagah?,” 192. 6. “Lo midah keneged midah,” Kol haam (26 Nov. 1954). 7. Moshe Sneh, “Hamishpat bemoskvah,” in idem, Ketavim, vol. 1, 1928–1939, ed. Emanuel Melzer (Tel Aviv: 1995), 330–333; first published in Yiddish in Heynt (21 Jan. 1937). 8. “Saba shel Yariv,” Kol haam (8 Oct. 1956). 9. “ Al mishmar haleninism—neged hareviziyonizm,” Kol haam (22 April 1960). 10. “Katar hahistoriyah shel hameah haesrim,” Kol haam (20 Oct. 1957). 11. “Miyomano shel komunist,” Kol haam (8 Nov. 1957). 12. Ibid. 13. Berl Balti, Bemaavak al hakiyum hayehudi: lidmuto shel Moshe Sneh (Jerusalem: 1981), 51. 14. Moshe Sneh, Sikumim basheelah haleumit leor hamarksizm-leninizm (Tel Aviv: 1954), 77. 15. Y. V. Stalin, Al hasheelah haleumit vehakoloniyalit: kovez maamarim uneumim (Tel Aviv: 1954), 35. 16. Sneh, Sikumin basheelah haleumit, 77. 17. “Mekomah hahistori vegoralah hahistori shel haz iyonut,” Kol haam (26 Dec. 1960). 18. “Hayitakhen tokhen h adash baz iyonut?” Kol haam (25 Dec. 1960). 19. “H aslanei haraayon mul h aslanei hairgun,” Kol haam (23 Dec. 1960). 20. Sneh, Sikumin basheelah haleumit, 131–132. 21. “Igeret el h averim miyamim avaru,” Kol haam (24 Dec. 1954). 22. Sneh, Sikumim basheelah haleumit, 133. 23. Ibid., 144. 24. “Igeret el h averim miyamim avaru.” 25. “Hatragediyah yayisreelit,” Kol haam (23 Nov. 1956). 26. “Perah adom al kivro,” Kol haam (24 Aug. 1962). 27. “Be’ad hafradat hamedinah min haz iyonut,” Kol haam (27 March 1964). 28. Sneh, “Haz evaah,” in idem, Ah arit kereshit, 272.

A German Jewish Communist of the Second Generation: The Changing Personae of Klaus Gysi Karin Hartewig go¨ ttingen

Linked for years with the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Klaus Gysi (1912–1999) held diverse political posts in the service of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]), the East German Communist party.1 His final government appointment, that of deputy minister for religious affairs, was in many respects the greatest of all the challenges faced by this Communist and confessed atheist—and, one might add, Jew. In the GDR, the religious communities were considered an ideological thorn in the side of the Marxist state. The two Protestant denominations, together with the smaller religious communities, were regarded as an alien sphere by the Communist bureaucracy and, well into the 1980s, were viewed with ideologically motivated suspicion. The incorporated Jewish communities (ju¨dische Gemeinden), for instance, were viewed as bastions of Zionism and as gateways for Western imperialism. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, castigated as an “American” organization, were outlawed in 1951. And in the 1970s, relations between the party-state and the Protestant church grew tense when opposition groups began to gather in the protective sanctum of church edifices. Although Gysi’s appointment, in early 1979, surprised many—he was 67 at the time and had come out of retirement to take on his new assignment—there was logic behind the choice. Gysi was widely regarded as an intellectual capable of change who had nonetheless dutifully served his dogmatic party, often by sorting out and rectifying problems caused by his proletarian comrades. He was known for his diplomatic skill, eloquence, wit, and unconventional methods. Back in the 1950s, he had also demonstrated his ability to wield an “iron broom” in sensitive matters connected with cultural policy. For these reasons, it was felt that he could be relied upon to keep the GDR’s ideological house in order. Yet Gysi’s greatest successes would, in actuality, not come in promoting a fruitful dialogue concerning the role of the “church in socialism” or in limiting the influence of the church-linked opposition. By the 1980s, a tenacious opposition movement had sprung up in the shadow of the churches, and this “independent peace 255

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movement” had crystallized into a distinctive East German subculture.2 Gysi could not, and did not, attempt to act against this movement. Instead—and more significant in terms of the GDR’s domestic and foreign policy—he pursued a number of alternative and bold initiatives, most notably on behalf of the Jewish communities. In so doing, his basic goal was to integrate Judaism and the Jews into the historical consciousness of the GDR. At the time of Gysi’s appointment, the Communist party had come to recognize the urgency of reconsidering its stance with regard to the Nazi era and the public rituals of memorialization. Estimated figures concerning membership in the Jewish communities were disturbing: it appeared as though Judaism in the GDR was under threat of imminent extinction. What this meant was that part of the state’s antifascist heritage was also under imminent threat. Years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gysi commented on the situation laconically and with a tinge of bitter irony: “The GDR was in danger of becoming ‘judenfrei’ sooner than the Federal Republic. And it was absolutely necessary to prevent that from happening.”3 The state’s awareness in this regard was prompted in part by newly awakened sensibilities within the Protestant church. According to a church report released in 1976, Jews were fading from the consciousness of the average population in the GDR. Especially among the younger generation, there was little knowledge of the ways in which Jews had been stripped of their rights, persecuted, and murdered under National Socialism. Two years later, the church published a brochure to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Kristallnacht—the pogroms of November 1938. This brochure, which was soon sold out in the GDR (and which was also distributed in the West), made reference to matters that had previously been neglected and repressed. At least today, it declared, no stone should be left unturned in the effort “to provide knowledge about the Jews in past and present” and “to come to genuine grips with our unfortunate past.”4 The party, which once more found itself lagging behind, tried to install itself at the head of the movement. In 1978, for the first time, the anniversary of Kristallnacht became an official party and state affair. Over time, the “Jewish problem” became more acute, and in 1985, a report issued by the Protestant Press Service provided the impetus for taking action. According to this report, while there were only some 450 Jews living in the GDR (240 of them residing in Berlin), the number of those who had been recognized as “victims of fascism” because of their Jewish origin was estimated at 7,000.5 Under Walter Ulbricht, the previous head of the East German Communist party, many SED members of Jewish origin had been forced to formally opt out of the Jewish community. The tiny community that remained no longer had its own rabbi, and it was only thanks to assistance provided by youth groups in the West that one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe was being properly maintained. Concerned about the cultural and political problems posed by the shrinking Jewish community, the party’s Central Committee commissioned a 50-page document, Die ju¨dischen Gemeinden in der DDR, completed in April 1986, that essentially celebrated German Jewish life in the GDR—a belated appropriation of an inheritance long spurned.6 Bolstered by numerous examples, Die ju¨dischen Gemeinden extolled the socialist society of the GDR as the true “home of the Jews.”7 The eight Jewish communities

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and their directors were described, and the text noted that the Jewish community in the GDR counted among its members a multitude of scientists, economic experts, university teachers, and artists. A list was also included of persons in public life whose Jewish background previously had never been emphasized, including Helene Weigel, Hans Rodenberg, Friedrich Wolf, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In its conclusion, the booklet lauded the numerous efforts being made to preserve and restore Jewish sacred sites and monuments. Fully aware of the threat to the Jewish community’s continued survival, Gysi boldly tackled a number of tasks that had long been postponed. He acted largely in direct agreement with party leader Erich Honeker and sometimes in cooperation with the Central Committee’s working group on religious affairs, although occasionally, as will be seen, he bypassed both the Central Committee and the Politburo. One important initiative undertaken by Gysi involved the search for a new chief rabbi. Following the death of Martin Riesenburger in 1965, the East German Jewish community had no regular rabbi. For several years, the Hungarian chief rabbi acted as an occasional substitute, and from 1969, a rabbi, Ernst Stein, and chief cantor Estrongo Nachama came from West Germany to officiate on the High Holidays. For quite patent reasons of foreign and trade policy, the SED leadership was interested in having a rabbi sent over from the United States. Beginning in 1985, Gysi negotiated with both representatives of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) as well as American politicians about this possibility. One of his interlocutors was William Lehman, a member of the House of Representatives (and himself Jewish), who had been apprised of the situation by Francis Meehan, then U.S. ambassador to East Berlin. Along with Isaac Newman (the designated rabbi) and Eugene DuBow (of the AJC), Lehman traveled to East Berlin in April 1987. Gysi informed Honeker that the contacts with the AJC and Lehman were crucial and might well enhance the GDR’s image abroad. He requested that the visit be utilized to deepen these ties; Honecker expressed his agreement. A certain momentum now developed. An official application was made to Gysi’s office to permit the employment of a rabbi from the United States, and Gysi spoke with Honecker on Newman’s behalf. Given such preliminaries, it was hardly possible to reject the American candidate.8 Newman was officially installed in September 1987.9 But soon misunderstandings and friction developed between the Jewish community and Newman, who considered himself to be a representative of Reform Judaism. The two sides had differing views concerning certain aspects of worship and Jewish identity, along with decided political differences. From the perspective of the Jewish community, Newman had come to the GDR as an American anti-Communist intent on struggling against an oppressive state. Newman, however, was forced to acknowledge that Jews in the GDR felt a close bond with their country’s political system and were extremely loyal to the SED. Such differences led to the rabbi’s departure a mere eight months after his appointment (in this short interval, though, he had managed to find himself a wife—none other than the daughter of Herbert Gru¨nstein, the former deputy interior minister in East Berlin).10 Gysi came under severe criticism by the secret service for “going it alone” in the matter of Newman’s appointment. In a ministry memo, it was noted that

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Comrade Gysi took steps on his own initiative to bring in a rabbi from the United States. In so doing, he consciously acted contrary to the position of comrade Jarowinsky [of the Politburo] and that of the state security ministry. . . . His behavior in this question is marked by a strong emotional engagement on behalf of the Jews and the expression of an accommodating attitude toward Jewish circles in the U.S.11

A second and more successful initiative of Gysi’s addressed the issue of access to the extensive holdings of the former Central Archive of German Jews, including the so-called Reich Genealogical Card Catalog (Reichssippenkartei) of the Nazi era. Requests from abroad to use the files for research on Jewish history became increasingly frequent during the 1980s, forcing the party and state to formulate a consistent policy. For its part, the secret service insisted (in its inimitable style), that the government’s goal should be to better coordinate “political-operational” cooperation in order to enhance “order and security in the sphere of the state archives.” Accordingly, the state security ministry tried to block any research “from a bourgeois perspective” regarding the history of the various religious communities, whether Christian or Jewish, and sought to prevent general access to the state archives.12 Gysi did not agree with this approach; in the end, his own view won out. The archives for Jewish history were opened, and the material housed within them was transferred to the control of a new foundation, the Centrum Judaicum. This agreement had been worked out in joint discussions, which initially were kept secret, between representatives of the archival administration, the Jewish community, and the designated director of the Centrum. Generally speaking, the new arrangement involved major concessions to the Jewish community. Aside from its potential value as a source for cultural history, the archival material was explosive—for two reasons. First, it was unclear what unwelcome new light might be cast on the behavior of German society during the Second World War. And second, it might now become possible to ascertain the extent of the wealth and property of the victims. In this way, after decades of silence, the topic of reparations inevitably found its way onto the government agenda. The state security ministry and state secretary’s office simultaneously went about checking the possible implications, again arriving at totally different conclusions; and once more, Gysi’s view prevailed. Gysi emphasized the legal succession of the GDR to the Third Reich—a formulation that had always been rejected by the Communist regime—and he noted sharply that only “when it comes to expropriated Jewish property in Berlin, is this question of legal succession raised de facto.” He also pointed out that no property rights whatsoever had been restored to the Jewish community in East Berlin. This constituted a unique case in the context of the GDR; all of the other Jewish communities had long since had their property returned to them. In East Berlin, however, property formerly under Jewish ownership had been confiscated after the war on the basis of Resolution No. 2 of the Allied Control Council, which also forbade building on any such property. This resolution was initially conceived as a way to protect Jewish holdings. But in the Soviet sector of the city, restitution after the war became entangled in the wheels of Stalinist anti-Zionism. At that time, the view established itself in the East that former Jewish property, declared to be “Reich


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property” by the Nazis, had in fact become “public property” (Volkseigentum), and thus could not be returned to its former owners. Though this formulation was still regarded by the state security ministry as valid, Gysi denounced it as “unacceptable” and a potential “time bomb” in its possible impact abroad. He pleaded that there be a speedy resolution of the problem and that the Berlin Jewish community be restored its former property rights, while conceding that, more generally, there was hardly any practical restitution or compensation possible for other Jewish property that had been stolen. Gysi recommended a case-by-case strategy, according to which “each concrete individual claim should immediately be clarified in a generous manner, in order to avoid the whole issue being blown up out of all proportion by latching onto some individual case.”13 Officially, however, the government proved willing to engage in what was little more than a symbolic political act: the sum of $100 million was to be placed at the disposal of needy Jews as humanitarian aid. Gysi’s third initiative involved reconstruction of the New Synagogue in Oranienburger Strasse, alongside the proposed Centrum Judaicum. The idea of restoring the synagogue and establishing a Jewish cultural and historical center—with the aid of funds from abroad—had been broached back in the 1970s. Another possibility considered at that time was a “partial demolition of the ruins of the synagogue.” This scheme had envisioned preserving only the synagogue’s facade and a small entrance hall created as a memorial site, with the rest of the land being given over to a car-repair facility run by the state.14 Fortunately, no action was taken for some 10 years. At the beginning of 1985, Gysi’s office took up the idea of creating the Centrum Judaicum as an “independent facility” supported by the state to guarantee the maintenance and care of the Jewish heritage in the GDR.15 In the intervening years, there had been a marked rise in interest, in both the American and the West German media, in the remnant of Jewish life in East Germany. The top echelon of the GDR saw the issue primarily in terms of gaining political sympathy and expanding commercial ties with the United States. Thus, the ultimate decision in favor of a “Foundation Centrum Judaicum” had more to do with the hope for improved financial options than with anything else. The groundbreaking ceremony for the New Synagogue and Centrum Judaicum complex took place three years later, on November 10, 1988, as part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. By this time, the GDR’s policy had changed. The government now sought to integrate German Jewry into the sanctioned canon of the East German heritage. Consequently, in addition to highlighting their roles as victims of National Socialism and as members of the resistance, the government now praised Jews for their contribution to German culture. Among the foundation’s aims, priority was indeed assigned to memorializing the resistance and the persecuted. But the Centrum Judaicum complex also had to serve as a place of prayer and was obliged to grant proper recognition to the role of Jewish citizens in German history—to “foster, investigate, present, and popularize their scholarly achievements as an integral part of the German cultural heritage.”16 Such language sounded a totally new tone in official GDR historical policy.17 Gysi was officially in charge of the preparations for the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in November 1988; these were prepared with great care, following

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the Politburo’s approval of the plan in May 1988.18 In October, a much-praised exhibition titled “And Teach Them to Remember!” was opened. Following this, the central commemorative event, organized by the Verband der ju¨dischen Gemeinden in der DDR took place in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin: a performance of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, the classic German plea for universal religious tolerance. During a special session of the People’s Chamber of Deputies, Heinz Galinksi, the head of the Association of Jewish Communities in West Germany—who for decades had been denounced in the GDR as a cold warrior—was allowed to take his place on the platform next to Honecker, Egon Krenz (a high-ranking member of the Politburo), and Sigmund Rotstein, the head of the Association of East German Jewish Communities. During the ceremony, all of the Jewish representatives, along with several Jewish “veteran workers,” were presented with the coveted “Order of Merit of the Fatherland,” and foreign guests from the United States and Israel were honored by bestowal of the “Star of Friendship between the World’s Peoples.” The final commemorative event, as noted, was the groundbreaking ceremony for the New Synagogue and Centrum Judaicum complex. The impressive East German commemoration of Kristallnacht contrasted favorably with parallel ceremonies held in West Germany. In this instance, the GDR, which in the past had so often sounded a false note in official ceremonies, boasted a small victory over its main rival. In the West German commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the pogroms of 1938, a minor scandal was sparked when the head of the Bundestag, Philipp Jenninger, used rhetoric that many regarded as reminiscent of the Third Reich.19 For Gysi, the commemorative events were the culmination of years of effort and persuasion and the keystone of his eventful biography. However, his actual participation was as a private citizen, since ill health had forced his retirement in July 1988. The New Synagogue-Centrum Judaicum complex was not formally dedicated until seven years later, on May 7, 1995, the eve of the 50th anniversary of the liberation from National Socialism. In the interim, the two Germanys had been reunited; and the center’s concept—bearing in many details the stamp of Gysi’s influence—had now become anschlussfa¨hig, a project that the West could appropriate and incorporate.

Gysi’s Life Story In the summer of 1945, the New York German-language Jewish newspaper Der Aufbau published a list of names of the German Jewish survivors in the American sector of Berlin. In the issue of August 24, 1945, reference is made to “Klaus Gysi, born March 3, 1912.” Gysi came from a partially Jewish (but totally assimilated) Berlin family that placed great value on education. On his father’s side, the family (which had emigrated in the 18th century from Switzerland to Berlin) had been headed for generations by physicians. Klaus was the first to break with that timehonored tradition. His father, Hermann, who maintained a medical practice in the working-class neighborhood of Neuko¨lln, harbored sympathies for Social Democracy.


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On his mother’s side, the family was Jewish, with one branch, the Franks, coming from southern Germany, where they had made their fortune as merchants. They had moved at the end of the 19th century to Berlin, where Gysi’s grandmother had married into the Potolowski family. These Jewish immigrants from Poland owned two glove stores on the elegant Friedrichstrasse; as a young woman, their daughter Erna—Klaus Gysi’s mother—was featured in advertisements for the stores. Yet this woman with her fine, delicate hands had no bourgeois leanings: Erna’s sympathies lay with the socialists, and later the Communists, because of their struggle on behalf of equal rights for women and the right to abortion. To that extent, she was more a Potolowski than a Frank. Although born and bred in Germany, her attitudes were closer to those of many young people in Poland and elsewhere in interwar Eastern Europe; she preferred the stormy attachment to Communism to the secure and settled values of the German Jewish middle class.20 Among Klaus’ family, only his maternal grandmother spoke about religion and Jewish tradition and attended synagogue services regularly. Erna, however, never denied her Jewish origins. In fact, many years later, she underwent an ideological and spiritual transformation and became a religiously observant Jew. This occurred well after the Second World War, during which almost all of her family had been murdered in Auschwitz and in other camps. Following her divorce from Hermann Gysi, Erna emigrated from Germany in 1938 and survived the war in France. At war’s end, she did not wish to return permanently to Germany, and in later years she limited herself to several visits to her son’s family. Following his mother’s early political leanings, Gysi joined the Communist youth movement at the age of 16, becoming a member of the German Communist party three years later. From 1931 on, he studied economics in Frankfurt, Paris, and Berlin. Economics at the time enjoyed great popularity among students on the Left because it enabled them to examine capitalist economy through the prism of their newly adopted political ideology. In 1935, just after receiving his degree, Gysi was expelled from the university “for reasons of race,” a move that rendered impossible any form of academic career. As a student official of the now illegal Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), Gysi traveled to England, Czechoslovakia, and France. During a mission of the student executive of the KPD, he and his companion (later his wife), Irene Lessing, were overtaken in Paris by the outbreak of the war. Interned as enemy aliens by French authorities, they were released in the summer of 1940. E´migre´ party leaders instructed them to travel back to Germany, since they still had valid passports and had not yet come to the attention of the German authorities as being Communists. Nonetheless, convinced that they would thus fall under the surveillance of the Gestapo bureaucracy in Paris, they chose to reenter Germany illegally, from the non-occupied area of France. A bribe to railroad personnel facilitated their safe passage. Henceforth Gysi lived a semi-legal existence. Exempted from military service as a “half-Jew” unworthy of service, he supported himself from 1940 as a freelance author, mainly of industrial monographs and company publications. Gysi was even able to visit German industrial installations, since what he wrote was published by Hoppenstedt & Co, which was not obliged to keep personnel files on its freelancers.

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Now and then, he sought peace and quiet in the more remote areas of the Alps. Eventually, however, he went into hiding, staying with Irene Lessing’s parents at their home in Schlachtensee, a quiet neighborhood of villas in Berlin. Although called up several times for forced labor in the Organization Todt, he always managed to evade induction by means of false medical documents provided by a physician friend. After liberation, Gysi was appointed by the American occupation authorities to serve as deputy mayor of the Berlin district of Zehlendorf. However, he did not remain long in this thankless post, where his main task was dealing with widespread shortages in the chaotic aftermath of the war. In any event, the KPD had more ambitious plans for this loyal comrade and impressive speaker. In the summer of 1945, two KPD functionaries who had just returned from Moscow took possession of a villa in Dahlen that had formerly belonged to the head of the Deutsche Bank. From this site, they made contacts with a number of people who had survived the Nazi period, including the 33-year-old Gysi, and set about establishing the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (the Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany)—envisioned as a cultural-ethical-intellectual association that would grapple with the issue of Germany’s recent past.21 Gysi was appointed editor-in-chief of its journal, Aufbau. Banned by Western occupation authorities in 1947, the Kulturbund established itself under Communist leadership in the Soviet zone (later part of the GDR) as a forum for university graduates. Its activities were aimed at promoting a broad consensus, and it held to a rather conservative conception of German culture and art that, at the same time, was powerfully stamped by anti-Americanism. Communists, very many of Jewish background, were active in the Kulturbund, which promoted classical German literature and the works of e´migre´ German authors. Among the first members of its executive were Anna Seghers, Arnold Zweig, Ernst Legal, Victor Klemperer, Ernst-Hermann Meyer, Reneé Sintenis, Ernst Bloch, Friedrich Wolf, Ju¨rgen Kuczynski, and Nathan Notowicz. Culturally, most of them stemmed from the bourgeois-liberal assimilated Jewry of imperial Germany and the Weimar republic, which had always valued participation in high German culture and in Bildung. In 1948, Gysi moved with his wife and two children to the Soviet sector of Berlin; the following year, together with Alexander Abusch (likewise from a Jewish background), he was appointed secretary of the Kulturbund. In this position, he maintained a dense web of social contacts with all the literary, artistic, and scientific celebrities in the Soviet zone and the early GDR. At this juncture, Gysi’s life appeared to be replete with possibilities in the service of the “better” Germany. Some time later, however, in June 1951, Gysi was stripped of his position in the Kulturbund. During the previous year, in the framework of the first purge launched against “emigrants from the West,” the Zentrale Parteikontrollkommission (ZPKK)—the SED’s watchdog commission—had instigated a probe into Gysi’s wartime past. Abusch, who had emigrated to Mexico during the Nazi era, likewise fell afoul of the machinery of the political purge, thus leaving the Kulturbund bereft of its ideological and organizational leadership. Gysi was grilled in great detail on the circumstances of his return from France and on the


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years he had spent during the war. This initial investigation ended with a ruling that there was nothing to be held against Gysi, and that he could therefore continue his work “in the service of the party.” Quiet inquiries, however, continued to be made in the background. Walter Ulbricht even asked the formal assistance of the secret service, since the party did not have sufficient data on Gysi’s past. It seemed difficult to believe that Gysi had survived the war unmolested, without having worked as a Gestapo informer. In his statements before the ZPKK, Gysi spoke about his Jewish background and his status as a “half-Jew,” which had protected him from military service until he was able to make use of false medical attestations. It would be a long time before he again broached his Jewish background. In general, Gysi found it preferable to overlook this part of his identity. He wished to be nothing more than a German Communist. After a short period of unemployment, Gysi was relegated to a publishing position. From 1952 to 1957, he worked at Volk und Wissen, where he was assigned the task of preparing a Marxist literary history and materials for German studies in the schools. He also sat in the People’s Chamber of Deputies, serving as the representative for the Kulturbund, of which he had remained a member. Following his brush with state security, Gysi realized that only absolute loyalty to the SED could eliminate the stain on his record. From the start of his work at the publishing house, he was able to reestablish himself as a member of the upper echelons of the SED. In the wake of popular unrest against the regime and its violent repression in June 1953, Gysi was even placed in command of one of the civilian combat units at his firm. The June uprising, which for many Jews in the GDR evoked uneasy memories of similar eruptions that had ended in pogroms, led Gysi to support a policy of preserving public order at all costs, including the use of Soviet tanks. In his posthumously published memoir, Alexander Abusch describes an event occurring at this time that probably made a profound impression on Gysi. On the evening of June 17, Gysi had taken part in a meeting of the active party members in the Kulturbund, which was called to discuss the critical situation. At the conclusion of the meeting, the participants all joined in the singing of the “International” and then set off to join a pro-Communist demonstration. Abusch and Gysi drove past the mass of demonstrators to the front of the Zeughaus on the Unter den Linden. Sitting in the car as they waited to join the demonstrators, they witnessed a totally unexpected turn of events: a group of people on bicycles, immediately identified as West Berliners, arrived on the scene and proceeded to incite a mass brawl. For Abusch, this sight brought to mind frightening scenes from Berlin’s past: the Freikorps soldiers in their 1920 coup and the torch parades of the SA following Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933.22 In September 1955, Gysi was given a chance to demonstrate his political trustworthiness when he was chosen to accompany the GDR delegation to the first international conference of Germanists in Rome. Eight months later, he was recruited by the secret service as an informer, a function he carried out for nearly a decade.23 Another test came later that year. In the fall of 1956, Gysi was appointed editor-in-chief—and censor—of the Kulturbund’s weekly publication, Sonntag. From this vantage point, he provided the security ministry with information per-

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taining to editorial discussions, and he also reported on the circle of intellectuals that had formed around Wolfgang Harich, the deputy editor for the philosophy section of the journal. Harich was subsequently arrested by the secret service and, together with Walter Janka, Gustav Just, and Heinz Zo¨ger, was sentenced to several years in prison for the crime of “forming a conspiratorial and counter-revolutionary platform hostile to the state.” In February 1957, Gysi officially resumed his position in the leadership group of the Kulturbund. Following Walter Janka’s arrest, he was also appointed director of the renowned Aufbau Verlag and assigned the task of guiding the firm back to the Communist party line of that period. Janka had eliminated preliminary censorship, stressing the responsibility of the publisher; but this publishing policy was now decried as an imitation of the deviant practices of Tito’s Yugoslavia. For his part, Gysi was adamant in bringing the publishing house back to the straight and narrow ideological path of the SED, and to this end he drafted a conservative publishing program for the press. Whereas Janka had published Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Franz Werfel, Gysi strengthened the representation of contemporary local authors such as Johannes R. Becher, Anna Seghers, and Alexander Abusch. Gysi also took security matters in hand, sending selected personnel files to the secret service. In numerous phone conversations, Gysi likewise discussed Janka’s trial with state security officials, offering his opinion on the court proceedings, the defendant, the witnesses, and the rising sense of public panic. As noted, Gysi acted as a secret informer until 1965, providing detailed reports on the two publishing houses in which he worked and on the editorial team of Sonntag, as well as more general assessments of the cultural and literary scene. Gysi’s activities were not confined to the local sphere. In 1959, he became head of the Leipziger Bo¨rsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels (Leipzig association of the German book trade). In this role, participating in the annual trade book fair in Frankfurt, he served as an unconventional publicity agent for East Germany’s literary policies in the West. Presiding at press conferences with charm and wit, he effectively promoted the GDR’s image as a purveyor of classical German literature. The Communist became famous for his ability to speak in a different tone and tenor. But on his home turf, both in the Kulturbund and in the East Geman media, Gysi, with the barbed tongue of a cold warrior, branded the German Federal Republic as a repository of American mass culture, cultural barbarism writ large, and national treason. For all his ability to survive and even flourish, Gysi could hardly take pride in his role during the dismal 1950s, when Stalinism, long after Stalin’s death, retained a firm hold on the East German cultural scene. The hallmarks of this era were political purges and denunciations. During the following decade, marked by stabilization and a certain rise in the GDR’s international standing, Gysi consolidated his position. Like many other Communists of Jewish origin, his career advanced via the state rather than the party apparatus. In 1966, he was appointed cultural minister of the GDR. The Western press appraised him as highly experienced and loyal to the party line, yet at the same time sophisticated and worldly—a rare combination in a party largely dominated by close-minded and poorly educated


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apparatchiks. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “Gysi is familiar to many Western journalists from press conferences at the Book Fair as a sharptongued yet elegant debating partner, with a firm grasp of ideology. To date, he has not been seen as a mere functionary, no matter how well he may have functioned in the service of the regime.”24 Upon Ulbricht’s death in 1973, and with Erich Honecker now head of the East German Communist party, Gysi’s career underwent a shift from the cultural to the diplomatic sphere. In 1973, he was accredited as the GDR’s first ambassador to Italy and Malta. Among Italian intellectuals, far beyond the circle of the Italian Communist party, Gysi enjoyed considerable popularity, enhancing East Germany’s cultural prestige in the international arena. In contrast, it was far harder for the GDR to attain political approbation, and here Gysi proved less successful. He remained in his post until 1978, when ill health forced his retirement. The following year, however, as already noted, he was called back to service as state secretary for religious affairs.25

The Second Generation Gysi belonged to the generation that molded life in the GDR. Unlike the founders, born between 1885 and 1900 and retired from active political life either before or by the beginning of the 1970s, Gysi’s generation left its stamp on the East German state over the entire 40 years of its existence.26 His contemporaries were appointed to political office in their best and most productive years. They were highly motivated, partly out of a sense that they had to make up for lost time; during the 12 years of Nazi rule, they had suffered from persecution and danger in various forms. In their economic and sociopolitical conceptions of socialism, Gysi and his cohort remained fixated on the experience of their youth, when they had first been politicized. Members of this generation experienced the First World War as children. Often their fathers were absent in the armed forces. They were the first to grow up, after 1918, as teens in a German democracy. However, for them the Weimar republic was characterized far less by its democratic achievements than by the destitution of many middle-class families (often their own) as a result of hyperinflation; the comet-like rise of profiteers; the material distress of the workers and the lack of food for their undernourished children; the housing crisis; and mass unemployment. Members of Gysi’s generation became involved in the Communist party as young adults in the final years of Weimar, after the Stalinization of the party. The highly emotional rhetoric of class struggle, the ideal of being “uncompromising” when it came to ideology, the irreconcilable antagonisms, and the girdle of hierarchy and discipline that they donned were all closely interconnected with the self-image they entertained of being politically tough but ideologically “elastic.” The demands made on these young people by the Communist movement can be described in terms such as “positive,” “objective,” “collective,” “pro-active,” “achievement-oriented,” and “militant.” In contrast to the veteran generation of the founders, Gysi and his contemporaries

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missed out on such experiences as a personal acquaintance with the fathers of the Communist movement or a journey to the Soviet Union in its early heroic years. They had no part in the “experience of the 1914 war.” Martial rhetoric and militant thinking were recruited to compensate for that lack: a respect for those who had experienced frontline combat went hand-in-hand with a scorn for “imperialist” war. Many young Communists volunteered for service in the Spanish Civil War, gaining field experience in the struggle for what they passionately believed to be a just cause. During the Second World War, in contrast, many of them, as emigrants in England and other lands of refuge, had little opportunity to engage in combat. Some were recruited into the propaganda machinery of the Allied powers, but few saw action at the front lines. In Germany, not only Jews but also “half-Jews” were excluded from military service, deemed “combat-unworthy.” Some political prisoners, it is true, were allowed out of the concentration camps in order to fight in the especially dangerous “penal battalions” (Strafbattalione); few of them survived. Thus, in contrast with the older generation and with their own peers who had served in the world war, the surviving Communists of the second generation were for the most part civilians. This fact was to provide a biographical basis and impetus for their later polemics against militarism. At war’s end, the so-called anti-fascist and democratic revolution that was introduced by the SED (in the shadow of the Soviet occupiers) was associated with a change of elites. The interlocking between de-Nazification, expropriation, collectivization, and social privilege installed new groups of young leaders at the helm. In relation to the very small number of Jews in the GDR, Communists of Jewish (or part-Jewish) origin were overrepresented in the new political class that aimed to eliminate the relics of the old order, that is, the “alliance of the elites” that had been in place from the Second Empire straight through to the end of the Third Reich.27 Having been so cruelly persecuted, Jewish Communists were now buoyed by a sense of moral right and saw themselves as part of a new counter-elite. This elite comprised proletarians moving upwards on the social ladder (that is, as skilled Communist workers); deracinated intellectuals and segments of the middle class, who, by joining the KPD, had gone through a kind of proletarian initiation; and “reformed” members of the antifascist bourgeois and aristocratic strata, who, after the war, as “men of good will,” embraced the new order in the Soviet zone. Given its chronic lack of qualified personnel, the SED was in urgent need of professionalism in filling posts within the party and state apparatus. As a result, career prospects were especially good for Communists of Jewish origin from middle-class backgrounds, though at the same time they were a recurrent target for intellectual and occasionally even antisemitic resentment in the party. Gysi is a good example. By the 1960s, as has been seen, he was ranked in the GDR’s elite (which never wanted to be recognized as an elite), appearing, for example, when serving as minister for culture, in a biographical dictionary published in 1969 on the 20th anniversary of the GDR, significantly titled Antifascists in Leading Positions.28 This publication was directly bound up with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s new Ostpolitik29 and clearly expressed the GDR’s need to showcase its


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anti-fascist reputation. The book sought to document the fact that the old contrast between intellect and power had finally been successfully reconciled in the GDR. Jewish Communists were heavily represented in this handbook, accounting for 24 of the 98 entries.30 An evaluation of another book, the Biographical Handbook of the GermanSpeaking Emigration after 1933 (in particular, the statistics within it regarding the members of the Politburo and the SED Central Committee) confirms the impression of a characteristic career pattern for Jews in the upper echelons of the system.31 In relative terms, they were integrated earlier and in greater numbers than others into the state as opposed to the party bureaucracy. Communists of Jewish origin seldom penetrated the innermost circle of political leadership to become members of the Politburo; before the Stalinist purges, only Rudolf Herrnstadt, an emigrant returned from Moscow, had managed to achieve this elevated status. (After 1958, Albert Norden, a Comintern agent and emigrant from the West, rose to the top level of the party.) Few Jews ever attained membership in the SED Central Committee. Very few Communists of Jewish extraction worked in the police, military, or state security. Exceptions such as Markus Wolf confirm the rule, pointing to the informal restrictions in access to certain types of activities, and also reflecting personal orientations and preferences. Instead of security, Jewish Communists most often were prominent on the ideological front. They became the ambassadors of a political and cultural antifascism in the broadest sense of the term—active as cultural officials, jurists, experts on foreign trade, diplomats, journalists, and propagandists. They put to practical effect the non-material capital available to the GDR, which was, after all, a small state with dubious legitimacy, limited sovereignty, and a lack of international recognition. In this sense, Gysi and others both agitated and acted as passionate patriots of the “other” Germany. Between 1949 and 1953, Jewish Communists had found themselves caught up in the swirling waves of late-Stalinist purges—no longer heroic, antifascist exiles but now “emigrants from the West,” supposed “Trotskyites,” or, because of their Jewish background, “Zionists.” Most were heavily traumatized by this stigmatization at the hands of their own comrades, which followed hard on the heels of their forced emigration, their survival in the camps, or their ordeal living underground or in semi-legality. But only a few party functionaries, among them Julius Meyer and Leo Zuckermann, chose to flee the GDR. Most stayed on and cooperated. Their bond with the Communist movement was simply indissoluble, a pact for life. Thus, during the popular uprising of June 1953, they tried to take advantage of every opportunity to demonstrate their political probity and loyalty. Like Gysi, most of those who were subjected to disciplinary measures were eventually allowed to resume high positions within the state. Zionism or Communism: for the Jews in the days of Weimar, these two movements had spelled the options for radical political involvement. Nonetheless, Communism remained the cause of no more than a very small minority among the Jews, the claims of vo¨lkisch and National Socialist propaganda after 1918 notwithstanding. Klaus Gysi was one of the minority who sought the path into the KPD at the end of the Great War and in the 1920s. For Gysi and other Jews of the younger

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generation, the turn to the Left was a loud protest against liberals and the “legalistic” conceptions of democracy that were then popular in the ranks of the Social Democratic (“reformist”) party; against the Orthodox Jewish homes some of them had been raised in; against a bourgeois lifestyle they repudiated as apolitical; and against Zionism as a “reactionary” movement of Jewish nationalism. By the end of the Weimar republic, the espousal of Communist ideology also increasingly became a declaration of war against the National Socialists and antisemitism, both of which had experienced a dramatic upswing, in a turn not predicted by bourgeois-liberal Jewish conceptions of assimilation. Precisely at that critical juncture, the vision of the future in a Communist society, where all social, religious, and ethnic discrimination would cease to exist, became a powerful magnet. In opting for the KPD, young Jews hoped that they would find emotional security, protection, an escape from isolation, and a simplification of the complex reality engulfing them. They wished nothing more than to be atheistic, German Communists.32 The Communists’ denial of their Jewish background was not a defensive reaction to the Right’s demagogic identification of “Bolshevism” with Judaism. Rather, it was the response to the Communist creed of a voluntary and uncompromising selfdistancing from the milieus of their origin. Full assimilation without a trace was to serve as the foundation of a new and totally political existence. In retrospect, many of those persecuted by the Third Reich came to see their survival as the outcome of their having successfully repressed their Jewish origin, since in a German concentration camp, one’s chances of survival were increased if one wore the red triangle designating a “political” prisoner of German nationality rather than the yellow star of a Jew. Communists in the camps tried to protect their Jewish comrades by claiming them simply as Communists. In Nazi Germany, outside the camps, it was of course dangerous to call notice to oneself either as a Jew or as a Communist. In Moscow, in contrast, exiles were best advised to call themselves Communists at all times. Only emigrants in the West had a chance of receiving some meager handout from a relief organization if they presented themselves as Jews rather than Communists—though later, this was a fact that was best played down when it came to the SED. For others, ideological certainties were annulled or left in abeyance for a short time at the end of the war. The mass murder of the European Jews, totally irrespective of their class origins, refuted the old economic analysis of fascism, according to which antisemitism was a manifestation of a more intensified class struggle. Many Jewish Communists now found themselves hard-pressed to ignore the genocide. In response, some were moved to take up the banner of a Jewish right to national self-determination. They relativized the postulate of total assimilation, initially looking upon the fledgling state of Israel with positive sentiments, a stance briefly legitimized by Soviet support for the establishment of the state in the years 1947–1948. Some, out of a sense of solidarity with the victims of the Shoah, even became members of the organized Jewish community. Over time, however, the purges from 1949 onward worked to restore the original ideological taboos. Reawakened self-discipline, party-political pressures, and the about-face in Soviet policy toward Israel all caused Communists of Jewish extrac-


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tion to return to their earlier creed of total assimilation. They resumed the old debates of their youth, engaging in polemics against the Zionists—though now the charge was that the Zionists were seeking to extract ideological capital from antisemitism and the catastrophe of the Shoah. They equated Judaism with Zionism, thus attacking not only Jewish nationalism but also the Jewish religion. The virtually obsessive anti-Zionism of the SED, formulated to programmatic perfection by Jewish Communists such as Alfred Norden and Hermann Axen, had its roots in the ideological skirmishes and positions of the 1920s.33 Further, with the creation of three new states—the GDR, West Germany, and Israel—the old political discourses of Communism, parliamentary democracy, and Zionism took on territorial form. The GDR became the historical site of an embodied idea—a transitional society building the way forward to socialism, in bitter opposition both to the bourgeois democracy of the capitalist West and to political Zionism in Israel. In its capacity as a truly antifascist state, a “home” for the Jewish survivors, and a nation with a highly developed culture, it laid special claim to being the “other,” better Germany. In the eyes of internationalists, the fact that this political and emotional home of Jewish Communists was a truncated socialist state, unable for four decades to become a full nation-state, made the GDR even more attractive. As in the 1920s, such idealists felt themselves to be the “patriots” of a worldview that had elevated “humankind” rather than individual nations to the status of a primary ideal. Despite the pervasiveness of national rhetoric in the GDR, what had to guide the country’s actions was, in their view, the cultural, rather than the political conception of the nation. Preferably seen in contrast with the “decadent” Americanized West, national culture meant German classicism and the ideals of the Enlightenment. After all, the rebellious young Jewish Communists had quite naturally imbibed the bourgeois ideal of Bildung and the humanism of the classical period in the homes of their youth. In the untiring diatribe against the Federal Republic and the proclamation of the GDR as the rightful successor to the German cultural heritage, Klaus Gysi, along with Albert Norden, Gerhart Eisler, and Alexander Abusch, were among those who formulated the most compelling and striking arguments. In his many-sided engagement in the cause of the GDR, Gysi was driven throughout his life by ideological passion and the power of an illusion.34 Yet in the final phase of his life, something else was added: an awakened awareness and appreciation of his Jewish background. In an interview conducted during the period of the “great change” following German reunification, Gysi acknowledged that, during his tenure as state secretary for religious affairs, Judaism had become an important element in his life. He also termed the mass murder of the Jews a “decisive event” for himself, personally.35 By saying this, Gysi was in no way denying the core of his political blueprint for living, his Communist identity. Communism for him had lost none of its central and paramount existential significance, but it had shed its hermetic quality. A repressed dimension had now welled up: his own Jewish origins. Shifted from the biographical to the political plane, one might say that the possibility that Jews and Judaism might someday disappear in the GDR had become

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an absolutely unacceptable notion—even for many Communists of Jewish extraction who, throughout their lives, had espoused total and complete assimilation.

Notes This essay was translated by William Templer. 1. This article is an expanded version of my biographical sketch, “Akrobat mit Schulung: Klaus Gysi,” in Karin Hartewig, Zuru¨ckgekehrt: Die Geschichte der ju¨dischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Cologne: 2000), 172–180. 2. On the history of the opposition and various cultural movements during the 1970s and 1980s, see Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (Oxford: 2000), 201–242; Erhart Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR, 1949– 1989 (Berlin: 1998), 335 ff. 3. Gysi, personal conversation with the author, May 1991. 4. Distributed in the Federal German Republic under the title Als die Synagogen brannten. Zwei Arbeitshefte aus der DDR: Dokumentation des Evangelischen Pressedienstes (Frankfurt: 1978). The secret service was aware of this publication; see Bundesbeauftragte fu¨r die Stasi-Unterlagen (henceforth: BStU-MfS), HA-XX, 4, 2213/2. Part of the irony of the tale told in this essay is that Gysi’s activities in the sphere of church policy can be totally reconstructed from the exhaustive files of the Ministerium fu¨r Staatssicherheit (henceforth: MfS). 5. See Manfred Fassler, “Verso¨hnung heisst Erinnerung: Juden in der DDR und kirchlich-ju¨discher Dialog,” Kirche im Sozialismus: Zeitschrift zu Entwicklungen in der DDR 11 (June 1985), 103–111. A copy of the Evangelischer Pressedienst report, 1985, can be found in Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR beim Bundesarchiv, Zentrales Parteiarchiv (henceforth: SAPMO-BA, ZPA), IV, B-2714/175/35. 6. Rudi Bellmann to Gysi, 21 March 1986 (“Die ju¨dischen Gemeinden in der DDR”), BStU-MfS, HA-XX, 4/1371/2–53. 7. BStU-MfS, HA-XX, 4/1371/5. 8. Gysi to Honecker, 8 April 1987, BStU-MfS, HA-XX, 4/698/62–65. 9. Newman had been active up until then in Champaign, Illinois. He was born in Poland in 1922 and had spent the war in various labor and concentration camps, the last of which was Auschwitz. After liberation, he went to Israel and then to the United States, where he finished his studies as a rabbi. 10. Attempts were made after Newman left to find another rabbi, but these proved unsuccessful. 11. Memo, 30 April 1987, from Col. Wiegand, state security ministry, BStU-MfS, HAXX, 4/699/96; see also Gysi to Honecker, 15 Jan. 1988, in: BstU-MfS, HA-XX, 4/1381/ 260–263. 12. Statement by Col. Wiegand, 9 Sept. 1985, BStU-MfS, HA-XX, 4/447/51. 13. Gysi to Honecker, 15 Jan. 1988, BStU-MfS, HA-XX, 4/1381/260–263. 14. Hans Wilke, office of the state secretary for religious affairs (Staatssekretariat fu¨r Kirchenfragen, henceforth: StfK), 19 Aug. 1975. (“Informationen zu einigen Problemen der Ju¨dischen Gemeinde von Gross-Berlin”), BStU-MfS, HA-XX, 4/21165/10 ff. 15. StfK, 11 Jan. 1985 (“Information zur ‘Neuen Synagoge’ ”), Bundesarchiv Berlin (henceforth: BA) DO-4, 1346/2. 16. “Verordnung u¨ber die Errichtung eines Stiftung ‘Neue Synagoge—Centrum Judaicum,’ ” Gesetzblatt der DDR 1, no. 13 (4 July 1988). 17. This heritage had long been rejected; see Sara Lorenzini, Il rifiuto di un’eredita` difficile: La Repubblica democratica tedesca, gli ebrei e Israele (Florence: 1998). 18. Minutes, meeting of the SED Politburo, 31 May 1988, SAPMO-BA, ZPA, J-IV 2/2/ 2277 (with extensive accompanying documentation).


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19. See Armin Laschet (ed.), Philipp Jenniger: Rede und Reaktion (Aachen: 1989); Astrid Linu, “. . . noch heute ein Faszinosum . . .” Philipp Jenninger zum 9. November 1938 und die Folgen (Mu¨nster: 1991). 20. See the superb portrait of the Gysis in Jonathan Kaufmann, A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe (New York: 1997), 39–41; other biographical information is based on interviews conducted with Gysi in May and June 1991 and February 1992, along with information found in Gysi’s SED cadre file, SAPMO-BA, ZPA, IV, 2/11/ 4911. 21. See Wolfgang Schievelbusch, Vor dem Vorhang: Das geistige Berlin 1945–1948 (Munich: 1995), 117–118. 22. Alexander Abusch, Mit offenem Visier: Memoiren (Berlin: 1986), 296; see also SAPMO-BA, ZPA, EA, 1084/3/351. 23. See Gysi’s file in the state security ministry and several volumes of files with informer reports in: BStU MfS-AP 13492/89 and BStU MfS-AIM 3803/65, vol. 1; vol. 2:1–4. 24. “Ein schillernder Funktiona¨r neuer Zonen-Kulturminister,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (14 Jan. 1966). 25. SAPMO-BA, ZPA, IV, 2/11/4911. 26. The same is true of many Jewish Communists in Poland. See Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley: 1991) and his essay “Jews and the Communist Movement in Interwar Poland” in this volume, 13–37. 27. The “alliance of the elites” concept was coined by Fritz Fischer, Bu¨ndnis der Eliten: Zur Kontinuita¨t der Machtstrukturen in Deutschland, 1871–1945 (Du¨sseldorf: 1979). The SED made use of this concept to characterize German “fascism” over a far longer period of time. 28. Antifaschisten in fu¨hrenden Positionen der DDR (Dresden: 1969). No author or editor is mentioned. 29. Books such as Peter Bender, Offensive Entspannung: Mo¨glichkeit fu¨r Deutschland (Cologne: 1964) and idem, Zehn Gru¨nde fu¨r die Anerkennung der DDR, (Cologne: 1968), as well as Ernst Richert, Die DDR-Elite oder Unsere Partner von morgen? (Reinbek: 1968) were published at that time. 30. The following Communists of Jewish origin were featured in the book: Heinz Abraham, Alexander Abusch, Hermann Axen, Bruno Baum, Hermann Budzislawski, Kurt Cohn, Stefan Doernberg, Lea Grundig, Klaus Gysi, Karl Kormes, Ju¨rgen Kuczynski, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Albert Norden, Hans Rodenberg, Herbert Sandberg, Hans Schaul, Anna Seghers, Peter Alfons Steiniger, Leo Stern, Heinrich Toeplitz, Deba Wieland, Margarete Wittkowski, and Konrad Wolf. 31. Werner Ro¨der (ed.), Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, 3 vols. (Munich: 1983), 3:275 ff.; also see Peter C. Ludz, Parteielite im Wandel: Funktionsaufbau, Sozialstruktur und Ideologie der SED-Fu¨hrung: Eine empirischsystematische Untersuchung (Cologne: 1968), appendix 2, materials, 350–364. 32. Isaac Deutscher called them examples of the “non-Jewish Jew”; see his Die ungelo¨ste Judenfrage: Zur Dialektik von Antisemitismus und Zionismus (Berlin: 1977), 7–20. 33. Recent forays into biographical studies include Norbert Podewin, Albert Norden: Der Rabbinersohn im Politbu¨ro (Berlin: 2001); Margarita Mathiopoulos, “Hermann Axen, Opfer, Ta¨ter, Hofjude,” in: Rendezvous mit der DDR: Politische Mythen und ihre Aufkla¨rung (Du¨sseldorf: 1994), 21–59. 34. See Francois Furet, Das Ende der Illusion: Der Kommunismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: 1996), 10. 35. “Gespra¨ch zwischen dem ehemaligen DDR-Kultur-Minister und Staatssekreta¨r fu¨r Kirchenfragen, Klaus Gysi, und Oberkirchenra¨tin Christa Lewek am 24.4.1990,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 3, no. 2 (1990), 441–442.


Essay


The “Orthodox” Orthography of Solomon Birnbaum Kalman Weiser york university

Apart from the YIVO Institute’s Standard Yiddish Orthography, the prevalent system in the secular sector, two other major spelling codes for Yiddish are current today. Sovetisher oysleyg (Soviet spelling) is encountered chiefly among aging Yiddish speakers from the former Soviet bloc and appears in print with diminishing frequency since the end of the Cold War. In contrast, “maskilic” spelling, the system haphazardly fashioned by 19th-century proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (which reflects now obsolete Germanized conventions) continues to thrive in the publications of the expanding hasidic sector. As the one group that has by and large preserved and even encouraged Yiddish as its communal vernacular since the Holocaust, contemporary ultra-Orthodox (and primarily hasidic) Jews regard themselves as the custodians of the language and its traditions. Yiddish is considered a part of the inheritance of their pious East European ancestors, whose way of life they idealize and seek to recreate as much as possible.1 The historic irony of this development—namely, the enshrinement of the work of secularized enlighteners, who themselves were bent on modernizing East European Jewry and uprooting Hasidism—is probably lost upon today’s tens of thousands of hasidic Yiddish speakers. The irony, however, was not lost on Solomon (in German, Salomo; in Yiddish, Shloyme) Birnbaum (1898–1989), a pioneering Yiddish linguist and Hebrew paleographer in the ultra-Orthodox sector. This essay examines Birnbaum’s own “Orthodox” orthography for Yiddish in both its purely linguistic and broader ideological contexts in interwar Poland, then home to the largest Jewish community in Europe and the world center of Yiddish culture.

A Brief History of Yiddish Spelling Like all post-exilic Jewish languages, Yiddish from its inception was written in Hebrew characters and consequently inherited orthographic conventions from both Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as from the written forms of Indo-European lan275

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guages previously spoken by Ashkenazic Jewry, such as Judeo-French and JudeoItalian.2 Because of the genetic unrelatedness of Hebrew and most of Yiddish, the latter necessarily made more phonetic use of the Hebrew alphabet, since it could not employ a Semitic root-based etymological system for the Indo-European components that composed the vast majority of its lexicon.3 Orthographic conventions generally obtained during the period of the First Literary Standard, the literary language based on the Yiddish dialects spoken on Germanic territory, which began to decay in the 1820s with the general decline of Yiddish there. Traditional conventions fared less well, however, during the period of the Second Literary Standard. Based on varieties of Eastern Yiddish, this literary language emerged in the late 18th century when the previous standard proved inadequate for the needs of the majority of Yiddish speakers, who were now concentrated on Slavic territory.4 The early 19th century saw the emergence in Yiddish orthography of two opposing tendencies—simplification, on the one hand, and Germanization, on the other. The model for the latter trend was the Biur, Moses Mendelssohn’s late 18thcentury translation of the Pentateuch, with original commentary, into New High German (NHG), using the Hebrew alphabet.5 During the Haskalah, Yiddish orthography became encumbered with superfluous letters in an attempt to ennoble (if not supplant) the language by modeling its usage and spelling on that of contemporary German. Foreign elements were introduced to mirror German orthography; some of them, above all the use of the silent h and [, remain in widespread use today.6 Even among those writers who sought to cultivate Yiddish as a literary language for its own sake, it was difficult to discard maskilic notions of the “purity” of German compared with the “mongrel” nature of Yiddish. This sense of inferiority before a closely related language, coupled with the general prestige accorded German as a language of high culture in Eastern Europe, commonly resulted in the conscious patterning of Yiddish spelling, vocabulary, and syntax according to German literary norms—a phenomenon known derisively as daytshmerish. The Germanization of Yiddish orthography was executed rather inconsistently and unsystematically, however, allowing many peculiarities of traditional Yiddish orthography to remain.7 Nonetheless, even those works by maskilim written in nonGermanized, popular (folkstimlekh) Yiddish, as well as traditional religious and devotional literature (for instance, biblical translations, edifying literature, and hasidic texts), generally followed these new conventions.8 Germanizing tendencies were intensified as a result of the influence of German socialists and anarchists on the Jewish labor movement in Eastern Europe and America toward the turn of the 20th century.9 One of the first to reject the daytshmerish spelling prevalent in early Yiddish periodicals (such as Alexander Tsederboym’s pioneering newspaper, Kol mevaser [Odessa, 1862–1871]) was the prominent lexicographer Shiye-Mordkhe Lifshits. In the preface to his Yiddish-Russian dictionary of 1876, Lifshits observed that “Mendelssohn’s rules are only for German, but are not suitable for Yiddish.”10 Accordingly, he employed a phonetic system based on his native Berditchev (Southeastern)

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Yiddish. Despite its many virtues, this system proved inconsistent and inappropriate for other dialects.11 Ber Borokhov, the Yiddish philologist and Poale Zion theoretician, was the next to approach the problem of orthography systemically. In his essay “The Tasks of Yiddish Philology” (1913), he primarily elaborated and gave scientific formulation to rules already proposed by Lifshits. Based on Northeastern pronunciation with some accommodation of other dialects, Borokhov’s system failed to come into use until after the Bolshevik revolution, when two publications, Naye tsayt (Vilna) and Letste nayes (Kiev) began to employ a similar system.12 With a few variations, the orthography used by the classic writer Mendele Moykher Sforim, which rejected many of Kol mevaser’s Germanized conventions, formed the basis of the system introduced in 1903 by Der fraynd (St. Petersburg), the first Yiddish daily in Russia. With some further changes, it prevailed as the most common system for the printed Yiddish word in Russia until the First World War.13 Not surprisingly, the other major impetus for orthographic reform and standardization came from pedagogues. Teachers in the Yiddish secular school movement complained that the peculiarities of Yiddish spelling and the abundance of competing systems constituted an unnecessary burden for children first learning to read and write.14 A singular, phonetically precise norm was desirable for use in the textbooks, juvenile literature, and other pedagogical materials being created to serve the Yiddish secular schools (first legalized by German occupation authorities in Eastern Europe during the First World War.)15 The creation of a unified system of spelling was thus taken up with great urgency by pedagogues, writers, language planners, and other interested individuals in the interwar years. The orthographic reform movement was lent additional impetus by the atmosphere of iconoclasm and radical political change in Eastern Europe and by spelling reforms in co-territorial languages, most significantly the reform of Russian first proposed in 1904 and finally effected after the Bolshevik revolution.16 Yiddishists in Poland were also doubtless aware of the attempt to put an end to what was seen as orthographic chaos in Polish.17 Between 1917 and 1919, the labor of standardizing Yiddish spelling passed largely from the hands of individual researchers, writers, and teachers to the collective resources of commissions and conferences in Ukraine and Poland. Orthographic conferences were subsequently convened in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia throughout the 1920s, and their proposals were published and discussed by scholars and language reformers across the borders. Three orthographic commissions were active in Warsaw alone during the years 1919–1921.18 During the interwar period, the debate over spelling and language reform culminated in the creation of three major “neo-traditional” orthographic codices. The first of these was SYO (Standard Yiddish Orthography),19 which was based on the system proposed in Zalmen Reyzen’s Gramatik fun der yidisher shprakh (Vilna: 1920) and elaborated in Poland in the 1930s by YIVO and by TsYShO (Tsentrale yidishe shul-organizatsye [the Central Yiddish School Organization]). The second was the Soviet system (Sovetisher oysleyg), largely the work of the linguist and pedagogue Ayzik Zaretski and traceable to the 1913 proposals of Mordkhe Veynger,

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who based his system on what he felt should be standard pronunciation rather than any of the three major dialectical varieties of Yiddish (Northeastern, or “Lithuanian”; Southeastern, or “Ukrainian”; and Central, or “Polish”). The Soviet codex was the only system conceived with official support and made binding by government decree. In contrast, the third system, the “Orthodox” or “traditionalist” system, was expounded exclusively and championed primarily by one person, Solomon Birnbaum.20 All of these systems, which rejected the most blatant daytshmerizmen, are essentially phonemic and largely interdialectical, meaning that speakers of any of the three major Yiddish dialects can read them according to their own dialectical pronunciations.21 The Soviet system differed primarily in that it fully naturalized the spelling of the Hebrew and Aramaic component and eliminated final letters, at least in publications destined for Soviet readers.22 The “Orthodox” system, which defined itself in strict opposition to what Birnbaum labeled the “neo-maskilic” (SYO) and “Bolshevik” (Soviet) systems, sought to represent the maximum number of phonemic distinctions in all three dialects simultaneously and was also more purist in its approach, rejecting secular European influences as foreign and on the whole inimical to the Jewish way of life.

Solomon Birnbaum One of three sons of Nathan Birnbaum, the chief organizer and initiator of the landmark Czernowitz conference for Yiddish held in 1908, Solomon Birnbaum literally grew up within the Yiddishist movement. The product of an acculturated middle-class home in Vienna, Nathan Birnbaum was the foremost leader of the Jewish nationalist movement in Austria prior to the arrival of Theodor Herzl on the scene but became disillusioned by what he deemed the spiritual barrenness of political Zionism. Soured by personal and ideological differences with Herzl, he withdrew from the movement (whose name he had coined) following the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. Meanwhile, contact with Yiddish-speaking Jewry during his itinerant Zionist activity in Eastern Europe inspired him to reappraise the diaspora, which he came to see as the site of a unique and venerable Jewish national culture. Having earlier denounced Yiddish as the corrupt language of the ghetto, he now became enamored of it as the language of unassimilated Jewry. Mastering the language (he was in his 40s at the time), Nathan Birnbaum worked increasingly as a publicist and politician to defend and promote the idiom and its blossoming secular culture. As early as 1904, he proclaimed the need to “awaken an open and conscious Jewish language-pride among Eastern European Jews” in order to combat the widespread perception of Yiddish as, at best, a “hand-maiden” of Hebrew and, at worst, a degenerate form of German.23 Embracing diaspora nationalism, he became a leader in the movement for Jewish cultural autonomy within the framework of the multilingual Habsburg empire. In 1907, he even ran unsuccessfully for election as a Jewish national delegate to the Austrian Reichsrat from the Galician district of Buczacz.24 Solomon Birnbaum was only six years old when his father left the Zionist move-


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ment and 16 when his family relocated from Vienna to Czernowitz in 1908. Like his father a native speaker of German, he began to publish translations from Yiddish and to lay the groundwork for an innovative system of transcription into Latin letters as early as 1907.25 His first publications addressing problems of Yiddish orthography and transcription into Latin letters appeared in Mordechai Fritz Kaufmann’s (German-language) Die Freistatt, the ephemeral organ of the “pan-Jewish” movement dedicated to uniting German and East European Jews, to which his father had begun contributing articles with an increasingly religious bent.26 Solomon acquired fluency in Yiddish while a student at the Czernowitz gymnasium, and he consequently adopted the Southeastern dialect of his peers.27 He returned to the Austrian capital, however, in 1910 to study architecture. The following year, his father, now estranged from the secular “idolatry” of the Yiddishist movement after having undergone a religious awakening, moved his family to Berlin.28 Both Nathan and Solomon eventually adopted Orthodoxy and became active in the Agudath Israel movement. Serving as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, Solomon Birnbaum was wounded in the throat. During his convalescence, he completed a groundbreaking grammar of the Yiddish language, Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache fu¨r den Selbstunterricht (1918).29 Although published as part of a series of self-instruction books (Die Kunst der Polyglottie) aimed at a popular audience, this grammar is deemed a classic of Yiddish linguistics.30 Following the First World War, he abandoned his study of architecture for financial reasons and turned to Oriental studies (which his father had also studied years earlier before taking up law) at the universities of Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, and Wu¨rzburg.31 In his dissertation of 1921, titled Das hebraïsche und aramaïsche Element in der jiddischen Sprache, Birnbaum discarded the final vestige of maskilic orthography present in the 1918 Grammatik.32 When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Birnbaum immediately emigrated from Germany, where he had taught Yiddish at the University of Hamburg since 1922. After arriving in England, he occupied a dual appointment as lecturer in Hebrew paleography and epigraphy at the School of Oriental and African Studies and as lecturer in East European studies at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, both of London University. He remained in these positions until his retirement in 1958.33 For more than two decades, Birnbaum continued to refine his orthographic and transliteration systems, striving to develop a modern, phonemically accurate and wholly consistent orthography based on the foundations of preHaskalah Yiddish literature and untainted by secular European influence. Following in his father’s path of religious return, Solomon Birnbaum repeatedly expressed in his writings the profound conviction that Yiddish, together with the sacred liturgical and scholarly language of Hebrew-Aramaic, represented the essential core of Ashkenazic religious and cultural life and thus necessitated careful cultivation. In his words: Yiddish is of great importance for Jewishness. It can be appreciated in various ways. One can regard Yiddish with respect to its worth for the judaization of life, of the secular, especially with regard to its value for the separation from other peoples—that

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is, other religious faiths. . . . It is said that language is a secular matter. In Jewish life, it is sanctified, along with all other parts of this world. As a result, it then influences the individual and helps him to sanctify life.34

Sharing this conviction with another prominent Yiddish linguist, Matisyohu Mieses,35 Birnbaum maintained that the Jewish religion and the way of life inspired by it was essentially responsible for the genesis and independent development of Yiddish. He denounced modern Hebrew, which draws primarily on biblical and mishnaic (not rabbinic) Hebrew and introduced a nontraditional pronunciation. To Birnbaum, modern Hebrew was an inorganic and “soulless Esperanto,” the artificial engineering of secular enlighteners and nationalists with little or no regard for the sanctity and historical legacy of loshn-koydesh—the amalgam of rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic developed over the course of centuries. Similarly, the goal of the predominantly leftist Yiddishist movement to transform Yiddish into an instrument of progressive, secular culture was for Birnbaum a distorted paradox.36 Yiddishists sought to make profane a language that had for centuries served as a medium to convey religious thought and feeling and consequently absorbed an element of holiness. In an article appearing in a 1925 jubilee volume dedicated to his father by Orthodox leaders, Birnbaum formulated a joint critique of Yiddishism and Hebraism. For him, the two bitter rivals were but two sides of the same coin threatening Jewish religiosity, which constituted the raison d’eˆtre of the Jewish people and the source of its uniqueness: Where the influence of religion ceases, the culture-creating process also stops and the profound particularities of peoples disappear, as we see among Jews and among other peoples. One look at Europe offers enough material for such observations. But the leftists have gone blind to the spiritual, and that camp of freethinkers among us that has made a banner of Yiddish uses the creation of religion against it, thinking that the force that created it is already old and decrepit, and the child can fend for itself. The “Yiddishist” war against religion, which most often also opposes Hebrew, sometimes blinds even one among us. Such a person sees only the danger of Yiddishism and sometimes he does not even understand the role of Yiddish, especially if he has unwittingly become infected with leftist opinions. This person does not see, because of his shortsightedness, that there is absolutely no difference between Yiddishism, on the one hand, and Hebraism, on the other. It is the same heretical nationalism in different dress. He does not see that the whole war between Yiddish and Hebrew, folk language and national language, is only a conflict between two brothers, that Hebrew is not loshn-koydesh—that for the Bolsheviks, Tchernichovsky and the Torah, forgive the comparison, are the same enemy.37

Especially during the 1920s and 1930s, when Yiddish orthography was the subject of much popular and scholarly discussion in Poland, the U.S.S.R. and New York, Birnbaum argued in various forums against the major spelling systems then in use, on both ideological and scientific grounds. The Haskalah, he charged, was responsible for the inner slavery of the Jews to Gentile values, and its vilification of Yiddish was tantamount to the negation of yidishkeyt.38 The “new maskilim”— 20th-century secular nationalists and socialists—had declared war on the “ugly, Germanized corrupt language” of the 19th-century “old maskilim” and to some


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extent had actually improved on their predecessors’ Germanized orthography (which Birnbaum dismissed as being “from a scientific standpoint . . . stupid”). These changes, however, had not rendered the language “more Jewish.”39 On the contrary, rather than build upon the language’s native traditions, Yiddishists had further denuded it of its authentically Jewish character through the imitation of Gentile languages. Like the “old maskilim” whom they opposed, they lived “in a world which is not in its essence Jewish, or is only half-Jewish” and they had consequently lost, or were in the process of losing, the authentic Yiddish idiom suffused with religious culture.40 Further, the determined efforts of Yiddishists had rid contemporary Yiddish only of its most glaring Germanisms and had unwittingly permitted new ones to creep into all linguistic spheres (except phonetics, which remained unaffected).41 Scores of NHG words had been adopted, often only with the slightest modification to make them appear more in harmony with the rules of Yiddish morphology and phonology.42 For instance, in the case of the term antviklung (cf. NHG Entwicklung, “development”)—a borrowing prompted by a lexical gap—the word had been only slightly Yiddishized; in fact, antvikelung would have been the proper Yiddish parallel, since all parts of the NHG model have Yiddish equivalents.43 Worst of all, NHG words had displaced Yiddish cognates—for instance, the Yiddish yugnt, or “young woman,” was used with the meaning of NHG Jugend, “youth”; and visnshaft, used in traditional Bible translations to mean “knowledge,” had assumed the meaning of NHG Wissenschaft, “science” or “scholarship.”44 Orthodox Jews, Birnbaum lamented, shared in the maskilic denigration of Yiddish by concurring with the evaluation of it as a corrupt, mixed language spoken by no other people than the Jews and therefore inherently parochial, devoid of value and prestige. Yet Yiddish’s intrinsic value stemmed precisely from its distinctiveness and its role in facilitating the Jews’ religiously prescribed selfsegregation from other peoples. In support of this claim, Birnbaum alluded to a well-known midrash, cited in various forms by halakhic authorities opposed to linguistic acculturation, that “among the reasons for which Israel was redeemed from Egypt, the Gemara includes language—that they did not change their language” and adopt Egyptian patterns.45 But now, Birnbaum charged, whereas the Orthodox were careful in all matters linked to religious observance, they dismissively proclaimed “Language . . . not important!” and benightedly clung to the outdated maskilic spelling system. Unwittingly influenced by the Yiddishists as well, their Bible translations borrowed from the idiom of the freethinkers, “which has assimilation in its soul, their words, their forms, their syntax.”46 For Birnbaum, such transgressions represented a “victory for the secularists,” who had made of Yiddish a European language in translation. Yet Birnbaum himself was not immune to contemporary currents, and he too romantically viewed language as the “true reflection” of the “soul” of a community and desired for Yiddish a “national orthography” based on premaskilic traditions.47 Hence his caustic admonitions regarding Orthodox readers, writers, and printers whose unconscious idealization of the deformed “literary language” of the “enlighteners” constituted evidence of the inroads of the “assimilationist” mentality into “Orthodox psychology.”48 Birnbaum wrote:

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Not long ago, one of the religious leaders of Polish Jewry reproached the language of Orthodox writers and was answered, “Perhaps we should write in the language of the Tseyne-ureyne?! After all, we cannot make laughing stocks of ourselves.” Laughing stocks: that means that if the leftists laugh, you are laughing stocks. They are the true arbiters of propriety. And what if they also laugh at beards and peyes, at kosher and treif, at talis and tefillin, and poke fun at God and the world? “So what,” I hear them answer. “What does one have to do with the other” The former is meant for God, the latter for people. We can’t, of course, be impractical.” Oh, if such a person only knew that with this reproach he demonstrates true impracticality. Above all, he detracts from the essence of Jewishness. . . . And who are the maskilim, the old and the new ones? Imitators of European modes of thought, modes that are, moreover, already long past their prime in Europe proper. And what are we? Imitators of imitators of outmoded styles.49

In order to preclude the further decay of Orthodoxy through the mechanism of linguistic contamination, Birnbaum proposed a plan for language reform, of which orthography represented only the beginning. The hope for a purified language lay in the hands of the Orthodox youth, he maintained, who were not yet accustomed to the “impurity” of maskilic spelling and would therefore master his own system without undue difficulty. In response to detractors who claimed that his system was too complicated for the non-philologist, Birnbaum countered that it should actually be of great pedagogical value, since children learning Germanized spelling conventions “must learn countless rules and details that contradict what their ears hear and their mouths pronounce.”50 Organizers of the Beys-yankev (Bajs Jakow) schools for girls shared Birnbaum’s concerns for the future of Yiddish in the Orthodox sector. They received the support of the influential Gerer rebbe, whose followers also constituted the backbone of support for the Agudah. The schools’ organizers and activists recognized the special danger posed to girls by the non-Orthodox world: girls generally enjoyed a less intensive religious education (one typically limited to the home) and greater exposure to Polish language and culture than their brothers studying in khadorim and yeshives. This problem was already in evidence among girls in predominantly hasidic Congress Poland and Galicia before the interwar period, especially within the upper bourgeoisie, and it became acute and generalized when Jewish girls began attending Polish state schools.51 So extensive was the penetration of the Polish language into Orthodox circles that when the Beys-yankev-zhurnal, the organ of the school movement, began to be published in 1923, it was virtually inconceivable to print it in Yiddish alone. A Polish supplement, Wschod, was included and not discontinued until years later.52 The Gerer rebbe was himself a proponent of instruction in Yiddish for both religious and secular subjects in Jewish schools; while not opposing the teaching of Polish, he did not wish to see it become the Jews’ primary language.53 Most of the Beys-yankev schools provided supplementary afternoon classes in Jewish subjects for girls attending state schools. Some offered a full-day curriculum encompassing the state program in secular subjects (taught in Polish). The schools stressed


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pride in Judaism, opposition to modern mores, and commitment to Yiddish not as a value in itself but as an integral component of Jewishness (yidishkeyt).54 In a special issue of the Beys-yankev-zhurnal dedicated to the “month in honor of Yiddish and Jewishness” (June 1931), Birnbaum and his Agudah colleagues expressed grave dismay over both the growing linguistic polonization of Jewish youth and the quality of spoken and written Yiddish among them. In state schools, it was remarked, Jewish children were not only taught to respect the Polish language and culture above their own but were also discouraged from speaking their foreign “German jargon.” Worse, Yiddish-speaking parents reinforced this deprecatory attitude by failing to attach importance to their daughters’ competence in spoken and written Yiddish. They were satisfied when their daughters acquired the rudiments of Yiddish literacy—it was enough for them to be able to recite devotional texts and to write letters full of Polonisms and ignorant misspellings. Meanwhile, these same parents insisted that their daughters devote their energies to mastering Polish since, growing up in a Jewish milieu, “they’ll know Yiddish anyway!” Hasidic mothers, in particular, were reproached for going so far as to speak Polish at home with their daughters.55 As a result, the Orthodox girls of Poland not only preferred to speak Polish with teachers and friends in the Beys-yankev schools but also felt most comfortable expressing themselves in this non-Jewish language.56 To counter these alarming trends, the Beys-yankev-zhurnal made various appeals to strengthen the pupils’ intellectual and affective bonds to Yiddish. It emphasized Yiddish’s role as the language of beloved grandparents and prior generations of pious and learned Jews and described it as the only vernacular fitting and adequate for the expression of the Jewish “soul” and the Jewish way of life. Teachers and students alike were called upon to resolve to speak only Yiddish whenever possible. Further, it was recommended that spelling and grammar, typically neglected or given only perfunctory attention by teachers, be taught in a systematic fashion on the model of Polish instruction in state schools. Only in this way would students come to accord Yiddish its due respect and regard it as a “real” language on par with Polish.57 A modern language textbook, Yidish loshn, was specifically created by Beys-yankev pedagogues for this purpose.58 Meanwhile, several months before the special issue of Beys-yankev-zhurnal came out, the Beys-yankev school system made the historic decision to adopt Birnbaum’s system (with slight changes) for all grades, as well as for the journal.59 Sore Shenirer, the founder of the Beys-yankev schools in Cracow in 1917, supported the decision, praising it as a means both to combat the pernicious maskilic influence and to eliminate the orthographic chaos then prevailing in the schools. Adopting Birnbaum’s system, she felt, would express “our unified heart, our unified thought” to do God’s will.60 Thereafter Birnbaum was able to point to the success of his system in the largest Jewish educational system in interwar Poland, where the number of children far exceeded that of even all Jewish secular schools put together.61 Still, much to his annoyance, most Orthodox writers and publications, including Dos yudishe togblat, the main Orthodox daily in Poland, rejected the linguist’s equating of form with content and refused to employ a spelling system different from that of the rest of the Warsaw Yiddish press.62

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The Principles of Birnbaum’s Approach to Yiddish Standardization Three key principles may be discerned in Solomon Birnbaum’s approach to the standardization of the Yiddish language.63 The first, anti-daytshmerizm, is a resolute opposition to NHG interference in the natural development of the language. Second, yidishlekhkeyt aims at preserving the distinctively Jewish character of the language by keeping external influences to a minimum. (Here it should be noted that, as a professional linguist, Birnbaum understood very well that language is not a closed system impervious to external influences; thus, he did not categorically reject foreign influences as negative. Though careful to avoid Germanisms, he employed internationalisms in his own writings in addition to introducing neologisms, especially in the technical fields of aviation, automechanics, and linguistics.)64 Finally, dorem-yidish represents Birnbaum’s preference for forms originating in the Southern (Central and Southeastern) dialects native to roughly three quarters of Yiddish speakers. He preferred them to forms originating in Northeastern (NE) dialect even though this dialect enjoyed great prestige throughout the Yiddish-speaking world in the period before the Second World War. In accordance with this last princple, Birnbaum rejected the pronunciation associated with klal yidish—the standard promoted in the secular sector and most commonly taught in academic settings today. The pronunciation of klal yisish is that of “purified” Lithuanian Yiddish, the speech of pre-First World War Vilna intellectual circles.65 This type of speech is popularly summarized by the formula “NE Yiddish without ey,” where other dialects have oy—for instance, Polish and Ukrainian boym (tree) instead of Lithuanian beym.66 Birnbaum scoffed at the notion of orthoepy, or standard pronunciation, for Yiddish on the grounds that this, too, constituted the conscious modeling of Gentile language habits. Rejecting the argument that the diffusion of a single prestigebearing dialect represents a natural and progressive sociolinguistic phenomenon, he encouraged each individual to retain his or her authentic, native dialect rather than assume a foreign one.67 Thus he supported the maintenance of a normative literary language, which had long existed in Yiddish, but not innovation in the form of a universal pronunciation. Having no native dialect of Yiddish, Birnbaum permitted himself to exchange the Bukovinian (Southeastern) pronunciation he had adopted in his adolescence for that of Central Yiddish, the dominant pronunciation in the ultra-Orthodox circles in which he increasingly traveled. During summer courses for the Beys-yankev schools in 1930, he had overheard a student unfamiliar with his dialect unfavorably remark that “he speaks like a goy,” and this provided the impetus for his own shift in pronunciation.68 Birnbaum also brought linguistic proofs to discredit the establishment of a Lithuanian-based norm. He denounced as “dictatorial” those responses to the problem of Yiddish orthography that were based on Northeastern pronunciation, such as the ones proposed by Ber Borokhov and adherents of Zalmen Reyzen’s “new orthography,” which forms the basis for the spelling system championed to this day by YIVO. In particular, he protested the disappearance of distinct vowels, especially in the phonemically richer Central and Southeastern dialects, through their repre-


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sentation with a common grapheme.69 He also demonstrated that single graphemes commonly represent multiple vowels in SYO.70 In order to remedy this situation, which especially complicates the pronunciation of words unfamiliar to the reader,71 Birnbaum sought to establish a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme for the Indo-European component of the language. Thus, a speaker of any of the three major Yiddish dialects could more easily read using his own pronunciation, rather than a normative one. Birnbaum also facilitated the reading of the Semitic component by reversing the trend, beginning in the 19th century, toward increasingly “defective script.”72 To achieve a more precise rendering of vowels in words of Hebrew and Aramaic origin, he suggested the retention of vocalization points (nekudot), as well as the introduction of a system of diacritics.73 Invoking the principle of “vos vayter fun daytsh” (the farther from German, the better) as his guide, Birnbaum further maintained that even if a standard pronunciation was necessary, the fact that Northeastern Yiddish (NEY) and klal-yidish were phonetically so similar to New High German (NHG) made them both unsuitable for this role.74 The greater affinity in vocalism between NEY and NHG than between the Southern dialects and NHG, he alleged, had facilitated the infiltration of Germanisms into the works of Lithuanian maskilim, whereas their southern counterparts generally wrote a purer Yiddish. Birnbaum further objected to the standard of “purified” NEY pronunciation because of its association with secularism and the Haskalah, in contrast with the speech of the more hasidic South. NEY pronunciation was generally employed on both continents in the various networks of Yiddish secular schools, which were largely organized on the initiatives of Litvaks (Lithuanian and Belarusian Jews), regardless of the native dialects of both teachers and students.75 To Birnbaum’s chagrin, this rejection of native in favor of foreign norms, again attributable to the influence of the “assimilationist leftists,” had been welcomed within the ranks of Beys-yankev students and teachers. Young speakers of Central Yiddish, he noted, all too frequently affected the Lithuanian pronunciation (with laughable results) because of the mistaken impression that it was somehow “purer,” “more dignified,” or “more correct” than that of their “non-intellectual” parents and home environment: One can say that the center of today’s Yiddishism is Vilna just as it was once a center of the old Haskalah. And Litvaks occupy in general a large place in the new Haskalah. The same holds true in Russia and in Minsk. Therefore a feeling begins to spread among Yiddishists that the Lithuanian dialect is more prestigious, more elegant, truly a language of intellectuals, as among other peoples. And our Polish, Eastern dialect is only a sort of folk dialect. And this skewed view has gradually insinuated its way in among us, where it is even more skewed. Moreover, is this imitating, this accommodation of Yiddishism, not really the greatest contradiction to the idea of traditional Jewishness?76

That the members of YIVO in Vilna were all native speakers of NEY, or often adopted it because of its “modern” and “enlightened” connotations, only strengthened his opposition to its spread. Nonetheless, he considered NEY, in principle,

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a legitimate historical development of the language and deemed it in no way inferior to any other dialect. In his eyes, it was merely grossly inappropriate for NEY to usurp the place of other dialects in the mouths of non-Litvaks.77 Following the Second World War and the liquidation of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union, Birnbaum directed his criticism almost exclusively at the proponents of SYO. He polemicized with them on the pages of Yidishe shprakh, YIVO’s journal for language standardization.78 Throughout his career, he continued to oppose what he saw as the tyranny of an “insignificant minority” (nishtike miut) of secular intellectuals determined to impose their own standard on the vast majority of Yiddish speakers.79 According to Birnbaum: There is no standard pronunciation in Yiddish. However, the members and friends of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research have strong views on the subject. They are convinced that Y[iddish] should not differ in this respect from the great Western languages, and so they are working to introduce a standard one. In their publications they speak as if it were already in existence, but that is wishful thinking—acceptance of their system being restricted to their circle. The original proponents of this “standard” were speakers of the Northern dialect and so, without further ado and without discussing the matter or giving any reasons, they decided that their own pronunciation was the “standard.” . . . It is ironic that the partisans of the “standard”—all convinced democrats—should ask the majority of Yiddish-speakers to switch over from their own pronunciation to that of a minority, comprising only a quarter of Yiddish speakers.80

A prominent Orthodox figure in a professional domain dominated by secularists, Solomon Birnbaum acted as an iconoclast both within the community of Yiddish linguists and in the religious world. While expressing resolute opposition to secular influences on Jewish life, linguistic or otherwise, he never clearly articulated boundaries between the realms and selectively chose which elements of the modern, nonOrthodox, and non-Jewish worlds to incorporate into his own life. As a language planner preoccupied with opposing secular influence on Yiddish, Birnbaum most easily found an educated forum for his anti-SYO arguments on the pages of YIVO journals. His fervor for language purity and the cultivation of Yiddish as a standardized literary language was shared most passionately by those whom he commonly denounced as “enlightened” and “heretical” on the pages of Orthodox publications and whose linguistic norms he therefore rejected. For him, as for them, the form of a language was almost as important as its content. Meanwhile, within his own community, this view was commonly deprecated as either inherently laughable, because of Yiddish’s lack of prestige among its speakers, or as simply fetishistic—that is, smacking of Yiddishism.81 This was the case despite statements by a number of rabbinic authorities (including Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe) attesting to the importance of language as a quasi-sacred barrier to assimilation.82 As Miriam Isaacs observes of contemporary Yiddish-speaking haredim: “Affection for Yiddish is not to be confused with its status in the sense that would inspire what has been considered the refinement of the language or formal education; little attention is paid to orthography or literary development.”83 The fact that Solomon Birnbaum, like his father, was not a native speaker of Yiddish should come as no surprise to students of nationalism. Indeed, the very


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fact was decisive in shaping his attitudes toward the language. Like many 19thcentury East European nationalists,84 most early ideologists of Yiddishism and Yiddish language planners were neither raised nor educated in environments where the language that they championed was the dominant tongue. Few leading Yiddish language ideologists can be considered “full” native speakers; more typically, they were products of either the Russian cultural sphere (as, for example, Borokhov and Prilutski) or the German (for instance, Max Weinreich and Zelig Kalmanovitsh), even if they were exposed to Yiddish in varying degrees in their childhood.85 It is understandable that Yiddish linguists and language planners did not emerge directly from among the romanticized folksmasn, the “unreflective” carriers of the language. A combination of self-conscious alienation from the folk language and a secular cosmopolitan education was necessary to create the perspective of an outsider. This perspective, in turn, allowed for the appreciation of Yiddish as an instrument to advance Jewish nationalism and a cultural “renaissance,” as well as an object of scientific study.86 For both Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum, a process of ideological exploration began with the appropriation of Yiddish as a tool for the promotion of secular Jewish nationalism and of the cultural rapprochement between West and East European Jewry, and ultimately culminated in the adoption of ultra-Orthodoxy as the single authentically Jewish way of life. Rejecting the cultivation of “language for language’s sake” as a Yiddishist (and, hence, Gentile) heresy, Solomon Birnbaum came to reappraise Yiddish for its instrumental value as a buttress to religious observance and as a protective wall surrounding Jewish cultural particularity. Of course, such an attitude, while explicitly supported by contemporary rabbinic authorities, was itself far from traditional. In pre-emancipation Ashkenazic society, where there was little reason to call into question the linguistic status quo, such an evaluation would have been inconceivable. While espousing the self-segregating and anti-modernist position of ultraOrthodox Judaism, Birnbaum retained much of the influence he had absorbed over the years through his contacts with the Jewish nationalist and secular spheres. His very devotion to scientific precision is largely, if not wholly, foreign to traditional Ashkenazic (especially hasidic) culture, for such a notion is itself a product of a secular education.87 In fact, he never severed his intellectual ties with secular academia and even made a career within it. He employed his education in Germanlanguage universities in order to engineer an orthographic system expressly for the purpose of combating the inroads of secularism (especially via German) and assimilation into Jewish life. Indeed, while a determined opponent of the loss of Jewish distinctiveness, he channeled most of his energies against the German influence on Yiddish, rather than against the Slavic influence—or even against the greater danger in the interwar and postwar periods, the adoption of co-territorial languages by Jews. Birnbaum’s combined experience as a university-educated, native speaker of German and as a baal teshuvah (Jewish “convert” to haredi Judaism) undoubtedly contributed to a purist stance more radical than that of YIVO, the primary agency for Yiddish language reform in independent Poland and the post-Holocaust world. YIVO’s Yiddishist members quite naturally rejected Birnbaum’s fiercely negative

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view of secularism. At the same time, other native speakers of German, above all YIVO’s head, Max Weinreich, shared Birnbaum’s distaste for Germanisms in Yiddish. Not surprisingly, native speakers of Yiddish and Russian were typically more tolerant (and perhaps less aware) in this regard and were willing to admit certain widespread Germanisms into the standard language then taking shape.88 Further, Birnbaum urged the cultivation of an Orthodox creative literature aspiring to aesthetic goals in order to dissuade voracious readers raised in Orthodox homes from turning to the growing corpus of secular Yiddish belles-lettres. Such a literature, a highly controversial issue in Orthodox circles, did indeed begin to emerge in the 1930s, only to be prematurely cut down, together with the lives of most of its exponents, during the Holocaust.89 Indeed, though his ideas about language were never accepted in wide circles, Birnbaum’s efforts may be understood as part of a larger process apparent among Orthodox Jewry in interwar Poland: the adoption of modern forms of political and social organization (for instance, schools for girls, a daily press, youth groups, and party politics), all of which were pioneered in Jewish secularist circles, in order to safeguard its intensely religious way of life.90 As mentioned previously, despite its numerous merits, Birnbaum’s system failed to obtain lasting recognition. Over time, it was forgotten outside those circles that it would most benefit today—hasidic speakers of Central Yiddish. Instead, SYO (with some variations) represents the most common system in use, thanks primarily to YIVO’s standardization efforts and prestige. Recently it has even made inroads into the religious sector because of its greater simplicity compared with the old maskilic system.91 Birnbaum’s system continues to represent a tremendous scholarly achievement, although its ideological weight is significantly lessened in a post-Holocaust world where NHG influence and secular Yiddishism, no longer a mass phenomenon, have ceased to present a serious challenge to traditional piety. Of course, secularism and assimilation continue to exist as external forces potentially jeopardizing the stability of the ultra-Orthodox world. This, in turn, has caused Yiddish to assume even greater importance as a badge of distinctiveness and as a barrier to acculturation. Today, Yiddish is associated almost exclusively with the ultra-Orthodox way of life, whereas Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, and Russian are the dominant languages of Jewish secularists. It is precisely the shriveling of the secular sector within the Yiddish-speaking milieu since the 1950s that has neutralized the ideological weight of SYO. Today, Birnbaum’s system is most likely to draw the attention not of Beysyankev pedagogues but of adult, non-hasidic students seeking to learn “nonstandard” Yiddish.

Notes 1. On the relationship of ultra-Orthodox Jews to Yiddish, see Miriam Isaacs and Lewis Glinert, “Pious Voices: Languages among Ultra-Orthodox Jews,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 138 (1999); Lewis Glinert and Yoseph Shilhav, “Holy Land,


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Holy Language: A Study of an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Ideology,” Language and Society 20 (1991), 59–86. 2. Orthographic conventions derived from Hebrew and Aramaic include the use of final letters, the use of the silent a in word initial position before vocalic w or y, the rendering of the consonant /v/ with ww and of the diphthong /ey/ with yy (indeed, Birnbaum himself demonstrated this. See his “Tsvey vovn kekhol hagoyim,” Beys-yankev-zhurnal 8, nos. 71–72 [1931], 32–33 and idem, “Fun daytshmerish biz der heyl in der midber,” Yidishe shprakh 13, no. 4 [1953], 109–120), and the near complete retention of traditional Hebrew spelling for words or forms of Hebrew origin. From Laaz (the Judeo-Romance languages), Yiddish inherited the frequent use of word-final silent a (perhaps a vestige of a formerly pronounced vowel) and the representation of /c˘/ via c. 3. Further, roots from loshn-koydesh were commonly separated from Germanic-origin morphs by parentheses, different print faces, or apostrophes. In order to avoid mispronunciations by readers not well versed in loshn-koydesh, the practice of “plene spelling” (ketiv male) for Hebrew-Aramaic elements, that is, the use of w and y as reading guides to indicate vowels (a practice employed widely though unsystematically in post-biblical literature) became widespread in place of the biblical “defective spelling” (ketiv h aser) of Hebrew. See Joshua Fishman, “The Phenomenological and Linguistic Pilgrimage of Yiddish: Some Examples of Functional and Structural Pidginization and Depidginization,” in Advances in the Creation and Revision of Language Systems, ed. Joshua Fishman (The Hague: 1977), 299– 300; David Gold, “Successes and Failures in the Standardization and Implementation of Yiddish Spelling and Romanization,” in ibid., 337. 4. The terms “First Literary Standard” and “Second Literary Standard,” and the periodization presented here, are Max Weinreich’s; see Gold, “Successes and Failures in the Standardization and Implementation of Yiddish Spelling and Romanization,” 337. 5. See Yudl Mark, “Di geshikhte fun yidishn oysleyg gor bekitser,” Yidishe shprakh 12, no. 1 (1952), 25. 6. For a detailed account of the evolution of Yiddish spelling, see Nokhem Shtif, “Tsu der historisher antviklung fun yidishn oysleyg,” Yidishe shprakh 2, nos. 1–2, 8–9 (1928), 33–60; and Mordkhe Schaechter, “Fun folksshprakh tsu kulturshprakh: an iberblik iber der historye funem eynheytlekhn yidishn oysleyg,” in idem, Der eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg (New York: 1999), 1–175. Germanizing elements (many of which have fallen into disuse) include the use of silent h (for instance, hjywr, rhay; cf. NHG Jahr, roth) and [, the latter commonly placed following /i/ or preceding syllabic /l/ and /n/ (for instance, ![Xywwc, l[jr[yp-; cf. NHG Viertel, zwischen); [ to mimic umlauted vowels (for instance, r[j[g, [k[lp-, r[j[p-; cf. NHG, Va¨ter, Fla¨che, Go¨tter); doubled vowels (for instance, r[[m, saal; cf. NHG Loos, Meer) and consonants (for instance, r[ssaww, !qqalg; cf. NHG Glocken, Wasser); the unnecessary diagraph cj instead of c alone (for instance, #jalp i; cf. NHG Platz); and the diagraph sk instead of sq, presumably because of the graphic resemblance between k and c (for instance, sk[z; cf. NHG sechs) or because of the usual sound correspondence between /ch/ and k. 7. Examples are the use of prosthetic a to separate adjacent vocalic w from consonantal ww, silent a following a word-final vowel, and the use of the diagraphs yy and yw to represent diphthongs. 8. Zalmen Reyzen, Gramatik fun der yidisher shprakh (Vilna: 1920), 119; Solomon Birnbaum, “Two Problems of Yiddish Linguistics,” in The Field of Yiddish, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York: 1954), 68. 9. Mark, “Di geshikhte fun yidishn oysleyg gor bekitser,” 26. The New York Forverts, which began publishing in 1897, is a prime example of this phenomenon. Its very name is not Yiddish but German (cf. NHG Vorwa¨rts), and its spelling js instead of # mirrors the German ts. 10. Shiye-Mordkhe Lifshits, Yidish rusisher verter-bukh (Zhitomir: 1876), quoted in Shtif, “Tsu der historisher antviklung fun yidishn oysleyg,” 47. 11. Ibid.; Reyzen, Gramatik fun der yidisher shprakh, 123.

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12. Shtif, “Tsu der historisher antviklung fun yidishn oysleyg,” 57–58; Mark, “Di geshikhte fun yidishn oysleyg gor bekitser,” 26. 13. Shtif, “Tsu der historisher antviklung fun yidishn oysleyg,” 52–56; Mark, “Di geshikhte fun yidishn oysleyg gor bekitser,” 25–27. 14. Shmuel Rozhanski (series ed.), Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur, vol. 24, Yidishe literatur un yidishe shprakh, ed. Zalmen Reyzen (Buenos Aires: 1965), 155; Schaechter, “Fun folksshprakh tsu kulturshprakh,” 9. 15. On activity to legalize Yiddish secular schools, see Zosa Szajkowski, “The Struggle for Yiddish during World War I: The Attitude of German Jewry,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 9 (1964), 131–158; Khaym Shloyme Kazdan, Fun kheyder un “shkoles” biz tsisho (Mexico City: 1956). 16. Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Developments (Oxford: 1999), 117. 17. Robert A. Rothstein, “Spelling and Society: The Polish Orthographic Controversy of the 1930s,” Papers in Slavic Philology 1 (1977), 225–226. 18. Schaechter, “Fun folksshprakh tsu kulturshprakh,” 13. 19. It is known in Yiddish as eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg or, more commonly, Yivooysleyg. 20. Gold, “Successes and Failures in the Standardization and Implementation of Yiddish Spelling and Romanization,” 310. 21. Six chief principles of general orthography, to some extent contradictory, were considered in the creation of a Yiddish standard. These are: 1. phonemic—“all phonemic oppositions must be represented graphically.” This principle supplanted the earlier widespread principle of “write as you speak/hear,” which most codifiers and reformers realized was impracticable. 2. morphophonemic (sometimes called etymological or morphological)—“if the phonemic principle obscures the visual identity between phonologically conditioned allomorphs of the same morpheme, all such allomorphs must be spelled identically.” Thus, jzalb r[ and not jsalb r[, since the verb is !zalb; and qla'p- sad, not gla'p- sad, since this is the singular of r[ql[p- (Reyzen, Gramatik fun der yidisher shprakh, 130). 3. etymological (sometimes called historical)—“words should be spelled as in the source language.” 4. interdialectal (also called dialectal, literary, or ultraquistic)—“orthography must not be based on any one regional variety but constructed in such a way that all speakers can read and write it with a minimum of difficulty (that is, the graphemes must represent diaphones and diamorphs). Ludwig Zamenhof, a Yiddish philologist as well as the creator of Esperanto, was the first to advance this principle. The Yiddishist Noyekh Prilutski also advocated and developed an interdialectal system. 5. historical—“deeply rooted traditions must be maintained.” Examples of this principle include the retention of final letters and the silent a before word-initial vocalic y or w. 6. differentiaton of homophones, which in general was not accepted by orthographers, in part because it would necessitate recourse to “superfluous” letters and because there is no limit to the number of semantic distinctions that could be represented graphically (see Reyzen, Gramatik fun der yidisher shprakh). Citations are from Gold, “Successes and Failures in the Standardization and Implementation of Yiddish Spelling and Romanization,” 308; schema adapted from ibid., 308–309, 338. 22. Apart from the matter of final letters, the codices vary little in their use of consonants, since it is overwhelmingly in their vocalism that Yiddish dialects differ. Slight differences in the use of consonants, such as the insertion of a [•] to distinguish B /b/ from b /v/, will therefore not be addressed here. 23. Nathan Birnbaum, “Die Sprachen des ju¨dischen Volkes,” in his Ausgewa¨hlte Schriften zur ju¨dischen Frage, vol. 1 (Czernowitz: 1910), 324.


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24. For details on Nathan Birnbaum’s life, see Joshua A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language: The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum (Ann Arbor: 1987). 25. Shmuel Hiley, “Solomon Birnbaum,” in History of Yiddish Studies (Chur, Switzerland: 1991), 3. 26. See, for instance, Nathan Birnbaum, “Sprachadel,” Die Freistatt 1, nos. 1–3 (May– June 1913), 137–145. 27. Hiley, “Solomon Birnbaum,” 3. 28. Hugh Denman, “Terumato shel Shlomo Birnbaum labalshanut hayidish,” Hasifrut 3– 4, nos. 35–36 (1986), 253. 29. The book was reprinted in a third and expanded edition under the title Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (Hamburg: 1979). 30. Dovid Katz, “Shloyme Birnbaum 1891–1989,” in Oksforder yidish, ed. Dovid Katz, vol. 2 (New York: 1991), 271. Birnbaum’s book includes excellent discussions of the phonology and morphology as well as of central syntactic phenomena of the language (including aspect, a topic that would not be discussed by Yiddish linguists until decades later). Based on the grammar of Central Yiddish, it nonetheless contains a comprehensive summary of the ways in which Northeastern pronunciation differs from Central pronunciation and references to syntactic and morphological uses that differ in the two dialects. Thanks to a preliminary version of Birnbaum’s interdialectal orthographic and transliteration systems, its entries can be read easily and precisely in any of the three major dialects. See Denman, “Terumato shel Shlomo Birnbaum labalshanut hayidish,” 256. 31. Denman, “Terumato shel Shlomo Birnbaum labalshanut hayidish,” 258. 32. Birnbaum replaced [ in unaccented syllables (for instance, !s[g[g) with traditional (and more phonologically precise) y (for instance, !s[gyg) a reform whose foundation had already been laid by Yude Yoffee and Ber Borokhov (see Hiley, “Solomon Birnbaum,” 5). He also abandoned the “silent” [ used in both traditional and maskilic orthography preceding syllabic consonants (for instance, !b[l replaced ![b[l). He retained, however, the traditional and maskilic “silent” or prosthetic a that SYO rejected. See Shloyme Birnboym, “Di yesoydes fun yidishn oysleyg,” in Der eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg, materialn un proyektn tsu der ortografisher konferents fun YIVO (Vienna: 1930); idem, Geule fun loshn (Lodz: 1931). Geule fun loshn is reprinted in its entirety in Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish Life and Letters, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (The Hague: 1981), 181–195. 33. These dates are based on Denman, “Terumato shel Shlomo Birnbaum labalshanut hayidish,” with corrections provided by his son David Birnbaum of Toronto, Canada (personal correspondence). 34. Birnboym, Geule fun loshn, in Fishman (ed.), Never Say Die! 181–182. 35. Matisyohu Mieses, Die Entstehungsursache der ju¨dischen Dialekte (Vienna: 1915). 36. Denman, “Terumato shel Shlomo Birnbaum labalshanut hayidish,” 255. 37. Shloyme Birnboym, “Yidish un yidishkeyt,” in Yubileum-bukh tsum zekhtsikstn geburts-tog fun d’r Nosn Birnboym, ed. Yehude Leyb Orlean and Nosn Hasoyfer (Warsaw: 1925), 147–157. A slightly different translation is to be found in Shlomo Birnbaum, “Jewishness and Yiddish,” in An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. Joseph Leftwich (The Hague: 1974), 122–128. 38. Birnboym, Geule fun loshn. 39. Birnboym, Yidishkeyt un loshn (Warsaw: 1930), 152–153. 40. Ibid., 152. 41. See Mordkhe Schaechter, “The ‘Hidden Standard’: A Study of Competing Influences in Standardization,” in The Field of Yiddish, third collection, ed. Marvin Herzog, Wita Rawid, and Uriel Weinreich (London: 1969), 284–304. 42. Birnboym, Yidishkeyt un loshn, 49, for an extensive sampling. 43. Solomon Birnbaum, “Two Problems of Yiddish Linguistics,” 68. 44. “Plonter in der neshome,” Beys-yankev-zhurnal 8, nos. 71–72 (1931), 43. 45. Birnbaum, “Jewishness and Yiddish,” 128. On the use of this theme to justify clinging to Yiddish in the ultra-Orthodox world, see Shilhav and Glinert, “Holy Land, Holy Lan-

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guage,” 72, 76, and Michael K. Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition, in The Uses of Tradition, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: 1992), 68–69. 46. Birnboym, Yidish un yidishkeyt, 152. 47. Ibid., 153. 48. Birnboym, Yidishkeyt un loshn; idem, “Di yesoydes fun yidishn oysleyg”; idem, “Tsvey vovn kekhol hagoyim,” 32–33. 49. Birnboym, Geule fun loshn, 189. 50. Birnboym, “Di yesoydes fun yidishn oysleyg,” 19. 51. Gershon Bacon, “La socie´te´ juive dans le royaume de la Pologne du Congre`s (1860– 1914),” in Socie´te´ juive a` travers l’histoire, ed. Shmuel Trigano (Paris: 1992), 647, 656; Moyshe Prager, “Dos yidishe togblat,” in Yidishe prese in varshe, vol. 2, Fun noentn over (New York: 1956), 488–489. An illustration of this phenomenon is found in I.J. Singer’s novel of Jewish life in pre–First World War Lodz, The Brothers Ashkenazi. Dinah, the daughter of an affluent family, receives a secular European education in a non-Jewish school. She comes to disdain what she deems the uncouth hasidic manners and Yiddish of her family and her yeshiva-educated spouse, preferring to speak Polish and to call herself Diana (I.J. Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi, trans. Joseph Singer [New York: 1991]). 52. Yosef Fridnzon, “Batei hasefer labanot bet-ya’akov bepolin,” in Hah inukh vehatarbut haivrit beeiropa bein shetei milh amot haolam, ed. Tsvi Sharfshteyn (New York: 1972), 78. 53. Letter from Gerer rebbe to Rabbi Emanuel Carlebach, in Osef mikhtavim udvarim, ed. Avraham Mordechai Alter (Jerusalem: 1966), 62. 54. See Gershon C. Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916– 1939 (Jerusalem: 1996), 174–175. 55. Eliezer Gershon Fridnzon, “Dos loshn in moyl fun der mamen,” in Beys-yankevzhurnal 8, nos. 71–72 (1931), 4. 56. Birnbaum, far more concerned with the danger posed by Yiddishism than polonization, had long since advocated the development of an Orthodox belle-lettres prose and poetry that would be infused with a religious tinge. At the beginning of the 1920s, he had even translated a novel with a religious theme, Max Brod’s Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott (1915) into Yiddish, in the process introducing a number of new words into Yiddish rather than relying on direct borrowing from German (see Brod, Tikho brahes veg tsu got [Berlin: 1921]). In this way, he hoped to compete with the diverse body of secular literature in Yiddish whose reading resulted in “irreligiousness or at least a strong maskilic influence.” See Birnboym, Yidish un yidishkeyt, 150. 57. See, for example, Yehude Leyb Orlean, “Yidish in der shul,” in Beys-yankev-zhurnal 8, nos. 71–72 (1931), 11. 58. For endorsements of the textbook by Sore Shenirer and others active in the school movement, see Malke Kutner, “Ale lernin mir nor fun bukh ‘yidish loshn’!” in ibid., 10, nos. 94–95 (1933), 47. 59. Hiley, “Solomon Birnbaum,” 6; “Yidish loshn far undzere kinder,” Beys-yankevzhurnal 9, no. 93 (1932), 5. 60. Sore Shenirer, “Yidishkeyt un yidish,” in ibid., 8, nos. 71–72 (1931), 8. 61. Denman, “Terumato shel Shlomo Birnbaum labalshanut hayidish,” 254. In the year 1934–1935, a total of 581,497 Jewish children attended schools in Poland. The majority— about 61 percent—attended Polish schools. Khoyrev and Beys-yankev schools were attended by some 109,000 children (approximately 18 percent), while 54,829 (approximately 9 percent) attended secular Jewish schools. Another 11 percent attended other schools in the religious sector, including khadorim. See Khaym Shloyme Kazdan, Di geshikhte fun yidishn shulvezn in umophengikn poyln (Mexico City: 1947), 549. 62. According to Moyshe Prager: With the strength of his authority (after all, a son of Nathan Birnbaum, the great bal-tshuve) and from his position as a linguist and Yiddish expert (Professor of Yiddish first at the University of Hamburg and later the University of London) he


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actually forced the Lodz Beys-yankev-zhurnal to adopt his spelling. And thus began the internal Orthodox orthography polemic. . . . Although Solomon Birnbaum himself tried to defend his point of view on the pages of the Togblat, the Orthodox writers showed no desire “to march to a different drummer” in the field of Yiddish orthography (“Dos yidishe togblat,” 496–497). The linguistic intricacies of Birnbaum’s system seem quite lost on Prager (and likely many other Orthodox writers), who reduces all of its differences vis-a`-vis the dominant system in the contemporary Warsaw press to replacing [ with y in unstressed syllables. 63. Mordkhe Schaechter, “D’r Shloyme Birnboym—der shprakh-normirer,” Yidishe shprakh 22, no. 2 (1962), 33. 64. Mordkhe Schaechter, “Toponimik un verter-furemung bay D’r Shloyme Birnboym,” ibid., no. 3 (1962), 74–75. 65. More accurately, “purified” Lithuanian Yiddish refers to a pronunciation based on the dialect of Lithuania and Belarus, with a few modifications and clarifications of historical distinctions that fail to be observed in “provincial” speech in those areas. Essentially, this means the following: elimination of the “sibilant confusion” that most notably characterizes sabesdiker loshn (thus, a clear distinction between /s/ and /sˇ/, /z/ and /zˇ/, and /ts/ and /cˇ/); the pronunciation of the consonantal yod in a number of words (for instance, /jId/ and /jIngl/ instead of /Id/ and /Ingl/ for “Jew” and “boy,” respectively); preservation of the distinction between the preposition wc, the converb wc, the verbal prefix [c, the particle preceding the infinitive wc, and the interrogative particle yc (all otherwise pronounced /tsu/); and pronunciation of the written vowel yw as /oj/ at all times instead of as both /oj/ and /ej/ depending on the word in question. See Yudl Mark, Gramatik fun der yidisher klal-shprakh (New York: 1978), 15–16. All references to Lithuanian, Vilna, or Northeastern pronunciation hereafter refer to “purified” Lithuanian speech. 66. On the prestige of NEY Yiddish, see, for instance, Yudl Mark, “A por kurtse heores tsu Sh. Birnboym’s notitsn,” Yidishe shprakh 8, nos. 1–2 (1948), 15–19. On its history and diffusion, see Dovid Katz, “The Religious Prestige of the Gaon and the Secular Prestige of Lithuanian Yiddish,” in The Gaon of Vilna and the Annals of Jewish Culture, ed. Izraelis Lempertas (Vilnius: 1998), 187–199 and idem, “Naye gilgulim fun alte makhloykesn: di litvishe norme un di sikhsukhim vos arum ir,” in Yivo-bleter, n.s. 2 (1994), 205–257. 67. B. [Shloyme Birnboym], “Zeyer gerekht!” Beys-yankev-zhurnal 8, nos. 71–72 (1931), 42–43; reprinted in Fishman, Never Say Die! 668–669. 68. Hiley, “Solomon Birnbaum,” 6. 69. Shloyme Birnboym, “Di klangen un dos oysleygn fun yidish,” Yidishe filologye 1, nos. 2–3 (1924), 176–180; idem, “Interdialektish,” Yidishe shprakh 4, nos. 3–6 (1944), 104– 109; idem, Yiddish: A Survey and Grammar (Toronto: 1979). He complained, for instance, that in SYO, Polish and Southern ya (oi) and Lithuanian y[ (ei) are today joined in one sign: yw, for example: jywr. Polish and Southern aa (ou) and Lithuanian ya (oi) are today joined in one sign: yw, for example: zywh. Polish ya (ai), Southern y[ (ei) and Lithuanian y[ (ei) are today joined in one sign: yy, for example: jyyrB (idem, “Di klangen un dos oysleygn fun yidish” 176–177). 70. Thus, for example, kop (head) and zogn (to say) are written with the same vowel (a), as are royt (red) and hoyz (house) (yw), although the sounds are differentiated “on the largest territory of Yiddish.” Further, according to Birnbaum: “When I see a new word with a, I have to choose between four possibilities: should it be the vowel of ![man or of !am or of qalg or of !raq? Or a new word with an [. Should I pronounce it like the vowel in ldn[p(pan) or like the dipthong of ldn[p- (flag)?” (ibid, 79; Birnboym, “Interdialektish,” 105). 71. Similarly, Noyekh Prilutski pointed out that less sophisticated Jews of Congress Poland incorrectly pronounced the title of Der moment, the popular Warsaw daily that he helped

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to found in 1910, as /mument/, since they were unfamiliar with this internationalism and accustomed to realizing the grapheme a in most cases as the vowel /u/ (See Prilutski, “Undzer ortografishe komisye (fun a referat),” in Naye himlen: literarishe zamelbukh, ed. Lipe Kestin (Warsaw: 1921), 88–93. 72. Birnboym, “Di klangen un dos oysleygn fun yidish”; idem, Yidishkeyt un loshn; idem, Geule fun loshn; idem, Yiddish: A Survey and Grammar. 73. Birnboym, “Di klangen un dos oysleygn fun yidish.” For a chart demonstrating Birnbaum’s system, see Denman, “Terumato shel Shlomo Birnbaum labalshanut hayidish,” 254. 74. Birnbaum attributes this principle to M. Weinreich (see Shloyme Birnboym, “Fun daytshmerish biz der heyl in der midber,” Yidishe shprakh 13, no. 4 [1953], 110). Khayim Gininger, however, attributes the formula “vos vayter fun daytsh” to Noyekh Prilutski’s article “Di yidishe bineshprakh,” Yidish teater (April–June 1927); see Gininger, “A bukh tsu lernen di yidishe kulturshprakh” (review of Uriel Weinreich’s College Yiddish), Yivo-bleter 32 (1949), 208. 75. Kalmen Vayzer, “Di debate arum aroysred in der yidisher veltlekher shul in mizrekheyrope,” Yidishe shprakh (forthcoming). 76. [Birnboym], “Zeyer gerekht!” 668. 77. Note Berliner, “Vegn litvishn dialekt in kongres-poyln,” Beys-yankev-zhurnal 8, nos. 71–72 (1931), 42; Birnboym, “Zeyer gerekht!” 78. According to David Gold, “the debates [over orthography] of the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s took place exclusively in the non-religious, noncommunist sectors of the Yiddishspeaking community. On the one hand, it was felt that religious groups (hasidic and nonhasidic) would want to have little or no intercourse with secularists, and, on the other, communist circles were taboo to those associated with the YIVO and CISHO [TsISho]” (Gold, “Successes and Failures in the Standardization and Implementation of Yiddish Spelling and Romanization,” 351). 79. Shloyme Birnboym, “Finf notitsn,” Yidishe shprakh 8, nos. 1–2 (1948), 14. 80. Solomon Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 100. 81. A recent letter to the editor of the Monsey, New York–based journal Mallos protests as excessive the journal’s policy of promoting the use of a cultivated Yiddish, with a minimum of English influence, among its hasidic readership. “I don’t like the race to learn our Yiddish language with complete consistency,” the correspondent writes, “to learn words that simply were not in use among the general public. That smacks of the old-style Yiddishism of the maskilim, who preached that we will only count as ‘human beings’ when we have a national language.” The editorial board argues, in response, that the threat of Yiddishism has long since passed and that Jews now stand before the menace of “goyishism.” In its words: “Never before have Jewish girls from the most pious families, hasidic homes, learned the Gentile language so perfectly as today.” In defense of its position, it brings further arguments with regard to English that are almost identical with those expressed by the prewar Beysyankev movement with respect to Polish (“Briv tsu der redaktsye,” Mayles [Mallos], Iyar 5762 [2002]). 82. Shinhav and Glinert, “Holy Land, Holy Language.” 83. Miriam Isaacs, “Yiddish in the Orthodox Communities of Jerusalem,” in The Politics of Yiddish, ed. Dov-Ber Kerler (Walnut Creek: 1998), 90. 84. On this subject, see, for example, Miroslav Hroch, “The Social Interpretation of Linguistic Demands in European National Movements,” EUI Working Paper No. 94/1 (1994). 85. Borokhov was raised as a Russian-speaker because his father (a Hebrew teacher) desired the children to speak a Russian not recognizably influenced by Yiddish (see Yehuda Slutsky, Haitonut hayehudit-rusit bereishit hamea haesrim [Tel Aviv: 1978], 10). Whereas Prilutski often heard (and presumably spoke) Yiddish during his childhood in Kremeniec (Volhyn), he long felt aloof from the language and its culture. He received a Russianlanguage education in state schools and considered both Russian and Hebrew (his father, Tsvi, was an early enthusiast for the revernacularization of Hebrew) his mother tongues. Perhaps with a degree of false modesty, he claimed that his Yiddish was “poor and raw”


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until he began to develop it as a Zionist orator and propagandist. See Noyekh Prilutski, “ ‘Der veg’: a bintl zikhroynes,” Der moment 176 (15 Aug. 1930). 86. Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race, and the Science of Language (London: 1998), 198. 87. Use of the term “secular” is somewhat complicated. Despite their practicality, there has traditionally been much opposition to the introduction of goyishe khokhmes, that is, secular learning such as mathematics and the natural sciences, into the exclusively religious curricula of Orthodox schools. In their daily lives, the ultra-Orthodox make use of the most modern technologies, including satellite television and desktop publishing, and readily participate in the surrounding society, both economically and—at least in America, where there is no ideological opposition to the government—politically. Nonetheless, the pursuit of secular learning for reasons other than the strictly vocational or for the furtherance of religious practice seems still to be discouraged. 88. For a survey of views on Germanisms among YIVO speakers, see Rakhmiel Peltz, “The Undoing of Language Planning from the Vantage of Cultural History: Two Twentieth Century Yiddish Examples,” in Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, ed. Michael Clyne (Berlin: 1997), 327–356. 89. Natan Cohen, Sofer, sefer veiton: merkaz hatarbut hayehudit bevarsha, 1918–1942 (Jerusalem: 2003); Beatrice Lang Caplan, “In gayst fun toyre umesoyre: Orthodox Yiddish Literature in Interwar Poland,” lecture, YIVO (New York), Jan. 2001. The religious YiddishHebrew writer known in Poland (before the Holocaust) as Yekhiel Feiner, and thereafter in Israel as the secular writer Katzetnik, represents an example of this prewar phenomenon. 90. On this phenomenon, see Gershon Bacon, The Politics of Tradition. Indeed, the early Orthodox press in Poland relied in part on “rented” hands—writers and editors originating outside of its circles—since there was a lack of qualified writers possessing the required ideology. See Prager, “Dos yidishe togblat,” 451. 91. See, for example, Der yid and Algemeyner zhurnal. These newspapers have begun somewhat to “modernize”—that is, to eliminate some German influences in order not to remain “behind the times”—since most other contemporary Yiddish publications have abandoned Germanized orthographic conventions (personal communication with Mordkhe Schaechter, 9 Aug. 1996). See also Shikl (Joshua) Fishman, “Vos kenen mir zikh oplernen fun english?” Der forverts (8 March 2002).


Review Essays


The Face of Modern Orthodoxy

Norman Lamm, Seventy Faces: Articles of Faith. Hoboken: Ktav, 2002. vol. 1, 258 pp.; vol. 2, 303 pp.

In Seventy Faces, Rabbi Professor Norman Lamm, longtime president of Yeshiva University and rosh yeshivah of its Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), offers to a wider readership a variety of “articles of faith” that were originally presented to more limited audiences. Included here are contributions that appeared in Jewish Life and Tradition; addresses to the general assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations; commencement speeches delivered at the ordination ceremonies of RIETS; and numerous talks given on special occasions. The first volume opens with Lamm’s eulogy for his teacher, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, followed by lectures delivered to Christian groups and sheurim (talmudic lessons) or halakhic studies prepared for delivery or publication in diverse Jewish forums. This collection amply demonstrates Lamm’s role not only as a scholar but also as a community leader, educator, and spokesman for modern (or “centrist”) Orthodoxy. As a result, reading these volumes affords an opportunity to examine the educational philosophy and accomplishments of that movement, as well as the challenges confronting it. Yeshiva University, after all, has come to stand for the face of modern Orthodoxy; what its president says represents, in a given public sense, the worldview of that movement, much as the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary speaks for Conservative Judaism and the president of the Hebrew Union College is viewed as the spiritual leader of Reform Judaism. The above statements, of course, oversimplify matters considerably. On the one hand, most of the right-wing spiritual leaders of Orthodox Judaism would vehemently deny their association with any “movement,” the modern Orthodox included. These leaders, the gedolim, display indifference and often disdain with regard to Americanized institutions and their leaders. Non-Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, tend to live comfortably in a secular world wherein rabbinic authority seems like an intrusive anachronism, and they rarely consider institutional pronouncements to be binding upon them. Certain writers, intellectuals, scholars, and “lay” leaders seem to command more attention and respect among the nonOrthodox than do the official spokesmen of religious-institutional Jewish life. Nonetheless, the heads of religious “denominations” see themselves as educators of their publics, and they are widely expected to present educational ideals, to speak for and to embody the life of commitment and faith in their communities. Speaking for modern or “centrist” Orthodoxy, however, presents uniquely diffi299

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cult challenges. Of the three major Jewish denominations, Orthodoxy, with its ideal of Torah study and prescribed living within the traditional framework of halakhah, is the smallest in size. Frequently portrayed (and perceived) as the most sectarian of Judaism’s modern branches, it would seem to have the most to lose from being defined as a movement alongside the Conservative and the Reform. Hence, its leaders are often to be found decrying Orthodoxy’s denominational public image. In fact, and paradoxically, Orthodoxy (modern Orthodoxy not excepted) is antidenominational, in that it claims to be the only authentic representative of Jewish tradition. Those on the left who posit that they, too, speak for the tradition are, in this view of things, inauthentic at best and schismatic (or even heretical) at worst. Moreover, the most vocal and self-confident Orthodox Jews and communities—the so-called haredim—also hold modern Orthodoxy in disdain. They are opposed in principle to philosophical modernity, and are uncomfortable with the very term “Orthodoxy.” Given that centrist Orthodoxy is open to modern sensibility and science, and polemically eschews what Lamm terms “transcendent parochialism” (vol. 1, p. 15), how can the ultra-Orthodox and centrist Orthodox coexist in a single movement? For the latter, in particular, this is a vexed question, for the centrist Orthodox can hardly disassociate themselves from those who claim to be living more consistently in accordance with halakhah. As for the haredim: can it be that they are correct in shunning meaningful contact with “other” Jews? Such contact, after all, evokes the danger of surrendering to modern modes of thinking and feeling. There is a perceived risk of placing “peoplehood” above “Torah” values, a sense that modern Orthodoxy may be marked not merely by complexity and ideological tension but also by a far more dangerous internal contradiction. Hence the dilemma for the modern Orthodox: should they be building bridges mainly to the “really” Orthodox with whom they claim to share a faith commitment, or to “the others” whom they meet wherever modern discourse and conventions, and commitments, prevail? Similarly, how should centrist Orthodoxy relate to the Gentile world, whose culture, especially in the United States, is not devoid of religious motifs and assumptions? Should these religio-cultural backdrops be viewed as morally and even spiritually congenial, or are they, as the ultra-Orthodox maintain, mere manifestations, however friendly, of false and idolatrous faith? Finally, how should a leader such as Lamm teach Judaism to his public? What should he say to his fellow modern Orthodox Jews when teachers at Orthodoxy’s renowned institutions of learning, the yeshivot, impart anti-centrist patterns of behavior and theologies that are ostensibly untainted by modern perceptions and philosophies? How should the centrist leader teach Judaism to the secularly sophisticated who will unabashedly raise theological perplexities, especially with regard to the Holocaust? What, indeed, will he teach his own community when the Holocaust suggests an absurd world, incongruent with divine providence and inherent order? In responding to these wide-ranging challenges, Lamm presents us with a programmatic statement of modern Orthodox experience and conviction. Centrist Orthodox Jews, he asserts, “have . . . undergone the modern experience—and survived it; [they are those] who refuse to accept modernity uncritically, but equally so, refuse to reject it unthinkingly.” This, one might respond, is rhetorically impressive,


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but how does it read differently from, say, a Conservative statement on the matter? Lamm hastens to clarify: the Orthodox response has indeed occasioned changes, but these are “changes in emphasis rather than substance.” For “not a single fundamental of Judaism has been disturbed by us. We adhere to the same ikkarim [principles], we are loyal to the same Torah, we strive for the same study of Torah and observance of the mitzvot that our parents and grandparents cherished throughout the generations from Sinai onward”(vol. 1, p. 42). Three major transformations are characteristic of centrist Orthodoxy (though Lamm would insist that all three are basically “changes of emphasis”). First, there is the “synthesis” of Torah and worldly knowledge; second, moderation in thought and practice defined as no less than a religious principle; and third, “the centrality of the people of Israel” even when this principle appears to challenge or threaten the preeminence of “love of Torah” and its authority. Torah umada’ (Torah and science), a phrase appearing on Yeshiva University’s emblem, and torah im derekh erez (Torah and worldly culture) are terms often used by Lamm in his discussion of the synthesis between Jewish and worldly wisdom. For him, such a synthesis is a de jure principle: the acquisition of wisdom is inherently valuable. Torah umada’ corresponds to the talmudic distinction between Torah and h okhmah. Yet while mada’ (designating both science and culture) has inherent value, Orthodox Jews hold to a hierarchy of value in which “Torah remains the unchallenged and pre-eminent center of our lives, our community, our value system” (vol. 1, p. 49). Nonetheless, he argues vehemently against the ultraOrthodox when he insists that the centrality of Torah (in the sense of halakhah) does not translate into exclusivity; it does not mean the rejection “of all other forms or sources of knowledge. . . . It does not yield the astounding conclusion that ignorance of Wisdom becomes a virtue . . . [that] ignorance should be raised to the level of a transcendent good and a source of ideological pride” (vol. 1, p. 46). Lamm derives the second principle, that of moderation in the practice of Judaism, from the doctrine of “the middle way” advocated by Maimonides and from his “Judaized version of the Aristotelian Golden Mean.” As interpreted by Soloveitchik, the “mean” comes to light as the result of a deliberation concerning which “way” is right under given circumstances. The process, rather than the result, is the main thing: “[Thus the principle of moderation] is not a mindless application of arithmetical averages to the philosophy of character.” Lamm proposes a dialectic that leads to choices determined by will and intellect: “the process of arriving at the—or a—mean necessitates the weighing of all available options, including both extremes, thus making sure that no relevant view is ignored and no valid value is overlooked” (vol. 1, pp. 56–58). It appears, then, that moderation is not a matter of locating the “mean” norm but rather of being committed to moral deliberation: seeking to gain an understanding of the whole picture, with all the paradoxes arising from its two “extremes,” and then deciding on the appropriate course of action in any given context. Yet how, having legitimated deliberation, is a Jew to maintain normative commitments? This, for Lamm, constitutes the question (vol. 1, p. 63), to which I later return. The third principle, that of the centrality of the people of Israel, leads Lamm to the conclusion that love of Israel “is the only value [in our lives] that can in any

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way challenge the preeminence of Torah and its corollary, ahavat ha-Torah, the love of Torah” (vol. 1, p. 50). Lamm here points to a dilemma in the world of values. On the one hand, in consequence of the Holocaust, the very existence of the Jews is threatened and thus no Jew, Orthodox or not, can evade responsibility for assuring the physical survival of the Jewish people. Yet, on the other hand, as a result of modern secularism, the Orthodox have become a decided minority and face the responsibility of being “the surrogates of all Israel as ‘the kingdom of priests.’ ” Here, then, is an archetypical example of the second principle, formulated as a principle in its own right—that of negotiating between “extremes” and attempting to preserve the values inherent in each of them. Each of the three principles, and all of them together, provide an ideational basis for a polemic against the haredi world without disowning it, and also for working together with non-Orthodox groups and granting their rabbinical leaders “spiritual dignity” while denying them legitimacy, and even for sharing a cultural world of wisdom with non-Jews. At the same time, it appears that the very openness informing Lamm’s “nondenominational” Judaism requires a shoring up of the banks of belief and distinctiveness. If modern Orthodoxy insists that it maintains the same eternal fundamentals, the same Torah, the same study of Torah and observance, even while it can speak of “Judaizing” Aristotelian conceptions, if it can demand valuative deliberations and can learn from Kant as well as from R. Tarphon (vol. 1, p. 204), while at the same time expressing regret that the majority of people in the United States “never show up in churches and synagogues” (vol. 1, p. 215) then one must stringently draw lines. If, because the currents of modern culture have misled them, the non-Orthodox movements reflect the falling away by the majority of Jews from the principles espoused by Jews since Sinai, then Orthodoxy must speak openly on behalf of doctrinal and behavioral standards. Lamm does so firmly. Biblical criticism, for instance, he regards as “chiefly a nuisance” rather than as an existential threat (vol. 1, p. 93) (a point of view perhaps at odds with the ideal of “unfettered scholarship” [vol. 1, p. 206] that is seemingly required by the ideal of Torah umada’). Reform and Conservative rabbis may indeed have spiritual dignity, as religious people, but have no normative legitimacy as teachers of a tradition founded on divine revelation of transcendent norms (vol. 1, pp. 138–139). Following in the footsteps of Moses himself, Orthodox Jews are enjoined to love all of their people without necessarily agreeing with them or even regarding their views as legitimate. Thus, for example, Lamm has no patience for homosexual rabbis who are “unrepentant and publicly assertive” (vol. 2, pp. 2–3). As a leader who must speak to various publics, Lamm at times seems at odds with himself. Speaking as a theologian, he relates the Holocaust to hester panim, to God’s hiding His face. Yet he also writes that God is present for those who invite Him in (vol. 1, p. 97), which suggests that, in theological terms, hester panim is an expression of human indifference to God. Elsewhere, he asserts that now, “God reveals Himself in events as well as words” (vol. 1, p. 109). As a philosopher, Lamm admits that we can attain truth only partially—and slowly. But as a leader, he restates this insight in a more narrow form: one can only convey the truth to the non-Orthodox slowly (vol. 1, p. 74). Lamm can respond with forthright indig-


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nation to various statements made by haredi leaders, terming them h ilul hashem (desecration of God’s name)—a grievous transgression, and a cardinal case of the extremism he insistently deplores (vol. 1, p. 71). Yet he also insists that there is something to be learned even from the radically ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta (vol. 2, p. 197). What stands behind declarations regarding “the supremacy of Torah” in Orthodox life or “authentic halakhic” change? What does Lamm mean when he says that Orthodox Jews “do not need a Martin Buber . . . or an Abraham Heschel to remind us” of Jewish truths (vol. 2, p. 61)? I believe that the modern Orthodoxy portrayed by Lamm possesses two central educational characteristics that indeed provide it with an astonishing inner strength and singular authenticity. The first is that modern Orthodoxy, at its best, refuses to deny the presence of a tragic element in human existence, and in the (generally) human and the (particularly) Jewish relationship to God. This makes for a certain somberness that can strengthen rather than destroy faith. Lamm makes this point almost offhandedly when discussing Holocaust education for non-Orthodox youth. While the Orthodox youngster also needs to study about the Holocaust, he or she is already aware, subliminally, of the possibility of Holocaust. An observant Jewish youngster . . . knows in his own bones the reality of destruction . . . is already aware of the insecurity of the Jewish people, of the marginality of man as such, of the uncertainty of the future of the very planet, of the pervasive fragility that is part and parcel of our destiny. . . . Teaching the Holocaust to such an Orthodox child is only teaching him what he already knows from his upbringing [italics added]. For the non-Orthodox child, such teaching is doubly important, because it adds a dimension of awareness that he might otherwise never attain (vol. 2, pp. 255–256).

For “giants” of religious sensibility, this tragic dimension is imbued with profound loneliness. Indeed, Lamm’s eulogy for Soloveitchik seems to capture well the saintly ideal he envisions for modern Orthodoxy: that of emulating Lamm’s own great teacher, who himself was immersed in halakhah, possessed of deep philosophic understanding, and completely at home in the world of academic exploration and discovery. The ideal figure represented by Soloveitchik is, above all, a man of faith who is fully aware of having chosen a (halakhic) path that carries with it a burden of “being different,” of living as a religious believer in a world of inexorable conflict and contradiction (vol. 1, p. 7). I venture to suggest that Orthodoxy’s strength is not in its doctrinal selfjustifications (as in its insistence that the tradition is ahistorical, so that all change is made to appear as a mere change of emphasis). Nor is its strength to be found in its summary dismissal of biblical research by means of a vort, a homiletic turn of phrase (vol. 1, p. 93). Moreover, Orthodoxy has not excelled in cultivating institutional humility or even compassion, though it recognizes these as cardinal virtues of Judaism. And, as noted, it does not, at its most sophisticated and genuine, deliver human beings from loneliness and spiritual travail. Why then, would anyone choose this path? For indeed, the life of modern Orthodoxy, even if its teachers sometimes deny or underplay that fact, is a choice—that of accepting absolute values and commitments.

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I would suggest that the greatest strength of Orthodoxy is that it can give substance to the notion of authority, without which the halakhic system, as a normative and interpretative “language,” cannot function. In Orthodox practice, halakhah is always being learned, and this in turn tempers the very nature of its authority. Consequently, this life of authority, of sacred routine and religious integrity and even heroism, is ultimately trusted—because it is entrusted with striving for and cultivating a community of those who experience themselves as under obligation to God, as Jews, and who seek the significance that is experienced as the presence of God. This sense of community that both bestows authority on its mentors, scholars, and saints, and generates the respect of the faithful is the main dividing line between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox public. Many non-Orthodox leaders strive for it and invest their quest with great spiritual fervor, but their publics generally view the demand for normative community as conflicting with cherished values they hold dear. Conversely, too much normative community, without the learning and the arguments, undermine spirituality. Not all Orthodox Jews “hear” the complex and dialectical teaching of the tradition clearly enough to avoid the siren calls of extremism, dogmatism, formalism, and insensitivity. They have not been educated for complexity and paradox, and modern Orthodoxy is mandated to repair this educational failing. Lamm, throughout these two volumes, commendably and courageously tries to “set them straight.” How? We have seen him presenting three principles that all suggest complexity and tension. He insists that the somber facet of life involves discipline, restraint, and problem-solving. And the difficult intention of Judaism—that people stand before God without putting Him in their pockets, and that Jews share in the life of an interpretive community without loss of self—might be seen as being embodied in the life of halakhah. Is it possible that, were the non-Orthodox to succeed in creating such communities, their spiritual leaders would attain similar authority, and the communities themselves would gain (in Orthodox eyes) in authenticity? In such a Jewish world of communities that take the canon and its interpreters seriously, the argumentation and sensibilities would probably proceed from different directions among the Orthodox and non-Orthodox. But if all Jews exhibited more ahavat hatorah conflicting less with ahavat yisrael; more Torah in conversation with h okhmah; and more deliberation on appropriate ways to act within the confusing reality in which we all live, who would demur? Michael Rosenak The Hebrew University

Sheerit Hapeletah: Between Destruction and Rebirth

Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xii ⫹ 335 pp. Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–1950. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. 311 pp.

“Despite its importance and some early attention, the inner history of the She’erith Hapletah [‘the surviving remnant’] has suffered neglect, and until recently was almost a forgotten history,” writes Zeev Mankowitz in Life between Memory and Hope (p. 4). Shortly after liberation, several comprehensive reports were written by individuals who worked with the survivors; among those reporting were Leo Srole, the social welfare worker of the UNRRA team; Koppel Pinson of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC); and Chaim Hoffman (Yahil), the leader of the Zionist delegation in Germany.1 A comprehensive study of DP life in Germany was published in 1953 by Leo Schwarz, director of the JDC in Germany.2 Yet after these initial works, very little was written on the history of the Jewish DPs until the 1970s. How can one explain this neglect, especially given the fact that the main archives were available to researchers? One explanation is that the devastating memory of the Holocaust was formed against the backdrop of the struggle for the establishment of the state of Israel, and that this drama overshadowed that of the daily lives of the refugees. Furthermore, the popular assumption that the underground fighters in the Yishuv forced the British out of Palestine and went on to win the War of Independence overlooked the possible role of the survivors in these important events. Following this logic, historical studies turned to the topic of postwar British and American diplomacy, arguing that Zionist propaganda and pressure paved the way to acceptance of the U.N. partition plan in November 1947 and U.S. recognition of the new state of Israel.3 For many years, scholars continued to overlook the role of Holocaust survivors in these events. The fact that their studies focused on the U.S. Army, UNRRA, the Jewish Brigade, or the Mosad le’aliya bet (the underground organization responsible for illegal immigration to Palestine) may have influenced their portrayal of the Holocaust survivors as a passive group waiting in the shadows while others made history. The prevalent image of the DPs was that 305

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of broken and helpless people—walking skeletons—a stereotype frequently used by fundraisers and Zionist politicians campaigning against the British policy in Palestine. An exception to this approach was that pioneered by Yehuda Bauer, who, in a study of 1970, maintained that the survivors had organized their communal lives months before the arrival of outside help. Furthermore, contradicting the popular view, he stressed the important role of the Holocaust survivors in the establishment of the state of Israel.4 From the 1980s, the dismissive approach regarding the survivors’ role gradually changed. In 1985, Yad Vashem organized an international conference devoted to the issue of the rehabilitation of the DPs after the war.5 Among the more recent works that have been published are Judith Tydor Baumel’s book on Kibbutz Buchenwald; Hagit Lavsky’s article on the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Jewish life in the British zone; Idith Zertal’s book on illegal immigration to Palestine; Dalia Ofer’s and Nachum Bogner’s articles on the Cyprus refugee camps; my own analysis of the activities of the various advisers on Jewish affairs who were sent to mediate between the U.S. Army and the DPs; Hanna Yablonka’s volume on the absorption of Holocaust survivors in Israeli society; and Arieh J. Kochavi’s study of British policy regarding the DPs.6 Yehuda Bauer, for his part, has published three volumes on the JDC, the third of which deals with the impact of American Jewry on the refugees.7 This impressive body of work has now been augmented by the two books under review.8 Life between Memory and Hope, a long-awaited extension of Zeev Mankowitz’s doctoral dissertation, aims “to focus on the internal history of a unique community that had abandoned its past and was yet to find its future” (p. 3). While most of the earlier studies depicted the survivors through the eyes of outsiders, Mankowitz’s intention is to disclose their rich inner life. He concentrates on the survivors’ dynamic community organizations, regarding the DPs “as subjects rather than objects of history” (p. 3). Therefore, he emphasizes the fact that the seeds of community organization had begun in 1944, months before liberation, and well before emissaries (shelih im) from Palestine arrived in Germany. By April–May 1945, the survivors were already preparing the establishment of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in Bavaria, the United Zionist Organization, and Kibbutz Buchenwald. Mankowitz details the formation of the Central Committee and its struggle for recognition by the U.S. Army and UNRRA (chs. 2, 6, and 11). Leaders of the Central Committee confronted many obstacles, notably the need to help the huge wave of refugees from Eastern Europe, while attempting to cooperate with the JDC, UNRRA and other international agencies, and with emissaries from Palestine. Dealing with the multiple problems of the DPs, they sought to maintain an independent position among the various organizations that intervened, financially and politically, in the daily life of the German DP camps. Mankowitz rightly arrives at the conclusion that “an overall assessment would suggest that in the face of these numerous challenges, the She’erith Hapletah and its leadership stood the test” (p. 130). As its title clearly indicates, Life between Memory and Hope focuses on the survivors’ traumatic experiences and their attempts to overcome the memories of


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the Holocaust by building new lives. As Mankowitz notes: “They envisaged themselves as the living bridge between destruction and rebirth” (p. 286). Moreover, “whatever their personal plans for the future, [they] were touched by the spirit of Zionism and gave their support to the achievement of its goals” (p. 294). The survivors’ Zionism gave them strength to live and to hope for the future, which in turn enabled them to become a creative, vital, and energetic community. Religious matters did not receive due attention from the many organizations operating in the DP camps. While most of the Jews before Hitler were religious, many of them had lost their faith in the course of the Holocaust and were hesitant about following the tradition of their parents. For some, Zionism and aliyah became a substitute for religion. Others, however, overcame their initial misgivings, as the establishment of yeshivot and Orthodox schools in occupied Germany attested. Yet textbooks for religious schools were in short supply, in part because the shelih im, who generally had little tolerance for the religious aspect of education, did not bring religious material with them from Palestine. On the issue of the survivors’ role in the termination of the British Mandate and in the establishment of the state of Israel, Mankowitz bases himself on figures provided by Hanna Yablonka, who estimated that soldiers recruited from among the survivors constituted about one third of the IDF fighting force at its height during the latter stages of the War of Independence.9 After a thorough analysis of the data, Mankowitz concludes that the “She’erith Hapletah played an important role in helping to generate the processes that led up to the British withdrawal from Palestine, and while their contribution to the 1948–1949 War of Independence was not decisive, it was far weightier than has generally been appreciated” (p. 302). The care that he brings to this subject is characteristic of Mankowitz’s book as a whole: this is a well-written and well-researched study. It presents an original thesis, which is convincingly argued. Whereas Zeev Mankowitz deals with the American zone of occupied Germany, Hagit Lavsky concentrates on the British zone. Like Mankowitz, she disagrees with the depiction of the DPs as a passive group, emphasizing instead the dynamic development of Jewish communities in Germany. Relying on extensive archival sources, Lavsky analyzes the everyday lives of the survivors and tells their story, whenever possible, in their own voices. New Beginnings differs from other studies on the Jewish presence in postwar Germany in its attempt “to integrate the history of Holocaust survivors in Germany, DPs and German Jews alike. . . . Political, social, cultural and economic aspects of German-Jewish life are viewed as part of a multifaceted complex in which many factors come into play” (pp. 11–12). Lavsky analyzes the change in self-image among German Jewish survivors who, before Hitler, had generally regarded themselves as Germans but later usually concluded that this belief had been illusory. After the Holocaust, they sought to identify themselves as Jews, insisting on being called “Jews in Germany” rather than “German Jews.” Returning to their old homes, formerly assimilated Jews put their efforts into establishing energetic and creative local communities. After initial difficulties, Jewish communities in Germany were in fact marked by a well-developed economic, social, and cultural life. These com-

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munities were strengthened by Jews from Eastern Europe who chose to remain in Germany, and have subsequently been reinforced by newcomers who, during the last five decades, have arrived from various East European countries, Israel, and, most recently, from the former Soviet Union. As noted, Lavsky’s book focuses on the British zone, which (unlike the American zone) has been studied by relatively few historians.10 Lavsky points out the peculiarities of the British zone that made its history different from other parts of occupied postwar Europe. “Because the Jewish remnant was so small and the economic burden so heavy,” she notes, “the authorities were not as attentive as they might have been to the specifically Jewish aspects of the problem” (p. 51). From the very beginning, the British, arguing that treating Jews differently from other refugees was tantamount to adopting the Nazis’ racial policy, disregarded the Jewishness of the Holocaust survivors. Thus Jews were categorized according to their nationality—which often meant being forced to live in DP camps alongside their former persecutors. While in the American zone this policy was changed after a report written by Earl Harrison, who was sent in July 1945 by President Truman to investigate the situation of the Jewish DPs, British authorities adamantly refused to put Jews in a separate category. Furthermore, the British prevented survivors from leaving the British zone to file claims for restitution of their property or for indemnification as victims of Nazi persecution. What was behind this pseudo-moralistic policy? Several historians have argued that concern over Palestine was a key factor: the British feared that world Jewish organizations would apply pressure on them to allow mass immigration to Palestine. Lavsky challenges this theory, arguing that military authorities in the British zone did not care what was going on in Palestine, since this was not their problem. Instead, Lavsky suggests, “a continuation of deep-seated animosity toward the Jews” and “latent antisemitism [that] bubbled beneath the surface” (p. 54) was what lay behind the rigid British attitude. In addition, the British were interested in lightening their financial burden in the zone by reducing their load of DPs as quickly as possible. Furthermore, they were concerned about the possibility of Jewish immigration to Britain, which was then suffering from a postwar economic depression. Paradoxically, according to Lavsky, this rigid policy left no choice to the Jews but to adopt a nationalist and militant policy. “The CC [Central Committee] was basically a highly centralized organization. Against the backdrop of harsh conditions, British hostility toward Jewish cohesiveness, frequent anti-Semitic outbursts by the Germans . . . an authoritarian, all-embracing framework was regarded as the only solution” (p. 111). The Central Committee established various semigovernmental activities in cooperation with German Jewish communities and with international Jewish organizations. In the British zone, a unique degree of collaboration developed between Zionists and non-Zionists, and between DPs and the communities of German Jews (p. 223). Moreover, Lavsky argues, a new type of Jewish identity was in the process of forming, a “spontaneous creation born in, and in the context of, the issues, experiences and struggles within . . . the camps” (p. 216). DP camps were the origin of a new national identity, “a community in transition.” Analyzing the day to day life


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of the Jewish DPs, Lavsky concludes that it “enables us to evaluate from a different perspective the role and position the survivors occupied in shaping a new or renewed Jewish national identity” (p. 216). The highly fraught sociocultural context encouraged the survivors to take an active part in public life. Thus, the political life in the camps was not the outcome of initiatives by the emissaries from Palestine but rather came from the grass-roots. As a case study of Jewish life in the British zone, New Beginnings successfully challenges existing opinion regarding the characterization and daily life of the survivors, the underlying causes of British policy toward the DPs, the contribution of Zionist activity to the camp life, and the rehabilitation of Jews in Germany. Lavksy has a central thesis—and proves it. This is a good and interesting book. In sum, and in contrast to the initial research on the subject, both of the works under review treat the sheerit hapeletah from an empathetic perspective, relying on archival sources and analyzing DP life from within. Both argue that life in the DP camps was “a success story.” Life between Memory and Hope and New Beginnings are good examples of a new phase in the historiography of the Holocaust survivors. Haim Genizi Bar-Ilan University

Notes 1. Leo Srole, “Why the DPs Can’t Wait: Proposing an International Plan of Rescue,” Commentary 3 (Jan. 1947), 13–24; Koppel S. Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (April 1947), 101–126; Chaim Yahil (Hoffman), “Doh mishlah at hashelih im lesheerit hapeletah, 1945–1949,” Yalkut moreshet 30 (Nov. 1980), 7–40; ibid., 31 (April 1981), 133–176. 2. Leo W. Schwarz, The Redeemers: A Saga of the Years 1945–1952 (New York: 1953). 3. Amitzur Ilan, Amerika, britaniyah veerez yisrael: reishitah vehitpath utah shel meuravut araz ot habrit bimdiniyut habritit beerez yisrael, 1938–1947 (Jerusalem: 1979); Zvi Ganin, Truman, American Jewry and Israel (New York: 1979); Shmuel Dothan, Hamaavak al erez yisrael (Tel Aviv: 1981); Michael J. Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945–1948 (Princeton: 1981); Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: 1982). 4. Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Escape: Bricha (New York: 1970). 5. Yisrael Gutman and Adina Drechsler (eds.), She’erit Hapletah 1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle (Jerusalem: 1990). 6. Judith Tydor Baumel, Kibuz Buchenwald (Tel Aviv: 1994); Hagit Lavsky, “The Day After: Bergen-Belsen, from Concentration Camp to the Center of Jewish Survivors in Germany,” German History 2 (1993), 36–59; Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (Berkeley: 1998); Dalia Ofer, “Holocaust Survivors as Immigrants: The Case of Israel and the Cyprus Detainees,” Modern Judaism 16 (Feb. 1996), 1–23; Nachum Bogner, I hageirush: mah anot hamaapilim bekafrisin, 1946– 1948 (Tel Aviv: 1991); Haim Genizi, Yoez umekim: hayoez laz avah haamerikani ulesheerit hapeletah, 1945–1949 (Tel Aviv: 1987); Hanna Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War (London: 1999). 7. Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry (Oxford: 1989). 8. See also a third book that was recently translated from German into English, Angelika Ko¨nigseder and Juliane Wetzel’s Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World

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War II Germany (Evanston: 2001). The aim of this book is “to show that the suffering of the Jewish survivors did not end when the war was over” (p. 7). 9. Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, 82. 10. Among the exceptions are Arieh J. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: 2001) and Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London: 1999).

Still More Books about Jerusalem

Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 274 pp. Marshall J. Breger and Ora Ahimeir (eds.), Jerusalem: A City and Its Future. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. 490 pp. Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 275 pp. Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City. London: Profile Books, 2001. 412 pp.

Jerusalem is a world city. It lacks a wealthy—or even healthy—economy, a large population, spectacular buildings or cultural resources. It is important because it is Jerusalem, located not in heaven as some believe, but on earth with more than its share of worldly problems. Jews began writing about the city more than two and a half millennia ago. The story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba describes physical splendor and happy officials (I Kings 10). A passage in the Book of Jeremiah identifies the centrality of the city, but in this case as a place that will suffer because of its people’s sins: [the Lord] will make Jerusalem heaps, a lair of jackals . . . an astonishment, and a hissing; everyone that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss because of all the plagues thereof . . . [the city’s people will] eat the flesh of their sons . . . (Jer. 9:10; 19:8–9).

We are still writing and reading about Jerusalem. Amazon.com lists 1,899 titles; Books in Print, 3,100, and Google.com returns some 4,200,000 hits in response to a request about “Jerusalem.” In terms of Google hits and published titles, Jerusalem scores above European cities of greater size such as Moscow, Vienna, and Stockholm, although below Paris and London. The aura surrounding Jerusalem may be timeless, but the city is not. It lives in a present that is dynamic and intensely political. It is common to describe the beginning of the intifada al-Aqsa as sparked by the visit of Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount/Haram esh Sharif. Most of the violence has occurred outside of Jerusalem, but the city has felt its impact even beyond those incidents that have occurred within its boundaries. The mood of Jews and Arabs in the city has changed from the hope of the mid- and late 1990s to the despair and mutual distrust of today. Israeli authorities have shifted from permissive accommodation to the repression of Palestinian national activities. Visiting and shopping across the ethnic 311

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boundaries have declined. A virtual elimination of tourism has hurt economies in both communities; the private security industry is virtually the only economic sector that is thriving. The Hebrew University still provides opportunities for Arab and Jewish students, as well as meetings and discussions between them. Since the bombing in one of its cafeterias, however, the university has sought to protect itself with new fences and security gates that rival those at international airports. While all this has been happening, the often ugly incidents between the city’s religious and secular Jews have declined in frequency and intensity. A common enemy that targets all Jews is more pressing than arguments about the Sabbath or the privileges of non-Orthodox rabbis. From the current perspective, in the midst of violence and highly charged political rhetoric, it is likely that recent events will constitute an important stage in the continued evolution of Jerusalem. All of the books being considered here make their contribution to our understanding of what has happened since 2000. None of them are among the vicious, ignorant, and misleading books that are blatantly antiIsrael or antisemitic. Nor are they among the books that are equally frustrating on account of their ignorant praise of all that Israel has done with respect to Jerusalem. However, only one of them provides anything close to a focused and satisfying assessment of the most recent period. Meron Benvenisti’s book first appeared in 1996; perhaps it is the appearance of a paperback edition in English that explains why it reached this reviewer’s desk only in the first week of 2003. The author’s chronic pessimism serves him well in the light of events, but his posture with respect to Jews and Arabs is more distracting than useful. The essays in Marshall J. Breger and Ora Ahimeir’s edited collection were conceived and written before the onset of the present intifada. Some of them have been touched up with a few post-2000 paragraphs added to the conclusions, but many still carry the optimism of a mid-Oslo peace process, and show no sign of the fact that times have changed. As an author who has been hurt by long-delayed group writing projects, I suspect that this book also suffered from tardy contributors or editors and a publisher who gave it low priority. Gershom Gorenberg’s book is a paperback edition of a volume originally published in 2000, with the addition of a new preface that links his argument to the intifada and to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Bernard Wasserstein’s book is the most current and useful in the context of what has happened more recently. But for readers wanting to know what specifics are likely to emerge from the current conflict, no book in print seems likely to satisfy. The confrontation is too intense; too many interests—local, regional, and global—are focused on the city, and any number of scenarios can be envisaged regarding Jerusalem’s future. For all the predictions that are feasible, only the continuation of dispute about the city’s future can claim a high degree of certainty. Meron Benvenisti’s pessimism, as already noted, puts his book in a good light, but his characteristic posture serves him no better in a time of violence than it did at the time of relative calm in which he wrote. As in previous books as well as the frequent articles he contributes to the Israeli press, Benvenisti combines detailed and useful historical and current reportage with an anti-Israeli spin that is persistent

Still More Books about Jerusalem

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and extreme. He claims to know not only the actions but also the motives of Israelis, explaining them as persistently anti-Arab and hypocritical. With respect to the lack of resources devoted to the Arab sector of the city, Benvenisti is convinced that the root cause is discrimination pure and simple. He dismisses the argument that Arabs would be better served if they ceased their boycott of municipal politics and elected a proportional number of their community to the city council. Benvenisti titles his chapter on Israeli city planning “Blueprint for Catastrophe.” The motives he sees are crass, geared toward quick economic profit, combined with a concern to emphasize a Jewish monopoly of rights and control over the city. Gone are the aesthetic values of the British and the Arab traditions that preserved the classic profile of the city. Benvenisti seems to yearn for the picturesque, lowprofile Jerusalem of centuries past—perhaps without the oppressive poverty and smells of open sewers. His description of residential segregation overlooks the Arab students and young professionals who have found apartments in his own neighborhood. He describes the current city as a “huge metropolis,” whereas it is actually of middling size by North American or European scales and small compared with other prominent Asian cities. In his view, the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University is massive and extravagant, but it would be considered modest as the campus of a distinguished university elsewhere. He terms the boundaries defined for the city “artificial,” as if municipal boundaries elsewhere were somehow more natural. Jews who seek to rent or purchase dwellings in Arab areas are “fanatics” who want to “Judaize” the neighborhoods. These words appear in the same paragraph that mentions, without shrill adjectives, a Jordanian law that imposed a death penalty on anyone convicted of selling land or buildings to Jews. Benvenisti ends his book with a chapter on Jerusalem’s cemeteries, and Jews whose intolerance does not stop with discriminating against the living. In his final paragraph, he has no doubt that the dead would want to pass on a message of peace and reconciliation to the living. His final sentence is more convincing: “. . . in the struggle over Jerusalem there are no victors and no vanquished.” The collection edited by Marshall J. Breger and Ora Ahimeir provides a wealth of material that should be mastered by anyone interested in understanding the many historical, legal, economic, religious, and political issues involved in Jerusalem’s current story. Most useful are the chapters on the demographic and economic basics by Maya Choshen; on the legal status of the city by Ruth Lapidoth; on Jerusalem in American politics by Geoffrey R. Watson; on the triangular conflicts involving Palestinians, Jordanians, and Israelis by Menachem Klein; on the ultra-Orthodox communities by Menachem Friedman; and two essays on the Temple Mount/Haram esh Sharif by Yitzhak Reiter and Amnon Ramon. Contributions by a Roman Catholic and an Eastern Orthodox scholar, respectively, provide a gesture toward ecumenical balance. However, both essays are more interesting for their portrayal of sectarian loyalties to old formulations about internationalization. They do not seem relevant to the changing realities in the city. Shlomo Hasson’s discussion of municipal organization is well informed and highlights issues related to the metropolitan area that may surface sooner or later, but much of the detail has been rendered marginal with the breakdown of communication between Israeli and Palestinian authorities. The essay on regional en-

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vironmental issues co-authored by Qasem Abdul-Jaber of al-Quds University and Deborah E. Mir of the Hebrew University portrays instances of cooperation, competition, and neglect with regard to water, sewage, solid waste, and land use. As in the case of numerous other essays, this one leaves the reader wanting to know what has happened since the violence reached its present level; in this case, who is drinking what kind of water. Gershom Gorenberg’s book differs from the others reviewed here. He is a journalist with The Jerusalem Report who provides well-constructed and interesting anecdotes, and he has a point worth telling: that the Temple Mount attracts messianic Christians and Jews who feed off one another even as they aspire to different endgames. They are the people who try to breed red heifers for the purpose of ritual purification; who prepare the sacred garments and utensils for Temple rituals; and who seek to establish Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount against the stand taken by most establishment rabbis and Israeli security officials. They provoke and compete with Muslim “apostles of the apocalypse” who incite their own followers into expecting Jews to destroy their holy sites. The resulting danger will persist as long as there are people who are certain about God’s plan and impatient for Him to begin its implementation. We cannot ignore the individuals and groups that fill Gorenberg’s book, or the danger that they will succeed in doing some spectacular damage that will elevate warfare to new heights of intensity. What Gorenberg’s study lacks, however, is an analytic perspective that weighs the danger of colliding crusades against the capacity of established institutions both to recognize the threats and to deal with them. Gorenberg describes a collection of religious outliers who garner attention because of their exotic pose. They may be dangerous, but they rank somewhere below violent Palestinian nationalists as a serious threat to the well-being of Jerusalem. Bernard Wasserstein’s book is not only the most current of this collection, it is also the most impressive piece of scholarship. Like the others, it ranges backward through the city’s long history, placing the numerous contemporary conflicts against their historical background. It touches on the literary as well as the religious, ethnic, economic, aesthetic, and realpolitik perspectives relevant to Jerusalem. It provides a fair reading of the Yossi Beilin-Abu Mazen duo; Bill Clinton’s proposal for Jerusalem; the Orient House; and the three-dimensional haggling about the Temple Mount, as well as the most recent guesses about the demographic present and future. Divided Jerusalem is well written, without the tendentious edge of Benvenisti or the awkward unevenness of the Breger-Ahimeir anthology. When all is said, however, it is only among the better of the 3,100 or so titles on offer about Jerusalem. I have yet to see one of these books warrant an adjective such as “ground-breaking,” “definitive,” “ultimate,” or “classic.” The fault lies not with the authors, but with the city. It is Jerusalem, whose tensions and dynamism foil the efforts of any writer who tries to capture it in its fullness or finality. Ira Sharkansky The Hebrew University

Book Reviews


Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army. New York: Basic Books, 2000. 539 pp. Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 271 pp.

Reviewing Joseph Bendersky’s The “Jewish Threat” together with Christopher Sterba’s Good Americans resembles the task of the blind men examining the elephant. Touching its trunk, legs, and tail respectively, each man understandably drew different conclusions regarding the creature. The elephant, in this case, is the U.S. Army. Bendersky explores the extensive files on Jews in the military intelligence division (MID), specifically File 245, a special dossier that contained data relevant to the “Jewish question.” His book covers the years from the First World War to beyond the Second World War. Sterba looks at two army divisions in the First World War: the Yankee Division and the 77th Division of the National Army created by the draft. He focuses specifically on Italian American volunteers from New Haven in a machine gun company in the 102nd Infantry of the Connecticut National Guard and contrasts their experiences with New York City Jews drafted into military service in the summer and fall of 1917. Bendersky is interested in the attitudes of officers, military attache´s, and topranking brass, including generals. Sterba is fascinated by the experiences of ordinary privates and noncommissioned officers. Both historians, however, use the army’s treatment of Jews to interpret the impact of the army on American society. Needless to say, like the blind men and the elephant, they reach different conclusions. Bendersky argues that profoundly antisemitic attitudes shaped the officer corps, and that this group influenced key aspects of American policy, ranging from immigration restriction in the immediate aftermath of the First World War to efforts to help European Jews before, during, and after the Second World War. What Bendersky uncovers in the dossier devoted to the “Jewish question” includes vicious stereotypes about Jews. The book begins with fears of a Jewish-led Bolshevik-style revolution erupting on the streets of New York City’s Lower East Side. The officer preparing for such an emergency creates elaborate ethnic maps of the city that highlight the potential dangers of East European Jews to U.S. national security. Later he presents his maps in testimony before Congress, which at the time is debating restrictive immigration legislation. The maps highlight the possible threat of East European Jews to American society. 317

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Book Reviews

Bendersky sees a direct link between discriminatory legislation aimed at eliminating East European Jewish immigration adopted by Congress in 1921 and 1924 and attitudes fostered among the military elite. Fears of high-ranking officers about a Jewish propensity for radicalism and subversive activities reinforced—and were reinforced by—pervasive racist ideas circulating among antisemitic intellectuals (who ranked Jews near the bottom in their list of “races,” well below Northern Europeans). Using the extensive MID files, Bendersky traces the influence of such documents as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Efforts to debunk the Protocols failed to sway officer opinion about Jews because its conspiracy theory confirmed important aspects of an American military worldview that regarded Jews with suspicion. Officer sympathies lay with Christians, whether in the United States or abroad—to such an extent that military attache´s claimed that the pogroms of 1919–1920 in Poland, Ukraine, and Romania were either exaggerated or justified. Had these antisemitic stereotypes remained within the secret files of military intelligence, they would not have deserved the more than 400 pages that Bendersky devotes to them. However, Bendersky contends that their influence extended to another generation of military leaders. He discusses the propagation of antisemitic racialism in courses at the army’s War College in the 1930s, and he describes in detail the ad hoc efforts by retired generals to convince other Americans of the peril Jews posed to the survival of the United States. Even during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when a number of these officers recognized that their views no longer carried as much weight as during the “tribal twenties,” the military refused to revise its attitudes toward Jews. Bendersky ascribes significant influence to military reports about potential Jewish spies from Germany on State Department policy toward refugees from Nazism. Despite occasional missteps as the United States moved toward support of Great Britain in the Second World War, antisemitic generals succeeded in retaining positions of prominence. Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, who apparently ignored theories of Jewish subversion, did not disavow his friendship with such antisemitic generals as George Van Horn Moseley, whom he saw as a mentor. During the Second World War, the army did its best to resist any efforts to assist refugees fleeing from Hitler. Bendersky enters the debate over rescue and the bombing of Auschwitz. He agrees with those scholars who contend that bombing the rail lines and crematoria of Auschwitz was militarily feasible during the summer of 1944, when Hungarian Jews were being murdered there. The army’s peremptory rejection of the request stemmed from deep-seated suspicion of, and animus toward, Jews. Similarly, the army struggled to ignore pressures to rescue European Jews, even after the creation of the War Refugee Board and the shift in administrative policy it represented. Finally, Bendersky depicts the army’s efforts to derail American support for the partition of Palestine and for the resulting establishment of the state of Israel. In each of these cases, he makes a connection between attitudes nurtured at army institutions such as the War College, or within officer cliques, and the decisions fateful for European Jews. In brief, Bendersky paints a relentlessly grim picture. Viewing the U.S. Army from the point of view of its MID files is a dispiriting enterprise. Networks of friendships and influence, of misinformation and antisemitism, manage to perpet-


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uate themselves decade after decade. The continuity is impressive. It leaves one wondering how any change occurred at all—for, in fact, the army did change during the Second World War. Bendersky briefly discusses some controversies that pitted prestigious army brass against influential civilian foes, but these incidents impress him more for the continuities they evidence than for the changes they augur. Sterba’s perspective could not be more different. He seeks to understand the impact of the federal government on the lives and attitudes of immigrant Jews and Italians. Aware of the minimal contact most immigrants had with the federal government, Sterba sees the First World War as a critical turning point, not only for the young men who entered military service but also for their communities. Sterba’s juxtaposition of New Haven Italians with New York Jews provides a study in contrasts. The insular New Haven immigrant enclave develops a network of associations that help propel its members into active and enthusiastic support for the war. The men respond to calls for volunteers for an Italian National Guard unit of machine gunners. They are feted by the city of New Haven, and this recognition helps to draw Italian immigrants, and especially their children, into urban politics. Mobilization for war brings prosperity as well as the recognition of Italians as Americans. By contrast, New York City Jews, with an equally elaborate network of associations, are bitterly divided over the war. A significant number vociferously oppose American participation, object to the draft, and champion pacifism. Sterba carefully distinguishes among the different Jewish groups, both prowar and antiwar. He argues that the latter experienced freedom of expression, especially during the New York City mayoral campaign of 1917, when Morris Hillquit, the socialist, ran on an antiwar platform. Though Hillquit came in a close third, the success of many Jewish socialist candidates for local offices strengthened the integration of Jews, albeit as dissenters, into American political life. Similarly, despite opposition to the draft, Jewish immigrants registered and were inducted without incident. The newly created 77th Infantry Division, known as the “melting pot” division, took as its insignia the Statue of Liberty. Sterba argues that unlike the relatively isolated Italians in the Yankee Division, Jewish draftees, who made up almost a quarter of the 77th Division, experienced upward mobility, including opportunities to become noncommissioned officers, because the division lacked any of the traditions associated with the National Guard. To accommodate the thousands of Jewish recruits, the army improvised policies, which included recognizing the High Holy Days. Less than a month after they were inducted, Jewish doughboys were given passes to leave Camp Upton on Long Island to return to New York City to observe Yom Kippur. The general in charge of the camp did his best not to isolate his division from the community and actively sought a Jewish chaplain for his men. Elkan Voorsanger, a Reform rabbi from San Francisco, became the first rabbi to achieve captain’s rank and the first to serve as senior chaplain of a division. From Sterba’s account, antisemitism in the 77th appears to have been negligible. The officer corps often included Jews, who commanded both Jewish and Gentile soldiers. Sterba follows both divisions to Europe, documenting their miserable encounter

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Book Reviews

with trench warfare. He describes the admirable behavior of the men under fire, despite high casualties caused by foolish military decisions. Sterba also devotes attention to the home front, charting shifting attitudes among New York Jews after the Russian Revolution. As German armies occupy large sections of what had been the Pale of Settlement in Russia, Jewish support for the war increases. The Balfour Declaration also diminishes antiwar sentiment. Sterba uses war bond sales as an index of support. His conclusions might surprise Bendersky, for Sterba argues that the experience of New York Jews and New Haven Italians in the armed forces during the First World War actually strengthened their bonds with the United States as well as their ethnic consciousness and sense of entitlement. Although Sterba does describe several antisemitic incidents, these occur in units drawn from the National Guard rather than in National Army divisions such as the 77th, where Jews made up a sizable percentage of soldiers. Both Bendersky and Sterba agree, however, that the U.S. Army exerted significant influence on the course of American Jewish history. Bendersky’s expose´ of the antisemitic politics within the U.S. Army claims to set the record straight by revealing how the military spied on Jews and did its best to thwart Jewish actions on behalf of European Jews. In his view, Jews were victims of antisemitic officers, and Jewish failures to help European Jews reflected American Jewish impotence in the face of a resolutely antisemitic army officer corps. Sterba emphasizes the relatively brief years of military service in the First World War as a critical moment of immigrant agency, of growth, entitlement, and politicization. Rather than viewing the imposition of the draft as crushing immigrant aspirations beneath massive pressures to Americanize, he sees Jews as making their own history even within the standardized world of the U.S. Army. Bendersky and Sterba exemplify two different historical perspectives and methodologies. This reviewer found Sterba’s comparative social history ultimately more convincing, despite the damning evidence Bendersky has unearthed. Deborah Dash Moore Vassar College

Joseph Berger, Displaced Persons: Growing up in America after the Holocaust. New York: Scribner, 2001. 347 pp.

Between 1947 and 1953, more than 140,000 refugees from Europe, many of them Jewish, made their way to the United States in search of a new beginning. Busy rebuilding their lives during the first postwar decades, the older generation of Holocaust survivors often began writing their memoirs or recording their experiences only in retirement, usually from the 1980s onwards. Focusing primarily on the prewar and wartime era, most devoted only a few pages to a summary of their lives after leaving Europe.1 Nevertheless, for almost all who raised families after the war,


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their children were their raison d’eˆtre and their triumph, the prize that proved how the Jews had ultimately vanquished Hitler. Although a collective sociological portrayal of the parents’ resettlement, including a thought-provoking discussion and analysis of their wartime survival, appeared more than a decade ago, it naturally concentrated on the survivors themselves rather than on their children.2 Some of these children were already born in America; others had crossed the ocean during the late 1940s or early 1950s as infants or as small children. Unlike their parents who remembered a “before,” these children knew only an “after,” a world that began with a cataclysm that brought together many couples of disparate social, geographic, economic, or religious backgrounds. The children soon sounded like natives in America, although it was many years before they felt the part. They were the first American branch of the “second generation”—or the “older 2Gs” as they would ultimately be known in sociological parlance—those who were born during or shortly after the war, to parents who often still bore the stamp of what they had undergone. As opposed to their younger siblings (born in the mid- to late 1950s into settled families), these children had many memories both of parents who knew no English and of a prolonged struggle for economic survival. Striving to be accepted by their American-born peers, some found themselves fighting an uphill battle against their European parents, whom they saw as a brake on their full Americanization. Yet how could they rebel against these survivors of ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps, whose daily suffering during the war utterly outweighed that of an entire childhood or adolescence? This dilemma was the focus of scholarly and popular literature dealing with the second generation, most notably Helen Epstein’s path-breaking book, Children of the Holocaust, published in 1979. Sociologists have noted that one of the means by which “2G’s” faced their parent’s past was by choosing “helping professions”: teaching, social work, medicine. Others achieved a measure of catharsis through writing and the arts, focusing on the Holocaust and, later, on their own experiences as American children of survivors. Excerpts from Holocaust-related fiction written by second-generation writers have appeared in a recent anthology collected by Melvin Jules Bukiet; several stories deal with the lives of children of survivors and their special relationship with their parents.3 Joseph Berger’s Displaced Persons is a non-fictionalized story describing his growing up as the son of postwar refugees in America. Berger was born in 1945 to Polish Jews who had escaped the Nazi occupation by fleeing to Russia. After going through labor camps and other hardships, his parents, who had married during the war, were repatriated to Warsaw in 1946, eventually making their way to the American zone in Germany where they found refuge in a DP camp. In March 1950, the Berger family—parents and two young sons—came to the United States to begin a new life. They arrived on Purim, almost five years after the end of the Second World War, and were housed by HIAS for the first days of their stay, until they were able to make their way in their new homeland. Within the American melting pot of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Berger family fared similarly to other postwar Jewish refugees. Having found a steady but

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Book Reviews

low-paying job in a factory, Berger’s father supported his family on a meager income while slowly losing esteem in the eyes of his Americanized and upwardly mobile children. Trying to keep the family together emotionally and economically, his mother took on work in the garment district in order to pay her sons’ yeshiva tuition. Like many of their refugee friends, the Berger family had few relatives in America and ended up in a social circle composed of other refugees, most of whom had “come over” with them after the war. Displaced Persons is the story not of an individual but of a family, told through the young Berger’s eyes. Berger’s father, mother, younger brother, and Americanborn sister play an important role in the narrative, which soon becomes a narrative within a narrative. Midway in his story, Berger begins interviewing his mother about her family in Europe before the war, and from there until the end of the book he intersperses her prewar and wartime experiences with descriptions of his own life. The book is also a story of circles, some moving in different directions, others meeting at the beginning or the end, and some that never close. In the first category is the religious circle formed by the various members of the Berger clan throughout their lives. Born to an observant family, Berger’s father lost his faith during the war and abandoned religious practice until reaching the age of retirement, when he returned to the Orthodox ways of his youth. Joseph Berger, who had always differed socially, religiously, and economically from his American-born yeshiva classmates, moved in the opposite direction from his father, ultimately leaving the Orthodox world. The story of an uncle, Yankel-Yasha, is that of a circle whose pieces continually intercross with that of his sister—Joseph Berger’s mother—each time under different circumstances. We are introduced to Yasha in his youth: the big brother to an admiring younger sister. Later we see them as young adults, with Yasha saving his sister’s life in wartime Russia. Sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia on a trumped-up charge, Yasha is separated from her until the war’s end. After miraculously being reunited with his sister and her family in a German DP camp, Yasha decides to move to Australia to begin a new life. Years later, when the American dream begins to overshadow that of Australia, Yasha brings his family to the United States. Berger describes the poignant clash between past and present that then ensues. Brother and sister reunite, but soon realize that two very different families living in close proximity cannot recapture the closeness that the two siblings had had in their youth. Noting his wife’s discomfort in the face of his sister’s attempts to mold their lives in America, Yasha decides to move his family to New Jersey, aware that only physical distance between the families could keep a volatile situation under control. And then there are the circles that never close, such as that described by Berger’s mother when telling him the tale of her family before and during the war. Having escaped to the East in order to avoid the German occupation, for many years she did not know the fate of those family members who remained behind in Poland. Only in later years did she find out what had happened to them under the Nazis, but even knowledge of their fate could not close the circle, since she would never be given the opportunity to say a final goodbye to her father, stepmother, and

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younger siblings. The same holds true for Berger’s father—a secondary figure in the narrative until close to the end, when he takes center stage in trying vainly to track down the fate of his own family lost in wartime Poland. Above all, Displaced Persons is the story of how the past connects to the present and thus to the future. Berger ends his story with a description of three Jewish ritual events connected to members of his own family: his youngest nephew’s circumcision, the boy’s bar mitzvah 13 years later, and his daughter’s bat mitzvah celebration that took place soon after. Noting how his parents told their grandchildren next to nothing about their families and past lives, he voices the hope that he and his siblings will “do the right thing” and teach them about the lives that had been lost “there” and been rebuilt “here.” His book is a major tool in this process, showing how even the children of survivors, who in the past concentrated so much on their own experiences, eventually realize that they are members of the “second generation” only because their parents were members of the first. Judith Tydor Baumel Bar-Ilan University

Notes 1. Regarding survivor autobiographies, see my article “Gender and Family Studies of the Holocaust,” Women: A Cultural Review 7 (1996), 114–124. See also Robert Rozett, “Personal Accounts of the Holocaust: What Can We Glean from Them?,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 18, Jews and Violence: Images, Ideologies, Realities, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 2002), 219–231. 2. William B. Helmreich, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New York: 1992). 3. Melvin Jules Bukiet (ed.), Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (New York: 2002).

David Kranzler, The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello, El Salvador and Switzerland’s Finest Hour. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 341 pp.

We live in non-heroic times. The Jewish people need heroes, so we should welcome David Kranzler’s portrayal of an almost forgotten hero: George Mantello, an El Salvadorian diplomat in Geneva who spearheaded a public campaign on behalf of the Jews of Hungary during the fateful months of 1944, when the lives of Budapest’s Jews hung in the balance. There is much to admire in this work. Kranzler offers a vivid portrait of the plight of Hungarian Jews from the German invasion of March 9, 1944, through the ghettoization that soon followed, and during the deportations to Auschwitz that commenced on May 15. He presents the infighting within the Jewish community

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of Hungary as it sought ways to respond and, most importantly, he surveys what world leaders knew and how they reacted to the killing that occurred so very late in the war—and when everyone knew that the Allied victory was only a matter of time—at a point when governments and individuals were seeking to position themselves for the postwar world. Kranzler’s central focus is Switzerland, which because of its geographic position and its neutrality was a place where information could be had and rescue efforts could be launched. Into this mix, Kranzler introduces Mantello, an affluent Jew of Romanian origin who, based in Geneva, served as the consul general of El Salvador and worked tirelessly and with seemingly superhuman determination on behalf of his fellow Jews. According to Kranzler, Mantello made strategic use of his diplomatic immunity, his wealth, and his personal connections. He issued El Salvadorian documents at a time when such documents meant the difference between life and death. He forced the Jewish community of Switzerland into an activist posture, working with the Orthodox and the Zionists, with the establishment and anti-establishment; and even walking into synagogues on Shabbat mornings and taking rabbis from their pulpits in order to ride off with him (in a waiting taxi) to attend important meetings. Most importantly, Mantello enlisted Switzerland’s Protestant leaders, notably Paul Vogel (Switzerland’s most prominent pastor) and Karl Barth and Emil Brunner (both of them world-famous theologians) to speak out publicly about the plight of the Jews and to remind their co-religionists of the Christian obligation to come to the Jews’ assistance. One senses in Kranzler’s portrait the urgency of the situation and the steely determination of Mantello. What also comes through is the pure selflessness of a man who had lived under the Germans before emigrating to Switzerland. A pessimist and therefore also a realist, he intuited deep in his soul that Jewish men, women, and children were being killed. And once the rumors were confirmed, he understood that the killing was systematic and without mercy, throughout Germanoccupied Europe. The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz joins the recent publication by David Wyman and Rafael Medoff concerning the important and parallel efforts undertaken in the United States by Hillel Kook (a.k.a. Peter Bergson). Like Mantello, Kook sought to embarrass, cajole, and force a conservative and non-activist establishment into bold action on behalf of the imperiled and isolated Jews of Europe.1 In both instances, the story that is told is moving, and it reinforces an important value, namely, that one man not only can but must make a difference. And yet, no matter how compelling Kranzler’s portrayal and how moving his tribute to Mantello (who is clearly worthy of praise and of being rescued from anonymity), there is an imbalance in the author’s historiography that weakens the book and leads to some skepticism regarding its conclusions. The title is overstated. No one man stopped the trains to Auschwitz. If failure is an orphan and success has many fathers, Kranzler’s own work demonstrates that it took many people to stop those trains. An agglomeration of forces had to come together to halt the deportations, including the collapsing German front; the unrealistic German hopes for a separate peace with the West; changes of heart (again on the Nazi side), resulting from changing perceptions with regard to the possibility of a German

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victory; and a turnabout in the policy of the American government. It would have been sufficient for Kranzler to document Mantello’s role without additional embellishment, thus providing a clearer assessment of his contribution. Moreover, there are discrepancies within the work, both large and small. Karl Barth—surely a well-known and respected figure—has his first name spelled two different ways. A more serious matter concerns the figures on how many people were killed at Auschwitz. Kranzler describes the report circulated by Mantello, which carried a figure of 1,715,000 victims. This report, however, was based on the Auschwitz Report, a document compiled by Rudolf Vrba (also known as Walter Rosenberg) and Alfred Wetzler (Jozko Lanik), which cited a higher figure of 1,765,000. In fact, this discrepancy is a useful clue in determining how widely and to whom Mantello’s report circulated. The reader, however, should have been apprised of the actual figures accepted by almost all present-day scholars as to the number of people murdered at Auschwitz (between 1,100,000 and 1,300,000 people, 90 percent of them Jews),2 in order to be able to assess the state of wartime knowledge. Ever since the symposium of 1993 at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., we have had a clearer picture of the debate concerning the U.S. decision not to bomb Auschwitz (or the train tracks leading to Auschwitz),3 which is nowhere reflected in this narrative. Either Kranzler has not read this research, or he is dismissive for reasons he does not share with his readers, or he has refused to let history diminish the polemical power of the accusation against the U.S. government. Among American Jews, more was at play than a love for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (particularly on the part of Rabbi Stephen Wise) when they refrained from pressing with all of the limited resources at their disposal to rescue the Jews. The understanding of what was going on in the American Jewish community at that time has changed since the publication of Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died (1968) and David Wyman’s important book The Abandonment of the Jews (1984). Finally, there is a disturbing presumption in Kranzler’s work (which often mirrors the countervailing Zionist presumption that only the Zionists were activists) that only religious Jews cared about the rescue efforts. Time and again, Kranzler tells us that although Mantello was not religious, he was of a religious background and was deeply respectful of religious Jews. As a religious Jew and a Zionist, I would suggest that both communities would benefit from some measure of humility. As a scholar, I would also suggest that understatement is more potent and more convincing than exaggeration. The narrative alone is sufficiently compelling. Michael Berenbaum The University of Judaism

Notes 1. See David Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (New York: 2002); a review of that book immediately follows this one. 2. See Fraticek Piper, “The Number of Victims at Auschwitz,” in Anatomy of the Ausch-

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witz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: 1994), 61– 80. Piper arrives at his final figure after taking the number of those who arrived at Auschwitz and subtracting from it those who survived and those who either left the camp or who died there and were accounted for in the camp records. 3. See Michael Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (New York: 2000).

David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust. New York: The New Press, 2002. 288 pp.

Thanks to the work of David Wyman, the wartime activities of the Bergson group, which was active in this country between 1940 and 1947 under various names, promises to become a cause ce´le`bre in Holocaust historiography. Like Martin Ostrow’s PBS documentary, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, this celebratory book portrays Bergson in heroic terms. It is based mostly on Wyman’s oral interviews, conducted in the spring of 1973, which are introduced by Medoff’s explanatory essay. The interviews are insightful, and the fact that they have been broken up in order to fit sequentially arranged chapters only occasionally compromises their integrity. It is a composite rather than a narrated work whose impact comes in an area where we least expect it. A Race against Death provides a distressing look at the way in which American Jewry was poorly served by its leaders, both recognized and self-proclaimed, during those bitter years. The story of the “Bergson boys” is well known. The Committee for a Jewish Army (the earliest incarnation of the Bergson group) was organized by six foreignborn young Jews under the command of the Irgun, the military arm of the breakaway Revisionist branch of the Zionist movement. It is important to note their draft status since draft-dodging became the most persistent and untrue charge against them: four of the six, including Bergson, were exempt from military duty because Palestinian Jews were not conscripted. They were under the command of the charismatic Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, who had formally taken his Revisionists out of the World Zionist Organization at the 17th Zionist Congress in 1935, just as the crisis in Europe was about to reach its climax. Like other nationalist leaders in the interwar period, Jabotinsky (who fondly recalled his years of service during the First World War as an officer in the 38th Royal Fusiliers) had a penchant for things military. Even before Mussolini adopted a similar uniform for his followers, Jabotinsky’s troopers could be recognized by their black shirts, and Jabotinsky’s notion of a Jewish army composed of stateless and Palestinian Jews harked back to the Jewish Mule Corps of the disastrous Galipoli campaign waged in 1915. The bitter hostility of most affiliated American Zionists toward this group of Irgunists can best be understood in the context of the split that had torn the Zionist movement apart at a crucial historical juncture, and that serves as the axis of Israeli politics to this day. For people who passionately believed that the kibbutz and reclamation of the land constituted the necessary first step in the restoration of the


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Jewish nation, the Bergsonites appeared to be a band of thieves out to steal the “jewel in the crown” of the Zionist movement, American Jewry. Setting up an “embassy” in Washington, D.C. to speak for stateless Jews appeared to be no more than a clever public relations trick, and running an ad that could be interpreted as claiming that 70,000 Jews could be saved “at $50 each” smacked of financial fraud. Yet the campaign for a Jewish army was the first evidence of Bergson’s remarkable talent both for ferreting out the issues that would draw the attention of the Jewish public and for marketing them as if they were toothpaste. The “Bergson boys” knew how to scream precisely at the historical moment when a loud-pitched voice was needed to pierce the silence surrounding the Final Solution. Those who argued that the group did not rescue a single Jew missed the point. In any final tally, the group’s public relations activity would rate as the most important of their contributions. Had there been more Bergsons, the attempt to rescue more European Jews might have had greater results. At least part of the response to the Final Solution, to the extent that there could have been an adequate response, depended on getting the story out. That the Bergsonites achieved, with great talent and energy. Rather than developing a mass membership organization, the Bergson group followed the pre-1935 model of the American Jewish Committee. Ad hoc chapters composed of influential, well-connected Jews and Christians were established in several major cities. Bergson was especially successful in attracting members of Congress, not all of whom were necessarily interested in garnering the Jewish vote. In addition, his group had in its arsenal such brilliant writers and publicists as Ben Hecht, Pierre van Paassen, and Max Lerner. Ben Hecht in particular produced copy that could almost wake the dead. Technically the Bergson group was under command of the Revisionist headquarters in Palestine. But since Jabotinsky had died in New York in August 1940 and the war had made the Yishuv all but inaccessible, Bergson was in fact virtually autonomous. The group’s decision of 1943 to change its focus from the need for a Jewish army to the rescue of European Jewry was probably taken without much consultation with the movement’s leadership, and a postwar request for funds from Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky’s successor, did not receive a positive response. When Bergson proposed the radical step of reclassifying Palestinian and stateless Jews as “Hebrews” (whereas settled diaspora Jews would remain simply “Jews”), Begin, realizing that a costly strategic error would result from such a division, counseled against it: after all, the idea of universal Jewish peoplehood was found, in its most pristine form, in Zionist ideology. Bergson went ahead anyway, realizing only years later that he had made a serious mistake. The distinction that he made between Hebrews and Jews predictably added fuel to the argument that his actions essentially served to disunite the Jewish people, and that he was thus part of the problem, not of its solution. Yet in retrospect, a good case can be made for one aspect of the proposed strategy. The goal of rescue could come into conflict with the goal of a national homeland. Insisting that resettlement specifically in Palestine, rather than in any available country, was the only solution for those who could get out of occupied Europe, Zionist leaders had testified against the Congressional resolution that set the stage for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s establishment of the War Refugee

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Board. The statehood goal (which incidentally Jabotinsky always strongly advocated) thus burdened the rescue effort. In fact, as Bergson maintained, pulling Jews out of the Nazi grasp rather than attempting to undo the White Paper should have received the highest priority. By 1944, the brightest lights of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe (or simply the Emergency Committee, as the Bergson group was now known)—Pierre van Paassen, Max Lerner, and Dean Alfange—had withdrawn from it. Bergson attributed these desertions to the relentless pressure exerted by mainline Zionists, whom he referred to, in terms that came fully into favor during the McCarthy period, as “fellow travelers” and “pinkos.” In fact, it is arguable that most Jews could have been so classified during those years. Opposition to Bergson was inevitable since his group adhered to a political ideology that was unpalatable to most liberal American Jews who supported the New Deal. When Stephen Wise repeatedly asked by what right the Bergson group claimed to speak for American Jewry, he was speaking as the head of an organization, the American Jewish Congress, whose driving force was its objective of achieving “democracy in Jewish life.” In 1917, at the behest of the Congress movement, American Jewry had conducted the largest ethnic election in American history in order to select a delegation to the Paris peace conference. Several other, not totally dissimilar, elections were conducted thereafter: to this day, organizations associated with the American Zionist movement hold elections every four years to determine the distribution of seats in the Jewish Agency. The democratic process has not been perfect, but the Zionist movement rightfully prides itself on introducing democracy into Jewish life wherever it has a presence. When the Bergson boys danced their way into the attention of American Jewry by means of loud publicity and enormous chutzpah, as when they opened their “embassy” in Washington, D.C., they aroused a storm of protest among the established American Jewish leadership. This might have been predicted, but the other side of the Bergson group’s brilliant activity as publicists was an ignorance of how American Jewry operated. It was easy to win an audience by staging startling pageants and running full-page newspaper ads. But something more than inspired public relations was required to create and to sustain an influential organization. This book, with its clear sense of who were the heroes and who the villains, does not approach the primary question that historians must address. Did the loss of a unified voice in Washington that was produced by Bergson’s confrontational approach balance the positive accomplishments of his Emergency Committee? On this issue, the verdict is not yet in. Much of the animus against the Bergson group was in fact gratuitous and reflected the petty nature of Jewish politics even during crises of survival. The Bergsonites’ flair for publicity clearly complemented the rescue operation of the Zionists and of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The urgency of the situation called for unity. Yet there are many reasons why even today there are people who believe that the Bergsonites were a divisive and disruptive force. Recent arrivals in the country, they nevertheless challenged the organized Jewish world in which Zionism played the major role. Had they followed a “truth in packaging” policy and revealed their political coloration, I doubt whether they would have been


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able to win and sustain the support of American Jews who, to this day, prefer the slightly left-of-center slot on the political spectrum. American Jewry was the only ethnic group that gave Roosevelt more than 90 percent of its vote for his third-term bid for presidential office in 1940. A good part of the New Deal’s welfare state program was incubated in the Jewish labor movement and in Jewish social work agencies. When American Jews thought of Zionism, what came to mind were Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, the kibbutz, the Palmach, modern Tel Aviv, and Jews working the land. Missing from the image fostered by the Zionist propaganda of the 1930s and 1940s were military formations of uniformed men ready to win the land by the force of arms. Not openly stating their political identity may have helped Bergson and his group to maximize their influence, but it also introduced an element of fraud that they were never able to shake off. The interviews that compose the heart of this book are a worthwhile addition to our knowledge of the role of the Jewish response to the crisis of European Jewry during the Second World War. The annotations are helpful. But the reader should be aware that the authors belong to Bergson’s fan club—not an ideal place for historians seeking balance to position themselves. Henry L. Feingold Baruch College of CUNY

Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. xx⫹ 324 pp.

Based on a conference devoted to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and afterwards that was held at Yeshiva University in April 2000, this well-edited volume documents a watershed in the academic and public discussion of this topic. The conference marked one of the earliest occasions on which Jan Tomasz Gross presented his findings about the massacre of the local Jewish population in July 1941 at the hands of its Polish neighbors in Jedwabne. His book, Neighbors, destroyed the “paradigm of [Polish] innocence” (p. 11) through the debate it triggered, and has indeed transformed the landscape of Polish collective memory. Joshua D. Zimmerman discusses this transformation in his introduction, although a more exhaustive list of Polish reactions to the book can be found on the homepage of the Polish publisher of Gross’ study.1 Contested Memories opens with contributions by Emanuel Melzer and David Engel on the period before the outbreak of the Second World War, each illustrating the extremely difficult situation of Polish Jews in a society marked by the growing influence of political antisemitism and by anti-Jewish violence. Melzer describes the exclusionary intentions of those Polish political circles that sought to accelerate Jewish emigration from Poland during this period. His references unfortunately do

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not include three recent monographs by Carla Tonini, Hans Jansen, and Magnus Brechtken on the topic. David Engel shows that the anti-Jewish pogrom in Lwow in November 1918 was considered by many Polish contemporaries to be a legitimate retaliation for the alleged anti-Polish intentions of the local Jewish community. Lwow (Lemberg) of 1918 became a metaphor for the presumed hostility of Jews toward the Polish state, and it reemerged during the Second World War as an argument by Polish members of the government-in-exile to refuse solidarity with Polish Jews, despite their being threatened by extermination. Fourteen contributions deal with different aspects of Polish-Jewish relations during the German occupation of Poland (parts 2-5). The first four focus on the period between the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of the GermanSoviet war in June 1941. During the Soviet occupation of much of eastern Poland and the ensuing period of Stalinization and Communist oppression, Polish-Jewish relations experienced a marked intensification of mutual distrust and even hate. Apart from the contribution of Jan Tomasz Gross, which sums up his view on the Jedwabne massacre and on the treatment of Jewish postwar testimonies, the material presented by Andrzej Z˙bikowski is especially important. Z˙bikowski’s sources are testimonies of Jews returning from what had been the Soviet-occupied zone to Warsaw in 1941 and early 1942. In contrast to the material used by Gross, these testimonies describe Polish-Jewish relations in the occupied kresy as recalled immediately after the events.2 Part 3 deals with “institutional responses” to the genocide, specifically those of the Polish government-in-exile (Darius Stola); the Polish underground (Shmuel Krakowski); and the Catholic hierarchy (John T. Pawlikowski). All three essays emphasize the prevalent anti-Jewish attitudes among members of these institutions and groupings, which dated back to the prewar period and which underwent no significant changes even in the face of the German extermination policy. Krakowski’s conclusion concerning the Polish underground’s “failing to create a proper atmosphere of popular support for the noble people who sheltered Jews” (p. 102) holds true for the government-in-exile and the Catholic church as well. The following four contributions by Daniel Blatman, Feliks Tych, Samuel Kassow, and Henry Abramson focus on “Poles through Jewish Eyes.” The most innovative account, by Abramson, deals with non-Jews in the writings of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalmish Shapiro, providing a captivating account of how the horrors of life in the Warsaw ghetto were reflected among the hasidim. What effect did the destruction of Polish Jewry have on Polish popular opinion? With some arithmetic artistry, Gunnar S. Paulsson undertakes to show that Poles were helpers, bystanders, or collaborators in more or less the same proportions as non-Jews in occupied Western Europe, but it is not possible to evaluate his claim on the basis of the material he provides. Nechama Tec helps us to understand that, among other things, death versus survival depended on gender, and that the chances to survive in occupied Poland were greater for Jewish women than for Jewish men. Probably for reasons of delicacy, questions of sexual relationships between persecuted Jews and non-Jews are not dealt with, though this phenomenon played a role in some cases of Jewish survival (as described by Shimon Redlich in his recent masterly study,

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Together and Apart in Brzezany, which is reviewed in these pages). The last section of Contested Memories is devoted to developments after the war and the genocide. Emerging from these collected essays is the image of two traumatized communities unable to find common ground, which continue to regard one another as embodying the causes of their suffering. Prewar attitudes, the trauma of war and occupation, the appropriation of Jewish property by the remaining Polish population, and the hardships of a postwar era characterized by immeasurable losses and renewed political oppression left no room for any form of empathy or even comprehension. Among the contributions in this section of the book are those focusing on the pogrom in Cracow in August 1945 (Anna Cichopek); the reorganization of Jewish communal and political life (Natalia Aleksiun); and the consequences of the mid-century events for later generations of Polish Jews, described in a personal account by Stanislaw Krajewski. Contested Memories covers all relevant aspects of the relationship between Poles and Jews before, during, and after the most tragic period of their parallel existence on Polish soil. The essays tend to sum up the achievements of past research rather than introducing new perspectives or asking new questions, and many contributions refer to the same events, the same authors, and the same crucial questions of right or wrong. No harm would have resulted from cutting these redundant perspectives. Moreover, quite a few of the essays are too short—10 pages or fewer in length—to be able to present substantial new insights. Nevertheless, this volume certainly can serve as an overview and can be of great help in teaching the subject. Zimmerman’s careful editing makes the book all the more to be recommended for this use. Franç ois Guesnet Potsdam University

Notes 1. See http://www.pogranicze.sejny.pl 2. These sources have recently been published (Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy. Tom 3. Relacje z Kreso´w. Opracował Andrzej Z˙bikowski. Warsaw 2002 [reads 2000]).

Biography, History, and the Social Sciences

Israel Bartal and Yisrael Gutman (eds.), Kiyum veshever: yehudei polin ledoro evrah, teihem (The broken chain: Polish Jewry through the ages), vol. 2, H tarbut, leumiyut (Society, culture, nationalism). Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2001. 766 pp.

This second collection of essays edited by Israel Bartal and Yisrael Gutman meets successfully the challenge of a long-expected synthetic work on the Jewish experience in Poland, which until the Second World War was home to the largest and most important Jewish community in the world. Whereas the first volume of The Broken Chain focused on various chapters in the history of Polish Jewry, the second is dedicated to Polish Jewish society, culture, and art. Following an interdisciplinary approach, Bartal and Gutman have assembled a collection drawing upon history, ethnography, literature, art, and theater, among other fields of research. The contributors include pioneers in the field of Polish Jewry alongside younger scholars based in Israel, North America, and Europe. Supplementing the essays are primary sources dealing with the central issues and personae, which are accompanied by explanatory introductions, maps, and illustrations. The volume consists of four parts. Part 1 is devoted to the topics of Torah and education. An opening essay by Ephraim A. Urbach offers an overview; originally published posthumously in 1998, many years after it was written, it is still a valuable piece because of the author’s innovative views. A pair of complementary essays by Moshe-Avigdor Schulwas and David Asaf on the world of Jewish learning in Poland present a comprehensive picture of that world from its beginnings until the 20th century. Sabina Lewin describes the system of Jewish education in the kingdom of Poland during the 19th century and analyzes the attitudes of the authorities and of various segments of Polish society toward the Jews. Both of these subjects are of critical importance for an understanding of Jewish society in this formative period. However, the importance of Lewin’s chapter is seriously undermined by its lack of footnotes or any other bibliographical reference: a very general note on several archival files is unsatisfactory. Missing in this section as a whole is any general discussion of the response of religious Jews, and especially the ultra-Orthodox, to the Holocaust. To date, the only aspect of this encounter that has been studied at any length is the crisis of faith experienced by many religious Jews; Esther Farbstein’s contribution likewise falls into this category. It focuses on sermons written by a hasidic rabbi, Kalonimus Shapiro of Piscina, while he was in the Warsaw ghetto. However, in her innovative 332


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analysis of the sources and her sharp criticism of the existing studies, Farbstein contributes a new approach to the problem of how faith was, or was not, preserved. Part 2 is dedicated to culture and the arts. Shmuel Werses describes the development of different streams in Hebrew literature in Poland from the beginning of the 19th century until the Holocaust. Bartal complements this picture by looking at the multilingual Jewish literature in Poland from a historian’s point of view. Focusing on the image of Polish magnates and leaseholders in Jewish literature, he shows how fiction reflected historical fact. David Roskies analyzes the main directions of Yiddish literature in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries, with special emphasis on the life and works of Isaac Leib Peretz. Nathan Cohen offers a comprehensive outline of Yiddish literature in interwar Poland, while Harold B. Segal provides a very useful look at references to Jews in Polish literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, Segal’s claim that Polish literature until the late 18th century (with a few exceptions in judicial and political writings) generally neglected the Jew is somewhat strange. In fact, references to the Jews in old Polish literature are relatively numerous, and they most often deal with religious and economic matters. Eugenia Prokop-Janiec also deals with the place of the Jews in Polish literature, offering as well an analysis of the current state of research in this area. Finally, Nathan Cohen surveys the Jewish daily press in interwar Poland. Overall, the essays in part 2 create an insightful portrait of Jewish literature and Jews in Polish literature in the 19th and 20th centuries; it is regrettable that a corresponding picture for pre-partition Poland is absent in this volume. Included as well in this section is Michael Steinlauf’s survey of Jewish theater in Poland, mainly from the latter half of the 19th century until the Second World War, with an introduction covering the previous period and an epilogue discussing the postwar period until the present. The introduction contains several problematic statements. For example, Steinlauf includes a number of Jewish religious activities—h azanut, preaching and the like—under the rubric of theater. And, as may have been be expected, he interprets the festival of Purim from the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories, but fails to distinguish between the religious holiday and the purimshpiel associated with it. Finally, as previously noted, there is the absence of references to pre-partition Poland. Rounding out this section are Jerzy Malinowski’s essay on modern Jewish art in Poland—which elegantly evades answering the eternal question: What is a Jewish artist?—and a rich description by Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz on the stereotypic image of the Jew in Polish rural folk art. Society and politics is the theme of Part 3. Mordekhai Zalkin proposes some very preliminary directions for discussion of the Jewish Enlightenment in Poland. Moshe Rosman’s essay on Jewish women in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth balances, at least in part, the general neglect of this period in the present volume. Gershon Bacon surveys Orthodox Jewish society in Poland and Russia from the mid-19th until the mid-20th century. (The near neglect of this subject stands in striking contrast to its historical importance in those two countries, where Orthodoxy represented mainstream Jewish practice well into the modern age.) Daniel Blatman writes about the Bund, and Shlomo Netser and Shimon Rudnicki deal, in their respective essays, with Jewish representation in the Polish par-

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liament in the interwar period. Ido Basok discusses Jewish youth movements during this same period. Gutman explores the topic of Polish antisemitism from the beginning of the 20th century until the Holocaust, and David Engel writes about Jewish political parties in the interwar period. Finally, the last section of the book, dedicated to historiography, contains essays by Arthur Eisenbach on Jewish interwar historiography, Moshe Rosman on Jewish historiography in Poland in the years 1945 to 1995, and Gutman on the historiography of the Holocaust. As noted, the editors of this volume made a welcome decision to include several primary texts—dating from the early modern age up to the 20th century—alongside the various essays. All of these documents are supplemented by a short introduction explaining their historical background and value. Adam Teller brings an excerpt from the well-known 17th-century chronicler Nathan Neta Hannover, who wrote about the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews during the Chmelnicki uprising. In this instance, however, the text focuses not on the bloodshed but rather on the structure of Jewish political leadership before the uprising. Teller also provides a selection from the famous memoirs of Shlomo Maimon that describes, through Jewish eyes, the lavish lifestyle of a Polish magnate. Bartal has chosen an entertaining and illuminating passage from the memoirs of Isaac Leib Peretz that describes Peretz’s native town of Zamosć´ after the failure of the Polish uprising of 1863. A glimpse into the life and activities of a Jewish shtadlan is provided by the reproduction of a document (originally published by Israel Halperin in 1945 and brought here by Bartal) granting official recognition to the appointment of R. Nisan ben Yehudah in 1730. In an excerpt included from the memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik by David Asaf, two historical events are set side by side: the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 and the Polish uprising two years later. Gutman introduces excerpts from an essay written by Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a distinguished Jewish leader in interwar Poland. He also presents the last letter written by Emmanuel Ringelblum, together with Abraham Adolf Berman, on March 1, 1944, in which the two describe the desperate situation in the Warsaw ghetto (where 95 percent of the Jewish population has already perished) to their colleagues in YIVO in New York. Judith Kalik The Hebrew University

Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiii ⫹ 219 pp. Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, Beth Wenger (eds.), Remembering the Lower East Side: American Reflections. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000. vii ⫹ 291 pp.

Hasia Diner understands well the difference between history, a secular critical discipline rooted in reasoned, open-ended interpretation and reconstruction of the


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past, and memory, which is often treated as a set of sacred stories, often absolute in meaning, and possessed as the identity of a nation, community, or group. And in writing Lower East Side Memories and co-editing Remembering the Lower East Side, she has stood courageously at the confluence of the two streams of American Jewish history and memory. Diner has done a valuable service in delineating some of the important myths that define American Jewish society. In Lower East Side Memories, she shows how the Lower East Side was transformed from just another profane urban space, albeit one where a heterogeneous community of hundreds of thousands of Jews lived temporarily for several decades, into a collective memory for Jews in the United States, regardless of where their forebears lived or where they themselves now live at the beginning of the 21st century. There are perfectly objective reasons for the continued centrality of the Lower East Side in the historical narrative of American Jewry. Of the 23 million immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920, 17 million came through the port of New York. Although most newcomers dispersed to other places, great numbers collected in immigrant enclaves on the island of Manhattan. No group outdid the Jews in this regard. Practically all East European immigrants arriving in the city after 1870 initially found their way to the Lower East Side, and the vast majority stayed within its nucleus—a 20-square-block area south of Houston Street and east of the Bowery. By 1892, three quarters of the city’s Jews lived on the Lower East Side. The percentage declined—50 percent in 1903, and 23 percent by 1916. But the absolute number of Jews, augmented by newcomers crowding into the district, continued to climb until it reached its peak of 542,000 in 1910. The Lower East Side literally bristled with Jews. Jacob Riis, the acerbic and energetic journalist interested in “how the other half lives,” observed in the 1890s that “nowhere in the world are so many people crowded together in a square mile” as in the Jewish quarter. The tenth ward averaged 730 people per acre by the turn of the 20th century, and some blocks of the Lower East Side in 1895 approached the astounding rate of one thousand per acre. Only Bombay and Calcutta had higher densities. In addition to housing large numbers of Jews over long periods of time, the Lower East Side from 1880 to 1920 produced a culture of yidishkeyt arguably more intense and pervasive than existed anywhere in the world up until that time. Not only did denizens of the neighborhood build a vast network of religious, cultural, political, and social institutions for their own use, but many of those institutions— the press, the publicity houses, the theater—“produced cultural texts that went forth from their neighborhood to the rest of American Jewry and to the larger world beyond” (p. 14). Because the Lower East Side was located in New York, America’s largest city and the center of the nation’s cultural productivity, investigative journalism, progressive reform, and documentary photography, Lower East Side Jewry was among the most observed and written about Jewish communities in history. It is easy to understand, then, why these East Europeans and their urban space were seized upon by later generations of social scientists, writers, and filmmakers seeking to understand and represent the American Jewish experience.

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But the Lower East Side was not the only important determinant of American Jewish identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Already in the 1890s, immigrants were recreating a Jewish communal existence in Harlem, the East Bronx, and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Boro Park, and Brownsville. In these communities, as well as in the Jewish neighborhoods of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Rochester, Cleveland, and Detroit, Jewish immigrants were involved in a process of blending secular Jewishness, religion, and New World ways in an interval of equilibrium. Yet it is the “story” of the Lower East Side that has almost universally been equated with the story of Jewish life in America. Indeed, according to Diner, it has become fixed in American Jewish memory as exclusive and “unified.” Moreover, as she ably argues, the story has all the markings of myth: a people religiously persecuted and oppressed in Eastern Europe, carrying only meager material possessions, fled, in steerage, to America, the “land of the free.” What they found, however, were congested streets, poor housing, and cramped, dangerous work spaces. They often experienced poverty, disease, and family instability, and they even clashed among themselves. But ultimately, in the intimacy of an all-Jewish world, they had had an authentic (the authentic!), vibrant, meaningful Jewish experience, before they rose out of the neighborhood into the triumph of becoming educated, middle-class “Jewish Americans.” However, as Hasia Diner in Lower East Side Memories and many of the writers who have contributed to Remembering the Lower East Side have shown, the mythic dimensions of the story do not quite fit the history. Diner puts it concisely: Other Jews, not from eastern Europe, lived on these streets well before the 1880s, the date when the story takes off in memory. The immigrants from eastern Europe came with a mix of motives, and economic ones played as much a role in their decision to emigrate as did political-religious ones. Many non-Jews also lived on what we now consider the Lower East Side, and there is little compelling evidence that the Jews who lived on what we now consider the Lower East Side ever thought of themselves as living in a single, bounded neighborhood (p. 8).

Indeed for the first half of the 20th century the Lower East Side held no special significance for American Jews and may even have been an embarrassing reminder of their unacculturated past. But after the Second World War, and especially after the 1960s, the status of the Lower East Side was raised in American Jewish consciousness and memory. As they confronted the Holocaust and a sense that their “Jewishness” was eroding, and as ethnic identity became de rigeuer in the age of “black is beautiful” and “the rise of the unmeltable ethnics,” American Jews reconstructed a venerated Lower East Side as sacred space. To substantiate her persuasive thesis, Diner, in addition to the scholarly literature, uses traditional texts by such writers as Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska as well as a wide variety of products from popular culture, including a 1950s children’s book, animated cartoons by Steven Spielberg, three film versions of The Jazz Singer, and an episode of the popular television cartoon series The Simpsons. In general, Diner uses these sources acutely and imaginatively, though I was taken somewhat aback by her virtual conflation of Irving Howe’s magisterial World of


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Our Fathers and Sydney Taylor’s fictional series for adolescents, All-of-a-Kind Family. The only other complaint I would make about Lower East Side Memories is that Diner continues to use the terms “singular” and “unified,” rather than “dominant,” when referring to current memory of the neighborhood. Several essays in Remembering the Lower East Side, which Diner co-edited with Jeffrey Shandler and Beth Wenger, strongly suggest that “memory” of the Lower East Side was different at different times. It could be argued, for example, that in the 1960s, the old neighborhood was remembered as the source of social justice activism; in the 1970s, as the home of authentic Jewishness, if not Judaism; and in the 1980s, as the proving ground of the time- and culture-bound proposition that the poor could make it out of the ghettoes without government assistance. Even now, as other essays in the collection demonstrate, there is a complex give and take among competing memories (different generations, different ethnic groups, and different ideological constituencies), which add up to an intriguing study in cultural politics. David Kaufman, for example, in “Constructions of Memory: The Synagogues of the Lower East Side” asks (but, with creative purpose, fails to answer) whether synagogues were peripheral or central to the life of the neighborhood. Paula Hyman in “Beyond Place and Ethnicity: The Uses of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire” traces the decline of the Triangle fire as an episode in Jewish life on the Lower East Side, and documents its rise as a case study in class and gender history. Jack Kugelmass’ “Turfing the Slum: New York’s Tenement Museum and the Politics of Heritage” expertly analyzes the social and ethnic tensions inherent in the creation and maintenance of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. And Suzanne Wasserman’s “Recreating the Recreations on the Lower East Side: Restaurants, Cabarets, Cafes and Coffeehouses in the 1930s” makes an important point about pilgrimages back to the Lower East Side that began as early as the late 1920s, which continues to apply to 21st-century venturings and walking tours: These pilgrimages encompassed myriad meanings: They could be a means to mark the passage of time, a way to fulfill real yearnings for a past perhaps remembered as more meaningful than the present, a means to deal with the ambivalence of assimilation, an avenue to locate oneself in a confusing and rapidly changing world, and/or a tool to justify and parade a rags-to-riches mentality (p. 156).

There are nine other essays: all are valuable and several are outstanding, including Riv-Ellen Prell’s “The Ghetto Girl and the Erasure of Memory,” Deborah Dash Moore and David Lobenstine’s “Photographing the Lower East Side,” and Joseph Dorman’s “The Lower East Side in the Memory of New York Jewish Intellectuals: A Filmmaker’s Experience.” Rich as the anthology is, I missed having an essay on landsmanshaftn, at least one on socialism, and another on the non-Jewish inhabitants of the neighborhood. Also, although the essays move beyond a fairly well-documented, though scattered, history of the Lower East Side to explore different “representations” over time, I could not help finishing these pieces with the feeling that what we need now is a history of the Lower East Side. I am not naive enough to think that we will get one that is not influenced, at least to some extent, by the “politics of memory.” But

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it will be worth burning the many candles necessary to compile and synthesize multiple perspectives on the Lower East Side in order to approach the “objectivity” that is inherent in the sum of them all. Gerald Sorin State University of New York at New Paltz

Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xii ⫹ 347 pp.

Todd Endelman, of the University of Michigan, is best known for his writings on the Jews of Georgian England—that is, England of the so-called “long” 18th century that ran from the Hanoverian accession until (in the opinion of some) the end of the Napoleonic Wars or (in the opinion of others) the Great Reform Act of 1832. Whichever view you take, it was during the “long” 18th century that the Jews became a settled and accepted (albeit reluctantly, in some circles) feature of the British social, economic, and political landscapes. Among many other things Endelman has taught us, these British Jews—preeminently the Sephardim, who were the prime beneficiaries of the Cromwellian “resettlement”—lost no time in assimilating into their host community. There were about 2,000 identifying Sephardim in England at the beginning of the 18th century, and about 2,000 at the end: their natural increase in population had simply been matched by out-marriage. This is a reflection not only of the weakness of their own religious and ethnic identity but also of the remarkable extent to which 18thcentury British society was free from violent anti-Jewish prejudice. Between the “Jew Bill” riots of 1753 and the South Wales “pogrom” of 1911, the only instances of serious anti-Jewish violence in Britain were some outbreaks during the Napoleonic Wars, and these were as much the result of popular xenophobia as of antiJewish feelings, if not more so. This does not mean that anti-Jewish prejudice did not exist. Far from it. It simply showed itself in other ways. The elegant speech on Jewish political emancipation made in the House of Commons by the great Whig statesman T. B. Macaulay—a speech so famous that Anglo-Jewish activists reprinted it as a free pamphlet—was riddled with such prejudice. Macaulay’s argument was simple: the Jews already had economic power, and because of this it would be downright dangerous to deny them admission to Parliament. Indeed it is probably the case that there were more non-Jews than Jews active in the campaign for British Jewish political rights. Most British Jews, as the social investigator Henry Mayhew recorded, were not the slightest bit interested in political equality. As Macaulay implied, they already had economic equality, which was much more profitable and much more reassuring. In short, the admission of the Jews into British civic society was—well—very “British.” Social and economic equality preceded political emancipation, which was, so to speak, the icing on the cake. If, in British terms, the campaign for


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Jewish political rights made the headlines at all, it was in the context of the much bigger campaign to disengage the British political state from organized religion—to be precise, the Established Church of England. First the Nonconformists were emancipated. Then the Roman Catholics. Then the Jews. Then the Unitarians. Then the atheists. The Jews, in short, were but a small part of a much larger picture. In retelling this story, Endelman says little that he has not said before, or that has not been said by others. His references attest to his wide grasp of secondary sources, as befits a textbook of substance. If I were to point to a single outstanding strength in his book, it would certainly be his description and explanation of the social dynamics of the Jewish communities in Britain—for instance, his portrayal of Anglo-Jewish boxers and prize-fighters, both male and female. Participation in sport is one well-tried method by which immigrants legitimize themselves. It is likely that Jewish involvement in sports of all kinds did more to gain acceptance of Jews, especially the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who flooded into the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, than did any amount of parliamentary legislation. By the 1930s, the refugees from Eastern Europe were themselves well on the way to assimilation—they were, in truth, more interested in boxing than in benching. Newcomers were unwelcome. The darkest period in modern Anglo-Jewish history was its reaction to Nazism and the Holocaust. More Central European Jews could have been saved, had the smug and frightened leaders of British Jewry not been quite so frightened or so smug—“The Order of Trembling Israelites,” as the late Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier dubbed them. With respect, Endelman seems to me not to have painted the picture as bleakly as the archival material suggests. That said, Endelman has presented us with a highly readable and judicious account, full of insight and pointers to further investigation. Geoffrey Alderman American InterContinental University, London

Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. 275 pp.

In this thoughtful and provocative book, Eli Lederhendler places himself in that line of historians whose topic is “the Jews of New York City” after the 1870s, which is to say, after the great East European immigration that altered—or, as Lederhendler suggests, did not alter—the very nature of that metropolis. His book provides the latest installment in the chronology formed by Moses Rischin’s The Promised City (1962), which ends with the First World War; Deborah Dash Moore’s At Home in America (1981), covering the interwar era; and Beth Wenger’s New York Jews and the Great Depression (1996).

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The conjunction in the book’s title is a bit misleading, as there is no analysis of a general postwar “decline of urban ethnicity” in the United States. Yet whatever title might be truer to the book’s subject, it would certainly include the word decline. Lederhendler explicitly poses his account against Moore’s earlier interpretation of New York Jewry, which emphasized the formation of a viable middleclass American Jewish identity “rooted in the fertile structures of New York life.”1 In so doing, he raises a host of important questions about the nature of Jewish identity in urban America and about the celebrated New York–Jewish synthesis. Unlike Rischin, Moore, and Wenger, who focused on chronological periods that predated their own lives, Lederhendler tells the story of the period in which he grew up and includes his own reminiscences as textual material. This injection of authorial self into the field of study is not necessarily bad—I enjoyed his reminiscences—but in a work of history it must be noted as somewhat unusual. Memories of growing up in postwar New York motivated Lederhendler to challenge the regnant idea that Jewish identity was somehow integrally linked to the culture of the city. For him, “Jewish culture” was something to be found “outside my immediate surroundings”—that is, apart from neighborhood and local community, and ultimately in Israel. In contrasting his study with Moore’s, Lederhendler begins by noting the “generational gap” between them. He speculates that Moore’s emphasis on neighborhood as a source of ethnic identity reflected her growing up with the social history of the 1960s and 1970s, whereas he considers himself influenced by more recent movements in cultural studies and American studies. This is an unfortunate way to start, not only because Moore’s cohort includes leading figures of today’s American studies but, more importantly, because Lederhendler’s book bears little resemblance to the kind of work being done in either cultural studies or American studies, and it also does not strongly engage with pertinent scholarship in American cultural and intellectual history. Though somewhat precariously rooted in the historiography of American culture, Lederhendler is at home in Jewish studies. He embellishes his scholarship with welcome references to Hebrew and Yiddish literary texts, and he understands the kinds of questions a scholar must ask in order to arrive at any reasonably satisfactory notion of American Jewish identity. That perspicacity gives his book the feeling of a rigorous historical sociology, and his perspective on the “inner contradictions, previously unnoticed in the very fabric of Jewish urbanism” (p. 34) is reminiscent of the work of the sociologist Charles Liebman. As Liebman once questioned the model of the halakhically strict immigrant undone by America, Lederhendler challenges the model of American Jewish identity as essentially urban and cosmopolitan. After 1950, he argues, an ephemeral Jewish connection to urban neighborhoods and to an almost utopian idealism about The City disappeared, as Jews abandoned New York for the suburbs and adopted “a new, more pessimistic Jewish response to city life” (p. 12). Lederhendler’s Jews lose themselves in a nostalgic “culture of retrieval” defined by feelings of “loss, relapsed hopes, and uncertainty” (p. 91). A new inwardness also characterized postwar religious thinkers, who did away with the secular optimism of an earlier gen-


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eration of intellectuals, those who believed that the essence of Judaism was universalism. The postwar Jewish intellectuals cultivated a “post-integrationist argument” based on “the most particularistic parts of the Jewish heritage” (p. 121). By the late 1960s, the years that form the chronological hinge of Lederhendler’s argument, the conspicuous racial, ethnic, and class polarization of New York defined Jewish life, which was suddenly marked by a split between a “public regarding” elite and members of the “self regarding” middle classes who increasingly resembled their white ethnic neighbors (pp. 160–162). Jewish neighborhoods, once a source of Jewish civic idealism, now symbolized “a retreat behind boundaries” (p. 166). The crisis of New York public schools in the 1960s, notorious for its racial definition and anti-Jewish excesses, highlighted the new ethnically fragmented, decentralized way of doing business in the city. In one of the book’s many insights, Lederhendler notes an irony of that crisis: “in the defense of the civic culture they treasured, Jews were goaded into bringing their own ethnocentrism out into the open” (p. 181). The new “protective, self-conscious politics of confrontation” interfaced with two events in world affairs, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the cause ce´le`bre of Soviet Jewry (p. 182). In contrast to the interwar ethnicity of New York Jews, that of the 1960s was “ideologically driven” and marked by “generationally segregated subgroups” (p. 192). Hopefully, this synopsis will suggest the importance of Lederhendler’s book for understanding the dynamics of Jewish life in postwar New York. There are some conspicuous flaws in the book’s argumentation. To demolish the idea of a Jewish–New York cultural symbiosis requires a more systematic analysis than we are given. Lederhendler denies that Jews contributed anything essential to the culture of New York City and approvingly cites Nathan Glazer’s remark that New York would have been basically the same with or without its Jews (p. 50). Yet as consumers and producers of culture, New York Jews (like the Jews of Vienna before they were eradicated) were so central that a counterhypothesis requires persuasive evidence and sustained argument. Here, though, we learn relatively little about what Jews were doing in the city’s cultural life. Without that knowledge, we cannot gauge the degree to which the city and its Jews depended on each other for a cultural identity. A similar tunnel vision troubles the argument about the pessimism of postwar Jewish thinkers, given that an entire cadre of Kaplanian-Deweyan optimists followed in the path of Milton Steinberg and Joshua Liebman. In fact, Liebman’s Peace of Mind, the most popular rabbinic treatise of the postwar era, espoused the same message that Lederhendler affixes to post-Holocaust pessimism: that redemption would henceforth depend on the return to specific ideas of Judaism (p. 142). Of the book’s historiographical oversights, the most notable is the absence of any reference to David Hollinger’s work on the culture of secular Jewish intellectuals, bearing as it does on the same cosmopolitan ideal that concerns Lederhendler. Similarly, in contextualizing Jewish opposition to religion in the schools (pp. 112– 114), Lederhendler does not mention the outspoken anti-Catholicism of liberal Jewish and Protestant intellectuals, to which both Hollinger and John McGreevy have turned our attention. The descriptions of urban identity on p. 132 mirror Gunther

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Barth’s argument in City People (1980) about the formation of a unique American urban identity, making it all the more surprising that there is no passing reference to that pioneering study. The discussion of the social psychology of victimhood (p. 134) would have been deepened by an awareness of the specifically Jewish elements of Kurt Lewin’s theorization of minority consciousness, which became so important to postwar thought. Finally, there is something strange about the concluding sentence of the book’s narrative. In the “culture of fragmentation and confrontation” of the 1960s, Lederhendler observes: “New York Jews’ relations with one another were primed by the larger forces that defined their society” (p. 200). In which era of American history was that not the case? What ought to be an initial assumption suddenly appears as a conclusion, leaving us with the erroneous implication that, before the period under review, Jewish relationships had been defined primarily by internal forces. These criticisms notwithstanding, Lederhendler’s probing scholarship forces us to think more productively about the underlying sources of Jewish identity in America. Andrew R. Heinze University of San Francisco

Note 1. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: 1981), 241.

Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, vol. 45). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 424 pp.

The first image that comes to mind when confronted with the phrase “the Jewish encounter with Russia” is most likely that of Cossacks and pogroms. This, of course, is not by chance: the Russian empire retained some of the most restrictive anti-Jewish laws in Europe to its very end, and Jews living in the empire did suffer police repression and pogroms. And yet this image, like so many others that have been reified in historical and popular mentalities, is incomplete and misleading. Decades ago, Hans Rogger argued against the prevalent and hitherto unchallenged idea that the tsarist government had actively fomented and planned pogroms, showing that no solid evidence existed for such conspiratorial accusations. Since then historians such as Jonathan Frankel, John Klier, I. Michael Aronson, and Erich Haberer—to name only a few—have considerably enriched our knowledge on the


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nuances of Jewish life in Russia and the Jewish-Russian encounter. Benjamin Nathans’ long-awaited book, Beyond the Pale, represents a major contribution to this historiography. It will instantly become required reading for all students and practitioners of Russian, Jewish, and East European history. Nathans begins his book by situating his own research in the context of preexisting historiography and of the way that Russia is popularly perceived by Jews. As he notes, Jews in prerevolutionary Russia are almost inevitably viewed as downtrodden, repressed, and alienated from Russian culture and society. Compared with the relatively much smaller Jewish communities in Western and Central Europe, such a depiction has its merits. And yet it is only part of the picture. While official Russia feared and restricted Jews, Moscow State University had a Jew among its graduates as early as the 1840s. The terrible penury of Belarusian and Lithuanian shtetlekh was very real; but so too was the distinguished Russian-speaking Jewish intelligentsia that was developing in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. Traditional historiography has generally chosen to emphasize the break of 1917 that helped bring Russian (and Soviet) culture to the Jews. Nathans joins a large and growing historiographical cohort pointing out that for all the changes after 1917, much of what came after was prefigured by developments before. To be sure, just over 1 percent of the empire’s Jews declared Russian to be their native tongue in 1897. Yet this numerically tiny group—augmented by many more Jews speaking Russian as a second or third language—wielded a disproportionately great economic, political, and social influence. It is their story Nathans has chosen to tell. The book is divided into four parts. The first considers the issue of emancipation in the Russian context, the position of “privileged” Jews in Russian society, and the official rationales advanced to justify the “selective integration” of useful Jews into the Russian mainstream. In just 60 pages, Nathans sweeps through some three generations of Russian-Jewish contacts, from the Polish partitions through the Kiselev commission of the 1840s, through arguments for and against lightening Jewish disabilities during the reform era of the 1860s. This section is a tour de force of historical research and writing, vividly showing the interplay between Jewish notables, Russian officials, and broader society. Having thus set down the background—the way in which restrictions were selectively eased for certain groups of Jews (artisans, merchants, Jews with higher education)—the narrative proceeds to a place not frequently associated with Jews: the imperial capital, St. Petersburg. This section begins with an apt quotation from Sholem Aleichem: “Take a city like St. Petersburg, where a Jew is definitely not kosher.” Not kosher, of course, in at least two senses: in the obvious meaning of cutting corners on religious observance, trimming beards, and consuming treyf, but also “not kosher” from the uneasy point of view of official Russia–what were these non-Christians up to in the capital of Holy Orthodox Russia? Nathans points out that St. Petersburg developed into the largest Jewish community in the empire outside the Pale and Russian Poland: a highly variegated community containing both impoverished artisans (or wouldbe artisans), rich merchants, and a very significant professional class in between. These chapters are fascinating both as Jewish history and in their depiction of a St. Petersburg rarely portrayed in the historiography (aside from the valuable works

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of Mikhail Beizer). A short review can hardly do justice to the rich material presented here on communal life, language use, squabbles over communal leadership, and the building of the magnificent St. Petersburg synagogue that opened in 1893. The book’s second half portrays two critical spaces of Russian-Jewish encounter: the university and the law courts. In the Russian context, the university was a place of remarkably free intellectual exchange within a predominantly liberal, even radical, atmosphere. Thus it comes as no surprise that the university—whether in Riga, Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Odessa—became one of the birthplaces of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia. At the same time, the tolerant atmosphere of the universities presented the danger for young Jewish students of becoming totally alienated from their own birth communities. Many Jewish students and graduates, for example, petitioned to change their Jewish names to Russian equivalents. Moreover, professors (and more rarely fellow students) not infrequently aired anti-Jewish views, and—more significantly—the government itself took fright at the idea of Jews “flooding the universities” and issued restrictive quotas on Jewish enrollments in the 1880s. Nathans devotes an entire chapter to these quotas, to their effects on admissions (typically for the Russian empire, the quotas were seldom strictly enforced), and to the broader context of growing anti-Jewish agitation within (as well as outside) the university. The legal profession was another place where Jews made their mark in postreform Russia. The new and quite progressive legal system offered significant opportunity for Jews both as attorneys and as subjects of the tsar. Many liberals— and liberal Jews—saw the development of a Rechtsstaat and the rule of law in Russia as inevitably leading to the atrophy of ethnic and religious restrictions. As in other fields, the optimistic expectations of the 1860s and 1870s were not borne out by ensuing decades. Still, Jews played a very significant role in the Russian legal profession even after their access to positions as full-fledged attorneys was curtailed. Nathans focuses in particular on the well-known lawyer Genrikh Sliozberg, perhaps the quintessential “Russian Jew” (with equal emphasis on both the adjective and noun). In a system where the law itself discriminated against Jews, the story of Russian Jewish legal professionals is a remarkable and contradictory one. Despite all restrictions, Jewish lawyers did enjoy certain successes, as Nathans demonstrates in his discussion of the Beilis and other less well-known trials. Lawyers, students, city dwellers, “privileged” individuals exempted from Russia’s anti-Jewish restrictions—these exceptional individuals have pride of place in this study. Why should this statistically small and sociologically atypical group merit such attention? The reasons are various: first, because of their exceptional cultural, economic, and political importance; second, because of the interesting similarities between this group and the Jews enjoying full legal rights in Central and Western Europe; and third, because their group portrayal serves to illuminate the variety of experience and cultural identities that existed within the larger Russian Jewish community. This is a very important book, based on broad and profound research in the archives, and reflecting a deep knowledge and appreciation of Russian and Jewish historiography. Well written, with sophisticated arguments and aptly chosen anecdotes, it is a pleasure to read. For anyone interested in Jewish or Russian history,


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in cultural encounters and assimilation, or in interethnic relations in 19th-century Europe, this book is required reading. Theodore R. Weeks Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. 319 pp. Evelyn Salz (ed.), Selected Letters of Mary Antin. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. xxv ⫹ 160 pp.

Some 20 years ago, Paula Hyman wrote that “the history of women within the immigrant Jewish community . . . makes clear the need for revising some of our received notions of the immigrant experience, with respect to patterns of social mobility, communal self-definition, and the adaptation of traditional values within the American environment.”1 By framing the issue of gender within the dynamics of identity and assimilation, she laid the theoretical groundwork for much of the work that has been done in the field in the intervening years. The two books under review here exemplify the ongoing quest to track these intertwined themes. The correspondence of Mary Antin (1881–1949)—once an icon of buoyant American immigrant energy and optimism—that has been selected and presented by Evelyn Salz, and Riv-Ellen Prell’s powerful and original study, Fighting to Become Americans, which analyzes intragroup negative Jewish stereotypes of the “other” gender, return us again and again to issues of group identity and assimilation. Hyman’s programmatic formulation that women’s experience “does more than supplement the history of immigrant men” has proven prescient, though perhaps in a way that she did not then fully anticipate. Gender studies complicate, perhaps even confound, what studies of ethnicity have tended to argue lately. Over the years since Hyman’s essay appeared, the study of American ethnicity and the study of gendered social experience have taken divergent paths: while scholars have increasingly turned away from defining ethnicity as something primordial, preferring instead to view it as elected or “invented” group affinities developing out of subjective choice and self-construction, gender studies generally reintroduce into the identity equation a deterministic factor—womanhood—which constitutes a fact of life working to circumscribe the individual’s freedom of choice. Individuality is thus twice subordinated: first to femaleness and second to the male-female power hierarchy in the social structure. When this determinism is yoked with Jewishness, the effect is both to reduce considerably the effectiveness of any claim that Jewishness, as a gendered identity, is subjective or self-constructed, and to locate it within a hierarchy that is not only male-female but also Gentile-Jewish. The distinction of gender is not, of course, an entirely fixed variable; rather, it is conceived as a culturally conditioned matrix of assigned roles, functions, and representations that can and do shift over time, and that change with altered so-

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ciohistorical circumstances (migration to a new cultural context being one such circumstance). Yet, for almost all people, gendered identity is not a matter of choice but of birth. It is a destiny—one that may be fulfilled in a variety of ways—in which the datum of birth represents an irreducible point of orientation. You do not choose it; it chooses you, so to speak. In an earlier era, ethnicity was also defined in this way, as in Horace Kallen’s famous dictum: “You cannot choose your grandparents.” Birth within a particular family was the irreducible core of the group-based web of relationships, symbols, and values that created ethnicity. The patterns of socialization and culture (including religious community) that flowed from the identity of one’s grandparents were never understood as entirely deterministic in function, certainly within the American context; rather, these patterns of life could be and indeed were plural and dynamic. They could be fulfilled or remain an unfulfilled destiny and, to that degree, perhaps, chosen. The choice, however, was circumscribed by the covenant of flesh: one might choose to assign more or less salience to the fact of one’s ethnic birthright, but it would not be within the power of the individual to exchange one birth for another: a Jew might choose to be an anglophile, but could not choose to be of Anglo-Saxon descent. As the overall understanding of ethnicity has become ever less grounded in Kallen’s type of genealogical determinism—a reflection of white ethnics’ intermingling to such an extent that today one can in fact “choose” which of one’s grandparents to regard as the source of one’s ethnic heritage, if indeed any—gender studies relating to Jewish ethnicity have taken up some of the slack. That is to say, if the construction of the label “Jew” is understood as other ethnic markers appear to be, increasingly portrayed as a subjective choice (a proposition unthinkable in Kallen’s time, when Jewishness was distinctive and irreducible in and of itself), then another kind of Jewish identity—within “Jew,” yet distinctive—might represent a marker that, though plastic, is nonetheless binding: a substitute covenant of the flesh. “The Jewish woman” adds to “the Jew” just such an irreducible component, something that is not “chosen,” after all. It requires us to see the Jew (as woman) within a specific social matrix, and thus recovers for the Jew a self that is distinctive by definition. It pairs up Jewish identity with the experience of women, showing how the two are intertwined, and thus makes of a woman’s Jewishness something inseparable from her gender: a cultural construct that is chosen for one, regardless of what one might later make of it. That this line of thought may underlie at least some gender studies in the modern Jewish field is borne out by numerous passages in Riv-Ellen Prell’s uncannily smart cultural history of negative Jewish gendered (primarily female) stereotypes. These deeply embedded and eerily consistent stereotypes of Jewish women (and sometimes men) bespeak the anxiety produced in Jewish immigrants and subsequent generations by an uncertain encounter with American society. In their negative portrayals of Jewish women’s exercise of a new-found freedom of choice, especially in terms of their allegedly excessive desires (sexual and material)—seen as gross and threatening distortions of American habits and values—Jewish men betrayed their insecurity over their own Americanization. As they perceived Americans viewing them as different, despite their desire to conform to a new social code,


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Jewish men faulted the “damaging” behavior of Jewish women. Similarly, Jewish immigrant women entertained notions of their male counterparts that compared them invidiously with American notions of productivity, ambition, drive, and civility. By displacing the “bad” attributes of Jewishness onto someone else, Prell argues, they also preserved “good” traits for a safer Jewish self-image. Lying athwart the junction between Jews’ self-perception and non-Jews’ marginalization of them, gendered stereotypes allowed men and women, respectively, to negotiate between Jewish and American identities. “Fighting” each other “to become Americans,” Prell maintains further, Jewish men and women were caught in a web of conflicting social attitudes and messages not entirely of their own making. Individual choice and inclination, she argues, have been shaped—sometimes distorted—by the fraught interaction of an immigrant minority with a “reluctantly pluralistic” American society. Prell uses the distorted mirror of hostile intragroup stereotypes to illuminate the difficult and—most importantly—incomplete processes of Jewish assimilation in America. Prell opens with a chapter on the “ghetto girl,” an immigrant-era prototype of essentially predatory images of materialistic vulgarity and unbridled sensuality, popularized in the English-language pages of the ethnic Yiddish press as well as in Progressive and aspiring middle-class discourse. Her analysis of how immigrantera Jewish marriages were often depicted as transactions enacted within the search for a newly defined American social status will be familiar to readers of this annual.2 Paraphrasing the critical spin placed by male writers on the social mobilitylinked marriage market, Prell finds that young women were seen as “quite simply [seeking] membership in the American middle class, assuredly not the one from which they came,” linking their wish for “five rooms and a bath” with “loving sweethearts and husbands whose successful accomplishments made them compatible with their own efforts” (p. 89). It was through deploying a negative image of the Jewish woman as a consumer of material goods (and the counter-image of the Jewish man as a not always adequate producer) that the fraught negotiation with American society was continued into a new generation. Though her analysis of stereotyped images from the culture of the immigrant and second generations is apt, she hits her stride and the most stimulating part of her scholarly performance once she begins to deal with the post-Second World War era. Here, the cumulative evidence of continued unease regarding gendered Jewish identity, as late as the 1990s, is deployed against the “danger of the illusion of sameness” (p. 5). Prells’s intention to contribute to the discourse of “re-Jewing” the American Jew, through the lens of gender, emerges here most clearly. “Jewish men and women and middle-class . . . non-Jews,” she writes, “became harder to differentiate in terms of where they lived, where they were educated, and what their occupations were.” But, the specter of assimilation was not only frightening for Jews who wanted their community to maintain its uniqueness, it was also illusory. . . . Men and women who wanted to retain their Jewishness in a culture committed to homogenization were acutely anxious about the dangers of being Jews. They no longer feared antisemitism . . . [but were] afraid of being seen as weak, undesirable, unsuccessful, or unattractive—in short, “too”

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Jewish. Jewish difference was a nightmare to those imagining a future and a family (pp. 207–208).

And finally: “They no longer have to fight to become Americans; they must fight to keep some distance from a culture that continues to use Jewishness to reflect on its own troubled relationship to diversity, consumption, and success” (p. 242). If Prell’s book sets out to undermine the illusion of sameness (recovering difference as a persistent Jewish trait), a historical case in point is provided in an entirely different mode by Evelyn Salz in her presentation of Mary Antin’s letters. Antin’s classic memoir, The Promised Land (1912), ended on a triumphant note of self-liberation. The past (meaning her family, religion, foreign birth, social class, and the limits of her gender) had no hold upon her; only the future—wide open and hers for the asking—was relevant, and it was in this free, untrammeled self that Antin identified herself with America. Antin’s project of self-construction would seem to make her a poster child for the postmodern, constructivist school of American ethnicity. It is no surprise, in light of her utopian vision of assimilation, to learn that the noted writer Israel Zangwill (author of the 1908 play, The Melting Pot) served for many years as her mentor and sponsor. Zangwill, it turns out, was actually the second in a series, for Antin, the daughter of an unsuccessful Jewish small businessman, seems to have moved through life, from adolescence on, as the prote´geé of powerful, older male figures. Salz, who has painstakingly tracked down Antin’s letters and ably supplies their context in concise introductions, makes a particular effort to preserve Antin as a Jew. She points to Antin’s pro-Zionism and to her expressions of ethnic feeling in correspondence dating from her married years (although she married a non-Jew, she specifically denied ever having converted to Christianity), as well as to echoes of Jewish attachments in her later years, despite an enduring involvement with anthroposophic and other cult-like healing and faith communes. Salz includes, as well, a letter to Antin written by Zangwill in the spring of 1914 upon the publication of her pro-immigration tract, They Who Knock at Our Gates, in which Zangwill cites his and Antin’s common ethnicity as a shared ground of idealism, in an “insider” tone that Zangwill clearly felt was appropriate for Antin: “I wonder if we Jews will succeed in educating the Americans in Americanism” (p. 152). The significance of these expressions, for Salz, lies in anchoring Antin’s Jewishness as an identity that, if not wholeheartedly embraced, was at least freely claimed and, in Kallen’s sense, indelible. (Kallen, incidentally, was one of Antin’s correspondents during 1916–1918, and she agreed in a general way with his notions of democratic pluralism in American life [pp. 81–82].) Thus, Salz quotes Antin in 1941: “I can no more return to the Jewish fold than I can return to my mother’s womb; neither can I in decency continue to enjoy my accidental personal immunity from the penalties of being a Jew in a time of virulent anti-Semitism. The least I can do, in my need to share the suffering of my people, is to declare that I am as one of them” (p. xxiii).


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Mary Antin’s Jewishness—with the inevitable vulnerability that it implied—is in fact more crucial to understanding her fate than Salz (though keenly interested in the matter) is able to convey in her brief chapter introductions. The letters dating from after the First World War describe Antin’s fall from grace, and mental health, when she could no longer exercise the absolute freedom of choice that she had treasured as her quintessentially American right. Her decline from budding celebrity status as an up-and-coming writer and public speaker to an emotionally damaged recluse was precipitated by the traumatic breakup of her marriage. Her husband, Amadeus Grabau, a German-American Lutheran professor of paleontology at Columbia University, stuck fast to his own ethnic loyalty during the First World War (which proved fatal for his professional standing and career in the United States; friends eventually found him a position in China, which saved him from starvation). His fealty to the Vaterland clashed directly with Antin’s fervent Americanism. That would have been disastrous enough for almost any marriage, and how much more so for a marriage that, to Antin, had symbolized the fulfillment of America’s promise to her. This is what she wrote in 1920: What is Amadeus to me? . . . He to me is the man who brought glory into my life and chaos. He is the one who cherished me like father and mother and lover and dearest friend in one. He is the one who wounded me and trampled upon me. . . . He typified to me at one time my country’s basic law; at another time, the canker growing on her vitals (p. 97).

But it was not just her high-status marriage that was at stake. Her self-constructed persona as a new, free, human being was apparently undone by this turn of events, and this is what devastated her spiritually and emotionally. Mary Antin’s choice to be an “American” with only the future to answer to, not a poor, foreign female from the backwater districts of Boston; a broadminded and progressive citizen, not trapped by parochial ethnic or religious bonds; and a writer active in the public sphere, not shackled to domesticity and family, came unraveled, at least in part, because such a range of choice, given her situation in life and the times in which she lived, had been a seductive illusion. In the real world, tribal ties still counted, and the estranged Jewish wife of a German Lutheran patriot, even with all her passion for a New World salvation, might not be equipped to become (as she put it), “less than nothing” (p. 97). Mary Antin’s own private melting pot cracked. She never really entered the Promised Land, after all. Riv-Ellen Prell’s book on gender stereotypes and the collected letters of Mary Antin bracket a cautionary tale about women and Jews in American life, whose status and identity are to be understood as a predicament, as yet unresolved. The focus on women thus reopens for discussion a historiographical discourse on the limits of assimilation. As women’s history, this narrative is guided by an aggrieved sense of having been sold a bill of goods. This posture bears a passing family resemblance to the Zionist historiographical tradition whose watchword was “the failure of emancipation.” In the American context, the ideological promulgation of this particularist agenda is perhaps best understood as a response to the way in which Jews have been viewed of late in the academic community: as part of the

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white, affluent, American majority, rather than as a minority group entitled to its badge of distinction. Eli Lederhendler The Hebrew University

Notes 1. Paula E. Hyman, “Culture and Gender: Women in the Immigrant Jewish Community,” in The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York: 1983), 165. 2. Riv-Ellen Prell, “Marriage, Americanization and American Jewish Culture, 1900– 1920,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 14, Coping with Life and Death: Jewish Families in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 1998), 27–48.

Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919–1945. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002. xxii ⫹ 202 pp.

Blending historical research with a voyage of personal discovery, this book endeavors to reconstruct the character of interethnic relations in a small east Galician/ west Ukrainian town before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust. Personal motivations initially impelled the author, a native of Brzezany who survived the German occupation as a young child (thanks to the combined, cooperative efforts of a Polish man and a Ukrainian woman on his behalf), to write about the world into which he had been born. In addition, as he explains in his introductory chapter, “I finally reached the conclusion that the only feasible way for me to return to my past was to integrate the bits and pieces of my personal memories into a [historical] study of my hometown” (p. 13). As a result, he turned to the archives—local town records stored in Ukrainian government depositories in Ternopil’ and Lviv, as well as trial documents from Yad Vashem and the Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Verfolgung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg. He also consulted the town newspapers and a considerable body of secondary research and literature, along with memoirs in Polish, Ukrainian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. In the end, though, the author appears to have been looking for something more than he could find in traditional historical sources alone: “I wanted to reconstruct Brzezany’s past with the memories of its former inhabitants; I also expected them to fill in the gaps in my own memory” (p. 13). Interviews with 50 current and former Brzezany residents—15 Poles, 20 Jews, and 15 Ukrainians—thus provided a major portion of the book’s source base. The upshot was what the author calls “a double experience” for him, “as fellow Brzezanyite and historian,” in which he employed the techniques of oral


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history “in a much more personal and intimate manner” than he had been used to doing (p. 13). That experience has generated a book in which the conventional boundaries between history and memory are constantly probed and transgressed. Nonetheless, as much as the dominant voice in the book is that of the erstwhile Brzezanyite, the hands that crafted the book’s representation of the town’s past seem more those of the scholar. The author presents parallel narratives of various episodes and periods in the recent history of Brzezany as seen by Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian witnesses, revealing considerable differences in the way members of each group experienced, interpreted, and recalled a shared past. But at the same time he takes members of all groups to task for their “particular,” “exclusive,” “inner-oriented” perspectives (p. 163). He reports employing his academic training to overcome what he saw as the possible distortions attending his personal quest. “A return to one’s roots is usually a mono-ethnic experience,” he declares, whereas “my intent was to present the multi-ethnic community of Brzezany, where Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians lived side by side” (p. 163). He thus made a conscious effort to visit Polish and Ukrainian as well as Jewish sites of mourning, wondering all the while, “Would I have done it if I were not a historian?” (p. 162). In the end, he suggests, it is the historian who is best able to promote intergroup understanding and reconciliation by insisting upon the existence of historical truths that transcend particular group memories. One of those truths, according to the author, is that during the interwar years, members of the three ethnic groups lived far less isolated existences than they would subsequently recall. The town gimnazjum, in particular, though termed by the author “a major landmark of ‘Polishness’ and Polish identity” (p. 48), represented a space in which Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians interacted with one another on a daily basis. Team sporting activities constituted another such arena. Nevertheless, whatever bonds tied the groups together were quickly and radically sundered once Soviet forces occupied the town in September 1939; the occupation affected each group differently, and “each group focused on its own particular suffering and victimization” (p. 92). The tensions that the Soviets fostered came home to roost following the German conquest in June 1941. Many Ukrainians viewed the Germans as liberators who would elevate them above the Polish majority, which had foiled their national aspirations before the war; they also saw German rule as an opportunity to take revenge upon local Jews, whom they charged with having served the Soviets. On July 4, 1941, a Ukrainian mob killed dozens of Jews, months before the first Nazi anti-Jewish Aktionen. At the same time, some prewar bonds must have held; otherwise the author would most likely never have lived to write his book. The question, then, is which bonds held, which gave way, and why. The author offers no observations on this matter—such an analytical problem is beyond the scope of his book. For understanding the Holocaust, though, the problem is crucial. Much recent research has shown that considerable loss of Jewish life in Eastern Europe under Nazi rule resulted from hostile actions by local conquered populations, whose violence emerged from within the fabric of the close prewar communal existence that the author describes. Yet although such actions were not rare, they were also not universal. Comparative local studies are needed to understand why

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the behavior of local populations varied. The present book shows one possible way for pursuing research to that end. David Engel New York University

Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiv ⫹ 252 pp.

Close to two decades after her much acclaimed book on the Viennese Jewish community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Marsha Rozenblit has published an eagerly awaited volume in which she expands the geographical field of research, shifting from the Austrian capital to the Austrian monarchy, and also pursuing a different approach. Instead of doing quantitative work in the area of demographic trends and acculturation processes, Rozenblit here draws heavily on autobiographical sources. The outcome of her assiduous work is a well-written volume that definitely enlarges the scope of knowledge about Austrian Jews. The book is successfully structured, making it easy for the reader to follow the author’s arguments. Although Rozenblit’s lengthy quotations from the autobiographical sources sometimes render the reading a little tedious—citing the works in a footnote would have done the job equally well—this hardly dwarfs her accomplishment. The strength of this book rests on three pillars. First, it not only shows but also explains the differences in identity between the Jews in Germany and those in Austria, who are still frequently lumped together as “German Jews.” Rozenblit points out specific circumstances in the respective countries that shaped in varying ways the identities of the local Jewish population. Second, she provides new insights into Jewish experiences during the First World War. Last, and probably most important, as it is the central theme of her book, the author introduces the notion of the “tripartite identity” developed by Austrian Jewry. The term tripartite identity denotes that Austrian Jews felt loyal to the state; that they acculturated to their respective social environments; and that they also behaved as a separate ethnic group. On the basis of this concept, Rozenblit sketches a picture of Austrian Jews that corrects the (false) notion of their unilateral development from religious tradition to assimilation. She indicates instead that the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish social environment was more complex and that the pursuit of acculturation was not automatically linked to an estrangement from Judaism, but could be kept in tune with a retention of Jewish traits. The assertion that Austrian Jews could be loyal citizens to the state and, simultaneously, emphasize their Jewishness does not go far beyond the thesis that Rozenblit presented in her book of 20 years ago, aside from the fact that she here applies it as well to Austrian Jews outside of Vienna. This is the point at which criticism may set in. Rozenblit’s thesis raises the question of the feasibility of


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ascribing a tripartite identity to all Austrian Jews. Is it really possible to perceive Austrian Jews as such a homogeneous entity? Where does the author take into account the highly acculturated Viennese Jews who articulated a German rather than a hybrid cultural identity? Could it be that the author focuses only on those Jews who corroborate her thesis, whereas others are left out? Austrian Jewry in this work is hypostatized not as a historical social entity but as a homogeneous group—a more easily employable construct that is nonetheless misleading. In fact, identity must be understood as a fluid phenomenon that is in constant interaction with outside influences. This conception stands in sharp contrast to Rozenblit’s usage of the term, according to which identity basically remains the same for decades. The author’s failure to take into account the dynamic aspects of identity formation might partly stem from her understanding of cultural adaptation, which is denoted here by the term acculturation. This understanding, however, largely ignores the interactive processes of cultural exchange between Jews and non-Jews. Instead, it gives a lease of life to the long-held myth that Jews unilaterally adapted to the culture of their social surroundings. In sharp contrast to this assumption, the fact is that Jews always influenced the society at large as well as acculturating to it; they contributed to its multifarious composition as well as letting it affect their own Jewishness. Jews took part in Austrian life to a much wider extent than Rozenblit makes the reader believe. Their degree of involvement in the Gentile society varied, to be sure, which influenced their own identities in differing ways. Against this background, the concept of a tripartite and purportedly unchanging identity grossly simplifies the impact of the close-knit relations between Jews and non-Jews on their identities. The restricted view of the Jewish experience in Austria is also reflected in Rozenblit’s use of autobiographical works. She seems to draw upon them in a very selective way, leaving out those sources that may contradict her thesis, for instance, those of Viennese Jewish writers and artists. Her restricted employment of the sources certainly allows her to maintain an image of the Jews that is in accordance with her thesis, but hardly reflects the reality of Jewish life as a historical entity. Resorting to autobiographical material can be very helpful in writing the history of a particular Jewry. The quotations not only enliven the narrative, adding flesh to the skeletal framework, but can also be employed as part of the corroborative underpinning of a theory. It must be taken into account, however, that autobiographies do not “tell reality.” They represent a source of memory, often written long after the time that they recount. Rozenblit does not seem to have sufficiently considered this point. Nonetheless, despite this problem, and her peculiar use of the concept of tripartite identity, she has written an important volume on Austrian Jews that cannot be ignored by anyone who deals with their history. Klaus Ho¨ dl Karl-Franzens-Universita¨t Graz

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Hilary L. Rubinstein, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J. Edelheit, and William D. Rubinstein, The Jews in the Modern World: A History since 1750. London: Arnold, 2002. xiv ⫹ 449 pp.

It is no simple task to undertake a history of the Jews in modern times even though, in the present case, four authors have shared the burden. The necessary scope of knowledge is nearly beyond acquisition when such a history must encompass Jews throughout the world over a period of 250 breathtaking years. But an author must start somewhere with what knowledge he or she has, and then enlarge it by consulting an inevitably limited number of primary sources and using secondary sources judiciously. While the knowledge needed for the book may be acquired through industrious digging, its definition and organization, and the selection of topics to be written about, demand breadth of view and clear statement, which are the product of mature reflection. I will state my conclusion at the outset, that Hilary Rubinstein and her fellow authors have generally succeeded in their digging, but have been much less successful in definition, organization, and the selection of topics. The authors do not say how they define modern times and why they came to 1750 as their starting point. They present instead a thumbnail sketch of medieval Jewry from which they glide into modern times; but that is not enough to distinguish the medieval from the modern. For example, the structure, functions, and leadership of the modern Jewish community are virtually unmentioned. It of course differs by far from its medieval forebear and has to be treated at least briefly, but this is not done. Jewish culture is likewise almost unattended. In a book full of names, one hasty paragraph “covers” Hebrew and Yiddish writers since Haskalah times. As in literature, key figures in modern Jewish scholarship are omitted or noted casually, while great rabbis who exerted long-term influence do not receive even a mention. What then fills the 440 pages of closely printed text? The details of political history and antisemitism seem to predominate. The large chapter on antisemitism, a subject that is also discussed in other chapters, contains little on its economic or psychological sources but gives extensive and little-needed detail about its prominent 19th-century French and German progenitors. On the evidence of the index, Hitler is mentioned more times and receives more space than any other person, which ought to raise some eyebrows. More than half the book is devoted to the Holocaust, Israel, and Anglo-American Jewry. This creates a significant imbalance in the authors’ treatment of their subject matter. The organizational problems of this history are exemplified by its attention to the Holocaust. It justly receives a separate chapter, half of which is devoted to the Nazi regime before the Second World War. However, after all the detailed references to the Holocaust in earlier chapters, the reader who reaches this chapter may wonder, “what, again?” Nor is the Holocaust chapter an incisive discussion, since much of its space is devoted to side issues and too little to the monstrous deeds themselves. One of the authors, William D. Rubinstein, wrote The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (1997), which


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focuses on the controversial issue of why the death camps and their access routes were not bombed. The present text sets forth his argument, but gives due attention to the well-known contrary position, that bombing the camps would have saved thousands of lives. Structural deficiencies are well illustrated by the first two chapters of the book. By page 44, the authors have summarized the history of Western Jewry from 1750 past the Second World War, only to have succeeding chapters repeat and supplement what has already been said. Thus, the good years of German Jewry receive attention in the first two chapters, only to return on pages 289 to 292, well after the authors have disposed of Nazism and the Holocaust. The third chapter, “Modern Developments in Judaism,” treats in uninspired fashion various religious movements, but deals with 20th-century Reconstructionism several pages before the rise and spread of Hasidism, which began around 1750. The authors have introduced new material on Oriental Jewry that readers should welcome, and they have provided considerable population data on Eastern Europe. Some of the figures, however, such as those on Soviet Jews living in the largest cities (p. 182), seem questionable. However, the discussion of Soviet Russian Jewry is one of the strong points of the book. To be sure, one finds relatively few factual errors in the book as a whole, although there are numerous mistaken dates of birth and death. A chronological table adds to the book’s merits as a textbook, and so do the bibliographies at the conclusion of each chapter (all are exclusively in English). Halfway through the book, at page 234, its focus changes abruptly. A chapter on British and American Jewry (pp. 234–272), which is better on the former community than on the latter, is followed by a long and quite standard account of Zionism and Palestine/Israel (pp. 273–383). In conclusion, there is a chapter on Jewish women and another on Jewish demography and cultural achievement. The chapter on women appears to be an awkward sort of compensation for their absence from all that preceded it. The closing chapter contains useful demographic information, but Jewish cultural achievement is merely an undifferentiated catalogue of names—40 names on page 430, another 40 on page 431, and so on. The Jews in the Modern World possesses the merit of offering considerable information and of being up to date. It also shows evidence of attention to recent research. But it is seriously disorganized and repetitive, and it lacks a central theme. If used as a textbook, students must resort to the index constantly to find the several places where any given topic is discussed. If this book is meant as a guide to the great trends of modern Jewish history for interested readers, it lacks rigor and clarity. Both categories of readers will find information and enlightenment, but only to a limited extent. Lloyd P. Gartner Tel Aviv University

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Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent. New York: New York University Press, 2002. xiv ⫹ 386 pp.

Gerald Sorin’s intelligent, sympathetic, and engaging biography of Irving Howe is very fine intellectual history. It is also something more because, when seen in context, Sorin’s book becomes part of the liberal arsenal in the struggle for the soul of American Jewry. Howe, who died in 1993, was a figure of contention throughout his life, and (perhaps fittingly) his memory and his intellectual and political legacy have become contested turf in the American Jewish culture wars. Sorin’s work attempts to reclaim Howe’s memory and mantle for the liberal camp after it was “hijacked,” so to speak, four years earlier by a biographer from the conservative side, Edward Alexander.1 Why should Howe’s life and thought be the subject of this tug-of-war? American Jewry has produced other prolific scholars (Jacob Neusner, for example), other cutand-thrust polemicists and public intellectuals (Arthur Hertzberg), other soapbox orators (Alan Dershowitz), and other eloquent chroniclers of the “downtown Jews” (Ronald Sanders); but with all due respect to these and others, it is difficult to imagine rival biographers feuding over their legacies. To be sure, Howe owes his almost iconic stature and appeal to the fact that he successfully combined all of the above-named roles, a feat that few, if any, figures on the American Jewish scene can match. I suspect, however, that there is also something else about Irving Howe that arouses passion and possessiveness. Sorin, who has worked in the past mainly on Jewish immigration, social history, and immigrant radicalism, in this book extends his range to encompass the arcane world of the American radical Left at large and the broad scope of Howe’s interests as literary critic and scholar. It is a mature book based on extensive research and profound understanding, doing more than justice to all aspects of Howe’s life and work. In conducting his research, he enjoyed the confidence and support of Howe’s children and received permission to quote from Howe’s letters and other papers—an advantage that was denied Edward Alexander. Perhaps because of this “inside track,” Sorin is privy to things that Alexander had to omit. Thus, he describes Howe’s private life in detail: wives (four), lovers (naming names), behind-thescenes peeks at the personal feuds in the halls of academe. Some readers’ eyebrows will occasionally be raised, wondering if all of it was necessary, but Sorin’s intent throughout appears to be to render as complete a portrait of Howe, the man, as possible. What, after all, are a few warts and foibles when matched against so much grace, intellect, moral vision, and love? Indeed, such qualities in Howe stand out in greater relief in Sorin’s portrait when viewed against the darker background– and that, perhaps, may have been Sorin’s purpose in acknowledging Howe to have been humanly fallible. Edward Alexander’s book is similarly intelligent, probing, well researched and full of insight—indeed, there are some discussions (on literary topics in particular, such as Howe’s reading of Emerson and Howe’s treatment of the literature of the Holocaust) in which Alexander’s analysis is keener, more extensive, and ultimately more satisfying.


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Howe’s appeal in the eyes of a politically conservative biographer such as Edward Alexander (over and above the opportunity to indulge in the pleasure of writing intellectual history) lies in the political realm. In chronicling Howe’s later years, Alexander frequently characterizes his positions as “conservative.” Here the claim is more subtle than it appears, for Howe had become neither Irving Kristol nor Norman Podhoretz, but a staunch left-wing liberal. The vindication of conservative culture and politics that Alexander seeks in Howe is not the easy vindication of the self-proclaimed former opponent-turned-ally, but the much more difficult and more highly prized vindication that can only come from a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. Howe becomes, for Alexander, a kind of Nathan the Wise, who would have made such a good Christian had he not already been so honorable a Jew: it is Nathan’s Jewishness that makes his “Christian” qualities all the more significant and laudable. Comparing the biographies, it is clear that many similar terms and ideas about Howe’s mind are used in the two: both refer, for example, to Howe’s quest for moral poise in political affairs, to his “reconquest” of his Jewishness, and to the value he placed on intimate fraternity as a social ideal. But although the rooms of the house may seem the same, all the furniture appears to have been rearranged. Sorin and Alexander differ subtly but markedly, for example, in presenting a key episode in Howe’s life, just before his father, David Horenstein, died. What redeems Howe in Alexander’s eyes is that he is able, albeit belatedly, to recognize and treasure his father’s “loyalty” toward him. “Howe recognized the unwavering solidarity of his father (with a son whose actions he often disapproved) as deriving from a deep sense in the immigrant milieu of what a Jew owed his son. . . . [Howe] learned to value that solidarity” (Alexander, p. 178). That is, it is Howe’s father (who, we are told, becomes for Howe a stand-in for the whole ethical community of immigrant Jewry, and by extension, the collective conscience in whose name Alexander wants to speak) who has earned the credit for his lifetime of steadfastness; Howe only reaps the benefit of this solidarity belatedly, when he begins, at last, to honor and to emulate his father’s Jewish solidarity. In Sorin’s account this is told quite differently, despite the surface similarity. “And when he heard his dying father praise his work, Howe did finally weep. He also smiled when he heard that his father had told [Irving’s son] Nicholas that Irving had been ‘a good son’ ” (Sorin, p. 269). Here it is Howe who gets the credit for all he has done, for having been “a good son.” It is Howe’s constancy, Howe’s virtue, that receives due confirmation and his father’s deathbed blessing, and Sorin seems to suggest that it is not only David Horenstein who can rightfully be proud. In Alexander’s Irving Howe we are shown not a “good son,” but a man who traverses the ground between the Haggadah’s “wicked son” and its “wise son.” Alexander is therefore at pains to make Howe’s wickedness truly awful, which he presents in terms of Howe’s (own confessed) silence about the Holocaust when it was happening. Sorin, who is also clearly disturbed by this matter, nevertheless is wont to give us the story with some benefit of doubt or extenuating circumstance (pp. 36–40, and elsewhere).2 While Alexander dates Howe’s adult response to his Jewishness to a late stage, basically the 1970s and after, with prefiguring, painful encounters beginning per-

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haps only with the Ezra Pound controversy of 1949 and proceeding haltingly through the 1950s and 1960s, Sorin perceives in Howe’s life a steady growth that flowered in his personality and intellect from “seeds of reengagement” planted as early as 1946 (pp. 63–64, 68–70, 131), a product of his deepening humanistic involvement with literature and with Jewishness. Sorin’s script is spiritual and positive in tone, and this, I believe, is a reflection of the aforementioned culture wars in American Jewish intellectual circles: Sorin’s kind of people are engaged in looking for an inward, positive Jewishness that is, at the same time, neither insular nor defensive. For Sorin, Howe personifies what is at stake: the ethical core or soul of American Jewishness. Here lies the link between the Howe legacy and the contest over it. In Alexander’s script (which is equally reflective of contemporary concerns on the political Right), Howe comes back to his Jewishness, belatedly, through coming to grips with the reality of antisemitism in modern, Western civilization and in the wake of the Holocaust. This explanation of Howe’s “return” seems at least partly plausible, but it would have been even more convincing had Alexander not undercut his own argument. He does this by embarking on an incisive critique of Sartre’s postwar view of Jewishness as a projection of the Jew’s “otherness” in the eyes of antisemites, and he enlists Howe as an ally in this critique, showing Howe’s rejection of the Sartrean view. But if Howe was not the sort of “negative Jew” that Sartre had in mind, then how is it that he could recover his Jewishness by (following Alexander’s argument) responding to the antisemitism he discovered at the core of modernism? The tacit question in Edward Alexander’s book is why it was Howe, and not one of the luminaries of the Right (with their solidarity intact and Jewish pride fully accredited), who undertook the monumental project of World of Our Fathers. Alexander’s answer is that World was necessary work for a “wise son” to come, after all, into his patrimony. Gerald Sorin has tried to suggest a different answer: it was in Howe that the “spirit of the ghetto” lived on, at least for a time. Eli Lederhendler The Hebrew University

Notes 1. Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington: 1998); reviewed by Alan Wald in vol. 16 of this journal. 2. Oddly, considering the importance of this issue to the “Howe debates,” Sorin’s index has no entries for either the Holocaust or for the Second World War.

Language, Literature, and the Arts

Emily Miller Budick (ed.), Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 284 pp.

This collection of powerful essays marks an important moment in literary, cultural, and Jewish studies. Bringing together inquiries concerning the place of ideology and Jewish identity in two major contemporary literatures, these 13 essays by a group of international scholars, deftly introduced by the editor, Emily Miller Budick, articulate and elaborate a comparative perspective that outlines the modern experience of contemporary Jews. Six of the essays focus on the North American experience, six on the Israeli literary, linguistic, and cultural matrix. The concluding piece, by Wolfgang Iser, brings the discussion back to the achievement of Gershon Shaked and its roots in the Habsburg world of German Jewry. It is an appropriate ending to a collection that emerged from a research seminar held at the Center for Literary Studies at the Hebrew University on the occasion of Professor Shaked’s retirement after more than three decades of teaching and research in the Department of Hebrew Literature. But more than honoring a distinguished colleague, this volume offers a brilliant snapshot of the current state of literary and cultural studies in the course of exploring a neglected (or perhaps new and emergent) subject of inquiry: the cultural situation of Jewish identity in modern literature, and its shaping of modern Jewish experience. Part of the pleasure and impact of this collection results from the participation of scholars and writers, such as Shaked himself, who have played an important role in that shaping. The essays by A.B. Yehoshua, Nili Rachel Scharf Gold, and Yitzhak Laor, as well as Gershon Shaked’s contribution, speak out of personal connection; they lead to important insights into the relationship of nationmaking and individual lives, ideology and Jewish identity. Shaked’s essay in particular reminds us that Israeli literature has not only reflected Zionist and national concerns but has also helped to articulate and elaborate them. A parallel intensity is evident in the essays on North American writing, especially in H.M. Daleski’s incisive discussion of the subtext of travel between Jerusalem and New York in Philip Roth’s recent fictions, in particular Operation Shylock. Daleski’s analysis reveals how diaspora habits and values inform not only Roth’s characters but also the construction of Jewish identity for the American writer. This discussion sharpens that concerning ideology, and also makes some of the stakes of the dialogue clear: identity, ideology, and, even more, the question of power and the construction of meaning are in play in these literatures and writers. 359

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The comparative perspective also yields implicit valuations. How language functions in American and Israeli literature comes in for much comment in the essays by David Roskies, Ruth Wisse, Michael Kramer, Nili Gold, and Yitzhak Laor. Emily Budick’s introduction points us to overt and hidden connections. And part of the value of this collection lies in its making available a discussion such as Laor’s, which poses a challenge: “Even after Hebrew had become a spoken language, a large segment of writers still bore feelings of suspicion toward the language of the streets.” The ideological misgivings of Hebrew writers led to a “rift between . . . cultural and spoken languages that it has been unable to repair. The writers have been incapable of incorporating into their writing spoken language itself, even though, as part of the dominant elite, they took part in constructing and imposing that language” (p. 214). Laor’s comment also calls our attention to the ideological aspects of American Jewish literature, often congratulated for its ability to include diversity; to play with the remnants of immigrant Yiddish; and to function as a supple and flexible idiom. But like Israeli literature, it too has filled an important ideological role, in this case in evading and perhaps even erasing the fact that the condition of Jewish exile has been instrumental in the shaping of American Jewish character. These issues come forward, if only implicitly, in the essays by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Budick, and Michael Kramer, as well as in Daleski’s penetrating discussion. These days, humanities research is not known for its conciseness. Overlapping frames of reference are part of the problem; so too is an unwillingness to leave evaluations and references non-explicit, perhaps occasioned by worry at being misread—and the computer with its word-processing ease also contributes to our current condition of overelaboration. In contrast, Ideology and Jewish Identity offers a dazzling array of discussions, placed in a dialogical relation, that together add up to a set of varied ideas usually to be found only in several books. It offers not only a snapshot of where we are today, but challenges us to reconsider the directions in which we should be heading. Murray Baumgarten University of California, Santa Cruz

Ranen Omer-Sherman, Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2002. xiii ⫹ 341 pp.

Before we have even begun to read Ranen Omer-Sherman’s Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature, the author has laid bare his politics. Prefacing his introduction with quotations from Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin’s Diaspora and from Grace Paley’s short story “The Used-Boy Raiser,” all of which call into question the validity of “Zionist ideology” (“I believe in the Diaspora . . . I’m against Israel,” goes the Paley quotation), Omer-Sherman goes on to trace the origins of


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his study in his own return from Israel to the diaspora. “From the moment I left Israel for a career as a Jewish academic in Catholic and Jesuit institutions abroad,” writes Omer-Sherman, I became aware that Jewish life is filled with exiles within exiles. . . . But the seeds of this project were probably planted in the hilly villages of southern Lebanon, where as a paratrooper I discovered that the “Jewish” state was built on power, not Jewish values, and that its official rabbis were in thrall to statism [p. 13].

The problem with this extremely political and polemical opening is that it casts doubt on the integrity and open-mindedness of the author’s very thoroughgoing and interesting study of four American Jewish writers—Emma Lazarus, Marie Syrkin, Charles Reznikoff, and Philip Roth—whom he presents as paradigmatic of the American Jewish tension concerning Zionism and diasporic identity. Indeed, the fact that one of the two prefatory quotations is not from a piece of critical writing but from a literary text raises questions about how Omer-Sherman conceptualizes the relationship between ideology and literary writing. How does literature encode politics? And how do we move from the literary voice back to the world of cultural affiliations and politics that we assume have inspired the text? “I intentionally resist making the hubristic claims of writing a study of the ‘modern Jewish canon,’ ” the author writes. He continues: Ruth Wisse’s brilliant but flawed study by that title ignores both poetry and Sephardic literature and generally repudiates any writer whose sympathy for deterritorialization or universal justice exceeds the parameters Wisse establishes for Jewish particularity. . . . The recent appearance of Wisse’s The Modern Jewish Canon (2000) added a greater sense of urgency to my hopes to develop a counter-paradigm of a more expansive Jewish canon by treating undeservedly neglected writers of both sexes. Indeed, Philip Roth is the only popular figure present (p. 5).

Not only does Omer-Sherman’s book mirror his objection to Wisse’s book but it deals with only three such neglected writers, and it is not in the least clear, either, that they are representative of American writing generally or that any of them is usefully comparable to Roth, not just in terms of popularity but also in terms of artistic merit. I would have relegated these negative observations about Omer-Sherman’s book to the concluding paragraphs of this review were it not for the fact that he himself puts them up front: an act of honesty, to be sure, but also one of confrontation and no small measure of aggression. This is a shame, because the bulk of the book— its in-depth, scholarly, and highly intelligent readings of Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth—has much to recommend it. Intended to introduce “readers to the creative tension between personal and collective myth that has proved so rewarding for the development of Jewish American literature” (p. 3), the book celebrates the vitality and vibrancy of the four writers selected by Omer-Sherman. And throughout the lengthy discussions of each of these writers, the author brings to bear a powerful storehouse of information and contextual materials as well as solid, pertinent, and compelling readings of the writers’ works. In the chapters on Lazarus and Syrkin, Omer-Sherman expertly

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discusses the clash between the assimilationist desires of the writers and the expectations and realities of (in Lazarus’ case) a 19th-century America still not fully open to Jewish participation in the cultural realm and, in the case of Syrkin, the realities of Jewish existence after the Holocaust. For Lazarus, the extremely personal disappointment of her being slighted by no less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who failed to accord her the status among American poets that she considered her due, forced her to consider how the Jew might not be assimilatable after all within American Christian culture. According to Omer-Sherman: Anticipating the cultural strategies of Horace Kallen in a later generation, Lazarus embraced ethnicity, not religion, as the key to Jewish survival. . . . [This ethnicity], if it was to have any tangible substance, would necessarily be linked to a concrete discourse of distinct origins and homelands. Hence, Lazarus’s prose and lyrics must be understood in relation to the typology of nineteenth-century European national movements, which were committed to physical boundaries and containment as well as her own conflation of “race” with Emersonian organicity and authenticity (p. 17).

For Syrkin, influenced not only by the catastrophe of the Second World War but also by the politics of her Hebraist father, Nachman Syrkin, Zionism achieves both a legitimacy and an inevitability not present in Lazarus’ ideology, such that, in her “collected essays there is no evidence of trust in a Jewish American life of any lasting value. . . . [F]or Syrkin the crisis of Jewish life everywhere would only be resolved when Zionism [was] accepted as the exclusive wellspring of authenticity” (p. 85). Not so for her “Jewish Urban Modernist” husband, Charles Reznikoff, to whom Omer-Sherman traces what we tend to think of as the much more recent “creative current in postmodern Jewish philosophy and poetics.” The author quotes Sidra Ezrahi on what he himself sees as a key paradigm: “The postromantic, democratic language of personal quest and the role of personal alienation within the general condition of collective exile [evolved] into a peculiarly American disasporic agenda” (p. 111). It is this agenda, in Omer-Sherman’s reading, that both animates Reznikoff’s poetry and makes him one of the first “identifiably Jewish poets of the twentieth century” (p. 111). Perhaps the most powerful of Omer-Sherman’s readings is that of Philip Roth, maybe because Roth is still, when all is said and done, the most accomplished of the four writers discussed in this book. Here the author’s important point is that Roth’s actual subject—even when it is ostensibly Zionism, or Israeli or Jewish politics in some larger sense—is always American Jewish identity. What Roth repeatedly perceives is the need of American Jews, in their sense of a waning Jewish vitality in the United States, to project onto Israel a compensatory heroism. I totally concur with this aspect of Omer-Sherman’s analysis (I would add that Roth knows this about himself as much as about the Jewish American community about which he writes). Much of the vitality of American Jewish literature, I would further agree, derives from the tension between its Americanist commitments and its Zionist desires; in


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the case of Roth, this means that he does not simply treat the fantasy of American Jewry vis-a`-vis Israel but enacts it in his own narrative voice. Roth knows a great deal about projection, about how we use other people, ideas, and history to carry the weight of our own unexamined personal desires. This brings me back to OmerSherman and his opening comments concerning his disasporic identity: what in that identity causes him to project onto the subject of Israel and Zionism a private agenda that does not, perhaps, quite do justice either to the American writers whom he treats or to the Zionism in which all of them (including Omer-Sherman) seem, for better and for worse, to be entangled? Emily Miller Budick The Hebrew University

Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 268 pp.

Perhaps postmodernism, intertextuality, and gender studies have been missing from our readings of Russian Jewish literature. After all, these methods have gained wide practice in English departments; why not import them into Jewish studies? But to answer that question, we have to know what we want to acquire from the study of literary texts. Do we want to get at the author’s intention; to psychoanalyze him or her; to reconstruct his or her culture’s values, or to analyze ourselves? By extensively using contemporary theories of lit crit, Gabriella Safran runs a danger that her work will reflect as much our own political and social values as those she studies. Rewriting the Jew comprises four chapters, of which two take up the image of the Jew by Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Leskov. There is also a chapter on translations into Russian of the writings of Eliza Orzeszkowa, and one on the important but little-known Russian Jewish author, Grigory Bogrov. Clearly, there is some disunion in the choice of topics. Two of the writers are Russians, one a Pole, and only one is himself a Jew. The material under investigation, then, consists not of “assimilation narratives,” but primarily of texts that present an image of the Jew. In itself this is not problematic, but we need to know what we are dealing with. In my view, the best chapters are on Leskov and Chekhov. Here Safran shows what may have been the main problem that many Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century faced when regarding Jews: their own biases. Expressing pity for the downtrodden (and Jews indeed were downtrodden), they also felt revulsion toward them. Jews were unclean, hostile, and incapable of assimilation. They were alien, “other,” not us. And although both the “liberal” Chekhov and the critical Leskov had a much more nuanced view of the Jewish question, some biases remained. For example, Leskov gave vent to these prejudices in “Zhidovskaia kuvyrkale-

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giia” (Yid summersault), but he was also chosen by leading St. Petersburg Jews to write Evrei v Rossii (Jews in Russia), a defense of equal rights; and near the end of his life, he wrote a story of Jewish-Christian reconciliation, “Fedor i Abram.” Chekhov grew up with Jews in Taganrog, had many Jewish friends, men and women, and regarded them as part of the landscape. He may not have taken the Jewish question seriously enough, and certainly he absorbed some of the hostile attitudes of his time, but he was certainly not an antisemite. The chapter on Grigory Bogrov is not as strong. I did not find convincing Safran’s argument that Bogrov’s novel Zapiski evreia (Notes of a Jew) is a hybrid kind of fiction that is “situated between existing” genres because he sought “new ways of describing” the acculturation of Jews (p. 192). The changes in narrative style throughout this “coming-of-age” story do not reflect a special use of narrative forms to transmit acculturation, but rather display conventional narrative modes of the period. The eclecticism in Russian literature of the time can be seen in other works, such as Dostoevsky’s Podrostok (The adolescent) which blends coming of age, questions of identity, social satire, and metaphysics; or Turgenev’s Otsy i deti (Fathers and sons), which mixes narratives of romanticism and realism to highlight social conflict between generations. Another major problem—perhaps this is my own problem—is the author’s lack of sensibility regarding anti-Jewish expressions. She deals with anti-Jewish stories such as Turgenev’s “Zhid” (The Kike), Leskov’s “Vladychii sud” (Episcopal justice), and Chekhov’s “Tina” (called “Mire” in the English version) without expressing any indignation. Cruel treatment of Jews is seen exclusively as a literary problem, a kind of narrative topos. There is no attempt to connect these literary issues to history or “real life.” This is somewhat disconcerting because, by not calling attention to cruelty, Safran at times gives the impression that such anti-Jewish expressions were not really consequential in any but a literary way. In fact, students of Russian history know very well what were the results of anti-Jewish attitudes in late tsarist Russia. Moreover, I believe, such a distanced view influences Safran’s interpretations. To regard the Jewish theme in Russian literature as consisting of mere literary matter that is divorced from life generates readings that seem at times to be at odds with historical realities. For example, Safran’s interpretation of Leskov’s story “Episcopal Justice” holds that the main character (the father of a Jewish recruit who has died in army service) ends up being a good reader of the New Testament and therefore converts to Christianity. Yet the story’s climax does not appear to reflect any conscious transformation on the part of the old man; he is an unfortunate victim from the start, and the author’s lack of pity can be seen in his depiction of the Jew throughout as deranged and craven, groveling on the floor and babbling an incomprehensible mixture of Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. There is no redemption in the father’s conversion, and the narrator treats him with no more kindness at the end than in the beginning. We should take note of the innovative subject of this book. It has been much too long since we have seen scholarly work on the image of the Jew in tsarist Russia. Safran’s Rewriting the Jew is a rare study that deals with subjects long left untouched. She has provided us with much that can be argued with, but it is clear


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that, with this book, we are now in a new epoch of research on Russian Jewish literature. Brian Horowitz Tulane University

Jeffrey A. Summit, The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiii ⫹ 203 pp.

Much synagogue music scholarship over the last decade has placed a prime emphasis on issues of historicity. Researchers such as Abraham Z. Idelsohn and Eric Werner viewed Jewish music as an ancient tradition that had survived over millennia through exact oral transmission. Consequently, their literature emphasized authenticity through what they viewed as “definitive” studies of age and provenance. Idelsohn, for example, attempted to show through comparisons with a broad range of Jewish communities that the melodic fragments of Torah cantillation could be traced to a single urtext—presumably the melody system used during the Second Temple period.1 Eric Werner employed a similar but more scattershot approach in the mid-20th century in his attempts to show that Christian chant borrowed liberally from Jewish chant during the Middle Ages.2 More recently, Joseph Levine and Sholom Kalib have used this idea of Jewish music’s “ancient survival” to extol the “greatness” of music they deem to be authentically Jewish.3 And interestingly, to one extent or another, all of them have used their research as a touchstone for evaluating (often negatively) contemporary synagogue musical practice. These musicologists have produced innumerable insights into the nature of music within Jewish life. Yet their larger projects fell victim to serious flaws: primary among them was that many of the historical connections these authors emphasized were often based more on faith than on viable evidence. A cornerstone of Idelsohn’s argument relied on the unsupported claim that the Yemenite Jewish community’s musical tradition had remained almost unchanged for nearly 2,000 years. Eric Werner routinely compared snippets of Jewish and Christian chants that came from sources hundreds of years apart, and that often set unrelated texts. Levine and Kalib place significant emphasis on “the synagogue modes” and other analytical conventions as indicators of Jewish authenticity, though there is much evidence that such conventions are themselves 19th-century constructs. These and other studies thus are as much attempts to legitimize conventional beliefs in the “timelessness” of Jewish music as they are essays in unearthing a definitive Jewish musical history. In this context, Jeffrey Summit’s study is particularly welcome. Summit, an ethnomusicologist and Hillel director at Tufts University, approaches synagogue music from the opposite direction, using ethnographic methods to venture inside the philosophical systems that lead American Jews to imbue certain tunes with sacred significance. Rather than determining which melodies are the most “legitimate” or

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deserving of attention, he lets the congregants of the communities he studies do most of the talking. What results is an illuminating study that shows the importance ethnographic research can have in contributing to Jewish musical scholarship. In The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land, the very people who are routinely criticized by scholars as having little musical taste or respect for “true” Jewish musical traditions show themselves to be articulate, sophisticated, philosophically complex, and clearly in control of both their musical preferences and the societal implications of these preferences. Summit has shaped his study around the assertion that the melodies people choose to sing in religious services often reflect deeply held sets of values that enhance their “sense of belonging, of membership, of place, and of connection to a particular community” (p. 17). Consequently, the bulk of his book focuses on musical settings of a single liturgical text—Lekha dodi, from the Friday evening service—as performed in five contrasting Boston-area congregations: one Havurah, one Reform congregation, the Conservative minyan at the Hillel center at Tufts, an Orthodox synagogue, and a hasidic congregation. After a short chapter explaining the general history and meaning of the Lekha dodi text, Summit introduces each congregation with a short history, a description of its leadership structure, and an account of its Friday evening service. Then he launches into a discussion of the music, meaning, and usage of Lekha dodi at each site. Spiritual leaders and congregants serve as the center of attention in these parts of the book, and Summit supplements their transcribed words with an included CD of “live” examples, recorded by the congregants either during services or in midweek simulations (depending upon each congregation’s policy with regard to the taping of music on Shabbat). In so doing, Summit creates an effective—if occasionally overly uncritical—multisensory experience for the reader, providing a series of vivid portraits on music and religious meaning. After this analysis, Summit takes on the issue of nusah (a multivalent term here used to describe a congregation’s view of its own “traditional” music) in much the same manner. Again, commendably, he focuses less on authoritarian notions of nusah than on the numerous ways in which the concept is understood and valued by worshippers at each congregation. While Summit makes some interesting observations, however, the framework of the discussion itself feels somewhat more forced than the Lekha dodi study. Nusah , he shows, is a slippery concept, meaning many things to many people even within the context of a single congregation. Yet this finding also decenters the chapter, consequently making nusah feel as if it were an imposed academic construct, despite Summit’s pains to let the congregants speak about it in their own words. The book concludes by framing the phenomenon of melody choice within the sociolinguistic concept of “code” and “code-switching” (p. 131). Deciding on a particular melody for prayer, Summit asserts, is akin to deciding on a “language” of expression, complete with all the associations and values that make it meaningful to a particular group of affiliated individuals. Although his attempt to extend this idea to other religious denominations is (self-admittedly) cursory at best, the concept itself bears merit. Through well-written studies such as this one, we may gain a broader and more nuanced understanding of synagogue musical expression, less

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as a test of historical trajectory than as a place where history and legitimacy are constantly subjected to rich layers of negotiation. Judah Cohen New York University

Notes 1. See Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Hebraïsch-orientalischer Melodienschatz, 10 vols. (Leipzig: 1914–1932). 2. See Eric Werner’s two volumes, The Sacred Bridge (New York: 1959, 1984). 3. See Sholom Kalib, The Musical Tradition of the Eastern European Synagogue (Syracuse: 2002); Joseph Levine, Synagogue Song in America (Crown Point, Ind.: 1989).

Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 412 pp.

Recent scholarship on American literature has been particularly preoccupied with the intersection of culture and politics, and Alan Wald’s latest book, an impressively researched and illustrated collective biography of the mid-20th-century Left, provides plentiful fuel for that fire. In particular, Wald asks some important questions about the role of left-wing Jews in shaping American literary culture. The author of an influential book on the New York intellectuals and several monographs and collections of essays that are required reading for students of literary radicalism, Wald is uniquely suited to answer these questions. Exiles from a Future Time is the first of three projected volumes in which Wald aims to re-imagine the entire literary history of the American Left. Here, as in his earlier work, he draws on personal interviews, archival materials, and pieces from rare periodicals to produce a readable account of his subjects’ lives and writings. This first installment treats the Left’s more utopian tendencies; subsequent volumes will concern militant antifascism and resistance to domestic repression. The trilogy as a whole promises to expand the literary history of the Left into the postwar years, while also addressing questions of multiculturalism and diversifying the range of genres and literary styles typically studied. By profiling many quirky and often forgotten writers, Wald hopes to remind young left-wing activists and scholars of the vitality of their legacy. Themes organizing Exiles from a Future Time include the appeal of modernist and avant-garde techniques, Afro-cosmopolitanism, gender ideologies, and the meaning of elective affinities with left-wing organizations. We also discover secondary motifs, such as the nature of exile, mystical belief, and countercultural lifestyles. The bulk of the book, though, consists of thoroughly researched biographical profiles ranging from three to 30 pages.

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One of the most interesting figures profiled is Sol Funaroff—from whose posthumous collection of poems Wald borrows his title. Stylistically influenced by T.S. Eliot and Apollonaire and topically inspired by his tenement upbringing, Funaroff was an active editor and reader of other poets’ work in addition to producing several volumes himself. Funaroff also typifies for Wald a tendency among Jewish leftists to identify with and promote the struggle for racial equality for African Americans. Sometimes this identification was so strong that—like Guy Endore—they were mistakenly treated by literary historians as if they were African American themselves. Wald also emphasizes the importance of Jewish identity for better-known figures such as Mike Gold, Joseph Freeman, and Muriel Rukeyser. He reports these authors’ claims that their political commitment flowed directly from their religious upbringing. In fact, the majority of the white writers profiled in the book are identified as Jewish. In his methodological preface, Wald pointedly defends the use of such identifying tags as a tool for overcoming habits of reading that silently convert all authors to mainstream affiliations. Later, he concludes that “male writers, overwhelmingly white and at least half of them Jewish, set the tone on the leading bodies of the official, New York-based publications of the Communist Left” (p. 254). Although such assertions of the significance of Jewish identity for leftwing politics and aesthetics appear throughout Exiles, Wald reserves fuller treatment of this theme for a later volume of his trilogy. This first installment is, nonetheless, enormously useful on its own. Wald’s recovery of lesser-known writers such as Funaroff, Endore, Don West, Joy Davidman, and William Attaway; his focus on themes of current interest; and his substantive reconstruction of important controversies at the New Masses and International Publishers all open up areas for further research. He shows, too, that there are many fascinating stories to be told about the political history of popular genres such as historical and detective fiction. And he introduces several previously unrecorded anecdotes demonstrating links between the Old Left writers and the Beats. For these reasons, Exiles from a Future Time and its companion volumes should join other major studies of the period—most notably, Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front (1996)—in encouraging a major rethinking of the role of the Left in 20thcentury American culture. Inevitably, work of this sort also invites some controversy. Exiles is on occasion perhaps too partisan in its treatment of certain segments of the anti-Stalinist Left. Methodological polemics also create some distracting background noise. In Exiles and related essays, Wald strenuously rejects what he describes as groundless theoretical speculation in favor of biographical empiricism. While he has a point, he may have overcompensated. His own discussions of the philosophy and concepts important to the mid-century Left are so minimal that they sometimes leave too much to the imagination. For example, his assertions that writers of the 1930s such as Davidman, Meridel Le Sueur, Genevieve Taggard, and Ruth Lechlitner were second-wave feminists avant la lettre, while attractive, are unconvincing. Wald’s case rests on interpretations of brief moments in the work of atypical individuals. He also alters with little explanation some of the more balanced claims made by prior scholarship entirely


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devoted to this topic. His reasons for downplaying, for instance, Paula Rabinowitz’s quite pointed critiques in Labor and Desire (1991) of sexism on the literary Left, while amplifying her more measured claims for left-wing women’s feminist consciousness, remain obscure. A few other hard questions are also sidestepped. Overturning common but implausible assumptions about Soviet brainwashing of American writers on the Left, Wald insists strongly on the literary Left’s indigenous character. In doing so, however, he leaves readers with little understanding of the appeal of internationalism in the period. Related concepts such as the notion of exile invoked in his own title seem essential for the study of the Left in the United States generally and of JewishAmerican leftists more particularly. Moreover, future scholars will need to continue exploring the relationship between the Old and the New Left. Wald underlines the need for such a rethinking but does not undertake it in this volume. Despite its controversial elements, Exiles from a Future Time offers a great deal of consistently original, often entertaining, and always rigorous and humane scholarship. Alan Wald has provided an essential corrective to decades of dogmatic scholarship that ignores or misidentifies the diversity of the American literary Left. His dedicated spadework has brought to the surface much that has been neglected in the rich and varied history of dissenting traditions, a history to which many of us may well need to turn more regularly in years to come. Caren Irr Brandeis University

Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 350 pp.

Both Barbie Zelizer, the editor of this volume (as well as an award-winning professor of journalism at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania), and Rutgers University Press should be complimented for their work and dedication in producing this book, which deals with issues related to the visual representation of the Holocaust. It is strongest on photography and film, since the only individuals discussed here who work in different media are Anselm Kiefer the painter and Art Spiegelman, famous for his cartoon work in Maus (assuming that Christian Boltanski’s work qualifies as both photography and installation). Zelizer poses the correct questions in the introduction when she asks “what it means to visualize the Holocaust, why doing so makes sense, for whom and under which conditions it works most effectively” (p. 1). She attests to the fact that representation of the Holocaust is a form of “translation rather than mere reportage” (p. 2) and therefore is viewed often as a series of fragments and is held suspect as compared with historical texts. Zelizer’s “uneasiness” about Holocaust representation is partially a response to events such as the making of Steven Spielberg’s

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Schindler’s List, Roberto Begnini’s Life Is Beautiful, and controversial artistic ventures by artists such as Judy Chicago and Robert Morris. In essence, the tension Zelizer is concerned about is between the “facts” and the representation, the latter often being subject to errors. While I, too, find this concern relevant, if one judges how other major historical events are now remembered at all in popular culture, it seems to be thanks primarily to fragments and artistic representation rather than to history books. The essays in this compilation are often derived from previously published monographs or have appeared since its publication in fuller forms. Thus chapters by Andreas Huyssen, Ernst van Alphen, Lisa Saltzman, Jeffrey Shandler, Yosefa Loshitzky, James E. Young, and Dora Apel have a familiar ring to those who read extensively about artistic representation of the Holocaust. Of course, they are among the best-known authors in the field. At the same time, I presume this work to be designed for the advanced undergraduate and graduate level classroom, and in this respect, it provides students with a useful and important array of essays dealing with issues and problems of representation. The essays by Liliane Weissberg and Andreas Huyssen are of particular interest, as they establish a conceptual framework for the rest of the book. These two essays focus on aesthetics, Holocaust representation as a response to trauma, and the problems of such a subject when it becomes entangled in the web of popular culture. Thus Weissberg successfully integrates the concept of aesthetic pleasure as a product of imagination (as articulated by Alexander Nehamas) with Theodor Adorno’s concern regarding the object represented, the issue of art (lyric poetry) after Auschwitz, and beauty itself. Huyssen’s chapter focuses on Adorno’s concept of mimesis and its relationship to “the cultural industry and its irredeemable link with deception, manipulation, domination, and the destruction of subjectivity” (p. 29). His analysis of narrative strategies against this conceptual backdrop is focused on Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which he uses as a prime example of “mimetic approximation” (p. 32). Yet it is only an approximation, Huyssen argues, since the basis of Spiegelman’s work is a combination of parental testimony, a certain amount of research, and much angst, all of which makes the book’s construction a matter of “postmemory.” Huyssen’s main issue, however, seems to be the question of which process best creates an authentic representation of the event. An understanding of mimesis is useful, but does not answer the question fully. Ernst Van Alphen’s essay on Christian Boltanski confirms that an important theme running through all of the essays is the ethical response of the artist to the event, and understanding what is real and what is created. Van Alphen uses Terrence Des Pres’ three commandments about respectable Holocaust representation as a springboard for his analysis of other artistic endeavors. Des Pres’ concept was that the Holocaust should be represented as (a) unique, (b) with accuracy, and (c) with solemnity. Obviously, such a dictate suggests a narrowness in art reminiscent of Byzantium, perhaps, or of contemporary dictatorships. In his own essay, Van Alphen implies that all of these presumptions are a problem and that Boltanski’s photographic-based works provide another avenue for understanding. That understanding comes first of all through “Holocaust effects” and


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secondly through the “archive as institution, not the ‘archived’ subjects” (p. 49) Boltanski, who uses the photo portrait to signify both presence and absence, provides, in the author’s view, both mimetic representation and authority to the subject. Van Alphen understands, correctly I think, that through Boltanski’s technique, the viewer experiences some reenactment of the Holocaust as he or she views the installations. At the same time, none of the historical cliche´s such as the watchtower, the yellow star, barbed wire, or Nazi symbols are found in the work. Van Alphen thus concludes that Boltanski’s fragmented creation is “sublime” because it confirms that the horror of the past cannot be reordered. James E. Young’s chapter on Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum is important, not only because of the architect’s already famous building in Germany, but also because memorial space has become an object of wide concern with regard to the reconstruction of New York’s World Trade Center. That Libeskind won the architectural competition for the World Trade Center site suggests that the Holocaust generally, and the Berlin Jewish Museum and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in particular, have become of key importance in imaging architectural places of memory. Young’s thesis, also raised in his monograph At Memory’s Edge, deals with what he calls “uncanny memorial architecture . . . which is necessarily antiredemptive” (p. 181). Libeskind made this a point of departure by adopting the title “Between the Lines” for the Jewish Museum project, avoiding the straight-line concept by designing the museum around a series of voids symbolizing absence. The debate about the design of the building, its success as a structure even without any exhibits in it, and the post-completion problems of installation all served to preserve the Holocaust as a pivotal subject within the public discourse of Germany. Lawrence Douglas’ essay on “The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald” is unique in that it helps to contextualize such bizarre representations as Ilse Koch’s human tattoo collection and the shrunken head of an executed Polish political prisoner, and to set them against images surveyed in various ways by other authors in the collection. These relics of extreme crimes (even the unfounded speculation about prisoners being made into soap), which were introduced as court evidence, raise an important clash of interpretations explored by Douglas: on the one hand, the sense that such evidence points to a crime so uncivilized that it almost speaks of a pre-civilized criminal mentality, as opposed to Zygmunt Bauman’s concept that the Holocaust was a modern event. For some, this collection may appear to be unduly weighted toward photography, film, and televised images at the expense of paintings, and especially paintings by Jewish artists. Of the artists, Kiefer is a non-Jew and Boltanski may or may not be Jewish (it seems to be a slippery question for him). Maus, by Spiegelman, a Jew, is a highly successful work and, indeed, might be said to have become an obsession with researchers because of its form as well as because of the interesting questions about representation that it raises. I would recommend the volume under review here especially for classroom use, and I have already used it. The diversity of subjects, while not as complete as it might be, still makes it one of the strongest anthologies on the visual representation of the Holocaust. In achieving this, Visual Culture and the Holocaust confirms that

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work done since the Second World War is perhaps as important as art created in the camps and ghettos, and can, perhaps, do as much to convey an understanding of the Holocaust. Stephen C. Feinstein University of Minnesota

Religion, Thought, and Education

Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverton. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002. x ⫹ 404 pp. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (eds.), New Perspectives on the Haskalah. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001. vii ⫹ 260 pp.

Historians have variously characterized the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) as a heroic struggle against obscurantism, a betrayal of Jewish national values, the ideology of the ascendant Jewish bourgeoisie, the vehicle for the literary revival of Hebrew and Yiddish, and even the precursor of Zionism. The movement’s identification with the emergence of “the modern Jew” has made it as much an ideological Rorschach test as an object of scholarly investigation. No wonder the editors of New Perspectives on the Haskalah embrace the historian Robert Darnton’s admonition to “deflate the Enlightenment.” In order to take its proper measure, the Haskalah must be cut down to size. Many of the essays in New Perspectives “deflate” the Haskalah by emphasizing its conservative character. As the editors put it, the Haskalah was an “innovative, if not revolutionary” agent of Jewish modernization (p. 3). David Sorkin sets the tone by calling attention to “The Early Haskalah”—which he dates from the 1740s to the 1760s—as distinct from the Haskalah proper, commencing in the 1770s. The early Haskalah, according to Sorkin, was a reaction against an insular and scholastic “Baroque Judaism” that dominated Ashkenazic Jewry in the 17th century. Its representatives (Asher Anshel Worms, Israel Zamosc, and Isaac Wetzlar, among others) sought to restore the relatively greater degree of cultural openness that they associated with medieval (especially medieval Sephardic) Jewry’s intellectual life, especially in the domains of Hebrew grammar, the study of European vernacular languages and, as Sorkin here emphasizes, science. Several of the early Haskalah figures daringly embraced the new science’s experimental method while exhibiting other signs of a shift in consciousness: Wetzlar, for instance, attacked the aesthetic disorder of the contemporary Jewish synagogue service, while Aaron Solomon Gumpertz frequented coffeehouses and joined learned societies and literary clubs— the very hallmarks of the Aufkla¨rung fellow traveler. At the same time, in a way that marked the early Haskalah as essentially conservative, they sharply separated the domain of science from that of faith while insisting (not just tactically or rhetorically) that Hebrew grammar and European languages were valuable less in their own right than as aids in preserving tradition. 373

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Historians have long assumed some connection between the men discussed by Sorkin and the emergence of the Berlin Haskalah (Gumpertz, for instance, was an associate of Moses Mendelssohn, whereas Solomon Hanau was one of Naphtali Herz Wessely’s tutors). But they did not, until now, offer a workable general definition of their activities. Indeed, much of the traditional scholarship on the Haskalah seemed to posit a Jewish Enlightenment that emerged ex nihilo, as it were, in the person and persona of Moses Mendelssohn. Sorkin’s “early Haskalah” thus proves attractive in positing a more organic progression toward modernity. Still, it does not succeed entirely in dispelling the fog that envelopes maskilic beginnings. Sorkin never quite clarifies the causal relationship between the early and the mature stages of the Haskalah. Compounding this vagueness is the problem of circularity. The existence of a phenomenon defined in large part by its modesty and inconspicuousness (these men, he says, “neither envisaged wide-ranging efforts at . . . reform nor did they have presumptions to leadership of any kind” [p. 26]) is ultimately as difficult to prove as to refute. A number of the essays in New Perspectives amplify Sorkin’s stress on the Haskalah’s conservatism. If, as he posits, even the young Moses Mendelssohn belonged to the early Haskalah, few until now would have questioned Naphtali Herz Wessely’s seminal role in defining the movement proper. Yet in the view of Edward Breuer, Wessely sought merely a revitalization of rabbinic tradition (a “return to pristine Jewish culture”) rather than an “internalization of European values” (p. 47). Though rightly stressing the apologetic motives behind Wessely’s emphasis on the study of Hebrew grammar, Breuer’s argument addresses only the author’s subjective intent and not the truly revolutionary character of at least some of his writings, particularly the groundbreaking Words of Peace and Truth of 1782. (One might here draw an analogy: even if, as some intellectual historians have maintained, Descartes’ Discourse on the Method represented a conservative rearguard defense of Christian belief, its quality and effect of seeking a way to reconstitute certainty was nevertheless radically disjunctive.) Placing a similar emphasis on the conservative motives of the maskilim, Harris Bor explains that they found the rabbinic musar genre congenial to their aims not just because it had long functioned as a vehicle of social criticism, but because its message reinforcing orthopraxy simultaneously supplied them with a defense against potentially heretical philosophical rationalism. Even the essays that emphasize maskilic discontinuity with the past do so by downplaying the Haskalah’s emancipatory intent. Hence Tova Cohen, in her powerful indictment of the Russian Haskalah’s depiction of women, argues that most maskilic writers, firmly rooted as they were in the traditional Jewish scholar class of lamdanim, tended to redirect that stratum’s inherited sense of gender alienation into literary characterizations of females that were “mere projections of their authors’ fears and fantasies” (p. 149). Since only male scholars could read maskilic Hebrew, Cohen argues, the Haskalah remained as much of a closed and elitist male club as the traditional rabbinate. Against the depiction of the Haskalah as fundamentally conservative, a contradictory albeit secondary tendency within New Perspectives takes the maskilim to task for their modernizing extremism. Joseph Salmon, for instance, shows how the


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maskilim inadvertently undermined the reform program tentatively emerging among a group of “enlightened rabbis” from the 1860s and 1870s (including Yehiel Michael Pines, Samuel Mohilewer, Jacob Lipschitz, and Isaac Jacob Reines). According to Salmon, Moses Leib Lilienblum’s 1867 appeal to reform Jewish law backfired by pressuring these figures, at least temporarily, into adopting a hard-line stance. In a similar vein, Immanuel Etkes repudiates the exaggerated and distorted maskilic claims that hasidim had an especial propensity for magic and “wonder working.” Etkes argues that Hasidism was no more oriented to magic (and perhaps less so) than mitnagdic and other contemporary styles of East European Orthodoxy that the Haskalah ignored or even championed. As Etkes astutely observes, their insistence on a special association between Hasidism and “magic” provided maskilim with a means to attack the general East European Jewish religious ethos by focusing on one distinctive strand within it. Still, as with Cohen’s incisive analysis, Etkes’ valuable essay is marred by its moralizing tone. Whereas Cohen seems ungenerous in ignoring the emancipatory potential embedded in maskilic critiques of rabbinic misogyny, Etkes neglects to stress the context of mid-19th-century Eastern Europe in which the maskilim, too, constituted persecuted “others.” In this bitter Kulturkampf, both sides, and not the maskilim alone, indulged in collective character assassination. Indeed, the essays by Yehuda Friedlander (on the maskilic embrace of the mitnagdim) and Shmuel Werses (on the youthful attraction many later maskilim felt for Hasidism) suggest a more ambiguous and complex picture. With its focus on maskilic “conservatism” as well as its novel treatment of the relationship between Haskalah, gender, Orthodoxy, and Hasidism, this well-edited volume can certainly justify its claim to offer “new perspectives on the Haskalah.” At the same time, however, it evinces at least some views associated with an older Haskalah scholarship. The German-centered model, for example, remains very much in evidence here. The book follows a familiar cultural and geographic route from Berlin to Galicia (see Nancy Sinkoff’s lucid and valuable essay on Mendel Lefin) and thence to Russia. One searches in vain for discussion of developments in Amsterdam, Paris, Alsace, Padua, Trieste, Prague, Budapest—or, in a later period, North Africa, Turkey, and the United States. The notable exception is David B. Ruderman’s stimulating survey of modernizing tendencies in the intellectual life of 18th-century Anglo-Jewry. In contrast, Shmuel Feiner’s concluding essay, “Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah,” reinforces traditional historiography while at times countering various of the “new perspectives” that precede it in the volume. For instance, despite recent admonitions within general Enlightenment studies to emphasize the heterogeneous and disjointed character of various national “Enlightenments,” Feiner seeks to encapsulate the Haskalah as a whole. And in contrast with his own seeming adoption of the “early Haskalah” rubric, he cannot disguise his conviction that the Haskalah constituted a fundamental break with the past. For if, as he alleges, the “maskil has no precedent in Jewish society” (p. 208), then whether the maskilim were of the “moderate” or “radical” variety, their presence, proliferation, endurance, and impact surely went beyond what the mild term “innovative” would suggest.

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This impulse to preserve the notion of a coherent Haskalah, one representing a fundamental break with the past, emerges strikingly in Feiner’s 1995 study, Haskalah and History, now available in English translation. Not only does this work successfully recapture a long-forgotten mental universe of maskilic historical writings, it also demonstrates unabashedly the author’s conviction that the Haskalah cannot be displaced from its central, if not exclusive, position in the narrative of Jewish modernization in Europe. Feiner deserves to be regarded as the leading historian of the Haskalah movement considered in its entirety. His mastery of the relevant sources and the scholarly literature on Enlightenment is phenomenal, as is the quality and quantity of his meticulous studies of key Haskalah phenomena and figures, from Moses Mendelssohn to Peretz Smolenskin. One of the features that linked many of these disparate strands was the maskilic penchant for writing history, and Feiner’s Haskalah and History demonstrates just how history-conscious a movement the Haskalah was. The maskilim produced historiography of all sorts—Jewish, non-Jewish, “universal,” and local—even if little of what they wrote, as Feiner concedes, holds up today. Yet Feiner has retrieved this long-forgotten literature, buried in 19th-century periodicals, manuscripts, and translations, out of a keen sense that, despite its weaknesses as scholarship, it holds valuable insights into maskilic ideology and consciousness. Feiner makes the case that history became central to Haskalah activity, particularly in the Galician and Russian phases of the movement, in part because the maskilim concluded that it inculcated right thinking: civic and national pride, a sense of natural causality, aesthetic literary evaluation, a faith in the alignment of providence with elementary morality, a rationale for Jewish endurance, and a critical appreciation of classical Jewish sources. But as Feiner demonstrates, maskilic historical writing reflected more than the sculpting of a propagandist design; it was also an exercise in self-definition. At its core lay the need of the maskilim perpetually to reaffirm the Haskalah’s crucial relevance to the Jewish future. Historywriting performed this function because it served to delineate the precise relationship of the glorious modern era to the troubled Jewish past. One might counter that Haskalah historiography shared this capacity with its better-credentialed German Jewish cousin, Wissenschaft des Judentums. In fact, some reviewers of the Hebrew original of Haskalah and History criticized Feiner for demoting Wissenschaft from its status as the primary source of “a modern Jewish historical consciousness.” Yet Feiner could not be clearer in his insistence that the contributions of Wissenschaft and Haskalah were separate. In fact, the more apt criticism would be that Feiner draws an altogether too rigorous distinction between them. Haskalah and History indicates just how indebted maskilim (such as Nachman Krochmal, Solomon Judah Rapoport, Samuel Joseph Fuenn, Isaac Baer Levinsohn, and Kalman Schulman) were to Wissenschaft historians such as Marcus Jost, Leopold Zunz, and Heinrich Graetz. A great deal of Haskalah historiography consisted of adaptations and translations of Wissenschaft works, for instance, Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten and Graetz’s Die Geschichte der Juden. Nor, as Feiner acknowledges, were German Jewish historians uninfluenced by the interpretations

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of medieval Judaism suggested by East European maskilic historians and, in a less salutary fashion, by their accounts of the origins and development of Hasidism. It can be agreed with Feiner that even the best Haskalah historiography displayed characteristic didactic, apologetic, and utilitarian features and that these reflected the mentality of an essentially inward-looking “pre-emancipation” community. But one should also recognize that, despite its overt commitment to a value-free historiography, much Wissenschaft scholarship (and not only the worst) shared some of these same tendencies, including a lachrymose conception of Jewish history (Leidensgeschichte) and a determination to promote internal cultural and economic reforms. Contra Feiner, the reason for these similarities is clear: like the Haskalah in Eastern Europe, albeit in a very different cultural setting, Wissenschaft during the Vorma¨rz period reflected the ongoing struggle for the full emancipation of the Jewish minority. Feiner’s determination to carve out a special functionality for maskilic historiography (beyond employing it as a barometer of maskilic consciousness) thus leads him to posit an artificial division of labor, with Wissenschaft functioning as “real” historiography and the Haskalah as modern Jewish historical consciousness and ideology. This strategy backfires, in part because it tempts Feiner to assume too wide a latitude in determining what qualifies as maskilic historiography. Thus for Feiner, maskilic history-writing encompasses such materials as the recruitment of Maimonides to convey criticism of contemporary rabbinic culture; the construction of deliberately anachronistic dialogues between various great figures from the Jewish past; hagiographic portraits of Mendelssohn by his disciples; the anti-rabbinic “historical” poems of Yehudah Leib Gordon; and Eliezer Zweifel’s positive maskilic reassessment of Hasidism. By such loose criteria, one can call “history” anything that is neither prophecy nor prognosis. Such methodological imprecision makes for a sprawling analysis. And yet Haskalah and History remains a deeply rewarding book. Its very expansiveness suits its author’s ambition to understand the Haskalah in its entirety, a task to which Feiner, as much as anyone, is equal. With all of its excesses and indulgences, Haskalah and History is a work the reader can luxuriate in. And although it is ostensibly about the arcane topic of maskilic historiography, this study, in its highly readable translation, now provides the best single-volume treatment in English of the broad (and yes, revolutionary) ideology of the Haskalah. Jonathan Karp Binghamton University, SUNY

Tzvi C. Marx, Disability in Jewish Law. London: Routledge, 2002. 361 pp.

Tzvi C. Marx’s Disability in Jewish Law is a welcome addition to recent monographs on sundry topics in Jewish law. This is especially so since the subject of

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disability has gained considerable and widespread interest over the past two or three decades. Although Marx writes about the Jewish legal tradition, this volume should be appreciated by anyone who is sensitive to the problems of the handicapped. The book is based on a doctoral thesis written in the early 1990s at the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht. The theological university context helps to explain the author’s method and purpose: this is not a usual research study that attempts to tackle a theme as objectively as one can within human restraints and academic standards. The author does, of course, base his research on a wide variety of sources—legal, philosophical, and homiletical. But he has an agenda, namely allowing the legitimacy of citing opinions that support inclusion [of the disabled in the observance of precepts], and downplaying those favoring exclusion. In keeping with my interest in seeking ways to make possible greater inclusion of the disabled, where opportunities for such readings of the sources are available, they are elaborated upon to a greater degree than where such readings are explicitly discredited. . . . [I]dentifying halakhically-sanctioned avenues for greater inclusion is, after all, the ultimate motivation for this study (p. 14).

As an academic, I would be wary of such a proposed doctoral thesis. But since we are now referring to a book for the general reading public, Marx’s honest and subjective approach is legitimate. Marx is far from being a pure legalist. He brings to the reader’s attention not only halakhic texts but also aggadic (homiletical) material that is cited in order to bolster one’s understanding of the halakhic matter. Not only Jewish law is discussed but also Jewish thought. The author sees the aggadah as critical for fully understanding the culture behind the halakhic texts and behind Jewish society’s attitudes toward the disabled. As he notes: “The Aggadic material often indicates the conduct which, though not mandated by law, the community ideally aspires to. Although primarily a study of the law, this work draws heavily on the literature, which I see as the environment within which the law formulates its ruling (p. 12).” The disabled about whom Marx writes include both the physically and mentally impaired: the blind, the deaf, the deaf-mute, the physically deformed, and the mentally retarded. Marx does not mention (except once in passing) one type of illness about which the sources—both legal and extralegal—abound: leprosy and the leper. Perhaps he does not do so because the specific problem of the leper is today all but moot within the Jewish community. Yet Marx does discuss other topics that are not of practical relevance today, including the ordeal of the sotah and various disabilities that exempt the disabled from observing precepts related to the Temple service. This being the case, he should have explained why he omitted a topic, leprosy, that is extensively treated in the legal, philosophical, and homiletical literature. Although there are many important insights and conclusions arrived at in this volume, one of its main contributions is its portrayal of the dissonance within halakhah between the humane outlook of the tradition toward the disabled and the law’s ambivalence toward them. The halakhah excludes disabled individuals from full or from partial participation in various religious activities—a problematical


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matter, since the fulfillment of mitzvot is central to the Jewish religion. For those whose mental facilities are not impaired, such as the blind, this is a particularly formidable blow. But as Marx so poignantly points out, all remain full members of the covenantal community. This all-inclusiveness is not only something in the abstract but also has practical implications, as Marx clearly illustrates by means of specific examples. A certain uneasiness that I have concerning the book’s methodology does not generally apply to the author’s sources. Moreover, Marx’s ends do not necessarily negate the justification of the means he uses. However, in his zeal for finding solutions within the halakhic framework to problems that he poses, Marx is sometimes led to inaccurate readings of the text. Here is one example. Near the end of a discussion regarding the fulfillment of the obligation to procreate—the question being when one is considered as having fulfilled this obligation—Marx is troubled by the halakhic ruling that one has not fulfilled the commandment if one’s progeny are in some way infertile (a son, for example, who is a eunuch, or a daughter who is an ailonit [infertile woman]). Marx writes: “One empathizes with the pain of the eunuch or ailonit at being denied this minimal recognition within the halakhic culture, at this affront to their personal dignity” (p. 336), and then attempts to find a solution to this problem. He points out that the law can be reassessed, and he proposes a halakhic solution. Marx states that just as adoptive children fulfill their adoptive parents’ mitzvah of procreation (with no requirement that they be capable of childbearing), so, too, bearing infertile children should be regarded as a fulfillment of the mitzvah. Unfortunately, the source the author cites regarding adoption—appearing in a footnote but not quoted in the text—does not say what it purportedly says. The source is purely homiletical and not legal; the legal position in Jewish law is that one does not fulfill one’s duty of procreation by adopting a child. Overall, it is refreshing to read a book that is substantially a legal treatise but that integrates aggadah and Jewish thought as part of the legal process or, at least, as part of the legal-cultural background. It is doubly refreshing to encounter the passion of the author, his love for the Jewish tradition, and his usually successful attempt to help us understand the halakhic mindset concerning the disabled. Even if the halakhah itself occasionally seems disabled in the eyes of the author, his love for the tradition conquers all. Shmuel Shilo The Hebrew University

Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001. 201 pp.

Gideon Ofrat has done scholars the great service of scouring the archive of Jacques Derrida’s writings for any hints of his comments on Jews and Judaism, thereby

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discovering the multiple traces of “the Jewish Derrida.” It is no small feat, since in his vast oeuvre, Derrida has approached the topic directly on only a few occasions; apart from his writing on Jewish thinkers (Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Hermann Cohen) and writers (Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabe`s), the Jewish Derrida is a marginal topic. Accordingly, in the massive bibliography on him, only a few articles and chapters in books have previously addressed the subject. However, Ofrat grants himself “the license to argue that Derrida cannot be thoroughly understood without elucidating the Jewish current running through his philosophy” (p. 1), and this contention is the root issue upon which The Jewish Derrida must be judged. Ofrat makes it clear that his project does not entail that the Jewish Derrida is the essence, the primary truth, or the metaphysical center of his work or life, since his philosophy relentlessly deconstructs these categories and his identity does not fit into neat, hermetic compartments. Indeed, Ofrat’s title itself connotes that “the Jewish Derrida” is only one of a heterogeneity of Derridas. A French-Algerian Jew born in 1930, he was raised in a family that was not Orthodox but that observed Jewish customs. Derrida was steeped neither in the texts of the Jewish tradition nor the Hebrew language. At age five, he was sent to a secular elementary school where he began his life-long immersion into French and European culture—only to be stripped of his French citizenship in 1940 and expelled in 1942 as a result of the numerus clausus imposed by the Vichy regime. He emigrated to France just after the Second World War, attending the Lyceé Louis-le-Grand before his admittance in 1952 to the training ground for France’s intellectual elite, the Ećole Normale Superieure, where he would teach from 1964 to 1984 (while simultaneously doing teaching stints abroad). Derrida’s biography can thus be told as a story of “cultural estrangement, lingual estrangement, divorce from tradition, a grueling peregrination between texts and countries (universities).” Within these contexts, Ofrat asks: Was Judaism “an essence from which Derrida was exiled?” (p. 3). Derrida relentlessly demands that we examine our alienation and exile (epistemologically, from truth; existentially, from identity; hermeneutically, from totalized meaning; politically, from utopian freedom; and ethically, in relation to our responsibility for the Other) even as we seek to pursue truth, to realize ourselves, to make meaning, to strive individually and collectively for liberty, and to do the right and the good. These paradoxes, or “double-binds,” are the connecting threads of his expansive corpus and the axis of his deconstructive methodology. Derrida’s writing is talmudic: he writes as a commentator on the texts of others. Understanding his work often depends, therefore, upon knowing what those texts are as well as the tradition of interpreting those sources. This is what makes Derrida one of today’s outstanding critics of the Western philosophical tradition. For the uninitiated, however, the result can be extremely frustrating, because Derrida speaks from within a preexisting and rarified conversation in order to open it in new directions. Moreover, his style is enigmatic and allusive, since one of the philosophical legacies that he seeks to critically expose is the clear and distinct discourse of philosophical logos. Ofrat likewise never stands removed from Derrida’s own texts, structuring his


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book by juxtaposing quotes from Derrida’s writing and weaving his own comments between these fragments. He writes by following the trace of a theme or trope in Derrida’s work. Each short chapter elucidates an element of Derrida’s thinking by elaborating the significance of these themes, which he shows are invariably wound around Jewish motifs. The connections between these topics and the link to Jewish subject matter is sometimes explicit in Derrida and at other times teased out by Ofrat, with his far greater knowledge of the Jewish tradition. The result is that for many readers, especially those not familiar with Derrida’s work (not to mention the philosophical tradition upon which he comments), much of the book will remain opaque. Indeed, Ofrat’s untangling of the multiple and complex Jewish cords in Derrida’s thought offers little promise that the uninitiated will not become tangled in his dense ruminations. The author parses key concepts in Derrida’s oeuvre—deconstruction, diffe´rance, dissemination, death (to only mention the d’s)—and explores their philosophical relationship to significant metaphors—“fire,” “ruins,” “secret,” “spirit,” “wound”— that comprise the woof and warp of Derrida’s thinking. These topics emerge in Ofrat’s exegesis of the major books in which Derrida explores his Jewish identity (Circonfession, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Voiles), but also in the margins of Derrida’s other works. He successfully shows how even Derrida’s peripheral mention of Jewish themes leads to the core issues broached in his philosophy. However, with regard to what Derrida’s deconstruction actually does—as when he seeks to undo the closure of Western metaphysics; to open ethics to the face of the Other; to destabilize the politics of power by valorizing the messianic hope of democracy; to reinfuse play into the struggles of human existence; to expand the possibilities of identity beyond identification—Ofrat says precious little. To the initiates, these themes are familiar. But if you have no idea what they mean or why they matter or why you should care, this book is no primer on deconstruction, and you will find little enlightenment here. Ofrat traverses Derrida’s exploration of his multiple and contradictory (Jewish) identities, in part through Derrida’s extended dissection of the cultural significance of circumcision, including his own. This is correlated to religious experience more generally: According to Derrida, the religious experience is dual: simultaneously phallic and castrating. On the one hand, the holy and the sanctified imply potency, creative power, fertility, might, erection . . . on the other, all three great monotheistic religions are embossed with the seal of the Covenant, invariably the Covenant of circumcision, external or internal, explicit or implicit. Here we find the duality, if not the “double bind,” of religion: affirmation of life (“Thou shalt not kill”) and the command to sacrifice (p. 106).

Ofrat interrogates the duality of the secular and religious in Derrida’s meditations on negative theology and their implications, since questioning the place of God in the metaphysical universe entails a reconsideration of “the place of ‘sun,’ ‘light,’ ‘substance,’ ‘essence,’ and other concepts of absolute truth (represented in Western culture by masculine images!)” (p. 63). He investigates Derrida’s deliberations on language and translation, writing and reading, and what these indicate about de-

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constructive hermeneutics. The philosophical issues are, of course, interrogated by articulating the differences between Derrida and Heidegger, Levinas, Hegel, and Kant, among others. If there is a thesis that Ofrat pursues it is that his analysis paradoxically “goes to show that aloofness from Judaism, and an affinity thereto, exist within one another in Derrida’s world, even if the aloofness is professed, while the affinity comes to light as [the] residue of concepts and values, as remnants, as traces” (p. 141). Ultimately, Ofrat convinces us not that understanding Derrida entails an appreciation of his affinity for Jewish values, but rather that already understanding him is a precondition for admiring Ofrat’s subtle reading of Derrida through a Jewish lens. Moreover, he is not always successful at showing how an appreciation of Derrida enriches our understanding of Jews and Judaism. Notwithstanding, Ofrat has helped to lay the foundation for further investigation of the Jewish hues within Derrida’s philosophy. Jonathan Judaken University of Memphis

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

Eli Lederhendler (ed.), The Six-Day War and World Jewry (Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture, vol. 8). Bethesda: The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry and the University Press of Maryland, 2000. viii ⫹ 340 pp.

The Yom Kippur and Lebanon wars, the Gulf War and the war in Iraq, suicide bombings, the rousing and dashing of hopes for peace between Israel and the Arabs, two intifadas, and the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere have eclipsed memory of the Israeli triumph in the Six-Day War. All but forgotten is the euphoria that gripped the Jewish world in 1967, the sense that the age-old powerlessness that had culminated in the Holocaust had finally been laid to rest. That the war was a watershed in Israeli and Jewish history and a catalyst for change is now often overlooked. Eli Lederhendler’s collection of essays relating to reverberations of the war in the diaspora is a timely recollection of the significance of the 1967 victory. Written by some of the most highly regarded scholars of contemporary Jewry (unfortunately not identified at any length in the book), the essays vary in scope and size. For example, the extensive surveys of the impact of the war on the organizational life of Canadian Jewry and the pro-Zionist Argentinian community by Harold Waller and Haim Avni, respectively, offer wide overviews of two middle-sized diaspora Jewries. In contrast, “Jewish Cultural Confidence in American Letters: A Writer’s Thoughts” by Nessa Rapoport and “Polish Jewry, the Six-Day War, and the Crisis of 1968” by Daniel Blatman examine specific, limited, contextual aspects of Jewish experience that were only lightly touched by the war. While all of the essays are helpful in reconstructing that seemingly remote historical crossroads, some serve to remind readers of the extent to which even critical junctures have a past and a future. Judith Friedlander’s essay notes that French Jews were “targeted for terrorist aggression” already in the late 1970s. More significantly, she elaborates on the failure of the Six-Day War to affect positively the largely unpalatable alternatives offered to the Jewish minority by a France that, to this day, disparages diversity and has a heritage of antisemitism—whether these alternatives be ultra-Orthodoxy, total assimilation, vicarious Jewishness (Zionism), or an artificial secular life rooted in another time and place. For his part, Blatman shows that, on the surface, the Six-Day War appeared to precipitate the elimination of all that remained of Polish Jewry. In reality, however, the “final solution” to Poland’s Jewish problem had been well prepared; at most, the war sped up the 383

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process while providing the pretext for the demonization of Israel and the Jews in 1968. Milton Shain’s piece on South Africa, appropriately titled “Consolidating the Consolidated,” emphasizes the ways in which the war reinforced the already solid Zionist commitments of South African Jews. Chaim Waxman stresses continuity of a different sort in the United States. He notes that many American Jews have no affiliation with the Jewish community and seldom express their Jewish connections in a tangible way. On them, he argues, the Six-Day War had a “limited impact.” (Whether he is correct is open to question. Those on the periphery are beyond the easy reach of researchers, and their attitudes and behavior are consequently hard to gauge. Nessa Rapoport suggests a different reading of the events, pointing to the subtle ways in which American Jewish writers and intellectuals were affected by the war.) In contrast, Canadian Jewry, as Waller describes it, underwent profound and extensive change in the wake of the war. Waller rightly claims that the war stiffened the backbone of Canadian Jews, making them less passive, more willing to assert their concerns and interests. The increasing openness and diversity of Canadian society in the post-Second World War era laid the groundwork for the shift, but the example of Israel’s courage and success hastened it along considerably. More tangibly, the institutional structure of the Canadian community was transformed substantially and irrevocably by the needs of the hour. The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), the Canadian Zionist Federation (CZF), and B’nai Brith joined together to form the Canada Israel Committee in order to lobby in Ottawa on behalf of the Jewish state. Israel’s increased financial needs led to the strengthening of plutocratic community federations in Canada, which were highly effective in fundraising. (The CJC, which had served as the democratic representative organization of Canada’s Jews since the 1930s, but which was not primarily oriented towards fund-raising, was overwhelmed, and the CZF, once among the most successful Zionist organizations in the world, declined into obsolescence.) Since 1967, the widespread consensus regarding the importance of Israel to Canadian Jewry has held firm. Yet the altered geopolitical situation in the Middle East has ruptured Canadian Jewish community discipline and has given rise to different approaches to the support of Israel. Manifestations of this development are the appearance of new organizations such as Canadian Friends of Peace Now and the New Israel Committee. Essays in the volume by Mordechai Altshuler and Zvi Gitelman describe reactions to the war in the former Soviet Union. These two scholars had access to documents that would have been unavailable to them before the fall of Communism. They found little that was unexpected, but they were able to confirm previous assumptions and thereby legitimate earlier analyses. Gitelman’s sources reveal the extent to which the Arab defeat shook confidence in Soviet technology and policy, while both he and Altshuler highlight the wide variety of Soviet Jewish responses to the war. Essays on Mexico and the Muslim world, a second essay on Argentina, others on demography and economics, and an introduction by the editor that contextual-


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izes the essays round out the volume. The last section of the book is a useful, if short, annotated bibliography prepared by Haim Avni and Jeffrey Mandl. Michael Brown York University

Asher Naim, Saving the Lost Tribe: The Rescue and Redemption of the Ethiopian Jews. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. 266 pp.

In May 1991, in one of the finest chapters in Zionist history, Israel masterminded a brilliant operation in which 14,310 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in a singularly courageous airlift as the future both of Jews in Ethiopia and of the Ethiopian government headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam were hanging in the balance. The pictures recurring on television screens throughout the world— thousands of handsome Jewish men, women, and children in traditional costume, with numbers imprinted on their foreheads, silently filing into airplanes in order to fulfill the ancient dream of emigrating to Israel—remain imprinted in Israeli collective memory. In Saving the Lost Tribe, Asher Naim, the Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia at the time, describes that dramatic airlift and reveals fascinating, behind-the-scenes information on how the operation was negotiated and how it was eventually implemented. There are marvelous descriptions of Addis Abeba: the smell of manure mixed with smoke, the cypress groves, and the encroaching rebels. There are moving vignettes of Jews encamped in the capital city, the clinic that was opened to counter meningitis, yellow fever, tetanus, and hepatitis among them, and the magical beliefs observed by the Beta Israel, as they are now called in academic circles.1 History is woven into the story in a natural manner, enabling the reader to learn with ease about Beta Israel religious customs and their unique way of life in the Ethiopian villages. The book’s greatest contribution is the hitherto unconfirmed details it offers of the process leading up to the airlift. For instance, Naim writes that the wife of Kasa Kebede, the Ethiopian minister in charge of the negotiations with the Israeli government (and Mengistu Haile Mariam’s chief adviser), did indeed apply to come and live in Israel herself. A matter of much greater speculation, namely, the destination of $35,000,000 paid in return for the release of the Beta Israel, is plainly stated, perhaps for the first time. According to Naim, Kasa Kebede at first provided a false bank account in New York to which the money should be transferred. The account number was different from the official Ethiopian government account number: It took Kasa more than two hours to finally come up with the correct number. We took maximum precautions to ensure that no one, but no one, except “the legal government

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Book Reviews

of Ethiopia” could touch the money. It was in an account that could only be released by the State Department’s confirmation of a legal and recognized government after the London peace conference. We could only hope that the money would be spent for the benefit of Ethiopia’s poor (p. 219).

In hindsight, one cannot help raising an eyebrow at the naı¨vete´ of the Israeli establishment; yet it is also the case that, without the transfer of huge sums of money (to whatever destination), the Ethiopian Jews would not be in Israel today and Israeli society would not be benefiting from their rich culture. Written in a dramatic documentary style that is both gripping and informative, Saving the Lost Tribe is clearly not intended to be a scholarly text and is thus difficult to judge according to academic criteria. At times, for instance, true stories appear to be conflated into a single narrative, a technique that is very different from critically reporting information gleaned from archives, interviews, or focus groups. Naim’s book, moreover, is one of many that have been published, or are in the process of being written, on the three airlifts (Operation Moses in 1984– 1985, Operation Sheba in 1985, and Operation Solomon in 1991) that brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel.2 To date, the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency consul in Addis Abeba, the American Association of Ethiopian Jews, the Mossad, and various individuals have all been credited (usually by themselves), in tracts of various quality, with the definitive role of “rescuing” Ethiopian Jewry in 1991. Saving the Lost Tribe is the latest in this series of attempts to claim a central role for the author in the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry. In the bound galley version of the book in my possession, the jacket cover states that the book was written “by the Israeli ambassador who made it happen.” On the back flap of the published edition, Naim is credited with a quest “to free his fellow Jews from tyranny” and with “helping the Falashas realize their three-thousand-year-old dream of returning to Jerusalem.” Apart from implying a dubious date of origin to the Beta Israel, such a statement gives no credit to the countless Ethiopian Jews, and others in Israel and abroad, who worked selflessly to bring about the aliyah of Ethiopian Jewry.3 Although Naim thanks his “very talented collaborator, who skillfully assisted” him in writing his book, Saving the Lost Tribe contains an amazing number of misspellings and grammatical errors (among them, “Allemby” for Allenby; “londoners” for Londoners; and “the person in charge of the blackmailing us”), as well as some surprising terminology. Today, it is accepted practice to refer to the Jews in Ethiopia as Beta Israel and in Israel as “Ethiopian Jews.” Naim, despite a note to the reader in which he apologizes in advance for his use of the appellation, designates them throughout as “Falashas,” a term they consider demeaning. Furthermore, Naim many times refers to Ethiopian Jews as “black” Jews, although they themselves, according to their indigenous classifications, do not perceive themselves as being black.4 Perhaps none of this would be significant in an ordinary book, but this volume goes to great lengths both to be politically correct and to demonstrate the warm relationship that Naim maintained, and apparently continues to maintain, with Ethiopian Jews. An extraordinary aspect of this book is its mystical title and tone. Naim asserts

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that he uses the word “redemption” in its literal sense of the “buying back” of another’s freedom. It is interesting to note that Ethiopian scholars have viewed the Jewish emigration from an entirely different perspective.5 Moreover, judging by some of the problems besetting the community in Israel, which are reported at the end of the book, it is unclear whether they in fact have been redeemed. Naim, who is also a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Finland, and South Korea (and who, ironically, after aiding others to emigrate to Israel, “now divides his time between Israel and the United States,” according to the jacket blurb on the bound galley), finishes his book thus: “The prophecies were not just words. For two thousand years [note: not “three thousand,” as in the back flap] we had been waiting for this moment, and it had arrived. The last [note: not “lost”] tribe had come home” (pp. 263–264). In this post-Zionist era, perhaps Operation Solomon was indeed the last great Zionist event. Even so, we are still awaiting a definitive academic work on the subject, one that will analyze objectively the politics behind Operation Solomon, based on interviews with army personnel, Ethiopian Jews, Ethiopian officials, American and Canadian organizations, and Mossad agents who helped organize the airlift; that will place Operation Solomon in ideological perspective; and that will document the passages and experiences of the Ethiopian Jews who left one Zion6 to come to another. Shalva Weil The Hebrew University

Notes 1. For a discussion of the different designations of Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia, see Shalva Weil, “Collective Designations and the Collective Identity of Ethiopian Jews,” in Ethiopian Jews in the Limelight, ed. Shalva Weil (Jerusalem: 1997), 35–48. 2. Recently, two works that are more scholarly in nature have been published. Gadi BenEzer’s The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977–1985 (London: 2002) deals with the journey made by thousands to the Sudan prior to Operation Moses (1984–1985); whereas Mitchell G. Bard’s From Tragedy to Triumph: The Politics behind the Rescue of Ethiopian Jewry (Westport: 2002) focuses on some of the political negotiations (primarily in the Jewish world) behind the airlifts, devoting only 15 pages to Operation Solomon. An as yet unpublished manuscript by Stephen Spector features an interview with Asher Naim, who is one of the central figures in the narrative. 3. Uri Lubrani, for example, is described in the book as a “high-level Israeli official in the Ministry of Defence” (p. 3), but no mention is made of his ambassadorial career and little is noted of his central role in making the airlift possible. 4. Haim Rosen, “On the Work of a Government Anthropologist among the Ethiopian Jews,” in Weil (ed.), Ethiopian Jews in the Limelight, 65–66. 5. Teshome Wagaw, “The International Ramifications of Falasha Emigration,” Journal of Modern African Studies 29, no. 4, 557–581. 6. Ethiopia is considered “the second Zion”; see Edward Ullendorff, The Two Zions: Reminiscences of Jerusalem and Ethiopia (Oxford: 1988).

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Book Reviews

Chanan Reich, Australia and Israel: An Ambiguous Relationship. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. 167 pp.

As a young man attending Melbourne University law school, I remember hearing an address delivered by Prime Minister Robert Menzies at a dinner arranged by the Melbourne Jewish community. This was in 1957, shortly after the Suez War. Menzies had been in London in the previous year to participate in the creation of the Suez Canal Association in response to Gamal abd al-Nasser’s dramatic nationalization of the Suez Canal. Anthony Eden, the prime minister of Great Britain, had requested Menzies to stop off in Cairo on his way back home and “read the riot act” to the Egyptian dictator, warning him of the fateful consequences that could be triggered by his seizure of the canal. Instead of a red carpet, Menzies had encountered a scornful Nasser who snubbed the Australian prime minister by keeping him waiting several hours, and who then contemptuously dismissed his threats as the last blasts of a dying imperialism. Humiliated, Menzies had returned home. Shortly thereafter, Israel launched its lightning strike into the Sinai, followed by the British and French intervention aimed at regaining control of the canal. As a result of American opposition, the Anglo-French expedition collapsed and only Israel emerged with significant achievements in its search for security in the face of the Egyptian threat. Menzies had never been particularly well disposed to the Jewish community, as Reich’s study makes clear. In fact, he had earlier stymied the entry into Australia of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe and, prior to its establishment, had never displayed any support for the notion of an independent Jewish state. As the documentation reveals, he had been even more adamant than the British government in opposing Jewish sovereignty. But the circumstances were drastically different now, and Israel had emerged as an ally in a common front to dislodge Nasser. The Jewish community was proud of Israel’s military prowess in defeating the Egyptian army and in expelling it from the Sinai, while Menzies was pleased that someone had taken Nasser on and had given him a black eye. There was cause for mutual celebration, and the dinner and address testified to a shared interest. It is perhaps one of the ironies of history that Eden and Menzies had come to look to Israel to spare them from disgrace. Both men had been instrumental in promoting the British policy of barring the entry of Jews into Palestine, but now they discovered that Israel’s cause was theirs, too. Eden, of course, was driven from office as a result of the Suez debacle, and Menzies, while he did not suffer such a fate, never fully restored his reputation, which had been badly bruised by his confrontation with Nasser. Reich also charts the checkered career of Herbert Evatt, Australia’s foreign minister during the 1940s, in relation to the creation of the Jewish state. It seems clear that Evatt played a major role in promoting the cause of Jewish statehood at the United Nations. He steered the 1947 partition resolution around the numerous shoals that might have grounded it, and he helped secure the two-thirds vote needed to ensure adoption of the resolution by the General Assembly. However, in 1949, he ordered the Australian delegation at the General Assembly to present a draft


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resolution calling for the internationalization of Jerusalem. This was an amazing proposal, since by that time Jerusalem was divided between two sovereign states, Jordan and Israel, neither of which was prepared to relinquish control of its sector in the city. There was no outside force that could possibly compel these states to transfer the administration of the city to some international body. Consequently, although the internationalization resolution was adopted by the General Assembly, its implementation was stillborn. Israel was deeply disappointed that a stalwart friend such as Evatt could initiate and promote a scheme that Israel felt would adversely affect the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and that could even threaten the cause of Jewish sovereignty. The key to the paradox, as Reich makes clear, was to be found in the domestic scene in Australia. Faced with approaching elections to the Australian parliament, Evatt’s Labour party was in dire straits. Desperately searching for some means of increasing support, the foreign minister’s thoughts turned to the Catholic community, a traditional ally of Labour. He reasoned that by endorsing the internationalization of Jerusalem, a cause strongly promoted by the Vatican, he would endear himself to the Catholic voters and ensure the return of Labour to power. Thus, in this instance, domestic politics produced a foreign policy initiative that, it was hoped, would dramatically alter the balance of forces in the electorate. As it happened, adoption of the resolution affected neither matters in Jerusalem, which remained divided as before between Jordan and Israel, nor the fate of the Labour party, which was turned out of office. Reich subtitles his book “An Ambiguous Relationship”—an appellation fully justified on the basis of his review of Australia’s policy toward Jewish refugees seeking entry into Australia or Palestine and its policy with regard to the creation and security of the state of Israel. Clearly, while Australian-Israeli relations have been basically cordial, there have been instances in which, beneath the surface (and at times more overtly), Australia’s policies have been anything but helpful to the interests of the Jewish state. All this merely confirms the adage that in international relations there are no permanent friends but only permanent interests, which are accommodated by shifting alliances depending on the prevailing situation. In his search for the factors that prompted the fluctuations in the relationship between the two states, Reich has plumbed the archival sources in Canberra, Jerusalem, and London, and his study draws on a rich lode of original material. This is not a superficial study based on impressions, hearsay, or mere interviews, but a careful analysis of the documentary record. Nor is it tainted with senseless jargon about international relations that is designed to make an author appear ultrasophisticated while effectively masking a paucity of original thought and analysis. Australia and Israel is a solid study that fills a void in the literature, and its appearance is to be applauded. At the same time, Reich would be the first to acknowledge that his work is not exhaustive. For one thing, resorting to archival sources means that the book is limited in its timeframe. It does not go beyond the period of the Six-Day War of 1967, and this event is also not examined in the same depth as are those of earlier periods. Moreover, there are some episodes that might justly have been included in this study, since they bear directly on the subject of the creation of a Jewish

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state. One such case is the confrontation between a young professor of international law at Sydney University, Julius Stone, and the former governor general of Australia, Sir Isaac Isaacs, over the right of the Jews in Palestine to attain their own state. Isaacs, who had served as a judge on the high court of Australia before becoming the first native-born Australian to assume the exalted position of governor general, was without question the most prominent Jew in Australia. Concerned that he and his fellow Jews could be accused of dual loyalty, he condemned the struggle for Jewish nationhood under the British Mandate on the grounds that it conflicted with the imperial aims of the British empire. Julius Stone, as junior as he was, wrote a pamphlet titled “Stand Up and Be Counted” in defense of the Jewish cause. In it, he highlighted the desperate plight of the Jewish refugees under the heels of the Nazi program of extermination and stressed that the land of Israel was now their sole country of refuge. He called upon his fellow religionists to ardently support the right of the homeless Jews to return to their ancient homeland. This was an extraordinarily courageous act on the part of the young professor, who went on to become a legend in his lifetime as an outstanding authority both in the field of jurisprudence and international law and as a stalwart fighter for Israel. Australia, as Reich points out, has had a vital interest in the Middle East for many years. Strategically, the area serves as a gateway to the United Kingdom in particular and Europe generally, and its economic importance as the repository of much of the world’s oil is patent. The significance that Australia attaches to the fate of the region is amply underscored by the heavy engagement of Australian forces there in both world wars. Australian soldiers were warmly welcomed by the Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa as well as in the kibbutzim, and the associations formed then provided a fruitful basis for later ties after the Jewish state was proclaimed. All of this is charted in Reich’s book, and it contributes to making his work a most welcome study of a close, albeit fluctuating, relationship between two friendly democracies. Shlomo Slonim The Hebrew University

Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz, and Jay Harris (eds.), ’Idan haziyonut (The age of Zionism). Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History (in cooperation with the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, and the Jacob and Libby Goodman Institute for the Study of Zionism, Brandeis University), 2000. 355 pp.

The essays gathered in this rich and colorful collection add significantly to our knowledge and understanding of Zionism, though its lack of focus makes the book somewhat diffuse. The 17 essays collected here discuss a wide range of aspects, spanning the entire 20th century and covering the globe. Some of the essays are


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clearly theoretical, some strictly descriptive. As there is no prominent question, theme, or major event around which the volume coheres, a division of the book into parts would have mitigated its sprawling nature, as would a sophisticated subject index. The chapters that center on Zionist ideology are those by Anita Shapira (on Herzl), Hedva Ben-Israel (a comparative analysis), Gideon Shimoni (on the negation of the diaspora), Shmuel Almog and Henry Near (both on pioneering), and Aviva Halamish (on the “selective immigration” issue). Essays devoted chiefly to literary and cultural subjects are by Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Avner Holtzman, David Roskies, and Alan Mintz. Zionist policy is discussed by Derek Penslar (on social policy), Joseph Heller (on the Arab question), and Shmuel Sandler (on the Yishuv’s foreign policy). Two contributors deal with Israeli themes: Esther Meir-Glitzenstein (the absorption of Iraqi Jews in Israel) and Hanna Yablonka (the consciousness of the Holocaust in Israel). Shimoni’s discussion of the “negation of the diaspora” and Jehuda Reinharz’s “Zionism as a Jewish Identity” could have served as organizing themes for a collection devoted to the age of Zionism. In this volume, though, they are isolated essays, comprising in a way a preface that calls for further development of the cardinal questions they raise, which are especially relevant to Western Jewries and Western patterns of Zionism. The massive historic event that undoubtedly closes “the century of Zionism”— the aliyah of about one million Russian Jews—is not mentioned in this volume. This neglect is glaring in a book that begins and ends with essays on Herzl and Herzlian Zionism. David Vital’s concluding essay, “Zionism as a Revolution? Zionism as a Rebellion?” keenly analyzes Herzl’s brand of Zionism; he also calls for a renewal today of classic Zionism as a revolutionary force for kibuz galuyot (ingathering of the exiles) in Israel, the historic homeland of the Jewish people. But again, the dramatic phenomenon that so powerfully vindicates Herzl’s vision of an exodus—the mass immigration of Russian Jews to Israel—is missing. Obviously, the discussions of Herzl at both ends of the volume, important as they are, are not enough to make this collection sufficiently comprehensive. Allon Gal Ben-Gurion University

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

XXI Edited by Eli Lederhendler

Symposium—Jews and Catholics: Dialogue and Confrontation since the Second World War Graciela Ben-Dror, The Catholic Church and the Jews in Postwar Brazil Manuela Consonni, The Church and the Memory of the Holocaust Andre´ Kaspi, Jules Isaac and His Role in Jewish-Christian Relations Michael Marrus, A Plea Unanswered: Jacques Maritain, Pope Pius XII, and the Holocaust Joanna Michlic and Antony Polonsky, Catholicism and the Jews in PostCommunist Poland Kenneth Wald, Toward a Structural Explanation of Jewish-Catholic Political Differences in the United States Joshua Zeitz, Communist! Fascist! New York Jews and Catholics Fight the Cold War Genevie`ve Zubrzycki, “Poles-Catholics” and “Symbolic Jews”: Jewishness as Social Closure in Poland . . . plus essays, review essays, and book reviews

392

Note on Editorial Policy

Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts for possible publication. Authors of essays on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the 20th century to the present) should send two copies to: The Editor, Studies in Contemporary Jewry The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry The Hebrew University Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905 Essays should not exceed 35 pages in length and must be double-spaced throughout (including intended quotations and endnotes). E-mail inquiries may be sent to the following address: [email protected] Abstracts of articles from previous issues may be found via our website: http://icj.huji.ac.il/StudiesCJ/studiescj.html

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Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism

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