Zydokomuna Influence Far Beyond Percentages Gitelman

The Quest for Utopia: Jewish Political Ideas and Institutions Through the Ages: Jewish Political Ideas and Institutions Through the Ages, by Zvi Y. Gitelman (Contributor). 1992

Jewish Revolutionaries Had a Much Greater Impact Than Their Numbers Suggest. The Zydokomuna Wore Many Political Guises. Jewish Germanophilia

This work is much more broad-based than its title would suggest. It deals with the Jewish political vision, ranging from religious to secular, and that amongst Jews in many nations. The most interesting chapter, in my opinion, is that of Jonathan Frankel. It covers Jewish politics from 1840 to 1939. Frankel is identified as professor of Russian studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. (p. xiii). My review focuses on his essay.

THE PRO-GERMAN ORIENTATION OF WESTERN POLAND’S JEWS

Poles had long complained that, after the Partitions, Jews generally sided with Poland’s enemies. Jonathan Frankel bears this out as he describes the Germanophilia of the Jews of German-ruled northwest Poland. He comments, (quote) As for the Posen [Poznan] area, annexed to Prussia, there the Jews, in very large part, took the opportunity to migrate westward, above all to Berlin. Even those who remained came to see themselves, for the most part, as Germans by allegiance, alienated from the local Polish population, and Jewish by religion alone. (unquote). (pp. 87-88).

JEWS AS THE “OTHER”: INCREASINGLY-AGGRESSIVE SEPARATISM

Recurring complaints that Poles saw their Jews as the “other” overlook the fact that Jews very much also thought themselves as the “other”, since antiquity, and acted accordingly. Furthermore, in the 19th century, Jewish particularism and separatism became increasingly overt and actively politicized (Frankel’s term: p. 94). The “Jews as nationality” concept went far beyond Zionism. Frankel writes, (quote) For their part (again according to the received wisdom), the East European Jews developed a radically different type of political culture. Their definition of Jewish peoplehood as national, not religious, in nature had implications of the most radical kind. Nationhood inevitably carried with it, in the modern world at least, a latent claim to national self-determination–a separate political and cultural existence. Minimally, this meant that the Russian and Austrian empires would have to be reconstituted as a federation of nationalities in which the Jewish people would enjoy some form of national autonomy…Political programs of this type were clearly revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary in nature…(unquote).(p. 83). Of course, the same thing happened in Poland after her resurrection in 1918, with many Jews effectively wanting to be effectively a separate nation on Polish soil. This facilitated the concept of Judeopolonia, and prompted the Endek slogan that, “There is no room on the Vistula [Wisla] for two nations.”

JEWISH REVOLUTIONARIES: SOME PERCENTAGES

Now consider what sometimes is called the Zydokomuna. Frankel (p. 90) cites Hebrew-language works that estimate that 30% of revolutionaries arrested, in the early 20th century, by the tsarist Russian authorities, were Jews. This was in an empire in which Jews were about 2% of the population.

JEWISH REVOLUTIONARIES FAR MORE SIGNIFICANT THAN THEIR NUMBERS!

In addition, Frankel realizes that assimilation did not necessarily imply an affinity for the host nation (another fact stressed by Endeks), and implicitly rejects the implications of the commonly voiced “very few Jews were revolutionaries” exculpation. He comments, (quote) The term “assimilationist”, so often used tendentiously, really did apply to most of the Jews in this particular category, who, being committed materialists, atheists, left-wing Nietzcheans, or simply root-and-branch antitraditionalists, considered Judaism as a religion to be noxious and the idea of Jewish nationality to be a reactionary fiction. In numerical terms, revolutionaries of this type obviously constituted a miniscule percentage of the Jewish people. One is talking of a few thousand, after all. But, throughout, their significance in Jewish life and politics was vastly greater than their strength in numbers. The highly prominent role played by revolutionary Jews–from Aron Zudelevich and Hessia Helfman at the time of the assassination of Alexander II, to Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, and Rosa Luxemburg during the revolution and civil war–meant that the “internationalist” alternative to autonomous Jewish politics was always powerfully represented on the left. (unquote). (pp. 90-91).

THE ZYDOKOMUNA, AS IN POLAND, WORE MANY DIFFERENT POLITICAL GUISES

Of course, politically active Jewish revolutionaries were hardly limited to outright Communists. For instance, Jonathan Frankel characterized the Bund of interwar Poland, in his words, as “always a would-be revolutionary Marxist party” (p. 93). Furthermore, (quote) …in interwar Poland, it cooperated with the left Poale Zion in the Yiddish school movement, Tsisho [Cysho, Tsysho]…the Bund, which combined Jewish nationalism with would-be orthodox Marxism. (unquote). (p. 98).

JEWISH INFLUENCE AT THE INTERNATIONAL LEVEL

Common pejorative references to “international Jewry”–and nebulous conspiracy theories that go as far as accusing influential Jews of controlling the world’s governments–have tended to obscure a rational understanding of high-level Jewish influence. So let us examine this subject objectively.

Jonathan Frankel touches on the growth of Jewish influence at the international scale. (pp. 86-87). He describes the emergence of influential, western-oriented Jewish groups in St. Petersburg and Moscow, including the St. Petersburg magnates, the Ginzburgs and the Poliakovs. Frankel describes their ties to similar influential western Jews, (quote) Up until the 1917 revolutions, this elite continued to serve as the key to the elites of Western Jewry whether for the receipt and distribution of emergency relief funds or for the exchange of political advice. Joined by ties of friendship, mutual confidence, joint financial interests, and even, in some cases, by marriage, to the world of the Schiffs, Rothschilds, Swaythlings, and Warburgs, they actually represented an integral unit of the subsystem of Jewish politics that (however anomalously in this case) is associated with the West. (unquote). (p. 87).