By Enzo Traverso
Translated by Bernard Gibbons
Brill, [2018]
The below are my underlinings/highlightings of Traverso. My own thoughts appear, if at all, as [N.B.].
Jay
Chapter 5: Jewish Marxism
Vladimir Medem
....Unlike the traditional anti-Judaism, modern mass anti-Semitism was opposed to assimilation. Taking a clear racist connotation, it did not demand the Russification of the Jews, but rather their exclusion from Russian society: 'Elsewhere national oppression tends toward the denationalisation of a particular ethnic group, toward incorporating it into the nation, toward eliminating its specificities. The case of the Jew is different.
Not only does anti-Semitism not seek to assimilate the Jews, but it is directly opposed to assimilation'.62 This tendency resulted in a whole set of discriminatory laws limiting the rights of Jews in the areas of residence, some professional activities and so on. In other words – and this revealed its vicious character –
this new anti-Semitism acted as a policy of denationalisation: the tsarist regime did not try to impose Russian culture on the Jews but prevented them from developing their own. The Jews thus found themselves at an impasse: 'They can neither become Russian nor remain Jewish'.63 According to Medem, Russian anti-Semitism was the tsarist reaction to the development of a Jewish 'modern cultural nation' under the impulsion of the workers' movement.
Medem was the first Marxist of his time to reject the dogma of assimilation.
He stressed the national character of the Eastern European Jews and claimed cultural national autonomy for them in the framework of Diaspora, where they had developed Yiddish as a modern national language. He never denied the historical reality of the assimilation of the Jews in the West. In his eyes, the Bund was a socialist party of the Jewish workers of the Tsarist Empire, certainly not –
in the manner of Poale Zion – a sort of Jewish workers' International.
Ber Borokhov
....Socialist Zionism was principally rooted in the southern areas of the Pale of Settlement, notably in Ukraine, where the Bund and the Russian social democracy had a weaker presence among the Jewish workers, and it thus succeeded in filling a political vacuum.
....Within socialist Zionism, however, only Borokhov could be qualified as a Marxist. Syrkin claimed a kind of vague humanistic socialism and Zhitlovsky never abandoned populism; their attitude towards Marx's ideas could be either indifferent or positive, but they never tried to participate in the Marxist debate.
....It did not make sense to suppress the legal discriminations against the Jews if the real and profound causes of anti-Semitism remained untouched. Thus, the abolition of the Pale of Settlement would only have resulted in the flourishing of anti-Semitism throughout Russia.
....scientific-technical progress was not inevitably the bearer of 'moral' and social progress, but that on the contrary it included the possibility of a modern 'degeneration' of which the Jews would be the victims. The return of the Jews to Palestine, which was not yet rationally motivated by socio-economic terms, was derived from a messianic ideal and conceived as the re-composition of an original harmony shattered by the Diaspora.
....Borokhov's first Marxist work was Class Interests and the National Question, published in Vilnius in 1905 in both Russian and Yiddish. This ambitious essay did not deal directly with Jewish issues, but it sketched the outlines of a Marxist theory of nation and nationalism that already contained the core of Borokhovism.
....His starting point was the concept of 'conditions of production', which set the framework in which the productive forces of society grew and developed and in which given relations of production were consequently established. These conditions of production, which thus represented the primary base of any economic and social system, were hierarchically enumerated in the following order: geographical (climatic-physical); anthropological (race); historical (the development of a human community, its internal relations, and so on). The historical conditions of production, the last in this series that sometimes reminds one of (and also anticipates) Fernand Braudel's
' longue durée'
....At the same time, Borokhov shared his stress on territory – the irreplaceable
'material base' of the nation – with both Kautsky and Stalin. Differently from the Bund, which identified the Jewish nation with the Yiddishkeit, stressing its origins and the historical peculiarities that distinguished it from most Western European nations, Kautsky, Stalin, and Borokhov naturalised nations by explaining them through a rigid deterministic causality (geographical, economic, cultural, psychological, etc.).
....Assimilation had been an active tendency at the time of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, when the Jews exercised an essential socio-economic function as market agents and could play a role in a continent not yet divided into developed nations. The great exodus of the Jews toward Eastern Europe took place when the rise of capitalism in the West meant there was no further need for their services. Before, their profession had distinguished them from the rest of the population, but in the modern world their social parasitic character isolated them and prevented their assimilation. Thus, the Jews developed a national consciousness without disposing of the necessary material conditions to live like other nations. According to Borokhov: During the first period of industrial capitalism, the factor of assimilation was largely dominant in Jewish life. The industrial revolution brought down the walls of the ghetto, opening to the Jews the broad space of free competition. The epoch of the decisive collision between capitalism and feudalism was, at the same time, the golden age of Jewish assimilation. However, a little later, an implacable corrective of individual specialization, national specialization, made its appearance, and assimilation began to give way to isolation. All the Jewish assimilationists are basically utopians and swim against the real current of the Jewish historical dynamic. The growing national specialization does not assimilate the Jew, but, on the contrary, nationalizes him
....'Our Platform', Borokhov interpreted both anti-Semitism and Jewish nationalism as historical tendencies that condemned the idea of assimilation as illusory, but he still defined the Jewish nation negatively, by its lack of a territory
....1915 he published an important History of Yiddish Literature. Gradually his conception of the Jewish nation became charged with a positive cultural content, linked primarily to language. Different from a Yiddish defender like Zhitlovsky, he did not hold Hebrew in contempt, continuing to attribute a significant 'spiritual' function to the sacred language ( loshn kdush), but now he saw Yiddish as the mirror of Jewish national life....
....the Jewish proletariat remained structurally weak, and its exclusion from mechanised industry was the fundamental cause of its political impotence. Jewish workers who went on strike could neither paralyse the economy nor significantly affect social life. Without a territorial unity, a Jewish national economy could not exist, and that deprived the political action of the workers of a 'strategic base'.
....Mass emigration was the inevitable consequence of the expulsion of the Jews from industry. In the United States, France, and England they vaguely foresaw a concrete solution to their growing impoverishment, but emigration was a tramp when the same economic anomaly reappeared in the country in which they settled. Borokhov gave the example of the United States, where the Jewish workers experienced 'a much more unilateral development than in Russia … and were concentrated exclusively in clothing'.100 The United States did not break the fatal law of the Diaspora: deprived of a territory of their own, even in America, the Jews had to adapt themselves to a body of 'external conditions of production', which perpetuated their national anomaly and oppression.
....Why, then, Palestine? Borokhov tried to justify this choice with rational rather than theological arguments. As a semi-agricultural country, Palestine presented the ideal economic conditions for the Zionist colonisation, and furthermore offered some cultural advantages non-existent in other countries.
....In spite of his criticism of 'bourgeois' Zionism, he shared with Herzl and Nordau the 'vision of the non-European world as a space to be colonized' (Maxime Rodinson).
....Borokhov did not avoid collaboration with the Jewish bourgeoisie. As the planning of a spontaneous migratory movement, Zionist colonisation had to combine two distinct moments, one 'constructive' and the other 'liberating'. The bourgeoisie could have accomplished the first one ( di shafende momenten) in developing the productive forces of the country, which meant concentrating capital and the labour force; the proletariat would have realised the second one ( die befreiende momenten) in leading the global process of colonisation.
....Borokhov rejected any possible encounter between the Jewish and non-Jewish proletariat. The danger, he wrote, was not represented 'by big foreign capital (large-scale industry) but by the foreign proletarianisation of the country'.
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