Reading notes on Chapter Intermezzo in The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate By Enzo Traverso

The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate 

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 Intermezzo: The Jews and the Russian Revolution (1917–37)

....One of the first measures adopted by the provisional government was the suppression of the anti-Semitic legislation in force under the old regime: a total of 650 laws limiting the civic rights of the Jewish population, as Trotsky noted in his History of the Russian Revolution.

....People's Commissariat of Nationalities – led by Stalin – established a Jewish section. Its leader was Simon Dimanshtein, an old Bolshevik who spoke Yiddish – he had received the title of rabbi before becoming an atheist Marxist – but had never participated in Jewish political life. To make up for such serious limits, he asked for the collaboration of Samuel Agurskj, a Socialist Jew just returned from the United States.

....During the civil war, between 1918 and 1921, the Russian Jews gradually shifted from an attitude of mistrust, indeed hostility, to substantial support for the Soviet regime.

.... A wave of extremely violent pogroms swept throughout Ukraine, which in 1917 had been an experimental ground for Jewish cultural national autonomy. Initially, most Jewish parties supported the government of Petliura (where the 'territorialist' Socialist Zilberfarb took the ministry of Jewish affairs) but they progressively joined the Soviet regime during the following years.6 Anti-Semitism always had been a pillar of the ideology and culture of the Russian army and quickly became – in an even more radicalised form – the banner of the Whites. The armies of Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel made very extensive use of anti-Semitism as a weapon in their struggle against the Soviet regime. Ukraine was the scene of 2,000 pogroms, affecting around a million Jews and leaving between 75,000 and 150,000 victims.7 According to several scholars, the pogroms of 1918–20 were qualitatively different from the previous waves of tsarist anti-Semitism of the 1880s and 1905–6: not only was the number of their victims incomparably higher, but also their propaganda turned into an open appeal to massacre. They took the form of a modern military campaign carefully planned and ideologically implemented, in which several scholars have seen a precedent of the Holocaust.

....Anti-Semitism was no longer fought as a specifically Jewish problem but as a state problem, intertwined with the very survival of the revolution. On the one hand there was the counter-revolution, which massacred the Jews; on the other hand, the Soviets, who made Emancipation their symbol and adopted legislation against anti-Semitism. Faced with such options, the choice of the Russian Jews was very easy. According to Oleg Budnitskii, 'for the Jews, the choice between the Reds and the Whites gradually evolved into a choice between life and death' .

.... The building of a new state apparatus was sown with obstacles, for the most politicised sector of the working class was engaged in the military effort and the old civil servants boycotted the new authorities. There remained the Jews: a vast reservoir of intellectual energies that Tsarism had always repressed and excluded. The revolution transformed this layer of pariahs, humiliated and persecuted by the former regime, into an elite called upon to play a role of the highest importance in the construction of socialism. 

....During its first ten years, the Soviet regime applied to a considerable extent the projects of national autonomy that the Austro-Marxists and the Bund had elaborated at the beginning of the century.

.... Evsektsiia was the instrument of this empirical Soviet orientation toward Jewish cultural national autonomy. The new regime made a considerable effort to improve the status of Yiddish, which remained the mother tongue of 70.4 percent of Soviet Jews in 1926. Just after the revolution, Yiddish gained the status of an official language in the Ukraine and Byelorussia. Yiddish literature was subsidised and encouraged; libraries, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and Yiddish theatres sprang up.

....Evsektsiia was responsible for closing down Hebrew schools and publications: the repression of religion was the necessary condition for building a modern Jewish (Yiddish) nation, cut off from its tradition and history. Along with Hebrew, both Zionism and Orthodox Judaism were banned. The Evsektsiia shaped Jewish cultural life by establishing a kind of enlightened despotism, applying its emancipatory and revolutionary measures with authoritarian and bureaucratic methods.

....Joseph Roth saw in 1927 the limits of the Russian Revolution in the Jewish world. He speculated on whether the Bolsheviks had really understood the nature of the Jewish Question, given their desire to create a modern Jewish nation completely separated from its past and its historic identity, of which religion was an irreplaceable element. In his opinion, the revolution had never considered the old question, the most important: are the Jews a nation like the others?

....Eradicating Hebrew from Jewish culture meant in the final analysis to 'dehistoricise' it....

....The decision to colonise Birobidzhan was taken in 1928 by the Soviet government (the Commissariat of Defense and the Academy of Agriculture) without any prior consultation with the Jewish population. Behind this decision lay a strategic consideration – the need to establish a forward post capable of containing Japanese expansionism in the Far East – which took no account of national or socio-economic factors. After the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, the process of construction of Jewish Birobidzhan was intensified. 

.... regime was proclaimed in 1934 – a state entity according to the Soviet constitution – less than 20 percent of the population was Jewish.33 In 1937, the regional administration reverted to the use of the Russian language alone and the new president, M. Koteles – brought in to replace Liberberg, who had just been executed as a Trotskyist – did not know Yiddish. The Jewish state of the Soviet Union was no more than a fiction....