Thread by @mollycrabapple

Who wants a thread about the beef between the Jewish Labor Bund and the Iskra faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party (led by Lenin and Martov)

(Ps every day in every way I become more and more uncool)

16 takers, I see

Okay, so being a Jew under the Tsar sucked. You were banned from living outside the Pale of Settlement, there were quotas for university, there was 25 year military conscription... and there were pogroms cause people thought Jews made matzoh with baby blood

Naturally, this led many Jews to join revolutionary movements to overthrow the Tsar (my great grandfather did this). However, they also faced racism from Russian workers- who didn’t necessarily care a bunch about the special legal crap they had to deal with

Jewish workers also spoke Yiddish- not Russian. Because of this, some Jewish revolutionaries thought there should be an autonomous group. The Jewish Labor Bund was founded in 1897, and became the Jewish section of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1898

The Jewish Labor Bund became an immensely popular illegal organization- growing to 35,000 members by 1903, getting $$$$ from New York garment workers, and, because Jews were confined to the border regions, dominating the smuggling routes into and out of the Tsarist empire.

But, the Bund had major weaknesses. The biggest was that Jews were a small minority who had been mostly banned from living in the major cities. The Bund had no power in Petersburg or Moscow. Jews also were mostly kept out of heavy industry-limiting the power of their strikes

The Bund was a regional party with zero ability to make a revolution on its own. It had to work in coalition. This is why it’s part of the RSDLP

However, it starts butting up against two people in the RSDLP: Lenin and Martov, who are besties, and run a paper called Iskra

Lenin and Martov will be the future warring leaders of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, but that’s later.

For now, Lenin objects to the Bund because he wants a rigidly centralized party, not one with a powerful autonomous group that controls what illegal pamphlets get into Russia

Martov’s reasons are more complicated. He was also Jewish, but came from a wealthy family, grew up in the capital and didn’t speak Yiddish. He had helped found the proto-Bund org during his exile in Vilna in his early twenties, but then decided assimilation was a better option

for the very reasons I just spelled out. (Leon Trotsky agreed). Both Trotsky and Martov were brilliant, ambitious internationalists and didn’t want to confine themselves to only organizing a structurally powerless minority just because they happened to be Jewish.

Both believed that antisemitism (and probably racism more generally) was the something that the socialist revolution would overcome- so there was no need for a special Jewish organization within the party (except to translate pamphlets into Yiddish)

The Bund- Iskra beef burned for two years in their respective newspapers before coming to a head in 1903, during the Second Congress of the RSDLP. The backdrop? A brutal pogrom in Kishinev, where Christians murdered 40 Jews, desecrated Torah scrolls and engaged in mass rape

The Bund immediately organizes self defense brigades (my great grandfather joined one of these). However, Iskra did not want too much attention paid to the pogroms- many pogromists were poor, and making too big a deal would lead to antagonism, and divide the working class

Starting to sound familiar?

With Kishinev in their minds, the Bundist delegates go into the Second Congress and ask to for the Bund to be considered the sole representative of the Jewish working class in Russia.

(Lenin has already rigged the delegate count against them btw)

At the conference, Martov and Trotsky lead the protest. Aren’t they Jews. But the Bund doesn’t represent them.

Mark Lieber quips that the Bund represented Jews who worked (Trotsky and Martov were both from rich families).

But it contains some truth- that while some Jews spoke beautiful Russian, had secular educations, and could assimilate, pass, sort of.. most, like my great grandfather with his two years at religious school and Yiddish monolingualism, didn’t have a chance in hell.

The Bund also had little trust that an all Russian party would really have their back (at least in significant numbers) when racists came to burn their neighborhoods- and they didn’t want to give up their autonomy without being sure of this

Well the upside is that because Lenin rigged the vote count (oh you Machiavellian bastard king of parliamentary wrangling) the Bund didn’t stand a chance and was forced to leave the party- but that Trotsky and Martov led the verbal attacks against them

In contemporary debates about “identity politics” vs “class essentialism” I see echoes of that Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903

PostScript:

At that same congress, Lenin and Martov split about bureucratic frippery. Because the Bund had left, with their five votes, Lenin took the majority, allowing him to call Martov’s faction the Mensheviks (minority), and his own the Bolsheviks

The Bund’s story is one of the ways a group from a persecuted minority fought alongside others for a better world, in spite of the majority’s betrayals. It’s a story that points to the need for ferocious solidarity across race and borders.

That’s why I’m writing this book

Last postscript:
PS
The Bund’s founders were Russian-speaking Jewish intellectuals who had been confined by racist laws to the Pale of Settlement. As Marxists, they knew the working class would lead the revolution.. and the working class in Vilna spoke Yiddish

So they learned

Okay, final postscript.. at the point when Lenin demanded the Bund give up its autonomy and completely submit itself to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the Bund had 35,000 members

The RSDLP, party of all of Russia, had 5,000

Imagine the cheek