The Two Go Hand in Hand: Nationalism and Revolution in the Early Bund

• In Event: Class and nation in Jewish radical’s thinking, politics and identity

Abstract

In conversations surrounding the General Jewish Labor Bund, the question of how the party’s commitement to Jewish particularism coexisted with its its devotion to radical cosmpopolitanism is central. Much ink has been spilled trying to explain how the Bund came to the apparently contradictory position of endorsing the politics of both class and nationality. Past scholarship has argued that the embrace of national politics by the Bund was an abberation from the Bund’s origins, a shift forced on the party by pogroms, competition with other parties, or the result of grassroots pressure from the Jewish working class. This paper will argue that the synthesis of national and class liberation was not an abberation at all, but rather part of the Bund’s self-conception from its founding in 1897. While skepticism toward nationality politics did exist within the ranks of the party, the majority of the disputations within the Bund were not as to whether or not Jews merited national rights, but as to how those rights might best be pursued within the revolutionary mileu of late Imperial Russia.

Author

• Joshua Meyers, Harvard University