The “Red Rabbi”: Abraham Bick and the Rise of Yiddish Religious Revolutionary Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s

• In Event: The Radical, The Revolutionary, and the Russian

Abstract

In REDEMPTION AND UTOPIA: JEWISH LIBERTARIAN THOUGHT IN CENTRAL EUROPE (1992), Michel Löwy ascribes a strain of Jewish messianic and anarchist thought to a wide range of early twentieth-century Central European Jewish intellectuals while pointedly rejecting the existence of any equivalent current among Eastern European Jewish leftists. The latter, he claims, whether they endorsed a radical cosmopolitanism or a national and cultural Jewish identity, “still had one element in common: rejection of the Jewish religion. Their world-view was always rationalist, atheist, secular, Aufklärer, materialist.” Löwy’s unequivocal assertion is contradicted by the emergence, starting in the 1920s but especially in the 1930s and 1940s, of a growing number of radical and transnational Russian- and Polish-born Jewish intellectuals who not only made reference to religion, but who argued for religious socialism in general and Jewish religious socialism in particular. They vouched for the primacy of an ethical, idealistic, messianic, and often anarchical socialism that was anti-materialist, anti-Marxist, and anti-Bolshevik, yet avowedly revolutionary and not reformist. Their ranks included thinkers such as the brothers Isaac Nahman and Aaron Steinberg, William Nathanson, A. Gordin, A. Almi, and Baruch Rivkin. In this paper, I focus on the early writings of the “red rabbi” Abraham Bick (1913-1990), one of the most colorful and idiosyncratic of this cast of characters. A former student of Rav Kook who became an Orthodox rabbi at a Brooklyn congregation beginning in the late 1930s and who signed his books and articles with the honorific “Rav,” Bick made the most concerted efforts of his contemporaries to ground Jewish revolutionary socialism in biblical and rabbinic prooftexts and meticulous halakhic observance. My paper builds on the recent research of Lilien Türk and Hayyim Rothman, who have drawn attention to the Jewish anarchist return to religion in the late ‘30s and ‘40s. While the extent to which Bick reflected a broader turn to socialism among some Orthodox Jews in this period requires further research, his life and work are proof that the notion that the Yiddish revolutionary left was staunchly secularist—especially in the post-World War I period—needs to be discarded.

Author

• Daniel Schwartz, The George Washington University