Philip Krantz and the Creation of the Internationalist Yiddish Public Sphere

• In Event: Nationalism, Liberation, and Internationalism in the Global Yiddish Public Sphere

Abstract

Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the young Narodnik Iakov Rombro – friend of several implicated Narodnaia volia conspirators – fled the Russian empire. Born in Zhitomir but educated in St. Petersburg, Rombro left the empire as a highly-cultured, “Russified” Jewish intellectual. In exile, he underwent a profound transformation. Shaken by the outbreak of the 1881 pogroms and re-emergence of antisemitism during his time as a student at the Sorbonne, the former Populist made his way to London where encountered the Yiddish Anarchist movement of London’s East End. There, he re-learned Yiddish and reinvented himself as Philip Krantz, writer for the Fraye abeter shtime, belle-lettrist, and author of an endless stream of popular pamphlets on general and Jewish history for the mass global Yiddish reading public. This paper focuses on this New York period to examine how Krantz sought to transform the popular historical pamphlet into a means to inculcate politics of integrationist internationalism within the global Yiddish reading public in 1890s New York. The paper then explores how Krantz’s politics of Yiddish integrationist internationalism came to be displaced by novel forms of nationalist, segregationist socialist politics emerging from the ranks of Yiddish (and other ethnic) trade union movements in fin de siècle New York.

Author

• Andrew Sloin, Baruch College / CUNY Graduate Center