A History of Zionism (79 page)

Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky

Communism was not beset by such doubts, claiming that it did have a solution. Lenin’s rejection of Jewish nationalism was based on the writings of Kautsky and Otto Bauer, whom he frequently quoted. In some respects he went beyond them, asserting that nationalism, even in its most justified and innocuous form, was incompatible with Marxism. Even the demand for national cultural autonomy (‘the most refined and therefore the most pernicious kind of nationalism’) was thoroughly harmful; it satisfied the ideals of the nationalist petty-bourgeois and was in absolute contradiction to the internationalism of the proletariat.
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Marxists had to fight against any form of national oppression, but it did not follow that the proletariat had to support the national development of every nation. On the contrary, it had to warn the masses against any nationalist illusions and to welcome every type of assimilation unless based on coercion. The Jews of the west had already achieved the highest degree of assimilation in the civilised countries. In Galicia and Russia they were not a nation either, but had remained a caste, through no fault of their own but because of the antisemites.
†
Jewish national culture was the slogan of rabbis and the bourgeois, and its advocates were therefore enemies of the proletariat.

Stalin, writing in 1913, elaborated Lenin’s view, defining a nation as a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and mental constitution expressed in a community of culture. According to this definition the Jews were, of course, not a nation. They had no continuous territory of their own which served as a political framework and a national market. Only 3 or 4 per cent of them were connected with agriculture, the remainder were city dwellers, scattered all over Russia, not constituting a majority in any single province. What kind of a nation was this, Stalin asked, that consisted of Georgian, Dagestani, Russian, American Jews, and so on? What kind of race, whose members lived in different parts of the world, spoke different languages, never saw each other and never acted in concert? This was not a real living nation; it was something mystical, amorphous, nebulous, out of this world. The demand for national cultural autonomy was therefore ridiculous. Autonomy was demanded on behalf of a nation whose existence was yet to be proven and whose future had not been recognised. All the Jews had in common was their religion, their common origin, and a few remaining national characteristics. But no one could seriously maintain that petrified religious rites and vanishing psychological traits were stronger than their socio-economic and cultural surroundings, which were inevitably leading to assimilation.
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The Bolsheviks sincerely intended to solve the Jewish question in Russia by giving full freedom to all Jews; assimilation was to be actively furthered. The oppressed Jews of Russia and Galicia were to become equal citizens of the new Socialist society.

A detailed survey of the Jewish policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lies outside the range of the present study. In brief, after the revolution a ‘Jewish Commissariat’ was established to deal with the specific problem of the Jewish population. Dimanshtein, its head, promised that a Palestine would be built in Moscow by making the masses productive, and by organising Jewish agricultural communes. Later, greater emphasis was put on the industrialisation of the Jewish population. They could maintain their own cultural institutions, such as schools, clubs, newspapers and theatres. Hebrew was banned but Yiddish could be freely used during the 1920s and 1930s. In the Ukraine and the Crimea, predominantly Jewish areas even received regional autonomy, and in March 1928 it was decided to set aside a special area in the Far East, Biro Bidzhan, for Jewish settlement. It was announced that by 1937 at least 150,000 Jews would be living there. There was tremendous enthusiasm among Jewish Communists abroad: ‘The Jews have gone into the Siberian forests’, Otto Heller wrote. ‘If you ask them about Palestine, they laugh. The Palestine dream will long have receded into history when in Biro Bidzhan there will be motor cars, railways and steamers, huge factories belching forth their smoke. … These settlers are founding a home in the taigas of Siberia not only for themselves but for millions of their people.’
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Kalinin, president of the Soviet Union, predicted that in ten years Biro Bidzhan would be the cultural centre of the Jewish masses. Even staunch anti-Communists like Chaim Zhitlovsky, one of the theoreticians of Jewish Socialism, and Lestschinsky, the sociologist, were deeply impressed; Biro Bidzhan would be a Jewish republic, a centre of genuine Jewish Socialist culture.

The dream of a Siberian Palestine did not last. Only a few thousand Jews came, and most of them turned back within a few months. Forty years after its foundation, Biro Bidzhan was a drab provincial region with about 25,000 Jewish inhabitants, a small percentage of the total population. No one, least of all the Soviet authorities and the Jewish Communists, wanted to be reminded of the affair. Partly it was the result of insufficient and incompetent planning, but basically it was not the fault of the authorities: Soviet Jews had no desire to build a second Zion on the shores of the Amur.

Despite the failure of Biro Bidzhan there was much sympathy in the west for the Soviet Union, the only country in which Jews were believed to be secure and in which the Jewish question was said to have been solved. These were the years of the world economic crisis, of the rise of fascist and antisemitic movements all over Europe. What, in comparison, had Zionism to offer? Its bankruptcy ‘was final and irrevocable’, Otto Heller wrote in 1931 in a much discussed book. In western Europe the assimilation of the Jewish bourgeoisie, as well as of the lower middle class and the workers, was an irresistible process. In the east, under Socialism, the Jewish question had been solved once and for all: ‘Next year in Jerusalem? This question was answered by history long ago. The Jewish proletarians and the starving artisans of eastern Europe pose a very different question: next year in a Socialist society! What is Jerusalem to the Jewish proletarian? Next year in Jerusalem? Next year in the Crimea! Next year in Biro Bidzhan!’
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Heller’s
Downfall of Judaism
presented the Stalinist case. Its argument was borrowed by and large from Kautsky, though the ‘renegade’ Kautsky was, for different reasons, by that time no longer in the good books of the Bolsheviks. It differed from Kautsky in adopting a more virulent tone: Zionism was a phenomenon frequently observed among a dying people; shortly before their demise they suddenly feel a new lease of life, only to expire the more quickly. Zionism was a product of the petty bourgeois stratum in European Jewry, a counter-revolutionary movement. It was an historical mistake, an impossibility, since it tried to detach the Jewish question from the problem of commodity production with which the fate of Jewry was indissolubly connected. It was an anachronism, contradicting not just the laws of historical development but of common sense.
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Heller freely used Kautsky’s similes without acknowledging their origin: Zionism was the last appearance of Ahasuerus, the eternal Jew on the historical scene. He had reached the end of the road. Judaism was doomed because it had lost its privileged, monopolistic position in capitalist society. At the same time the social conditions for a revival of antisemitism had disappeared. ‘Zionism, the last, most desperate and most wretched kind of nationalism, was thus breathing its last.’

It was a persuasive theme, and, if its ideological premises were accepted, logical and consistent despite its shrillness and arrogance. But the book had one major flaw: it ignored the writing on the wall. When it appeared in the bookshops Hitler’s brownshirts were already marching through the cities of Germany. Two years later antisemitism in its most rabid form had seized Germany and continued to expand all over Europe despite the confident announcement that antisemitism had lost its ‘social foundations’. A few years later Heller and many other Jewish Communists lost their lives in Nazi extermination camps or in one of the Soviet prisons from which there was no return.

The case of Otto Heller is of interest; the views he expressed were shared by thousands of young Jewish Communists all over Europe who were firmly convinced that Communism and no other movement was capable of solving the Jewish question. Nor was this belief limited to committed party members; a growing number of fellow travellers were influenced by it and Hitler’s seizure of power only strengthened them in their conviction.

When Heller’s book appeared in 1931 Europe was still relatively quiet, the situation of European Jewry seemingly secure. Six years later, when William Zukerman published
The Jew in Revolt
, there could no longer be any doubt about the impending catastrophe.
The Jew in Revolt
is an ambitious analysis of the Jewish situation at a time of crisis which suggests remedies. In the sharpest terms the author condemns the schemes for emigration from Nazi Germany, for the German Jews were deeply rooted in German soil and bound to their country by a thousand spiritual ties:

It is a gross slander on the German Jews whose love for the fatherland is proverbial, to represent them all as being ready to rush in panicky haste from it in a mass exodus at the first approach of misfortune. … After all, the Jews are not the only victims of persecution in Germany today. Why not a wholesale exodus of German Communists, Socialists, Pacifists, Liberals and Catholics? … The Jewish acceptance of the Jewish exodus plan from Germany is at the same time the voluntary acceptance of the entire Nazi point of view with regard to the Jews. It is a complete Jewish capitulation to the racial theory of Hitlerism. … It is playing the Nazi game in a manner which Hitler himself probably never dared to hope that the Jews would do.
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Zukerman believed that the main responsibility for the contemptible plan for emigration fell on the Zionist bourgeoisie:

Fanatical Zionist theoreticians have been even more busy than the Nazis in preparing schemes and plans. … Zionist financiers have actually raised huge sums of money for its organisation and have started it on the road to success. The fact is that, inasmuch as the exodus plan has now become a popular solution for the Jewish problem, it is due more to a number of Zionist zealots and to a few big Zionist financiers than to the fascists. Of all the paradoxes of our time, this one will probably go down into history as the most curious of all.
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But the author had no doubt that the plot for mass emigration would fail:

In spite of the brutal Nazi persecution the bulk of German Jews will remain in Germany, and they will be there long, long after Hitler is gone, when even his name is a mere legend in German history. … They bear the cross of their suffering with dignity and fortitude, as behoves an ancient people which has seen martyrdom and knows that tyranny, no matter how powerful temporarily, cannot forever turn back the wheels of history. … They know that even if Hitler be all-powerful now and his régime successfully established for years to come, this is no reason why Jews should willingly accept his gospel of the ghetto and exile.

The picture as Zukerman saw it was not all black, for there was one country where the Jewish problem had been solved and it was showing the road to salvation to Jews everywhere. What struck him most forcibly in Russia was both the economic transformation of Russian Jewry and the mental change that had come with it:

Gone is the almost pathological desire of every Jewish parent to bring up his offspring as doctors or lawyers. Although the universities and higher schools of learning are open to the Jews as in no other country, there is no rush of a disorderly mob of Jewish youth into them … Jews are positively the best factory workers in Russia and are sought after in every great plant.

The Soviet Union had been virtually freed of the scourge of Jew-hatred, the very meaning of the word antisemitism was being rapidly forgotten. The Soviet Union had solved the Jewish problem ‘economically, politically, and even psychologically. Whatever larger successes the Soviet régime may or may not have to its credit, it has certainly evolved a perfect solution of the Jewish problem.’
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Zukerman concluded this eloquent account by proclaiming that the golden age of liberalism was at an end, that there was only one road open to the Jews, whether he approved of everything going on in the Soviet Union or not: as a Jew he could do nothing but follow the road shown by Moscow for the solution of the Jewish problem. This was a moral necessity. The great revolt of the Jews not only against capitalism but also against themselves was morally cleansing: ‘Whatever its social or political danger to the Jews may be, morally it atones for everything. Spiritually, the social-revolutionary movement is saving the Jews for the world.’
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These extensive quotations are necessary to convey the full flavour of Zukerman’s case, and again it should be said that such views were by no means the monopoly of an outsider. They were shared by liberals who had succumbed to despair, even by some Jewish communal leaders and rabbis. For this was the time when belief in the Soviet Union was at its height: Stalin had stamped out unemployment and illiteracy, he had liquidated neurosis, crime, juvenile delinquency and alcoholism. He had produced a new type of man and in the process antisemitism was rapidly disappearing. The appeal to the Jew of Germany not to be seduced by the siren song of the Zionists but to stay in their native country was not exclusively Communist either. It was shared, for instance, by the Bundists from whom Zukerman may have received some of his original inspiration.

The Communist critique of Zionism had its heyday in the 1930s but later lost much of its appeal, and not just because Biro Bidzhan had failed to offer a serious alternative to Palestine. It was above all the growing discrepancy between Bolshevik theory and practice which made the Communist case unconvincing. Lenin had no doubt been sincere in his belief that mankind was inexorably moving towards internationalism. It could have been argued that however much the Jews resented the demand to give up their national identity, the price asked was not too high if in return they received complete equality before the law, and if eventually all nations were to undergo cultural assimilation. But events in the Soviet Union were taking a very different course from that which Lenin had anticipated. In the 1930s patriotism returned with a vengeance, the national heroes of Russian history were restored to a place of honour, and generally nationalism became a factor of growing importance in Soviet domestic policy. This left the Jews in a vulnerable position: they were still expected to give up their national identity and to become assimilated, but it was no longer clear whether they should try to become Russians, Ukrainians, or Turkmen, or whether to be Soviet citizens
tout court.
If so, they would be the first and only Soviet citizens, in the same sense that the German Jews had been almost the only liberals and republicans in the Weimar period, a position both unenviable and, in the long run, untenable. Assimilation might have worked within several generations as a result of intermarriage and the absence of Jewish education, if the Jews had been left in peace. But they were singled out for attack in Stalin’s last years, and again later on under his successors, and their fate in Czechoslovakia and Poland was no happier. They were denounced as cosmopolitans and nationalists at one and the same time. Such attacks, far from solving the Jewish problem, helped to perpetuate it.