Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture

Propaganda or Fighting the Myth of Pakhdones? Naye Prese, the Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War

On April 24, 1938, Naye Prese, the Paris-based Yiddish communist daily, published a greeting on its front page from Misha Reger, the political commissar of the Naftali Botwin Company. The Botwin Company, a small Jewish military unit within the International Brigades, was at that time fighting in Spain on the side of the Republican government against the military revolt by the socalled Nationalists headed by General Francisco Franco.1 The lead article on that same front page announced a meeting of dozens of Jewish organizations in Paris, organized by the Initsiativ komitet far fareynikn demokratishe gezelshaftn (Committee to Unite the Democratic Organizations). The meeting arose as the result of an initiative of Jewish immigrant communists in Paris who wished to convene to create a new organizational platform among the Parisian Jewish immigrant population.2 This front-page configuration was not coincidental. Formed in December 1937 on the initiative of Jewish immigrant communists in Paris, the Botwin Company had since become an important tool to mobilize and maintain support for the Spanish cause as well as to promote the Popular Front on der yidisher gas (the Jewish street). Part of that effort included the April 24th meeting ,and the Reger letter was aimed at reinforcing the specific message that only unity on the Jewish street could serve as an appropriate defense against the threats that immigrant Jews faced. Those threats consisted of economic hardship , a general rise of xenophobia and anti-Semitism in France, and, very concretely , restrictions on immigrant labor and the threat of expulsion faced by many paperless (Jewish) immigrants emanating from the decree laws that the new government of Edouard Daladier introduced in May 1938. Reger’s article encouraged Jewish leaders in Paris to heed the example set by the many Jewish Propaganda or Fighting the Myth of Pakhdones? Naye Prese, the Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War gerben zaagsma 88 G e r b e n Z a a g s m a volunteers, the “best sons of the Jewish people,” as Naye Prese often described them,who,according to the newspaper, fought united against fascism and antiSemitism on the Spanish battlefields. As this particular example shows, reports in Naye Prese closely tied the events in Spain, and particularly the participation of Jewish volunteers in the International Brigades, to the politics and strategies of Jewish communists on the Jewish street in Paris. Given the importance of Spain in the Popular Front strategy of the Communist International (or, Comintern) this should come as no surprise.Officially adopted at the Seventh Comintern Congress in July 1935, the Popular Front tactic entailed the formation of broad antifascist alliances, including nonworkers parties. In 1936 Popular Front coalitions won election victories in Spain (February) and France (April). When the military revolt that began in Spain in July received almost instant support from the main fascist leaders of the day, Hitler and Mussolini, a civil war deeply rooted in internal Spanish strife turned rapidly into a conflict with significant international dimensions . The Soviet Union and Comintern in turn actively supported the Republican government and decided on the formation of the International Brigades that saw deployment from October 1936 until their withdrawal in autumn 1938. For the Comintern and its member parties, the Spanish cause subsequently served as a crucial propaganda tool to raise awareness about and maintain support for the Popular Front, and the brigades were presented as the example of united antifascist action in practice.3 For Jewish communists in Paris the International Brigades were thus an important tool to promote what they called a “Jewish Popular Front” among the Jewish immigrant population. But representations of Jewish volunteers in Naye Prese did not merely propagate the Popular Front on the Jewish street. In the course of the war the subtext to that propaganda became increasingly Jewish as reports placed increasing emphasis on “Jewish heroism” in Spain. Many articles asserted that the participation of Jewish volunteers, symbolized most clearly by the Botwin Company, disproved prejudices and allegations of Jewish cowardice that had surfaced in the brigades as well as in the Polish immigrant press in Paris.Such representations of Jewish volunteers were related to Jewish communist concerns with relations between Polish and Jewish immigrants, as well as the position of Jewish workers in the French labor movement and France in general.As we will see, it was within this context that Naye Prese fashioned the participation of Jewish volunteers as a model of Jewish...