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| 19 1 “Harmoniously Functioning Nationalities” Yiddish Socialism in Russia and the United States, 1892–1918 During the Sixth Zionist conference in Basle, Switzerland, in late August 1903, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, asked to speak with Chaim Zhitlowsky, perhaps the most famous philosopher of Yiddish socialism. Though an obscure historical figure today, during the 1890s and 1900s Zhitlowsky commanded the attention of Russian Jewish intellectuals, while Herzl was better known among European heads of state than in the Jewish Diaspora. As a small movement of western European Jews, Zionism was overshadowed by revolutionary movements in the Russian Empire, such as the General Union of Jewish Workers, known as the Bund. According to Zhitlowsky’s account of their August 1903 meeting, Herzl asked him to use his influence in the Bund to halt the revolutionary movement among militant Russian Jews. Herzl had offered him a solution to the Jewish problem in Russia proposed by the Russian interior minister, Vyacheslav Plehve. “I have just come from Plehve. I have his positive, binding promise that in fifteen years, at the maximum, he will effectuate for us a charter for Palestine. But this is tied to one condition: the Jewish revolutionists shall cease their struggle against the Russian government.”1 Zhitlowsky refused on both practical and ideological grounds. He explained, We, Jewish revolutionists, even the most national among us, are not Zionists and do not believe that Zionism is able to resolve our problem. To transfer the Jewish people from Russia to Eretz-Yisroel [the land of Israel] is, in our eyes, a utopia, and because of a utopia we will not renounce the path upon which we have embarked—the path of the revolutionary struggle against the Russian government, which should also lead to the freedom of the Jewish people.2 20 | “Harmoniously Functioning Nationalities” In the 1880s and 1890s, Zhitlowsky developed his ideas for revolution while living outside Russia, as did many Jewish intellectuals who influenced Russian Yiddishism.3 In 1891, Zhitlowsky settled in Zurich, where in 1893 he helped to found the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), a Jewish revolutionary movement that argued for Jewish agrarian socialism.4 Agrarian socialism was never more than a marginal philosophy in the urban centers of the Jewish Diaspora, but the SR’s vision of a socialist Russia comprising a federation of nations, each exploring and developing its autonomous culture within a socialist context, fired the imagination of other Russian socialists.5 Born in 1865 in Vitebsk, Belarus, Zhitlowsky lived with his grandfather, a prosperous merchant and a Lubavitcher Chasid, an ultraorthodox follower of a charismatic teacher.6 As a teen, Zhitlowsky met Shlomo Ansky, a slightly older man who introduced him to radical Russian and German Enlightenment literature. In 1879, Zhitlowsky entered gymnasium (an elite secondary school) but left before he graduated as he became more radicalized by Russian revolutionary thinkers. Throughout the 1880s, Zhitlowsky found inspiration in articles discussing Jewish nationalism in the Hebrew-language dailies, as well as in his friend Ansky’s travels among the poor Jewish shtetlakh (small towns) collecting folk tales.7 As Zhitlowsky began to write, he urged Jewish intellectuals to adopt a movement of Jewish nationalism built on a foundation of Yiddish culture among working-class Jews in Russia. For Zhitlowsky, the elevation of Yiddish kultur, “an all-encompassing, primarily secular civilization in Yiddish” best expressed in literature, was a means to struggle in Russia and throughout the Jewish Diaspora for a socialist society founded on the principles of social justice and human rights.8 When Zhitlowsky reflected on his meeting with Herzl years later, he remembered being both astonished and shocked at Herzl’s presumptions. First, Herzl misunderstood Zhitlowsky’s standing in the Bund, which he had formally left a few months earlier. Though Zhitlowsky still maintained good relations with the revolutionary Jewish organization, he was not its leader, nor was there any singular leader of Jewish revolutionaries. That was a relatively minor point, however. Zhitlowsky was much more disturbed by Herzl’s willingness to deal with Minister Plehve, whom Jews regarded as responsible for the Kishinev pogrom that had occurred a few months before, during Easter week of 1903. Hundreds of Jews were beaten, raped, and killed by local mobs whipped up by official anti-Semitic proclamations. Police in the capital city of Bessarabia (now Moldova) watched and did nothing to stop the slaughter. Pogroms—the Russian-derived Yiddish word for state-sponsored or officially tolerated terror visited on Jews—had been...

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