Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (review)

140 SHOFAR Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia, by Yoav Peled. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. 171 pp. $45.00. The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russian , more commonly known as the Bund, was founded in Vilna in 1897, a year after Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, referred to Jewish workers as the "vanguard" of the Russian proletariat. For the better part of a decade, the Jewish working class lived up to Plekhanov's praise. The Bund soon became a leading constituent of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. It helped educate, organize, and politicize Jewish workers, whose eagerness to strike won them significant wage concessions and a shorter working day. By 1905, however, many of those achievements were in the process of being reversed. In 1903 the Bolsheviks hijacked the RSDLP. After the 1905 revolution many of the material gains won by the Jewish working class were turned back. The strike movement waned. Although part of that decline is attributable to the general reaction that set in after 1905, it also had deeper structural roots. Close to 85 percent of the 300,000 Jewish workers in the Pale labored in small shops with one or two other employees. The remaining 15 percent-the Jewish industrial working class proper-were concentrated in the least productive, technologically most backward plants of the Russian empire, located mainly in the northwest region . Simply put, the Jewish workers' movement weakened because the industrial positions its members occupied were being squeezed out of existence by more advanced plants. In this short, tightly written treatise, Yoav Peled brilliantly analyzes the reasons why the Bund, confronting the situation just described, developed a program that simultaneously spoke to the class and ethnic interests of Jewish workers. The Bund originally propagandized in Russian and spoke hardly at all of special Jewish needs in the labor movement. By the early years of this century, however, it had switched to Yiddish as its main language of agitation and education. Moreover, it had developed the idea that the Jewish community in general, and the Jewish proletariat in particular, had special needs and interests that required a: fight for "national-cultural autonomy," that is, the control of educational and cultural institutions, and for a new Russia based on a federation of nationalities. That shift of emphasis is usually explained as a result of the increasing involvement of Jewish workers in the Bund. As the Yiddish-speaking masses swelled the ranks of the organization, it is held, the intellectual leadership had little choice but to become more ethnically conscious and nationalistic. Nearly a decade ago, the Hebrew University historian, Jonathan Frankel, VoLume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 141 offered a revisionist interpretation. In his opinion, it was less pressure from below than inter-party struggles that required a new strategy. The nationalistic appeal of socialist Zionism and Polish socialism threatened to attract many Jewish workers, and the Bund leadership simply decided to chart a new course in order to consolidate and expand its power base. In part, Frankel made his case by analyzing Jewish labor movements cqmparatively. He showed that "sociologically similar" movements in various countries had divergent ideological trajectories because of variations in the form of interparty competition. Peled agrees with neither interpretation. He scores the traditionalists for failing to explain in structural (or material) terms what it was about the situation of the Jewish masses that made them so ethnically conscious. And he demonstrates that the movements analyzed comparatively by Frankel were in fact not sociologically similar. In brief, Peled holds that the Bund could not develop a purely ethnic program, as the Zionists did, because its actual and potential membership consisted ofworkers in conflict with their bosses-and their bosses were Jews too. Nor could the Bund develop a purely class program , like the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, because the fortunes ofJewish workers were closely tied to the fate of Jewish employers. Fighting for higher wages and better working conditions, the workers drove many Jewish employers out of business; but unemployed Jewish workers found it virtually impossible to get jobs in more...