A History of the Jewish Labour Bund
Michael Hindley reviews Here Where We Live Is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple, published by Bloomsbury, the story of the forgotten and suppressed history of the Jewish, Socialist, Anti-Zionist Party.
An estimated eight to ten million Jews worldwide can trace their origins to the long past Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which lasted from 1569 to 1795. The Common-wealth provided a safe haven for Jews, who fled or were driven from other less enlightened and tolerant parts of Europe.
The Commonwealth had an elected King, who extended his royal protection to Jews. But the Commonwealth had a weak central government, which tempted its more aggressive, expansionist neighbours, who made substantial inroads into Common-wealth territory, culminating in the Commonwealth’s total collapse and annexation in 1795. The spoils were divided between Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1795. Poland and Lithuania were expunged from the political map of Europe only to re-emerge as independent states between the two World Wars.
Imperial Russia proved the most oppressive occupier. A joke in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories runs that even God can make mistakes, for example: “He put the Jews in Russia and not Switzerland.”
The situation became decidedly worse for the Jews of the Pale after the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a mild reformer who had freed the Russian serfs. He was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, a reactionary anti-Semite, and a wave a political suppression was unleashed. Jews were again targeted and with increased severity. This in turn led to the mass exodus of Jews from the Pale, mainly to the USA but also to Britain, in the next decades. Their arrival in Britain prompted to Westminster’s first ‘immigration laws’.
The demand for ‘nation states’ had grown in mid- to late-nineteenth century Europe and the demand for a Jewish state arose too, resulting in the founding of the World Zionism Congress in 1895 in Basel, Switzerland. Much lesser known, is that two years later (1897), a secular, socialist political party was founded within the Pale in Vilna (now Vilnius in Lithuania), namely the “Jewish Labour Bund”, generally known simply as “The Bund”.
It is the heroic tale of the Bund, which Molly Crabapple traces with admirably diligent research and passion. She even learnt Yiddish to gain access to primary sources.
The very title Here Where We Live Is Our Country expresses the essence of the Bund and is in itself an explicit rejection of Zionism. The Bundists wanted to live in safety where they were born, lived and wished to continuing to live. The Bund was internationalist and chose to identify and express solidarity with socialists and workers’ movements in the Pale and beyond. The Bund believed that for Jews to live safely, the rest of society also needed safety and social and economic justice.
This meant that the Bund became enmeshed in the international Socialist movements and particularly in pre-revolutionary Russia. They took part in the whirlwind of activities, conferences, disputes, arguments and rivalries in the prelude to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bund found itself in a minority, numerically and ideologically, under the ruthless rise and seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.
The Paris Peace Conference (1919) to settle the post-war WWI world created a new European order based on the nation states, which emerged from the collapse of the Great European Empires, Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian. The Bolshevik regime had made their own peace with Germany during the war and did not attend the Paris talks. The old Jewish Pale was divided into the new states of Poland and the tiny Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In these states any hope of democracy was swept aside in the interwar decades by a tide of authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism.
The new Poland inherited the largest Jewish population.
Molly Crabapple composes her history well, moving chronologically and inserting the biographies of key characters into the narrative of the Bund.
Like many central European socialist and social-democratic movements, the Bund organized social and sports clubs, set up cooperatives, education classes and, as antisemitist violence was ever-present, the Bund organised self-defence units.
Molly Crabapple’s starting point is the tale of her own great-grandfather, from whom she inherits her artistic talent. Her great-grandfather, an early Bundist, found refuge in the USA and pursued a career of mixed fortune as an artist. His life story is told with marked affection.
The Bund, in Molly Crabapple’s words, did not fail, but was defeated by stronger forces in the maelstrom of revolutions and wars, which dominated Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
The interwar years were horrific for the Bund. The rivalry between the Bund and the Zionists was bitter and spread from ideological differences to outright hostility and street fights.
The Bund was assailed from several directions politically and physically. The Stalinist Communists regarded the Bund as dangerous heretics, the Polish government wanted to expel Jews and the Catholic Church joined the call to boycott Jewish business. The Bund’s only constant ally was the Polish Socialist Party, they too being victims of Stalin’s paranoia.
If the interwar years were horrific, World War II was catastrophic. The Nazi occupation witnessed Jews being driven into ghettos throughout Poland, as elsewhere. The largest and most infamous one was in Warsaw, which had the second largest Jewish population in the world after New York. The Bund ran courier services, underground supply lines with the rest of Warsaw beyond the ghetto and even managed to produce newsletters. Their heroic resistance, joined by some Zionists, reached its apogee in the ghetto rising and ultimate destruction in April 1943. The uprising was the largest Jewish revolt against Nazism.
The Polish “Home Army”, the resistance under the command of the Polish government in exile in London, cooperated with the Bund, but needed weapons themselves and had few arms and ammunition to spare for the Bund.
Throughout the book there are intriguing references to the Jewish mafia’s protective actions for fellow Jews in peace and war. (The Jewish mafia also make an appearance in Isaac Babel’s writings. Isaak Babel was a Jewish writer and correspondent in the Russian Civil War, who was murdered in Stalin’s purges in 1940. His wry tales of Jewish life, are told in Odessa Stories. In his days Odessa was in the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine).
The end of the war brought little relief. Though there were many acts of kindness and protection by Poles, surviving and returning Jews still found a hostile reception from their former neighbours, some of whom had seized Jewish property.
Many European Jews had neither energy nor confidence that they could claim their rightful place in Europe. Nor was there trust that Jews could find a home “where we live now”. After the Holocaust, Zionist Israel was a convincing safer option.
The post-war settlement changed Eastern Europe beyond all recognition from multicultural societies into mainly monocultural ones. And Stalin’s satraps were ruling Poland and Europe beyond the Iron Curtain.
Internationally the Holocaust had convinced the world’s dominant powers that a national homeland for Jews was inevitable.
In her conclusion, Molly Crabapple asserts that the Bund did not “fail” but was defeated by shattering violent upheavals beyond its power to resist.
The Bund had always taken the view that a Jewish homeland in Palestine could only become a reality at the expense of the rights of the local population.
In 1933 one of the Bund leaders, Henryk Erlich, argued with Casandra-like prescience that “if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations… no, we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful… and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all the other nations.”
It’s a chilling and accurate prediction, which is validated as we witness daily the murderous actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank.
But the Bund’s legacy has survived in spirt and reality. A Jewish, secular, progressive, anti-Zionist view of the world remains. It is a rational and pragmatic choice, which many Jews worldwide have taken, namely that “their home is where they are”. It is a commitment, which my Jewish friends and Jews worldwide still hold dearly, whatever their families’ history and fate has brought them.
You can order Molly Crabapple’s excellent book from your local lending library or an independent bookseller.
Michael Hindley is a former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and is now freelance writer and lecturer on international politics. He is the author of The Semi- Detached European, a history of UK/Europe relations since 1945. He posts on: @hindleylancs.bsky.social. This article originally appeared on his substackhere.
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