Jewish Problems

The Jewish people have always been faced with harsh repression and anti-Semitism dating back thousand of years. This astonishing fact is greatly substantiated by divine writings of the Torah. Eastern European Jews from the eighteenth century and up until mid-to-late twentieth century did not deviated from their Jewish ancestor’s clichйd treatment, and they too have also faced incomprehensible amounts of hatred and ignorance. It is known that repression breeds revolutions; inevitably this is the path Eastern European Jews took, being immensely influenced by radical political ideologies of that time period.

The Eastern European Jews natural attraction to radical political ideologies is the corollary of many unique factors exerting in one forceful analogous direction. The Haskalah which translates into English as Enlightenment was a time period when the Maskilim, who were the Jews that followed the Haskalah, questioned their traditional diasporic religion and culture. This radical movement advocated that reason and logic should hold more creditability then untested faith. Maskilim educated themselves in the sciences and digressed from the obsolete sacred texts that their ancestors studied. Essentially what the Haskalah accomplished was that it opened the minds and eyes of the Jews and gave them the notion that public assimilation into society was ok. Another fact that can be deduced is that the Haskalah also provided the infrastructure for future radical political ideologies to flourish given this new questioning, open minded mentality.

The major driving force for radicalism was the ubiquitous anti-Semitism that was present in Eastern Europe. For example in Russia the May Laws existed. The Laws were sanctioned by the Czar in May of 1882. These laws were official anti-Semitic legislation that restricted Jewish settlement and also restrictedexpatriated Jews out of certain professions. These laws were the consequence of the assassination of the Czar Alexander II in 1881. The alleged criminals that assassinated the Czar were believed to be members of the People Will’s, a revolution populist group in Russia. The overall consensus from Russian society was that it was a “Jewish plot” because one member out of the eight that was arrested, Hesia Helfand, was Jewish. The aftermath of the Czar’s assassination provide some of the most intense and brutal pogroms of Jewish history, occurring in 1881 and 1882. The pogroms that transpired forced Jews to reassess their positions on slowly integrating into society, and looked for more effective radical solutions to account for their tribulations.

Isaac Leyb Peretz who grew up during the Haskalah, in1894 published a propagandistic short story at the height of Yiddish literature called “Bontshe Shavayg” or “Silent Bontshe”. It characterized traditional diasporic Jews. Bontshe who was the main character in the story was portrayed as a weak, powerless, passive, defenseless man that succumbed to any given circumstance, typifying the response of traditional diasporic Jews to anti-Semitism. This piece of literature served a motivational and inspirational function for the Jews in the late nineteenth century. Essentially it implicitly said “enough was enough”, lets us get some “Muscle Jewry”, be proud, and fight for what is right.

At the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the three groups of Jews that were present were the Jews that followed acculturation, Jewish-Jews, and Radical Jews. The Jews who followed acculturation wanted to integrate into society slowly and did not see radical politics as the means to do so. The Jewish-Jews who were obstinate wanted to keep their traditional customs and culture and wanted to survive just the way they have for the past thousands of years. The radicals, which was the group taking the most action, were composed of three movements: Marxism, Bundism, and Zionism. Marxism and to large degree Bundism all originate form the teachings of Karl Marx.

Roland Stromberg in his book European Intellectual History depicts Marx’s writings.

Marxism also known as communism, is a political ideology that promises a class-less society in which every human being is equal. Marx believed that capitalism was essentially doomed because it dug its own grave and that the bourgeois or the ruling class, exploited the working class to get richer.

This notion of a class-less society really gained momentum in the young radical working Jewish population who were ready to drop there ineffective traditional ways to find a better way of life. Essentially, communism was look at as being a more than a sufficient resolution it was the answer to the Jewish prayer. It was everything Jews wanted, a means into society, acceptance, and equality. This was monumental for the Jews because if they were looked at as workers rather then Jews it would forced