Foreword to The Jews of Eastern Europe
from Utopia to Revolt

This volume contains the records of a conference held in Turin in January 1984 on the journey of Eastern European Jews “from utopia to revolt.” It offers many surprises to the Italian reader, whether Jewish or Christian. We have read a lot about the final stop on this journey—that is, the bloody and desperate rebellions in the ghettos and the Lagers—varying from thorough, historically accurate works to epic transformations and commercial novels. The cinema has also dealt with the subject, again at varying levels of artistic quality and philological accuracy. On the other hand, we knew relatively little, or had only partial and distorted notions, about the background, the complicated historical and social circumstances that led to rebellion, and from which rebellion drew its exemplary strength.

In the West, and especially in Italy (where the Jewish presence was always numerically small and where, even during the terrible years when Hitler’s barbarity was spreading, Jewish refugees in search of safety were few), people had a vague and poetic image of Eastern Jewry. This image came to us through the channels of literature, where the books of Joseph Roth and the Singer brothers, precisely because of their transfiguring power, played a preeminent and forceful role. From these, the reader basically derives the image of a Jew removed from the world, confined (voluntarily or not) to his shtetl, which is both a prison and a nest; he is alien, unaware, untouched by the political convulsions that changed the face and the borders of European countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a luftmensch, “man of air,” nourished on a naïve faith, on family love, on weird, picturesque legends; gentle, humble, wandering, neurotic. A second, negative image was superimposed on this one, the result of Fascist propaganda or the sediment of old prejudices: Judaism, apparently scattered among the nations (the goyim), in reality is a single unit, an astute and wicked power bent on the economic conquest of the world, held together by secret ties that cross all borders.

The picture that emerges from these writings, from both the personal accounts and the historical reconstructions, is quite different. It’s not only more articulate but also more concrete and credible, better suited to enabling us to understand the reality of yesterday and today. The picturesque and dreamy civilization of the shtetl survives into the second half of the nineteenth century, but it is secondary: in the Jewish world, as in the rest of Europe, a rapid process of urbanization is under way. The small Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian rural communities are becoming depopulated: the big-city factories attract artisans, tradesmen, the lower middle classes, who feel better protected from the recurrent countryside pogroms. A Jewish, urban proletariat is born, similar to, and yet different from, the majority proletariat. Similar in the merciless exploitation it is subjected to; different, and more restless and divided, because exploitation is often compounded by the hostility that Jews sense around them. The Jewish proletariat listens carefully to socialist and Marxist teachings but does not forget its own identity: it is divided between two allegiances, to its class and to its roots. An astonishing variety of options arise from this tension and are put forward. Toward the end of the century, however, two basic, incompatible trends emerge, both charged with messianic promise.

The trauma of the Dreyfus affair gives birth (or rebirth) to Zionist prophethood. Here in Europe, or even in America, you are and always will be a stranger; if you ever forget that you are a Jew, “the others” will remind you. You have a homeland, the land of your forefathers: it’s far away and has become a desert, but if you cultivate it, it will bloom, it will flow with milk and honey. If you rescue it, it will rescue you: never again will you be a stranger or a slave. It seems like a dream, but, if you want, it can become reality. Paradoxically, this appeal draws the benevolent attention of tsarist authorities: why not? If they want to leave, why should we hinder them? Zionist leaders go as far as making contact with officials of the tsar’s police; it’s a clever and daring move that shocks supporters of Jewish socialist internationalism.

A social democratic strain soon emerges from among the different trends that compete with one another in this field. In 1897 it is established as a union-political party, first semi-clandestine and later official: the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, the Bund. How far we are from all stereotypes! Bund members, workers and intellectuals, are neither humble nor resigned. Their double allegiance has turned into double pride: the pride of the proletariat and the pride of the Diaspora. Aliyah, the Zionists’ return to the homeland, is desertion, flight: why immigrate to Palestine and rebuild hated bourgeois society there? This is our country, where we and our flesh-and-blood forefathers were born—not the patriarchs of the Torah. We are here, and here we wish to remain, in Poland and in Russia, proletariat among the proletariat of the whole world, because our struggle is their struggle. Yet we are not like them. We have, and we want to keep, our cultural autonomy, and first of all our language: not Hebrew, the rabbis’ language, the language of a religion that we reject as we do all religions, but Yiddish, the mame-loshn, the mother tongue that for centuries we have been speaking in our homes. Judaism’s center of gravity is us, it’s here, do in Yiddish; our patriotism is the “doikeyt,” “here-ism.” “The Bundists’ messianism, absorbed since childhood from parents, grandparents, and teachers, even when rejected at the level of consciousness, was feeding in a completely natural way the messianic eschatology of the socialist view of the world” (Frankel).

Around the turn of the century, the Bund is the largest Jewish workers’ party in the Tsarist empire. It cooperates with smaller parties with which it is in constant, dissonant agreement; like every socialist party, it is shaken by internal conflicts, but, unlike other socialist parties, it has no inclination toward compromise; through strikes, congresses, and demonstrations, it strives to keep its members in a state of stormy and constant anger. In 1905 it reaches the peak of its revolutionary potential: it has available a well-trained paramilitary force and is one of the great revolutionary parties of European Russia. When, in June, the sailors of the battleship Potemkin revolt, it’s a young Bundist, Anna Lipsic, who speaks before tens of thousands of people and the leveled guns of Cossacks and police. However, the Bund emerges weakened from that failed revolution. In Russia, the Bolsheviks crushed it in 1919, along with the other parties of the left. The Bund survived in Poland until the Nazi carnage, but neither in Russia nor in Poland did it die a natural death.

In retrospect, the utopian effort of the Bund may appear reckless, but no one at the time could have predicted the measure, or, rather, the lack of measure, of the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Subsequent history proved the loathed Zionists, “anti-Semites who speak Yiddish,” according to a Bund slogan, right. For the Jews of Eastern Europe, there was no salvation without emigration. Yet the ideological and moral vigor of the Bund found its tragic height precisely in the crucial years of the Nazi terror. Without the insurrectionary experience of the Bundists, the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto and the other heroic uprisings in ghettos and extermination Lagers would not have happened, or would have been just local tremors, desperate and improvised, with no idealistic context. The brothers-enemies—Bundists, Zionists, and Communists—could find agreement and unity of action only in the ghettos besieged by hunger, daily slaughters, and epidemics, only in the European resistance movement that fought to the very end without the light of hope.

It seems to me that, thanks to the pages collected here, the fighters of the ghetto show the Italian (or, generally, Western) reader a new face, historically believable and, above all, modern: a face far from that of the simplified heroes, the blameless knights so dear to folklore of all times, and closer to us, to our still controversial choices, to our unending Jewish quest for identity. Their precursors, the indomitable activists of the Bund, of early Zionism, and of all the other innumerable currents and trends (remotely mirrored in the plethora of parties that, to this day, complicate Israeli politics), were, like us, blind before the future, but they had precociously understood, and their story enables us to understand, that inaction and servility don’t pay.

Gli ebrei dell’Europa orientale dall’utopia alla rivolta (The Jews of
Eastern Europe from Utopia to Revolt), edited by M. Brunazzi
and A. M. Fubini (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1985)