In the late 19th century, unrelenting and widespread antisemitism was terrorizing Europe’s Jews. Pogroms swept through the Russian Empire, where the majority of the world’s Jewish population were forced to live in a large designated, urbanized area called “The Pale of Settlement”. And in France the so-called “Dreyfus Affair” — which saw an innocent Jewish army officer spend five years in a hard labor camp after being sentenced for spying with little to no evidence — had recently roiled the political world. To European Jews, it was apparent that nowhere on the continent was safe for them, and that they had to do something to protect themselves. But what?
Two distinct answers to this question emerged — both of which, seemingly coincidentally, crystallized into social movements that were born within two months of each other in 1897.
The first and most well-known of these movements was born in a well-appointed Swiss concert hall at a gathering of formally-dressed (mostly) men: this was the First Zionist Congress. Convinced that antisemitism was intrinsic to gentile populations, and tempted by the pseudo-scientific notion that Europe’s Ashkenazi Jewish population represented the primary, direct descendants of the Jewish people who had lived in the area of modern-day Palestine two thousand years prior, Zionists proposed the creation (or, in their words, the “restoration”) of an independent Jewish nation-state in Palestine — a land that was well-known to be populated by people who would, of course, have to be displaced for the Zionist project to succeed.
The second movement that formed in response to the scourge of antisemitism was quite different. It was born at a secret meeting held somewhere in the city of Vilnius, Lithuania (which, at the time, was a part of the Russian Empire) that brought together a group of Jewish labor leaders and Marxist intellectuals that were a part of the revolutionary tradition that was coalescing in Russia at the time. This was the first meeting of the "General Jewish Labour Union in Russia and Poland”, which, for convenience, became better known simply as “the Union” — or, in Yiddish, “the Bund”.
Indeed, Zionism and Bundism were in many ways diametrically opposed. To paraphrase one chronicler, Zionism was nationalist while Bundism was internationalist; Zionism advocated isolationism and evacuation while Bundism advocated integration and doikayt (or “hereness”); Zionism was pessimistic while Bundism was optimistic; and Zionism advocated class collaboration to achieve its aims while Bundism advocated the class struggle. Thus, from the very beginning the Bund was antagonistic toward Zionism, which it saw as serving the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie but not of the Jewish people more broadly. The Bund’s embrace of Yiddish (the common Jewish tongue in Eastern Europe) is an illustration of its more proletarian focus: Hebrew, on the other hand, which became the official language of Zionist Israel, was roughly analogous to Latin at the time as the language of the Jewish religious elite.
Moreover, the Bund recognized that the true source of antisemitism was not human nature but rather the inequalities inherent in class society. It was therefore only with the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a classless society that the emancipation of the Jews could be won — right along with the emancipation of the gentile masses, who, the Bund recognized, were themselves exploited and oppressed. Conversely, it was only by joining forces with the broader proletariat that the Jews could hope to defeat capitalism. This reasoning led the Bund to seek Jewish emancipation, not through the creation of yet another class-ridden society, but through international socialist revolution.
To this end the Bund resolved to fight Zionism “in all its forms and nuances” — a stance that is today often condemned as antisemitic, but which at the time found great resonance among European Jews. By way of illustration: in 1900 the Bund claimed 5,600 members; by the time of the 1905 Russian Revolution that number had grown to 35,000, making the Bund the largest Marxist party in Europe — bigger, even, than the combined Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who numbered 8,400 in 1905.
The Bund was, accordingly, instrumental in the Russian revolutions of both 1905 and 1917. In fact, in 1898 the Bund had helped found the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, hosting its first congress in Minsk, Belarus, and supplying three of the nine delegates that attended this top-secret meeting — which, notably, was also attended by a young Vladimir Lenin. In 1905 the Bund orchestrated general strikes throughout the Pale of Settlement and battled bloody pogroms that were encouraged by the vengeful Tsar. And in 1917 the Bund was again active, taking their own revenge by helping to finally overthrow the Tsar and bring Lenin’s Bolsheviks to power.
This triumph, however, also marked the end of the Bund in Russia, as the revolution split the Bund into pro- and anti-Bolshevik factions, with the former group (the “Kombund”) largely assimilating into the newly-formed Communist Party (only to be purged and killed en masse after Stalin’s rise to power) and much of the latter group fleeing the country. Meanwhile, an independent Poland had reemerged from the ashes of the Russian Empire, and the Polish-Soviet War (1919-21) sheered the Bund’s remaining Russian sections off from its central locus.
That said, in Poland, where almost ten percent of the population was Jewish, the Bund kept going strong right up until the Second World War, holding fast against a once-again-rising tide of antisemitism, and organizing Jewish trade unions, schools, youth movements. women’s organizations, sports clubs, and welfare activities. All of this helped make the Bund the leading representative of Jews in the country: in 1938, in some of the last municipal elections held in Poland prior to the near-simultaneous invasions of Hitler and Stalin, the Bund dominated its Zionist rivals, winning large majorities in Warsaw (where it won 17 of the 20 city council seats won by Jewish candidates) as well as in several other cities.
But the Second World War, and the brutal Nazi occupation in particular, was the beginning of the end for the Bund. While Stalin arrested and executed its leaders, the Nazi’s herded every Jew they could find into ghettos and finally into extermination camps, killing a full 90% of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews. The Bund was still active in these dark days, establishing an underground network that secretly educated youth, and leading (together with Zionists) heroic acts of resistance like the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but it emerged from the war in a state of abject devastation. And even after the war the Bund was subject to brutal persecution in the Stalinist USSR (which had grown to envelop Poland), stymieing its attempts to rebuild.
Together, these tragic events not only decimated the Bund but also seemed to legitimize the Zionist position on the immutability of antisemitism and the necessity of a Jewish state. Moreover, after the war Jewish refugees were largely denied visas to the US, Britain, and the other Western, capitalist democracies, all but forcing many of them to immigrate to Palestine where a substantial number of German Jews had already fled. And the victors of the war were all too happy to support this migration as an alternative to offering the bedraggled mass of Jewish refugees a home within their borders — not to mention the fact that, in strategically-situated Palestine, the Jews could prove useful pawns in their imperial machinations.
Even at this point, however, the Bund, though critically wounded and in what would prove to be terminal decline, still limped on in the form of the International Jewish Labor Bund (founded in 1947): an organization centered in New York with sections in over a dozen countries, including Canada. Even when the Zionist dream was realized in 1948 with the founding of Israel — an event still commemorated by Palestinians as the “Nakba” (or “catastrophe”) — the Bund still maintained its vehement anti-Zionism. And even those Bundists who ended up immigrating to the new state fought within it against anti-Yiddish discrimination and discrimination against Arabs — the latter of which they often compared to the very antisemitism that Israel had ostensibly been conceived to counter.
And though the establishment of Israel forced the Bund to somewhat alter its approach to confronting Zionism, culminating in its 1955 admission (made in Montreal at the International Jewish Labor Bund’s Third Congress) that “Israel is a significant factor in Jewish life”, and that “[a]s a self-contained, self-governing Jewish community, Israel can play an affirmative role in Jewish life”, the Bund never strayed far from its initial attitude to the Zionist state, which was expressed in an article written immediately after its founding in 1948. It reads:
“We frankly admit that the rank and file of the Jewish Socialists under the BUND banner cannot rejoice with the majority of the Jewish population. Heavy misgivings assail us as to the immediate future of the 600,000 Jews in Palestine as well as to the repercussions of the Jewish State on the whole of Jewish life outside of it. What the Jews in Palestine need is not the right to bleed and die under the banner of their own independent state, but to live in peaceful cooperation with the Arabs. . . . The present state of affairs, in which the life and future of the 600,000 Jews in Palestine became an object with which the great world powers play their imperialistic game, is foreboding indeed.”
After going on to condemn the new state’s government for including “the representatives of the notorious Jewish terrorist groups with familiar fascist tendencies”, the article concludes:
“The Jewish population, as well as the Arabs, must not sacrifice their lives on the shrine of nationalism. The Jews as well as the Arabs need peaceful relations based on equality, on mutual respect for the rightful aspirations of both nationalities of Palestine. An independent Palestine — a common state of the Arabs and the Jews, which may guarantee both nations the widest autonomy . . . and unite them for the well-being of all the inhabitants of the land —, that is the real goal to strive for.”
Postscript: The Bund continued to dwindle until the International Jewish Labor Bund was finally dissolved in the early 2000’s; the last Bundist periodical, the Israeli “Lebns-fragn”, published its final issue in 2014. But its impact on the modern world was hardly negligible: as just one small example, David Lewis, a founding member of the Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) and its second leader following Tommy Douglas, came from a Bundist family and was greatly influenced by the Bund’s politics, including its anti-Zionism.
(If only this anti-Zionism had been inherited by the Ontario NDP, which recently ousted an MPP over her very reasonable remarks concerning the ongoing genocide in Gaza!)