out of all proportion to their numerical weight in the population.27
The most well-known were but the tip of the iceberg: Leon D. Trotsky (Bronstein); Rosa Luxemburg; Leo Jogiches; Julius Martov (Tsederbaum); Raphael Abramovich; Lev Deutsch; Pavel Axelrod; Mark Liber (Goldman); Fyodor Dan (Gurvytch); Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld); Karl Radek (Sobelsohn); Grigory Zinoviev (Radomylsky); Yakov Sverdlov; David Ryazanov (Goldendach); Maxim Litvinov (Wallach); Adolf Joffe; Mikhail Borodin (Grusenberg); Adolf Warski; Isaac Deutscher, and so on. In addition, of course, there were the leading figures of specifically Jewish socialist organizations, such as the Bund and the left-wing Zionists, and the numerous Jews originally from the East who participated in the revolutionary workers’ movement abroad; in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, Parvus (Israel Helphand), Arkadi Maslow (Isaac Chereminsky), August Kleine (Samuel Haifiz), among others; in England (Aron Lieberman, Lazar Goldenberg); or in the United States (Emma Goldmann, Alexander Berkman, S. Yanofsky).
Yet all of these Jewish revolutionary ideologues, militants and leaders, who had widely different if not conflicting political orientations, and whose relationship to Judaism went from complete and deliberate assimilation in the name of internationalism to proud affirmation of a national/cultural Jewish identity, still had one element in common: rejection of the Jewish religion. Their world-view was always rationalist, atheist, secular, Aufklärer, materialist. The Jewish religious tradition, the mysticism of the cabbala, Hasidism and messianism were of no interest to them. In their eyes, these were but obscurantist relics of the past, reactionary medieval ideologies which they had to be rid of as quickly as possible in favour of science, Enlightenment and progress. When a revolutionary Yiddish writer such as Moishe Kulback wrote on messianism (with a mixture of attraction, repulsion and nostalgia), it was mainly to show the sad role of false messiahs like Jakob Frank, who had led their followers to catastrophe.28 An anarchist of Russian origins, such as Emma Goldmann, had nothing in common with the mystical spiritualism of someone like Landauer: in her libertarian universalism, there was no room for Jewish particularity, and religion (Jewish or Christian) belonged to the realm of superstition. In the best cases, as with the Bundist Medem, the first visit to a synagogue ‘made a deep impression’ because of the ‘great beauty present in the passion of mass feeling’: the actual religious content of worship was alien to him.29 The passion of revolutionary Jewish intellectuals for atheism and science is marvellously illustrated by the story that Leo Jogiches, organizer of the first Jewish workers’ circles in Vilna, began his activities as a political educator by bringing along a real skeleton and lecturing on anatomy.30
Many historians believe that, in the socialist and revolutionary convictions of Russian Jewish intellectuals, they can discern a secularized expression of messianism, a manifestation, in atheist and materialist form, of mental attitudes inherited from millennia of religious tradition. This hypothesis may prove to be applicable in certain cases. But for most of the Marxist or anarchist leaders mentioned above, it is implausible because their education and their familial and social milieux were so assimilated, so unreligious, that a real cultural link with the messianic heritage would be sought in vain. In any case, the writings of radical Russian-Jewish intellectuals, unlike those of many Central European Jewish revolutionaries, did not make the least reference to religion, nor did they display the least trace of a messianic/religious dimension.
How can this marked difference in world-view between the Jewish intelligentsia of German cultural origins and the Jewish intelligentsia of the tsarist Empire be explained?
Let us first note that the great majority of Jewish revolutionary intellectuals from the East came from ‘enlightened’, assimilated and religiously indifferent families; several were born or grew up in three cities that were the bastions of the Haskala in Russia: Odessa (Martov, Trotsky, Parvus); Vilna (Jogiches); Zamosc (Rosa Luxemburg). This was the movement that advocated opening the Jewish world to rationalist culture and the Enlightenment, which Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher from Berlin, had inaugurated in the late eighteenth century. But the difference between the Haskala in Germany and Russia needs to be considered. As Rachel Ertel showed so well in her study on the Shtetl, the Haskala and the emancipation of the Jews ‘in a Western Europe made up of nation-states, required a “denominationalization” of the Jewish religion stripped of all its national characteristics’. On the other hand, ‘the East European Haskala had deeply national characteristics. If, in the West, the movement aspired to denominationalization, in the East it aimed at secularization.’31
The national content of emancipation was an outcome both of the nature of the tsarist State – a multinational, authoritarian and anti-Semitic Empire – and of the situation of the Jewish communities: a pariah condition characterized by segregation, discrimination, persecutions and pogroms; territorial concentration in ghettos and in the Shtetl, cultural and linguistic unity (Yiddish).
Of course, many Marxist Jewish intellectuals (unlike the Bund and socialist Zionists) rejected any and all national or Jewish cultural references. One need only recall Trotsky’s famous response to questioning by the Bundist Medem at the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party: ‘I assume that you consider yourself to be either a Russian or a Jew?’ ‘No’, replied Trotsky, ‘you are wrong. I am nothing but a Social Democrat.’ In any event, whether the Jewish identity was accepted or rejected, it was – at least after the terrible pogroms of 1881 – a national/cultural and not merely a religious identity. Unlike in Germany, there were very few Jews in the tsarist Empire who thought of themselves merely as ‘Russian citizens of Jewish denomination’.
The atheist and secular orientation of the Eastern European revolutionary intelligentsia will be better understood if we look more closely at the religious aspect proper of the Haskala movement. In Germany, the Haskala actually did succeed in ‘enlightening’, modernizing, rationalizing and ‘Germanizing’ the Jewish religion. The movement of religious reform led by Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–74) and the more prudent reformist current (‘the historical school’) of Rabbi Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) gained hegemony in the religious institutions of the Jewish community. Even the minority neo-orthodox movement founded by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) accepted certain reforms and values of the German secular culture.
Such was not the case in Russia where reform synagogues had few followers except in a small layer of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. The iconoclastic attack of the maskilim (‘enlightened’) on the dogmas of orthodoxy only caused traditionalists to burrow into the most dogged immobility: ‘Before Haskala … rabbinic Judaism had been more worldly, more tolerant, and more responsive to social change. After the Haskala, rabbinic Judaism became conservative, inflexible, and repressive; Hasidism, too, followed suit.’32 While in Germany (and to a certain extent, in all of Central Europe) the Jewish religion was reformed and became more flexible and receptive to outside influences – neo-Kantian (Hermann Cohen) or neo-romantic (Buber) – in Eastern Europe, the traditional religious cultural universe remained largely intact, rigid, closed, impervious to any outside cultural input. The quietist and politically indifferentist messianism of orthodox circles (rabbinical or Hasidic) could not combine or link up with a secular utopia, which these circles rejected as a foreign body. One first had to be freed of religion, to become atheist or ‘enlightened’, in order to accede to the ‘outside’ world of revolutionary ideas. It was not surprising, therefore, that such ideas chiefly developed in Jewish concentrations furthest from all religious practices, as in Odessa, for example, which the orthodox considered a true den of sinners.
Another aspect to be taken into consideration is the immense authoritarian power of the orthodox Rabbis and Hasidic Zadikkim in the traditionalist communities, for which there was no equivalent in Central Europe. As a result, there was open conflict between the rebellious youth, be it Bundist, socialist or anarchist, and the religious establishment:
Feeling threatened, the traditional circles often responded with open or insidious violence, trying to maintain their hold by all means,
