The Jewish political movements of pre-war Europe were the substantial political response of European Jewish communities to the conditions of modern political life. They had developed across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to the substantial questions the period raised: emancipation and its limits, the position of Jewish communities within the European nation-states, the rise of organised antisemitism, the Russian and Polish pogroms, the question of whether the Jewish future lay in integration with the surrounding societies or in separate national or religious organisation. By 1939 the European Jewish political world contained at least seven distinct organised movements with substantial mass followings. The Holocaust destroyed the populations from which the movements had drawn their members. Several of the movements survived the destruction in altered form. The pages below address each of the principal movements in turn.
The principal movements
The General Zionists, the centrist mainstream of the Zionist movement, advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine through diplomatic and practical means. The movement had been founded by Theodor Herzl with the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897 and had built, over the following four decades, a substantial international organisation, the Jewish Agency, the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine), and a network of national federations across the European Jewish communities. The Polish General Zionists were the largest single national federation outside the Yishuv itself, with substantial parliamentary representation in the inter-war Polish Sejm.
The Labour Zionists (Poalei Zion, Mapai and the kibbutz movements) advocated the establishment of a Jewish state through the agricultural colonisation of Palestine and the building of a socialist Jewish society there. The movement had been the most operationally successful of the Zionist streams in the inter-war period, having built the substantial kibbutz network that became the social and political backbone of the future Israeli state.
The Revisionist Zionists, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1925 in protest against the slow pace of mainstream Zionist progress towards statehood, advocated the immediate establishment of a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan, the establishment of a Jewish military force, and a more confrontational approach to British Mandate policy. The movement was substantially the smallest of the inter-war Zionist streams but became the principal opposition to the Labour Zionist establishment and the eventual founding tradition of the Likud party in post-1948 Israel.
The Bund (the General Jewish Labour Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia) was the principal non-Zionist Jewish socialist party. Founded in Vilna in 1897, the same year as the First Zionist Congress, the Bund advocated the establishment of Jewish national-cultural autonomy within the multinational states of central and eastern Europe rather than the establishment of a separate Jewish state. The movement was substantially the largest Jewish political party in inter-war Poland by membership and by working-class support, particularly in Warsaw, Łódź and the smaller Polish industrial cities. The Bund’s Polish leadership was substantially destroyed in the Holocaust; the movement survived in altered form in post-war Poland (until the 1968 antisemitic campaign drove out most remaining Jewish Bundists), in New York and in the kibbutz movement of the future Israeli state.
The Folkists (the Folkspartei) was a smaller Jewish autonomist party founded by the historian Simon Dubnow in 1906, advocating Jewish national-cultural autonomy on a broader basis than the Bund’s working-class focus. The party had substantial intellectual influence in pre-war Polish Jewish life through the Yiddish daily press and the YIVO Institute (the Yiddish Scientific Institute, founded in Vilna in 1925) but limited mass political support.
Agudat Yisrael, founded in 1912 in Katowice as the international Orthodox political movement, advocated the political organisation of Orthodox-Hasidic Jewry within the Polish parliamentary system in opposition to both the Zionist and the secular socialist movements. Agudat Yisrael had substantial Hasidic backing in Poland and continued in altered form in the post-war period as the Israeli Agudat Yisrael party (now the Yahadut HaTorah bloc).
The Communists were the seventh substantial movement. The Polish Communist Party of the inter-war period had a substantially Jewish membership (estimated at around 25 per cent in the late 1930s, against around 9 per cent of the Polish population that was Jewish), although the party did not present itself as a Jewish movement and the Jewish Communists generally did not consider themselves to be acting as Jews. The proportion was the basis for the substantial post-war antisemitic claim that Polish Communism was a Jewish phenomenon, a claim addressed in detail on the dedicated denier-rebuttal pages on this site.
What the movements produced
The Jewish political movements of pre-war Europe produced the substantial cadre that built the institutions of the post-war Jewish world. The Labour Zionist movement built the State of Israel. The Revisionist Zionist movement provided the founding leadership of the Likud and the post-1977 Israeli political right. The Bundist tradition shaped substantial parts of the post-war American Jewish trade union movement, the Workmen’s Circle and the Forward newspaper. Agudat Yisrael shaped the post-war Israeli Haredi political world. The Communist Jewish cadres of pre-war Poland, where they survived, provided substantial leadership to the post-war Polish state until the 1968 antisemitic purge.
The Jewish political world of pre-war Europe is the world that was lost. The substantial reconstruction of Jewish political life in the post-war period happened on different territory and in different forms. The historiography of the inter-war Jewish political movements is one of the principal subjects of the academic Jewish-studies field as it has developed since the 1970s.
See also
- Yiddish Culture and Language
- The Hasidic Movement
- Jewish Contributions to European Civilisation
- The Haavara Agreement
Sources
- Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, Indiana University Press, 1983
- Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1862-1917, Cambridge University Press, 1981
- Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III: 1914 to 2008, Littman Library, 2012
- Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology, Oxford University Press, 1987
- Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland 1939-1949, Vallentine Mitchell, 2003
- Gershon Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland 1916-1939, Magnes Press, 1996
- Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, Basic Books, 1996 (for the Soviet Jewish Communist context)
- YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, two volumes, Yale University Press, 2008, https://yivoencyclopedia.org