The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland

By Jaff Schatz

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520332119

Jaff Schatz

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THE GENERATION

The Rise and Fall of the Jewish

Communists of Poland

SOCIETIES AND CULTURE IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

General Editors: Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan T. Gross

i. Jan Jozef Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976—1981, translated by Olga Amsterdamska and Gene M. Moore

1. Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, translated by Maya Latynski

3. Maciej Łopiński, Marcin Moskit, and Mariusz Wilk, Kon- spira: Solidarity Underground, translated by Jane Cave

4. Alfred Erich Senn, Lithuania Awakening

5. Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland

THE GENERATION

The Rise and Fall of the Jewish

Communists of Poland

JAFF SCHATZ

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES OXFORD

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press

Oxford, England

Copyright© 1991 by Jaff Schatz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dau

Schatz, Jaff.

The generation: rise and fall of the Jewish communists of Poland /Jaff Schatz.

p. cm.—(Societies and culture in East-Central Europe; 5)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07136-0 (alk. paper)

i. Jews—Poland—Politics and government. 2. Jewish communists— Poland—History. 3. Communism—Poland—History—20th century.

4. Poland—Ethnic relations. I. Title. II. Series.

DS135.P6S264 1991

943.8'004924—dc2o 90-29047

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One Generation and the Riddle of Radical Jews

Chapter Two The Framework

The Question of Perspective

Polish Jewry between the Wars

Heritage and Becoming

The Messianic Glow

The Legacy of the Shtetl

The Appeal of Marxism

Chapter Three Conditions and Contingencies: The Path to the Communist Movement

Becoming Communists

Conditions, Contingencies, Becoming

Chapter Four Polish Communists and Their Movement

The Communist Movement in Interwar Poland

Strength and Structure

Image and Repressions

Ideology, Politics, Climate

Chapter Five Jews and the Polish Communist Movement

Chapter Six In the Movement

Actions and Perceptions

Alienation and Commitment

Chapter Seven On the Street: Among non-Jews and Jews

Chapter Eight Prison and the Birth of the Generation

Chapter Nine Confronting Dreams

How Many Were They?

The Soviet Rule

Paths and Destinies

Chapter Ten The Winds of War

Misery and Hope

Anders’s Army

The Second Chance

Chapter Eleven The Soviet Experience

Chapter Twelve Coming Home

Chapter Thirteen Careers and Visions

Options and Limitations

Categories, Paths, Conceptions

Ethnicity: Appeals, Aspirations, Limitations

Chapter Fourteen Holy Madness

Chapter Fifteen The Thaw and After

Chapter Sixteen The Defeat

Clouding Skies, Fading Sparks

The Earthquake: Mir hobn gevigt a toyt kind

Chapter Seventeen Looking Back

Generations, Career, Jewish Identity: Conceptual Framework

The Problem of Generations

Some Further Considerations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Over the years I have worked on this project, I have acquired a large number of intellectual and personal debts. My greatest debt is owed to Ron Eyerman, who not only gave me continuous encouragement, thoughtful suggestions, and comments but also devoted very considerable time to the careful correction of the imperfect English manuscript. For his advice and encouragement, I would also like to thank warmly Joachim Israel. Moshe Mishkin- sky, Chimen Abramsky, Krystyna Kersten, Tom Bryder, Lars Dencik, and Joseph Zi tomersky offered insightful comments for which I am very grateful. I want also to express my sincere thanks to Henryk Rozenberg for patient guidance through the secrets and possibilities contained in the world of computers. Of course, the responsibility for this book is solely mine.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to the people I interviewed for sharing their experience with me. Opening their hearts and minds and confronting past deeds, thoughts, and emotions could sometimes bring relief but often was obviously dramatic and painful.

Carrying out this project was made possible thanks to grants and moral support from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Community of Malmö, Pauline Warburg’s Donationsfond, Stiftelsen Cías Groschinsky’s Minnesfond, Eduard and Sophie Heckscher’s Stiftelse, and my own University of Lund.

My wife, Jadwiga, and my sons, Patrik and Adam, put up for many years with the problems connected with my involvement in this project. Their understanding and loving support made it a common concern.

Prace te dedykuje moim rodzicom.

Introduction

They were revolutionaries, rebels, refugees, and soldiers, tailors, shoemakers, intellectuals, and apparatchniks, triumphant builders of communism and victims of its wrath. Their lives mirror five decades of the modern histories of communism, Poland, and Jews. They were the generation of Polish-Jewish Communists.

Sometimes in history there occur extraordinary generations, the formation of contemporaries shaped by huge historical processes of dramatic sociopolitical change. Through its unique intensity, the experience of such generations extracts and clearly exemplifies both great historical changes and the general existential conditions of the human predicament. Those whose time and path this book depicts formed such a generation. Having been both active subjects in large processes of social and political change and passive objects of winds and forces over which they had no influence, they embody the moral and existential dilemmas of human beings confronted with the ballast of existing conditions and institutions, yet seized by blazing visions of the future. The life path of this generation reflects and actualizes not only the unique and particular but also the universal and general: questions of ideology and politics, ethnicity and identity, morality and ethics, individual and collective formation, and the very idea of a generation.

Three related considerations stimulated me in carrying out this project. First, there is the fact that despite the dramatic intensity that should have generated wide research interest, the life path of this generation has not been explored in general sociological or historical research. Left to be forgotten, it has continued to pro- duce, or reproduce, powerful stereotypes, taboos, and prejudice, which in itself deserves a separate investigation. The same lack of interest has also been apparent within the area of Jewish studies, where this important part of the modern Jewish experience has hardly been given systematic (and still less, empathic) attention. In the highly respected and cherished history of Polish Jewry, Polish- Jewish Communists form a very much neglected chapter, depreciated and, if discussed at all, almost a priori negatively evaluated. This disregard and apparent bias reminds one of the deep prejudice that surrounded research on Sabbatai Sevi and his movement prior to Gershom Scholem’s work. I cannot resist quoting Scholem’s judgment of this situation: One of the remarkable features of research on Sabbataianism is the tendency to minimize the scope of the movement and to distort its meaning. … The lack of objectivity among scholars was brought about both by the sheer irrationality, so to speak, of the events they were studying and by their moral condemnation of the consequences of the movement and of many of its leaders (1973: XI—XII). Scholem called this research bias a rationalist perversion of sound judgement and refuted it as the internal censorship of the past. 1 believe his words also apply to this field of study. Jewish Communists, even those who in their messianic fury expressly denied their Jewish roots, form an integral and, in resemblance to the Sabbataians, fascinating part of the modern Jewish historical experience.

Second, in its uniquely intense mixture of ethnicity and politics, vision and reality, world history and personal biography, the life path of this generation presents fascinating stuff for the student of the social sciences, exemplifying several issues of great general interest for sociology, history, social psychology, and political science.

The third consideration is a personal one. Through my parents—who followed for a time the path of this generation— and their friends, I became acquainted at an early stage with the views and perspectives that guided its experience. In my view, the moral lessons of the lives under study here carry great importance even for our time. Trusting that one can and should learn from history, with this book, I want to preserve part of this experience and make it available for reflection. As my own sons and their peers read the story of this generation, I would like them to learn to dare to dream great dreams and never to accept humiliation and, at the same time, never to be blinded by promises of total denouement and to treasure always common human decency. Thus, even if I tried to describe the lives and careers of these people as they were to the limits of my ability and honesty, in one way or another, such a description would and should reflect part of my own liberal-democratic beliefs, preferences, and inclinations.

Extraordinary generations, brought to life by good or bad luck in unusually intense times of fundamental upheavals, cannot be understood outside the context of the history and society in which their perceptions and actions are rooted. So it is with the current case. Another time or another place would have generated a different set of conditions and options for their becoming, most probably making them different from what they were. Therefore, while in thinking about them one can surely reflect on one’s own life and time, one should be careful not to fall into the trap of judging from later perspectives, born after a particular generation has marched on. Such ahistorical judgments are in themselves groundless, morally false, and, simply, unjust. Offering a poor explanation of the past, they obscure the present and poison the future.

This is not the story of all Polish-Jewish Communists. There were also others: those who joined the Communist movement before them, often becoming their older comrades and Communist mentors, and those who joined the party after 1945, when being Communist became opportune. Although the latter in particular are mentioned in several contexts, their paths and destinies are not the main focus of this book.

Those whose experience is described here were born around 1910. They joined the Communist movement at the end of the 19x0s and the beginning of the 1930s. They survived World War II in the USSR and after the war rebuilt their lives in Poland. On their final defeat two and a half decades later, they became refugees again, leaving Poland together with the remnants of Polish Jewry. Considering that they were forced to rebuild their lives in three different countries and at four different times, their biographies are uniquely intense. Taken together, they represent the social, political, and ideological history of their times and society and in concentrated form reflect the drama of Central Eastern Europe’s modern political and social history.

It could be argued that this generation of Polish-Jewish Communists is larger than that described in this book. Besides those who followed the main pathways of their common career, some participated in the Spanish Civil War, and others spent part of the interwar period in Palestine or found themselves in France when World War II broke out. In addition, there were those who began with them but who left Poland and/or communism much earlier. Conscious of these destinies, this book focuses on the main path of these peers, those who until their final defeat at the end of the 1960s followed the longest and least interrupted common career of their ethnopolitical generation. There are good reasons to believe that in so doing this book describes not only the main pathway of the generation but also the most essential traits of identity and action of those whose road differed in one respect or another from that of the core.

This project began formally in 1986, but the gathering of materials, discussions, and informal interviews had already begun in 1981. From the very beginning it was clear that much psychological resistance needed to be overcome to convince the informants to share with an open heart the experience of their lives. It was also apparent that only qualitative research methods could be utilized and that all quantitative information must be regarded as mere approximations.

The forty-three in-depth interviews that form the empirical basis of this study were conducted in Sweden and Denmark. In addition, fifteen control interviews with people who witnessed or followed part of the path of the generation were conducted in Israel, West Germany, and Poland. Further, seventy-one persons (among them the respondents) were asked to answer an extensive questionnaire on identity and identity change seen in a purely social psychological perspective; forty-four accepted this request. In accordance with my original intentions, I also recorded or transcribed songs, anecdotes, and reminiscences of the world that is no more and scrutinized institutional or private archives for documents and photographs.

In my search for respondents, I announced my project through the central Swedish-Jewish magazine, Judisk Kronika, and contacted all local Jewish organizations with whom such people might be involved. In addition to this and my own network of private contacts, the most important source proved to be the introductions provided by one person to another.

Out of the forty-three interviews, I was permitted to record only fifteen from beginning to end; in others, the tape recorder had to be either occasionally turned down or entirely turned off (in these cases, the interviews were transcribed). On several occasions, I had to give my word of honor regarding absolute secrecy. Many of those I initially contacted refused to be interviewed altogether. Whatever the reasons for these difficulties—the lack of confidence, suspicion, feelings of shame or pain, or the will once and for all to let bygones be bygones—it is clear that their past is still sensitive and existentially of deep significance. Given this background, I regard the number and the depth of the interviews as a success, the key to which lies in my good reputation with those 1 have known for a long time and the personal recommendation I received from comrade to comrade.

Can such a research population be regarded as representative? In one sense, those interviewed constitute a total population: I interviewed everyone I was able to locate and convince. The question of whether these respondents are representative of their generation in the statistical sense is both impossible to answer and quite irrelevant. What matters is that they represent all the units, or categories, that were typical for their generation at the different points of its path. Thus, they constitute the entire scale of careers, perceptions, and destinies, understood as ideal types.

The interviews were conducted in Polish according to flexible guidelines that sought to capture the entire life span of the respondents—from their childhood and family background to their current situation. The conscious flexibility of the interviews and the intentionally open-ended questions aimed at allowing the respondents to develop their own rhythm and their own way of structuring their reality. The object was to follow their own pattern of thinking, to penetrate latent meanings and associations, or, as Theodore Reik put it, to listen with the Third Ear. Conducted in this way, the interviews were very time-consuming: most took several days to complete.

Any account of reality is bound to be founded on the treacherous ground of selectivity and interpretation. Also, the truth of an account of a past social reality lies not in resurrecting the facts but in a correct presentation and interpretation of how they were perceived. It is from this perspective that the individual life histories told by these people must be seen. These interviews can in no way be compared to, for instance, police interrogations. The goal was not to establish the exact circumstances of individual path but to extract the picture of a generation, its categories and the patterns of their moral and social career.

One more reservation should be added. No analysis is possible without the analyst and his or her established pattern of selective sensibility, perception, and thinking. However, with all these reservations clearly stated, I have done my best to maintain the proper criticism of sources, as regards evaluation of sparsely available pieces of quantitative information, the pictures of certain events, and the general veracity of the interviews. The control interviews, which aimed at verifying certain sequences of events, perceptions, and actions, served in the latter aim. I also aimed at being attentive to the inner consistency of the accounts and their relative concordance. Seen in this light, individual contradictions, omissions, or, even more, willful distortions attained a special significance, pointing to sensitive areas with direct bearing on identity and, often, directions for further exploration.

As the content of the interviews was being sorted and classified into different subgroups of categories, career types, classes of perceptions and actions, collective patterns of identity and action clearly emerged. In exemplifying these patterns, I did not have to choose any particular destinies above others. The only reason some quotations were chosen to summarize or illustrate issues was, simply, the power of their concise, concentrated articulation.

Complemented by the results of the questionnaire, archive research, and the study of the literature of the corresponding subject areas, the individual life histories presented in the interviews allowed for the depiction of the generation, its paths and its time.

In a situation where a sociologist deals with a research population gained by accessibility and the prosaic fact of physical survival, rather than by random sampling, all customary quantitative assertions are meaningless. However, regarding the respondents as representative of their generation, that is, as representing all its categories, the patterns of becoming, identity, and action, some semiquantitative estimates are necessary. Sometimes expressed in such imprecise terms as most or some, they should not be understood as the results of some quantitative measurement but rather as the respondents’ own estimations of the approximate proportions in the overall pattern, which were accepted by the author because of their repetitive or otherwise mutually supportive character.

One more comment is necessary. In an analytical narrative that stretches over five decades, huge sociopolitical processes, and changing patterns of perception and action and that is intentionally based on an interchanging actors’-researcher’s perspective, it may be difficult to discern the viewpoints and opinions of the actors from the generalizations and comments of the author. Thus, all description of the actors’ actions and perceptions is their own (or extracted from their own), while the generalizations and comments, if not denoted otherwise, are mine.

Part I of this book describes the points of departure for the life path of the generation. Chapter i contains discussion of the highly inflamed subject of radical Jews. Chapter z discusses the social predicament and cultural heritage that provided the framework for the formation of the generation, while chapter 3 describes the paths and factors that led these young people into the contemporary Communist movement. Part II describes their revolutionary career and the formation of their generation. Chapter 4 analyzes the Polish Communist movement during the interwar period, its structure, strength, ideology, and politics. In chapter 5, the issue of Jews and the Polish Communist movement is discussed. Chapter 6 describes the common traits of the existential situation of these young Communists acting within the framework of their movement. Chapter 7 focuses on the different characteristics contained in two distinct situations: acting among non-Jews or on the Jewish street. Chapter 8 describes their prison terms as the high point in their revolutionary career, crucial for their formation as individuals and as a generation. It ends with the outbreak of World War II and their path to the USSR. Part III describes their wartime Soviet odyssey. In chapter 9, the first meetings with Soviet rule and the beginnings of their separate types of wartime careers are described. The development of these separate careers and categories against the background of the war and SovietPolish-Western politics is discussed in chapter 10. Their Soviet experience and its lessons are summed up in chapter 11. Part IV describes the postwar career of the generation until its final defeat. Chapter 12. describes their return to Poland and the beginning of their postwar career. Chapter 13 discusses the formation and evolution of the different types of postwar categories, careers, and visions. Chapter 14 describes the period of holy madness—the Stalinist years, its policies, climate, and impact on the members of the generation. Chapter 15 discusses the impact and significance of the thaw and its aftermath, and chapter 16 analyzes the last decade of the Polish career of the generation, the factors and circumstances of its ultimate defeat. Finally, chapter 17 sums up some of the conclusions of the history of this generation and its times.

The Appendix contains discussion of the key concepts and perspectives employed.

Asked if this book is essentially historical or sociological, following Philip Abrams, I would answer that history and sociology are and always have been the same thing. Both seek to understand the puzzle of human agency and both seek to do so in terms of the process of social structuring. … Sociology must be concerned with eventuation, because that is how structuring happens. History must be theoretical, because that is how structuring is apprehended. History has no privileged access to the empirical evidence relevant to the common explanatory project. And sociology has no privileged theoretical access (1982: X—XI). Thus, in seeing structures and action as reciprocally and continuously constructed in time, this book affirms historical sociology.

In the description of experience that is both individual and collective, there is always the necessity of balancing the desire to tell the story of the myriad individual paths and destinies—every one of them is unique and irreplaceable—and the ambition to look for and extract common traits that make all the uniquely individual experiences into that of societies. To paint a panorama of a collective, the individual life histories must be taken up to a certain level of abstract typification, through which an analysis of collective change along a time dimension is made possible. Although this is a necessary procedure, it does not lessen the desire, at least in part, to retain the uniquely individual. Whether I have succeeded here is for the reader to judge.

Part One

Points of Departure

Chapter One

Generation and the Riddle of Radical Jews

The truest community to which one can belong, Robert Wohl has written, is that defined by age and experience (1979: 203). Those who are the subject matter of this study formed such a community. Now, nearing the end of their lives, they are deeply aware of the fact that their individual biographies form part of the common history of their generation. Thus, the story we are about to tell is about a generation, an extraordinary generation whose life was shaped by dramatic historical change and upheaval, by tremendous hope and frustration, by ideology, ethnicity, and politics. This is the story of the times and path of the generation of Polish-Jewish Communists.

They were seized by the Communist vision in a time when this vision could be regarded as heralding an approaching age of fundamental general redemption. Despite frustrations and disappointments, they remained faithful to its basic core until the time of their final existential defeat. Although it went almost unnoticed, this defeat augured what was to become apparent to the world in less than two decades: the complete moral, ideological, economic, and political bankruptcy of the Communist system.

They were not the only Polish-Jewish radicals of their time but, compared to their peers, they were the most radical of all radical Jews.

In modern times, radical Jews caught the attention of the world.

Men and women of Jewish descent were in such a disproportionate number among the theoreticians, leaders, and rank and file of the leftist movements that, depending on one’s point of view, Jews were prized or cursed for their alleged radicalism. Thus, after having uttered several anti-Jewish remarks in his early years but now deeply impressed by the role played by the Jewish leaders in the Socialist movement and the radicalization of the Jewish proletariat in the Russian Empire, London, and New York, Engels wrote in 1890, To say nothing of Heine and Börne, Marx was of purest Jewish blood; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best people are Jews. My friend Victor Adler,… Eduard Bernstein,… Paul Singer…—people of whose friendship I am proud, are all Jews! Have I not been turned into a Jew myself by the ‘Gartenlaube’?¹ In a lecture in Geneva in 1905, Lenin said, The hatred of the czars was particularly directed against the Jews. The Jews provided an extremely high percentage (compared to the total of the Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement. In passing, it should be said to their credit that today the Jews provide a relatively high percentage of representatives of internationalism compared with other nations.² In contrast, King Fredrick Wilhelm IV of Prussia lamented the disgrace which the circumcised ringleaders among the revolutionaries had brought upon Germany. A report written by the Prussian police in 1879 about the connection between Jews and the Social Democratic party stated that Jews support Socialist ideas financially and by advocating them in the press and concluded that if we add the fact that the most prominent leaders of the revolutionary parties in the various countries are Jews, such as Karl Hirsch in Bruxelles, Karl Marx in London, Leo Fraenkel in Budapest and that the large party of Russian nihilists… consists mostly of Jews, there is reason to justify the claim that Jewry is by nature a revolutionary movement.³ Russian Czar Nicholas II complained to his wife that nine-tenths of the troublemakers are Jews. Russian Minister of Interior Plehve noted that 70 percent of all political dissidents known by the police were Jews,⁴ while Count Witte told Theodor Herzl in 1903 that in his opinion, the proportion of Jews among Russian revolutionaries was 50 percent.⁵ Sixty-five years later, on learning of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National convention in Chicago, President Nixon wondered whether all the indicted conspirators are Jews, or whether… only about half are.⁶

In discussing the subject of Jewish radicals—or, as some prefer to say, Jewish radicalism—in modern times, it is important to keep in mind that extreme radicals formed but a tiny minority among Jews as a whole. Theories equating Jews with radicalism have, simply, no substance and are a product of incompetence or prejudice. However, the disproportionate participation of Jews in leftist parties and movements has historically been highly significant (and highly visible). In other words, although there have been few radicals among Jews, there have been many Jews among radicals.

Much ink has been used (and not a little wasted) in trying to solve the riddle of Jewish radicalism. Let us take a look at a couple of typical examples.⁷ If intellectuals as such form a relatively classless stratum which is not too firmly situated in the social order,⁸ Jewish intellectuals falling in between Jewish and non- Jewish segments of society must be even more so. Thus, one can find theories attributing Jewish intellectual radicalism to their positively interpreted cosmopolitanism and secular, messianic universalism, which is said to allow Jews to become true internationalists and to formulate ideas about how to reform society. This is expressed most prominently and most affirmatively by Isaac Deutscher who sees the revolutionary non-Jewish Jew as one who continues a specifically Jewish tradition of transcending the borders of Judaism when they are too narrow, too archaic, and too restricting in order to strive for the universal, as against the particularist, and for the internationalist, as against the nationalist solutions to the problems of their time (1968: 33). Similar theories attribute Jewish radicalism to a marginal, isolated position in the middle class, which is said to transform Jews into radicals fighting for ideas and making them, in Robert Michels’s words, apt to find a shorter road to socialism than the Gentile (1962: 247—248). There are other theories that oppose marginality and the corresponding idea of classlessness as causes of radicalism, proposing instead to look to structural determinants of embeddedness in certain social strata.⁹ Still others see structural reasons as a general background and randomness or coincidence as the factor that explains why concrete persons become involved with different political ideologies and movements.¹⁰

Another group of theories seeks to explain the phenomenon of Jewish radicalism by referring to Jewish cultural heritage in which messianism is said to have special appeal. This position is best expressed by Nicolas Berdyaev, in whose view the most important aspect of Marx’s teaching can be explained by the fact that the messianic expectations of Israel remained in his subconsciousness and that, therefore, the proletariat was for him the new Israel, God’s chosen people, the liberator and the builder of an earthly kingdom that is to come. Communism is for Berdyaev a secularized form of the ancient Jewish chiliasm, because a messianic consciousness is surely always of ancient Hebrew origin (1961: 69-7o).n Similar modern theories are exemplified by Lawrence Fuchs (1956) whose theory, although conceived of as an explanation of American Jewish liberalism, can be adapted to explain Jewish radicalism as well. Fuchs attributes a supposed Jewish yearning for justice to the effect of the Jewish religious imperative of tikkun olant (repair of the world), the prophetic traditions, the love for learning, and immunity from ascetism, which direct activity into the concrete world of economy and politics. Referring to some observations made by Fuchs and also by Nathan Glazer (1970), Stephen Whitfield proposes paying attention to yet another possible explanation, namely, Jewish intellectuality as the chief factor. If Jews have been disproportionately radicals, it may be because they have been disproportionately intellectuals. Thus, intellectuality would cause Jews to question the dogmas and practices of the world, for which revolutionary politics was a natural outlet (1985: 39-40).

Other theories point out deprivation and anti-Semitism as the main causes of Jewish radicalism. Thus, Hugo Valentin, arguing primarily against racist doctrines (but also against those who attribute Jewish political radicalism to cultural heritage), states simply that the only explanation for the participation of Jews in the Communist movements of Eastern Europe was their hopeless predicament of misery, prosecution, and anti-Semitism. He supports his point by stating that in America, Italy, Western Europe, Scandinavia, where Jews were treated as equals, they should not be on average more radical than the non-Jewish members of the social classes to which they came to belong (1935: 219). Similarly, Michels points out that the legal emancipation of the Jews has not… been followed by their social and moral emancipation (1962: 247) and that this deprivation together with a traditional yearning for justice explains political radicalism among Jews. In the context of the deprivation approach, Whitfield points out that to avoid simplification, the term should be understood in a broad sense: The discrepancy between the exalted religious and historical status and a low civic and economic state, and between their own ethical sensitivities and the cruelty which their neighbors often exhibited… might also trigger the need to remedy gross unfairness through pursuit of revolution (1983: 146). W. D. Rubinstein (1982) explains an alleged inclination of Jews toward leftist radicalism by the social-political circumstances in Europe after Jewish emancipation. Turning toward the right was then unthinkable because of its anti-Semitism and conservatism, while the left was striving for universal equality. In other words, involvement with the left is here thought to be in line with Jewish self-interest.

There is also a relatively rich flora of psychological or psychologizing theories on this subject. Lewis Feuer (1969) attributes a radical conflict of generations to the workings of the Oedipus complex, which, in principle, could also be applied in the case of young Jewish radicals. Disputing theories that attribute the leftist radicalism of revolutionary Jews to a secularized cultural heritage of messianism, Robert Wistrich seeks a general explanation in their self-hatred, their Jewish anti-Semitism, or their ethnic death-wish caused by the marginality of the assimilated (or semi-assimilated) Jewish intellectual, whose radicalism made him a heretical figure with regard to his minority community and the Gentile world (1976: 8) and caused him to accept the anti-Jewish heritage and stereotypes of Christianity and the Enlightenment. Similarly, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin locate Jewish radicalism in the results of a double marginality of individuals who do not feel rooted in either the Gentile religion or nation or the Jews’ religion or nation. As a result, they have become revolutionaries in many instances precisely in order to overcome this rootlessness or alienation and therefore seek to have the nonJews become like them, alienated from traditional religious and national values. Only then will these revolutionaries cease to feel alienated (1983: 60-61). John M. Cuddihy (1974) finds an explanation of Jewish radicalism in the confrontation between the uncivil, premodem shtetl and the civil, modern Christian society (or a struggle between vulgarity and refinement in which the Jews resist the process of modernization).

The range of theories and explanations of Jewish radicalism thus covers almost all possible grounds. Roughly speaking, one can divide them into those that seek explanation in psychological factors, in cultural predicament, or in social situation. Most of these theories tend to be monistic, that is, they tend to select one factor, or one group of factors, to explain the phenomenon. Some of them are consciously ahistorical; others—as those dealing with Jewish participation in the American New Left—seek a timebound explanation that cannot be applied to other periods (as Glazer’s empirical observation of the nurtured atmosphere of an earlier political dissidence in the families from which the New Left Jewish members grew up, or their apparent intellectuality).

Theories attributing Jewish radicalism solely or mainly to Jewish cultural heritage prove insufficient by the very facts of life. Those most knowledgeable in the principles of Judaism and who practiced it in their everyday life, that is, the observant Jews, were far from social and political radicalism. Also, radicals have always been a minority among the Jews. Moreover, as Charles Liebman (1973) points out in his criticism of Fuchs’s view that traditional Jewish values are the source of Jewish liberalism, it is not enough to show that some values promote liberalism (or radicalism); to prove such a connection, it is also necessary to show the absence of values that would encourage conservatism. If not, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Jews are selective in choosing the values they are influenced by.

The impact of some traditional Jewish values, such as love for learning, intellectuality, and messianic longings, cannot be denied, however. It is, for instance, apparent that among the different dimensions of the dynamic structure of Judaism, there always was a rebellious and universalist one and that the kind of intellectuality represented by radical Jews (at least, as will be shown in this study) differed in a characteristic manner from that of their non- Jewish comrades. Against the criticism of Wistrich (1976)—that Marxism broke completely with the Judeo-Christian tradition, that revolutionary Jews expressly denied Judaism, and that most of them were ignorant of it—it can be said that cultural traditions can be transmitted in several indirect, elusive, and hardly discernible ways, and even, as Scholem (1971) proves, through denial. However, regarding Jewish intellectuality as conducive to radicalism, it must be mentioned that most of the members of the generation studied here had their roots in the Jewish proletarian milieu and, as young people, were usually self-taught. Although unusually intellectual, that is, with highly developed interests in ideology and politics, most of them were not intellectuals in the sense of class or profession. Moreover, at the end of their road, when they are more intellectual than ever, they are also more moderate than ever before.

Thus, the notion that sees the cultural impact of some traditional Jewish values as the sole or main explanation of Jewish radicalism is insufficient. However, if such an impact did not exist, the phenomenon would undoubtedly not have been what it is.

The author must admit to a bias against psychological theories as often applied in this context. Cuddihy’s view represents an example of ignorance of Jewish history, sweeping generalizations, and oversimplifications. Moreover, his analysis smacks of prejudice. Feuer’s psychoanalytical theory of an Oedipus complex cannot account for those Jewish radicals who had excellent relations with their parents and those non-Jewish ones who did not. Wistrich’s (or Prager’s and Telushkin’s) approach seems to be highly ascriptive and, although individualistic, lacking in any attempt at sympathetic understanding. Moreover, it is doubtful whether the concept of self-hatred applied in this way really explains anything. It seems to ascribe psychological motives to acting individuals in a circular manner. Suppose that we say: These persons were self-haters. How do we know that? Because they acted in this way. Why did they act in this way? Because they were self-haters. The circular reasoning implied is typical for the ascription of motives in general. From overt action, one derives certain motives, which, in turn, are used as causal factors in explaining actions. Furthermore, the concept of self-hatred appears to be dependent on both the researcher’s own affirmative attitude toward the values said to be held in contempt by the objects of analysis and on his or her knowledge of the ultimate outcome of the historical process being described. Also, it should be kept in mind that ethnic self-hatred cannot possibly be an either-or category but rather a continuum ranging from self-affirmation to selfhatred. On the whole, it appears that the concept of self-hatred might be of some descriptive, but only limited explanatory, value. In general terms, although they might contain insightful observations, the psychological approaches tend to reduce complex social, cultural, and political variables to individualistic psychological phenomena for which they cannot account.

Attributing Jewish radicalism solely or mainly to the Jewish predicament (anti-Semitism, deprivation) is not sufficient. If all or most of the Jews in certain countries and in certain periods were subjected to anti-Semitism and deprivation, why did not all, or most, rebel? Suffering and misery in themselves are not sufficient causes for rebellion or radicalism.¹² And if it was in the selfinterest of Jews to join the revolution, why did most of them reject it? In the ghettos of Eastern Europe of which Valentin writes, radicalism was seen as a dangerous deviancy,¹³ and Moscow’s chief rabbi is reported to have said to Trotsky (whose original name was Bronstein) that the Trotskys make the revolution and the Bronsteins pay the price.¹⁴ If anti-Semitism, misery, and the principal hostility of the right were the sole reason for Jewish leftist involvement, how could we account for the disproportionate number of Jews involved in the New Left in the United States?¹⁵

Accounts attributing Jewish radicalism to social predicament cannot be altogether dismissed, however. As this study will also show, anti-Semitism and misery have been among the most influential factors that produced radicals striving for Jewish and/or global emancipation. Thus, if applied in an exclusive manner, this group of accounts is apparently insufficient as explanation; however, they contain points of crucial importance that cannot be omitted.

Brym’s view of individual embedding in concrete social strata as decisive for becoming a Jewish radical of a particular color is undoubtedly tempting. However, it cannot account for several cases (in fact, so many that they are almost typical) of brothers, sisters, and peers who began from identical positions and yet ended up on opposite sides of the barricades.

The issue of radical Jews always forms a question of concrete people involved in the concrete, complex, and changing circumstances of their time and society. Acting in these circumstances, they are empowered by the heritage of their past, by the problems of the present, and by visions of the future. This study suggests that there exists no particular Jewish radicalism and, consequently, that a category of Jewish radicals, which it implies, is a chimera. It suggests, rather, that the question of radical Jews should be seen in the perspective of the general mechanisms of individual and collective becoming as functioning through and in the fabric of a specific, culturally encased social situation. Thus, it is proposed that the issue of radical Jews, and of ethnopolitical generations, at least as exemplified by the generation of Polish-Jewish Communists, should be explained by (1) the combined impact of specific cultural heritage and social predicament; (x) the characteristic entanglement of conditions and noncoincidential contingencies, decisive in determining the initial individual choices; and (3) the reciprocative and consequential character of individual and collective formation, conducive to restricting the field of available, obvious options within the path along which the social and moral careers of the particular individuals who form a generation develop.

Armed with this perspective, let us begin sketching the background to the story of a generation.

Chapter Two

The Framework

The Question of Perspective

Sociological generations—communities shaped by the trinity of demography, identity, and action—do not jump forth out of nothing. Whether sudden and traumatic or accumulated and prolonged, the sequences of significant experience under whose impact generations are created operate on the deeper layer of background factors that are similar or common for all those who will form the new generation. Because these factors relate both to past heritage and to contemporary events, a common framework that forms out of cultural heritage and current social situation is needed for a new sociological generation to appear. Thus, for instance, the decisive factor that triggered the formation of the Nazi generation was the traumatic experience of life in the trenches of the First World War, the humiliating defeat that ended that war, and the subsequent confusing disorder of German society that was perceived as deeply immoral. However, the background factors without which the Nazi generation would not have become the way it was included the inherited cultural values of hard work, patriotism, and discipline and the common, or similar, social situation related to class position and personal career.¹ To take another, historically, geographically, and ethically quite different example: the background factors of cultural heritage and social situation previous to the decisive, shared experiences of the Sabba- taian message and movement were in a similar way responsible for formation of the generation of Sabbataians, the followers of the last great false messiah, Sabbatai Sevi.²

Obviously, intertwining to form a unifying framework, shared social predicament and cultural heritage (even if this heritage was transformed or denied) played a similarly significant role in the creation of the generation of Polish-Jewish Communists as well as of their Zionist and Bundist peers. For all of them, this common framework formed the base and starting point for the development of their radical potential, their individual formation, and their eventual division into competing political generations.

Neither social situation nor cultural heritage taken by itself would suffice to explain the background to the formation of the generation. Common social predicament alone would not have produced the similar pattern of response in attitude and action, while the common cultural heritage might in itself have as well resulted in the perpetuation of the traditional generation and its identity. It was the merging of these factors that produced the radical potential in which different, specific possibilities of choosing alternative strategies of emancipation (which