An estimated eight to ten million Jews worldwide can trace their origins to the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which lasted from 1569 to 1795.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lasted until 1795
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth provided a safe haven for Jews who fled or were driven from other, less enlightened and tolerant parts of Europe in the 16th 17th and 18th century.
The Commonwealth had an elected King, who extended his royal protection to Jews. But at the end the Commonwealth had a weak central government, and this tempted its more aggressive, expansionist neighbours, who made substantial inroads into Commonwealth territory, culminating in the Commonwealth’s total collapse and annexation in 1795. The spoils were divided between Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1795. Poland and Lithuania were expunged from the political map of Europe only to re-emerge as independent states between the two World Wars.
Imperial Russia proved the most oppressive occupier. A joke in Isaac Babel’s “Odessa Stories” runs that even God can make mistakes, for example “He put the Jews in Russia and not Switzerland”.
Imperial Russia was oppressive to the Jewish people
After the collapse of the Commonwealth, many Jews settled in the Pale (the area in Russia where Jewish people were allowed to settle), but the situation became decidedly worse for those Jews after the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Tsar Alexander II had been a mild reformer who had freed the Russian serfs. He was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, a reactionary antisemite, and a wave of political suppression was unleashed. Jews were again targeted, known as pogroms with increasing severity. This in turn led to the mass exodus of Jews from the Pale, mainly to the USA but also to Britain in the next decades. Their arrival in Britain prompted Westminster’s first ‘immigration laws’.
The demand for ‘nation states’ had grown in mid to late 19th century Europe and the demand for a Jewish state arose too, resulting in the founding of the World Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. Much lesser known is that the same year a secular, socialist, political party was founded within the Pale in Vilna (now Vilnius in Lithuania); namely the ‘Jewish Labour Bund’, generally known simply as ‘The Bund’.
It is the heroic tale of the Bund, which Molly Crabapple traces with admirably diligent research and passion. She even learnt Yiddish to gain access to primary sources.
The Bund wasn’t Zionist, just Jewish
The very title “Here Where We Live Is Our Country:The Story of the Jewish Bund” expresses the essence of the Bund and is in itself an explicit rejection of Zionism. The Bundists wanted to live in safety where they were born, lived and wished to continue to live. The Bund was internationalist and chose to identify and express solidarity with socialists and workers’ movements in the Pale and beyond. The Bund believed that for Jews to live safely, the rest of society also needed safety and social and economic justice.
This meant that the Bund became enmeshed in the international Socialist movements and particularly in pre-revolutionary Russia. They took part in a whirlwind of activities – conferences, disputes, arguments, rivalries – in the prelude to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bund found itself in a minority, numerically and ideologically, under the ruthless rise and seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.
Borders were rearranged after WWI
The Paris Peace Conference (1919) to settle the post-WWI world created a new European order based on the nation states, which emerged from the collapse of the Great European Empires, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian. The Bolshevik regime had made their own peace with Germany during the war and did not attend the Paris talks. The old Jewish Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was absorbed into the new states of Poland and the tiny Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In these states any hope of democracy was swept aside in the interwar decades by a tide of authoritarianism and ethnonationalism.
The new Poland inherited the largest Jewish population, and a new Jewish Bund was formed in Poland, known as the ‘Kombund’.
Molly Crabapple composes her history well, moving chronologically and inserting the biographies of key characters into the narrative of the Bund.
Like many central European socialist and social-democratic movements, the Bund organised social and sports clubs, set up cooperatives, education classes and, as antisemitic violence was ever-present, the Bund organised self-defence units.
Molly Crabapple’s book starts with her great-grandfather
Molly Crabapple’s starting point is the tale of her own great-grandfather, from whom she inherits her artistic talent. Her great-grandfather, an early Bundist, found refuge in the USA and pursued a career of mixed fortune as an artist. His life story is told with marked affection.
The Bund, in Molly Crabapple’s words, did not fail, but was defeated by stronger forces in the maelstrom of revolutions and wars, which dominated Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
The interwar years were horrific for the Bund. The rivalry between the Bund and the Zionists was bitter and spread from ideological differences to outright hostility and street fights.
The Polish ‘Home Army’ and the Bund cooperated in WWII
The Bund was assailed from several directions politically and physically. The Stalinist Communists regarded the Bund as dangerous heretics, the Polish government wanted to expel Jews and the Catholic Church joined the call to boycott Jewish businesses. The Bund’s only constant ally was the Polish Socialist Party, they too being victims of Stalin’s paranoia.
If the interwar years were horrific, World War II was catastrophic. The Nazi occupation witnessed Jews being driven into ghettos throughout Poland, as well as elsewhere. The largest and most infamous one being in Warsaw, which had the second largest Jewish population in the world after New York. The Bund ran courier services, underground supply lines with the rest of Warsaw beyond the ghetto and even managed to produce newsletters. Their heroic resistance, joined by some Zionists, reached its apogee in the ghetto rising and ultimate destruction in April 1943. The uprising was the largest Jewish revolt against Nazism.
The Polish “Home Army”, the resistance under the command of the Polish government in exile in London, cooperated with the Bund, but needed weapons themselves and had few arms and ammunition to spare for the Bund.
Throughout the book there are intriguing references to the Jewish mafia’s protective actions for fellow Jews in peace and war. (The Jewish mafia also make an appearance in Isaac Babel’s writings – see footnote)
Little relief when WWII ended
The end of the war brought little relief. Though there were many acts of kindness and protection by Poles, surviving and returning Jews still found a hostile reception from their former neighbours, some of whom had seized Jewish property.
Many European Jews had neither energy nor confidence that they could claim their rightful place in Europe. Nor was there trust that Jews could find a home “where we live now”. After the Holocaust, Zionist Israel was a convincing safer option.
The post-war settlement changed Eastern Europe beyond all recognition from multicultural societies to mainly monocultural ones. And Stalin’s men were controlling Poland and Europe beyond the Iron Curtain.
Internationally the Holocaust had convinced the world’s dominant powers that a national homeland just for Jews was now needed more than ever.
In her conclusion Molly Crabapple asserts that the Bund did not “fail” but was defeated by shattering violent upheavals beyond its power to resist.
A Jewish homeland in Palestine would be at the expense of the locals
The Bund had always taken the view that a Jewish homeland in Palestine could only become a reality at the expense of the rights of the local population.
In 1933 one of the Bund leaders, Henryk Erlich, argued with Cassandra-like prescience that “if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations…no, we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful…and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all the other nations.”
A chilling and accurate prediction, which is validated as we witness daily the murderous actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank.
But the Bund’s legacy has survived in spirit and reality. A Jewish, secular, progressive, anti-Zionist view of the world remains. It is a rational and pragmatic choice, which many Jews worldwide have taken, namely that “their home is where they are”. It is a commitment, which my Jewish friends and Jews worldwide still hold dearly; whatever their families’ history and fate has brought them.
Footnote: Isaak Babel, Jewish writer and correspondent in the Russian Civil War, who was murdered in Stalin’s purges in 1940. His wry tales of Jewish life are told in “Odessa Stories”. (In his days Odessa was in the Soviet Union, it is now in Ukraine)
You can order Molly Crabapple’s excellent book from your local lending library or an independent bookseller.
Read the original book review on Michael Hindley’s Substack.
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