The Jews and the Left

[This essay was published in 2008 in A Time To Speak Out, the Independent Jewish Voices initiative published by Verso.]

“Fear the Lord, my son, and the king, and with dissidents do not mingle.” (Proverbs 24, 21)

The recent emergence of Jewish dissent on Israel has been met with fierce hostility by established Jewish organisations and spokespersons. Predictably, when the Independent Jewish Voices statement was released the authenticity and representativeness of its signatories came under attack. That response only reconfirmed the urgency of the statement’s assertion of the diversity and necessary conflict of opinion among Jews. In coupling this declaration of independence with a commitment to the universality of human rights, the statement takes its place in a venerable Jewish tradition, one that is at odds with those who seek a monopoly on Jewish public expression.

These days, when people think of Jewish political influence they think of the neo-Cons and the pro-Israel lobbying groups, and a Jewish political conspiracy is assumed to be right wing rather than left wing. At the same time, the left is seen by some Jews, not least communal leaders, as the carrier of a new anti-semitism. But for generations, Jews were identified with the left, and in some quarters the left was identified with the Jews. This was both a major theme of anti-semitic mythology, and a reality, though a more complex one than anti-semites or indeed many Jews would acknowledge.

Historically, the Jewish contribution to progressive movements – labour struggles in western Europe and north America, the civil rights struggle in the USA, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, to name but a few – is remarkable. The roll call of eminent leftists who were also Jews is lengthy and illustrious, from Marx, Trotsky, Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxembourg to Joe Slovo and Noam Chomsky by way of Leon Blum and Abbie Hoffman. It spans Eastern and Western Europe, North America, South Africa and the Arab world – in all of which, at various times, Jews were found on the left in significant numbers.

Jewish participation on the left has been ecumenical: Jews are to be found on either side of every major split. Jews have played prominent roles as social democrats, Communists, Trotskyists, anarchists, trades unionists, feminists and social reformers. They have been intellectuals, publicists, organisers, grass roots participants. At certain junctures, Jews have provided a mass constituency for the left. And everywhere, Jews on the left have faced opposition from Jewish defenders of the established order, often from rabbis and the orthodox, and not infrequently from the bulk of their fellow Jews.

The Jewish link with the left is often attributed to the prophetic tradition rooted in the Hebrew Bible, which is central to all forms of liberal and progressive Judaism. But the thesis is misleading. The particular prophetic tradition referred to is a modern construction. As it exists in the Bible, the tradition is open-ended and often contradictory. Alongside the calls for social justice, the championing of the poor against the rich, the denunciations of oppressive rulers are calls for genocide, assertions of collective ethnic guilt, and a misogyny the Taliban could cite as precedent. Both Zionists and anti-Zionists, liberals and fundamentalists can find succour in the prophetic texts. Certainly many Jewish leftists have found inspiration and justification there. But they imbibed this particular construction of the prophets in and through their engagement with modern society, not apart from it. The Jewish association with the left is less the product of a transhistorical ethical tradition than of the particular circumstances under which Jews entered the modern world and modern mass politics.

Emancipation and equivocation

Though the emancipation of the Jews – full citizenship and equal rights – is the foundation of Jewish social participation, it receives scant attention in contemporary Jewish circles. There are a number of reasons for this. There is no single glorious moment, no Emancipation Proclamation; it was a piecemeal, uneven process that spanned the 19th century. What’s more, it was a process that divided Jews. Communal leaders in general resisted it; and Jews of various classes wrestled in different ways with the terms on which Jews were to be admitted to the commonwealth.

The French revolution gave birth to the modern western left and to the first national emancipation of the Jews, an epochal event, often ignored – not least because it’s a story that offers no comfort to the Jewish establishment or to Zionists. In fact, emancipation was feared and even opposed by sections of French Jewry, as well as by sections of the left. In 1789, 40,000 Jews lived in France, divided between two major communities—the Ashkenazi in the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine (with their capital in the Jewish quarter in Metz) and the Sephardim in the west and south (Bordeaux and Avignon). The less numerous but more prosperous sephardim enjoyed nearly full civic rights and took part in the election to the Estates General. In contrast, the 30,000 Jews of eastern France had no civil rights, except the right to be judged by their own courts. In addition, there were several thousand Jews living in Paris, on sufferance, since the 14th century expulsion had never been rescinded. Many lived in the city without legal sanction, frequently impoverished, but free from rabbinic rule.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen implied Jewish emancipation, but the process of realizing the new principles in a living society with varied vested interests proved contentious. On the day of the declaration, August 26, 1789, an ad hoc group of “Jews of Paris” published an address to the National Assembly in which, under the terms of the Declaration, they claimed the title of citizens. “In order that there is no ambiguity, that the long oppression of which we have been victim does not become in the eyes of some individuals a pretext to oppress us again,” they called on the Assembly to “make particular mention of the Jewish nation and thus consecrate our title and our rights as citizens.” At the same time, the signatories renounced Jewish courts and constables and asked that Jews join the citizenry as a whole in “a uniform plan of police and jurisprudence”.

The Metz leadership greeted the revolution more hesitantly. Their representatives in Paris welcomed citizenship but wanted to keep juridical autonomy, restrict freedom of movement and retain the old Jewish quarters. Zalkind Hourwitz, a Jew from Poland long settled in Paris and an outspoken champion of Jewish freedom, was outraged that these syndics should be received by the National Assembly as the authentic representatives of their people. “They will sacrifice the well-being of their brothers to their superstitions and their private interests,” he warned. The Metz leadership feared that their authority among Jews would be undermined by greater intercourse with the wider populace; they also owned property in the Jewish quarters where restrictions on movement kept rents artificially high. Hourwitz wrote to the Assembly denouncing “the injustice of their pretensions… tyrannising the conscience of their fellow Jews with a rabbinical inquisition and … living in a cesspool.”

In his Apologie des Juifs, published in 1787, Hourwitz had argued for an unconditional end to discrimination against Jews, while at the same time calling on Jews to reform their own institutions and customs. For Hourwitz, standing at the fountainhead of what was to become the Jewish left, the answer to the Jewish question was neither separation nor assimilation, but the larger transformation of the social whole. He joined the National Guard in the summer of 1789, one of perhaps 800-1000 Jews, mostly young and poor, who shouldered musket and sabre for the revolution in its imperilled infancy. In June 1790, he was received by the Assembly as a member of an international brigade of revolutionary “foreigners”. As “ambassadors of the human race”, they declared that the Rights of Man should be applied everywhere, regardless of borders.

In December 1789, the Assembly debated the eligibility of non-Catholics for full citizenship. The anti-Jewish delegates were quick to seize on the Metz leadership’s equivocations. “They demand to be Frenchmen, but still wish to preserve Jewish administration, Jewish judges, Jewish notaries” as well as “their particular laws on heritage, marriage, tutelage,” noted Jean-Francois Reubell, a Jacobin delegate from Colmar (and later a member of the Directory). The Bishop of Nancy argued that Jewry’s “eyes turn incessantly toward a homeland which will one day reunite all its dispersed members” and “perforce cannot commit itself to the land in which it dwells. In the end, while granting full-citizenship to non-Catholic Christians, the Assembly postponed any decision on the status of the Jews. The Sephardim detached themselves from the dilemmas surrounding the Jews of the east and lobbied successfully for a specific resolution confirming their own rights, which the Assembly passed in January, 1790.2

The Assembly returned repeatedly to the matter of the Jews but, under pressure from the anti-semitic delegates from Alsace and Lorraine, made little headway. In contrast, the agitation for Jewish emancipation was taken up with zeal by the Paris Commune, as Hourwitz galvanised neighbourhood committees with his speeches: “Behold the men whom one seeks to deprive of the rights of man.” In February 1790, the Commune of Paris unanimously petitioned the National Assembly to acknowledge all Jews as citizens.

On Sept 27, 1791, after 25 months of debate and adjournment, the Assembly at last annulled “all adjournments, restrictions and exceptions … affecting individual Jews who will take the civil oath.” The next day, in response to an appeal by Reubell, the legislators added the stipulation that in taking the oath Jews would be considered to have renounced “all privileges and exceptions introduced previously in their favour.”

The emancipation of the Jews can only be understood, as Hourwitz understood it, as an inextricable part of the process of the Revolution, embodied in a series of landmark votes in the National Assembly: from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen through the nationalisation of church property, the abolition of hereditary titles and feudal guilds, the suppression of monastic orders. The day after the decision on Jewish emancipation, in one of its last acts, the Assembly voted to free black slaves living in France (slavery overseas was outlawed three years later).

The subsequent history of Jewish emancipation was chequered, reflecting the fortunes of the wider movement for democratic rights. This century-spanning process – the incomplete emancipation of the Jews– coincided with the growth of modern anti-semitism, organised and virulent, and hostile in particular to the trans-national associations of Jewry. Jews were both beneficiaries and victims of the rapid development of industrial society, simultaneously outsiders and insiders, their situation both promising and precarious. Out of this historical experience emerges the modern critical Jewish consciousness, and specifically the Jewish left. Jews turn to the left – and link their emancipation as Jews with a larger social cause – in significant numbers in modernising societies experiencing social crises: Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the US and Britain in the 30s; north Africa and the middle east in the 40s.

Socialism and nationalism

In late 19th century the Jews of the Russian Empire – at that time by far the most numerous Jewish population anywhere – faced, for the first time, en masse, the brutal vicissitudes of modern industrial life. In response, “the General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia”, known as the Bund, was founded in 1897 at a clandestine conference in Vilna. It rapidly developed from a federation of Jewish unions into a wider political and social movement.

From the outset the Bund combined revolutionary Marxist ideology with a practical, intimate link with Jewish working-class life. It organised strikes (mainly against Jewish employers, since these were the main employers of Jewish workers), massive leafleting campaigns (more than half a million pieces of literature in the year 1904), and a wealth of educational and cultural activities, conducted, crucially, in Yiddish. Where the Zionists and the Enlightenment-inspired Haskala favoured Hebrew and frowned on Yiddish as a debased jargon, the Bundists embraced Yiddish as the language of the Jewish masses of eastern Europe.

In 1898, the Bund helped create the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP), forerunner of what became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Though rooted in the Jewish working class of the Pale, the Bundists defined themselves first and foremost as internationalists and sought, with Lenin, Martov and others gathered around the magazine Iskra, to unite the Russian Empire’s dispersed “social democrats” (i.e. Marxists). In the following years the terms of that unity were to be fiercely contested, and never fully resolved.

At its 1901 Congress, the Bund declared that the Jewish proletariat had “national aspirations based on characteristics dear and peculiar to it – language, customs, ways of life, culture in general – which ought to have full freedom of development.” What the Bund sought was not Jewish territorial jurisdiction but “national autonomy” within a larger democratic state. At this Congress, the Bund also debated the challenge from Zionism, which it condemned as a utopian and bourgeois response to anti-semitism. Modern Russian society had been built in part by Jewish labour and Jewish labour would not abandon this investment for a Biblical homeland, but fight here and now for its share of that society’s wealth. 3

The Bund clashed with Lenin and the RSDWP leadership at a crucial Congress held in Brussels in July 1903. The Bund had demanded autonomy within the party, the right to elect its own central committee, to form policy on Jewish issues, and to be recognised as sole representative of the RSDWP among Jewish workers. To the previously agreed demands for equal rights, they added a demand for Jewish “cultural autonomy”, including education in Yiddish.

The Iskra leadership which would soon split bitterly into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks united against the Bund’s proposals. Interestingly, Iskra’s side of the debate was presented exclusively by Jews – so this was not an argument between Jews and Russians, but at least in part among Jews. The leadership’s rebuttal was led by the future Menshevik Julius Martov, whose exile to Vilna in the 1890s had helped inspire the formation of the Bund. Martov warned that “to squeeze the Jewish workers movement into a narrow channel of nationalism” would weaken its ties with the larger working class. Trotsky rose to inform the Congress that 12 Jewish delegates, members of the RSDWP, had signed Martov’s anti-Bund resolution – “and still considered themselves representatives of the Jewish proletariat”. An assertion angrily challenged by Bundists who asked how Trotsky and his comrades could represent people “among whom they have never worked.” 4Trotsky hit back by charging that in resisting Zionism, the Bund had absorbed some of its nationalism.

Despite the charges and counter charges of separatism and assimilationism, the opposition between Bund and Iskraites was not as clear-cut as it is sometimes made to appear. Both sides agreed that that there was a distinctive Jewish culture and workers movement, and, vitally, that its ultimate fate rested on the advance of the larger social democratic movement. What they could not agree about was the framework for that interaction. And that was partly because both sides were burdened with a schematic understanding of “national minorities”, incompatible with the indeterminate spectrum of Jewishness, and the multi-dimensionality of Jewish relations with non-Jews. The questions raised in the Bund-Iskra split of 1903 echo through the history of the left: the tensions between pluralism and unity, ethnicity and class, members and those who claim to represent them.

Zionism and the left

In the economic and political crises of the 1930s, the fate of Europe’s Jews became inextricably entwined with the larger conflict between democracy and fascism, and in both the USA and western Europe Jews entered the left in large numbers. In Britain, this meant the Labour Party and the Communist Party; in the USA, the Communist party and the New Deal left. It was a cultural as well as political outpouring, in which a secular, relaxed but unapologetic Jewishness flourished, fully consonant, it seemed, with the larger loyalties of the left.

Ultimately, Zionism and Israel were to break the perceived equation between Jewish interests and left politics. But it was a slow process. While both the theoretical basis and actual practice of Zionism have always been incompatible with left tenets, for decades Zionism coexisted and in some corners flourished within the left. Historically, the western left’s error has not been knee-jerk hostility to Israel, as claimed by recent critics, but turning a blind eye to what Zionism might imply for the people of Palestine.

The British Labour Party condemned the Arab revolt of 1936-39 as “fascist”. Its 1944 conference passed without dissent a resolution calling for the transfer of the Arab population of Palestine to accommodate a new Jewish state. Here solidarity with the victims of anti-semitism went hand in hand with colonial assumptions about Britain’s right to determine the fate of nations, and racist assumptions that rendered actually existing Palestinians invisible.

During the 30s and 40s, Zionism acquired greater legitimacy on the left as part of a constellation of anti-fascist forces. In the USA, where support for Irish and Indian independence was widespread, it posed as an anti-colonialist force in opposition to the British Mandate. At Communist front gatherings in the USA during World War II, Ha Tikvah was sung along with the Star Spangled Banner and the Internationale.

After World War II, when the left turned against Truman’s Cold War policy, one of its charges was that the president had betrayed the Jews in Palestine; his administration was said to be subservient to Arab oil interests, and more broadly to reactionary pro-British and anti-Soviet lobbies. With the enthusiastic backing of the Communists, former vice-president Henry Wallace made support for the Jewish state a pillar of his 1948 challenge to Truman. So it was the left that first played the Israel card in US politics.

The Soviet Union, after some hesitation, came to support partition. Arms shipments from the Soviet Bloc ensured the Jewish state’s establishment on the ground. That policy was highly saleable with the left’s constituencies in Britain and USA but a disaster in the Arab world, where it baffled and infuriated the grassroots, and enabled right-wing rulers to ban Zionism and Communism together.

Within a few years, the Soviet Union had shifted its position and aligned itself with Arab nationalism; Israel was drawn into the US Cold War orbit and began to establish itself as a regional power. At the same time, Jews in Britain and the US, benefiting from post war growth, climbed the socio-economic ladder. The Jewish working class diminished and with it, an organic link to the left. The Jewish establishment and Jewish communal organisations embraced Zionism as the great cause of the Jews.

For decades, Zionism flourished within the left, and the left flourished within Zionism. The builders of the State of Israel, chief perpetrators of the Palestinian nakba, called themselves socialists. The Zionist left, which emerged in the Pale as a competitor to the Bund, played an essential role in cementing the Jewish working class in the yishuv to the Zionist enterprise and the state of Israel. It also gave Zionism and Israel legitimacy on sections of the international left, especially in the labour movement, and for many years a patina of socialist idealism. In Britain, only a handful of left-wing anti-Stalinists – including the Jews Isaac Deutscher and Tony Cliff – challenged the Zionist narrative.

The Western left came only belatedly and with considerable division to support the Palestinian cause. (Even today, Israel remains a touchy subject on the US left, and US labour continues to act as one of Israel’s least critical backers.) It is only in recent decades that there has been a broad realignment of the left in solidarity with the Palestinians, whose stubborn struggle forced a reassessment of Zionism’s claims.

The gradual exposure of the iniquities of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians posed inescapable questions to Jews on the left. Some broke permanently with the left over the issue. Some sought and still seek to reconcile loyalty to Israel with their left-wing beliefs. And some found or are finding no reason to exempt Israel from their broader commitments to justice and equality, and specifically their opposition to racism and colonialism.

Despite the appearance of many obituaries, the Jewish association with the left is not dead. Jewish activists are to be found in significant numbers in the movements against war, racism and corporate globalisation. Their activism, especially their alertness to manifestations of racism, is often influenced by their awareness of Jewish history. Nor are these activists as cut off from the Jewish mainstream as some would have us believe. Western Jews in general continue to lean to the left. In the US, Jews opposed the Iraq war and voted against Bush in disproportionate numbers. On social issues, the Jewish majority, despite the growth of ultra-orthodoxies, remains liberal. Even on Israel, Jewish popular opinion is to the left of the Jewish establishment.

Like Hourwitz and the Bund, the IJV statement places the question of the Jews in the larger context of social justice; it refuses to separate Jewish freedom from the humanist cause. In light of the continuing injustice inflicted on the Palestinians, it is urgently necessary to contest the claim of global Jewish support for Israel, not sotto voce, not only discretely within Jewish circles, but robustly and in the face of the world, and, crucially, as part of a broader movement.

There’s a Jewish tradition of freedom of thought and diversity of opinion, but there’s also a Jewish tradition of suppressing freedom and diversity. The Zionist establishment is the secular successor to the rabbinic forces that long claimed a monopoly on Jewish representation. As in the past, their strategy has been to ally Jewish interests with the prevailing axis of power, local or global.

Much effort has gone into propagating the thesis that the western left is today a hotbed of anti-semitism, and that no self-respecting Jew would be part of it. To Jews on the left today, however, that is an unrecognisable picture. The left is not immune to anti-semitism or other forms of racism, but the gist of the charge rests on the conflation of Israel with the Jews and of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism – a drastic narrowing of what it is to be Jewish, and of the Jewish historical legacy. Only by abandoning its best historic traditions, its humanist and egalitarian core, could the left satisfy its Zionist critics. And only by compromising their own commitments to universalist principles can Jews today fail to challenge the Jewish establishment’s championing of Israel.