The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia,N. A. Bukhbinder: The History of the Jewish Labor Movement in Russia. According to unpublished archive material. Tamar 1931. generally called The Bund, or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a secular Jewish socialist party initially formed in the Russian Empire and active between 1897 and 1920. A member of the Bund was called a Bundist. Between 1898 and 1903, the Bund was an autonomous part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but left after the Second Congress. The majority faction of the Russian Bund was dissolved in 1921 and incorporated into the Communist Party. Other remnants of the Bund endured in various countries.
In 1917, the Bund organizations in Poland seceded from the Russian Bund and created a new Polish General Jewish Labour Bund which continued to operate in Poland in the years between the two world wars.
Founding
During the mid-to-late 19th century eastern Europe, Jewish politics was shifting away from the oligarchic politics of the kehilla, and religious conflict towards secular mass politics. Additionally, Jewish political thought expanded to include more general issues beyond Jewish issues alone, being joined by concerns of broader issues such as class issues and economics, as well as political rights and civil rights. This shift was joined by an increased assertiveness from Jewish politics. The "General Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland" was founded in Vilna on 7 October 1897. The name was inspired by the General German Workers' Association. The Bund’s roots were in underground circles of revolutionary study active in the late 1800s, where Jewish workers and intellectuals held discussions in socialist theory and organized in groups such as the “Jewish Social Democrats,” one of the first Jewish labor movements. These small circles began to develop into broader mass agitation following calls from leaders such as Julius Martov and Arcady Kremer for the Jewish proletariat to couple the struggle of obtaining civil rights for Jews with the wider economic needs of the Russian workers.
The Bund sought to unite all Jewish workers in the Russian Empire into a united socialist party, and also to ally itself with the wider Russian social democratic movement to achieve a democratic and socialist Russia. The Russian Empire then included Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and most of present-day Poland, areas where the majority of the world's Jews then lived. They hoped to see the Jews achieve a legal minority status in Russia. Of all Jewish political parties of the time, the Bund was the most progressive regarding gender equality, with women making up more than one-third of all members.
The Bund actively campaigned against antisemitism, and defended Jewish civil and cultural rights. As affirmed by Bundist leader Vladimir Medem, the Bund was not against assimilation but against the aim to assimilate; similarly, it was not against nationalism but against nationalist policy based solely on territory. Its position on Jewish national unity (klal yisrael) has thus been disputed. The Bund avoided any automatic solidarity with Jews of the middle and upper classes and generally rejected political cooperation with Jewish groups that held religious, Zionist or conservative views.
At the heart of the vision of the future of the Bund was the idea that there is no contradiction between the national aspect on the one hand and the socialist aspect on the other. As a strictly secular organization, the Bund renounced the quasi-religious aspect of the Zionist project and its use of the Hebrew language.
After Kremer and Kossovsky were arrested, a new party leadership emerged. A new central committee was set up under the leadership of Dovid Kats (Taras). Other key figures in the new party leadership were Leon Goldman, Pavel (Piney) Rozental and Zeldov (Nemansky). The 2nd Bund conference was held in September 1898. The 3rd Bund conference was held in Kovno in December 1899. John Mill had returned from exile to attend the conference, at which he argued that the Bund should advocate for Jewish national rights. However, Mill's line did not win support from the other conference delegates. The 3rd conference affirmed that the Bund only struggled for civil, not national, rights.
However, the Bund later reversed this position in its Fourth Conference in 1901, where it declared that its aims were also for the principle of equal national rights. In this conference, they promoted the idea of a Russia transformed into a federation of nationalities, each to enjoy “full autonomy, independent from the territory in which it resides.” The term nationality, stated the Congress, was to apply also to the Jewish people. Later, the demand for national-cultural autonomy, outlined in the Bund’s demands for cultural development of all nations and right to use one’s native language in government and social institutions, was integrated as a political demand in the Bund’s program. By the 8th Congress, the Bund’s interest in equal national rights for Jews, and the rights to develop a secular national culture, had become ingrained within Bund’s development of a national-cultural program.
In 1901, the word "Lithuania" was added to the name of the party.Minczeles, Henri. Histoire générale du Bund: un mouvement révolutionnaire juif. Paris: Editions Austral, 1995. p. 61
The Bund's membership grew to 900 in Łódź and 1,200 in Warsaw in the fall of 1904.
During the period of 1903–1904, the Bund was harshly affected by Czarist state repression. Between June 1903 and July 1904, 4,467 Bundists were arrested and jailed.Minczeles, Henri. Histoire générale du Bund: un mouvement révolutionnaire juif. Paris: Editions Austral, 1995. p. 119
In its early years, the Bund had remarkable success, gaining an estimated 30,000 members in 1903 and an estimated 40,000 supporters in 1906, making it the largest socialist group in the Russian Empire.
As part of the Russian Social Democracy Given the Bund's secular and socialist perspective, it opposed what it viewed as the reactionary nature of traditional Jewish life in Russia. Created before the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), the Bund was a founding collective member at the RSDLP's first congress in Minsk in March 1898. Three out of nine delegates at the Minsk congress were from the Bund, and one of three members of the first RSDLP Central Committee was a Bundist.International Socialism. The rise and fall of the Jewish Labour Bund For the next 5 years, the Bund was recognized as the sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP, although many Russian socialists of Jewish descent, especially outside of the Pale of Settlement, joined the RSDLP directly. As of 1907, Jewish membership in the RSDLP was roughly 11,900.Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution, pp. 364–365.
At the RSDLP's second congress in Brussels and London in August 1903, the Bund's autonomous position within the RSDLP was rejected, with both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks voting against, and the Bund's representatives left the Congress, the first of many splits in the Russian social democratic movement in the years to come. The five representatives of the Bund at this Congress were Vladimir Kossowsky, Arkadi Kremer, Mikhail Liber, Vladimir Medem and Noah Portnoy.
During this period two trade unions, the Union of Bristle-Makers (Bersther-Bund) and the Union of Tanners (Garber-Bund), were affiliated to the Bund. In its report to the 1903 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party congress, the Bund claimed to have district organizations in Vilna (Sventiany, etc.), Kovno (Ponevezh, Vilkomir, Shavli, Onikshty, Keydany, Yanovo, Shaty, Utena...), Grodno (Kartuz-Bereza, etc.), Białystok, Dvinsk (Rezhitsa...), Minsk (Borisov, Pinsk, Mozyr, Bobruisk, Parichi...), Vitebsk (Beshankovichy, Liozna, Lyady...), Warsaw, Łódź, Siedlce,Rusiniak-Karwat, Martyna. "The Siedlce branch of the Bund (1902-1939)". Virtual Shtetl. Retrieved 6 December 2020. Płock, Suwałki, Mariampol, Gomel (Dobryanyka, Vietka...), Mogilev (Shklow, Orsha, Bykhov, Kopys...), Zhytomyr, Berdichev, Odessa, Nizhyn, Bila Tserkva, Podolian Governorate (Vinnitsa, Bratslav, Tulchina, Nemirov), Lutsk, Volhynian Governorate, as well as the districts of the Union of Bristle-Makers; Nevel, Kreslavka, Vilkovyshki, Kalvaria, Vladislavovo, Verzhbolovo, Vystinets, , Trostyan, Knyszyn, and the districts of the Union of Tanners; Smorgon, Oshmyany, Krynki, Zabludovo, , etc.
Per Vladimir Akimov's account of the history of social democracy 1897–1903, there were 14 local committees of Bund – Warsaw, Łódź, Belostok, Grodno, Vilna, Dvisnk, Kovno, Vitebsk, Minsk, Gomel, Mogilev, Berdichev, Zhitomir, Riga. Per Akimov's account the local committees had six types of councils; trade councils (fakhoye skhodki), revolutionary groups, propaganda councils, councils for intellectuals, discussion groups for intellectuals and agitators' councils. The Bristle-Makers Union and Tanners Union had committee status. Bund had organizations that weren't full-fledged committees in Pinsk, Sedlice, Petrokov, Płock, Brest-Litovsk, Vilkomir, Priluki, Rezhitsa, Kiev, Odessa, Bobruisk, and many smaller townships.
Parliamentary representation At the 1906 First Duma elections, the Bund made an electoral agreement with the Lithuanian Labourers' Party (Trudoviks), which resulted in the election to the Duma of two (apparently non-Bundist) candidates supported by the Bund: Dr. Shmaryahu Levin for the Vilna province and Leon Bramson for the Kovno province. In total, there were twelve Jewish deputies in the Duma, falling to three in the Second Duma (February 1907 to June 1907), two in the Third Duma (1907–1912) and again three in the fourth, elected in 1912, none of them being affiliated to the Bund.
Policies The Bund’s position was strongly anti-Zionist since its inception; its modus operandi was based upon the notion of doikayt, or hereness, which affirmed that Jews should advance Jewish culture where they lived, rather than supporting what Bundists considered an anti-semitic idea of Jews as strangers. Bundist opposition to Zionism was multifaceted; Vladimir Medem viewed Zionist as not only an unrealistic fantasy, but also as the equivalent of the bourgeois capitalist nationalism of the non-Jewish world and the antithesis to proletarian struggle.
The Bund did not advocate separatism. Instead, it focused on culture, rather than a state or a place, as the glue of Jewish "nationalism". In this they borrowed extensively from the Austro-Marxist school, further alienating the Bolsheviks and Lenin. The Bund also promoted the use of Yiddish as a Jewish national language and to some extent opposed the Zionist project of reviving Hebrew.
The Bund won converts mainly among Jewish artisans and workers, but also among the growing Jewish intelligentsia. It led a trade union movement of its own. It joined with the Poalei Zion (Labour Zionists) and other groups to form self-defense organisations to protect Jewish communities against pogroms and government troops. During the Russian Revolution of 1905 the Bund headed the revolutionary movement in the Jewish towns, particularly in Belarus and Ukraine.
The Bund recognized the Yiddish language as a social identifier. To maintain its national-cultural autonomy, the Bund advocated for the Polish Jewish minority to use its own language and maintain its cultural institutions in areas where it was considered a sizable portion of the local population. As a Germanic language, Yiddish also helped maintain the Bund's European identity. This can be compared to the anti-Yiddish campaign taking place in Palestine during the early twentieth century, where Yiddish newspapers were banned and physical attacks took place against Yiddish speakers.