Jews and Non-Territorial Autonomy: Political Programmes and Historical Perspectives

Abstract

Non-territorial autonomy, in various forms, was an enormously popular idea among Central and East European Jews in the early twentieth century, until two major events, the extermination of most European Jews during the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel as an ethnonational state in 1948, sidelined the public debate, among Jews, on alternatives to the nation state. This article analyses the relatively little known (but intellectually fecund) political programmes for Jewish autonomy in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century: the non-territorial Jewish autonomy envisioned by proponents of diaspora nationalism (primarily the historian Simon Dubnow), the national–cultural autonomy proposed by the Jewish Labour Bund (elaborated mainly by Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem) and the proposals by some liberal Zionists, such as Robert Weltsch and Hans Kohn, of Brit Shalom, to create a binational state in Palestine. It also considers the few historical attempts to implement these ideas in practice.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Adriana Benzaquén, the three anonymous reviewers and the editor of this special issue for their suggestions and constructive criticism of an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. The most comprehensive collection of historical demographic data can be found in Mahler (1958), which includes a volume with detailed statistics based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century censuses. For early twentieth-century data, see Lestschinsky (1922). See also DellaPergola (2001, pp. 11–33); Stampfer (1997, pp. 263–285). Weinreich (1973) is still the most comprehensive source for the history of the Yiddish language.

2. An abridged English translation of the Letters can be found in Dubnow (1958, pp. 73–249). For the full text of the Letters in Yiddish, see Dubnow (1959), and, in French, Dubnow (1989). Unless noted, all references to Dubnow's Letters are to the English edition and by letter number used in that edition (e.g. Twelfth Letter). For a discussion of the different editions of the Letters, see Shumsky (2012).

3. In the words of Israeli historian Pappe (2013): ‘The secular Jews who founded the Zionist movement wanted paradoxically both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine; in other words, they did not believe in God but He nonetheless promised them Palestine.’

4. The minutes of the debate on the national question at the Bund's Fifth Congress were published in 1927 and 1928; see ‘Di diskusie vegn der natsionaler frage afn V tsuzamenfor fun “Bund” iuni 1903 Tsiurikh (fun di protokoln fun tsuzamenfor)', Unzer tsayt: sotsialistishe khoydesh-shrift (Warsaw) 1:2 (November 1927): 87–96; Unzer tsayt 1:3/4 (December 1927): 82–91 and Unzer tsayt 2:1 (January 1928): 83–96.

5. The article was first published in Russian in 1904 and translated into Yiddish as Di natsionale frage un di sotsial demokratsie (Vilne, 1906). All references here are from the later version (‘Di sotsial-demokratie un di natsionale frage’ in Medem, 1943 [1904], pp. 173–219). Unfortunately, no complete English translation of this text is available.

6. That Medem, the most venerated Bundist leader, was a non-Jew according to the halakha, since both his parents had converted to Christianity and he himself was baptized as a child, is a phenomenon probably without parallel in any modern Jewish organization.

7. Neutralism was rebuked by some Bundists in later years, but Medem's articles on this issue continued to be reprinted by the party press as late as 1918 (see previous note). Jewish-Yiddishist identity became a central pillar of Bundist faith in the Bundist groups that developed in several countries around the world after the Second World War, leaving behind any trace of the cosmopolitanism of the party's founding fathers; see Slucki (2012).

8. Helsingfors is the Swedish name for Helsinki; see Frankel (1981, p. 166); and Janowsky (1933, pp. 106–112). Mintz (1984, p. 154) discerns Dubnow's influence on the young Russian Zionists who promoted the Helsingfors Programme; see also Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (1995, pp. 555–556).

9. While the liberal members of Brit Shalom were mostly from Central Europe, another important group that proposed binationalism consisted of Eastern Europeans. This was the Marxist-Leninist Hashomer Hatzair Party (1930–1946), later the Hashomer Hatzair Worker's Party (1946–1948), led by Ya'akov Hazan and Meir Ya'ari, whose programme was inspired not by events in the Habsburg Empire but rather by the Soviet Union as a ‘communal apartment’ of nationalities; see Hashomer Hatzair Worker's Party (1946) and Slezkine (1994). The Hashomer Hatzair Party had strong support among the members of the Kibutz Artzi movement and a wider membership than Brit Shalom's.

10. Hermann (2005, pp. 383–384) outlines five different models of binationalism, only two of which include an element of collective autonomy.

11. Kohn, ‘Le dmuta hapolitit shel erets yisrael’, Sheifoteinu 1 (1927), quoted in Shumsky (2011, p. 343).

12. The 14-point programme can be found in Lavsky (2002, p. 202).

13. In recent years, Shumsky has become an important and courageous public Israeli intellectual and regular contributor to Haaretz, What sets him apart from other critics of Israeli discriminatory policies is that he consistently supports his arguments with references to the founding fathers of Zionism and the State of Israel, such as Theodore Herzl. For instance, in one of his most recent interventions, Shumsky proclaims that no party today better reflects ’Herzl's values’, as described in his programmatic novel Altneuland, than the left-wing, anti-Zionist Hadash, the party that staunchly defends the civic and political rights of Israeli-Palestinians and promotes social justice for both Jews and Arabs; Shumsky (2015).

14. According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in September 2014, the Israeli-citizen Palestinian population was estimated at 1,710,500 out of a total permanent population of 8,253,200; see http://www1.cbs.gov.il/reader/?MIval=cw_usr_view_SHTML&ID=629 (accessed October 2014). The West Bank and Gaza data are a 2013 mid-year estimate by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, but they exclude the over half a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; see http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/Portals/_PCBS/Downloads/book2025.pdf (accessed October 2014), pp. 26–27. These estimates are contested by pro-settler activists, but do not differ substantially from official Israeli figures; see Hasson (2013).