During the revolution, the Jewish Workers’ Party of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania—the Bund—was the most popular Jewish political organization. It had a membership of fifty thousand; its sympathizers were many times that. Formed in 1897, its mission was to represent the Jewish worker by organizing strikes for higher wages and by promoting revolutionary political activity.15 Bund leaders sought to overthrow the tsarist regime and construct a new society based on socialism. The Bund had been part of the Russian Social Democrats until 1903, but they decided to leave the party because of the attacks on the Bund’s national dimension and the claim that non-Bundists could not understand the true needs of the Jewish worker.16
The Bund had advantages over Zionism. For a time, its alliance with the revolutionary parties seemed to promise political transformation and the end of tsarism. Additionally, the Bund had come to be associated with Jewish self-defense. That helped its popularity during the summer and especially the fall of 1905, when Jews were under attack by elements hostile to the revolution.
The Bund’s success appeared to mirror Zionism’s failure. Fewer people were paying the single shekel membership. With Russia up in arms, Zionism, with its emphasis on settlement in Palestine, seemed irrelevant. It also did not help that Zionism was considered a plaything of the well-to-do that had little in common with the working class. Jabotinsky responded by reaching out to workers and explaining to them that Zionists were the original defenders of Jewish interests and remained uncompromising advocates, whereas Bundists were divided in their loyalties.
In The Bund and Zionism (1906), Jabotinsky presented a simple argument. Instead of belittling the Bund, he praised its work, but compared it to a step on an evolutionary ladder in which Zionism represented a higher rung. To justify this hierarchy, Jabotinsky claimed that Zionism provided the Bund with its original inspiration: the consciousness of a Jewish nation and the desire to serve the nation’s interests. Later, Bundist leaders grew that original seed into something different: a Jewish workers’ party. However, Zionism differed from the Bund because the latter inevitably veered toward “assimilation”; “inevitably,” because its calls for national self-renewal were subordinate to socialist unity and the denial of Jewish separatism. According to Jabotinsky, even the announcement in favor of national autonomy at the Bund’s Fourth Conference (1901) reflected a promise that the leaders could not keep.
Comparing the Bund with the government’s program to allow wage strikes but not politically motivated work stoppages (Zubatovshchina), Jabotinsky writes: “I do not place an equal sign between the Bund and the agents of autocracy, but the proclamation of national autonomy at the Bund’s 4th Conference was an act of national Zubatovshchina. And in the same way that real Zubatovshchina was conceived subjectively for the elimination of Social Democracy, but objectively signified the subordination of aristocracy under the impact of Social Democracy—in exactly the same way the nationalization of the Bund program, undertaken for a struggle with Zionism, was in reality a concession to Zionism.”17
“Zubatovshchina,” named after the tsarist official who designed it—Sergei Zubatov—was a government policy intended to separate legitimate economic demands from revolutionary activity, and thereby isolate the revolutionaries from the ordinary workers. In the government’s view, the policy was successful as a political strategy but went against its own economic goals. Simultaneously, many believed that the policy was dangerous since the success of “economic” strikes might whet a desire for increased political rights. Jabotinsky’s point was that the Bund initiated the national policy in order to stave off Zionism, the party truly devoted to Jewish national interests. Jabotinsky further claimed that there was no need to compromise between Jewish nationalism and socialism. Only Zionism was designed to advance national politics without compromise or half-measures.
One should not get the impression from Jabotinsky’s argumentation that he actually respected the Bund. His argument hung on the premise that the Bund and Zionists were not antipodes, as Bundists argued, but rather “two plants with a single root,” each operating according to its own inner logic.18 Thus, the Bund actually promoted Zionism’s ideals. Jabotinsky writes, “When the future scholar writes a comprehensive history of the Zionist movement, one chapter in his work, perhaps, will draw the reader’s special attention. It will immediately follow the chapters about Palestine immigration and Ahad-Ha’am’s philosophy. At the beginning, its reader will encounter a repetition of Pinsker’s ideas, at the end, the first proclamation of Poale Tsion. In this chapter, one of the episodes of Zionism will be recounted, and this chapter will be entitled ‘Bund.’”19 Incidentally, it is hard not to recall here the argument of Grigory Plekhanov that “Bundists are Zionists who fear sea sickness.”20
However, for Jabotinsky the tactic of connecting the Bund and Zionists made sense since support taken from the Bund was a net win for Zionism. In the context of the Bund’s boycott of the elections to the First Duma, Jabotinsky’s Zionism filled the absence. He was saying, in essence: If you care about Jewish interests, you need not worry about the Bund’s boycott of the Duma, since Zionism has stepped into the space that belonged to the Bund. Therefore, a vote for Zionism was actually a vote for Jewish nationalism in its superior form.
In his criticisms, Jabotinsky unabashedly pilfered from the enemy. Jonathan Frankel explains, “It was typical of the period that, in attacking the socialists, Jabotinsky tended to adopt their historico-philosophical modes of thought and even their vocabulary. He, too, spoke of the inevitably unfolding of historical necessities; of the logical development from revolution to Jewish national autonomy in Russia and from autonomy as a penultimate stage to final and maximal goals. This ideological framework was shared by all the Jewish socialist parties in 1906. More specifically, Jabotinsky adopted the incrementalist or quasi-evolutionist approach to revolution and territorialism first advanced in coherent ideological form by the Vozrozhdentsy in the years 1903–4.”21
Jabotinsky’s polemic against the Bund also reflected a degree of cynicism, since the two organizations clashed on every issue. Bundists rejected Jabotinsky’s arguments as entirely divorced from reality because he willfully ignored the main differences: class conflict, coalitions with Russian parties, integration in Russia, and the question of Palestine. To a degree, the two movements appealed to different constituencies. The Bund courted the working class and intellectuals who supported the workers. Zionists rejected class conflict and stressed collective national unity. The Bund maintained that “unity” concealed the true interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie: to exploit the workers.22 In addition, the Bund desired to link the Jewish masses to the international workers’ movement, and asserted that Jews would remain in Eastern Europe.23 For their part, Zionists rejected the Diaspora and envisioned a new society in Palestine. They also clashed on the language issue: the Bund embraced Yiddish and Jewish folk culture, whereas Zionists valorized Hebrew, the language of the Bible and the upper class (rabbis and the elite, for example).24
Bund representatives did not ignore Jabotinsky’s attacks. At the Bund’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Conferences, representatives denounced Zionism as “bourgeois politics” that distracted the Jewish working class from its proper role.25 In fact, the Bund apparently used its conflict with Zionism to score points with Russian radicals. Jabotinsky took note of the struggle. In response to a pro-Bund article in Iskra, he wrote: “The ‘Bund’ responded to this with an unprecedented intensification, so to speak, of repression against Zionists of every stripe. Every scrap of printing paper was to be utilized for the ‘struggle.’”26
Apparently hostilities between the Bund and the other Jewish