Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora NationalismAuthor(s): Joshua ShanesSource: Monatshefte, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 178-188Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30153699Accessed: 27/11/2009 01:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwisc.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toMonatshefte.

http://www.jstor.org

Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism

JOSHUA SHANES

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Recent historical scholarship has focused on the emergence of "mod- ern Jewish politics" in Europe, particularly within the East Central Euro- pean empires.1 Unfortunately, this literature has tended to be teleological in its analysis of Jewish nationalism. That is, the ultimate failure of Diaspora nationalists to achieve lasting Jewish cultural or political autonomy and the subsequent success of the Zionists led historians to discount Jewish nation- alist "alternatives" to the Zionist parties, the various forms of Diaspora nationalism, and the history of the struggle for national minority rights. Indeed, more often than not scholars equate Jewish nationalism with Zi- onism, often complicating research into non-Zionist nationalist groups.

Europe boasted a number of non-Zionist forms of Jewish nationalist expression. Autonomists sought Jewish national minority rights, particu- larly language and education rights, within the context of a democratic multi-national state. Some socialist groups, such as the Bund, ultimately accepted a nationalist platform. Territorialists affirmed Jewish nationhood in the Diaspora, but accepted political Zionism's fundamental belief in the need for an independent political territory. And Yiddishists defended Yid- dish as a legitimate (or the only legitimate) Jewish national language and sought to have it recognized as such by the ruling powers as the basis for a Jewish national renaissance. Far from being exclusive categories, however, these political groups were part of a single political discourse, which in- creasingly demanded a Diaspora nationalist platform. Yiddish, whether as a value or a target of attack, was critical to each of these groups' nationalist identity and program.

The man today most connected with the doctrine of national auton- omism is the historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow developed his theories of autonomism in a series of articles he wrote for the Russian-Jewish journal Voskhod entitled "Letters on Old and New Judaism."2 He articulated a three-stage theory of national development whose highest level was a peo- ple which had lost its sovereignty and even its territorial continuity but

Monatshefte, Vol. 90, No. 2, 1998 178 0026-9271/98/0002/0178 $01.50/0 C 1998 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System

Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism 179

achieved a spiritual connectedness based in religion, history, and language. The Jews, he argued, were the sole case of such a nation, and the persistence of the Jews since the Babylonian exile, and particularly through the last two thousand years, indicated to him the unique stage of development which they had reached.

Dubnow chastised both traditional religious hegemony and assimila- tionism, the former for "crushing the spirit of freedom with the fetters of tradition," the later for alienating the Jew from his own nationality. He wanted a synthesis to balance these two extremes, to strengthen the Jewish soul while maintaining the humanity which assimilationists sought. This syn- thesis was progressive nationalism, which balanced the Jew's national rights with secular universalism.

In forging this synthesis, Dubnow sought to adapt Judaism to the twentieth century, to draw on every tool at the Jewish nation's disposal to replace the bulwark of religious autonomy:

In order to strengthen the Diaspora we'll use the weapons of national struggle which served us for thousands of years and which are adapted to the world view of our time. You ask what wall we shall erect in place of the fallen ghetto walls? Every period has its own architecture, and the powerful vital instinct will unmistakably tell the people what style to use for building the wall of national autonomy which will replace the former religious 'fence to the fence'... .3

Dubnow clearly valued Yiddish as a critical tool in the unity and cre- ativity of the Jewish people, as a "weapon of national struggle in place of fallen ghetto walls." He called Yiddish Israel's "artificial leg" in place of a contiguous territory. But he also supported Hebrew, which he labeled the Jewish nation's "natural leg," and he wrote principally in Russian, which he also considered a valid language of Jewish expression. This inclusiveness was typical of Dubnow; indeed, he supported nearly every form of Jewish expression and politics with the exception of the socialists because their narrow concern for the Jewish proletariat excluded the rest of the Jewish nation.

Dubnow's openness to the language question has led both nationalists and scholars to draw on his writings somewhat selectively. For example, a recent scholarly collection promoting Yiddish language and culture opens with this quote:

... we dare not abandon one of the foundations of national unity in the very hour that the languages of the peoples around us rob our people of thousands and tens of thousands of its sons, so that they no longer understand the lan- guage used by their parents. We must not destroy with our own hands the power of our folk language to compete with the foreign languages which lead to assimilation.... Insofar as we recognize the merit of national existence in

180 Shanes

the Diaspora, we must also recognize the merit of Yiddish as one of the instruments of autonomy, together with Hebrew and the other factors of our culture.4

But Dubnow was extremely critical of those who would see Yiddish as the be-all and end-all of national Jewish life, rather than merely an im- portant tool, and was particularly bothered by their tendency to write off non-Yiddish-speaking Jews. Criticizing Chaim Zhitlowsky and other Yid- dishists, Dubnow wrote:

The Yiddish language is here [in Zhitlowsky's national program] the only national cultural value that our people has created in its history, and which may guarantee its survival in the future. But this is only a legacy of several centuries, and what shall we do with our millennial heritage? About one third of our people does not speak Yiddish today, and several generations later another third may disregard it (especially in America); should we abandon them to complete assimilation? History has shown us that had the Jewish people rested only on language no trace of it would have remained by now ... The future of a people must be built up on all pillars of its cultural autonomy, and not solely upon one of them ....5

National autonomism, with its emphasis on language and education rights, did not remain the program only of Dubnow and his followers. In- deed, by the time of the first Russian Revolution it totally dominated Jewish political discourse in Russia, shaping every Jewish party including the so- cialists and the Zionists. Yiddish was particularly crucial to the former group, represented in Russia by the Bund, the Jewish socialist party founded in Russia in 1897.

Although initially universalist and anti-national, proclaiming itself merely a part of the international proletariat, during its first decade of ex- istence the Bund assumed a staunchly pro-nationalist position based in Yid- dish language and culture. There is some historical disagreement about the causes of this transformation. The traditional interpretation construes it an internal phenomenon, developing from the Bund's practical need to use Yiddish to communicate with the Jewish masses and its inevitable battle

against specifially Jewish afflictions.

The struggle of the Jewish proletariat inevitably involved the need to remove the disabilities suffered by the Jewish people as a whole.... This focus of political activity, together with the need to employ Yiddish to organize the Jewish workers, led to the formation of a socialist-nationalist ideology, in which Yiddish was glorified as the language of the laboring class and national- cultural autonomy for the Jewish people was a leading principle.6

Hebrew, conversely, was seen as reactionary and bourgeois, a remnant of past religious hegemony. Indeed, besides the religious hierarchy, many Russian Jewish intellectuals had become estranged from the masses be-

Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism 181

cause of their emphasis on Hebrew. Both Zhitlowsky and Nathan Birn- baum, whom I discuss below, criticized intellectuals for their failure to con- nect with the masses through Yiddish.

Pragmatism alone does not explain this ideological transformation, however, and recent scholarship has emphasized the context of socialist politics in Russia. Externally, as Russian and Polish socialisms became in- creasingly nationalistic and exclusionary, Bundists were increasingly pushed towards a Jewish nationalist position. Internally, key Bundist ideologues, particularly John (Joseph) Mill and other members of the "Berne Group" ultimately convinced their comrades that adopting a nationalist platform would enable them to compete with the Zionists.7

In any case, the Bund's massive political campaigns and publications in Yiddish certainly advanced the cause of Yiddishists and pushed them towards a Yiddishist position. Nevertheless, until roughly 1903, the Bund tended to endorse an ideology of "neutralism" towards Yiddish, an ap- proach espoused by the Bund's chief ideologue Vladimir Medem. In 1903, the Bund split entirely from the RSDRP (Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) over its request to be considered the exclusive representatives of the Jewish proletariat. Although it rejoined four years later, its brief indepen- dence during the critical years of the first revolution clearly solidified its growingly nationalist platform. Medem, too, during this time abandoned his ideology of "neutralism" and began promoting Yiddish language and culture.

For a number of reasons, Yiddish remained critical to the Bund's na- tionalist platform. Its ideological glorification of Yiddish as authentic pro- letarian culture was of course central to this. In addition, the Bund's initial opposition to endorse a nationalist platform was because of its fear of jeop- ardizing class consciousness, and thus even after 1903/1907 it endorsed only national cultural, not political, autonomy. Moreover, following the Tsar's dissolution of the Dumas, revolutionary activity in Russia was increasingly prosecuted, and thus the socialist leadership turned increasingly to cultural activities.

Perhaps no one merged Marxist cosmopolitanism with Jewish nation- alism and Yiddishism better than Chaim Zhitlowsky. Whereas Dubnow's nationalism was based in an affirmation of history and Jewish spirituality, Zhitlowsky's major emphasis was secularism, and East European Yiddish culture became the supreme national value which had to be preserved and defended. Dubnow had argued that, although one need not be religious to be a Jew, conversion to another religion certainly excused one from the nation. Zhitlowsky was the supreme secularist, arguing that as long as one continued to speak Yiddish and participate in Yiddish culture, it made no difference what religion one practiced.

Zhitlowsky was particularly concerned about the estrangement be-

182 Shanes

tween the masses and their intellectuals, caused by the early Maskilim's opposition to Yiddish, and argued that a return to Yiddish was the solution.

... If earlier, in the assimilationist period, it was a matter of respect for in- tellectuals to demonstrate their attachment to European civilization at every opportunity, then in our time a new moral imperative has evolved from that: to show with every breath and with ever pulse-beat of your heart your mem- bership in the Jewish people and your solidarity with its historic destiny! And this is possible for all Jews, for all parties, classes, and movements in one way only: in the form of attachment to the Yiddish language.8

Ultimately, however, it was not in Russia but in Austria-Hungary that agitation for national minority rights, particularly language rights, reached its pinnacle. The empire had a large number of distinct nationalities, some of the larger ones (Magyar, Polish) enjoying an increasing amount of au- tonomy, while the smaller ones were clamoring for the same. Not surpris- ingly, it was here that fundamental contributions to autonomist theory were made by the Austro-Marxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. It was in Aus- trian Galicia that Jewish nationalist agitation for language rights came to a head in 1907 and 1910. And it was here that the first world Yiddish confer- ence was held in 1908 in Czernowitz. Perhaps the most important person- ality in Austrian Jewish nationalism, from its beginnings in the 1870s through the First World War, was Nathan Birnbaum.

Birnbaum is an enigmatic figure. During the course of his life he would come to espouse virulent Zionism and Hebraism, national autonomism and Yiddishism, until finally he abandoned both political courses as inauthentic and became a Ba'al Teshuva, a repentant Jew "returning" to a traditional religious life. His multiple metamorphoses are examples par excellence of the fluid nature of Jewish political discourse during this period.

Born in Vienna in 1864, Birnbaum rejected the dominant German identity of the Viennese Jewish community at a very early age. By his late teens he already felt that the Jews constituted a racial community, sup- ported by its national language, Hebrew. Indeed, like other Hebraists at the time, Birnbaum in his early years felt Yiddish was useful only as a medium of propaganda among the masses, having no intrinsic value. When Birnbaum entered the University of Vienna in 1883 he formed a Jewish nationalist organization called Kadimah, meaning both forward and East- ward. A year later he began publishing the magazine Selbst-Emanzipation, in which he coined the term "Zionism," and he began the slow process of gaining adherents to the nationalist cause a decade before Herzl's conver- sion to Zionism.

When Herzl entered the political arena in 1896 with the publication of Der Judenstaat, Birnbaum was at first extremely enthusiastic. At the first Zionist Congress he delivered a speech on "Zionism as a Cultural Move-

Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism 183

ment" and was well received. However, tensions grew between Birnbaum and Herzl. He felt Herzl was superficial and narcissistic, and resented that the movement had so quickly pledged its allegiance to Herzl after he had spent over a decade laying its foundations in Vienna. (Herzl's diaries reveal that the personal dislike was mutual.) Like Ahad Ha-Am just a few years later, Birnbaum especially resented that Herzl was totally uninterested in rejuvenating Jewish national culture, instead focusing on the goal of politi- cal normalization. As his speech title suggests, it was the cultural needs of the Jewish nation which concerned Birnbaum, and insofar as he pursued a political agenda it was ultimately for the sake of the Jewish soul. Unlike Ha-Am, however, who felt Jewish authenticity existed only in the land of Israel, Birnbaum discovered among his Eastern European conationals a vibrant culture which he increasingly felt did not require Zionism to flour- ish.

When I found them to be a people with all the signs of a live, separate nation, it became more and more clear to me that a nation that already exists does not have to be created again de novo, and that what is of principal importance is preserving its life. Thus I developed my Golus-Nationalism.9

He called his program of non-Zionist nationalism Alljudentum, or pan-Judaism. It focused on the spiritual rejuvenation of the Jewish people based in the authentic Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jewry, rather than in a spiritual center in Palestine as Ha-Am believed. Birnbaum argued Dubnow's multi-national state suited Austria perfectly.

Austria does not exist, as so many tend to believe, for the sake of its dynasty but for the sake of its nationalities ... the nationalities today fill Austrian politics with their clamor precisely because as such they possess no rights. Because each nationality is forced to achieve the satisfaction of its cultural needs in the Reichsrat and the provincial legislatures, the result is a battle of each one against all. For this reason, nationality as well as religious affairs must cease being a common matter on which all can have a say and must become a matter solely for each individual nationality. Each should admin- ister its own cultural affairs, especially its schools.'0

Most importantly, Birnbaum argued that the political process of na- tional autonomy itself would serve to strengthen Jewish culture, always his primary objective:

And what could serve this purpose [cultural revitalization] better than eth- nonational autonomy? First of all, nationality elections will instill in the vot- ers, and in the elected of all parties, a feeling of cultural responsibility, and, which would be the principal and lasting effect, they would, through a national school system and the concentration of Jewish intellects, necessarily lead to ethnonational cultural results."

184 Shanes

The crescendo of Birnbaum's Diaspora nationalist phase was the mil- itant nationalist struggle in Galicia, whose Polish majority Austria had granted virtual autonomy in 1867.12 There the Ruthenians and Jews through electoral manipulation and corruption were all but ignored as national mi- norities. Beginning in the 1890s, the Ruthenian national movement began promoting Jewish national rights, particularly language rights, as a counter- measure against the Poles and to a smaller extent against the Austrian Germans. Austrian censuses defined nationality by language, but did not permit an answer of Yiddish. Those Jews who responded Yiddish, and the great majority of Galician Jewry spoke Yiddish (often exclusively) were registered either as Polish, or in Bukovina as German.13 The issue of the upcoming 1910 census was central to the 1907 election of the Reichsrat, the first with universal manhood suffrage, in which Birnbaum himself ran but, because of electoral corruption, was defeated.

Despite his defeat, however, these few years were critical to the na- tionalist, and Yiddishist, movements. During the two years leading up to the 1907 elections there was unprecedented interaction between Zionists and Diaspora nationalists, so that by the time of the election the Austrian Zionists had also become committed to the fight for national autonomy. Indeed, by the time of the first world war the Diaspora nationalist organi- zations in Vienna had become dominated by Zionists. In addition, Birn- baum led a massive campaign in 1910, including a march through the town of Czernowitz, to permit Jews to register Yiddish on the census, a campaign supported by both Zionists and Bundists. Although he failed in the end, and Yiddish speakers were again registered either as Poles or Germans, this campaign, as one scholar writes, "represented the first mass manifestation of Jewish national solidarity on behalf of Yiddish."'14

Ultimately Birnbaum's most important contribution to the Diaspora nationalist discourse was his strong Yiddishism. "Yiddish became indeed the vehicle of his Golus Nationalism, the symbol of the pan-Judaist con- sciousness which he sought to instill in the Jewish masses throughout the Diaspora."'15 Dubnow valued Yiddish as the Jews' "artificial leg," a useful unifying force on which the Jews could lean in building national autonomy. And language rights in schools and government agencies was certainly cen- tral to his autonomist demands. For Birnbaum, however, supporting and developing Yiddish became an end in itself, the prime generator of authen- tic Jewish national culture.

From Golus-Nationalism, I followed a direct path to the Golus language, to Yiddish, and I began to wage a long war in order to raise its esteem among those who spoke it, among other Jews and even among other nations. I stressed its natural liveliness compared to the artificiality of the new Hebrew.16

In 1908 Birnbaum organized the first world conference on the Yiddish language in Czernowitz, inside Austrian controlled Galicia. The idea was

Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism 185

born between him, Zhitlowsky, and several others in America while Birn- baum was on a speaking tour promoting national autonomism. Although many of the conference's goals were never achieved, including ambitious plans to create a world Yiddish organization, the event was nonetheless an important turning point in the history of Yiddishism and its role in Jewish nationalism. The debate which dominated the conference was the role of Yiddish to the Jewish nation. In the end, a compromise was reached whereby Yiddish was pronounced "a," but not "the," Jewish national lan- guage.

Birnbaum's quest for Jewish authenticity eventually took him to a third and final stage, Torah Judaism. But although he repudiated Yiddishists for valuing the Jewish language as merely a "tool of the people," he con- tinued to support Yiddish as a Jewish treasure, the language in which "au- thentic" Jewish culture had been created for centuries.17 I. L. Peretz, inter- estingly, reflecting on the eve of the Holocaust on the failure of Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe, made a similar call to return to Yiddishkeit (i.e., Judaism), rather than to Yiddish.

Finally, mention must be made of the role of Yiddish in the Zionist national conception. The classic dichotomy between so-called Diaspora na- tionalists and Zionists, or for that matter between Cultural Zionists (led by Ahad Ha-Am) and Political Zionists (led by Herzl) clearly does no justice to the extremely fluid nature of political ideologies in this period. As I have argued, the traditional view of Zionism as purely Palestine-oriented, whether as political refuge or cultural center, is not accurate. By 1907 both Russian and Austrian Zionists had committed themselves to campaign for national autonomy and language rights, and in fact it was the Zionist lead- ership which ultimately led the Jewish delegation at Versailles to success in securing these rights, if only on paper.

The role of Yiddish was similarly complex vis-t-vis the Zionist fac- tions. The case of Labor Zionist Ber Borechev, whose contribution to Yid- dishism was fundamental to modern Yiddish scholarship, is well known. Other dissenters are less famous. For example, "Political Zionists" are typ- ically considered to be in the anti-Yiddishist camp. It is well known that Herzl considered Yiddish a gutter dialect of German, unfit for a cultured nation. But Yiddish was central to Israel Zangwill's concept of Jewish na- tionhood. Zangwill, a strict political Zionist, argued that Jewish normali- zation, namely territory and statehood, were critical to their survival. He split from the Zionists, protesting their rejection of Britain's offer of Uganda, and formed the Jewish Territorialists Association (ITO).

Language for Zangwill was the measure of a nation's existence. In one essay he writes, "Language is the chief index of life.... But by speech we must understand a distinctive speech, not a speech spoken by all the world. A peculiar people without a peculiar speech would be a contradiction."'8

186 Shanes

Ahad Ha-Am, leader of the so-called cultural Zionist camp, might also have agreed with this, arguing that the Jews eternal language is Hebrew. But Zangwill insisted a nation's language must be living, and Hebrew did not qualify. "By speech as a proof of life is meant living speech; that is to say, fluid speech-speech that changes with the changes of life. The Hebrew in which Hebrew literature since the destruction of the Second Temple has been written, can for these reasons not be said to be entirely living."'19 Thus, he concludes,

It is to Yiddish that we must look for the truest repository of specifically Jewish sociology.... Yiddish, far more than Hebrew or Neo-Hebrew, answers to our definition of a living language. The principal, if not the only, medium of communication among Jewish masses, it vibrates with their history, follows the mould of their life and thought, and colours itself with their moods. More- over it has that truest mark of life-the power of absorbing and transforming elements from without.20

This same thought is echoed by the famous Yiddish educator Avra- ham Golomb. "Bachartanu me-kol am v'kedashtanu me-kol lashon: volk un lashon seinen da identisch."21 Note his characteristically Yiddishist use of the religious liturgy despite his professed secularism.22

Still, the primacy of language in national identity certainly did not necessitate an affirmation of Yiddish and the Diaspora. Obviously many Zionists based their nationalism just as strongly in language, if not in Yid- dish. Rejection of Yiddish was initially an important part of many Zionists' ideological agenda, a part of the negation of the Diaspora. Yehezkel Kauf- mann typifies such a worldview. He argued even more strongly than Zang- will that language is the essence of a nation's identity, and even recognized that "jargon" was the Jews' daily language. But he maintained Hebrew was the Jews' national language, while Yiddish remained a foreign dialect. "To be sure," he admited, "the average Jew's knowledge of Hebrew never went beyond a familiarity with the prayer book and the Torah, but it was the relationship that counted, not the amount of knowledge."'23 As a Jewish nationalist, he argued vehemently that "jargon" was merely a bridge to- wards the host country's language and, ultimately, assimilation. Without Hebrew, this would be inevitable, and therefore his struggle against Yid- dishists was a struggle for the survival of the Jewish nation. "... there is room for at most one of the two languages. If this is so, one can hardly speak about an alliance. All that is possible is an aggravated, life-and-death struggle between the two languages."'24

Reflecting on Yiddishism and its relation to Jewish nationalism in 1958, Bezalel Sherman wrote, "Yiddishism as a movement produced prac- tically nothing constructive. It has become a refuge for all anti-Zionist non-

Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism 187

assimilationist Jews.... Scratch an ideological Yiddishist and an anti-Zi- onist will emerge."25 Writing for the Herzl Institute Pamphlet series in 1958, after the comfort of ten years of statehood, this author's smug dismissal of Yiddishism is understandable. But forty years later, it seems far less certain.

Yiddish was critical to the formation of Jewish national identity in the modern period, and to the struggle for national rights in the Diaspora. This struggle is not simply an intellectual curiosity which in practice failed to achieve its goals. To an unrecognized extent advocates for minority rights were successful; agitation for minority rights by Diaspora nationalist groups was instrumental in the success of written guarantees at the Paris Peace Conference, for example. These included education and religious rights (i.e., Yiddish instruction and Saturday Sabbath observance) and in some cases even proportional representation in the national government. More- over, there were instances, however ephemeral, of real national autonomy in Eastern Europe following the First World War, for example in the Ukraine and in Lithuania. There was even a limited degree of national autonomy in the early Soviet period. Although these experiments were short-lived, much was achieved by Jewish national leaders before their au- tonomy was revoked.

Finally, Diaspora nationalists did not merely present competing po- litical programs, but competing historical interpretations which the passage of time has in many ways validated. To be sure, no examination of the Diaspora nationalists, whether autonomist, territorialist, or socialist, can overlook their failure to predict the possibility of the Jews achieving a sov- ereign state in the land of Israel, or of the cataclysmic heights antisemitism would reach during the Holocaust. But, in reality, this was merely poor political judgment. Their basic historical philosophy, which contended that Jews would continue to remain in the Diaspora and that they would have to come to terms with their national life in exile, remains true today. Indeed, despite the Zionists' political successes, it is the Zionist historical construc- tion which has proved to be fundamentally flawed. Even with the massive impact of the Holocaust, which simultaneously destroyed the center of Di- aspora Jewish life in Eastern Europe and displaced millions of Jews to Israel, the majority of Jews today have remained in the Diaspora, and are still seeking to balance this life with their Jewish identity.

'For example, on Jewish politics in Russia see Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) and Christoph Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900-1914 (New York: New York UP, 1995); on Jewish politics in central Europe see Marsha Rozenblitt, The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Iden- tity (Albany: State U of New York P, 1983) and Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna: 1918-1938 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955).

2 The letters are available in English translation. See Koppel Pinson, ed., Nationalism and History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958).

188 Shanes

3 Simon Dubnow, "Letters on Old and New Judaism." In Pinson, 186-87. 4Quoted in Joshua Fishman, Never Say Die (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981) 1. iQuoted in Saul Goodman, The Faith of Secular Jews (New York: Ktav Publishing,

1976) 15. 6Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World (New York:

Oxford UP, 1995) 422. 7See especially Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1981). 8Quoted in Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the

Twentieth Century (London: Associated UPresses, 1976) 212. 9 Quoted in Goldsmith, 107. 'oNathan Birnbaum, "Jewish Autonomy," Ideology, Society, and Language, ed. Joshua

Fishman (Ann Arbor: Karom Publishers, 1987) 186. " Ibid. 188. 12 See Leila Everett, "The Rise of Jewish National Politics in Galicia," Nationbuilding

and the Politics of Nationalism, ed. Andrei S. Markovits and Frank E. Sysyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982).

"3 See Nathan Birnbaum, "Struggle for Recognition of the Jewish People: The Census in Galicia" in Ideology, Society, and Language, ed. Fishman, 211-17.

14 Goldsmith 224.

1"Robert Wistrich, "The Clash of Ideologies in Jewish Vienna", Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1988): 227.

16 Quoted in Goldsmith, 109. 7Nathan Birnbaum, Confession (New York: Jewish Pocket Books, 1946). "8Israel Zangwill, The Voice of Jerusalem (New York: MacMillan, 1921) 255. '9 Ibid. 256.

20 Ibid. 258. 21Avrahom Golomb, "Yiddish Folk, Yiddish Lashon," in Fishman, Never Say Die, 141. 22Revealingly, he misquotes the liturgy. It should read romimanu me-kol lashon

v'kedashtau b'Mitzvosav (He exalted us above all languages and made us holy in His com- mandments), which he renders simply "He made us holy above all languages."

23Yehezkel Kaufmann, "The Hebrew Language and Our National Future," Essays from Martin Buber's Journal Der Jude, ed. Arthur Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980) 104.

24 Ibid. 108. 25 Bezalel Sherman, "Bund, Galuth Nationalism, Yiddishism," Herzl Institute Pamphlet,

No. 6 (New York, 1958) 26.