The role of ideology in the history of the Bund

This chapter is a study of the ideology that by 1905 had come to be known as Bundism. It deals primarily with the origins and development of that ideology rather than with its impact.

That Bundism exerted enormous influence on Jewish political thought is not in doubt. Although Dubnov and Zhitlovsky were the first to advocate the idea of autonomism (or extraterritorial self-government), the Bund alone took it up at an early stage (in 1901) and thus lent it real weight. It was adopted in the years 1905–6 by nearly all the Jewish parties in Russia and in 1918 (as “national rights”) by the leaders of American Jewry. Via this route it found its way in 1919–20 into the Paris Peace Treaties, which dealt with the newly independent states of non-Soviet eastern Europe. Jewish autonomism was explicitly rejected by the Bolshevik regime. However, the related concept also first (but not exclusively) developed by the Bund – a Jewish nationality expressing itself through the Yiddish language and a secular proletarian Yiddish culture–was absorbed, albeit temporarily, into official Soviet thinking in the 1920s.

If the external influence of Bundist ideology is beyond dispute, the same cannot be said of the role played by the ideological factor in the evolution of the Bund itself, in its history as a revolutionary and Social Democratic movement.