The tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism in the Galician socialist movement

Abstract

One of Zionism's stock tacics has been to conflate Zionism and Judaism. Just as there are Jewish opponents of the racist Israeli state today, there have always been opponents of the Zionist strategy for dealing with anti-semitism. Zionism, as a political movement was established during the late 1890s. It was fought, from the start, by another modern political movement which in the same period. Rather than examine this aspect of the politics of the largest organisation of Jewish workers, the Bund in the Russian empire, this paper considers the attitude of its sister organisation in the Austrian Empire, the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (JSDP). Jewish social democrats in Galicia were, as members of the Polish Social Democratic Party (PPSD), in competition with Zionists for the allegiance of workers during the 1890s. The PPSD did not, however, take the organisations of Jewish workers seriously and Zionism made headway in the Jewish working class. In 1904, an Austrian Poale Zion (PZ, Labour Zionist) organisation in 1904. Dissatisfied with the assimilationist policies of the PPSD and, especially, its neglect of Jewish workers' organisations and agitation and literature in Yiddish, dissident Jewish socialists, led by Henryk Grossman, announded the formation of the JSDP on Mayday 1905. From the its first public statements, the Party emphasised its fundamental commitment to the class organisation of the Jewish workers, solidarity with the international working class and a commitment to class struggle. On the basis of this position, the Party explicity rejected Zionism. The JSDP's campaign against Zionist was an ongoing, if subordinate feature of its political activity. The Jewish Social Democrats competed with PZ for members of its constituent unions, particularly amongst shop assistants and clerks. The two organisations supported rival candidates in the first election to the Austrian Imperial Parliament under universal suffrage, in 1907, and in provincial (which years were there elections to the Sjem, municipal, workers' insurance fund ballots. When they eventually suppported the same candidates, on some occasions, it was because PZ moved to the left and backed social democrats. In the campaign for universal suffrage, the JSDP's policies were in accord with those of the General Austrian Social Democratic Party, calling for equal, geographic constituencies, while PZ backed the Zionist demand for elections by national curia. The JSDP also exposed the inadequacies of Zionist policies through material in its weekly newspaper, Der sotsial-demokrat. It carried articles not only on the doings and faults of Zionists and PZ members in Galicia and Austria, but also an expose of the conditions facing Jewish workers in Palestine, and a review of one of the first expressions of Arab nationalism published in the west. Like the Bund, the JSDP after 1905 had considerable success in organising Jewish workers. It rapidly overtook the influence of PZ and built an organisation committed to the emancipation of the Jewish working class where it was, rather than flight in the face of anti-semitism and class collaboration in pursuit of the project of colonising Arab land.