Among those Jews who chose to remain in Russia, many joined the
Russian Socialist Party, on the assumption that social revolution would
eliminate anti-Semitism. To be sure, Jewish labor organization had preceded
- A Jewish working class had emerged in the Pale by the 1870s, and
some Jewish workers had joined the socialist movement even before 1881.
For others, the decision to join seemed obvious. Russian socialists, after all,
had condemned the pogroms as counterrevolutionary. By 1897, Russian-
Jewish socialists had organized a separate Jewish wing of the general Socialist
Party, which came to be known as the Bund. Initially, the aim of the Bund
was to bring socialism to the Jewish street – that is, teaching Jews in Yiddish
about the benefits of social revolution.
Zionism
The most dramatic Jewish response to the pogroms was a renewed sense of
Jewish nationalism among disillusioned Russian maskilim, which resulted in
the birth of Zionism. Zionism refers to an ideology and political movement
that aimed at creating a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. As such,
Zionism was fundamentally different from the messianic return to Zion,
though referring perhaps to a spatially similar movement. The return to Zion
was a divinely driven movement; Zionism was primarily a secular (with the
lone exception of religious Zionism) and humanistic endeavor. Furthermore,
Zionism emerged as a movement in the context of the age of nationalism. The
beginnings of Zionism coincided with Italian unification, Germany unifica-
tion, and – as some Europeans termed the Civil War – the American war of
national unification. Moses Hess, a German-Jewish socialist turned Jewish
nationalist, regarded nationalism as a natural development, and noted in Rome
and Jerusalemhow Italians and Jews rediscovered an ancient national heritage
and recast it in nineteenth-century terms. Like other national movements, the
realization of Zionist aims was a tortuous process. Though Zionism wound up
as the great success story of modern Jewish history, its success was by no
means inevitable.
In retrospect, Zionism solved different problems for different groups of
Jews. For Jews in western and central Europe and America, Zionism created a
new sense of honor, improved their image, and combated negative stereotypes
such as Jews being weak, bookish, unproductive, racially inferior. For Jews in
eastern Europe, Zionism provided a refuge from persecution, pogroms, anti-
Jewish legislation, and poverty.
The impact of Zionism was not only in creating a new center of Jewish life,
but creating for Jews a secular alternative to various religious identities. By
the beginning of the twentieth century, Zionists began to take over Jewish
communal leadership. Zionism introduced new possibilities, especially for
heretofore marginal elements in the Jewish community, such as women.
Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914 187