It was administered separately, and exceptionally western. In Odessa, civic
equality for Jews was realized de factoby the mid-nineteenth century.
For Jews like Dubnow, long before any other Russian Jews, Odessa
instilled a sense that emancipation was possible in Russia. The multiethnic
populace of Odessa, moreover, gave Dubnow a sense that Jews could remain
Jews even as citizens. This view was evident in his understanding of Jewish
history. In the diaspora, he argued, Jews had lost certain normal attributes
such as territory and political sovereignty, but had been compensated by a
special social system and communal ideology embedded in the autonomous
Jewish community.
This view reflected his overall understanding of Jewish national develop-
ment. Dubnow believed that every nation went through three stages of
national development: a tribal stage; a political-territorial stage, in which
most nations were situated at the end of the nineteenth century; and a post-
territorial cultural stage, in which territory was no longer necessary for
nationhod. Jews, he argued, had moved beyond the political-territorial stage
in 70 C.E., and were the only nation to have reached the third and ultimate
stage of national development. Hence, he regarded Zionism as retrograde
nationalism, trying to revert atavistically back to the second stage. In this
context of national development, Dubnow conceptualized the future of world
Jewry: Autonomism.
The basic concept of Autonomism was cultural autonomy for Jews in the
diaspora. Inspired by the Austro-Marxist notion of a community of nationali-
ties enjoying equal rights in a single state, Autonomism recast the premodern
notion of corporate autonomy in a new political garb. Dubnow believed that
the corporate Jewish community organized around religious laws had held
the Jews together as a people for centuries, but its usefulness had expired in
age of modern politics. As such, Autonomism had two components: political
emancipation and cultural autonomy in the form of a national language,
schools, literature, and theater. In contrast to Asher Ginsberg, who regarded
the language of the Jews as Hebrew, Dubnow defined the Jewish national lan-
guage as the language of the center of world Jewry: Yiddish. Several decades
later, the aims of Autonomism would be realized in interwar Poland and, in
some ways, in twentieth-century America.
The other diaspora Jewish national movement was the Bund, shorthand for
Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland(General Jewish
Workers’ Party in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia). Originally organized in
1897 as a Jewish wing of the Russian Socialist Party in the wake of the
Kishinev pogrom, the Bund broke with its mother organization in 1905.
Initially it had 25,000–30,000 members. The Bund had three main aims:
socialist revolution, national cultural autonomy for Jews, and the creation of
socialist secular Jewish culture in preparation for Jewish life in the postrevo-
lutionary world. Like Autonomism, the Bund advocated Yiddish as the
national language of the Jews.
Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914 197