Politics, Culture, and Religion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Political Discord, Social Movements

The growing politicization—both ideological and social—of Jewish societies in the concluding decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century played a seminal role in the powerful cultural changes born of the Jewish confrontation with modernity. Between 1880 and 1918, a sprawling network of Jewish political parties and social and cultural movements spread across the globe. Largely taking over the old communal frameworks, this network rearranged conceptual priorities, transformed linguistic codes, and challenged the standard religious and cultural discourses that had been accepted for generations across the diaspora. This new network crossed political borders, skipped over oceans, linked South and North America, and connected Sephardic Jews in the Balkans to Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe. This politicization process both signaled and independently furthered the penetration of major aspects of modernity—in its European, continental, imperial, and colonial manifestations—into the hearts and minds of individual Jews and Jewish collective experience.

New Jewish political movements of the period between 1880 and 1918 influenced and accelerated processes of modernization. A useful key to understanding the tense dialogues between politics and culture that emerge from the selections included in the Posen Library is the distinction drawn between political culture and the politics of culture. Political culture refers to the ways in which people express, expound, and enact their political demands.¹ The Posen Library’s  texts bespeak three profound shifts in Jewish political culture born or globalized in this era. As growing numbers of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to New York to Salonika embraced social radicalism, others—particularly in Eastern Europe—internalized the idea of Jewish nationhood; still others, in the New World particularly, sought integration into societies more democratic than they had previously known. The politics of culture, in contrast, bears on the attitude toward culture of those who work to shape cultural processes, influence them, and instill them in some community. The Jewish politics of culture played out at a variety of scales and in a variety of sites, some of which might not be initially regarded as sites of politics: not only in fierce political debates and street demonstrations in New York City or in Warsaw in 1905, but also in quieter debates about Jewish education in newspaper columns or communal meetings in small towns, in a classroom at an Alliance Israélite Universelle school in North Africa, at a planning meeting of Jewish agriculturalists in a Jewish agricultural colony in Argentina or the United States, and in family debates around the table.

To some degree, the increasingly heterogeneous space of modern Jewish politics was characterized by sustained dialogue across ideological positions, but there were also matters that could not be compromised and that rendered dialogue impossible and enmity inevitable. Perhaps the deepest conflict in this period was inherited from the mid-nineteenth century: the irreconcilable tensions between traditionalist and modernizing and secular visions. Many authors writing between 1880 and 1918 committed to some modernist venture, be it the creation of new Jewish identity or the transformation of the human condition. Others objected to any such conception out of deep adherence to the idea that tradition was not culture but commandment, coupled with a growing sense that modernity posed a unique danger to the system of beliefs and values they cherished. In the three decades leading up to World War I, spokesmen for a host of divergent visions of Jewishness waged a battle over who controlled the heritage of the past, and they wrestled with the question of the appropriate Jewish identity to be established in the Old Country, the new lands of immigration, and perhaps Palestine.

Jewish Emancipation

The confrontation between traditionalism and modernist visions of Jewish self-organization was fundamental. But Jewish political modernism, so to speak, was hardly a unitary politics. Quite the contrary. Our period saw the emergence of two new political visions, Jewish nationalist and socialist ideologies, that jointly stood in tension not only with traditionalism but also with the first great Jewish modernist ideology, the liberal ideology of emancipation born a century earlier. Both Jewish nationalism and Jewish socialism insisted that Jews, or particular classes of Jews, would have to pursue something much more far-reaching than legal emancipation for Jews as individuals; either Jewish national liberation (“autoemancipation”) or the transformation of the very terms of global social life through socialist revolution. Yet Jewish national self-understandings and Jewish social radicalisms also quickly entered into profound tension and contention with each other. In particular, many Jewish socialists rejected the idea of Jewish political nationhood with no less vigor than they did religious traditionalism and its associated structures of authority and patriarchy. And yet, having said all that, there were also surprising forms of dialogue, exchange, and synthesis among all four of the notional “camps” in Jewish political life: traditionalists, integrationists, nationalists, and social radicals. Not least because questions of ethnicity, religious difference, class (or poverty), rights, and antisemitic reaction were so profoundly entangled in the real lives of most Jews—especially in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman world—many Jewish nationalists embraced leftist social visions, and some Jewish liberals and socialists alike embraced ideals of Jewish nationhood and national autonomy.

The 1880–1918 era is distinct in Jewish political life not only because of this proliferation of ideologies but also because of unprecedented degrees of democratization and mass mobilization in Jewish communities around the world. Texts in the Posen Library engage with the challenges posed to millions of Jews around the world by the increasing politicization of the modern experience. They offer a broad and multifaceted panorama of responses to the trials of modernity, positive and negative. Readers will find optimistic yearnings for full integration and, in sharp contrast, warnings about the threats of the changing milieu, including the disturbing rise of antisemitism. The selections map out the contours of ideological platforms that would eventually lead to concrete political programs that would transform some Jews’ lives profoundly, as well as a selection of defensive and/or adaptive strategies to a variety of political, social, and cultural realities in a fluctuating world that Jews could only affect marginally.

Religious Ideology and Rituals

The Posen Library also contains many texts from between 1880 and 1914 about Jewish religious ideology and rituals. These texts express the emerging counterpolitics of traditionalist Jews pushed into a defensive stance in the face of technological innovations, political changes, and the cultural tide. Others, by contrast, reflect the religious ideals that flourished in some nontraditional circles, among integrated and integrationist Jews, especially in the West. These years saw the formation of an Orthodoxy that was notably heterogeneous and religiously inconsistent but tended to unite against the threat of the range of unorthodox alternatives to traditional Judaism. This period also produced modern interpretations of Judaism and its texts that were unprecedented in traditional society. Indeed, this period marked the first time that large masses of Jews were attracted to new Jewish political movements, cultural ideals, or one of the modern religious currents that spread from Europe to the lands of immigration overseas.

World War I greatly accelerated the disintegration of the traditional modes of existence in the diaspora and brought this dialogue to its climax. The war was seen by many Jews as a catastrophe that wreaked havoc and destruction on the old Jewish world, but also as an introduction to a new world order. But even before the war, more than a few of the political, cultural, and artistic visions born in the space between rationalism and radicalism were also powered by apocalyptic, millenarian, and messianic urges.

The extraordinary variety of political, cultural, and religious texts in the Posen Library bespeak the kaleidoscopic effects of modernity and the bewilderingly wide range of influences to which Jewish thought was suddenly subjected. The reader will encounter political essays, art criticism, political party posters, movement manifestoes, a speech by a Jewish laborer at a social-democratic conference, political anthems such as the Bund’s “Di shvue” (The Oath) or the Zionist “Tikvatenu” (Our Hope), a proposal for a Jewish studies curriculum in a Zionist spirit, an outline of gymnastics classes designed to develop a “new Jew,” the prospectus of a book publisher, a popular Yiddish biography of exemplary figures such as Karl Marx, and also halakhic works, an anti-Zionist rabbinical sermon, and a proposal for a movement of Jewish religious revival. This diversity highlights the internationalism of the new Jewish political discourse but also the continuity of rabbinic creativity that challenged or sometimes totally disregarded these changes. At the same time, the texts expose profound local and regional variation. They also sometimes include allusions—in both content and form—to religious Jewish texts from earlier periods, which have been removed from their original theological and historical contexts and integrated into the nontraditional discourse.