We, Jewish Socialists

Unknown

1904

As socialists, we strive to overthrow the existing order, which is based on economic and political slavery, and to create on its ruins that collectivized state which alone can guarantee the full and free development of the individual person—the ideal of all our aspirations and all our beliefs.

As Jews, we are concerned for the revival of the scattered and oppressed Jewish nation. We worry lest, in the process of the imperative and necessary universal struggle for economic and political freedom, the interests of our national collectivity are erased or forgotten —our national liberation, which constitutes a need that cannot be compromised, is the object of our passionate aspirations and eternal pursuit, is no less a necessity for us than economic or political freedom . . .

The first of our tasks [as socialists] is clear [ . . . ]. Not so with our second task, with our ideal of national revival and liberation. The very declaration of this idea, that every inscription of the idea of national liberation on the banner of the struggle for the socialist ideal will seem to many [ . . . ] a contradiction. [ . . . ]

Yes, we declare openly and unabashedly that we are nationalists [ . . . ]. We see in the persistence of distinct nations living their distinct social and cultural lives the highest form of the complicated differentiation obtaining in our social and spiritual environment. For us, nationalism is a source of historical progress, of a unique richness in life, and of the harmonious development of the human self. . . .

Translated by

Marian

Schwartz

and

Kenneth B.

Moss

Credits

Anonymous, “Nashi zadachi” [Our Tasks/We, Jewish Socialists], Vozrozhdenie, no. 1–2 (1904): p. 3.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.

Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance), for which this manifesto was penned, was a Russian-language periodical associated with a Jewish socialist circle of the same name in Kiev (Kyiv), with offshoots elsewhere. The Vozrozhdenie circle consisted of young Jewish intellectuals drawn to both socialist and Jewish nationalist analyses of the situation of East European Jewry and influenced by the veteran Jewish socialist, cultural nationalist, and Yiddishist Chaim Zhitlowsky. During the 1905 Revolution, Vozrozhdenie recast itself as the Jewish Socialist Labor Party. It promoted Jewish participation in socialist revolution, the active cultivation of Jewish diasporic nationhood, and a vision of self-determination through a democratically elected Jewish people’s body (a seym or sejm), which was to have far-reaching, state-recognized authority to shape an autonomous Jewish civic and cultural life. Members of the party, often called Seymistn, went on to play a central role as intellectual leaders and organizers in the whole subsequent history of Jewish efforts to find a synthesis of socialism and Yiddish diaspora nationalism.

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We, Jewish Socialists

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