General Jewish Labour Bund

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia,^[a][5] generally called The Bund,^[b] or the Jewish Labour Bund,^[c] was a secular Jewishsocialist party initially formed in the Russian Empire and active between 1897 and 1920. A member of the Bund was called a Bundist. Between 1898 and 1903, the Bund was an autonomous part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but left after the Second Congress. The majority faction of the Russian Bund was dissolved in 1921 and incorporated into the Communist Party. Other remnants of the Bund endured in various countries.^[6]

In 1917, the Bund organizations in Poland seceded from the Russian Bund and created a new Polish General Jewish Labour Bund which continued to operate in Poland in the years between the two world wars.

During the mid-to-late 19th century eastern Europe, Jewish politics was shifting away from the oligarchic politics of the kehilla, and religious conflict towards secular mass politics.^[7] Additionally, Jewish political thought expanded to include more general issues beyond Jewish issues alone, being joined by concerns of broader issues such as class issues and economics, as well as political rights and civil rights.^[7] This shift was joined by an increased assertiveness from Jewish politics.^[7]

The "General Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland" was founded in Vilna on 7 October 1897.^[8][9] The name was inspired by the General German Workers' Association.^[10] The Bund’s roots were in underground circles of revolutionary study active in the late 1800s, where Jewish workers and intellectuals held discussions in socialist theory and organized in groups such as the “Jewish Social Democrats,” one of the first Jewish labor movements.^[11] These small circles began to develop into broader mass agitation following calls from leaders such as Julius Martov and Arcady Kremer for the Jewish proletariat to couple the struggle of obtaining civil rights for Jews with the wider economic needs of the Russian workers.^[12]

The Bund sought to unite all Jewish workers in the Russian Empire into a united socialist party, and also to ally itself with the wider Russian social democratic movement to achieve a democratic and socialist Russia. The Russian Empire then included Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and most of present-day Poland, areas where the majority of the world's Jews then lived.^[13] They hoped to see the Jews achieve a legal minority status in Russia. Of all Jewish political parties of the time, the Bund was the most progressive regarding gender equality, with women making up more than one-third of all members.^[14]

The Bund actively campaigned against antisemitism, and defended Jewish civil and cultural rights. As affirmed by Bundist leader Vladimir Medem, the Bund was not against assimilation but against the aim to assimilate; similarly, it was not against nationalism but against nationalist policy based solely on territory. Its position on Jewish national unity (klal yisrael) has thus been disputed.^[15] The Bund avoided any automatic solidarity with Jews of the middle and upper classes and generally rejected political cooperation with Jewish groups that held religious, Zionist or conservative views.

At the heart of the vision of the future of the Bund was the idea that there is no contradiction between the national aspect on the one hand and the socialist aspect on the other. As a strictly secular organization, the Bund renounced the quasi-religious aspect of the Zionist project and its use of the Hebrew language.^[16]

After Kremer and Kossovsky were arrested, a new party leadership emerged. A new central committee was set up under the leadership of Dovid Kats (Taras).^[17] Other key figures in the new party leadership were Leon Goldman, Pavel (Piney) Rozental and Zeldov (Nemansky).^[17] The 2nd Bund conference was held in September 1898.^[17] The 3rd Bund conference was held in Kovno in December 1899.^[17][18]John Mill had returned from exile to attend the conference, at which he argued that the Bund should advocate for Jewish national rights. However, Mill's line did not win support from the other conference delegates.^[17] The 3rd conference affirmed that the Bund only struggled for civil, not national, rights.^[17]

However, the Bund later reversed this position in its Fourth Conference in 1901, where it declared that its aims were also for the principle of equal national rights.^[19] In this conference, they promoted the idea of a Russia transformed into a federation of nationalities, each to enjoy “full autonomy, independent from the territory in which it resides.” The term nationality, stated the Congress, was to apply also to the Jewish people. Later, the demand for national-cultural autonomy, outlined in the Bund’s demands for cultural development of all nations and right to use one’s native language in government and social institutions, was integrated as a political demand in the Bund’s program. By the 8th Congress, the Bund’s interest in equal national rights for Jews, and the rights to develop a secular national culture, had become ingrained within Bund’s development of a national-cultural program.^[20]

In 1901, the word "Lithuania" was added to the name of the party.^[10][21]

The Bund's membership grew to 900 in Łódź and 1,200 in Warsaw in the fall of 1904.^[22]

During the period of 1903–1904, the Bund was harshly affected by Czarist state repression. Between June 1903 and July 1904, 4,467 Bundists were arrested and jailed.^[23]

In its early years, the Bund had remarkable success, gaining an estimated 30,000 members in 1903 and an estimated 40,000 supporters in 1906, making it the largest socialist group in the Russian Empire.^[24]

Given the Bund's secular and socialist perspective, it opposed what it viewed as the reactionary nature of traditional Jewish life in Russia. Created before the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP),^[25] the Bund was a founding collective member at the RSDLP's first congress in Minsk in March 1898.^[26][27] Three out of nine delegates at the Minsk congress were from the Bund, and one of three members of the first RSDLP Central Committee was a Bundist.^[28] For the next 5 years, the Bund was recognized as the sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP, although many Russian socialists of Jewish descent, especially outside of the Pale of Settlement, joined the RSDLP directly. As of 1907, Jewish membership in the RSDLP was roughly 11,900.^[29]

At the RSDLP's second congress in Brussels and London in August 1903,^[30] the Bund's autonomous position within the RSDLP was rejected,^[31] with both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks voting against, and the Bund's representatives left the Congress, the first of many splits in the Russian social democratic movement in the years to come.^[32][33] The five representatives of the Bund at this Congress were Vladimir Kossowsky, Arkadi Kremer, Mikhail Liber, Vladimir Medem and Noah Portnoy.^[34]

During this period two trade unions, the Union of Bristle-Makers (Bersther-Bund) and the Union of Tanners (Garber-Bund), were affiliated to the Bund.^[35] In its report to the 1903 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party congress, the Bund claimed to have district organizations in Vilna (Sventiany, etc.), Kovno (Ponevezh, Vilkomir, Shavli, Onikshty, Keydany, Yanovo, Shaty, Utena...), Grodno (Kartuz-Bereza, etc.), Białystok, Dvinsk (Rezhitsa...), Minsk (Borisov, Pinsk, Mozyr, Bobruisk, Parichi...), Vitebsk (Beshankovichy, Liozna, Lyady...), Warsaw, Łódź, Siedlce,^[36]Płock, Suwałki, Mariampol, Gomel (Dobryanyka, Vietka...), Mogilev (Shklow, Orsha, Bykhov, Kopys...), Zhytomyr, Berdichev, Odessa, Nizhyn, Bila Tserkva, Podolian Governorate (Vinnitsa, Bratslav, Tulchina, Nemirov), Lutsk, Volhynian Governorate, as well as the districts of the Union of Bristle-Makers; Nevel, Kreslavka, Vilkovyshki, Kalvaria, Vladislavovo, Verzhbolovo, Vystinets, Mezhdurechye, Trostyan, Knyszyn, and the districts of the Union of Tanners; Smorgon, Oshmyany, Krynki, Zabludovo, Shishlovichi, etc.^[37]

Per Vladimir Akimov's account of the history of social democracy 1897–1903, there were 14 local committees of Bund – Warsaw, Łódź, Belostok, Grodno, Vilna, Dvisnk, Kovno, Vitebsk, Minsk, Gomel, Mogilev, Berdichev, Zhitomir, Riga. Per Akimov's account the local committees had six types of councils; trade councils (fakhoye skhodki), revolutionary groups, propaganda councils, councils for intellectuals, discussion groups for intellectuals and agitators' councils. The Bristle-Makers Union and Tanners Union had committee status. Bund had organizations that weren't full-fledged committees in Pinsk, Sedlice, Petrokov, Płock, Brest-Litovsk, Vilkomir, Priluki, Rezhitsa, Kiev, Odessa, Bobruisk, and many smaller townships.^[38]

At the 1906 First Duma elections, the Bund made an electoral agreement with the Lithuanian Labourers' Party (Trudoviks), which resulted in the election to the Duma of two (apparently non-Bundist) candidates supported by the Bund: Dr. Shmaryahu Levin for the Vilna province and Leon Bramson for the Kovno province. In total, there were twelve Jewish deputies in the Duma, falling to three in the Second Duma (February 1907 to June 1907), two in the Third Duma (1907–1912) and again three in the fourth, elected in 1912, none of them being affiliated to the Bund.^[39]

The Bund’s position was strongly anti-Zionist since its inception; its modus operandi was based upon the notion of doikayt, or hereness, which affirmed that Jews should advance Jewish culture where they lived, rather than supporting what Bundists considered an anti-semitic idea of Jews as strangers.^[40] Bundist opposition to Zionism was multifaceted; Vladimir Medem viewed Zionist as not only an unrealistic fantasy, but also as the equivalent of the bourgeois capitalist nationalism of the non-Jewish world and the antithesis to proletarian struggle.^[41]

The Bund did not advocate separatism. Instead, it focused on culture, rather than a state or a place, as the glue of Jewish "nationalism". In this they borrowed extensively from the Austro-Marxist school, further alienating the Bolsheviks and Lenin. The Bund also promoted the use of Yiddish as a Jewish national language and to some extent opposed the Zionist project of reviving Hebrew.^[42][43]

The Bund won converts mainly among Jewish artisans and workers, but also among the growing Jewish intelligentsia. It led a trade union movement of its own. It joined with the Poalei Zion (Labour Zionists) and other groups to form self-defense organisations to protect Jewish communities against pogroms and government troops. During the Russian Revolution of 1905 the Bund headed the revolutionary movement in the Jewish towns, particularly in Belarus and Ukraine.

The Bund recognized the Yiddish language as a social identifier. To maintain its national-cultural autonomy, the Bund advocated for the Polish Jewish minority to use its own language and maintain its cultural institutions in areas where it was considered a sizable portion of the local population.^[44] As a Germanic language, Yiddish also helped maintain the Bund's European identity. This can be compared to the anti-Yiddish campaign taking place in Palestine during the early twentieth century, where Yiddish newspapers were banned and physical attacks took place against Yiddish speakers.^[44]

The Bund had a major role in maintaining and developing Yiddish, including Yiddish literature and other secular cultural uses of the language. It published its news in a Yiddish newspaper – Der Yiddisher Arbeyter (The Yiddish Worker) – which had been formed by the Jewish Social Democrats in 1896 as the first Yiddish newspaper in tsarist Russia.^[45]

The Bund was heavily invested in building camaraderie and support internally. In the 1880s, the Bund created its first kassy in Lithuania and Belarus. The kassy was a mutual aid fund designed to support workers during strikes.^[46] Other similar funds were created to support the militia. In the case of a militiaman being wounded and then unable to work for an extended period of time, the Bund created a mutual aid fund, requiring every member to contribute regularly. When a member was wounded and their personal funds ran low, the Bund would step in and help cover costs.^[47] The idea supporting this approach was to increase solidarity amongst its members, reminding them that they were each responsible for one another and in struggle together.

The Bund also incorporated efforts to raise consciousness amongst its members and the Jewish working class. Between 1903 and 1904, the Bund “held 429 political meetings, organized forty-five demonstrations and forty-one political strikes, and distributed 305 leaflets.”^[46] They expanded these efforts by creating a youth organization, Tsukunft, in 1910 and published daily in their newspaper, Yugnt veker.^[48] Women in the Bundist movement actively engaged in fights for birth control and free childcare. Additionally, they put together study groups and shared readings and experiences.

Less than a year after the founding of the party, its Foreign Committee was set up in Geneva. Also within the same timespan, Bundist groups began to constitute themselves internationally. However, the Bund did not construct any world party (as did Poalei Zion). On the contrary, the Bund argued that it was a party for action inside the Russian empire. The Bundist groups abroad were not included into the party structures. In 1902, a United Organization of Workers' Associations and Support Groups to the Bund Abroad was founded. The groups affiliated to the United Organization played an important role in raising funds for the party.^[49]

Between 1901 and 1903, the Foreign Committee was based in London.^[49] The United Organization, the Foreign Committee as well as the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad were all dissolved at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917.^[49]

In Poland

When Poland fell under German occupation in 1914, contact between the Bundists in Poland and the party centre in St. Petersburg became difficult. In November 1914 the Bund Central Committee appointed a separate Committee of Bund Organizations in Poland to run the party in Poland.^[50] Theoretically the Bundists in Poland and Russia were members of the same party, but in practice the Polish Bundists operated as a party of their own.^[51] In December 1917 the split was formalized, as the Polish Bundists held a clandestine meeting in Lublin and reconstituted themselves as a separate political party.^[52]

The Bund undertook various forms of armed resistance against pogroms, and later, against Nazi Germany. Their efforts to create armed self-defense groups began in 1902, and intensified after the infamous Kishinev pogrom in 1903. At least in the early stages of the first Russian Revolution, the armed groups of the "Bund" were likely the strongest revolutionary force in Western Russia.^[82] The Bund’s militia had no special privileges over other party members and were held to a higher disciplinary standard, paying the same amount of dues as other party members.^[47]

In September 1942, in response to Nazi violence and deportation of Jews to extermination camps in Warsaw, Bundist youth group activists in occupied Poland joined left-wing Zionist youth in the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), or ŻOB, dedicated to the armed resistance against German powers. Turning to smuggling and donations from those with more valuables than most, the ŻOB amassed pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails for each of its 500 members by April 1943.^[83] The Polish Bundists found themselves in a precarious position organizing with left-wing Zionist youth associations as a core part of the ŻOB, and to a lesser degree, with right-wing Zionist youth who formed the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy), or ŻZW. With an estimated 400 members, the ŻZW had access to pistols, grenades, submachine guns, machine guns, and rifles.

On April 19, 1943, German forces attempted to enter the ghetto in a deportation operation but were met with armed resistance.^[83] The ŻOB and ŻZW planned to take their deaths into their own hands. Following 19 days of rebellion, the ghetto was set ablaze and resistance fighters forced out of cover. Jürgen Stroop, a Nazi commander, ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue to symbolize German victory, marking the end of the uprising. This act of resistance, the largest single event of Jewish resistance against the Nazis during World War II, would later be known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Esther Frumkin and Aron Isaakovich (Rakhmiel) Vainsthein were the key leaders of the Communist Bund 1920–1921.^[92] Communist Bund organs, such as Der Veker, were published irregularly in Belarus.^[93]

Following the Gomel Conference, a process of negotiations for a merger between the Communist Party and the Communist Bund took place.^[92][94] As noted above, the Communist Bund argued that it should be affiliated as an autonomous organization within the Communist Party on the same terms as the Bund had joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903.^[94] Furthermore, the Bund demanded that a commission be set up to discuss the terms of the merger.^[95] The Communist Party ceded to this request and a 7-member commission was formed (3 Communist Party representatives, 3 Bund representatives and 1 Comintern representative as arbiter).^[95] On 6 May 1920, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (bolshevik) discussed the question of "The Conditions for the Bund's Admission to Membership of the R.C.P." and resolved "that Kamenev, Stalin and Preobrazhensky be authorised to receive the representatives of the Bund and hear their proposals".^[91] Within the Communist Party, its Jewish section (Yevsektsiya) strongly opposed the Bund and argued against allowing the Bund to form an autonomous body within the party.^[95]

On 9 June 1920, the Communist faction of the Fareynikhte party merged into the Communist Bund.^[96]

Eventually the Comintern arbiter in the unity commission was convinced by the Yevsektsiya argumentation, and the Comintern ordered the Bund to dissolve itself.^[95] At an Extraordinary All-Russian Bundist Conference, held in Minsk on 5 March 1921, the delegates representing some 3,000 party members debated disbanding the Communist Bund.^[91][97][98] Vainsthein spoke in favour of disbanding the Communist Bund and merging with the Communist Party.^[99] Perel represented the minority view, arguing that the Bund should be retained as a separate party.^[99] 47 delegates voted against Perel's proposal, 23 delegates abstained from voting.^[99] In April 1921 the Communist International called on all Bundists to join the Communist Party.^[92] The Communist Bund was subsequently disbanded.^[99] In Belarus, the Communist Party of Byelorussia agreed to provide automatic party membership to any Bundist that joined the party, and one Bundist was included in the CP(b)B Central Bureau and two Bundists in CP(b)B District Committees.^[98] Symbolically marking the merger, a ceremony was held in a theatre in Minsk on 19 April 1921, where Bundists handed over their banners to the CP(b)B.^[98]Der Veker became the organ of the Yevsektsiya (Jewish section of the Communist Party) in the Byelorussian SSR.^[98] After their party was dissolved, many former members of the Communist Bund joined the RCP(b) as individuals.^[100]

Around 1923, the remnants of the Bund (S.D.) had ceased to function in Soviet Russia.^[90] Many former Bundists, like Mikhail Liber and David Petrovsky, perished during Stalin's purges in the 1930s. The Polish Bundists continued their activities until 1948. During the latter half of the 20th century the Bundist legacy was represented through the International Jewish Labor Bund, a federation of local Bundist groups around the world. A leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was Bundist Marek Edelman.

In West Belarus, areas that came under Polish rule between the two world wars, the remnants of the Russian Bund eventually merged into the Polish Bund, while many activists chose to join the Polish Communist Party.

• Armenian Social-Democratic Workers Organization – an Armenian organization inspired by the Bund
• The Workers Circle – an American organization inspired by the Bund

• Jack Jacobs (ed.), Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
• Alfred Katz, "Bund: The Jewish Socialist Labor Party", The Polish Review, vol. 10, no. 3 (Summer 1965), pp. 67–74.
• Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, ch. 3.

• Bund article at The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
• Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeyter Bund Collection at the International Institute of Social History
• Jewish Workers' Bund Archive at marxists.org
• Photo galleys of Bund leaders at the Center for Jewish History: Part 1 and Part 2
• Bund political cartoons from Łódź and Warsaw at the Center for Jewish History