This article examines the views of Vladimir Medem (1879-1923) —a major leader and theorist of the Jewish Labour Bund in Tsarist Russia and, after 1918, in independent Poland— on the ‘national question’, as he presented them in internal discussions within the Bund and in his theoretical works. It demonstrates that Medem’s goal was not just to outline a political program for the Bund but to establish the foundations for a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the nation from a social democratic perspective. Strongly opposed to nationalism in all its manifestations, Medem put forward, as an alternative to the nation-state (demanded by all nationalist movements), a model of a ‘state of nationalities’ in which citizenship would be nationally neutral and granted equally to the members of all nationalities. At the same time, Medem proposed that the state must take an active role in protecting national minorities by granting each of them a national-cultural autonomy with a limited jurisdiction over cultural matters (and only those matters). Medem’s analysis of the national question and the Bund’s program of national-cultural autonomy (like the similar views formulated by Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer) deserve special attention, I argue; as a form of ‘multiculturalism avant la lettre’, they may offer insights relevant to today’s increasingly diverse and multicultural societies.

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National-Cultural Autonomy and 'Neutralism': Vladimir Medem's Marxist Analysis of the National Question, 1903-1920.

/pdf/10-quellen-und-literaturverzeichnis-2ktwf0nv.pdf

10 Quellen- und Literaturverzeichnis

Jewish nation – Jewish nationhood The traditional categorization of the Bund on the question of ‘nation- hood’ and ‘class’ has cast this movement, from its inception, into a singular framework in which the idea of Jewish cultural autonomism is merged into a Marxist political worldview. The Bund ideology never recognized the world-spanning nature of the ‘Jewish problem’ or an inclusive, shared Jewish interest. In the Bundist ideology, the ‘Jewish people’ is an entity that, although endowed with linguistic and cultural characteristics, has never had a common national, let alone ethnic, .element. Until its national ideological infrastructure coalesced, the Bund followed an unbroken path of disputes and confrontations with sister socialist parties in Eastern Europe. Each of these parties – such as the RSDRP, the PPS, and the SDKPiL – ruled out, in its own way and for its own reasons, the idea of a separate Jewish labor movement. The founders of the Bund in the 1890s, who considered themselves, above all, members of the general Russian socialist camp, had to devise a worldview that stressed concurrently the singularity of the national and class condition of the Jewish worker and the integral inclusion of this worker in the general proletarian camp. The decision to depict the Jews as a distinct national bloc within the Eastern European working class and to demand national cultural autonomy on its behalf surfaced as a basic plank in the Bund platform as early as 1905.

The National Ideology of the Bund in the Test of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, 1933–47

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The National Ideology of the Bund in the Test of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, 1933–47