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Title: Anarchy in Yiddish
Author: Jesse Cohn
Date: 2 April 2005
Language: en
Topics: Jewish anarchism
Source: Retrieved on 2011-07-26 from https://web.archive.org/web/20110726101554/http://raforum.info/spip.php?article488&lang=en

Jesse Cohn

Anarchy in Yiddish

“We can’t defect to a future which has no relation to its past

— a past which consists of pain and evil.”

It’s a bright May day in Paris in 1926, a quarter after two in the

afternoon. A middle-aged watchmaker named Samuel Schwartzbard, a veteran

of the French Foreign Legion and, as it happens, of the Red Army, is

waiting outside the Chartier restaurant in the Rue Racine. A man with a

cane, a former foreign dignitary now living in exile, steps out of the

restaurant. Schwartzbard approaches him, and calls out in Ukrainian:

“Are you Mr. Petliura?” The man turns. “Defend yourself, you bandit,”

shouts the watchmaker, drawing his pistol, and as Petliura raises the

cane in his right hand, Schwartzbard shoots him three times, shouting,

“This for the pogroms; this for the massacres; this for the victims.”

And thus Samuel Schwartzbard – Shalom, as he was also called –

assassinated General Simon Petliura, the former leader of the

independent nation of Ukraine, who between 1919 and 1921 had ordered a

wave of pogroms that had consumed the lives of sixty thousand Jews.

Schwartzbard, who was also a Ukrainian, had survived a pogrom at the age

of nineteen, fleeing to Romania; much of his family did not escape or

survive.

Schwartzbard, acquitted after his trial, rejoices with his family

Since then, Schwartzbard had traveled, fought, written poetry, studied.

He had made friends with several other expatriates in Paris, notably

Alexander Berkman, Mollie Steimer, Senya Fleshin, and Nestor Makhno.

Berkman, Steimer, and Fleshin were Jews from America, all of immigrant

parentage, all now living in exile, having been deported. Makhno was a

Ukrainian, the exiled leader of a failed peasant insurrection that, for

a while, had battled both Trotsky’s Red Army and the White armies of

Petliura and Denikin. All of them were anarchists.

Anarchism was, for a time, one of the primary contenders for the

loyalties of working men and women the world over – including the

hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing poverty and oppression in Russia

in the late 1800s, many of whom fled to England and America to become

part of the most heavily exploited strata of the working classes there.

Socialist ideas like justice, solidarity, and freedom caught on quick in

the oppressive atmosphere of the sweatshops; so did anarchism. Here is

how Rudolf Rocker, a German anarchist, first met his Jewish comrades –

this is from William Fishman’s wonderful book on the East End Jewish

Radicals, which we have in the Temple library:

His first personal experience of Jews and Jewish radicals came in spring

1893, while strolling round the Parisian boulevards with a friend,

Liederle, who asked him if he would like to attend a Jewish Anarchist

meeting. Jewish Anarchists! Identification in religious terms seemed, to

Rocker, a travesty of the meaning of Anarchism. He had scarcely known

Jews [back home] in Mainz ...

That Sunday, in a hired room on the first floor of a coffee house in the

Boulevard Barbès, Rocker met, for the first time a group of Jewish

Anarchists. Scattered around tables, in small groups, he saw about fifty

or sixty comrades of both sexes in lively discussion. A few were

absorbed in reading journals printed in Hebrew, which he later recalled

as the Arbeiter Fraint and the Freie Arbeiter Stimme ... All spoke a

German patois, which he followed with difficulty. What struck him

forcibly was the active participation of women in large numbers, who, in

accordance with Libertarian principles, operated as equals within the

circle.

It was this spirit of egalitarianism, as well as “the warmth and

hospitality” and “the high-powered thrust in debate,” that drew Rocker

to this community (Fishman 231–232). Although he himself was a Gentile,

Rocker would come to play a major role in the life of the Jewish

community of London’s East End; he learned Yiddish, fell in love with a

young Jewish labor militant (Milly Witkop), became a key activist in the

Jewish Anarchist Federation, and took over as editor of the

Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper Di Arbeter Fraint. In the years to

come, some would call him “the anarchist rabbi.” Indeed, shortly after

Rocker led Jewish sweatshop workers to victory in a 1912 strike, as

Rocker later recalled,

One day as I was walking along a narrow Whitechapel street, an old Jew

with a long white beard stopped me outside his house, and said: “May God

bless you! You helped my children in their need. You are not a Jew, but

you are a man!” This old man lived in a world completely different from

mine. But the memory of the gratitude that shone in those eyes has

remained with me all these years. [1]

This powerful experience of community was defining for Rudolf Rocker,

and it defined the meaning of anarchism for the men and women who made

the movement.

Anarchism itself was part of the broader currents of socialism – it was

the left wing of the socialist movement. My own great-grandfather

William Edlin, who became an editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper

The Day, when he was young, used to quote from both the communist Karl

Marx and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his pamphlets on the coming of

the great social revolution. For some time, anarchism was a real

contender for the future of the international labor movement. It was

after 1917, really, that the tide definitively turned against the

anarchists: the world finally had an example of a “successful”

revolution, and that was the so-called Soviet Union. The anarchists were

condemned to sit out the rest of history as the “losers” – and to have

their own achievements forgotten. Even in 1932, the aging Alexander

Berkman complained in a letter to a friend that American workers had

entirely forgotten that anarchists had led the fight for the eight hour

day in the benighted days of the 19^(th) century. His beloved Emma

Goldman, famous as “Red Emma,” is widely remembered as a feisty feminist

firebrand, but rarely as one of the most prominent anarchists in

American history.

So what is this largely-forgotten anarchist movement, and what role did

Jews play in it?

I’ve given you some quotes from Jewish anarchists who explain

“anarchism” in their own words, but to put it in even more of a

nutshell: rather than meaning chaos, violence, or the absence of any

order or organization, anarchism – as defined by its philosophers and

practitioners from the 19^(th) century to the present – is a movement

which seeks to abolish all forms of hierarchy and domination,

particularly to abolish both the government and the wage system.

Anarchists put these beliefs into practice in different ways: it’s true

that many anarchists resorted to terroristic means, assassinating heads

of state and wealthy capitalists. As a hot-blooded young anarchist

militant, Alexander Berkman made an attempt on the life of steel magnate

Henry Clay Frick on behalf of the striking workers murdered at

Homestead, Pennsylvania . It didn’t work: Frick lived, and Berkman went

to prison. Other anarchists practicing “propaganda by the deed” were

more successful than Berkman – Samuel Schwartzbard would be one example

– but this period of bombings and stabbings largely exhausted itself by

1894, when anarchists woke up and realized that all these sporadic,

individual acts of violence weren’t accomplishing anything and only made

the State stronger in the ensuing waves of judicial crackdowns and

police reprisals. Even Berkman, in his later years, declared that he was

no longer generally “in favor of terroristic tactics, except under very

exceptional circumstances” – Nazi Germany being one of those

“exceptional circumstances” (LML 721). The German-Jewish anarchist

Gustav Landauer spoke for many when he wrote in 1907 :

One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but ... [only]

idle talkers ... regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that

one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a

certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior between men;

we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving

differently toward one another

... We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we

have created the institutions that form a real community and society of

men. [2]

From 1894 on, anarchists emphasized positive, constructive activism,

particularly in terms of organizing. Anarchists created workers’

cooperatives, experimental schools, collective farms, “mutual aid”

societies, and anarcho-syndicalist labor unions like the I.W.W. (the

famous Industrial Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies” as they were

known in America). Far from being anti-organization, anarchists

advocated a kind of “organization from below.” They sought to replace

coercive institutions with cooperative ones, to find ways of doing what

needs to be done in a democratic, egalitarian, and decentralized

fashion, using frequent face-to-face meetings of small groups to make

decisions rather than voting every few years for “representatives.”

Most anarchists saw anarchism as embracing the struggle of all oppressed

people against oppression, including the struggle of Jews against

anti-semitism – with a few notable exceptions. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

and Mikhail Bakunin, two of the pioneers of the anarchist movement in

the mid-to-late nineteenth century, were themselves anti-semites who

identified Jews with money and capitalism. Their prejudices would only

be seriously repudiated later in the nineteenth century, as anarchists

reacted against the growing anti-semitic movements in France and

elsewhere. In fact, it was at that point that both Jewish and non-Jewish

anarchists developed theories about the origins and nature of

anti-semitism, and organized against it politically.

Anti-semitism, argued anarchists such as Voline, had evolved as a sort

of safety valve that the wealthy and powerful could use to control

working class anger – people who were conscious of being cheated and

misused could be persuaded to attack the Jews rather than their rulers

or their employers. As everyone from the Czars to Hitler discovered,

Jews make excellent scapegoats. To really permanently destroy

anti-semitism, anarchists argued, we have to attack the root of the

problem: the conditions of exploitation and injustice that Jew-hating

serves as a distraction from. Thus, Voline wrote that

the complete destruction of present-day society and its reorganization

on a completely different social basis which will lead to the definitive

disappearance of the nationalist plague, and with it, of antisemitism.

It will disappear when the vast human masses, at the end of their

sufferings and misfortunes, and at the price of atrocious experiences,

comprehend, finally, that humanity must, on pain of death, organize its

life on the sane and natural basis of cooperation, material and moral,

fraternal and just, that is to say, on a truly human basis.

(“Antisemitisme,” Encyc. Anarchiste)

Jewish anarchists took this a step further by beginning the battle

against anti-semitism in the present. Samuel Schwartzbard didn’t stop at

his personal revenge for the pogroms; he founded an organization called

the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. In exile from

the U.S., Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman investigated and reported

back on the condition of the Russian Jews in the early years of the

Soviet Union. Leah Feldman rode with Nestor Makhno’s army against the

pogromchiks. One way or another, Jewish anarchists fought back – as

Jews, as anarchists, as human beings rising against their oppressors.

At the same time, they didn’t always have an easy time getting along

with other Jews. Religion was a particular sticking point. Proudhon and

Bakunin had defined anarchism as the revolt against all forms of human

enslavement, physical and mental – and religion they counted as a form

of mental slavery, noting that the Church had always bolstered the

State, and that poor people were always told to wait for their reward in

heaven rather than seeking justice on earth. Jewish anarchists

frequently took up this wholesale attack on religion; in her famous

manifesto, Emma Goldman wrote of “religion” as “the dominion of the

human mind” (AOE 53):

The primitive man, unable to understand his being ... felt himself

absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and

taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a

mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be

appeased by complete surrender. All the ... biblical tales dealing with

the relation of man to God, to the State, to society ... [express] the

same motif, man is nothing, the powers are everything. Thus Jehovah

would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have

all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of

himself ...

Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades

his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of

that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so

cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood

have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion

against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to

man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of

the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress. (51,

53)

Now, in light of this kind of pronounced atheism emanating from the

anarchist quarters, it’s no wonder rabbis in New York and London saw the

Jewish anarchists as a threat to their traditions, their communities –

and their own rabbinical authority. In 1888, the “clerical and lay

leaders” of London’s Jewish community “set out to destroy” the

Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper, the Arbeter Fraint. According to

Fishman, “The back page of every issue carried the appeal in heavy type:

‘Workers, do your duty. Spread the Arbeter Fraint!’” The typesetter was

bribed, and issue number 26 appeared with the wording of the ad slightly

changed: “Workers, do your duty. Destroy the Arbeter Fraint!” The

typesetter promptly disappeared, fleeing the wrath of the editors; then,

after that, they bribed the printer (155). By 1904, they were hiring

“gangs of thugs (schlogers) ... to break up Anarchist and Social

Democrat meetings” (259).

Anarchists didn’t take all this lying down, needless to say – nor did

they fail to provoke it. When the Arbeter Fraint started up again, it

featured a full-bore attack on orthodox Judaism, including parodies of

the Passover seder and the Lamentations (155). In the late 1880s, a

group of Jewish anarchists on the Lower East Side organized as a club

called “The Pioneers of Freedom,” which “distributed Yiddish parodies of

penitential prayers, mocking the traditions of Yom Kippur,” and

organized “Yom Kippur Balls held on Kol Nidre night” (Kolel) In 1889,

they leafleted to “[invite] Jewish workers to spend Kol Nidre evening at

the Clarendon Hall on Thirtieth Street” – causing a “near-riot” when the

proprietor, “under political pressure,” tried to call it off. In 1890,

in Brooklyn, they threw a “Grand Yom Kippur Ball with theater” on the

Day of Atonement (“A Life Apart: The Treyfe Medina”), advertising their

celebration as “Arranged with the consent of all new rabbis of Liberty

... Kol Nidre, music, dancing, buffet; Marseillaise and other hymns.”

This spectacle, which more than once provoked actual street fracases

between believers and non-believers, was duplicated in London and in

Philadelphia (Kolel) – although on at least one occasion, in 1890, the

Russian-Jewish anarchists of Philadelphia actually called off their Yom

Kippur Ball – which was to feature “pork-eating” – out of respect for

the role played by the city’s orthodox rabbi, Sabato Morais, in

mediating a crucial strike of cloakmakers that year (“Morais”). In

London in the 1890s, Rudolf Rocker was asked to comment on the habit of

some Jewish anarchists of demonstrating “provocative behaviour” in front

of the Brick Lane synagogue on Shabbat. He answered that “the place for

believers was the house of worship, and the place for non-believers was

the radical meeting” (Ward). Which, if you think about it, is a

peculiarly rabbinical sort of exchange – it’s just the sort of question

young men used to ask rabbis to answer: Rabbi, are the comrades right to

demonstrate in front of the synagogue on the Sabbath? No wonder Sam

Dreen said “Rocker was our rabbi!” (qtd. in Fishman 254).

Still, this tension about Judaism and anarchism raises the question: can

you really be an anarchist and a Jew? Is there such a thing as a Jewish

anarchist, or are there only Jewish-born anarchists? Let me add some

tension to the question: if you search the Internet for the name of

Bernard Lazare, an anarchist born to a Jewish family in southern France

in 1865, you will find his 1896 book, titled Antisemitism: Its History

and Its Causes, quoted on the websites of several anti-semitic

organizations. It’s no wonder when you read the opening paragraph of the

book, in which Lazare writes:

... the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel

itself, and not in those who antagonized it ... the Jews were

themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills ... Which

virtues or which vices have earned for the Jew this universal enmity?

Why was he ill-treated and hated alike and in turn by the Alexandrians

and the Romans, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and the

Christian nations? Because, everywhere up to our own days the Jew was an

unsociable being. Why was he unsociable? Because he was exclusive, and

his exclusiveness was both political and religious, or rather he held

fast to his political and religious cult, to his law. (ch. 1)

You read this, and you say to yourself: this is a Jew? This apology for

pogroms, this Jew-hating historiography? And the truth is, Lazare was in

some sense anti-semitic at the time that he began writing his book on

anti-semitism. He really was a kind of self-hating Jew, having embraced

anarchism and divorced himself from his people and its traditions. In

the opening chapter of his book, Lazare defines Jewish identity in terms

of unsociability and exclusivity: to be Jewish, according to Lazare, is

to define yourself as apart from the rest of humanity. Better, then, to

be a human being and not a Jew. He defines humanity as what is

universal, and Jewishness as what is merely particular. Is this an

anarchist attitude towards Judaism and Jewish being?

Would you be surprised, at this point, if I told you that Bernard

Lazare, without ever renouncing anarchism, was the first to come to the

defense of the falsely-accused Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus in 1898?

That Lazare, that same year, founded a Zionist journal called Le

Flambeau (The Torch), the first of its kind in France? That this same

Bernard Lazare, in this same book on anti-semitism, repudiates the false

racial “science” of Jew-haters like Edouard Drumont (ch. 10), denouncing

anti-semitism as “one of the last, though most long lived,

manifestations of thatold spirit of reaction and narrow conservatism,

which is vainly attempting to arrest the onward movement of the

Revolution” (ch. 15)?

Well, clearly things are a little complicated.

Consider this: a number of the prime representatives of the great

enemies and antagonists of anarchism – for instance, Karl Marx and Leon

Trotsky – were born Jewish, but disavowed their Jewish identities; for

them, though, this disavowal was not merely a personal choice, but a

deeply philosophical one. If you read Marx’s essay “On the Jewish

Question,” you’ll find that Marx really embraces this notion that to be

Jewish is to be particularistic and exclusive,torefuse to join the wider

human community. He declares that the solution to the “Jewish Question”

is the abolition of Jews as Jews – not their extermination (Hitler’s

“final solution”), but their voluntary renunciation of Judaism and

Jewishness, as well as Gentiles’ voluntary renunciation of Christianity.

For Marx and the marxists, progress means the abolition of everything

that is traditional and backward-looking, the abolition of particularity

and diversity in favor of universality and sameness. It is the anarchist

Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s ideological enemy, who objects to Marx’s notions

of historical progress, who objects to the obliteration of diversity and

the establishment of universal uniformity.

Thus it is that we find the German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer

writing in a passionate essay of 1912: “Humanity does not mean identity;

humanity is the union of the manifold.” In other words, for Landauer,

there is no such thing as universality without diversity. In 1915,

Landauer wrote: “Why should one ... preach the ending of ... all

differences in the world? ... I am happy about every imponderable and

ineffable thing that brings about exclusive bonds, unities, and also

differentiations within humanity. If I want to transform patriotism then

I do not proceed in the slightest against the fine fact of the nation

... but against the mixing up of the nation and the state, against the

confusion of differentiation and opposition” (qtd. in Lunn 263).

“Differentiation” doesn’t mean “opposition” or conflict, so diversity

and togetherness are not opposites either. Landauer considered himself

to have three unique communal identities – as a German, as a Jew, and as

a southern German (??) – as well as a universally shared human identity.

These are not incompatible options for Landauer: to be a real Jew (or a

real German, or a real Swabian) is to be a real mensch – a real human

being. Landauer would fully have understood what the old Jewish man said

to Rudolf Rocker in Whitechapel: “You are not a Jew, but you are a

mensch!” In other words: you do not observe our faith, but by involving

yourself in our community in the name of what is common to all humanity,

you make yourself a real human being, and as such, you are blessed by

God, whether you recognize it or not.

Landauer did not observe the Jewish religion in any formal sense; he was

an atheist. However, his passionate interest in Hassidic mysticism and

his close personal friendship with the great theologian Martin Buber

leads Michael Lowy to call Landauer a “religious atheist” – a

contradiction in terms, but maybe the only way to express it. Although

he “refused to believe in a God ‘beyond the earth and above the world,’”

he also defined anarchism as a “religion” (Lowy 135), as a kind of

spiritual mission, an earthly messianism. What Landauer calls “spirit”

is not a supernatural force, but as the shared feelings, ideals, values,

language, and beliefs that unify individuals into a community. The State

only exists because the spirit that creates community has weakened: the

community has fractured and turned against itself (what is “crime” and

“war” after all? human beings fighting among themselves). The State is

what emerges when the warmth of the binding “spirit” withdraws. Thus,

Landauer speaks of revolution in spiritual terms, calling it redemption,

using Jewish religious language to describe the need for social and

political transformation.

Bernard Lazare, too, came to identify Judaism with the spirit of

radicalism, even with anarchism. When he began writing his book on

anti-semitism in 1891, he did so as a Jew alienated from Jewishness and

Judaism alike, but as Michael Lowy points out, over the next two years

Lazare changed direction. The first part of Antisemitism: Its History

and Its Causes “holds Jews responsible, ‘in part, at least’ for their

ills, because of their ‘unsociable’ character, their political and

religious exclusiveness, their tendency to form a State within the

State, their obstinacy in rejecting the message of Christ, and so on”;

but “the second part ... written in 1893,” reflects Lazare’s growing

admiration for the Jewish tradition, particularly for “the great

prophetic texts in the Bible” (188). Thus Lazare writes that Judaism

itself contains a “revolutionary spirit” which is implicit in the

this-worldly character of the tradition. Since, Lazare argues, “the Jew

does not believe in the Beyond and cannot accept unhappiness and

injustice in earthly life in the name of a future reward” (189),

therefore the Jews always “sought justice, and never finding it, ever

dissatisfied, they were restless to get it.” Beyond this, though, the

very Jewish

conception of divinity ... led them to conceive the equality of men, it

led them even to anarchy ... [For] all Jews are Yahweh’s subjects; He

has said it Himself: “For unto me the children of Israel are servants.”

What [earthly] authority can, then, prevail by the side of the divine

authority? All government, whatever it be, is evil since it tends to

take the place of the government of God; it must be fought against,

because Yahweh is the only head of the Jewish commonwealth, the only one

to whom the Israelite owes obedience. (ch. ??)

No wonder all the kings and princes of the world have found Jews to be

such troublemakers.

It was people like Gustav Landauer and Bernard Lazare who gave early

Zionism its radical edge. In 1897, Lazare declared, “We must live once

again as a nation, or more closely like a free collectivity, but only on

the condition that the collectivity not be modeled after the

capitalistic and oppressor states in which we live” (qtd. in Lowy 194).

In his correspondence with Theodor Herzl, the father of the modern

Zionist movement, Lazare upbraided Herzl for his inconsistencies: “You

are bourgeois, because your thoughts are bourgeois, your feelings are

bourgeois, your ideas are bourgeois andyour social views

arebourgeois.And yet you want to lead a nation, our nation, the nation

of the poor, the oppressed, the proletarians” (qtd. in Lowy 195).

Instead of recreating the modern liberal capitalist State in Palestine,

Lazare and Landauer advocated that Jews should reach into the well of

their most ancient traditions create something new – a functioning

anarchist society.

According to Giora Manor, a journalist who happens to be a member of

Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek, “Historically speaking, the founders and early

thinkers of the kibbutzmovement were influenced by and acknowledged

their debt to anarchism.” Manor distinguishes between what most people

think of as “anarchy” – i.e., “the total absence of laws and

regulations” – and “anarchism,” which is “not a lawless society but a

society based on voluntary acceptance of the decisions and laws of the

society by each individual member, by consent, without coercion and

statutory sanctions.” Any kibbutz has its rules for living, but these

rules are arrived at collectively and voluntarily accepted by each

member: thus, while “there is no anarchy” in the kibbutz, “anarchism” is

“exactly what takes place in kibbutz life.” Professor Yaacov Oved, a

member of Kibbutz Pal-machim, gets more specific: via the influence of

the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, whose pamphlet on “Anarchist

Communism,” translated into Hebrew in 1921, was widely read by the

recent immigrants to Palestine, and via the influence of Gustav

Landauer, whose voice had been widely heard in Zionist circles, and

whose close personal friend Martin Buber memorialized his ideas among

the pioneers even after Landauer’s death, through the 1920s and beyond,

particularly among the young members of the Hashomer Hatzair movement.

“Up to 1925,” says Oved, during “the initial, experimental stage” of

kibbutz life, “anarchistic influences were prevalent” (my emphasis). It

was only between the late 20s and the mid 60s, during the phase of

“movement and party institutionalization,” that the anarchist influences

were buried or lost. Since then, there has been some rediscovery and

reclamation of the anarchist character of the kibbutzim.

The most famous and notable Jewish anarchists, though, were always

outside of Palestine/Israel; most of the ones on the list on page three

of your handout were either born in Russia or Eastern Europe or were the

children of immigrants from those countries. Very frequently, they not

only adopted existing anarchist theories, but innovated them: women like

Etta Federn and Emma Goldman applied the anarchist critique of power and

authority to the home and the family, bringing feminist concerns into

the movement; Paul Goodman brought anarchist thinking into the mostly

liberal peace movement, and advanced the cause of gay rights; Murray

Bookchin tied anarchist philosophy to environmentalism, creating a new

“green” anarchism. All of these men and women, whether or not they

declared themselves atheists, embraced anarchism with a kind of fervor

that is religious, even though most of them were also extreme

rationalists; they rejected the established religion of their fathers

and mothers for the same reason that they rejected the established

institutions of power and money – because they felt it was irrational.

They believed that rational persuasion and education could overcome the

irrational reign of force, that right could overcome might. At the same

time, as rationalists, they yearned for a great ideal to embrace, for

what even Noam Chomsky (a rationalist’s rationalist) has called a

“spiritual transformation.” They were moralists, deeply motivated by

ethical questions, incensed by injustices. They carried a very Jewish

sense of righteousness, the spirit of the Book of Exodus; they rejected

the idea of a life organized in pyramids of power and status, with a few

Pharoahs on the top and masses of slaves underneath.

I would say that the anarchist Jews were not only “true Jews” in a

cultural sense, but were really also deeply religious Jews in the old

sense of the prophets. When the Jewish anarchists of Brooklyn defied the

call to atonement, calling themselves “the new rabbis of liberty,” they

were behaving like the prophets, who themselves were a kind of “new

rabbis of liberty”: they were being iconoclasts, rejecting the

established religious cult as a hollow ritual, just like the prophets

did. It’s Isaiah who says,

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the

Lord ... Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me

... Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth ... when ye

spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye

make many prayers, I will not hear; [for] your hands are full of blood.

Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before

mine eyes; cease to do evil;

Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the

fatherless, plead for the widow. (1:11–17)

Isaiah is saying that the official ritual of Judaism has become an empty

show, a hollow repetition of formal gestures, empty of spirit. It is not

the letter of the Law but the spirit that matters. What is this spirit

that is missing? It is the spirit of justice and compassion – the ideals

and values that bound the people together in the desert. This is what a

Jewish anarchist like Saul Yanofsky was reminding his cousins when he

wrote angrily in the Arbeter Fraint of the gross spectacle of Yom Kippur

services attended by “rich [Jews] overdressed and overfed in seats set

aside for the sheine leit,” and by poor Jews “pressed together by the

door, hungry and ill-clad with no prospects of a sumptious fast-breaking

meal to return to” (211). I can hear an echo of Isaiah in Yanofsky’s

voice. And it is Emma Goldman who wrote that

at the age of eight I used to dream of becoming a Judith and visioned

myself in the act cutting off Holofernes’ head to avenge the wrongs of

my people. But since I had become aware that social injustice is not

confined to my own race, I had decided that there were too many heads

for one Judith to cut off. (Goldman, LML 370)

From the age of sixteen on, she spent her entire long life fighting for

civil liberties, for womens’ rights, for the rights of working men and

women, for peace and freedom; she endured terror and jail and separation

from her loved ones and exile and hardships beyond measure for the

cause. She took care of people – as a leader, a nurse, a friend – and

she never submitted to the will of the powers that be in this world. She

lived and died as an anarchist. I think she also lived and died as a

Jew. For Goldman, for Berkman, for Landauer and Lazare, for Pesotta and

Goodman and the others, the coming of the Messiah was not something to

pray for but to embody; the day of redemption was not something to await

but to bring. In their own heretical way, they kept faith with Israel.

[1] Rocker qtd. in Woodcock 422

[2] qtd. in Lunn 226, my emphasis