💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › jesse-cohn-messianic-troublemakers.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:11:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Messianic Troublemakers Author: Jesse Cohn Date: March 2002 Language: en Topics: Jewish anarchism, national liberation Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-10 from http://www.zeek.net/politics_0504.shtml Notes: This essay is based on a lecture given in March, 2002. An earlier version appears on the Research into Anarchism Forum website.
It had an amazing scent, the anarchic flower
when I was young it flashed out of books and genealogies
and with a hand eased by the thwack of hope
I offered it to the world and you ...
Meir Wieseltier, “The Flower of Anarchy” (translated from the Hebrew by
Shirley Kaufman)
It’s a bright May Day in Paris, 1926, a quarter after two in the
afternoon. A middle-aged watchmaker named Samuel Schwartzbard, a veteran
of the French Foreign Legion and the Red Army, is waiting outside the
Chartier restaurant on 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.”
Thus Samuel Schwartzbard (1866–1938) – Shalom, as he was also called –
assassinated General Simon Petliura, former leader of the independent
nation of Ukraine, who between 1919 and 1921 had ordered a wave of
pogroms which had taken the lives of sixty thousand Jews, including most
of Schwartzbard’s own family. Escaping to Romania at the age of
nineteen, Schwartzbard had since traveled, fought, written poetry,
studied, and eventually fallen in with a crowd of like-minded expatriate
Jews in Paris.
There were so many of them.
Exemplary vagrants, these Hebrews (from the Akkadian word khabiru,
“vagrant”): Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Mollie Steimer (1897–1980),
Senya Fleshin (1894–1981), Leah Feldman (1899–1993), V. M. “Voline”
Eichenbaum (1882–1945), the notorious Emma Goldman herself (1869–1940).
Russian Jews who had fought with Nestor Makhno’s peasant rebellion in
the Ukraine; or German Jews; or American Jews of Russian-immigrant
parentage deported to Red Russia, which had no use for them either – too
dangerous, too quick to catch on, too Red to be trusted – then deported
to Germany, then ... here. Exemplars of galut, of exile as a condition
and even a vocation, they were habitual border-crossers, trespassers.
They believed in the nation but not in the State; they knew the Spirit
in their bodies but rejected the Law. Iconoclasts par excellence –
Messianic troublemakers. Their banner was empty of images, like God –
black, not blank; not a tabula rasa but as if all the words of
denunciation, rejoicing, mourning, defiance, prophecy, had somehow been
crammed together into this anti-image: the black flag. These are my
spiritual ancestors: Jewish anarchists.
Anarchists are back in the news today — not only in the ubiquitous
protests/uprisings/street festivals that spring up wherever the WTO,
IMF, World Bank, or G-8 meet, but also up and down the scar that runs
the length of the West Bank, between the Israeli magen david and the
Palestinian tricolor, a puzzling negation of all the options on offer.
But few know the rich history of Jewish anarchism, and the long
tradition of struggle that it represents.
For example, the “Anarchists Against The Wall” initiative, part of the
latest wave in post-Zionist activism, is, ironically, born of the same
world as Zionism itself. In the face-offs between young Israeli
anarchists and baffled Israeli riot cops, there is an echo of the
tsimmes between Theodor Herzl, founding father of establishment Zionism,
and fiery journalist Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), an early defender of
Alfred Dreyfus from his antisemitic persecutors:
“Anarchist!” Herzl shouted.
“Bourgeois!” replied Lazare.
One forgotten footnote of history is that, for all his success as an
organizer, Herzl’s statist/capitalist vision didn’t animate as many of
the early Jewish settlers in Palestine as did Lazare’s. “We must live
once again as a nation,” Lazare declared, “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.”
Martin Buber, echoing the sentiments of his anarchist friend Gustav
Landauer (1870–1919), agreed: if there is to be such a thing as a Jewish
nation at all, it can’t be like a goyische nation, with “cannons, flags,
and military decorations”; it would have to be a kind of horizontal
federation of little self-organizing communities, similar to the de
facto Jewish government in effect in Poland and the Pale of Settlement
during the nineteenth century. A decade or so later, these little
communities started to spring up in Palestine: they were called
“kibbutzim.” Svoboda! exulted a Russian immigrant to an interviewer at
Rishon-le-Zion in 1905: Freedom! “This is a land without order and
authority,” he declared. “Here a man can live as he pleases.” And for
the next two decades, most of the kibbutzniks agreed with him.
(Today in Israel, the language is slightly different. In the words of a
leaflet written by “the Anarchist Communist Initiative” and distributed
by “Israeli National Traitor Anarchists”: Two States for Two Nations –
Two States Too Many!)
---
The Jewish anarchists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries sometimes thought of themselves as dipping into the well of
their most ancient traditions to discover something already there. As a
girl, Emma Goldman “used to dream of becoming a Judith,” she confesses
in her epic autobiography, Living My Life, “and visioned myself in the
act cutting off Holofernes’ head to avenge the wrongs of my people.”
Others had a more complicated relationship with Jewish tradition. If you
search for Lazare’s name on the web, you’ll find it quoted with
alarming, but unsurprising frequency on the websites of antisemitic
organizations: “The general causes of antisemitism have always resided
in Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it ... everywhere up
to our own days the Jew was an unsociable being. Why was he unsociable?
Because he was exclusive,” he wrote in the first half of his magnum
opus, Antisemitism: Its History And Its Causes (1896).
The Nazi types who gloat over this, however, are not quite as excited by
the second half of the book, written after an enlightening interregnum,
in which Lazare repudiates the false racial “science” of Jew-haters like
Edouard Drumont, and immersed himself in the words of the prophets,
those excellent malcontents. Now Lazare wrote that antisemitism was “one
of the last, though most long lived, manifestations of that old spirit
of reaction and narrow conservatism, which is vainly attempting to
arrest the onward movement of the Revolution.” Conversely, Lazare
discovers a “revolutionary spirit” in Judaism itself, a tendency
implicit in the this-worldly character of the tradition. Since, Lazare
argues, “the Jew does not believe in the Beyond,” Jews “cannot accept
unhappiness and injustice in earthly life in the name of a future
reward” and have therefore continually “sought justice” in the here and
now. (No opiate of the masses for us, thanks.) Indeed, Lazare believed,
“anarchy” was implicit in the First Commandment: if we are to have no
other master before God, “What 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.”
Still, there was a strong anti-traditional streak among Jewish
anarchists, as in the tradition of the anarchist Yom Kippur Ball. In the
late 1880s, “The Pioneers of Freedom,” a Jewish anarchist club based in
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, passed out mock Avinu Malkenus written in
Yiddish and partied through Kol Nidre. In 1889, they invited all Jewish
workers to join the party – party with a lower-case “p” – in the
Clarendon Hall, causing a “near-riot” when the proprietor tried to call
it off at the last minute. In 1890, in Brooklyn, they threw a “Grand Yom
Kippur Ball with theater” on Yom Kippur, 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 skirmishes
between believers and non-believers, was duplicated in London and in
Philadelphia. Some tales even tell that in the heyday of the anarchist
kibbutzim, a group held a Yom Kippur march to the Wailing Wall to eat
ham sandwiches.
The rabbinic establishment fought back. For example, in 1888, the
religious leaders of London’s Jewish community declared war on the
Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper, the Arbeter Fraint. According to
William J. Fishman’s exquisite history, East End Jewish Radicals,
1875–1914, “the back page of every issue carried the appeal in heavy
type: ‘Workers, do your duty. Spread the Arbeter Fraint!’” But someone
aligned with the rabbinic authorities bribed the typesetter, 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. Anarchists were as active in their
reaction as in their provocation. When the Arbeter Fraint started up
again, it featured a full-bore attack on orthodox Judaism, including
parodies of the Passover seder and Lamentations for good measure.
(Truces were sometimes declared, though; 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.)
In London in the 1890s, Rudolf Rocker – a German gentile who had fallen
in love with a young Jewish labor militant, taught himself Yiddish, and
eventually found himself editor of the Arbeter Fraint, the de facto
political leader of the East End Jewish working class – 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.” This, 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?
And indeed, Rocker functioned as a kind of rabbi, preaching
revolutionary ardor and connecting with individuals in the movement. If
Marxism was all about systems – economic mechanisms, stages of history,
dialectical laws – anarchism was more prophetic in nature: it came from
moral indignation, not sociological analysis. As a result, anarchism
differed from Marxism in its regard for the individual. From Marx to
Trotsky, the prescription had always been the same: assimilation into
one grand, generic working-class identity and participation in the one
grand, generic workers’ revolution. But Lazare despaired of “the ending
of ... all differences in the world.” He wrote, “I am happy about every
imponderable and ineffable thing that brings about exclusive bonds,
unities, and also differentiations within humanity.”
Anarchists also differed from Marxists on the question of ends and
means. For anarchists, the question of ethics, of how one ought to live,
was not something to be postponed until “after the revolution,” the
Marxist equivalent of the Christian afterlife; it had to be addressed
here and now, in the very process of creating a revolution. “There is no
greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing,
while methods and tactics are another,” wrote Goldman in the wake of her
expulsion from Russia. “To divest one’s methods of ethical concepts
means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.”
Anarchist tactics – bombings, sabotage, assassinations — today seem
redolent of terrorism. But this is more image than substance. True, as
hot-blooded young militants, Goldman and Berkman plotted an attempt on
the life of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick on behalf of the striking
workers murdered by his Pinkerton goons 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 –
Schwartzbard’s slaying of Petliura was only one of many examples
(incredibly, the jury acquitted him out of sympathy!) – 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. In fact, a favorite tactic of the powers that be, then and
now, has been to manufacture “anarchist” bombs, bomb-plots, and even
bombers, to terrify ordinary people. (Goldman’s comrades suspected that
Leon Czolgosz, the self-proclaimed anarchist who shot President McKinley
in 1901, was a police spy.) 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
circumstances.
Consequently, from 1894 on, anarchists emphasized positive, constructive
activism, organizing clubs, neighborhoods, workers’ cooperatives,
experimental schools, collective farms, mutual-aid societies, and
anarcho-syndicalist labor unions. Far from being allergic to
organization, anarchists advocated a kind of organization “from below,”
in the words of Voline. They sought to replace coercive institutions
with cooperative ones, to find ways of building a working society in a
democratic, egalitarian, and decentralized fashion, using frequent
face-to-face meetings of small groups to make decisions – rather like a
kibbutz.
---
Nonviolent resistance to evil is always hard, and in a situation where
even peaceful assemblies can be met with brutal repression – as in
Homestead or Budrus (where Gil Na’amati, an anarchist and kibbutznik,
was shot by IDF forces in 2003) – it may become all but impossible.
Still, 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. We are the state. We do it to ourselves, all of us, all
the time, by obeying much and resisting little, by settling for a piece
of the pie in exchange for our dignity, by accepting subordination in
exchange for domination over the even less fortunate. If this ugly
tangle of social relationships is “the state,” then all the gaudy
regicides in the world can’t buy us our freedom. Revolution, these
anarchists argued, begins in our hearts and in the space between us.
Among the anarchist books translated into Hebrew and circulated in
Jewish Palestine by the 1920s was Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, which
argued that the dominant concept of Western politics, Thomas Hobbes’s
vision of the “state of nature” as a “war of all against all,” was a
scarecrow designed to justify the existence of the authoritarian state.
Just as “natural” as competition for survival, Kropotkin argued, was
cooperation for survival. Anarchism, in Goldman’s words, it is “the
philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by
man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence,
and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”
Unnecessary? Hard to tell that to a Jewish mother in Haifa or a
Palestinian mother in Jenin. In the absence of a Hobbesian state with a
legal monopoly on violence, what protects us from those beasts, our
neighbors? With all the fences and checkpoints gone, what’s to keep them
from getting at us?
From an anarchist perspective, the hard truth is that aggressive forms
of Arab nationalism, like the aggressive Jewish nationalism personified
by Ariel Sharon, is rooted in an entire system of social relations that
will have to be undone and reconstructed. “Antisemitism,” (and by
extension, the anti-arabism of right-wing Jewish zealots) predicted
Voline on the eve of the Shoah,:
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.
In today’s terms, take away the endless supply of recruits – young men
with no money, no security, no water, no jobs, no hope – and the suicide
bombings will eventually stop. Stop the flow of fear and money into the
politico-religio-economic machine, and the Likudniks will be out of a
job. Refocus everyone’s attention on arranging the real business of
life, the common good, and the fundamentalist zealots will see
attendance go down in mosque and synagogue alike.
Easier said than done – but it happened in the kibbutzim. Fractious,
hard-headed, kibbutznikim managed to get it together anyway. As one
sociologist of the kibbutz has noted, having done away with “any
objective foundation for the traditional hostile relations” –
dog-eat-dog marketplace competition, hierarchies of power and status,
the war of each against all – the kibbutzniks found they had lost any
need for the state. As a result, “aggressive manifestations are
restrained, and the collective conscience becomes the primary force
determining man’s way of life ... Life is conducted without the need for
formal sanctions: work is done without a supervisor, morality does not
need to be defended by priests, judges and policement. Mutual aid is
transformed into the highest law of life, and cooperation between
comrades is the only guarantee ...” These folks had indeed translated
Kropotkin’s anarchist vision into Hebrew.
Kibbutzim are, to an extent, exercises in utopia, and so it is no
surprise that the discourse of Jewish anarchism frequently takes a
spiritual, messianic turn, as in Gershom Scholem’s
Kabbalistically-informed reading of anarchism as bringing about
messianic consciousness. Shortly after leading Jewish sweatshop workers
to victory in a 1912 strike, as Rudolf Rocker later recalled,
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.
Most Jewish anarchists, like the gentile Rocker, were staunchly atheist;
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, and they had no conception of faculties that might lie beyond
reason. 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, and
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.
Landauer, sometimes called a “religious atheist,” embodies this seeming
contradiction. Although he denied the existence of a God “beyond the
earth and above the world,” Landauer also defined anarchism as a
religion, 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, he says, because the spirit
that creates community has weakened: the community has fractured and
turned against itself. Thus, Landauer speaks of revolution in spiritual
terms, calling it redemption, using Jewish religious language to
describe the need for social and political transformation.
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 holy teachers of liberty: they were
being iconoclasts, rejecting the established religious cult as a hollow
ritual, just like the prophets did. It’s Isaiah who thunders that the
official ritual of Judaism has become an empty show, a hollow repetition
of formal gestures, empty of spirit: “To what purpose is the multitude
of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord ... 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.” Without justice and
compassion – the ideals and values that bound the people together in the
desert — ritual is empty. This is what a Jewish anarchist like Yanofsky
was reminding his cousins when he wrote angrily in the Arbeter Fraint of
the gross spectacle of Yom Kippur services attended by wealthier Jews
“overdressed and overfed in seats set aside for the sheine leit” while
poor Jews “pressed together by the door, hungry and ill-clad with no
prospects of a sumptious fast-breaking meal to return to.” I can hear an
echo of Isaiah: “Bring no more vain oblations ... seek judgment, relieve
the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow”!
So too in the lives of other Jewish anarchists – David Edelshtadt
(1866–1892), sweatshop poet; Abraham Frumkin (1873–1940), itinerant
writer and translator; Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) and Carl Einstein
(1885–1940), committed artists; Manya Shohat (1880–1961), rebel without
borders; Senna Hoy (1882–1914) and Paul Goodman (1911–1972), anti-war
activists and defenders of homosexual rights; Etta Federn, founder of
the revolutionary womens’ organization, Mujeres Libres (1883–1951); Rose
Pesotta (1896–1965), tireless labor organizer — these men and women
spent their lives fighting for civil liberties, womens’ rights, and for
the rights of working people, gay liberation, ecology, peace and
freedom; they endured terror, jail, separation from their loved ones,
exile, and hardships beyond measure. They took care of people – as
organizers, nurses, teachers, lovers, fighters, peacemakers, friends –
and never submitted to the will of arbitrarily established authorities.
For these activists, 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 live. In heresy, in protest, they kept faith with Israel.
---
Jesse Cohn is a Green activist, a scholar of anarchy, and an Assistant
Professor of English at Purdue University. This essay is based on a
lecture given in March, 2002. An earlier version appears on the Research
into Anarchism Forum website.