Our Notes & References

A complete set of the most important publication of the recently founded Socialist Jewish Labour Party.

Founded in 1906, the Socialist Jewish Labour Party wished to represent the interests of Jewish workers across the Russian Empire. The Party’s program proclaimed socialism as its central goal while emphasising the national question facing the Jewish population and advocating for Jewish political autonomy. In particular, it proposed establishing “kagals”, local Jewish self-governing communities, and supported the creation of an all-Russian Jewish Seim (congress) to co-ordinate these local communities, for which the Party members earned the nickname of “seimovtsy.”

The Party published its own materials, initially only in Russian but later also in Yiddish, including periodicals and brochures. The advertisement pages in these two volumes offer a good glimpse into the range of these publications, from ‘Folksshtime’ [Volkstimme; the People’s Voice] to ‘Kampf’, a Vilnius-based periodical “in spoken Jewish language”.

Featuring important articles by the Party’s leaders, these two volumes present all of its main ideas, covering nationalism and the role of the proletariat, federalism and socialism, the Party’s history and objectives, Jewish political thought, essays on new publications, and a dramatic, emotional report on the 1905 Ekaterinoslav (Dnipro) uprising and the Jewish pogrom that followed.

They also contain reports from contemporary global socialist and Zionist gatherings, including the 1907 8th Zionist Congress in The Hague, with criticism towards the latest ideas presented there by Zhabotinsky, such as a Jewish emigration to Ottoman Palestine.

From its inception, the Party distinguished itself from other Jewish organisations, not only the Zionists but also the BUND (the General Jewish Labour Union), which promoted the “doikayt” (Yiddish for “hereness”), the principle that Jews should remain and build their culture in the countries where they lived, and advocated Marxist Democratic ideology while aligning with the Mensheviks. However, during the revolutionary year of 1917, SERP united with the BUND and later merged into the Ukrainian Communist Party.

Among the Party’s leaders and theorists was the Jewish publicist and thinker Chaim Zhitlovskii (1865–1943), who had previously participated in forming a ‘Narodnaia Volia’ group in Vitebsk (‘The People’s Will’, a famous revolutionary group). Although, he emigrated at the end of the 19^th century, he maintained connections with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and many Russian Jewish socialists.

Zhitlovskii identified inconsistencies in Marxist theory and proposed his own national and economic ideas to address them. He was among the first Jewish thinkers to advocate for a distinct Jewish political existence, supporting cultural rather than territorial nationalism with a diminished role for religion. He promoted these ideas within the Jewish diaspora, particularly in Yiddish. However, in the 1920s he revised his position to support the creation of a Jewish national democratic state, and saw his ideas realised in the infamous Soviet Birobidzhan project.

The volumes also include articles by other Party founders: Mark Ratner (1871–1917), a lawyer who also had ties to ‘Narodnaia Volia’ and whose legal practice included defending pogrom victims; Moshe Zilberfarb (pseud. Basin, 1876–1934), who in 1918 became the first Minister for Jewish Affairs of the pre-Bolshevik Ukrainian state; Abraham Rosin (pseud. Ben-Adir, 1878–1942), editor of the Party’s periodicals; Samuil Lozinskii (1874–1945), a famous publicist and history professor at various universities; as well as by Ludvig Kulchitskii (1866–1941), a Polish socialist and politician.

Provenance

‘Printed in Russia’ (blue ink stamps at beginning of vol 1, showing legal import into America); from the estate of Chimen Abramsky (1916–2010), a renowned Jewish historian, bibliophile, and scholar. Born in Minsk to the prominent Rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky, he fled the Soviet Union and studied in Jerusalem and Oxford, becoming a professor at the University College London, a Senior Fellow at Oxford, and a visiting professor at Brandeis and Stanford. A bibliophile and book collector himself, Abramsky became an expert on valuable Hebrew books and manuscripts for Sotheby’s and even issued a few lists of rare Judaica and Russian books for sale. One of his main areas of research was the Jewish population and policies in Russia and Soviet Union.

Bibliography

Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia Brokgauza i Efrona. Sankt-Peterburg, 1908–1913; Politicheskie Partii Rossii: konets XIX–pervaia tret XX veka. Moskva, 1996.