Re: [marxmail] Bundism, Zionism, and Bolshevism: Review of Molly Crabapple’s New Book

Thanks, Abraham. I’ve looked at Trotsky's 1937 interview with Jewish correspondents in Mexico which can be found at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/jewish.htm

You’re correct that Trotsky revised his youthful "prognosis that the Jews of different countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear in a quasi-automatic fashion.”

The rise of fascism showed that “decaying capitalism has everywhere swung over to an exacerbated nationalism, one part of which is anti-semitism. The Jewish question has loomed largest in the most highly developed capitalist country of Europe, in Germany.”

Trotsky did not himself speak Yiddish but *he clearly defined Jewish nationhood in terms of the Yiddish language*.  Perhaps that’s why he bristled at being called “Bronstein” and did not define himself as “Jewish”.

The fact, he said, that "the Jews of different countries have created their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument adapted to modern-culture” meant that “one must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come.”

But if the Yiddish-speaking Jews in the diaspora did not “reassemble" in a homeland of their own, the Jewish nation would disappear.. “The nation cannot normally exist without a common territory”, he stated flatly. "Zionism springs from this very idea. But the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question.”

Consistent with Trotsky’s overall political perspective, only the world socialist revolution he foresaw resulting from the impending world war could accomplish that task. He told his interviewer:

"And how, you ask me, can socialism solve this question?...Socialism will open the possibility of great migrations on the basis of the most developed technique and culture. It goes without saying that what is here involved is not compulsory displacements, that is, the creation of new ghettos for certain nationalities, but displacements freely consented to, or rather demanded by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities.

"The dispersed Jews who would want to be reassembled in the same community will find a sufficiently extensive and rich spot under the sun. The same possibility will be opened for the Arabs, as for all other scattered nations. National topography will become a part of the planned economy . This is the grand historical perspective that I envisage. To work for international socialism means also to work for the solution of the Jewish question.”

So how correct, I must ask you, Abraham, was Trotsky’s forecast? Did he reckon with the fact that the Yiddish-speaking nation centred in eastern Europe would not last for another decade, much less an “epoch”? That you and your parents would not live in a Yiddish-speaking republic? That Yiddish today in not your first language?

Or should Trotsky - who to his credit understood fascism better than most but who could still not anticipate the tragic scale of the Judeocide - have stuck with his earlier prognosis that "the Jews of different countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear in a quasi-automatic fashion?”

The answer seems clear to me if not to you.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#43045): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43045
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120754303/6024700
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/10173629/6024700/1441833971/xyzzy [[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-