The Bund

The General Jewish Labor Bund, known simply as "The Bund," was a Marxist socialist party founded in 1897 in Vilna by Arkadii Kremer, Yuli Martov, and other Russian social democrats of Jewish background to organize Jewish workers for socialist and revolutionary ends. The Bund soon grew to become the largest Jewish socialist party in Europe, numbering some thirty thousand members in 1903—composed of Jewish artisans, workers, and intelligentsia in more than 250 local branches—despite its illegality and persecution by the tsarist regime. Broadly allied with the Menshevik Party, The Bund’s relationship to Jewish collectivity and culture was complicated; throughout its existence, it was pulled between the view that the sole reason for a separate Jewish socialist party to exist was the practical need to organize a growing Jewish working class linguistically and socially distinct from other workers in the empire, and the countervailing view of some of its leaders that this same linguistic and social distinctiveness entitled Jewish workers to cultivate their own separate modern, secular workers’ culture in Yiddish, which The Bund should work to support. Within the space between these two commitments, The Bund focused most of its efforts on organizing Jewish workers to fight for better conditions in the near term and social revolution in the long term. To these ends, The Bund produced a rich party press in Russian, Yiddish, and eventually Polish. Particularly during Russia’s 1905 Revolution and again in independent Poland in the late 1930s, The Bund also grew active in the fight against antisemitism, laying special emphasis on fostering ties between Jewish and Christian workers and organizing Jewish self-defense. Adhering to Russian social democracy’s sharp opposition to political nationalism, The Bund sharply rejected Zionism and generally refused to work openly with Jewish organizations predicated on any idea of cross-class Jewish national interests. Reemerging as a significant force in Jewish life in 1917 after a decade of suppression, The Bund split sharply over its relationship to the Bolshevik seizure of power and Soviet project. Some party members ultimately aligned with the new regime, which in turn dissolved The Bund along with all other independent parties. But The Bund reemerged as the leading Jewish socialist and diasporist party in newly independent Poland, gaining mass support and even a modicum of predominance in Jewish life in the late 1930s especially. Throughout its existence, but especially in interwar Poland, The Bund directed special recruitment efforts not only at Jewish workers but also at Jewish women and Jewish young people, through its youth movement Tsukunft. It also played a significant role in the development of a free-standing secular Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe. The degree to which The Bund was pivotal to the incubation and growth of secular Yiddish culture has often been greatly exaggerated; The Bund’s support for Yiddish cultural creativity was often quite limited, ideologically mixed and always conditioned on subordination of Yiddish cultural institutions to the party’s ideals. Concomitantly, few significant Yiddish writers and cultural producers were Bundists, the leading Yiddish cultural and literary journals were generally not created or run by Bundists, and many saw the party’s rather narrow vision of what belonged in cultural life as constraining. But The Bund did help to foster a readership for Yiddish secular works, provided essential financial support for Yiddish cultural institutions at various junctures, and played an especially important role in building Poland’s largest Yiddish secular school system, TsYShO.