Ya‘akov Ze’ev Latski-Bertholdi

Born in Kiev (Kyiv) during a pogrom and raised in Riga, Ya‘akov Ze’ev Latski was expelled from the Riga Polytechnic Institute for radical political activity in 1901. A year later in Berlin he joined Naḥman Syrkin’s Ḥerut party, an organization devoted to fusing Zionist and socialist ideas. By 1903, Latski (who sometimes used the pen name Bertholdi) had moved toward the view that Jewish nationalism should emphasize Jewish national revival “on the ground” in the Russian Empire. This meant shifting emphasis from Palestine-centric work to a focus on cultivating a modern Yiddish national culture in Eastern Europe in place of both traditional religion and assimilation, pursuing the creation of autonomous Jewish political institutions that would (he imagined) allow Jews in Russia to determine their own collective political fate, and working toward democratic and socialist revolution in Russia. Working out these views with other young Jewish nationalist intellectuals under the rubric of “Vozrozhdenie” (Russian for revival or renascence) in 1903 and 1904, Latski became a founding figure of the Zionist-Socialist Workers’ Party (generally called the S.S. Party) during the Russian Revolution of 1905. Despite its name, the party was not Zionist but territorialist, and even that idea took a back seat to a focus on pursuit of Jewish autonomy and national awakening in the diaspora and revolutionary socialist activism. In 1917, he helped revive Simon Dubnow’s nonsocialist diaspora-nationalist Folkspartey and emerged as a leading figure in Jewish national politics in briefly independent Ukraine, even becoming minister of Jewish Affairs in 1918. He also cofounded the most important nonsocialist Yiddishist publishing house of the era, the Folks-Farlag. In the interwar years, Latski continued its work in the Berlin-based Klal Farlag and worked as the leading figure of the very small Yiddish cultural scene of newly independent Latvia. He drew close to Zionism once again around 1930, and he ultimately immigrated in 1935 to Palestine, where he joined Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party.