Tasks of Yiddish Philology

Born to a maskilic family in Zolotonosha, near Poltava, a southern frontier region of the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine), Ber Borochov (Borokhov) attended gymnasium and studied at the university in Ekaterinoslav, where he grew active in socialist and then Zionist-socialist politics. His greatest significance inheres in his efforts to replace the purely voluntarist, ethical, and utopian ideals of socialist Zionism with a properly “objective marxist” argument that unavoidable economic and political conditions in backwards and multiethnic Eastern Europe would inevitably provoke antisemitic exclusion or structural marginalization in the labor market and thus produce a vast unemployed Jewish Lumpenproletariat. Ironically, these objectivist arguments served as especially compelling subjective arguments for Russian Zionist youth of the 1905 generation, who were immersed in Marxist ideas and felt cornered by various non- or anti-Zionist socialist arguments in Jewish youth circles. With the older socialist Zionist Nachman (Naḥum) Syrkin, Borochov founded the Po’ale Tsiyon—the Jewish Socialist Democratic Workers Party; his 1906 “Nasha platforma” (1906) became the party’s manifesto, influencing among others the young David Ben-Gurion. Living in Vienna between 1907 and 1914, Borochov developed an ever greater interest in the Yiddish language, which he came to see as the chief language of the emerging transnational Jewish proletariat and as a national value in itself; his “Tasks of Yiddish Philology” was as influential in Yiddishist-diasporist circles as his Zionist writings had been in Russian and Yishuv Labor Zionist circles. Remaining an active organizer-leader of Po’ale Tsiyon, Borochov returned to Russia from New York during the first heady days of the Russian Revolution and died while on a speaking tour. His body was interred in Israel in 1963.