Czernowitz Conference Speech: On National Education

Signs of a new spirit among certain circles of the Jewish intelligentsia can be detected even in the private sphere, within the four walls of their homes. It happens—admittedly, not very often, but this is a new phenomenon, nonetheless—that a Jewish mother from an intellectual family will pose the question of how she could raise her children in the national spirit. They complain that there are no appropriate Jewish-national books in Russian for children. They take their children to Maccabee-evenings and Purim celebrations. They hire Hebrew teachers. They no longer banish Yiddish songs from the home mercilessly. They establish Jewish [Yiddish] kindergartens—true, Jewish only in name. There are even instances when intellectual and radical Jewish parents won’t let their children go to kindergarten on Shabbos . . .

Efforts are being made to revive old customs and celebrate holidays and Shabbos not from a religious but a national point of view, in order to fill the children’s hearts with a national feeling.

It is also widely discussed that children must be taught Jewish history so that the great past of our people can inspire them with love and enthusiasm for our people.

They are trying to find a way to ensure that the young generation won’t be cut off from the [Jewish] people, to provide a national education. [ . . . ]

The Jewish intelligentsia wants to educate their children in Russian while also instilling in them a Jewish national feeling. Naturally, all the Maccabee-evenings—the Russian translations of Yiddish writers, [Gershon] Sirotas’s nigunim from the gramophone,¹ and [Moisei] Maimon’s [1893 painting] The Marranos of Spain on the wall—appear under the general banner of Russian education, which like foreign, strange stains, causes a split in the soul . . .

And, considering the circumstances, they are not only useless but also harmful. Disconnected from the dynamic life of the people and their real needs, far away and detached from its reality, the children take away from the history and Hebrew lessons, from all the hazy and faint talk of some abstract national spirit, an abstract feeling of only vague national aspirations and longings, unhealthy daydreaming, and a susceptibility to every reactionary utopia as long as it is nicely decorated with empty national slogans. And all this nicely matches the cold indifference to the real life of the people, with contempt for its living language, culture, and literature.

National education can be carried out only in a national family connected to the people and its culture, and speaking its language.

The nationalization of Jewish intellectual families and of the Jewish intelligentsia in general can only result from objective historical conditions and long social development. Only that historical process that already forced some part of the Jewish intelligentsia to recall the Yiddish language; that compelled Jewish doctors, lawyers, and dentists to speak with their clients in Yiddish; that placed Jewish writers on the “Yiddish lectern,” drove Jewish politicians onto the Yiddish political scene, and created on the Jewish street a space—for now only a small one—where Yiddish intellectual powers can be applied at least to some extent—only that process which is slow and complicated and is only just beginning now, will ultimately break down the language and cultural barrier that separates the Jewish intelligentsia from the Jewish people. [ . . . ]

Where does the question of national education for the Jewish proletarian family stand?

The Jewish working-class family does not need to search for special tools to connect its children to the people. In its case the issue is not the national character of education but [how to provide] education at all. [Once there is education,] it will be national as a matter of course.

When Jewish working-class families will provide an education for their children, this education will have a national character without this being set as a goal, because the Jewish working class itself is deeply national. The same was the case with the entire workers’ movement, from the very first step until the last one: since the working class itself is deeply national, its movement created national treasures and a national culture without setting that as an end in itself.

It is true that the process of assimilation penetrated some groups within the working class, too. [ . . . ]

The Jewish working-class family is folksy [folkstimlekh], subconsciously national. It is not the national character that is missing from the education of the Jewish proletarian child so much as education itself. [ . . . ]

The deeper that class consciousness burrows into the soul of the proletarian, the stronger his enthusiasm for the great ideal, the more ferocious his hatred for the old world of servitude—the more natural his desire to pass on to his children his love and his hatred, his faith and his courage, his fervor, and his willingness for sacrifice.

And since schools, society, and the immediate environment are often dark and ignorant, they influence children only in the opposite direction, striving to instill in the child only the old concepts of truth—beauty and goodness—the efforts of a conscious proletariat to give its children an education in the spirit of the proletarian ideal must be all the more forceful. Interest in the issue of education among progressive circles of the working class in Western Europe, the participation of the masses in progressive school associations, the lively discussion of the question of education at the Party Congress in Mannheim and at the Women’s Conference in Nuremberg—all this proves that at least the avant-garde of the proletariat is beginning to understand that children’s education has enormous value for their cause. [ . . . ]

The old, religious Jewish holidays are declining. But the proletariat has other holidays—international ones. In Western Europe people make sure that their children participate in them, too. They take their children to participate in May Day Parades, they create entertainment programs for them on those days. These holidays are celebrated at home, too. People clean their homes; children are dressed in holiday clothes. They make sure that the children look forward to and enjoy these holidays just as they did the old religious holidays. In addition to the First of May there are other international holidays celebrated by the entire proletariat all over the world, and others that are country specific. I will not list them here—the reader will be able to recall them.

There are memorial days when children can be taken to the cemetery, when we can tell them stories of people who are no longer alive, stories of those who fought and fell. Almost every one of our cities has such memorial days.

Naturally, children need to learn Jewish history in order to understand their current situation; there are some purely national Jewish holidays that can be filled with truly proletarian content, for instance Hanukkah. But when will this have educational and national meaning? Only if it does not contradict daily life, only if it is not done in order to patch up the family’s otherwise non-Jewish way of life. Neither festivals and holidays nor history and legends will connect children to their people, but daily life, the small details of everyday life; not the past, but the present; the legend that is created today, the living joys and sufferings of today, the current hopes for tomorrow. If there is a connection here, then history, legends, and holidays will only make it tighter. If there is no connection, then nothing will help—not history, not legends, and not Maccabee-evenings.