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Immigrants Against the State

Yiddish and Italian Amar Chism in America

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

"Yiddish Is My Homeland": Jewish Anarchists in New York City

Between 1880 and 1924, approximately two million Eastern European Jews migrated to the United States. More than half made their homes in New York City, where Yiddish-speaking anarchist and socialist movements emerged from the sweatshops and tenement houses of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Anarchists constituted a "vital minority" within the American Jewish labor movement from its origins in the 1880s until well into the 1920s, and Yiddish anarchism grew to become the largest section of America's anarchist movement by the eve of the First World War. Along the way, anarchists forged a vibrant revolutionary subculture deeply embedded in the larger "cultures of opposition" developed by immigrant Jewish workers and intellectuals.

These radicals carried on a lively debate over the meaning of Jewishness. Many pioneers of the movement began as either quasi-nationalist "Jewish populists" or assimilated "Russified intellectuals who promoted complete Jewish absorption into cultural majorities. After an early lurch toward the assimilationist position, anarchists redefined Jewish identity as being rooted in the Yiddish language and its cultural productions, encapsulated in the term yidishkayt — a Yiddish word literally meaning both "Yiddishness" and "Jewishness." More than an adjective, yidishkayt expressed an entire worldview; in making the essential features of peoplehood language and modern secular culture rather than religion, tradition, and homeland, yidishkayt was inherently cosmopolitan. In Irving Howe's words, yidishkayt "set itself the goal of yoking the provincial to the universal"; equally important, as Karen Brodkin notes, it "did not rest upon invidious comparison for its existential meaning." The anarchist variant of yidishkayt rejected both Judaism and Zionism and instead represented an early formulation of Jewish diasporism.

However, Yiddish anarchism's embeddedness in the language and culture of the Jewish working class also enmeshed it in a web of tensions between ethnoracial priorities and universal aspirations. Yiddish became the foundation on which Jewish anarchism was built, but it simultaneously walled off this movement from the world outside the Jewish ghetto. Anarchists who opposed nationalism paradoxically helped foster an insular Jewish culture, illustrating the difficultie inherent in navigating a "rooted cosmopolitanism" that simultaneously exalted Jewish identity and professed a radical cultural pluralism.

In 1897, more than 5.2 million Jews lived in the Russian Empire, the great majority of them restricted to the western region designated the Pale of Settlement. They were the unwanted spoils of the partitioning of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century, and the Russian monarchy alternately attempted to "selectively integrate" and marginalize them. Discriminatory legislation limited Jews' access to education and professional occupations and barred most from residency outside of the Pale as well as from landownership. Czar Alexander II relaxed some of these restrictions in 1861, enabling thousands of young Jews to attend Russian gymnasia (advanced secondary schools) and universities. But Alexander's assassination by revolutionaries in 1881 was followed by a wave of pogroms and anti-Semitic legislation, including the expulsion of Jews from Moscow and other major cities and strict new limits on Jewish enrollment in institutions of higher learning.

The forced urbanization of Russian Jewry within the Pale meanwhile created an oversaturated labor market in which Jewish artisans and workshop employees faced increasing competition from non-Jewish workers following the 1861 abolition of serfdom. This economic dislocation, combined with growing anti-Semitism, sparked mass emigration beginning in 1881. By 1914, more than 1.5 million Russian Jews had made their way to the United States, while hundreds of thousands more went to England, Argentina, France, Palestine, Australia, and elsewhere. Most of these migrants had to "steal the border" — that is, illegally cross into Germany, usually with the aid of a paid smuggler, or " agent," to evade anachronistic Russian legislation banning permanent emigration.

Although more than three-quarters of the Jews who arrived in America came from Russia, large numbers also originated in Romania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Jews enjoyed greater legal freedoms but still faced formal and informal anti-Semitism. Romania placed restrictive quotas on Jewish education and employment beginning in 1886, and in 1899 a severe depression and series of pogroms sparked the "Romanian Exodus," proportionately the largest emigration of Jews from any country: nearly 30 percent of Romania's Jewish population emigrated between 1871 and 1914. More than 278,000 Jews also arrived from the Galician region of Austria-Hungary, where market integration, delayed industrialization, and economic discrimination impoverished much of the Jewish populace.

Because artisans and skilled workers were among the most adversely affecte by changing economic conditions, and because their skills were likely to be transferable, they accounted for more than 67 percent of those Jews who listed an occupation upon arrival in America between 1899 and 1910. Commercial and professional occupations, meanwhile, were severely underrepresented in the Jewish emigration. A majority of Jews, however, arrived with no experience in factory work, including most women, who comprised 43 percent of Jewish immigrants, as well as the nearly one in four arrivals under the age of fourteen.

A small minority of Jewish immigrants were young men (and a few women) who had attended Russia's gymnasia and universities under Alexander II. Though they had few professional prospects in Russia, most emigrated for political reasons. They were strongly influenced by the Haskalah — the "Jewish Enlightenment" — that spread from Germany to Eastern Europe in the Early nineteenth century, inspired by the same universalist and humanist impulses as the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. Haskalah thinkers hoped to "normalize" Jewish existence through the legal emancipation of Jews and their incorporation into European societies. For most, this process entailed secularization, linguistic and cultural assimilation, and abandonment of "parasitic" economic roles in favor of "productive" occupations like farming and manufacturing. The inteligentn, as the leftist Jewish intelligentsia was known, therefore rejected religion, spoke Russian instead of Yiddish, and viewed Jewish culture as anachronistic. Most were sympathetic to or active within the Russian populist, nihilist, or socialist movements, prompting some to flee to avoid arrest. Others, among them future anarchist Isidore Kopeloff did not wish "to sit and wait for a wedding match with a dowry and then to become middlemen, shopkeepers, or to walk about the streets without purpose — for us worldly, enlightened, socialist-minded youths this was impossible." The largest group of radical inteligentn arrived in the wake of the 1881 pogroms, having become convinced that assimilation within anti-Semitic Europe was impossible. Many joined Am Oylom (Eternal People), a movement combining vaguely socialist, nationalist, and populist principles with the aim of remaking Jewish society through emigration to the United States and the formation of collective agricultural communes. Five or six Am Oylom groups with a combined membership of more than a thousand arrived in 1882, but only two founded farms as planned; the rest fell apart, with most members never leaving the vicinity of New York City.

Regardless of class or education in the Old World, "greenhorn" newcomers were overwhelmingly employed as manual or semiskilled laborers. A number of factors concentrated Jewish immigrants in the needle trades: one in three claimed to have previous garment-making experience; the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) froze Eastern European Jews out of most skilled occupations; Jewish immigration coincided with a dramatic expansion of American ready-to-wear garment production; and an earlier generation of German and Austrian Jewish entrepreneurs dominated the industry and preferred to hire Jewish workers. These factors also gave rise to the sweatshop system, in which large clothing firms outsourced the sewing of precut material into finished garments to independent contractors, who were paid a predetermined price for the finished product. Contractors therefore underbid each other for jobs and could turn profits only by minimizing labor costs through the creation of a hyperexploitative workplace. Hundreds of these "outside shops" were dispersed throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, and conditions were uniformly poor and unsanitary. Fifteen- and sixteen-hour workdays were common, and during the busy season, work might continue through the entire night.

Men, women, and children alike labored in sweatshops. But despite a nearly even sex ratio, the workforce was strongly gendered. Unlike Europe, where Jewish women were often household breadwinners, Jewish wives in New York were pressured to conform to American notions of respectability by remaining in the home. In 1905, only 1 percent of married Jewish women held outside employment. Most female garment workers were unmarried young women, a majority of whom worked for wages by age sixteen. Sewing machine operation was generally considered "women's work," while men monopolized better-paying positions such as cutters. Still other jobs, such as buttonhole making and pressing, employed an equal ratio of men and women, but women universally received lower wages.

In addition to the sweatshop, Jewish immigrants rarely escaped the experience of tenement housing. The Lower East Side's tenements were notoriously cramped, overcrowded, dark, poorly ventilated, and unsanitary. The first time anarchist Marie Ganz's mother entered the family's tiny two-room apartment, she cried out in dismay, "So we have crossed half the world for this!" Poet David Edelstadt, who contracted tuberculosis as a result of his poor working and living conditions, proclaimed that tenement houses belonged to "the history of the terrible crimes of man against man."

Immigrants' initial contacts with American political and educational institutions did little to alleviate their disappointment. The corrupt Tammany Hall machine dominated city politics, showing newcomers "another America" that they had never imagined. In school, Jewish children were insulted by Gentile teachers and bullied by peers. Jews enjoyed most of the same legal protections as "Anglo-Saxons" but still faced pervasive taunts, discrimination, and occasional violent outbursts. Jewish workers quickly discovered, as Edelstadt put it, that "in the free republic / something is only free on paper, / and there the factories are full of slaves, and every boss — a vampire." Sweatshops and tenements were the crucibles in which male needle workers, factory girls, and declassed intellectuals came together to forge Jewish American radicalism.

Romanian Jewish memoirist Marcus Ravage recalled his surprise when he "suddenly realized that everybody I knew was either a socialist or an anarchist." This radicalism was, by and large, American-made. Although a disproportionate number of Jewish immigrants had participated in Eastern European radical circles, a majority of those active in the Jewish American Left prior to 1905 had not. Furthermore, although the two most influential theoreticians of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, were Russians, they spent most of their radical careers in exile, and no exclusively anarchist organizations existed within the Russian Empire until after the turn of the twentieth century. Likewise, Romania and Austrian Galicia were virtually untouched by anarchism. Russian Jewish engineer Leon Moisseiff recalled, "Anarchism as a popular movement was alien to us"; he read anarchists' writings only after coming to America in 1891, "and their principles were to me a new phenomenon." Similarly, though Joseph J. Cohen was active in the socialist movement in Minsk for more than a decade before emigrating in 1903, he never encountered the term anarchism before arriving in the United States. Hillel Solotaroff voyaged to America as a member of Am Oylom and then spent four years earning a medical degree before joining the anarchist ranks in 1886. At that time, a comrade noted, "he was already thoroughly 'Americanized.'" The path to a Yiddish anarchist movement, however, began with a Russian detour, German and British interventions, and an American gallows.

The radical Jews who immigrated in the 1880s and 1890s were enamored with the Russian revolutionary milieu. They were especially influenced by writers Peter Lavrov and Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who emphasized both a materialist conception of history in which socialist revolution was inevitable and a subjective view of the role of the individual — and the radical intellectual in particular — in hastening revolutionary change by "going to the people" and preparing them for their historic role. In New York, these migrants still perceived themselves in the Russian mold, and they initially formed Russian-language organizations, the most important of which the Russian Progressive Union, founded in 1886. The group's first undertaking was a fund-raising ball on behalf of Russian revolutionaries that collected $110, which was sent to Peter Lavrov himself. The Russian Progressive Union also functioned as a debating society and clearinghouse for political ideas such as Marxism and, increasingly, anarchism.

This interest in anarchism reflected the growing influence of Jews' German neighbors on the Lower East Side, which before the turn of the century was still known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany). German radicals predominated within both the Socialist Labor Party and the anarchist International Working People's Association, which had several New York branches. In 1886, a writer for the German anarchist paper Freiheit estimated that the city had some twenty-five hundred anarchists. Many Jews were already familiar with the German language, which was relatively easy for Yiddish speakers to learn since both languages are descended from Old High German. As a consequence of this geographic and linguistic proximity, German radicals " served as the midwives of the Jewish labor movement." And no German was more instrumental in this birth than Johann Most, the editor of Freiheit. One of the greatest public speakers of his day, Most could, according to Yiddish anarchist Chaim Weinberg, "so mesmerize his listeners that they would at any time go with him should he call them to man the barricades. He could bring the apathetic person to tears with his hypnotizing power." The memoirs of Weinberg's Jewish comrades uniformly note Most's electrifying impact, and Yiddish playwright Leon Kobrin described the German as "the god of almost all the Jewish anarchists in those days." Many Jewish radicals began reading Freiheit, while those not literate in the German script had friends read the paper aloud to them.

Developments in England also influenced the emerging Jewish anarchist movement. In London's East End, Jewish immigrants were likewise concentrated in dilapidated housing and sweatshop labor, and in 1884, revolutionary socialist poet Morris Winchevsky founded Der Poylisher Yidl (The Little Polish Jew), the world's first radical Yiddish newspaper. Winchevsky replaced it the following year with Der Arbayter Fraynd (The Worker's Friend), a publication "open to all radicals," including a growing number of Jews influenced by London's cosmopolitan anarchist movement. By 1887, anarchists comprised a majority within the Arbayter Fraynd Group and had formed their own organization, the Knights of Liberty (Riter fun Frayhayt). London became the "spiritual center" of Jewish anarchism, and most Yiddish anarchist material that circulated in America in the 1880s and 1890s was published there. Many Jewish migrants spent time in England before coming to the United States, and some, like labor poet David Goldstein, joined the anarchist movement while there; in 1889, several of these remigrants founded branches of the Knights of Liberty in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

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Excerpted from Immigrants Against the State by Kenyon Zimmer. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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