Abstract
This essay proposes what may seem to some an outlandish idea, namely that the emergence of modern Jewish internationalism had little to do with conceptions of nationhood or even Judaism. It was not a religious movement in the conventional sense, nor was it a relatively abstract, imagined community of the type described by Benedict Anderson.1 Rather, the spread of transnational ties across class, ethnic and denominational lines was a product of the practice of philanthropy and advocacy begun in the mid-nineteenth century. This internationalism can be defined as a sort of peoplehood (umah in Hebrew), reflected and forged by increasing circles of activism for one’s coreligionists, strikingly similar to the Islamic umma examined by Francis Robinson and Amira Bennison elsewhere in this volume. To borrow a term from Robinson, Jewish internationalism is a community of opinion; to refine it further, it is a community of action informed by a vague communal and traditional religious consciousness.
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Notes
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
For seminal works, see John A. Armstrong, ‘Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas’, American Political Science Review, 70.2 (1976), 393–408; and
Gabriel Sheffer, ed., Modern Diasporas in International Politics (New York: St Martins, 1986).
For an enduring analysis, see Ephraim Frisch, An Historical Survey of Jewish Philanthropy from the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1924). See also
Alfred J. Kutzik, ‘The Social Basis of American Jewish Philanthropy.’, PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1967; and
Henry Allen Moe, ‘Notes on the Origin of Philanthropy in Christendom’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105.2 (April 1961), 141–4.
Among recent relevant works: Bas Arts et al., eds, Non-State Actors and International Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and
Volker Berghahn, ‘Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the “American Century”’, Diplomatic History, 23.3 (1999), 393–419.
For example, see André Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine, 1860–1960 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965);
Theodore Norman, An Outstretched Arm: A History of the Jewish Colonization Association (London: Routledge, 1985);
Merle Curti, ‘Tradition and Innovation in American Philanthropy’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105.2 (April 1961), 146–56.
A recent example is Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff, ed., Diasporas and Development: Exploring the Potential (Boulder: Rienner, 2008).
David Eliezer Jaffe, ‘Sociological and Religious Origins of the Non-Profit Sector in Israel’, International Sociology, 8.2 (June 1992), 169.
For overviews, see Daniel J. Elazar, ‘The Jewish People as the Classic Diaspora: A Political Analysis’, in Sheffer, ed., Modern Diasporas, pp. 212–57; William Safran, ‘The Jewish Diaspora in a Comparative and Theoretical Perspective’, Israel Studies, 10.1 (2005), 36–60; and Jaffe, ‘Sociological and Religious Origins’, pp. 159, 169–71.
Many scholars concur on the formative nature of these revolutions. For example, see Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 63.
For example, see Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews and International Minority Protection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 149.
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, ‘Business and Philanthropy: Engaging and Disengaging in Russia (1880–1906)’, paper presented at conference in Roubaix, France, November 2006. For general histories, see Niall Ferguson’s two-volume The House of Rothschild (New York: Penguin, 1998, 1999);
Simon Schama, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (London: Collins, 1978); and
Mattiyahu Mintz, ‘Nesigat harotshildim memilveh April 1891 lerusyah min hahebet hayehudi’, Zion, 54 (1989), 401–35.
In the early modern Sephardic world, see Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World Maritime Empires 1540–1740 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
Israel Bartal, ‘Politikah yehudit terom-modernit: ‘va’adei ha’aratsot’ bemizraḥ eiropah’, in Stuart Eisenshtadt and Moshe Lissak, eds, Hatsiyonut vehaḥazarah lehistoriyah (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1999), pp. 186–94.
This network fits the ‘weak’ theoretical model proposed in Mark S. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, The American Journal of Sociology, 78.6 (May 1973), 1360–80.
Unhappy with French dominance in the Alliance, British Jews founded the Anglo-Jewish Association in 1870, Austrians founded the Israelitische Allianze in 1873 and Germans founded the Hilfsverein der Deutscher Juden in 1901. See Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p.167.
For new reassessments, see Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan Meir, Israel Bartal, eds, Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
Priscilla Roberts, ‘Jewish Bankers, Russia, and the Soviet Union, 1900–1940: The Case of Kuhn, Loeb and Company’, American Jewish Archives Journal, 49.1–2 (1997), 9–37;
Naomi W. Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1999);
Evyatar Friesel, ‘Jacob H. Schiff and the Leadership of the American Jewish Community’, Jewish Social Studies, 8.2–3 (2002), 61–72.
Daniel Gutwein, The Divided Elite: Economics, Politics and Anglo-Jewry, 1882–1917 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), p. 335.
Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper: A History of the AJJDC, 1929–1939 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974);
Mikhail Mitsel, ‘Uchastie Amerikanskogo evreiskogo raspredelitel’nogo komiteta v bor’be s golodom na Ukraine v 1922–1923 gg.’, Evreis’ka istoriia ta kul’turakintsia XIX — pochatku XX st. Zbirnik nauckovikh prats’. Materiali 10 mizhnarod-noi konferentsii (Kyiv: Institut Iudaiki, 2003), pp. 75–84;
Michael Beizer, ‘Samuil Lubarsky: Portrait of an Outstanding Agronomist’, East European Jewish Affairs, 34.1 (2004), 91–103;
Leon Shapiro, The History of ORT: A Jewish Movement for Social Change (New York: Schocken, 1980).
For descriptions of early efforts, see Ya’akov Kelner, Reshito shel tikhnun ḥevrati kelal-yehudi: hahitarvut hamemusedet bimetsukat yehudei rusyah bereshit shenot hame’ah ha-19 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 6–40; and,
Eli Bar-Chen, ‘Two Communities with a Sense of Mission: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden,’ in Michael Brenner et al., eds, Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), pp. 111–21. On Romania, see Leff, Sacred Bonds, pp. 158–9, 184–91.
For case studies, see Selwyn Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus, eds, Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period (London: Frank Cass, 1992).
Some of these are described in Mary McCune, The Whole Wide World without Limits: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893–1930 (Detroit: Wayne State, 2005).
Stuart Altshuler, From Exodus to Freedom: A History of the Soviet Jewry Movement (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 50.
This movement is described in Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin, eds, A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1999); and
Henry Feingold, Silent No More: Saving the Jews of Russia, the American Jewish Effort, 1967–1989 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006). The first Brussels World Conference convened in 1971, attended by 760 delegates from 38 countries, covered by 250 news-people. The second Conference convened in 1976 with nearly double these numbers.
William W. Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), p. 34.
For example, see Nahum Karlinsky, ‘Jewish Philanthropy and Jewish Credit Cooperatives in Eastern Europe and Palestine up to 1939: A Transnational Phenomenon?’, Journal of Israeli History, 27.2 (2008), 149–70.
Soviet sensitivity can be seen during the interwar period. For example, see Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv pri Sovete Ministrov Avtonomnoi Respubliki Krym (State Archive of the Council of Ministers of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine; GAARK), fol. r-515; ‘Komzet’, opis 1, dela 416, ll. 113–17 (Mandel’shtam to Emes, c.May 1934); GAARK, fol. p-1, ‘Obkom’, opis 1, dela 990, l. 146 (report of Crimean OGPU on the activity of Agro-Joint, 27 December 1930). It can also be seen in the 1970s. See Boris Morozov, Documents on Soviet Jewish Immigration (London: Cass, 1999).
This pattern emerged in late imperial Russia. See Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 11–13, 225–7, 376–9.
For example, see Jonathan Dekel-Chen, ‘An Unlikely Triangle: Philanthropists, Commissars, and American Statesmanship Meet in Soviet Crimea, 1922–37’, Diplomatic History, 27.3 (2003), 353–76.
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–41 (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2005), chapter 3.
For example, see Selwyn Ilan Troen, ed., Jewish Centers and Peripheries: Europe between America and Israel Fifty Years after World War II (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999), pp. 6–12.
Fred Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel versus the American Jewish Establishment (Lanham: Lexington, 2005);
Pauline Peretz, ‘The Action of Nativ’s Emissaries in the United States: a Trigger for the American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews, 1958–1974’, Bulletin du Centre Recherche Français de Jérusalem, 14 (2004), 112–28; Altshuler, Exodus to Freedom, p. 52; Feingold, Silent No More, pp. 298, 314.
See Nathaniel Rothschild’s 1890 correspondence with Finance Minister Ivan Vyshnegradskii, RAL, dept. 11, series 111, box 108 (Vyshnegradskii to Nathaniel Rothschild, 29 November 1890). See also Eliyahu Feldman, ‘The Rothschilds and the Russian Loans: High Finance and Jewish Solidarity’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 10 (1994), 231–56 (237–41, 244).
Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001);
Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003);
Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia: From the Secret Archives of the Former Soviet Union (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995).
Dina Porat, ‘The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”: New Uses of an Old Myth’, in Robert Wistrich, ed., Demonizing the Other (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1999), pp. 323–35;
Jonathan Frankel, ‘The Soviet Regime and Anti-Zionism: An Analysis’, in Yaacov Ro’iet al., eds, Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1991), pp. 310–54 ;
Esther Webman, ‘Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Criticism of Israel: The Arab Perspective’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte, 33 (2005), 306–29;
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, ‘Crimea 2008: A Lesson about Uses and Misuses of History’, East European Jewish Affairs, 39.1 (April 2009), 101–5.
For example, see Angel M. Eikenberry, ‘Philanthropy and Governance’, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 28.4 (2006), 588.
I rely here on the findings of John F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Vincent Viaene’s chapter in this volume.
Residual hostility endures. See Jacob Birnbaum, ‘U.S. Jewish Student Activism for Soviet Jewry in the 1960s’, unpublished MS, New York, Center for Russian Jewry with SSSJ, December 2007.
Daphne Gerlis, Those Wonderful Women in Black: The Story of the Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry (London: Minerva, 1996).
Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, p. 260. Similar tensions brewed in North America between ‘veteran’ German-speaking Jews and newcomers from Eastern Europe. See, for example, Daniel Soyer, ‘Brownstones and Brownsville: Elite Philanthropists and Immigrant Constituents at the Hebrew Educational Society of Brooklyn, 1899–1929’, American Jewish History, 88.2 (2000), 182, 190, 207.
Luisa Levi d’Ancona, ‘Philanthropy and Politics: Strategies of Jewish Bourgeois in Italy, France and England between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries’, Traverse, 1 (2006), 85–86, 89; Kutzik, ‘The Social Basis’, 984–9;
Thomas Adam, ed., Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 9.
Space does not allow for a full accounting. Many are mentioned in Eliyahu Benjamini, Medinot layehudim: uganda, birobidzhan ve’od 34 tokhniyot (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame’uhad, 1990).
One of these cases — Agudat Yisrael — is studied in Jeremy Stolow, ‘Transnationalism and the New Religio-Politics’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21.2 (2004), 109–37. I would counter that Agudat Yisrael does not qualify as internationalism because: (a) it has little appeal in the Jewish world beyond its own relatively small, Orthodox constituency; (b) the limited civil authority it enjoys in Israeli politics does not equate to acceptance of its agenda among the majority of Israelis; and (c) the Orthodox community remains fractious due to ethnic differences and disagreements among rabbinical ‘courts’.
Fink, Defending the Rights, pp. 283–5, 317–20; David Vital, ‘Diplomacy in the Jewish Interest’, in Ada Rapaport-Albert and Steven Zipperstein, eds, Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky (London: Halban, 1988), pp. 683–95.
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Dekel-Chen, J. (2012). Activism as Engine: Jewish Internationalism, 1880s–1980s. In: Green, A., Viaene, V. (eds) Religious Internationals in the Modern World. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031716_12
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