The Tragedy of a Generation: Interview with Joshua Karlip

The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2013) traces the origins of two influential but overlooked strains of Jewish thought, Diaspora Nationalism and Yiddishism. Its leading exemplars dreamed of an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe, but were forced to reassess this ideal when confronted with the realities of life and politics in post-World War I Eastern Europe, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and later, the Holocaust. The book's author, Joshua Karlip, examines Diaspora Nationalism and Yiddishism by tracing the lives and thought of three of the movements' leaders, Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Kalmanovitch.

Joshua M. Karlip is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. In July 2014, he will be teach an afternoon seminar, The Emergence of Modern Yiddish Culture, in YIVO's Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture.

He was interviewed by Yedies Editor, Roberta Newman.

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RN: I thought I would begin by asking you to define “Diaspora Nationalism.”

JK: I would define Diaspora Nationalism as that strain of Jewish nationalism that saw the Jews as a modern nation with the defining characteristics of a modern nation, but disagreed with the Zionists that the national renaissance would take place in Palestine and that the Jews needed a territory. Instead, Diaspora Nationalists felt that this cultural and political renaissance could take place in Eastern Europe. Whereas Zionism decried Jewish statelessness, Diaspora Nationalists celebrated it, hoping for the Jews to take their place within a confederation of nationalities in achieving national autonomy.

RN: Why do you think Diaspora Nationalism has been overlooked in scholarship and popular memory? Outside of academia, most Jews probably haven’t ever heard of it.

JK: I think it's been overlooked, first of all, because the form of Jewish nationalism that won in ultimately achieving its goal was Zionism, in terms of the creation of the state of Israel. But the fact that Jewish nationalism achieved statehood through the creation of the state of Israel should not blind us to the fact that there were many other forms of Jewish nationalism around up until  World War II. Secondly, even within Zionism itself there were significant calls for Jewish national autonomy in the Diaspora. Often, Zionists—both in the Tsarist Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then in the successor nation states in the interwar era—were the most vocal proponents of Jewish national autonomy and Jewish minority rights in the Diaspora.

RN: How and why are Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism ideologically and historically intertwined? They go hand in glove, don't they?

JK: There's a new strain in historiography which looks at the  elements of Diaspora Nationalism within Zionism. In my book, I discuss those strains in the introduction but then move on to focus on those who consciously referred to themselves as Diaspora Nationalists and not Zionists. And for those who consciously referred to themselves as Diaspora Nationalists, who affirmed Jewish political and cultural life in Eastern Europe, it made sense that when they turned toward creating a modern culture for a secularizing East European Jewish nation, they would turn to that nation's common language, which was Yiddish. However, it's important to state that the founder of Jewish Diaspora Nationalism in Russia, Simon Dubnow, was not a Yiddishist. Dubnow was a Russian-language writer and believed in the creation of Jewish national culture in all three languages of East European Jewry: Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. My book discusses how many of his disciples, such as Elias Tcherikower [Elye Tsherikover], made the transition from Russian language to Yiddish and ended up embracing Yiddishism. They wed it to Diaspora Nationalism, much more than the first generation had. However, Chaim Zhitlovsky [Zhitlowsky], who was also an architect of Diaspora Nationalism, was an avid Yiddishist from the beginning; so it had those two strains.

RN: How formidable a rival was Diaspora Nationalism to Zionism in Eastern Europe?

JK: Diaspora Nationalism was indeed a formidable rival. Dubnow's Letters on Old and New Judaism, the basic work where he lays out his whole plan of implementing Diaspora Nationalism, was influential in the way that it influenced parties both to his right and to his left. The Russian Zionists were very influenced by Diaspora Nationalism, so much so that in 1906 at the Helsingfors Conference of Russian Zionists, in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, they committed themselves to what is known in German as Gegenwartsarbeit (work in the present), meaning work in the Diaspora. The idea was: Even though our ultimate goal is the creation of a state in Palestine, we're going to work for Jewish national rights in the here and now. This was definitely a direct influence of Diaspora Nationalism and nobody less than Vladimir Jabotinsky, in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, called for the creation of a Jewish national assembly in Russia.

During the Russian Revolution, especially in the aftermath of the February Revolution, until the Bolshevik consolidation of power, the Zionists were the ones who were most active in trying to implement Jewish national autonomy in a liberated Russia. They largely were the ones who created an All-Russian Jewish Congress, they ran tickets for elections to democratically elected kehiles and also ran candidates for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. The Folkspartey (which was a small party of Dubnow's followers) was never more than a small minority, but its ideas were adopted by the Zionists, who were granted a mandate by the Jewish electorate in those elections.

When Diaspora Nationalism really lost out was after World War I. First of all, a major blow, if not the major blow, was the dissolution of the imperial boundaries and the creation of successor nation-states. Diaspora Nationalism really needs a multinational, multiethnic environment to be implemented. In a nation-state in which the Jews are a small minority in a sea of a national majority there's no will on the part of the national majority to grant the Jews that type of autonomy. So in Lithuania, for instance, in the early 1920s, when it looked like the Lithuanians needed Jewish support for the incorporation of Vilna, they promised the Jews broad-sweeping autonomy and granted it to them: a Jewish national parliament, a Jewish minister of affairs, kehiles, funding for schools. But, by the mid-1920s, they pulled back on all except for the funding for schools. This repeal of Jewish national autonomy occurred when it was demonstrated that, number one, the Jews didn't have the diplomatic power that they thought they had, and number two, and most importantly, that Lithuania wasn't a large multiethnic state that included a lot of Belorussians and other ethnic minorities in addition to Jews. It was a small nation-state with Lithuanians and a small Jewish minority and there was thus no incentive to grant them this type of autonomy. And interwar Poland, which signed the Minorities Treaty at the Paris Peace  Conference against its will, never wanted to implemented the treaty and, in 1934 actually renounced its obligations to uphold it. Then, of course, with the rise of xenophobic nationalism in the 1930s and the consolidation of Nazism and the spread of fascist and semi-fascist ideas and forms of government, Diaspora Nationalism really hit its nadir. Many of its primary spokesmen turned increasingly to Territorialism and to Zionism.

RN: Territorialism being also a kind of Diaspora Nationalism, but focused on getting Jews out of Europe and settling them in an autonomous territory?

JK: Right. The Territorialist group that was most influential at the time was the Frayland-lige, which was established by Yitskhok Nakhmen Steinberg. It was particularly influential in Vilna. By the mid-1930s, Zelig Kalmanovitch, who had been a very active Diaspora Nationalist and Yiddishist, was an avid Territorialist. But regarding the people who joined the Territorialist movement—the question is: why didn't they become Zionists? At least in Kalmanovitch 's case, why didn't he become a Zionist right away? It was really because they were wedded to Yiddish and Yiddish culture. Whereas Hebrew culture and the  renaissance of Hebrew was touted by the Zionists, the Territorialists—at least members of the Frayland-lige—still believed in the thriving of Yiddish culture. And by the way, a major component in this was the linguistic acculturation that was going on during the interwar period, especially in Poland, notwithstanding the antisemitism, notwithstanding the extrusion of Jews from the economy, their extrusion from the body politic. Polish Jewry was rapidly linguistically acculturating, and people like Kalmanovitch hoped that a Jewish territory where Yiddish didn't have to compete with other territorial languages would be the answer.

RN: What led you to focus your book on three individual proponents of Diaspora Nationalism? How did you settle on these particular three individuals?

JK: The idea for this book in its embryonic form first came to me fifteen years ago when I wrote a seminar paper for Samuel Kassow for a class he was giving at the time at JTS [Jewish Theological Seminary] on East European Jewry during the Holocaust. I wrote a paper on Kalmanovitch and I was intrigued by the ideological transformations from Yiddishist to Zionist and from secularism to religion voiced in his Vilna ghetto diary. I found it so interesting that I wanted to discover more. I took my next step in a seminar led by David Fishman by researching the journal, Oyfn Sheydveg, in which Kalmanovitch participated with Tcherikower and Efroikin. And I found that this wasn't a lone ideological turn on the part of Kalmanovitch. It was representative of a larger group of Diaspora Nationalist, Yiddishist intellectuals undergoing an ideological crisis and searching for a new ideology in an age of counter-emancipation in the late 1930s. And that led me to follow these three from the 1905 Revolution through the Holocaust.

RN: And Kalmanovitch’s ideological transformation was characterized by a return to traditional Judaism?

JK: For Kalmanovitch, it was complicated because, as I wrote about in the book, during the late tsarist period and early in the interwar period, he had seen traditional Judaism as an impediment to the creation of a modern secular Yiddish culture, believing that the tradition weighed down its adherents from doing anything culturally daring, from engaging in renaissance. But by the end of the 1930s, the extreme hostility that he saw around him in the non-Jewish world (the European world with which he had very much sought a synthesis), the alienation of the younger generation from the sources of Jewish tradition, and the anti-traditionalism and anti-Hebraic stance of Soviet Yiddish culture led him to a nostalgic yearning for the world of tradition. And it led him to the conclusion that modernity had crushed the sense of Jewish collectivity that had existed in pre-modern Jewish times.

RN: And the other two men you write about in your book?

JK: The other two went through similar processes with different nuances. In 1939, Tcherikower wrote in his essay, “The Tragedy of a Weak Generation,” (whence I have drawn the title of my book)  that national culture had not proven an adequate substitute for Jewish religious identity, both in terms of preventing assimilation and in terms of leading Jews to react to persecution with cultural creativity—and with martyrdom, if need be. Of the three, Kalmanovitch embraced religious tradition in the Vilna Ghetto, Tcherikower had sort of a selective, or at least an intellectual reembrace but didn't return to religious observance, and Efroikin, after the war, wrote a book A kheshbn hanefesh (A soul searching), in which he declared the secular revolution a mistake and called on his readers to return to religious tradition and practice.

RN: All three of these individuals, were very involved with YIVO. In fact, the whole history of YIVO is interwoven with that of Diaspora Nationalism.

JK: YIVO was in many ways the crowning achievement of Yiddishism. This was the institute that celebrated the Yiddish language and that set as its goal the academic study of the Yiddish language, Yiddish culture, and Yiddish-speaking Jewry. It also, of course, represented cultural Diaspora Nationalism par excellence, in the sense that it celebrated the Yiddish-speaking nation, which, by 1925, when YIVO was established, was spread across the various borders of the East European nation-states of Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union (though YIVO couldn't do research in the USSR or interact with Soviet Jewry). YIVO embodied the Diaspora Nationalism ideal of studying the common people, studying their language, creating a bridge between the intelligentsia and the folk—there were zamlers (collectors) who did the actual spadework of collecting folklore and other materials from Jews all over the world, especially in Poland, while the scholars at YIVO did the research and analysis. But it’s important to keep in mind that YIVO paled in comparison to the original dreams of Kalmanovitch, Tcherikower, and Efroikin, who all had helped in the founding of this institution. What they had envisioned was a national institute and a Yiddish cultural renaissance with state support. The fact is that YIVO came to fruition only after the political dreams of Diaspora Nationalists had died after it was clear that Poland wasn't going to honor the Minorities Treaty, after Lithuania rolled back its broad-sweeping offer of Jewish national autonomy. YIVO basically came in and said, "We're doing this without state support; we're doing this by raising our own funds; we're galvanizing the people; we're galvanizing the nation." And they sought to salvage their dream that way and achieved great things but they always were cognizant of the fact of just how poor they were and just what that lack of state support meant.

Interview edited for length and clarity.