Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Glossary
- Introduction
- Part I The preparty stage
- Part II The party ideologies until 1907
- 3 The politics of Jewish liberation, 1905–1906
- 4 The Bund: between nation and class
- 5 Chaim Zhitlovsky: Russian populist and Jewish socialist, 1887–1907
- 6 Nachman Syrkin: On the populist and prophetic strands in socialist Zionism, 1882–1907
- 7 Ber Borochov and Marxist Zionism, 1903–1907
- Part III Ideology and émigré realities
- Note: The American Jewish Congress and Russian Jewry, 1915–1919
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Chaim Zhitlovsky: Russian populist and Jewish socialist, 1887–1907
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Glossary
- Introduction
- Part I The preparty stage
- Part II The party ideologies until 1907
- 3 The politics of Jewish liberation, 1905–1906
- 4 The Bund: between nation and class
- 5 Chaim Zhitlovsky: Russian populist and Jewish socialist, 1887–1907
- 6 Nachman Syrkin: On the populist and prophetic strands in socialist Zionism, 1882–1907
- 7 Ber Borochov and Marxist Zionism, 1903–1907
- Part III Ideology and émigré realities
- Note: The American Jewish Congress and Russian Jewry, 1915–1919
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When he died in 1943 while on a lecture tour in Canada, Chaim Zhitlovsky was still a well-known figure in the Jewish world as he had been for some forty years, so much so that posthumously he at once became the object of a bitter and highly publicized controversy. Accused in articles and monographs by leading members of the Forverts group–Abe Cahan, Hillel Rogoff, and Chaim Liberman – of having been a life-long Jewish antisemite, he was defended by the literary critic Shmuel Niger in a series of articles in Der tog and in a book put out by his memorial committee, which included such prominent publicists on the pro-Communist left as Ben Zion Goldberg and Kalman Marmor. By now, however, he is largely forgotten.
Perhaps this fate is no more than poetic justice. A man who adopted, abandoned, or lost interest in so many different political programs and causes; who joined, left, or drifted away from so many parties was probably destined, at least in the short run, to oblivion. At varying times, he was a sharp opponent of Zionism and a Zionist, an antiterritorialist and a territorialist, a supporter of the Bund and one of its harshest critics, a Socialist Revolutionary and an apologist for Bolshevism. He was a kind of ideological nomad, forever on the move.
Such a man might, of course, have imposed himself on the imagination of posterity by his sheer creative power or the depth of his personality.
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- Information
- Prophecy and PoliticsSocialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917, pp. 258 - 287Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981