II. STATISTICAL AND THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT JEWISH POVERTY IN EASTERN EUROPE BEFORE 1902

Jewish workers’ poverty in Russia was a well-documented phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. This section describes the empirical literature of the late nineteenth century, which the Labor Zionists of the early twentieth century both inherited and criticized in the 1900s.

One of the earliest attempts to document the Russian Jewry’s general economic condition came from the jurist Ilya G. Orshanski (1846–1875) in the 1870s. Orshanski wrote a series of articles about Jews’ socio-economic status in Russia, from 1869 to 1871, in the Russian Jewish journal Den. These studies were then published in two volumes, entitled The Jews in Russia (1872) and Russian Legislation Affecting the Jews (1877). Orshanski’s studies marked a breakthrough relative to the ideology of the Haskalah ( Jewish Enlightenment), an ideological movement promoted by (some) Jewish intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While previous Maskilim (Enlightened Jews) considered socio-economic reforms in moral terms, urging Russian Jews to “modernize” themselves and abandon “obscurantist” religious practices, Orshanski aimed for an impartial and scientific analysis (Stern Reference Stern2018, pp. 60–62). He accomplished an important work of compiling and synthesizing empirical material that had previously been collected, and indeed, he came to be praised in later empirical research for being the first to build his analysis “on figures and facts only” (Jewish Colonization Association [1904] 1906, p. 3). As a jurist, Orshanski described the juridical details of anti-Jewish discrimination in Russia, and also described this legislation’s historical emergence.

Orshanski was a particularly important influence for Horovitz, who regularly quoted Orshanski’s works (e.g., Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902c, p. 66; Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 122). After Orshanski, Jan Bloch’s initiatives in the next decade aimed to collect statistical material more systematically. Bloch (1836–1902) was a rich Jewish financier and philanthropist. Though he converted to Protestantism in 1851, he remained concerned with Jews’ situation in the Russian Empire. In the 1880s, he set up a statistical bureau to collect material about Jews’ economic conditions in the Russian Pale of Settlement and in Poland. This material led Bloch to publish, in 1891, an 1,800-page book entitled A Comparison of the Physical Subsistence and Moral Condition of the Population in the Jewish Pale of Settlement and Elsewhere. Bloch’s study was not widely disseminated. Shortly after publication, almost all copies were accidentally destroyed and only twenty-five copies survived (Alroey Reference Alroey2006, p. 267).

The research of Andrei P. Subotin (1852–1906) was much more influential. Subotin, who was not Jewish, worked for Bloch’s statistical bureau. He traveled extensively in the Pale of Settlement in the 1880s to document Jewish poverty. In 1888 and 1890, Subotin published two volumes entitled In the Jewish Pale of Settlement, which appear to have been funded by Bloch (Alroey Reference Alroey2006, p. 267). These studies were important references for the Labor Zionists in the 1900s. Horovitz, for instance, quotes extensive parts of “Professor Subotin’s” works in his 1902 article (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, pp. 110–118). Subotin’s studies were also regularly cited in Leshchinsky’s writings (e.g., Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1931, p. 85; [1903] 1960, p. 41). Beyond statistical material per se, Subotin’s methods in his detailed reports (e.g., descriptions of people’s houses and transcripts of his conversations with residents) were particularly influential—especially for Leshchinsky (Alroey Reference Alroey2006, p. 277). These reports paved the way for similar empirical surveys.

The next crucial step was the emergence of large-scale statistical knowledge about Eastern European Jews. This knowledge resulted from two important surveys that had started the same year, in 1897, and whose results became available during the first years of the next decade:Footnote ⁶ the Russian census and the inquiry of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). As the chronology suggests, these two surveys directly influenced the discussions of Jewish non-proletarianization that started in 1902.

The 1897 Russian census brought two major innovations to the socio-economic knowledge of Jewish economic life in Eastern Europe. First, it employed large-scale resources, involving more than 150,000 census-takers (Cadiot Reference Cadiot2004, p. 442); therefore, it significantly expanded upon previous research, which had been restricted to specific towns or regions. One of the main advantages of the Russian census was that it was quasi-exhaustive—at least for Jews living in the Russian Empire. Though it might have been conceived as a tool for the regime’s policy toward (and against) nationalities, paradoxically, the census ultimately made ethnic and national minorities more visible (Cadiot Reference Cadiot2004). In the Jews’ case, the census provided the first accurate estimate of the population, identifying Jews mostly on the basis of their mother tongue. Another important characteristic of the census was that it contained not only demographic material but also socio-economic data, notably on professions, occupations, literacy, and education (Cadiot Reference Cadiot2004, p. 442).

The JCA was established in 1891 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a rich philanthropist. Its main goal was to move a large number of impoverished Jews from Russia to agricultural colonies throughout the world (Norman Reference Norman1985). In 1897, the JCA launched a large statistical inquiry into several governates of Imperial Russia. Though it did not exhaustively cover the Russian Jewish population, the survey involved a large-scale dimension, providing statistics about 1,302 towns with the help of more than 1,000 correspondents (JCA [1904] 1906, p. 8). The study was a storehouse of socio-economic information—including, in particular, a detailed survey of Jewish handworkers, artisans, and small industry.

The JCA’s survey was framed by a particular political agenda. It was motivated by the idea of “productivization”—that is, diverting the Jewish population to agricultural and industrial occupations, sectors that were regarded as “productive.”Footnote ⁷ As a result, the survey did not cover commerce, which was considered a non-productive sector, even though a large number of Jews had commercial occupations. These political and ideological motives also influenced the report’s comments and interpretations. Indeed, the survey’s authors expressed a clear vision of the causes underlying the perceived weakness among the Jewish working class. Repeatedly, these authors claimed that religious rules—observing the shabbat and eating kosher food, in particular—prevented Jews from working at Christian companies (JCA [1904] 1906, pp. 246, 257–258; JCA 1908, p. 16). As a result of this self-imposed isolation, the survey suggested, Jewish artisans received poor technical training and produced low-quality goods.

The blame for this “professional mediocrity” (JCA [1904] 1906, p. 270) was not entirely placed on Jews themselves; the report insisted on the Pale of Settlement’s negative influence, which prevented Jews from living and working in the richest and most developed part of Russia. Yet, ultimately, the report’s authors considered—consistently with the socio-economic ideology of “productivization” in the Haskalah—that Jewish workers and the Jewish working poor were too weak to help themselves and should be led by “Israelite notables” and “enlightened” leaders (p. 270).

III. HOROWITZ AND THE BIRTH OF NON-PROLETARIANIZATION THEORY

In 1902, Horovitz published a series of seven articles in Hebrew entitled “The Economic Question and Its Place in Our National Movement” in the journal Ha-Shiloah (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902a to Reference Horovitz1902f). That same year, Horovitz presented his study at the Second Conference of Russian Zionists in Minsk. This conference stemmed directly from internal struggles within the Jewish labor movement. The year before, the Bund had expelled its Zionist members after its Fourth Congress. The Minsk conference presented an occasion to gather dissident Bundists (Peled Reference Peled1989, p. 79). Horovitz thus addressed an audience that mostly comprised opponents to the Bund’s new anti-Zionist orientation, and his lecture significantly influenced the Labor Zionist movement (Peled Reference Peled1989, p. 79; Gutwein Reference Gutwein1994, p. 113; Mintz Reference Mintz1976, p. 59).

In “The Economic Question,” Horovitz claimed that fighting Jewish poverty required quantitative knowledge:

Statistics were thus needed, according to Horovitz, as both descriptive (i.e., to describe, observe, and understand causes) and normative tools (i.e., to fight poverty and improve the economic situation of the Jews). The study was structured per this agenda. The descriptive parts were relatively short and occupied the fourth and fifth articles only. Horovitz based his descriptions on only a few statistical sources: the JCA’s survey, a few public and official economic statistics, and some materials from the ORT.Footnote ⁸ His analysis did not address the entire Jewish Pale, and it was restricted only to several governorates that he considered representative (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902c, p. 60).

Horovitz’s basic observation was that Jews tended to be concentrated in the lowest-paid, -skilled, and -technologically advanced economic sectors. Roughly half of the Jewish population was employed in handicrafts, a third in commerce, and only a tenth in industry—with minor fluctuations between governorates. Jews’ involvement in industry was significantly lower than Christians’. Analyzing volumes of businesses and numbers of employees, Horovitz also observed that the tiny Jewish industry was actually “almost similar to handicraft” and pointed out its “sad situation” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902c, p. 66). A classification of craft branches according to their annual average earnings showed that Jews were even more active in a given branch of production if its revenue was low (relative to other branches) (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902c, p. 68). Horovitz thus concluded that Jews suffered generally from the process that Gutwein calls “vertical dispossession” (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1990, Reference Gutwein1994): industrial developments had degraded Jews’ economic situation, causing a gradual transition from the highest sectors (i.e., industry and productive crafts) to the lowest sectors (petty trade and domestic work) until Jews had become completely “superfluous” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 114).

Horovitz supplemented factual observations with his own explanations, mainly in his fifth and sixth articles. Horovitz regarded the main cause of Jewish “non-proletarianization” as a lack of territorial autonomy and the “national struggle.” As a national minority without a territory, Jews suffered from increasing competition from both national workers and capitalists (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, pp. 118–123). For instance, trade unions in Western Europe were naturally inclined to organize themselves on a national basis in order to promote the welfare of the national proletariat and thus prevent foreign workers from accessing the labor market (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 126).

Horovitz’s focus on (this lack of) territorial autonomy reflects his political and polemical motives. If the “economic question” was, above all, a national concern (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902a, p. 18), socio-economic policies without national or “spiritual” goals were bound to fail unless Jews’ “national existence” was itself reformed. This claim was polemically intended to oppose both the Bund and other non-Zionist agendas of Jewish “productivization,” as embodied by the JCA’s report. Horovitz did not view the source of Jews’ economic problems as their observance of strict religious rules or their inability to assimilate or adapt to modern economic life, as the authors of the JCA report had claimed. On the contrary, he promoted a reinvigorated “national spirit,” which he felt was necessary for Jews to compete successfully in the national struggle. This view led Horovitz to downplay the role of legal discrimination, which the JCA survey had regarded as a major source of Jewish poverty (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 125). Horovitz’s claim that the Russian regime did not produce a “significant impediment” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 110) to Jewish economic activities might seem surprising, given the overwhelming evidence of this discrimination’s significance; yet it can be easily explained by his ideological motives. Ultimately, considering the economic question as a national matter meant that the only remedy to Jewish economic problems was Jews’ departure from Russia.

Horovitz’s study also opposed the usual rhetoric of Maskilim and Western European philanthropists, who argued that Jews should receive help “from the outside.” This belief, Horovitz claimed, fundamentally opposed “the fundaments of Marx’s and Engels’ theory” and neglected the fact that “simple and naïve men … can easily understand high and important ideas” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902a, p. 17). In reaction to the anti-religious polemics of the “enlightened,” Horovitz even wrote that this taste for intellectual discussion of social problems was “actually reinforced by religious feelings of the masses” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902a, p. 17). Hence, Horovitz strongly defended the principle of self-organization: associations of Jewish workers, which were required to compete in the national struggle, “shall be created only if workers are actively involved in their foundation…. Self-help is the foundational principle of any economic ethic” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902f, p. 405).

By claiming that Jewish economic and national questions were aspects of the same problems, Horovitz also meant to challenge what he called “cultural Zionism.” From Horovitz’s perspective, cultural or political Zionists—such as Theodore Herzl and his followers—were concerned only with political, and mostly diplomatic, issues. He felt that they had failed to understand that Eastern European Jews’ terrible economic situation prevented a national aspiration among most of the world’s Jewish population, notably in Galicia (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902a, pp. 18–19). Zionism required a social and economic improvement of Jewish economic life “here and now,” in the diaspora, through such concrete actions as the establishment of Jewish cooperatives, professional education, or emigration to “the Land of our Fathers” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902e, p. 332). As has been said, Horovitz regarded these reforms as insufficient; yet they were necessary for the Jewish people’s preparation for economic and national “resurrection” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902e, p. 333).

Horovitz’s essay thus allowed for political pragmatism. If territorial autonomy remained his long-term goal, Horovitz’s agenda also intended to address present socio-economic issues. His goals were actually compatible with many reforms later promoted by Labor Zionists’ various initiatives. In this regard, a particularly pressing issue was Jewish immigration from Russia, which was reaching its peak in the first decade of the twentieth century. Horovitz lamented Jewish immigrants’ disproportionate concentration in the “sweating system,” notably in England (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 125). He called for organized migration, similar to Borochov and Leshchinsky’s later proposals.

Alongside his political and polemical aims, theoretically, Horovitz’s proud support of Eastern European Jewish nationalism was very much influenced by the folk psychology that he had inherited from German historicism.Footnote ⁹ This folk-psychological frame led to an ambivalent attitude toward Jewish workers. On the one hand, according to Horovitz, Jews were not directly responsible for their situation, which had resulted from a lack of territorial autonomy. He also praised Jews’ perseverance as a nation despite persecutions and economic hardships (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902e, p. 329). Intense Jewish religiosity attested to the vitality of “the spiritual life of the Jews”: “in their shabbat, are effective and visible the positive characteristics of the Jewish spirit.” On the other hand, Horovitz regretted Jews’ “double-faced nature”; their practical life, as opposed to their spiritual life, was governed only by “self-love and restricted individual interests” (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902f, p. 401). Their feeling of unity remained “religious-national,” failing to translate into economic and social terms (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902e, p. 333). According to Horovitz, the excessive individualism underpinning Jews’ economic behavior explained the lack of “mutual economic institutions,” labor organizations, and unions among Jewish workers (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902e, p. 333).

In drawing this Janus-faced portrait of the Jewish economic agent, Horovitz invoked many economic stereotypes about Jews that were prevalent in late nineteenth-century German folk psychology.Footnote ¹⁰ He particularly defended the idea that Jewish existence had always depended on external circumstances and, therefore, that Jews tended to wait for “economic miracles.” For Horovitz, this perspective explained Jews’ professional instability and the predominance of their “commercial spirit” that naturally inclined them toward speculation, rather than production (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 123).

This portrait clearly channeled antisemitic tropes about Jews’ alleged economic selfishness—or their inclination for speculation and commerce. Importantly, though, from Horovitz’s perspective, these negative characteristics did not reflect “intrinsic” or “essential” features of Jewish workers; rather, they were dictated by Jewish workers’ lack of territorial autonomy. According to Horovitz, Jews were determined to have “wandering” occupations with “changing conditions” because they lacked a “solid economic ground”—that is, an autonomous territory (Horovitz Reference Horovitz1902d, p. 122).

In this regard, Horovitz’s portrait of the Jewish worker was very likely inspired by the image of the Luftmentsch that had been popularized by Zionist leader Max Nordau in his discourse at the 1901 Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel. In this speech, Nordau used the word Luftmentsch—literally an “air-person” or “air-man”—to refer to Eastern European Jewish peddlers, petty traders, or paupers without a definite occupation or business. He described these characters waking “up each morning with the hope of some miracle coming to pass that would furnish them some way to get through the day.” Thus, like Horovitz, Nordau associated professional instability with dependence upon a “miracle,” suggesting that these characters stemmed from “groundlessness” (Bodenlosigkeit)—that is, the lack of Jews’ own territory. Luftmentschen, he said, “lack a solid economic base to stand upon and they live … day by day, by grace of miracles rather than proper labor” (Nordau [1909] Reference Nordau1923, pp. 118–119).Footnote ¹¹

IV. “WHAT DO YOU SAY ABOUT HOROVITZ’S NUMBERS?” LESHCHINSKY’S STRONG PESSIMISM AND BOROCHOV’S CRITIQUE

Horovitz’s study sparked confusion among left-wing Russian Zionists. After the Minsk conference, the pro-Palestine wing of the Zionist movement in Russia led a campaign of “agitation” to spread its Palestine-oriented program among youths and workers (Frankel Reference Frankel1984, pp. 336–337). Yet the Russian context raised major doubts about the program’s feasibility. For instance, a few weeks after Horovitz’s lecture, Yosef Leshchinsky—Yakov’s brother—wrote a letter to Dov-Ber Slutski, a long-time friend. He explained that he was willing to participate in the “agitation” in Palestine’s favor but confessed to having no “definitive idea about Zionism.” Jewish workers’ desperate economic situation in Russia necessitated deeper theoretical reflections. Yosef Leshchinsky wrote, “Theory stands in our way…. What do you say about Horovitz’s numbers?”Footnote ¹²

In 1903, these doubts crystallized into a dissident political movement. That year, the pogrom in Kishinev and the threat of further massacres made an enormous impression on many Labor Zionists, including Borochov (Frankel Reference Frankel1984, p. 335) and Yakov Leshchinsky (Manor Reference Manor1961, pp. 31–34). At the 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Theodore Herzl proposed the so-called Uganda plan to create a Jewish territory in British-controlled Uganda (now in Kenya). The proposal split the Zionist movement between the faction who still preferred the idea of emigration to Palestine and the “territorialist” faction, which was “prepared to sacrifice the ‘Land of Israel’” in favor of another territory (Alroey Reference Alroey2011, p. 9). Territorialists felt that an immediate relief of Jews’ distress in Russia required a rapid response; they could not wait on the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

This sense of urgency clearly motivated Leshchinsky’s pessimistic perspective on the non-proletarianization problem. It felt all the more compelling in 1906, when another wave of pogroms swept through Russia in the revolution’s aftermath. In this context, non-proletarianization theory became a theoretical justification for territorialism. Because of Jewish workers’ “abnormal” situation, Leshchinsky and his followers argued, Zionism could not develop; thus, immediate political action was needed (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1990, pp. 170–172). The Zionist Socialist party, created in 1906, was built upon this political platform, including support for any territorial solution, as well as active involvement in the political struggle to overthrow the Tsarist regime (Mintz Reference Mintz2010).

Thus, in the second part of the 1910s, non-proletarianization theories reflected a particular political context that had not previously existed. Before 1903, no debate had questioned “territorialism.” Many Zionists, including Horovitz, had not felt any contradiction between Zionism and their willingness to establish a national territory for Jews outside of Palestine. Yet, from a theoretical perspective, Leshchinsky’s writings from 1903 to 1907 extended Horovitz’s articles published in 1902. Before 1903, Leshchinsky had been working on his first essay, which was published a year after Horovitz’s articles on “The Economic Question” in the same journal, Ha-Shiloah (Leshchinsky [1903] 1960). In this empirical study entitled “Statistics of a Small Town,” Leshchinsky gathered socio-economic statistics about the Jewish population of his hometown, Horodyshche (now in Ukraine). He reached similar conclusions as Horovitz: most Jewish workers in Horodyshche belonged to a middle class of petty traders and artisans, yet the vast majority were losing their sources of income. Describing their misery, in this early study, Leshchinsky discussed a process of “proletarianization” (hitproletariut) (Leshchinsky [1903] 1960, p. 25). This process did not mean Jewish workers were becoming proletarians in large-scale industry; rather, they tended to concentrate in sweatshops (shitah ha-ezah) and home industry—that is, in the lowest branches of industrial production (Leshchinsky [1903] 1960, p. 25).

In 1906, Leshchinsky published an essay entitled The Jewish Worker in Russia. This pamphlet became an ideological cornerstone of the Zionist Socialist party (Manor Reference Manor1961, pp. 74–75; Mahler Reference Mahler1967, p. 189).Footnote ¹³ Yet, The Jewish Worker in Russia reads less as a political manifesto than as an economic-statistical inquiry, similar to Horovitz’s. Building on recent developments in statistical knowledge, Leshchinsky generalized his first study’s results. He evidenced what he now referred to as “non-proletarianization” (nitproletarizirung).Footnote ¹⁴ Using statistics from the 1897 Russian census, he estimated that non-Jewish Russian workers were employed as factory workers more than four times as often as Jews (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, pp. 18–20). With this estimate, Leshchinsky meant to debunk a Bundist brochure’s claim that Jews and non-Jews were similarly represented among industrial proletarians.Footnote ¹⁵

Data from the JCA’s survey also indicated that Jewish-owned factories were smaller, that they used less machine power, and that Jewish labor was almost completely employed in manufacturing (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, pp. 36–37). Consistent with Horovitz’s theory, Leshchinsky observed that “the closer one approaches the most developed branches of production (e.g., steel, chemical industries, mining) the smaller the proportion of Jews in them” and that Jews were stuck in “the backward branches of production,” such as the food and garment industries (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, p. 24).

Leshchinsky’s explanation also resembled Horovitz’s: the main reason for Jewish “non-proletarianization” was the “national struggle” between Jewish and Christian workers in Russia. Christian factory owners refused to hire Jewish labor in order to “paint” class antagonism with “national colors” and “to manipulate (non-Jewish) workers lacking class consciousness” (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, p. 93).

Yet Leshchinsky’s prognosis was much more pessimistic than Horovitz’s. While Horovitz had considered non-proletarianization to affect the Jewish middle class as a whole, and that it could help raise this group’s class and national consciousness, Leshchinsky suggested that a differentiation process among Jews prevented any possibility of social progress (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1990). On the one hand, “the real economic interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie demand that it assimilates with the (Russian) bourgeoisie … to demonstrate its … loyalty to the country”; therefore, Jewish capitalists refused to hire Jews in their factories (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, p. 103). On the other hand, the Jewish proletariat was a “lumpenproletariat” (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, p. 5), “utterly disorganized, helpless,” and did “not constitute a political force”—unlike the “modern” proletariat in Western Europe, particularly in England (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, p. 10).

For Leshchinsky, Jews’ massive emigration was one of the clearest symptoms of Jewish working-class weakness. This migration was bound to fail, as Leshchinsky argued in his pamphlet The Jewish Worker in London, which came out a year later, in 1907.Footnote ¹⁶ Using figures and reports from various sources, including Charles Booth (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1907, p. 10) and Beatrice Webb (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1907, p. 17), Leshchinsky observed that Jewish immigrants in London tended to concentrate in the economic branches where the shvits-sistem—that is, sweatshops and home industry—predominated.

Jewish workers’ disproportionate concentration in the shvits-sistem was a decisive issue for Leshchinsky because it revealed, from his perspective, a fundamental “psychological” maladaptation to modern economic life among Jewish workers. Working at home or in a sweatshop prevented the Jewish proletariat’s concentration, hindering its class consciousness—hence the lack of proletarian organizations and the influence of “anarchism” (i.e., individualistic and non-structured utopias) among London’s Jewish working class (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1907, pp. 28–31).

Leshchinsky also suggested that this particular character of the Jewish worker both resulted from and caused economic dire straits. In a later article entitled “The Psychology of Jewish Migrants,” published in a German statistical journal in 1913, Leshchinsky developed a general theory about Jewish migrants’ capacities that explained why Jews around the world were excessively concentrated in the less technologically advanced economic branches:

Later, Leshchinsky elaborated on this description. He contrasted non-Jewish peasants with Jewish petit bourgeois, writing that “the rural non-Jewish peasant with his healthy body and primitive mentality, trifling needs and even more trifling ambitions … was much less expensive and easier to employ than the small-town petit bourgeois Jew with his weak body, excitability, higher standard of living and more developed mind” (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1931, p. 71).Footnote ¹⁷ This psychological portrait of Jewish and non-Jewish workers recurred throughout Leshchinsky’s works (e.g., Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1916, p. 165; [1933] Reference Leshchinsky1947, p. 201).

Leshchinsky’s strong pessimism was severely criticized by Borochov. Unlike Leshchinsky, Borochov did not support territorialism. Therefore, he rejected the political doctrine of the Zionist Socialist Party. Since 1904, Borochov had been working as an “agitator” for the Zionist movement’s pro-Palestine wing in Russia (Frankel Reference Frankel1984, pp. 331–332). He remained committed to the Palestine cause throughout his career. In 1906–07, he defended the idea that Jews’ participation in Russia’s class struggle would spontaneously lead to emigration to Palestine. From there, he argued, the concentration and development of the Jewish proletariat would begin.

Importantly, though, from Borochov’s perspective, Palestine offered no specific cultural or emotional appeal to Jews; it offered strictly economic advantages.Footnote ¹⁸ As for Borochov, any Jewish settlement outside Palestine was bound to fail because Jewish workers could not compete with native peasants for physical jobs, thus undermining the formation of the Jewish proletariat. Only Palestine’s native population was culturally closer to Jews and, therefore, could be gradually absorbed into the growing proletariat.

Borochov thus criticized non-proletarianization theories inasmuch as they politically justified territorialism. He specifically rejected the idea that Jewish workers lacked class consciousness, which contradicted his own hypothesis that the Jewish proletariat could grow spontaneously. In 1906, when the Zionist Socialist Party published Leshchinsky’s The Jewish Worker in Russia, Borochov wrote Our Platform, which became the political manifesto for the rival Po’ale Tsiyon party. In Our Platform, Borochov did not directly criticize non-proletarianization theory, but he opposed Leshchinsky’s theory by pointing out that the Jewish proletariat was already class-conscious and had “an overwhelming revolutionary energy” (Borochov Reference Borochov and Cohen1984, p. 90).

A year later, Borochov explicitly criticized what he referred to as theories of “non-industrialization.” Again, his critique was fundamentally political. Claiming that Jews are not “bearers of the socialist movement” was politically counterproductive because it hindered Jews’ desire to heal from this “sickness of non-industrialization” (Borochov [1907] Reference Borochov1928, pp. 31–32). Borochov accused Sejmists and Zionist Socialists of distrusting the Jewish proletariat’s revolutionary capacities and of relying on the bourgeoisie as a political avant-garde.

Borochov strove to empirically support his objection to non-proletarianization theory. If Jewish workers were observed to be politically active, he suggested, then they could be regarded as true proletarians (Borochov [1907] Reference Borochov1928, p. 32). In a later essay entitled The Jewish Worker Movement in Figures, published in 1916 but originally directed against Leshchinsky (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1990, p. 180), Borochov tried to substantiate this empirical refutation. Using statistics from workers’ organizations and unions throughout Europe, he showed that the Jewish proletariat was significantly more active and successful in strikes than other national workforces. If Jewish workers were less employed in large-scale factories compared with other workforces, they nonetheless benefited from their more urban character, which favored solidarity among Jewish workers—even in small-scale craft production. Hence, “the major characteristic of the Jewish economy,” wrote Borochov, was not “the famous and meaningless non-proletarianization”; rather, “Jewish masses are proletarianizing” (Borochov [1916] Reference Borochov1923, p. 23).

In The Economic Evolution of the Jewish People, published in 1916, Borochov retrospectively critiqued the non-proletarianization theories that had been popular among Labor Zionists in the 1900s. “Thirteen or fourteen years ago,” recalled Borochov, “the so-called ‘non-proletarianization theory’ (nit-proletarizirung-teorie) was fashionable among Jewish Socialists.” Borochov credited Horovitz as “the first creator” of that theory, while he described Leshchinsky as the “most profound social economist from the Zionist Socialists,” whose book The Jewish Worker in Russia offered the strongest theoretical support for this theory. Borochov repeated a previous argument that suggesting “the Jewish proletarian can not proletarianize” was self-contradictory; rather, empirical observation suggested that the Jewish masses “are proletarianizing and industrializing” (Borochov [1916] Reference Borochov1919, pp. 2–3).Footnote ¹⁹

As Gutwein argues, Borochov merely refused the political consequences of the non-proletarianization theory while agreeing with Leshchinsky and Horovitz on its “descriptive part”—that is, on the observation that Jewish workers were relegated to “lower” economic sectors (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1990). According to Matityahu Mintz, Borochov—like many Labor Zionists—actually subscribed to the thesis of non-proletarianization in the early 1900s, and his opposition at the end of the decade was guided by polemical motives against the Zionist Socialist party and particularly against Leshchinsky (Mintz Reference Mintz1976, pp. 59–63).Footnote ²⁰

Indeed, Borochov admitted to some “sane truth” in non-proletarianization theory. In the remainder of his essay on The Economic Evolution of the Jewish People, after a short critique of the non-proletarianization theoreticians, Borochov empirically described the Jewish workforce. Ultimately, his description resembled Horovitz and Leshchinsky’s views. Borrowing statistics from the 1897 Russian census, Borochov classified the Jewish employment profile into five branches, depending on their degree of proximity to nature, from agriculture and manufacture to industries serving consumers directly. He observed that Jews were disproportionately concentrated in the consumer-serving sector, highlighting “the economic groundlessness of the Jews” and “the dominant law of Jewish economics, namely, that the concentration of Jewish labor in any occupation varies directly with the remoteness of that occupation from nature” (Borochov [1916] Reference Borochov1919, p. 13). This Borochovian scheme of an “inverted” occupational pyramid popularized an idea that was close to the idea of vertical dispossession. This diagnosis, like Leshchinsky’s and Horovitz’s, entailed some pessimism about Jewish economic “relegation” in modern times, since “obviously,” Borochov wrote, “the fate of society does not on any extent rest on the needle or tobaccos industries” (Borochov [1916] Reference Borochov1919, p. 13).

From the internal perspective of discourse and theories, and consistent with my interpretation, Borochov shared many common ideas and characteristics with Leshchinsky and Horovitz. As we saw earlier, discourses about Jewish non-proletarianization were largely based on statistical materials, and they benefited from the publication of a large-scale census about the Russian Jewry. As a result, the discussion about Jewish non-proletarianization was framed as a statistical debate from its very beginning. Numbers played a central role in the opposition between the Bund and Zionist Socialists, notably in Shmul Gozhansky’s Bundist brochure mentioned above and its critique by Leshchinsky (cf. supra, Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1906, pp. 17–20).Footnote ²¹ Internal controversies among Labor Zionists were also framed by statistics. Borochov, for instance, strove to structure his opposition to Leshchinsky on numbers in The Jewish Worker Movement in Figures. In The Economic Evolution of the Jewish People, Borochov also criticized Leshchinsky for claiming—on the basis of the JCA’s survey—that no factory in Russia employed more than a thousand Jewish workers in Russia despite this source indicating that a tobacco factory in Grodno employed 1,594 Jews (Borochov [1916] Reference Borochov1919, p. 4).Footnote ²²

Horovitz, Leshchinsky, and Borochov also similarly explained Jews’ relatively minimal participation in large-scale industrial work. They agreed that the main cause was “national struggle”—that is, competition between national groups. From a practical perspective, the three authors proposed similar “therapeutics” for what they perceived as Jewish workers’ “social disease.” Agreeing about the Jewish proletariat’s “anormal situation,” they called for economic reforms in the diaspora “here and now.” Borochov and Leshchinsky particularly agreed that the Jewish proletariat had to participate in Russia’s class struggle and fight for any improvements.

In the very short term, Horovitz, Borochov, and Leshchinsky disagreed about some of these reforms. Borochov criticized Horovitz’s project of cooperatives (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1990, p. 175), while his party adopted the Sejmists’ demand for a Sejm, a Jewish national assembly. This demand was probably motivated by party interests and the need to distinguish the Po’ale Tsiyon from the rival Zionist Socialist Party (Frankel Reference Frankel1984, p. 348). Yet, as we shall see later, most of the opposition between the two parties faded in the interwar period. Moreover, former members of the two factions often collaborated in practical works. This cooperation was not mere political opportunism. Both Po’ale Tsiyon and Zionist Socialists fundamentally agreed that political advances in Russia were only superficial and could not alter the Jewish working class’s underlying economic structure.

Both the diagnosis and proposed cure for the non-proletarianization problem were also directed against similar non-Zionist targets, philanthropists, and Bundists in particular. Leshchinsky, for instance, stressed that Jewish artisans should “take charge of their self-help, organize themselves” because no lasting improvement could be expected from the occasional and accidental “good deeds” of Jewish philanthropists and the Jewish bourgeoisie (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1912a, p. 4). Meanwhile, he also rejected the Bundist idea that the dissolution of the Pale would help reduce Jewish poverty (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1912b, p. 25). More generally, emphasizing national struggle undermined the role of Jewish religious practices, which previous social reformers had usually identified—notably in the JCA’s report and also among Bundist leaders (Peled Reference Peled1989, p. 75)—as major factors of Jewish poverty. In thus undermining the religious role, non-proletarianization theoreticians reacted to what they perceived as unfair attacks on religion and the Jewish masses’ popular religious beliefs while also praising their cultural worth. Those who blamed Jews for the economic consequences of their shabbat, wrote Borochov, “do not understand that keeping shabbat is not only a religious rule, but a deeply enrooted custom from economic and social life; hence, it is an advantage and not a default of (Jewish) workers.” In any case, most Jews were willing to work on shabbat, but this willingness did not help them get jobs (Borochov Reference Borochov1928, pp. 180–181).

Like many of the period’s Jewish radicals, Borochov, Leshchinsky, and Borochov thus expressed similar rejections of the Haskalah. Because it had opposed Jewish nationalism since its Fourth Congress in 1901, the Bund was associated with these liberal efforts to “modernize” Jews and to integrate them into Russian society (Trachtenberg Reference Trachtenberg2008, p. 39); therefore, it was rejected as a “socialist version of Haskalah” (cf. Peled Reference Peled1989, p. 69).Footnote ²³

A final and important aspect of this intellectual tradition was its methodological reliance on folk psychology alongside statistics and empirical material. I previously discussed Leshchinsky and Horovitz’s arguments about Jewish workers’ character. Similarly, Borochov proposed moral portraits, such as the following excerpt:

Elaborating on this idea of a Jewish “entrepreneurial spirit,” Leshchinsky wrote that given their “psychic liveliness,” a Jew would strive “to free himself as quickly as possible from the worker’s yoke and become an owner” (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1931, p.71). Conversely, Borochov agreed with Leshchinsky about “the Jewish worker’s inability to face competition of the non-Jewish worker” (Borochov Reference Borochov and Cohen1984, p. 81). He similarly contrasted non-Jewish peasants, who were “stronger physically, and their standard of living is lower,” with “the Jewish worker,” who “requires much more comfort and luxury; therefore he adapts himself more quickly to the class conflict and enters the struggle with his employer more readily” (Borochov Reference Borochov and Cohen1984, p. 81). Weak bodies, agitated minds, excessive individualism, and a desire to achieve “success” emerged as a similar picture of the Jewish worker across Horovitz, Borochov, and Leshchinsky’s writing.Footnote ²⁴

VI. NON-PROLETARIANIZATION, ANTISEMITISM, AND THE ANTI-SWEATSHOP CAMPAIGN

An important corollary of the non-proletarianization doctrine was that Jewish migration could not succeed without territorial concentration. According to this theory, the fundamental cause of Jewish non-proletarianization was a lack of territorial autonomy. Therefore, Jewish workers’ immigration outside of the Russian Empire simply meant moving the problem from one country to another. Horovitz, Borochov, and Leshchinsky all regarded Jewish immigrants’ disproportionate concentration in what they called the “sweating system” as both a prediction and a confirmation of their theories. This perspective reflected a growing, wider concern about the so-called sweatshop in Western Europe and the United States. The phrase “sweatshop” was coined in the 1890s by US politicians, journalists, and economists to describe small shops of immigrant contractors (Bender Reference Bender2004, p. 9). Labor Zionists did not use this word, instead favoring the expression “sweating system” (shitah ha-ezah in Hebrew; shvits-sistem in Yiddish). Yet the terms carried the same meaning, contrasting with an idealized image of the “industrial factory” (Bender Reference Bender2004, p. 9). Sweatshops, or the sweating system, referred to the most “backward,” non-mechanical, “light” industries that were concentrated in the “final levels of production” (e.g., Borochov Reference Borochov and Cohen1984, p. 84). This system was also characterized by extremely poor and unregulated working conditions and a “contracting system” in which intermediaries or “contractors” operated between capitalists and workers, further reducing their respective margins and wages (de Lagerie Reference de Lagerie2013).

Jews played a central role in the social and political discourse against sweatshops. Particularly in England and the United States, the sweating system’s rise in the Progressive Era was firmly associated with Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Social reformers tended to blame Jews for the sweatshop’s social problems (Bender Reference Bender2004). An important primary source in this regard is the report “Immigration and Its Economic Effects” that John R. Commons wrote for the US Industrial Commission in 1901 (Commons Reference Commons1901). The antisemitic character of Commons’s comments on Jewish garment workers in this report was recently debated in this journal (Fiorito and Orsi Reference Fiorito and Orsi2016; Chasse Reference Chasse2018). In the remainder of the current section, I do not exhaustively discuss Commons’s alleged antisemitism.Footnote ²⁵ I merely invoke a comparative perspective on his report to draw a few general principles regarding antisemitism in the history of economic thought.

The following three excerpts from Commons’s report represent the material at stake in the debated controversy between, on the one hand, Luca Fiorito and Cosma Orsi and, on the other hand, Dennis Chasse:

These excerpts channel classical antisemitic tropes about Jewish economic behavior (Penslar Reference Penslar2001). From these and similar quotes, Fiorito and Orsi “feel confident” in adding Commons’s name to other “great economists” who have been accused of antisemitism (Fiorito and Orsi Reference Fiorito and Orsi2016, p. 56). I have shown, however, that Horovitz, Borochov, and Leshchinsky included exactly the same features in their descriptions of Jewish workers: physical weakness, a special taste for commerce and speculation, a lack of discipline, a higher standard of living, and excessive intellectual development.

I do not intend my contribution to this debate as a defense of Commons. The significant differences between the anti-sweatshop campaign and non-proletarianization theories are important. First, unlike Commons and other non-Jewish social reformers, Labor Zionists eschewed the language of race in their portraits of Jewish workers. They regarded Jews’ alleged inaptitude for industrial work as grounded not in racial traits but, rather, in a national struggle and a lack of territorial autonomy, while non-Jewish activists stressed race as sweatshops’ underlying cause (Bender Reference Bender2004, p. 44). This difference explains why non-proletarianization theories’ general characterization of the Jewish workforce, though mostly negative, did not include the “most lurid images of Jewish racial inferiority” or the anxiety about Jewish immigrants’ “germs” and “smell and filth” that appeared in the anti-sweatshop campaign (Bender Reference Bender2004, p. 49).

Importantly, Horovitz, Leshchinsky, and Borochov on the one side and authors such as Commons on the other side reached completely opposed political conclusions in their studies. Both sides—except for Borochov—agreed that the Jewish character severely impeded the social organization of labor. But Commons, like many Progressive Era reformers, advocated for a strong restriction of immigration—particularly by Eastern European Jews—while Labor Zionists sought, on the contrary, to increase, organize, and “concentrate” migration in a given territory.

Commons’s and Labor Zionists’ descriptions are similar regarding the rhetoric of “degeneration” and “regeneration” that cultural historian Todd Presner identifies in the period’s Zionist discourse. Presner has shown how the Zionist ideal of the “muscle Jew”—a counter-image to Jews’ alleged physical and moral weakness in the diaspora—internalized many antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish degeneracy and took clear inspiration from the Fascist fascination with “sane” and strong bodies. Yet, as Presner argues, this connection does not mean Fascism and Zionism are at all equivalent, since their political goals differed entirely (Presner Reference Presner2007, p. 17).Footnote ²⁶

The similarities between Labor Zionists’ and Commons’s descriptions of Jewish workers do not, therefore, invalidate Fiorito and Orsi’s general argument about Commons’s antisemitism. However, as Presner has shown, they confirm that Jews can also internalize and be influenced by anti-Jewish stereotypes. Chasse seems to have ignored this basic principle. In his response to Fiorito and Orsi, Chasse points out that Commons, in preparing his report, spent six months with Abram Bisno, a Jewish garment worker and union leader. Chasse repeatedly asks in his article, “How can Commons be accused of antisemitism by using the words of a Jewish union leader?” (Chasse Reference Chasse2018 pp. 424, 426–427). Thus, he implies that Jews’ antisemitic opinions are self-contradictory.Footnote ²⁷ However, both Jewish and non-Jewish authors can share similar prejudices and influence each other. Though Commons and other Progressive Era social scientists were unlikely to have read Labor Zionist pamphlets in Yiddish, conversely, Labor Zionists were likely inspired by non-Jewish social science. In Jewish Worker in London, for instance, Leshchinsky quoted Beatrice Webb’s survey of London’s Jewish community, which included similar comments about Jews’ “mental agility,” “trained intellect, admirably adapted to commerce and finance,” and “lack of social morality,” which she suggested was responsible for their concentration in the sweating system (Webb Reference Webb and Booth1889, pp. 586–589; Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1907, pp. 17–18).

Another important lesson from the comparison between the anti-sweatshop discourse and non-proletarianization theories is the difficulty—if not impossibility—of distinguishing anti-Jewish prejudice from “sound” economic thinking. This difficulty complicates both sides of the controversy. On the one hand, Chasse strives to demonstrate that many of Commons’s arguments against Jewish and non-Jewish immigration were “reasonable” and grounded in concrete observations. For instance, he cites the idea that immigration was pro-cyclical or that it complicated labor organization among workers of many nationalities (Chasse Reference Chasse2018, p. 423). Chasse also considers some of the terms Commons used to have had no negative sense. For example, he discusses the word “individualism,” which was not “synonymous with ‘selfishness’ or ‘uncooperativeness’” and had no “pejorative sense” (Chase Reference Chasse2018, p. 426).

Chasse’s reading overestimates the degrees of consistency and coherence in these alleged characters of the Jewish worker. In Labor Zionists’ writings, portraits of the Jewish worker were vague and ambivalent. For instance, Leshchinsky frequently related Jews’ “mental agitation” to their lack of discipline and inaptitude for industrial work while also associating, in different contexts, their “intellectual agility” (neshome rirevdikayt) with such positive qualities as a sense of innovation and an adaptive or entrepreneurial spirit (e.g., Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1931, p. 16). As Leshchinsky wrote, “The desire to rise can be either an inclination to evil [yeytser-hore] or inclination to good [yeytser-hatov]” (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1938, p. 180). Borochov, like Leshchinsky, constantly referred to Jewish bodies’ alleged physical inferiority, but he sometimes criticized the idea of Jewish reluctance toward physical work, emphasizing the long Jewish tradition of manual work (e.g., Borochov Reference Borochov1928, p. 180). These paradoxes and contradictions are, again, consistent with Presner’s observations on “Muscular Judaism” as a “deeply conflicted ideal” (Presner Reference Presner2007, p. 17).

Fiorito and Orsi are aware of antisemitism’s often conflicting and contradictory nature, referring to the notion of “ambivalent antisemitism” that was first popularized in the history of economic thought by Melvin Reder’s article about John M. Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter (Reder Reference Reder2000). Yet their approach is still morally framed at the individual level. They treat antisemitism as a set of personal beliefs and prejudices by a single author. They seek to determine whether Commons is among the famous economists who held morally reprehensible ideas about Jews.

The corpus of non-proletarianization theories suggests that this repertoire of anti-Jewish economic tropes cannot be well understood as private, personal obsessions among individuals who were—aside from these prejudices—“great economists.” Though vague and mutable, these images of the Jewish worker were extremely influential, and they echo throughout social science. These images’ pervasiveness illustrates what Presner calls the “intersectionality of discursive formations,” multiple economic, statistical, eugenic, and esthetic discourses that “related to and build off one another” (Presner Reference Presner2007, p. 19). Hence, non-proletarianization theories’ folk-psychological considerations should not be regarded as undesirable, separable by-products of economic and statistical thinking. Rather, they were part of this thinking. Therefore, in my opinion, studying the origin and diffusion of these images and stereotypes offers a more promising approach. We can track their transformation from one group of authors to another—between Jews and non-Jews—to show how economic representations of Jews generally informed the history of economic thought.Footnote ²⁸

Beyond Commons’s case, the anti-sweatshop discourse of social reform and non-proletarianization theories also aligned in a similar stance toward gender. Both in Eastern Europe and in immigration countries, women represented a significant part of the overall Jewish workforce (Glenn Reference Glenn1990; Bender Reference Bender2004), especially in the garment industry (Green Reference Green1998). Women played also an important political role in the Jewish labor movement. They constituted a large part of the Bund’s membership in Eastern Europe.Footnote ²⁹ In the United States, women worked at the forefront of the garment industry’s major strikes from 1909 to 1913 (Glenn Reference Glenn1990, pp. 167–205; Bender Reference Bender2004).

Historian Daniel Bender argues that the anti-sweatshop campaign in the American Progressive Era sought to reinforce “conceptions of sexual difference.” Against the sweatshop, social reformers promoted “an ideal of ‘separate spheres’” in which the home was understood as a reproductive space and the workplace was understood as a “productive space” (Bender Reference Bender2004, pp. 12–16). They maintained that women’s work could be only transient, before marriage, and that men should remain the primary breadwinners.

A striking feature of non-proletarianization theories in this regard is that they almost completely ignored women—despite women’s important economic and political roles. Leshchinsky seldom discussed women’s work, toward which he held an ambivalent attitude at best. He saw the rise of Jewish female employment as a positive phenomenon of “productivization” (e.g., Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1937). But he worried about negative demographic consequences (e.g., Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1912b). Consistent with Bender’s interpretation of the anti-sweatshop campaign, Leshchinsky also regarded women’s work as the consequence of poverty. He pointed out that, in more affluent households, women did not have to work (e.g., Leshchinsky [1903] Reference Leshchinsky1960, p. 28). Thus, he suggested, men should serve as breadwinners. Borochov seems to have been interested in feminism, and he gathered notes on the subject (Cohen Reference Cohen1984, p. 33). However, with few exceptions (e.g., Borochov Reference Borochov1928, p. 179; Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1937, p. 66), discussions about non-proletarianization relied on the gender-neutral word “worker” (arbeter in Yiddish) and not “female workers” (arbetorins).

Thus, one could reasonably argue that Bender’s interpretation extends to Labor Zionists’ writings and that non-proletarianization’s gender-neutral language came to refer to male workers only, reinforcing the ideal of male workers as the preferred breadwinners. This development also made the negative image of the “weak” proletarian a masculine counter-image. In this regard, Presner’s remarks on the “muscle Jew” figure apply, too. The muscle Jew was a masculinist ideal, according to Presner, not because men were the only muscle Jews and women did not try to conform to the muscle ideal; rather, “it was Jewish men who were supposedly not strong enough, healthy enough, and fit enough” (Presner Reference Presner2007, p. 12). Similarly, one could argue that although Jewish women significantly participated in the labor movement, the Zionist proletarian was a masculinist ideal because men were uniquely targeted as “weak” workers.

VII. POLITICAL AND THEORETICAL LEGACIES OF THE NON-PROLETARIANIZATION DEBATE

Non-proletarianization theories in Labor Zionism peaked in the early 1900s. At the end of this decade, the movement’s political influence faded away. In the years following the 1905 Revolution, many Labor Zionism leaders left the Russian Empire. By 1908, the Sejmists and the Zionist Socialist parties had largely disbanded (Trachtenberg Reference Trachtenberg2008, p. 38). As early as 1905, Horovitz abandoned the ideas of mass emigration and territorial concentration and expected legal improvement and normalization of the Jewish economy in Russia from capitalism’s further advance (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1994, p. 106). He then became active in the Jewish cooperative movement in Russia (Slutsky Reference Slutsky, Skolnik and Berenbaum2007, p. 534).

Leshchinsky changed his mind, too. He gradually departed from the Labor Zionist movement in the late 1900s (Manor Reference Manor1961, p. 46). During World War I, he came to consider the “non-productive” elements of the Jewish workforce to be transitioning into productive factory work in Eastern Europe (Estraikh Reference Estraikh2009, p. 11). Such positive views of the Jewish economy in the diaspora became more and more frequent in Leshchinsky’s writings of the late 1910s and early 1920s (e.g., Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1921, esp. pp. 18–24; Reference Leshchinsky1923; [1928] Reference Leshchinsky and Brym2020; [1931] Reference Leshchinsky and Brym2020).

Horovitz and Leshchinsky’s political evolution can be read as predictive failures of their earlier views. In retrospect, many of the 1900s’ proletarianization theories proved wrong. These theories failed, notably, to anticipate Jewish immigrants’ successful integration into the United States and their active participation—especially among young women—in the major strikes of the US garment industry from 1909 to 1913 (Bender Reference Bender2004). According to Yoav Peled, the Zionist Socialist diagnosis of non-proletarianization suffered from one weakness: “reifying” Jews’ economic situation in Russia and identifying “national antagonism” as the major factor preventing “understanding the dynamics, rather than only the statics, of the Jewish condition” (Peled Reference Peled1989, p. 91).

Bundist demographer Liebmann Hersch formulated a similar critique in a 1927 letter to Leshchinsky. He suggested that the Zionist Socialists had fundamentally erred in considering the “national antagonism between Jewish and Christian workers” as an “inevitable outcome life in the Diaspora,” overstating its significance, while the Bund had correctly identified this antagonism as a “historical and transient phenomenon.”Footnote ³⁰ From Hersch’s Bundist perspective, territorialism was no solution. Jews had to fight for socio-economic justice in Russia and Poland. Leshchinsky, indeed, moved closer to such Bundist positions as a result of his slightly less pessimistic outlook on Jewish life in the diaspora.Footnote ³¹

Conversely, Borochov seems to have offered a more effective practical solution to the problem of Jewish non-proletarianization relative to Leshchinsky and Horovitz’s initial conjectures. The pro-Palestine wing of Labor Zionism ultimately had a much brighter future. Only in Palestine was a significant concentration of the Jewish workforce achieved. Many of Borochov’s former disciples—including David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir—became dominant figures in Palestine and the future state of Israel.Footnote ³² Despite his early death in 1917, Borochov is now remembered as the main inspirational leader of Labor Zionism.

Yet the territorialist factions’ political failure and Borochov’s relatively successful lineage do not suggest that Borochov’s camp better interpreted the data in the early 1900s. Rather, they resulted from the largely unexpected events of the following decade. After the outbreak of World War I and the Balfour Declaration, the idea of a Jewish national territory outside Palestine became increasingly unrealistic and irrelevant to the new era’s Zionist agenda (Alroey Reference Alroey2011). The creation of both the Soviet Union and the independent state of Poland promised that the former Russian Empire’s national minorities—including Jews—could be recognized and afforded some form of cultural autonomy. Many former Labor Zionists turned to “diaspora nationalism,” seeking to defend Jews’ political and cultural rights in their countries of residence while preserving a favorable attitude toward Zionism. This new agenda led the Zionist Socialist Party to abandon territorialism and amalgamate, in 1917, with the Sejmists to form the Fareynikte (United) Party (Guterman Reference Guterman1985, pp. 9–10).Footnote ³³

World War I and the 1917 Revolution, thus, completely changed the political debate for Jews in Russia, blurring the former ideological proclivities between Labor Zionism’s various factions and even between non-Zionist and Zionist socialists. Indeed, many former members of these parties renounced their political affiliations in the interwar period, and through their practical works, approached both the Bund and Zionism (Alroey Reference Alroey2006, p. 80).Footnote ³⁴ Leshchinsky notably underwent this kind of transition. After a short period of political activity in 1917–18 in the Fareynikte—which explicitly relinquished territorialism—he moved to Berlin. There, he abandoned all political affiliations (Estraikh Reference Estraikh2007, p. 222). He continued his numerous economic and statistical activities while remaining active in various Jewish relief agencies. These organizations displayed considerable ideological and political flexibility. For instance, the ORT—which sought to promote Jews’ professional training in the diaspora—found supporters with a large spectrum of political tendencies: “enlightened” liberals, Bundists, and also territorialist or even Zionists and communists (Estraikh Reference Estraikh2009).

This political blurring does not mean, however, that Leshchinsky and his comrades’ political trajectory was completely inconsistent or fortuitous. As a journalist and statistician, Leshchinsky came naturally to revise his positions, depending on modifications to economic and political circumstances. Yet, overall, Leshchinsky’s political outlook remained fairly consistent. He remained committed to the idea of directing Jewish emigration from Russia to new places for territorial concentration. That idea may have temporarily disappeared from his political views during World War I, but Leshchinsky quickly re-emerged as a leader in the Berlin-based organizations dedicated to organizing Jewish emigration in 1921 (Saß Reference Saß2012, pp. 215–224). In the mid-1920s, his optimism about Jewish economic “productivization” in the diaspora ended (e.g., Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1925a, pp. 89–90; Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1925b).Footnote ³⁵ His economic reports became increasingly pessimistic in the 1930s, with the rise of nationalism and Fascism in Europe (e.g., Leshchinsky [1933] 1947, Reference Leshchinsky1936). Leshchinsky thus favored renewed territorialism in the years preceding World War II. He sympathized, for instance, with positions defended by his long-time political comrade Ben-Adir (Avrom Rozin, a leading Sejmist figure), the Fareynikte, and ultimately the territorialist association known as Frayland-lige (the Freeland League, founded in 1935).Footnote ³⁶

This political consistency is exemplified in the introduction to Leshchinsky’s 1933 book At the Edge of the Abyss, where he recalled that he had written an article with the same title “twenty-one years” ago, in 1906. Leshchinsky regretted then, in 1933, that the situation had worsened: “Nowadays, European Jewry is not at the edge, but already deep, very deep inside the abyss” (Leshchinsky [1933] 1947, pp. 10–12). Notwithstanding this further degradation, Leshchinsky also stressed that he remained committed throughout his whole life to the “emigration doctrine”—that is, the idea that European Jews had no future apart from “the exit out of Europe” (Leshchinsky [1933] 1947, p.12).

This consistency was not only political but also intellectual. Economic debates among early 1900s Labor Zionists had a theoretical legacy. From this perspective, non-proletarianization theories’ most enduring contribution was perhaps not political answers and forecasts based in statistics but, rather, establishing non-proletarianization as a scientific notion. In his letter to Leshchinsky, Hersch wrote that the Zionist Socialists “raised the [correct] question, the correct answer came from the Bund.”Footnote ³⁷ This opinion might have been true—at least from Hersch’s perspective—but one could argue that Leshchinsky and other Labor Zionists’ long-term intellectual influence precisely drew attention to this specific issue of Jewish access to large-scale industrial work. In Jewish economic historiography, this influence could have enforced the idea that, first, this issue was Jews’ main economic problem,Footnote ³⁸ and, second, that this discussion had to be informed by quantitative knowledge.

This particular framing determined how statisticians and economists assessed the favorability of Jews’ economic situation generally. I have shown that, in these theories’ early days, economic research on Jewish non-proletarianization was mostly based on pre-existing, late nineteenth-century statistical sources—particularly from the JCA report and the Russian census. These data’s focus on non-proletarianization led Labor Zionists to focus on indicators such as numbers of workers per factory, factory and workshop size, and the relative importance of Jewish employment in producing consumer goods versus the means of production, or salaried workers’ prevalence over independent workers.

In the 1930s, this intellectual tradition evolved into a more mature research program when Leshchinsky, as the head of the Economic-Statistical Section of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, became capable of conducting large-scale surveys about Polish Jews’ economic situation and producing his own statistics. Yet he essentially maintained the same focus. Leshchinsky and his collaborators at the YIVO explicitly regarded the proletarianization and non-proletarianization processes as central topics in their scientific agenda.Footnote ³⁹ This priority was clearly reflected in Yidishe ekonomik, the economic periodical published by the section and edited by Leshchinsky. This consistency in empirical research clearly shows that non-proletarianization theories survived their initial predictive failure and succeeded in presenting non-proletarianization as a stable scientific notion.

Another important element of consistency in this intellectual tradition is the reliance upon folk-psychological arguments about Jewish workers’ “character.” In his later works, Leshchinsky repeatedly referred to such arguments. Although he observed that this “spirit” had changed (Leshchinsky [1933] 1947, pp. 211–215), he never abandoned the idea of a specific and inherited mentality among Jewish workers. For instance, in a 1938 article, he wrote that the fundamental cause for the Jews’ “avoidance of the factory and strive toward craft professions” was the “desire to rise” on the social ladder, which was significantly more ingrained in the Jewish masses (Leshchinsky Reference Leshchinsky1938, pp. 175, 180).Footnote ⁴⁰

This continuous folk-psychological frame in Leshchinsky’s works—and, more generally, in non-proletarianization theories—leads me to disagree partially with Daniel Gutwein’s interpretation. In his article on Borochov and the development of non-proletarianization theories, Gutwein opposed these theories’ two respective versions by Leshchinsky and Horovitz. According to Gutwein, Horovitz would consider “national struggle” only as an indirect cause of non-proletarianization and would focus more on “psychological causes” that shape Jews’ “national character,” while Leshchinsky would regard national struggle as a direct cause produced by a “real economic” process on the market (Gutwein Reference Gutwein1990, p. 160). In my opinion, the opposition between two explanatory schemes—respectively, psychological and Marxist or economic—does not seem operative to me in this intellectual tradition, which distinguished itself precisely with its mixture of folk-psychological considerations and statistical-economic arguments.