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Ber Borochov

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Dov Ber Borochov
Ber Borochov
Ber Borochov
BornJuly 3, 1881 (1881-07-03) (Julian date)
Zolotonosha, Ukraine, Russian Empire
DiedDecember 17, 1917 (1917-12-18) (aged 36)
Kiev
OccupationFounder of the Labor Zionist movement

Dov Ber Borochov (Template:Lang-ru; July 3, 1881[1] – December 17, 1917) was a Marxist Zionist and one of the founders of the Labor Zionist movement and unusually for a Zionist, as a pioneer in the study of Yiddish as a language.

Biography

Borochov was born in the town of Zolotonosha, Russian Empire (currently in Ukraine),[2] and grew up in nearby Poltava. His mother and father were both teachers.[3] As an adult he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party but was expelled when he formed a Zionist Socialist Workers Union in Yekaterinoslav.[2] After being arrested by the Russian authorities he left for the United States.[4] Subsequently, he helped form the Poale Zion party and devoted his life to promoting the party in Russia, Europe, and America. When the Russian social democrats came to power, Borochov returned to Russia in March 1917 to lead the Poale Zion. He became ill and died in Kiev of pneumonia in December 1917.[2]

Ideology

Borochov became highly influential in the Zionist movement because he explained nationalism in general, and Jewish Nationalism in particular in terms of Marxist class struggle and dialectical materialism. He saw himself as a Marxist, and laid out his philosophy in his first major work published in 1905, The National Question and the Class Struggle.[3] Borochov predicted that nationalist forces would be more important in determining events than economic and class considerations, especially as concerned the Jews. Borochov argued that the class structure of European Jews resembled an inverted class pyramid where few Jews occupied the productive layers of society as workers. The Jews would migrate from country to country as they were forced out of their chosen professions by a "stychic process" which would ultimately force migration to Palestine, where they would form a proletarian basis in order to carry out Marxist class struggle.[2] In November 1905 he joined, and soon became a leader, of the Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) movement. He became an avid supporter of a Palestine-based Zionism following the Sixth Zionist Congress, during which the question of Uganda as a possible temporary refuge for the Jews was debated.[3]

A key part of Borochovian ideology was that the Arab and Jewish working classes had a common proletarian interest and would participate in the class struggle together once Jews had returned to Palestine.[5] In his last recorded speech, he said:

Many point out the obstacles which we encounter in our colonization work. Some say that the Turkish law hinders our work, others contend that Palestine is insignificantly small, and still others charge us with the odious crime of wishing to oppress and expel the Arabs from Palestine...
When the waste lands are prepared for colonization, when modern technique is introduced, and when the other obstacles are removed, there will be sufficient land to accommodate both the Jews and the Arabs. Normal relations between the Jews and Arabs will and must prevail.[6]

Influence

Borochov, along with Nachman Syrkin is considered a father of socialist Zionism. Borochov's ideas were influential in convincing Jewish youth from Europe to move to Palestine. However, Borochov's theories remained most influential in Eastern Europe, where they formed the basis of the Left Poale Zionist movement which was active in Poland during the interwar years. Indeed, Borochov's vision of class struggle in Palestine was widely viewed as untenable by the 1910s, with Jewish migrants to Palestine struggling to establish an economic foothold and with interclass cooperation seemingly necessary, and his theories dimmed in popularity there. Borochov, for years an advocate for a doctrinaire Marxist Zionism, himself seemed to repudiate his former vision of class struggle in Palestine in speeches towards the end of his life. Borochov insisted that he was a Social Democrat, but Borochov's Left Poale Zion followers continued to vigorously advocate class struggle both in Palestine and eastern Europe, supporting the February Revolution of 1917.

Return to Russia

Borochov returned to Russia in August 1917 and attended the Third All-Russian Poalei Tziyon Party congress to argue for socialist settlement in Palestine,[7] The Poalei Tziyon conference selected Borochov as a delegate the Conference of Nationalities[8] where he issued a paper calling for Russia as a decentralized socialist commonwealth of nations (“Rossiia kak sodruzhestvo narodov”).[9]

Death and split of Russian Poale Zion

Borochov caught pneumonia while on a speaking tour and died in Kiev on December 17, 1917 at the age of 36. The Russian Poale Zion movement split into two factions over attitudes towards the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. The Poale Zion Left formed a "Borochov Brigade" to join the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and ultimately split from the main Poale Zion party to become the Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion) in 1919 and would go on to join the Jewish section (Yevsektsiya) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while the social democratic Right Poale Zion was banned.[10]

Re-interment

After his death in December 2017 Borochov was buried in the Lukyanovka Jewish Cemetery in Baby Yar, near Kiev. In 1954 a process to reinter the remains of notable leaders of Russian Zionism to Israel was initiated by the Association of Russian Immigrants to Israel. With the intervention of Israel's second President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who had been a friend of Borochov, his remains were finally brought to Israel and buried in the Kinneret cemetery, the heart of Socialist pioneering, in April 3, 1963.[4]

International Poale Zion

The international Poale Zion movement also split into left and right factions, which have evolved into the modern Israeli political parties of the leftist Mapam (later Meretz) and the non-Marxist party of Ben Gurion, Mapai, the precursor of the Israeli Labor Party respectively.[2] The European branch of the Left Poale Zion movement was effectively destroyed by the early 1950s; many of its members were killed by the Nazis during World War II, and the surviving activists were persecuted and ultimately outlawed under the various post-war Communist regimes.

Yiddish

While most Zionists regarded Yiddish as a derivative language characteristic of the Jewish Diaspora and to be abandoned by the Jewish people in favor of Hebrew, Borochov was a committed Yiddishist and Yiddish philologist and wrote extensively on the importance of the language. He wrote a short dictionary of Old Yiddish, and was a regular contributor to the Yiddish daily Di Warheit. Although he only began to study Yiddish at the age of 26, he is considered the founder of modern Yiddish studies.[2][11]

Borochov’s contributions were recognized in various ways by the early Jewish settlement in Palestine. For example, the first workers' neighborhood in the country, in what later became the city of Giv'atayim, was named after Borochov.

Notes

  1. ^ Ber Borochov's Letters (1987-1917), Edited by Matityahu Minc & Zvia Balshan, Am Oved Publishers Ltd. Tel Aviv, 1989, page 13.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Green, David B. (December 17, 2012). "This day in Jewish history / A great Zionist mind dies young". Ha'aretz. Retrieved December 17, 2012.
  3. ^ a b c Green, David B. (2012-12-17). "This Day in Jewish History 1917: A Great Zionist Mind Dies Young". Haaretz. Retrieved 2018-02-13. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  4. ^ a b Bar, Doron (2016). Landscape and Ideology. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG,. ISBN 9783110493788.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  5. ^ "Ber Borochov". Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved December 17, 2012.
  6. ^ ""Eretz Yisrael in our Program and Tactics" (Ber Dov Borochov)". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 2018-02-13.
  7. ^ Cohn-Sherbok, D. (1997). Fifty Key Jewish Thinkers. Routledge. p. 22. ISBN 9780415126274. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
  8. ^ Gurevitz, B. (1980). National Communism in the Soviet Union, 1918-28. University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 21. ISBN 9780822977360. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
  9. ^ "YIVO | Borokhov, Ber". yivoencyclopedia.org. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
  10. ^ Borochov, B.; Cohen, M. Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation: Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism. Transaction Books. p. 31. ISBN 9781412819695. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
  11. ^ "Science in Context - Ber Borochov's “The Tasks of Yiddish Philology” - Cambridge Journals Online". journals.cambridge.org. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
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