Yevsektsiya

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yevsektsiya (alternative spelling: Yevsektsia), Russian: ЕвСекция, the abbreviation of the phrase "Еврейская секция" (Yevreyskaya sektsiya) was the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party created to challenge and eventually destroy the rival Bund and Zionist parties, suppress Judaism and "bourgeois nationalism" and replace traditional Jewish culture with "proletarian culture", as well as to impose the ideas of Dictatorship of the proletariat onto the Jewish worker class. An important aim of the Yevsektsiya was to mobilize the world Jewry in favor of the Soviet regime. The first conference of Yevsektsiya took place in October 1918. For most of its existence, the Yevsektsya was headed by Semyon Dimanstein (Семен Диманштейн).

Persons of Jewish origin were over-represented in the Russian revolutionary leadership. However, most of them were hostile to traditional Jewish culture and Jewish political parties, and were eager to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party's atheism and proletarian internationalism, and committed to stamp out any sign of "Jewish cultural particularism". Yevsektsiya members were sometimes derogatorily called Yevseki (pl.).

In 1919, Zionist parties' headquarters in Moscow and Petrograd were taken over, their membership arrested and their newspapers shut down. In April 1920, the All-Russian Zionist Congress was broken up by the Yevsektsiya activists and the Cheka. Seventy-five delegates were arrested on the spot, thousands of members were sent to prison for "counter-revolutionary... collusion in the interests of the Anglo-French bourgeoisie... to restore the Palestine state."

1 Languages and culture
- 1.1 Suppression of Hebrew
- 1.2 Yiddish
2 Dismantlement of Yevsektsiya
3 Footnotes
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Languages and culture

Lenin wrote in his Critical Remarks on the National Question (1913): "Whoever directly or indirectly puts forward the slogan of a Jewish "national culture" is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of the old and of the caste position of the Jews, an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeosie".

[edit] Suppression of Hebrew

The Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew "reactionary" since it was associated with both Judaism and Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education) as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education (the language itself didn't cease to be studied at universities for historical and linguistic purposes [1]). The official ordinance stated that Yiddish, being the spoken language of the Russian Jews, should be treated as their only national language, while Hebrew was to be handled as a foreign language ([2]). Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s. Despite numerous protests in the West^[1], teachers and students who attempted to study Hebrew language were pilloried and sentenced for "counter revolutionary" and later for "anti-Soviet" activities. ^{[citation needed]} The famous Habima Theater had to obtain official permission to exist from Lenin, but was branded a "zionist nest" and in the early 1920s was forced to leave Russia for a long world tour. It settled for good in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1926.

In 1930, as concerns about the Soviet suppression of the Hebrew culture escalated, a group of Western intellectuals not considered hostile to the Soviet regime hoped to influence its anti-Hebrew policies. The protest letter was authored by writer Jacob Klatzkin, among the signatories were Albert Einstein, Selma Lagerlöf, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, Arnold Zweig, Artur Schnabel, Max Liebermann and Edouard Herriot. It stated:

"We, European intellectuals, friends and supporters of every means which could lead away from capitalist economic chaos and its catastrophes of bloody wars, desire by our signatures to make the Russian Government take note that, concerning the Hebrew language and its persecution, we can neither approve the stand of the "Jewish Section" nor understand why the Government should consider itself bound insolubly to this section of the communist party. ... The Jewish people cannot and will never renounce the revival of its great cultural legacy—one of the greatest—which has been given to Human Spirit imperishable values, and, further, continues to give them in the form of modern Hebrew poetry and philosophy." ^[3]

[edit] Yiddish

The Soviets made some efforts to encourage "Soviet proletarian culture" in Yiddish language as a countermeasure against traditional Jewish "bourgeois" or "shtetl" culture. A Yiddish newspaper, Der Emeth ("The Truth") was published from 1920 to 1938. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was established in a remote area of southern Siberia in 1928 to serve as a new homeland for Jewish proletarian culture within the USSR, and Yiddish was one of its official languages. For some time in the 1920s Yiddish was designated one of the four official languages in Belarus. During 1920s-1930s, many educational institutions in the former Pale of Settlement taught in Yiddish. In all Soviet schools the emphasis in history subjects was shifted from the traditional history of the Jewish people as described in the Bible to the Marxist history of class struggle.

Minority national cultures were officially stimulated in the Soviet Union, as the Bolsheviks sought to disassociate themselves from the chauvinism and imperialism of tsarist Russia. However, by Soviet definition, national cultures were to be "socialist by content and national by form", to be used to promote the official aims and values of the state. The specific shtetl culture associated with Yiddish was partly undesirable for the regime and partly unattractive for the ambitions of the new generation, and Yiddish schools suffered from a lack of staff and resources, so both became less popular with time. In addition, Yiddish began to silently fall out of favor in the mid 1930s, along with minority cultures and languages in the general [4]. A new low was reached when Stalin initiated a covertly anti-Semitic campaign in 1948 (See Solomon Mikhoels, Rootless cosmopolitan, Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee). There are still a few writers in the countries of Former Soviet Union, who write in Yiddish, such as Alexander Beiderman from Odessa and Josef Burg from Chernivtsi.

[edit] Dismantlement of Yevsektsiya

The Yevsektsia was disbanded in 1929, after the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Many of its members perished in the Great Purge, along with their Gentile counterparts.