You might know Tevye — the dairyman who ascended to fame through the familiar and beloved musical, Fiddler on the Roof. But Tevye’s initial rise to stardom occurred earlier. Before being adapted for stage and screen, the character first appeared in the Yiddish language stories of Shalom Rabinovitz (1859–1916), known better by his pen name, Sholem Aleichem.
Along with Mendele Moykher Sforim (1835–1917) and Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (1851-1915), Sholem Aleichem is considered a parent of modern Yiddish literature. Born in Pereyaslav, Ukraine, Sholem Aleichem received elementary education in a traditional Jewish kheyder before attending a Russian secondary school. Initially, he aspired to write in more well-respected languages — Russian or Hebrew. Ultimately, his writings in his vernacular, idiom-rich Yiddish were the works that brought him acclaim.
Sholem Aleichem was a keen observer of Jewish politics, and he used fiction to chronicle the upheavals in Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his characteristically wry but compassionate humour, Sholem Aleichem critiqued as much as he cheered and consoled. By satirising their very real growing pains, Sholem Aleichem gave his readers permission to laugh at themselves while urging them to chart a path forward. He offered his work as a poultice for smarting changes and wielded it as a weapon in contemporary political conflicts. A century later, his stories provide a guide to the political and cultural conflicts that gripped the Jewish world at the start of the twentieth century.
One of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Di ershte yudishe republik(1907), provides a humorous typology of the parties to these conflicts. This satirical utopia, published in nine instalments by the then St. Petersburg-based Yiddish-language daily, Der Fraynd, tells the story of thirteen Jewish castaways of various political persuasions who try to establish a Jewish state on the island where they are shipwrecked. However, establishing the ‘The Thirteen United States of the First Jewish Republic’ was not an easy task. On every question of institutional design and social organisation, the thirteen ‘Jewish Robinsons’ disagree. ‘Thirteen people, thirteen opinions’ becomes the story’s central refrain.
Each of the thirteen Jewish inhabitants of the island represents what Sholem Aleichem calls an ‘element’ in modern Jewish politics. They are known to one another by their sobriquets: The Atheist, The Orthodox, The Zionist, The Territorialist, The Socialist, The Capitalist, The Assimilationist, The Nationalist, The Idealist, The Materialist, The Madam, The Proletarian, and The Writer.
While on board the ship, the swaggering American Atheist struts about the deck in his suit vest, making drawn-out speeches. When cast into the sea by a storm, he pleads with God for his life. Safe ashore, his disbelief is restored. The American Atheist is a new element in Jewish politics, born when successive waves of pogroms occasioned mass migration from Eastern Europe to the United States. Sholem Aleichem, too, arrived in the United States from Russia in the aftermath of The 1905 Revolution, when the Black Hundreds carried out and the tsarist authorities quietly condoned counterrevolutionary pogroms. In New York, Sholem Aleichem encountered, for the first time, the inhabitants of a rapidly expanding centre in the ever-expanding socio-linguistic Yiddishland.
Among the thirteen shipwrecked, there is only one traditionally observant religious Jew. Appropriately, if uncreatively, he is nicknamed ‘The Orthodox’. He is the story’s sole representative of ‘old’ Jewish life. By treating him as a distinct ‘element’ in Jewish politics, Sholem Aleichem presents traditional observance as one of many modes of Jewishness and departs from an understanding of Jewish life as an indivisible whole in which the customs of dress and music that we call culture, the devotional practices we call religion, and the conflicts of inter- and intra-communal institutional design and social organisation that we call politics, were intertwined. This rupture opened up new possibilities. Today, the best-known variety of Jewish politics to result from this break between old and new is Zionism.
Unfortunately for The Zionist, he had the bad luck to wash up somewhere other than the ‘promised land’. Though the island provided abundant bananas, nuts, and goat’s milk, it was no land of milk and honey. Cutting his losses, The Zionist insists on calling the new Jewish state ‘Israel’ anyway. Sholem Aleichem’s Zionist represents the then relatively new Palestino-centric Political Zionism eventually endorsed by Theodore Herzl and embraced by the Zionist Organization he helped to found in 1897. Before the twentieth century, proto-Zionist groups had advocated ‘self-help’ and resettlement in colonies in Ottoman Palestine. Unlike Political Zionists, Proto-Zionists did not aspire to statehood. Similarly, ‘Cultural’ or ‘Spiritual’ Zionists, like Ahad Ha’am, saw the revival of spoken Hebrew and the establishment of a Jewish cultural centre in Palestine as critical for Jewish flourishing wherever they lived. This could be accomplished without statehood. Political Zionists also faced competition from Socialist Zionists who dreamt of a Jewish state in Palestine but dreamt it in red, managing even to see the project of colonisation with rose-tinted glasses.
Like Sholem Aleichem’s Zionist, The Territorialist wants to establish a Jewish territory with the trappings of political sovereignty. Unlike The Zionist, he does not have his heart set on any particular place. He will take what he can get. He is prone to compromise, that is, with everyone except the Zionist. Disagreements with those closest to you are often the most bitter, and the split between Zionists and Territorialists was no exception. At the Sixth Zionist Congress, Herzl tentatively introduced Chamberlain’s proposal to establish a Jewish homeland in British-colonised East Africa. In the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom (1903), it seemed ridiculous to the Territorialists not to accept. Led by Israel Zangwill, the Jewish Territorialists Organization continued to seek a suitable territory for Jewish settlement wherever they could find it.
However hostile Territorialists and Zionists were to one another, they jointly opposed non-territorialist and anti-Zionist Jewish socialists committed to remaining in the diaspora. Known for his fiery speeches in a Yiddish that is more Russian than Yiddish, a black-shirt-wearing student represents an ascendant element in Jewish politics – The Socialist. Jewish Socialists were members of several Jewish and non-Jewish parties. The largest Jewish socialist party was the General Jewish Labour Bund. The Bund predated, initially outnumbered, and helped to form the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Jews were also overrepresented in the RSDLP and in non-Marxist parties like the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In addition to embracing socialist ideals of community, equality, and liberty, Jewish parties endorsed ‘Autonomism’ – the idea that Jews were a diasporic nation entitled to national cultural autonomy wherever they lived. Though subject to disagreement, Autonomism usually entailed group rights, including language rights, and control over educational institutions like schools and cultural institutions like publishing houses and theatres.
While Sholem Aleichem’s Atheist argued with The Orthodox about God, and The Zionist with The Territorialist about where Jews should live, The Socialist had it out with The Capitalist about what the Jewish role in economic life and broader political and social systems should be. Always the first to give his opinion, The Capitalist’s political proclivities are captured by his proposal at the constitutional convention of the new Jewish republic that the inhabitants of the island be divided into three classes with corresponding sets of entitlements. First-class citizens would be entitled to eat, drink, and sleep. Second-class citizens would be free to amuse first-class citizens with conversation, stories, and jokes. The ‘free citizens of the third class’would be free to work for the higher classes and keep it to themselves when they disliked something.
Though each of the thirteen is from a different place with the mannerisms to prove it, only The Assimilationist makes this sort of acculturation a self-conscious policy. The narrator wryly refers to The Assimilationist, an intellectual from Warsaw and a self-proclaimed Pole, as ‘one of Moses’s Poles’. Acculturationism came in an assortment of forms and was not an unpopular option, especially where legally enshrined and socially widespread antisemitism restricted the choices of Jews. Hardline assimilationists encouraged Jews to give up all vestiges of their Jewishness and adopt the dominant culture of the country where they lived. Civic integrationists encouraged Jews to transform Jewishness – a way of life and identity – into Judaism – a private religion akin to Christianity.
The Nationalist disdains anything that smells of acculturation. The irony of this is that his conception of modern nationhood comes from the non-Jewish world. Jewish nationalism came in many forms in the early twentieth century, and many streams included in this typology came in a nationalist variety. Political Zionists and Territorialists, who sought a territory for a nation, are most easily recognisable as nationalists in the way we use the term today. The Jewish Socialist Workers Party and the Jewish Folkspartay considered themselves nationalist in that they prioritised what they took to be Jewish national interests; they were particularly concerned with developing national culture in the form of high literature and academic scholarship. Even the Bund endorsed the idea that Jews were a diasporic nation and pursued what they saw as the national interests of the Jewish proletariat. However, Bundists rejected the idea of unconditional Jewish solidarity across classes and were avowedly ‘neutral’ as to what the future of the Jewish nation would look like.
Setting material limitations and worldly considerations aside, The Idealist allied himself with The Zionist, The Nationalist, and The Orthodox. Though he has little to say for himself, his support for a particular proposal indicates that Sholem Aleichem saw that proposal as desirable but unfeasible, too good to be true.
Like The Idealist, The Materialist’s presence in a coalition denotes shared assumptions and a common orientation. Where The Materialist is present, Sholem Aleichem indicates that he sees a proposal as practical, stemming from or grounded in material conditions, though perhaps to the neglect of the ideal. The Materialist tends to keep company with the Socialist, the Atheist, and the Proletarian.
In a play on the twelve tribes, one of the thirteen inhabitants of the Jewish Republic is a woman — The Madam. Her status, like that of Jacob’s biblical daughter Dinah, is uncertain. She does not have a political persuasion of her own. Though she is a devoted member of the ‘political club’ that meets daily under the shade of a tree, her principal contribution to their debates is to pose, by her presence, the woman question.
While the others debate questions of institutional design, the worker — nicknamed The Proletarian — gathers bananas, milks the goats, remakes the beds with fresh grass, and diplomatically intervenes with common sense solutions. He is not a partisan, but a constituent the other twelve castaways appeal to for support and a producer on whom they depend for their material survival. The Proletarian represents a growing element in Jewish politics. Industrial development in Russia precipitated the formation of a large Yiddish-speaking proletariat destined to give Jewish politics a socialist bent. For Sholem Aleichem, The Proletarian is the voice of practical reason and the arbiter of what will come to be.
The Writer is the self-conscious voice of a growing Yiddish-speaking intellectual class that wrested literature and scholarship away from a Jewish intelligentsia that preferred Hebrew, German, and Russian and started speaking Yiddish among themselves. The Writer is an unapologetic Yiddishist. He believes that Yiddish, rather than any other language, should play the preeminent role in Jewish life, giving it its cultural shape. Many Yiddishists even thought Yiddish should delineate the national but non-territorial boundaries of the diasporic Jewish nation. By including a Yiddish Writer in his political typology, Sholem Aleichem acknowledged that writing in Yiddish was unavoidably political. Despite being the first language of most Ashkenazi Jews, Yiddish was widely disliked — denigrated by assimilationists and disparaged by Hebraist Zionists. To write in Yiddish was to take a controversial stance in the period’s fiercely fought and aptly named ‘Jewish language war’.
Ultimately, the fated thirteen fail to establish a Jewish republic. The recurring motif of the number thirteen proves a revealing choice for an author who was so averse to the number that, according to his daughter, he labelled the thirteenth page of his manuscripts 12a. Looking back, Sholem Aleichem’s triskaidekaphobia appears well-founded — he died in New York on 13 May 1916. But the world that Sholem Aleichem immortalised in his fiction remains a valuable resource for thinking about the intertwined histories of Yiddish literature and Jewish politics. In addition to illuminating the uses of utopian satire, Di Ershte Yudishe republic serves as a pertinent reminder that Jewish politics has never been characterised by consensus, least of all about what shape Jewish political, social, and cultural life should take.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.