Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund by Frank Wolff

Abstract

The continuing economic development of Imperial Russia and the pre-1880s state policy of "civilizing" Jewish subjects through luring them into general education prepared ever larger numbers of Jews to give up their traditional ways and live a life culturally compatible with that of the urban Christian population. A very small minority even converted to Christianity and thus emancipated themselves from the stifling legal restrictions placed upon adherents of Judaism. However, hundreds of the converts later officially returned to Judaism after realizing that conversion did not alleviate the stigma of their origin. A new stratum of [End Page 220] people, with one leg in traditional society and the other in the non-Jewish world, arose in Russia. Not only state school and university graduates steeped in Russian culture belonged to this stratum. The same or nearby social space was populated by "semi-intelligentsia" (54). This snobby tag described haphazardly educated autodidacts, many of them renegade Talmudic students.