reviewed by Ellen Rifkin
In politics, as in friendship or love, we don't get to do it all. Our vision of social change may include planet earth and every creature on it, but our commitments to women's health, or to the lives of children, or to Jewish cultural survival, for example, may claim the actual time and energy we have to give. In spite of our deepest longings, we end up making choices.
Who do we choose to work with and why? What is the relationship among our sensibilities, our convictions and dreams, and our choice of comrades? Naomi Shepherd's A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals reminds us that these questions aren't new. In the period that interests her--the late 19th and early 20th centuries- -Russian Jews living under the Czar were fast becoming an urban working class, as hundreds of thousands left behind the world of the shtetl. Faced with intensified economic and cultural discrimination in the cities of the Pale of Settlement, 0 many dreamed of fundamental social transformation and also fought bitterly among themselves. Internationalists saw themselves as citizens of the human race and threw in their lot with Russian revolutionary organizations; Bundists saw Jewish workers as allies of Russian socialists but also as an oppressed minorityin need of cultural and political autonomy; Zionists believed authentic freedom for Jews required our own nation-state. Each group gave lip service to gender equality, as we call it today, but actual opportunities varied. This milieu is the backdrop for Shepherd's book. She gives us a fascinating history of six activists, exploring the complex and difficult ways that they ex pressed themselves as Jews, as women, and as political actors on a world stage.
The lives of her subjects span, approximately, the four decades before and four decades after the Soviet revolution of 1917, and the major developments in Zionism, Bundism, and the U.S. Labor movement. The six activists are Anna Kuliscioff, influential in the Italian socialist movement from the late 1870s through the early 1920s; Rosa Luxemburg, avidly anti-nationalist and anti-Zionist, and active as a prominent Marxist theorist in the first two decades of this century; Esther Frumkin, also a committed Marxist during the same period as Luxemburg, but an activist who united her socialist vision with Jewish nationalism as a leader of the Jewish Labor Bund; Manya Shochat, organizer of the first collective settlement in Zionist Palestine; Bertha Pappenheim, founder of the German Jewish feminist movement and consistently active from the turn of the century until her death in 1936; and Rosa Pesotta, an anarchist who emigrated to the United States as a young woman and who was prominent in the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union until her resignation from the executive board in the 1940s.
By drawing detailed and colorful portraits of these six figures, Shepherd teaches us a good deal about the political movements they helped shape. She also contextualizes the six extended individual portraits with capsule biographies of women whose lives in some way paralleled those of her main subjects. Consequently, we meet not only Esther Frumkin but an impressive number of her revolutionary Bundist comrades, while a whole gallery of middle- class reformers high lights the distinctiveness of Bertha Pappenheim's career. Shepherd therefore emphasizes how the specific direction of each woman's life was both rooted in the actions of her contemporaries and shaped by perspectives she herself chose to discard or embrace.
Though not Shepherd's exclusive concern, the Eastern European Jewish milieu is central to her work. Out of it emerged Esther Frumkin's advocacy of the Yiddish language andyidishkayt as the basis for a proletarian Jewish culture in the Diaspora. From the communal religious organizations of Jewish artisans were developed new forms of mutual aid to meet the needs of women workers and strikers. Interaction between activists and the agricultural collectives of Russian peasants strongly influenced Manya Shochat's determined struggle to prove the viability of kibbutzim in pre-state Israel, 1 and her participation in plots against anti-Semitic czarist officials piqued her lifelong taste for danger Forced urbanization of Jews in the Pale led directly to the influx of Jewish poor into Bertha Pappenheim's Germany; as traditional communal institutions disintegrated, Jewish prostitution became widespread and claimed her attention.
Among Shepherd's six activists, the work of Frumkin, Shochat, and Pappenheim was solidly embedded in the concerns of Eastern European Jewry, and rooted in a sense of Jewish identity as each understood it. But the rich political history of Jews in Russian Poland also directly influenced the socialism of Anna Kuliscioff in Italy, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, and the unusual anarchism of Rosa Pesotta, who worked as a CIO strike leader and educational organizer all over North America. Shepherd shows how the lives of each of these three, though far removed from specifically Jewish concerns, also reflected back upon the Ashkenazi communities they had left.
The "woman of valor" in the Jewish scriptures, 2) whose "price" is "far above rubies," works with her hands as well as her mind. She is a craftswoman and businesswoman, a dispenser of wisdom and charity. Her competence and strength, though, are rooted first and fore most in her commitment to her husband and her position in her family. All of Shepherd's six activists would have been found wanting as women by traditional Jewish standards. Shepherd's title reminds us loudly of this, and her extensive first chapter argues that the "wisdom" ascribed by Jewish tradition to this "woman of valor" has nothing to do with To rah learning, the most precious gem of all. This sets the stage for the "rebellion" she wants to explore.
Shepherd shows that Jewish women from the Pale of Settlement, unlike Jewish men, participated in radical movements in numbers far exceeding their actual percentage of the population. To explain this, she interweaves the position of women in Eastern European Jewish culture with political and economic developments in late nineteenth- century Russia. She points out, as have several writers theorizing about Jewish women's radicalism, 3 that Jewish women were raised in a culture that highly valued participation in an intellectual tradition and simultaneously barred them from access to that tradition. In her capsule biographies of revolutionary women, Shepherd cites instance after instance of daughters of Orthodox merchants or liberal maskilim (secular intellectuals) whose brothers were sent to yeshivas, while they were supposed to content themselves with learning the prayer over the candles or studying secular subjects at home with an indulgent and "enlightened" father. Therefore, Shepherd con tends, when the czarist regime opened up its schools and universities to Jews--and women-- for the first time in the 1860s and 1870s, upper middle-class Jewish women flocked to the gates. Those who were not admitted under the quota system traveled to Germany or Switzerland to study and to train for professional careers.
Many, however, never practiced their professions, and some never even graduated. In the decades after Alexander II freed the serfs (1861) and temporarily lifted economic and geographical restrictions against Jews, revolutionary ideas spread throughout Russia like wildfire, particularly among university students. Even the government rabbinical seminary in Vilna was a major center of anarchist and populist activity.(4) Coming from backgrounds that at once stimulated and suppressed their desire for learning, Jewish women students in particular took to revolutionary doctrine as if it were "oxygen." In other words, "One set of 'holy books' had taken the place of those others that the girls could not read."
Jewish women believed strongly in the liberatory power of education. While upper-class Russian women were "bringing education to the peasants" through the Sunday School movement, Shepherd asserts that university-educated Jewish women led "circles" for their working-class sisters--in the years leading up to and following the formation of the Bund--on a scale unmatched among the gentiles. Like Esther Frumkin, who was still an adolescent when she led her first circle, these leaders ac corded as much importance to socialist theory and political economy as to geometry or literature; as political educators and activists, they contributed substantially to the formation of a distinctive. militant Jewish working class in the urban centers of the Pale. They were tremendously significant historically: In the late nineteenth century, Jewish women formed a quarter of the Eastern European work force that ultimately overthrew Russian czarism (p.6).Jewish factory workers were the first to use the "strike weapon," and the Bund evolved into a strong socialist organization well in advance of the Russian workers' parties.
Shepherd contends that hunger for learning drove Jewish women out of their own communities. Her absorbing accounts demonstrate that when this hunger turned into a taste for freedom and a desire for justice, some of them returned to their communities of origin as revolutionaries and activists, while others were driven even further away from their Jewish communities. She points out, for example, that women determined to live as freely as possible in their personal lives, or who were committed in their political work to women's sexual freedom, could not find homes in any Ashkenazi community during the period that she examines. Though she does not draw the connection specifically, among her roster of rebels it was Kuliscioff, Luxemburg, and Pesotta--the international socialists or anarchists whose political work took them the furthest from the Jewish community--who also sought egalitarian heterosexual relationships outside of marriage.
Shepherd's treatment of Rosa Luxemburg's life in the context of Jewish identity is especially interesting. She finds in Luxemburg's private papers evidence that her parents were far more rooted in Jewish culture than the famous theorist acknowledged, and argues, citing letters, that in later life Luxemburg regretted having attended an International congress--"making the whole world happy," Luxemburg wrote wryly in retrospect--while her father was dying. Luxemburg's contempt for other Jews and self-contempt emerge at different points in Shepherd's portrait of her. Re counting the circumstances of a pogrom that swept through Luxemburg's neighborhood on Christmas day, 1881, when she was 11, and juxtaposing various fragments from her public and personal writings, Shepherd links Luxemburg's experience of herself as a Jewish daughter, her sometimes "irrational" (in Shepherd's words) internationalism, and her rejection of "special Jewish sorrows," as Luxemburg her self referred to them. The author's compassion for the ways that oppression can affect our thinking comes through strongly here. An epilogue on Emma Goldman also examines-- poignantly in places--a thinker whose connections to the Jewish community were extremely ambivalent.
At one point, Shepherd asserts that her rebels are most significant historically as Jewish women not because of the political issues they advanced but because of their "efforts to create a new identity for themselves as women, in defiance of the norms of their own society" (p. 290). Yet we come away from the book with an extensive, vital sense of their public and organizational activities, while the dimensions of their personal struggles as women are sometimes obscured. For example, precisely because she draws such a fascinating picture of Manya Shochat, a seemingly fearless revolutionary, I wanted to know even more about the issues she grappled with personally.
As Zionist pioneers, both Manya Shochat and her husband figured importantly in the radical Shomer and the Labor Legion--two organizations "fervently dedicated" "to the social ideal of the collective" and to the principle of "Hebrew labor"--the idea that Jews themselves should do manual work in the land of Israel rather than functioning as supervisors for Arab labor (pp. 189-190). Though the principle of Hebrew labor never achieved general acceptance, the kibbutzim have had tremendous economic and political importance in Israel's development. Their existence owes a great deal to Manya Shochat's determined convictions, re search, and personal charisma.
Overcoming resistance and skepticism from nearly all backers of the Zionist venture at that time, in 1907 Manya founded the first agricultural Jewish workers' collective in Palestine and proved its economic viability within a year. Located in a remote settlement near the Galilee, it had also provided an initial base for the Shomer, the first roving contingent of Jewish guards for the Zionist settlements.5 The collective Manya led at Sejera was then also the only place in Palestine where women actually worked the land; it inspired the agronomistHanna Meizel to establish a training farm specifically for the women who at other settlements were given few opportunities outside of the kitchen.6) It was thus an extraordinarily important experiment, both as a prototype of the Labor Legion's collectives and as an example of a community in which women were nearly equal participants. Though both the Labor Legion and the Shomer were ultimately marginalized in Israeli politics, "even the most sober historians," writes Shepherd, acknowledge that they were crucial to the creation of Israel.
Though Shochat emerges as a vivid personality and remarkable pioneer in Shepherd's ac count, the writer does not specifically explore connections between her political commitments and questions she may have wrestled with personally. She does suggest that her "unhappy middle age" may have been linked to the isolation of the Shomer and Labor Legion at the hands of Ben Gurion and the Histradrut.7 She leaves us to speculate largely on our own, though, about Shochat's suicidal tendencies and the price she may have paid for remaining "politically and sexually loyal" to her "chronically unfaithful husband." I especially missed somediscussion of what it may have meant to Manya Shochat that the trails she blazed for Jewish women--and men--to work the land were effectively abandoned during her lifetime. Given the contrast between my Sunday School images of desert pioneers and the reality of Israel's dependence upon Arab labor as the economy evolved, I wanted to read more about Shochat's conviction that Jewish and Arab workers needed to build a movement together on an equal foundation. Shepherd notes that Manya was "haunted" always by the contra diction between this conviction and her belief that Arab workers should be supplanted by He brew labor in Palestine. Now that Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza are achieving the right to develop their own economy, it wouldbe instructive to learn more about Shochat's vision of a bicultural workers' organization.
0. The region in western Russia (including what is now Poland, Lithuania, White Russia and the Ukraine) where the overwhelming majority of Russian Jews were required by law to live in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only a small number of professionals and businessmen were allowed to travel or reside outside of this area. Shepherd writes, "By 1897 there were more than five million Jews in the Pale." [Return to text]
1. Shepherd notes that the example of Arab collectives in Palestine influenced Shochat's vision also. [Return to text]
2. Book of Proverbs 31:10. [Return to text]
3. See Irena Klepfisz in "Di Mames, dos loshn: Feminism, Yidishkayt, and the Politics of Memory," in Bridges, Vol. 4, No. 1; Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl (Cornell UP 1990); and Sydney Stahl Weinberg, The World of our Mothers (University of North Carolina 1988). [Return to text]
4. Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements 1871-1917 (Schocken 1977), p. 30. [Return to text]
5. Arab neighbors had formerly been hired for this purpose, Shepherd explains (pp. 194-195). [Return to text]
6. See also Shulamit Reinharz, "Manya Wilbushewitz-Shohat and the Winding Road to Sejera," in Pioneers and Homemakers, ed. Deborah Bernstein (SUNY 1992). [Return to text]
7. Israeli umbrella trade union organization. [Return to text]
The conclusion of this article appears in BRIDGES Volume 4 Number 2.
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