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Science for the People: Visnshaft in Yiddish

>> Tony Michels is our incoming director of the Center for Jewish Studies, but he’s also the George L Mosse Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He just wrote that he’s the author of “A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York,” but didn’t point out that it was written up in The New Yorker, in the LA Review of Books, and is a fantastic book. He’s co-editor of the forthcoming “Cambridge History of Judaism: The Modern Era.” He’s co-editor of “Journal of Jewish Studies,” and many other things. And, also, Tony is the brainchild behind the coolest thing I’ve ever done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is together we organized a trip for undergraduates to go to New York City to do Jews, food, and immigration to New York. We just ate our way through New York City thanks to the Coleman Fund. And I could take some credit for it, but I have to say, as wonderful a speaker as you’re going to see Tony here, to see him standing in front of buildings and talking about texts and architecture and history, you feel like those people come back to life and walk past you, and it’s just a marvelous thing to behold. And hopefully we get to do trips like that in the future again, and we can bring alumni along because you’ll see how amazing Tony is as a speaker. But today you’ll get just a little taste of that. So without future ado, I’d like to introduce Tony Michels.

[applause] >> Thank you, Jordan, for that generous introduction. That, I think, set me up for disappointment. [laughter] But, thank you. Today, I’m going to speak about visnshaft, as it was known in Yiddish. Obviously the word is German derived. And the way it was used in Yiddish was everything from a natural science, physical science, social science, and the scientific or the scholarly study of the humanities. So when people used the word visnshaft, that’s what they were referring to. Really, the entirety of scholarly knowledge. And during the immigrant, the era of great mass immigration to the United States, from roughly the 1880s to the 1920s, visnshaft was a pervasive ideal.

It was in some corners almost a cult. People spoke of it as an necessity, as an imperative, as an ideal, as a goal that immigrants had to learn visnshaft. It was a major theme, an aspect of immigrant Jewish life. One reason for that, a big, the big, major force behind that, were socialists. Now, it’s worth remembering that socialists at this time and in the Jewish community, and especially in the major cities such as New York City with the largest immigrant Jewish population in the world, socialists were not lunatics or a fringe element or a minor group. Socialists were actually the major force in the immigrant Jewish community at that time because they published the most popular Yiddish newspaper, the Forverts, and they had founded all sorts of mass membership working class organizations, like trade unions or the Workman’s Circle, which I’ll talk about later today. And they were public figures, major lecturers, communal leaders. They were authorities who were listened to, looked up to in many respects. And so that when they spoke about visnshaft, as they often did, people listened to that.

A large number of immigrants, workers, socialists, sometimes people who did not considered themselves socialists, even rabbis took notice. That visnshaft was something that had to be acquired, that immigrants ought to educate themselves in the sciences. So, socialists played a very big role. And today, my talk is going to explore this movement for popular visnshaft in Yiddish. That’s what I’m going to speak on. What you’re looking at here is a picture of Karl Marx with his name in Yiddish. And Karl Marx is here because the reason why, I didn’t explain to you, the reason why socialists were so much at the forefront of this movement for popular visnshaft in part was their Marxism. And what I mean here is they understood Marxist thought and theory as a science of society. So that was the first part of it.

They understood their own view of the world as scientific. So that was one reason why they put so much emphasis on it. The other reason was that their thought was that for workers to be able to change the world, they needed to understand the world around them. They needed to understand not just their own working conditions, but the way society and government worked. History, where humanity had come from, so they might be able to understand where it was going. Now, any number of people might accept that view, not just socialists, but socialists thought it as an urgent need, as I say, because they wanted to harness learning in the service of social change. All right, so for them, this was not a leisurely pursuit exactly. This was part and parcel with struggles of immigrant workers to change their circumstances of working in the sweatshops and the tenements, so politics and education geared towards, again, or built around visnshaft was crucial to how they understood the world. And, finally, they viewed visnshaft as so important because they saw it as, they saw it as counteracting religious belief.

They were atheists, of course. At least the leading spokesmen of the Jewish working class, the writers, the intellectuals, the socialists activists were all atheists. But they did not think it was constructive or particularly helpful to attack religion in an aggressive or confrontational way. Anarchists did that. Anarchists were known for doing things like smoking cigarettes in front of a synagogue on Yom Kippur. [laughter] That was the kind of thing anarchists enjoyed doing, at least for a time. Marxists thought that was spiteful and counterproductive. That the best thing to do was to teach the sciences. And that by learning about history or Darwinism, evolution, and so forth, immigrants from traditional religious backgrounds would slowly but surely come to realize that belief in God, in the supernatural, anything supernatural was silly.

So it had served that purpose as well. Visnshaft served a secularizing goal without being aggressive, without being confrontational about it. With the idea being that even someone who thought of himself or herself as religious might partake in the acquisition of knowledge, secular knowledge and hopefully, down the line, come to relinquish belief in God for science. Okay, so we’re going to start in 1892 with a Yiddish magazine called the Zukunft. Die Zukunft, meaning the future. And what you’re looking at here is a poster that if you were in New York around 1910, you would have seen this handbill, a poster plastered around the Lower East Side and other Jewish neighborhoods. And it’s for the Zukunft. And it says at the top, “Es lebt Di tsukunft.” The Zukunft lives. And there’s “A groysn masn farzamlung.” A large mass gathering, a mass meeting to support this magazine, the Zukunft. This is 1910. I’m starting in 1892, but I wanted to show you an artifact of this magazine that was around the Lower East Side. This man speaking is Comrade William Edlund, a former Stanford University student who made his way to the Lower East Side to become a very popular Yiddish journalist, lecturer, and writer in the early 20th century. The Zukunft is where we’re going to start. This was a magazine that was dedicated, when it was founded in 1892, to the popularization of visnshaft in Yiddish.

Now, when it was started, the very first issue, the editorial, written by a man by the name of Philip Krantz, a Russian-born Jew who came to the United States via England in 1890 to become one of the foremost Yiddish editors, he said, Phillip Krantz said, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” He said that Zukunft is an experiment. “It’s a trial , and we don’t know if it’s going to work.” And he said that because there was nothing like this at the time anywhere in the world. There was no Yiddish magazine or publication of any kind where you could open up and read the kind of material you saw in the Zukunft. So, what did you see in the Zukunft? You saw articles like, articles on Darwin. You saw articles on psychology, physics, astronomy, sociology, criminology, history of the United States, history of Europe, and on and on. This was the typical issue of the magazine. You’d see all these articles, articles on all these subjects. And this was a new thing. This was a new thing in Yiddish. Why was it new? For a couple of reasons.

One, in eastern Europe, in Russia in particular, the censor banned this sort of thing. This was illegal. This kind of content was illegal You couldn’t publish a magazine with Karl Marx’s face on the front, as you saw on the first issue of the Zukunft. You couldn’t do it. You’d wind up in prison. So censorship prevented this kind of magazine in eastern Europe. There was no, in 1892, no Yiddish newspaper of any kind. Forget about a magazine like the Zukunft. There was nothing, no periodical press in Russia due to censorship. So there’s no tradition of this. And the other reason why it hadn’t been attempted was that most writers, educated people who knew enough about these subjects to write for this magazine had to know Yiddish and if they did know Yiddish, had to be willing to use Yiddish because most intellectuals thought Yiddish was either beneath them or was not a language capable of expressing high or sophisticated thoughts about anything.

So how can you explain the workings of the cardiovascular system in the Yiddish language? Yiddish language was meant for selling fish in the shtetl marketplace. Yiddish was the language of the home. It’s the language of lullabies. It’s the language of what the rabbi or the melamed speaks when he’s explaining Torah to the students. The idea that you could write this kind of material in the Yiddish language seemed ludicrous to most educated people at that time. You had to make an effort, if you were an educated person, to write Yiddish. And, in fact, the editor of this magazine at the time, Philip Krantz, did not know the language when he left Russia. He was a Russian-speaking Jew. And so he made that effort to learn Yiddish in London first and then the United States and to write to the masses in the language.

That was, he turned on its head what was expected, what intellectuals expected for themselves at this time. So, it was an experiment, he said. Are there enough writers? Who knows. Are there enough readers? Who knows. Because, after all, who were the immigrant Jewish masses? These were people with very little education. Most women, Jewish women, at that time, couldn’t read. Many men couldn’t read a whole lot. Their education was what? They went to heder and they studied Torah a little bit until they were 13, and then they stopped. And Jewish girls had almost no formal schooling in any way, shape or form.

And if you were a Jew who had a lot of education in a traditional setting, then that means you’re training to be a rabbi in yeshiva, right? And then there was the small number of secularly educated, maybe university-educated Jews, who may or may have known Yiddish, but if they knew Yiddish, then why read a magazine like the Zukunft. If you know Russian or English or German, you don’t need a magazine like this. So, were there enough readers? Were there enough writers? The whole Jewish world was such that it hadn’t yet yielded a magazine like this because there was seemingly no demand for it and there was no supply on either one. But this happened in New York City in 1892 because the immigrant Jewish world was changing so rapidly. It was a cauldron of social change. Immigrants had broken from their traditional communities. Parental authority was almost non-existent. Rabbis had almost no power of any– They had really no power of any sort. They had some influence, but their influence wasn’t great. Because most immigrants were fairly young and they spent most of their time working and they were open to cultural change, they didn’t want to spend much of their time in synagogues or living a devout Jewish life according to religious law.

So in this context, all sorts of things were possible. And one thing that was possible was the publication of a visnshaftlekheh, a scientific magazine like the Zukunft. As it turned out, the magazine was successful. According to the magazine’s own estimate, it was, it had about 3500 readers, subscribers rather, several times more, maybe 10,000 readers, which wasn’t bad in the 1890s. Again, especially for a journal as difficult as this was for most immigrants to read. We don’t know a tremendous amount about immediate reactions to the Zukunft, but the managing editor several years later quoted from a letter. He said Hebrew was inundated with hundreds of letters after these issues, the first two or three issues came out. He said that the office of the Zukunft on the Lower East Side regularly had workers who wanted to buy copies of the magazine. They were sold out completely.

They weren’t able to meet the demand. So, here are two letters. I’m going to read to you two letters that were supposedly sent to the editor. I say supposedly because I have not seen the letters. The letters have been destroyed or were lost or dumped out, whatever the case was. But according to the secretary of the magazine that handled correspondence, again hundreds of these came in, and I’ll read one. So here’s one letter. “We read the Zukunft and simply can’t believe our own eyes. “Is this possible that in the hated jargon–” That’s the word that was often used by educated Jews to describe the Yiddish language.

They called it a jargon (French) or jargon. “That in the hated jargon, in the language of servant girls, “such deep thoughts can be expressed plainly and simply so “that the ignorant might be introduced “to the highest science. “This is the greatest undertaking you can set for yourselves. “We will do everything in our power “to help you in your noble work.” So that was one letter that supposedly came in. Here’s, more briefly, another letter. “Die Zukunft is the only ray of light in our lives. “We gather in a hall in the evening and somebody reads “the learned articles aloud, and then we discuss them. “The effect that the Zukunft has had on us is indescribable. “Finally we have the possibility to partake “in the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge.” So it had a big effect.

The cover alone, I should say, the cover of the magazine projected the values of articles in the perceptive of the editor. So, what you saw on the cover was, first of all, a robed woman– I’m sorry I wasn’t able to find an image for you that was usable. So I can only describe it to you, I can’t show it to you. On the cover was a robed woman holding a torch, representing freedom, and holding a tablet that states in Yiddish “Workers of the world unite,” obviously from the Communist Manifesto. So that’s the first thing. The biggest image is a woman in robes holding a torch and then “Workers of the world unite.” And then, at her feet lies an array of scholarly books, various scholarly treatises around her, around her feet, representing, of course, science, visnshaft. And then an array of scientific tools, measuring instruments and so forth. Instruments, various instruments that scientists would use. And then, in Latin, at the bottom of the page, appears the words “Wisdom and labor conquers all.” Again melding the two impulses here, the need for knowledge and the idea that the working class benefits and of course not only benefits from knowledge, but is the future.

And indeed the idea of the name itself conveyed this kind of optimism. The future. There is a bright future. The future is guaranteed to be better but only if the readers of the Zukunft read this magazine and act on it. So, optimism, knowledge, socialism, simply uneducated people bettering themselves to change the world. That’s what that cover conveyed in every issue. And so all the contents on the articles, even if they had nothing to do with social struggle or politics, was somehow connected to that goal. So this helps to explain this kind of, this really overwhelming enthusiasm for the magazine, at least among its readers because they were being told, they were being ushered into the world of traditional Judaism, of the shtetl, of religion, and now they are exposed to the world of learning that was previously beyond reach. And on top of it, they were not being made to feel ashamed for being uneducated or being poor or coming from a poor background.

They were not ashamed of it in this context. They were elevated to a level of importance that they had never experienced before. Again, they’re lowly immigrants. They’re working in sweatshops. They’re out of place in the United States. They come from family backgrounds that were not prestigious in Jewish communities. These were the lower elements in Jewish communities. They weren’t the di sheyneh yidn, the rabbis, or the wealthy businessmen, you know? So they were accustomed to being in a lower status within the Jewish community and in the world beyond them. And now, in the grimy circumstances of the immigrant Jewish neighborhoods, they are exposed to a magazine and these ideals that imbue it in a new way. You can’t understand those letters that I read to you without appreciating the psychology in and around, the psychological uplift that the magazine represented.

All right, so, who read it? How did they read it? Where was it read? You might have noticed that one of those letters said, “We gather in a hall and read the magazine.” So it was read collectively in groups, and it was done that way because many people simply couldn’t– The typical reader is, of 1892, 1893, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t read it on its own for a couple reasons. One, the obvious reason is, as I keep stressing, they didn’t know anything about these subjects. Second was a problem of language. They knew Yiddish, but what kind of Yiddish is this in the Zukunft? Well, it had to borrow from German because Yiddish didn’t have all the terminology necessary. it had developed it yet, to explain, again, physics, biology, criminology, sociology, zoology. Right? So the language had to be invented as it went. Not Yiddish, but the kind of Yiddish that could convey the subject matter in an appropriate way for the readers. That was very difficult. And when you think that a good number of the writers for that magazine were not native Yiddish speakers, like the first editor himself, you can imagine how difficult this was to put out something that was digestible. So immigrants met often in groups to read to each other and to discuss.

There were a number of Zukunft clubs that formed. Clubs to support the magazine. They read it and they raised money for the magazine so it could continue to publish. So we know those clubs existed in various cities, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, and so forth. Beyond those clubs were what were called self-education societies. These were clubs started by young men and women to educate themselves. And this is one picture. It’s one example. This is in Chicago.

This is a group, well you can see the young men and women, represented almost equally. Notice the age. The age is important here. The people who were most likely to read a magazine like the Zukunft were in their teens and 20s in the 1890s. And the reasons for this. If you were, let’s say, under 10 years old when you came to the United States, you went to public school, probably, at least for a few years. You weren’t working in the sweatshops yet, and you acquired English more quickly than older immigrants, either in the streets or the public schools. They were too young for this, they were not as tied to Yiddish, and they were not yet working in the factories. So, someone who came between the ages of one and roughly 10 was heading towards English.

All right? If, however, on the other end, you were above the age of, let’s say, 25-30 when you came, if you had children already, you had other responsibilities than gathering it all at night to read in groups. All right? And the older you got, the more likely, at this point in time, more likely it was that you were religious and weren’t immediately attracted to this sort of, these sort of ideas. So we’re talking about a readership that was relatively young, in their teens and 20s, meaning that they were old enough to be tied to the Yiddish language but young enough not to be tied towards religious tradition so much that you would not pick this up. All right? And you can see this here. Right? You can see the age. Notice no man here is wearing a beard. That’s a clear indication that they are not religious anymore. I can guarantee you there’s not a single yarmulke on any head here. And so that right away tells you these aren’t religious people. They’ve already broken from that. And this is not, I should just say, this is not for the Zukunft. This is another publication called the Yiddish Di yidisheh arbeter velt, the Jewish Workers World in Chicago, but it is a self-education society.

They gathered every week to read and to discuss. Okay, good. All right. Here’s another group. This is called the Yunge yidishe literarishe farayn in Winnipeg. Oh, you can see here, the Young Jewish Literary Association in Winnipeg. This is a little later. This is from the late teens. And, again, notice the age. If anything, these people are even younger.

Men and women both. I don’t know what they read. I haven’t seen, I haven’t seen any documentation. In all likelihood, it was a mix of fiction, poetry. In other words, imaginative literature and scientific literature. That was often the combination. And this is a fairly large group. This group is not an educational society. This is just a group of guys who went to a park with the socialists Yiddish Forvets and thought it was important enough to take a picture.

Now, it’s important, I’m showing you this picture for a couple reasons. The first is the kind of loyalty that readers felt towards their publications. That they thought, and this is expressed here, that you see this over and over again in pictures from the time. Immigrants posed with their newspapers. Something that I think none of us can imagine doing today. Not only because many of us read online, but, nonetheless, we wouldn’t do it with the New York Times. And they’re doing it because they’re expressing a new identity. That’s what’s important here. That they are saying we are readers. We’re now readers in America.

We read. And we’re reading this newspaper. The socialist newspaper, which is the most popular Yiddish newspaper and that expresses who we are. You know, we’re readers. We’re secular. We’re learning about the modern world, and we favor social justice as they understand it. I should mention that the Forvets at this time had a weekly column called “Popular Science.” So there wasn’t the case that there was, you know, difficult magazines, only difficult magazine dealt with visnshaft. Popular newspapers also had columns for this. And so every week readers could read something, read about the topics the Zukunft covered but in a more, just much more, in a lighter way.

The articles were shorter. They were more superficial and so forth. But there’s the same idea, popular science, visnshaft for the people. And you have these readers saying this is, again, this is our newspaper. So there were all these groups, and we don’t know, these self-education groups, all we know is that they existed. They didn’t keep records. There are no minutes of meetings, but we know they existed because there were dozens of them that took out advertisements in various newspapers. That’s where the information comes from. So I’ll give you just a sampling of the names to convey what they were about.

There was a group called the Proletariat Society. There was the Young Education Society. Again the emphasis on youth. The Young Friends Progressive Education Society. Youth, progressive politics, education, right? All captured in that name: Young Friends Progressive Education Society. My favorite name that I’ve found, favorite group. Brotherliness Workers Continuing Education Society. [laughter] You know? It doesn’t sound good in English. It doesn’t sound good in Yiddish either. [laughter] This is, you know, they are not the most literate group, otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen that exact title.

And it admitted women, I should say. I happen to know that women were members of the Brotherliness Society. Don’t let the name fool you. So, there was the Karl Marx Association and the Ferdinand Lassalle Continuing Education Society and the William Morris Club and the Bakunin Group, named after the Russian anarchist. So there were just dozens of these groups. And many of them were dedicated to reading or hiring lecturers to come speak to them. The people who lectured were often writers for the Zukunft and other publications. So, this magazine, the Zukunft, was the beginning, at least in concrete form, of this mania for visnshaft. Now, I said that not just– I mentioned in passing that not just socialists approved of this, they were the main promoters, but those who did not see themselves as especially political or radical in any way liked this magazine.

And one example of it is the leading, one of the pioneers of the Yiddish press, a guy named Kasriel Sarasohn, who published various Yiddish newspapers, an occasional Hebrew publication, as well. And he announced in his paper how important it is to his readers. He said to his readers. This was in 1894… What did he say to his readers? He said to his readers that they needed to read the paper because it is “the only purely scientific journal “in simple Yiddish. “Everyone who loves education itself and wants the poor Jewish “people to become more educated should support the Zukunft “in its holy task by circulating it.” So a couple things I think are interesting and worth pointing out. The first is Sarasohn himself. He was a rabbi. He was an ordained rabbi in Lithuania. Comes to America, he’s not a rabbi in America.

He’s a newspaper publisher. He’s a businessman. So that’s one thing that’s interesting because it reflects the shift towards or away from religion that was very widespread. He didn’t reject it. He didn’t have a crisis of faith. He promoted it in his newspaper. He was always identified with the religious segment of immigrant Jewry. But he was no longer a rabbi because that didn’t make– He couldn’t earn a living doing that. And, second, this rabbi who, in Lithuania where he was from, would surely had condemned the Zukunft at that time. Right? Would have punished students if he saw students in yeshiva with a copy of the Zukunft tucked away in the Talmud, which happened, as we know from memoirs.

You’d be ejected from yeshiva from doing that. And he probably would have done that himself if he were there instead of New York City. But New York City, he says the Zukunft and its cause was a holy task. So, again, there’s a shift in values towards the secular that even rabbis, or former rabbis, accepted and promoted. One more comment about the readers that’s interesting, and a comment about who read them and so on. The Zukunft was also read in Russia, which is an interesting story in and of itself. The magazine was smuggled into Russia by couriers, usually revolutionaries, who had the magazine shipped from New York to Switzerland or France, often Switzerland, and then student revolutionaries, Jewish students and revolutionaries, took the magazine and put it in false bottoms in their suitcases. Or sometimes strapped them to their body and smuggled them one way or another across the Russian border into the Pale of Settlement where most Jews lived. And then the magazine was distributed surreptitiously.

Bundles were sometimes, one or two copies were sometimes dropped off in a base midrash where Jewish men would hang out, study Torah a little bit, socialize a little bit, some went there. Some went to book peddlers who distributed them. Sometimes they were dropped off in the back rooms of Jewish stores. In these ways, the magazine was circulated with high risk to small groups of Jewish workers and activists and revolutionaries who then often took the magazine into forests, into the woods, and they’d read them in groups, in circles out in the woods. They had to do this because if they got caught either by the Jewish communal authorities or by the Russian police, they could get into a lot of trouble. So they usually went out into the woods in the winter and when the weather was nicer, whatever. That’s where they went. And the activists of the time have written about these in the recollections and have talked about how important the Zukunft was to them. Because, again, they had no other source for this information and knowledge.

One activist in Minsk said that it was, as he called it, a true holiday every time the copy of the Zukunft arrived in Minsk in the 1890s and in the 1900s. These were shipped to political prisoners in Siberia. It got to the point where almost every single place where there was a group of workers and activists, the Zukunft reached them in Russia. This is in the years before the Russian revolution. So its influence spread eastward is my point here. Not just, it was not just limited to the immigrants in the United States. The Zukunft and the values and the information, the education it carried went in the other direction back to Russia. So by all accounts this was an achievement. On its fifth anniversary in 1897, the editor, the new editor who at that time was Abraham Cahan, there he is, the young Abraham Cahan, the great editor of the Yiddish forwards, that’s him as a young man in 1885, he boasted on the anniversary of the magazine, “Who in the early years,” the early years being two, three years before he wrote this, “Who in the early years “would have thought it possible.

“Die Zukunft, a pure scientific journal for the simple folk in “the simple language of the folk. “This is an event one could be proud of even if it were in a “major language of one of the gentile nations. “And it is only the labor movement’s pride,” he wrote. At that point, he boasted, 2,100 pages of visnshaft had been published. So that was something that the editors were very, very proud of. Eventually, the Zukunft evolved into a very different kind of magazine. It left its early mission to be a scientific journal and became more of a general interest magazine where you could read about contemporary politics, literature, theater, those sorts of things. It became a contemporary magazine of politics and the arts and was a very good one. The circulation eventually climbed to 20,000, which is actually, if you consider how small the Jewish community was, about 2.5 million, three million immigrants, it means a high proportion of immigrants read that magazine.

But it moved into something else. And by that time a new idea about visnshaft started to emerge. This idea that I’ll describe to you was brought by this man here. A man by the name of Chaim Zhitlowsky, a name that’s not well known today, but in his own time was, I’ll put it to you this way, he’s the most influential Jewish leader you’ve never heard of. In his day, he influenced every major Jewish political party, Zionists, socialist Zionists, all sorts of groups with his idea of Jewish nationalism, the details of which I’m not going to go into now. But the essential aspect for our purposes was this: that Jews– He was born in Russia into a traditional family, became a revolutionary, fled to Switzerland, earned a PhD in philosophy, was a founder of what became the largest revolutionary party in Russia called the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, came to the United States, however, and stayed there in part because he wanted to live among the largest Yiddish-speaking community in the world. And that was New York City that had a Jewish population that was about one-and-a-half-million by the time he settled in New York. So he thought this is where he wanted to be, and Zhitlowsky’s idea was basically this: that Jews are a Yiddish-speaking nation. They’re a nation without a territory, but they’re a nation with their own language and culture.

And that makes them– The fact that they have this language and culture means they are every bit as viable and valid as a nation as the French or the Germans or the Estonians or the Spaniards. That Jews were no less national than any of these groups. They just happened to lack a territory. And they aren’t as developed as some of those nations. They haven’t produced the heights of culture that the Germans have, yet. So his mission was to bring Yiddish-speaking culture into the 20th century, so that it would match the best of whatever European civilization had to offer. That was his idea. So when he came to the United States, he preached this idea. And so when he looked at the subject of visnshaft, he had a different view than people like Abraham Cahan, who I just showed you. Abraham Cahan’s view was that Yiddish is temporary.

It’s not permanent. The immigrants will adapt to America. They will learn English. It’s good that they learn English. This is the way of the country. And so they will eventually give up Yiddish and be part of the general American society or, more precisely, the general American working class. That Jews will assimilate into that and they’ll have their own culture, American culture. It’s progressive, ideally, and also committed to learning and science and rationality and enlightenment, but not Yiddish, in English. So, Yiddish, or a magazine like the Zukunft, was transitional for Cahan and almost all of its founders.

They didn’t see any value in Yiddish. They respected the language, but they didn’t see any permanent value in it. Zhitlowsky comes around two decades later and says, well, it’s good to educate the simple workers. They should have popular science. Popular visnshaft is good but that’s just the starting point. That’s the beginning point. What we need to aim for is our– We need to produce scholarship, advance knowledge in Yiddish that we ought to be able to not just appeal to the workers and the uneducated but the most educated people in society, the young Jews who are going to college and invariable leave the Jewish people when they go to college because why, what’s to be gained by staying with the Jewish people? They leave Yiddish because there’s no advantage or practical use to it if you’re going to college. You can read in other languages. So he said we have to stop this language assimilation by giving the best, the crme de la crme of Jewish life something worth reading in Yiddish.

So he created a different magazine just for that purpose, and it’s, whoops, it’s that one. It was called Dos Naye Lebn, the New Life. Again, the emphasis is on novelty and the future. It’s optimistic in the way the Zukunft is optimistic. This is from 1910, the January issue of 1910. And here, what you’d read in Dos Naye Lebn was a very different kind of content. There was no attempt to use simple language. The language was actually very, very difficult. It was difficult Yiddish.

Lots of abstract terminology. Lots of terminology adapted from religious sources, rabbinic sources, to convey abstract or high concepts. And subject matter that was of no immediate use to anybody, seemingly. So he wrote about philosophy. He was a philosopher, so he wrote quite a bit on the history of philosophy. He developed his own theory about morality and politics that he laid out here. He wrote about Jewish history across the centuries. Based often on original research by scholars, university-trained scholars who wrote in Yiddish. These are the kinds of people he gathered around him in the magazine.

Now, someone like Abraham Cahan thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and they got into a long-running debate. And the debate was over the purpose of visnshaft. Should visnshaft be popular to serve an instrumental purpose of educating workers and then helping them, guiding them out of the Jewish fold into the larger non-Yiddish-speaking world? Cahan said that’s the purpose of visnshaft. Zhitlowsky said no. Zhitlowsky said Yiddish is an end in itself in Yiddish culture. To create Yiddish culture, we need to create visnshaft. Not popularize it but create it. We need our own scholars. We need our own scientists who write in Yiddish. Cahan responded: You’re creating a culture for people that doesn’t exist and you’re an elitist.

And Zhitlowsky said in response: I’m not an elitist. He said, I’m serving many Jews who want to read in Yiddish, who don’t necessarily want to drift away from Jewish culture, but they don’t have an equal culture that exists in English. All right? So they went back and forth over this. In the Zukunft, you never read Darwin. You read popularizations of Darwin. Right? Summaries of Darwin. Summaries of Karl Marx. Zhitlowsky said, no, we need to translate them, right? And so in the wake of Zhitlowsky, his followers started translating. You could finally read Karl Marx and everything he wrote in Yiddish translation. Cahan looked at that and said this is a waste of time.

By the time an immigrant Jew can understand the content of Das Kapital or something like that, they can read in English. They don’t need the Yiddish, so you’re wasting your time. And again Zhitlowsky’s response is: You don’t understand what I’m talking about here. We don’t’ want them to leave Yiddish. We don’t want them to leave Yiddish. We want them to not have to make that choice between English and Yiddish. They could find everything they want in Yiddish was his point. All right, so, you start seeing translations of scientific work, historical works, faithful transition, high quality transitions by followers of Zhitlowsky or in journals, like Dos Naye Lebn. So it’s a very advanced magazine that signaled a new stage in thinking about the role of visnshaft in Jewish life.

Again, one that’s not instrumental but part of the cultivation of a new Jewish nation just beginning to flower. Zhitlowsky was the tribune of that way of thinking. Obviously, the readership was much smaller. But it was surprisingly wide. I went into the archives to see what I could find about his readers, and I saw these letters to the editor, letters to Zhitlowsky as editor, saying things like, you know, I’m a grocery wholesaler in Los Angeles, I kid you not. This is 1910-1912. I’m a grocer, I’m a vegetable wholesaler in Los Angeles, and I regard your magazine as a holy undertaking and here’s the donation. He sent in some donation. I don’t know what it was.

And I just want you to know, he said that we read your magazine in Los Angeles. A farmer, a Jewish farmer in Massachusetts, again I kid you not, wrote to him and said the same thing. He said, “I feel like I’m a little bit of an intellectual inside.” Those were his words, “I’m a little bit of an intellectual.” And so I turned to Dos Naye Lebn to satisfy my intellectual cravings. Another writer wrote to him and said, “You’re the embodiment of the Jewish nation.” What he meant is that you perfectly balance higher learning and commitment to the Jewish people. You are every bit as Jewish as a rabbi, even though you’re secular atheist, but you’re every bit as learned as a modern man because you have a PhD in philosophy and, you know, he could speak multiple languages and he dressed well and he looked very civilized and so forth. So that was the second approach to visnshaft that became current by the First World War. Finally, finally I want to turn to the way in which visnshaft became– I’ve been focusing on magazines, which had a popular readership, but I want to focus now on the way visnshaft was spread very broadly through mass membership organizations built by workers themselves, and the best example I can give you is the Arbeter Ring or the Workmen’s Circle, which some of you know and maybe even have some connection with. The Workmen’s Circle was founded in the same year the Zukunft was founded, in 1892 in New York City, on Essex Street, on the Lower East Side. Same street where the B’nai Brith was founded, actually.

And it was a small group of workers whose idea was– Well, you know, there’s no social insurance. There’s no social security at the time. They started a self-help organization. A mutual aid society. The idea is if you cut your finger off when you’re working at a sewing machine, you might lose your finger but at least you will have insurance. You’ll have financial support from this mutual aid society. Or if you pass away, your widow will be able to afford the burial. That was the idea. But because these were workers who had absorbed the ideas of enlightenment and visnshaft, they made a membership requirement in the Workmen’s Circle.

The membership requirement was every branch of the Workmen’s Circle had to hold educational lectures at least once a month. That was the distinguishing feature of the Workmen’s Circle as distinct from other self-help organizations. It was the educational component. It was an indication, again, that they had absorbed these ideas, these values of the socialists, intellectuals and writers and leaders that were all around them. They took it upon themselves to make that their own requirement, and they taxed themselves. They taxed themselves to pay for the fee. You have to pay for lectures. So they taxed themselves to do it. Right? Again more emphatically indicating how important this ideal of education was for them. The Workmen’s Circle grew.

It became a national organization with hundreds of branches and ultimately almost 90,000 members by the 1920s. So it was really a major organization by the ’20s with branches not just in the major cities but in what New Yorkers like to call the provinces. The provinces were everywhere outside of New York City, but that included everything from, you know, Madison, Wisconsin, to Sioux City, Iowa, to Galveston, Texas, you could find far flung branches of the Workmen’s Circle. The Workmen’s Circle created– this was in 1910– an educational committee to send out lectures across the country to spread the idea of visnshaft. And I want to give you some examples of this. There were, by 1908, 363 lectures organized by this committee alone. So almost every day of the week there was a lecture to attend in Yiddish by one of the hired lecturers of the Workmen’s Circle. And that number only grew. Some of these people were towering figures in immigrant Jewish life.

For example, a man by the name of Nachman Syrkin, who was the founding theoretician of socialist Zionism back when he lived in Germany. This is a Russian-born Jew, went to Germany, earned two PhDs there, and then, in the 1890s, wrote a very important work about antisemitism and the Jewish question and the need to create a Jewish homeland, a socialist Jewish homeland. He wound up in the United States, Syrkin, and became one of the most popular lecturers on all sorts of topics. So people like him were sent out by the Workmen’s Circle to speak on all the topics I’ve been talking about. But now, again, reaching a mass audience. The high point, the most significant achievement of the Workmen’s Circle, something that I still kind of marvel at to this day, was a series called “Di velt un di mentshayt, “Humanity in the World.” And this was a 13-part lecture organized by a young Russian Jewish revolutionary who came to the United States, who, by the way, went back to Russia after the Russian revolution broke out and died, tragically, in 1917. Almost a hundred years exactly to this day, this organizer died in Russia. But in 1910, he was in the United States, and he organized this series [inaudible], and it was a 13-part lecture series on– Well, I wrote it down here. On everything from anthropology, astronomy, biology, cultural history, economic history, aesthetic culture, geology, intellectual culture, law, psychology, religion and sociology.

That was the idea. The idea was that the best lecturers, such as Syrkin, or a guy by the name of Lewis Bodeen, a well-known scholar of law, of American law, as well as a scholar of Marxist social thought. He wrote in English and Yiddish. He was known in and outside the Jewish community. These people would give systematic, rigorous lectures on all these topics to workers. Now, imagine– And then this was a traveling lecture series. So it started on the Lower East Side, went for several weeks, then went to Brownsville, Brooklyn, for several weeks, then went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, several weeks, then went to Harlem and the Bronx. So it went over months, this series, and the number of people who attended approached 14,000. On the Lower East Side alone, the average attendance was 795 students a night to hear these lectures in Yiddish about these topics.

Now, again, mind you, these are workers who spent most of the day in sweatshops. That’s how they spent their days. They were toiling at a sewing machine or stitching buttonholes and buttons into buttonholes or maybe painting houses if they weren’t in the clothing industry or whatever. But the bulk of these people were working class people. So they dragged themselves out to hear these lectures by the thousands in, this was 1913, this series, in the winter and spring of 1913. It was tremendously successful. So successful that this guy who organized it, he’s named Terman, compiled this into a book. The book was published by the Workmen’s Circle, and it sold out within a matter of a month-and-a-half. They sold all the books out because the Workmen’s Circle branches that existed from Detroit to Michigan to Winnipeg to California bought bulk copies, put them in their little libraries that they had, and, you know, encouraged members to read them.

Could the members read them? We don’t know much about it. Abraham Cahan and some of his friends said, again, who’s going to read this? This is very difficult stuff. And the editor’s response was: Don’t underestimate the Jewish working masses. Some can understand it. And some maybe can’t now but will in 12 months or two years get to the point where they can read this material. But, regardless of the level of comprehension, we do know that thousands of copies were printed and purchased, shipped across the country, and shipped to Europe. A publishing company in Warsaw bought the rights to issue a new edition in Warsaw, and it appeared there as well. All right, so this was one of the crowning achievements, and based on that, the Workmen’s Circle started a publishing house, a publishing imprint, to put out called “The Workmen’s Circle Bibliotech,” “The Workmen’s Circle Library,” that put out works on US history, political science, political economy and so forth. Again, these went through multiple printings.

The volume on political economy was sent to the Soviet Union in the 1920s for use in their Yiddish school system for kids. The Soviet Union sponsored a Yiddish school system for Jewish kids, and what do you teach them? Well, there was not this history that I’m trying to describe of visnshaft in Yiddish in eastern Europe. So they turned to the United States to purchase copies of this series on political economy produced by the Workmen’s Circle. Okay, so let me say then, just by way of conclusion, what did this amount to? What I think this amounted to, this enshrinement of visnshaft as instituted first through the Zukunft, then through other journals, then through lectures and book series, through mass-based organizations like the Workmen’s Circle, especially the Workmen’s Circle, meant was a whole culture in formation, a new culture that encompassed a shift in values. This new culture was in the Yiddish language, so it was by definition Jewish, but it was secular. Not based on religion or at least certainly not directly. And it was encapsulated in it a set of new values. Learning, science, rationality, a notion of knowledge in the service of humanity, of changing the world. These values were enshrined, embodied, or materialized is maybe the better word, in the kinds of things I’m talking about, the magazines, the books, the lectures and so forth, so that there is a new American Jewish sensibility, value system, and outlook coming into shape during this period. And I stress that it’s American because it was not brought over from eastern Europe, as I tried to stress before.

There wasn’t a deeply rooted tradition of any of this. This comes out of the urban Jewish immigrant, working-class experience. So even though it was in Yiddish, and therefore seemingly alien, was actually part of the American experience. This reflected an Americanization process that held in place, I would suggest as a final thought, well passed the Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their generation. That this was a formative way of understanding oneself as a Jew in society, in American society, that became the basis for a kind of new American Jewish identity. All right, I’ll leave it at that, and I’m happy to take questions. [applause]