isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

AT THE DOOR OF HISTORY 75
and Jewish cultural life at large should not be centred on and
closed in itself. He tabled a motion to this effect, supplementing
Martov's general resolution. Both resolutions were carried by
an overwhelming majority. 1
Like Martov, Axelrod, Deutsch, and other Socialists of Jewish
origin, Trotsky took the so-called assimilationist view, holding
that there was no future for the Jews as a separate community.
The ties that had kept the Jews together were either those of
religion, which, according to the prevalent Socialist conviction,
were bound to dissolve; or those of a semi-fictitious nationalism
culminating in Zionism. The Bund was strongly opposed to
Zionism, for it conceived the future of the Jews to lie in the
countries of the so-called diaspora. But, Trotsky argued, in its
opposition to Zionism the Bund absorbed from the latter its
nationalist essence. 2 He saw the solution of the Jewish problem
not in the formation of a Jewish state, still less in the formation·
of Jewish states within the non-Jewish ones, but in a consistently
internationalist reshaping of society. The premiss for this was
mutual unreserved confidence between Jews and non-Jews,
whether in the party or in the state. To this attitude he was to
adhere till the end of his life-only the impact of Nazism was
to induce him to soften a little his hostility towards Zionism.J
He would not grant the tragic truth contained in the Jews'
distrust of their gentile environment. Neither he nor arty other
Socialist could imagine even in a nightmare that the working
classes of Europe, having through generations listened to the
preachings of international solidarity, would, forty years later,
be unable or unwilling to prevent or stop the murder of six
I Ibid., p. 198.
' Some time af1er the congress Trotsky published in Iskra a bitter attack on
Zionism. The occasion was a conflict between the original Zionists who were led
by Theodore Herzl and those Zionists who, led by Max !\:ordau, were prepared to
abandon Palestine for Uganda as a.Jewish homeland. Herzl tried to buy the land
of Palestine from the Sultan, while Nordau conducted a campaign for the acquisition
of Uganda. A fanatical follower of Herzl made an attempt on l\ordau's life.
Trol~ky wrote in this connexion about l lcrzl as a 'shamdc~s adventuri:r' and about
'the hysterical sohbings of the romanticists of Zion'; and he saw in the conflict the
bankruptcy of Zionism. (Iskra, no. 56, 1 January 1904.)
3
In an interview with the American-Jewish Forward (28.January 1937) Trotsky
stat~d that after the experience of !\azism, it was difficult to believe in the 'assirniJa.
tion' of the Jews, for which he had hoped. Zionism by itsdf, he went on, would not
solve the problem; but even under Socialism, it might be nect'SSary for the Jews to
settle on a separate territory.