JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

126 SAOTHAR 13.account of Mr. Connolly to every section of the electors. How they said to the Catholics that he was anOrangeman, to the Protestants that he was a Fenian, to the Jews that he was an anti-Semite, to others thathe was a Jew. '32 .'With prejudices being whipped up in this manner, for Connolly to have come second in the 1902Wood Quay Ward election, and to have secured 431 votes from both Gentile and Jewish workers in thatWard, was certainly a most creditable performance. Boris Kahan's Yiddish leaflet had played aprominent part in Connolly's campaign. The following year, once again in his capacity as Secretaryof the East London, Jewish Branch of the SDF, Kahan was to the fore in organising a Paris CommuneCommemorative meeting in Whitectiapel on 21 March, 1903 at which Lenin was a speaker. One of onlythree public meetings which he addressed during his period of exile in London?3 Kaban wassubsequently associated with the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democrats which was held inLondon in 1907 and described as follows by Andrew Rothstein,'There were 105 Bolsheviks (representing 46;000 members), 97 Mensheviks (from 38,000 members), 57(Jewish Social Democratic) Bundists (25,000 members), 44 Polish Social Democrats (25,000 members),29 Lettish Social Democrats (13,000 members) and 4 'independents'. It was by far the largest SocialDemocratic Congress ever held by the Russian parties - and it was the last at which all these groups met"under a single roof ... It was Lenin who moved the vote of thanks (on 16 May, 1907) to 'the representativeof the British Social Democratic Federation for its help in arranging the Congress'. There were among theguests a number of Russian political emigrants who had joined the SDF -Zelda Kahan; ... her brother Boris,secretary of the East London (Jewish) branch of the SDF; ... Theodore Rothstein and his wife Anna(Kahan).'34Zelda Kahan, later to be a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, would marryKinsale-born W.P. Coates who organised the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in theKilkenny-Waterford area during 1918-19. Coates went on to become Secretary of the 'Hands OffRussia' Movement and later of the Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee. 35 Theodore Rothsteinwould become a very close associate of Frederick Ryan (founding first Secretary of the reorganisedSocialist Party of Ireland in 1909) between the years 1907 and 1913 in vigorously campaigning onbehalf of Egyptian independence. 36 Rothstein afterwards became a founding member of the CommunistParty of Great Britain in 1920 but was forbidden re-entry to Britain following a visit to Russia thatsame year and went on to become the fIrst Soviet ambassador to Persia. Boris Kahan also returned tothe land of his birth following the Russian Revolution. He died in Moscow in December 1951. Hisnephew, Andrew Rothstein, writes 'Boris K .... worked until the end of his life in the Soviet trademachinery ... He never was a victim of repression, but died of a late-treated 'minor operation' '.37The Connolly election address in Yiddish resulted in a legacy of good-will between his politicalassociates in the ISRP and Dublin's Jewish community which persisted after his own emigration to theUSA in 1903. When Arthur Griffith made his United Irishman the political organ of Father Creagh's1904 anti-semitic campaign, the only voice of protest in its columns was that of the Dublin socialistFrederick Ryan. He maintained:'The Jew has been historically made the ~capegoat of Christendom. Anti-Semitism is the refuge of theContinental reactionary parties. It may seem good tactics on the part of corrupt militarists to set the mobat the heels of rich Jews. But the cause of true liberty has nothing to gain by being associated with suchtricks ... Let us resolutely shut our eyes to questions of race and creed, which are only raised by the reactionariesto create disorder in the camp ofprogress.'38In 1906 one of the ISRP's successor groupings, the SoCialist Partybf Ireland (SPI), decided to holda meeting on Sunday, 21 January to commemorate the first anniversary of the Bloody Sunday massacrein St. Petersburg which had precipitated the 1905 Russian Revolution. The SPI also decided to seek