Transcript of a paper dlivered at a conference on Ukrainian-Jewish relations, McMaster University, 17-20 October 1983. Published in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.

The Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Nineteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Thought

Ivan L. Rudnytsky

Martin Buber relates in his biographical sketch of the great Hasidic teacher, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810), that when Rabbi Nachman felt the approach of death, he decided to move to the town of Uman.1 In 1768, a few years before Rabbi Nachman's birth, Uman had been seized by Ukrainian peasant and Cossack rebels, the haidamaks, who slaughtered the Jewish inhabitants, together with the Polish nobles and Catholic clergy.2 In Uman, Rabbi Nachman took a house whose windows .overlooked the Jewish cemetery. He believed that the souls of the martyred victims still hovered over the burial place, and he wished to be close to them.

What this moving tale fails to convey is that the perpetrators of the massacre were victims and martyrs too. They were victims of social and religious-national oppression, against which they revolted. Soon after the uprising had been put down by the joint forces of the Polish magnates and the Russian army, thousands of the haidamaks were tortured to death or mutilated. For the Jews, the haidamaks were assassins. But in the Ukrainians' eyes the haidamaks were avengers of the people's wrongs and freedom fighters, while the Jews were agents of a system of injustice and degradation. This traditional popular view later found powerful expression in Taras Shevchenko's poem, Haidamaky (The Haidamaks, 1841), a classic of Ukrainian literature.

This episode may serve as an illustration of the tragic nature of the Ukrainian-Jewish involvement: two peoples living for centuries side by side on the same soil, both victims of unfavourable historical circumstances over which they had no control, and yet separated by a wall of incomprehension, mutual fears, resentments, and recriminations, by memories of past grievances, and by present conflicts of interest.

It should therefore be evident that the problem of Ukrainian-Jewish relations presented a special challenge to the political thought of the two peoples. Because of the difficult and emotionally charged nature of the problem, its treatment placed high demands on the thinkers who felt compelled to approach it. It called for an attitude that would be at once realistic and idealistic. Realistic—in order to do justice to the complexities of the situation; idealistic —in order to rise above ingrained prejudices and mental cliches in search of a workable solution acceptable to both sides. And if a totally satisfactory solution could not be found at once, it was extremely important at least to open up channels of communication, to create a platform for continual rational dialogue, to break out of the vicious circle of blind emotional reactions and counter-reactions. The work of the theorists had great practical relevance, inasmuch as ideas serve as catalysts of social and political actions.

A consideration of "Jewish answers to the Ukrainian question" does not enter into the plan of this paper. Let me only observe that the first Jewish publicist to have dealt extensively and constructively with the Ukrainian problem during the pre-World War I era seems to have been Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the future founder of the revisionist wing of the Zionist movement.3 I propose to discuss "Ukrainian answers to the Jewish question" in the nineteenth century, concentrating on the ideas of three men, Mykola Kostomarov (1817-85), Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-95), and Ivan Franko (1856-1916). It is noteworthy that Ukrainian efforts to deal with the problem considerably preceded those by Jewish authors.

The first major Ukrainian statement concerning Ukrainian-Jewish relations was the article by Kostomarov, "Iudeiam" (To the Jews), published in the January 1862 issue of the monthly Osnova (Foundation) in St. Petersburg.4 Kostomarov, a brilliant and prolific historian, may be considered the ideologist of Ukrainian populism. Osnova, the organ of the Ukrainian national-cultural movement during the short period of liberal "thaw" in the Russian Empire following the Crimean War, published material in both Ukrainian and Russian. Kostomarov was the journal's chief contributor of programmatic articles. "To the Jews," like most of his scholarly and journalistic productions, was written in Russian.

"To the Jews" was a contribution to the polemic between Osnova and the Russian-language Jewish journal in Odessa, Sion.5 In his article Kostomarov spoke out against any persecution of the Jews and in favour of Jewish emancipation from existing legal restrictions:

We must wish that the Jews obtain completely equal rights and that the widest possible field [of activity] be opened to them.... We sympathize with every effort on the part of the Jews to preserve and develop their age-old pecularities. Any hostility toward the Jews on the grounds of religious differences is in our eyes a symptom of extreme ignorance and stupid fanaticism, contrary to the spirit of Christian piety. We respect the Jewish religion, especially as the high teachings of our own religion oblige us to do so.6

At the same time, the article contained a number of anti-Jewish barbs. Thus, Kostomarov stated, "The Little Russians candidly acknowledge that they generally dislike the Jewish tribe [Iudeiskomu plemeni] living in the midst of their homeland,"7 and he charged the Jews with clannish-ness and indifference toward the welfare of the host country. He recalled the past role of the Jews as instruments of the oppression and exploitation of the Ukrainian people by the Polish lords, and he alleged their present inclination ruthlessly to take advantage of the ignorance, helplessness, and even vices of the peasantry.

The irritated tone of Kostomarov's article was due to the circumstance that, in the course of their controversy with Osnova, the editors of Sion had assumed the stance of Russian super-loyalists; they insinuated that the work of the Ukrainophiles (as Ukrainian patriots were referred to at the time) was subversive to the cultural and potentially also to the political unity of the Russian Empire. This smacked of a denunciation, and, indeed, Sion's arguments were picked up by the chauvinist Russian press. The members of the Osnova circle strove to convince the Russian authorities and public opinion of the politically harmless character of the Ukrainian cultural-literary revival. This explains the acerbity of Kostomarov's polemic against Sion, but it does not excuse his aspersions against the Jewish people as a whole. One must agree with Mykhailo Hrushevsky's comment that Kostomarov had been carried away by his "subjective emotions," and that this prevented him from elucidating adequately the causes of Ukrainian-Jewish friction, although in principle he wished to overcome it.8

Kostomarov's relative failure will help us to appreciate better Drahomanov's intellectual achievement. Drahomanov, the outstanding Ukrainian political thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century, dealt at considerable length and systematically with the problem of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. His ideas on the subject, therefore, merit special attention.9

Drahomanov's perception of the Jewish question must be seen against the background of his general social and political world-view.10 His thought represented a sophisticated blend of liberal-democratic, socialist, and Ukrainian patriotic elements, with positivistic philosophical underpinnings. Drahomanov envisaged the final goal of mankind's progress as anarchy: a voluntary association of free and equal, harmoniously developed individuals in which compulsory and authoritarian features in social life would be eliminated. He assumed that the practical approach toward implementing this ideal was federalism, implying decentralization of power and self-government of communities and regions. Drahomanov insisted on the priority of civil rights and free political institutions over economic class interests, and of universal human values, which he saw embodied in the world-wide progress of science, over exclusive national concerns. However, he believed that nationality was a necessary building stone of mankind, and he coined the slogan: "Cosmopolitanism in ideas and ends, nationality in foundations and forms." Drahomanov declared himself a socialist without fully subscribing to any school of current socialist thought; he rejected Marxism as theoretically erroneous and ill-suited to Ukrainian conditions. He was convinced that in agrarian Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, socialism ought to be oriented toward the peasantry. Because of this, he may be classified as a populist in the broad meaning of the term. However, he strongly objected to certain typical features of Russian populism, such as reliance on terror, glorification of elemental peasant revolts, and disregard for Western-type liberal political institutions. Drahomanov regretted that the Ukrainian people had not preserved an independent state in the past, since in principle they were entitled to independence, but he thought that a policy of separatism was unrealistic under current circumstances. Moreover, his philosophical anarchism did not allow him to envisage national statehood as a wholly desirable objective. He admonished his fellow countrymen to concentrate their efforts on the democratization and federalization of the existing states, Russia and Austria-Hungary, and he assumed that this would ensure sufficient scope for the free development of the Ukrainian nation. Such a policy necessitated collaboration with the libertarian and progressive forces of all the other peoples of Eastern Europe, particularly those with whom the Ukrainians lived in closest contact, namely the Russians, the Poles, and the Jews. While staunchly defending the legitimate social and national claims of the Ukrainian people, Drahomanov consistently combated all expressions of xenophobic Ukrainian nationalism.

Drahomanov devoted two major papers to the Jewish problem, "Evrei i poliaki v Iugo-Zapadnom krae" (The Jews and the Poles in the Southwestern Land, 1875)11 and "Evreiskii vopros na Ukraine" (The Jewish Question in Ukraine, 1882).12 The former was written when Drahomanov was still a Russian subject, and it appeared in a "legal" St. Petersburg periodical; thus the author had to be somewhat guarded in the expression of his views. The latter belongs to the period when Drahomanov lived as an exile in Switzerland and could speak out in full freedom. In addition, comments on the Jewish problem are scattered through many of Drahomanov's writings. Over the years, one can notice certain minor variations in the formulation of his ideas, but the basic conception remained constant. I shall present Drahomanov's thoughts on this subject as an organic whole, culling together statements made by the author at different times.

Drahomanov estimated the Jewish population in the Ukrainian lands of the Russian and Habsburg Empires at over one million.13 According to him, "the Jews represent in Ukraine [simultaneously] a nation, a religion, and a social class" (soslovie, literally "estate").14 As a nationality, they were differentiated from the rest of the population by certain specific traits in their physical and mental make-up, and by a separate language, Yiddish. Their national identity was bolstered by the religious distinctiveness of Judaism. Moreover, "the Jews, including those who live in the countryside, belong here [in Ukraine] almost exclusively to the so-called urban classes, and among the latter predominantly to those not directly engaged in the production of goods."15

Using various statistical methods, Drahomanov demonstrated that the majority of Ukrainian Jews were occupied as petty tradesmen, innkeepers, pedlars, middlemen, etc. He concluded that "the Jewish nation in Ukraine. . . forms, to a large extent, a parasitic class. ... In those regions the terms 'exploiter' and 'Jew' have become synonymous in the people's speech."16 In another article Drahomanov qualified this harsh judgment to the effect that one-third of Ukrainian Jewry should be considered "workingmen,'' by which he meant labourers and craftsmen.17

Drahomanov was well aware of the fact that most Jews in Ukraine were poor, many of them living in abject poverty. But he asserted that even Jewish paupers had no feeling of solidarity with their working-class Christian neighbours, but rather identified themselves with their wealthy co-religionists, whom they served as agents and operatives. According to Drahomanov, the Jews tended to display a supercilious and arrogant attitude toward the Ukrainian peasantry. "All Jews in Ukraine look upon themselves as a class superior to the Ukrainian peasants. I have myself heard extremely poor Jews say: 'The peasant is an idiot, a reptile, a pig.' I have heard expressions which indicate that the Jews consider themselves as belonging to the ruling class, together with the gentry, as distinct from the peasantry."18

Drahomanov held the Russian government largely responsible for the unenviable condition of Ukrainian Jewry and the growth of Ukrainian-Jewish tensions. The tsarist regime, contrary to its general policy of centralization and levelling of all regional distinctions, maintained the so-called Pale of Settlement, which caused an excessive concentration of the Jewish population in the western provinces. "This accumulation has been created quite articially by the Russian legislation which, in this instance, was motivated not only by narrow Great Russian considerations, but also by the manifest intent to repress the development of a national Ukrainian middle class that had still existed in the eighteenth century in the cities enjoying the Magdeburg Law. ... "19 At present, the Russian government, while restricting the Jews' opportunities for gainful employment, uses their services in order to extract money from the people for the benefit of the state. "As leaseholders of inns and collectors of tax arrears, the Jews are nowadays agents of the fisc."20 Drahomanov chided those short-sighted Ukrainians who approved of existing anti-Jewish laws. In his opinion, not only universal liberal principles, but also Ukrainian national interests, called for the abolition of the Pale, which would facilitate the dispersal of a part of Ukrainian Jewry to other regions of the Empire.21

In 1881 a wave of anti-Jewish riots occurred in Ukraine. Many Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary populists were tempted to approve the pogroms, since their ideology implied a positive attitude toward all expressions of social protest and popular rage, and also because they deluded themselves with the hope that ethnic disorders might escalate into a general revolt against the established order. Furthermore, sheer anti-Semitic prejudice was also present among certain members of the socialist-populist milieu.22 Thus the prominent Ukrainian socialist Serhii Podolynsky (1850-91), the one-time collaborator of Drahomanov in Geneva, confessed in a letter to a friend, in 1875, that he had "not yet resolved [for himself] the question of Judaeophobia."23

Drahomanov's reaction to the 1881 pogroms differed markedly from that prevalent in populist circles. He noted, in the first place, that owing to the Russian revolutionaries' habitual neglect of the multinational character of the Empire, the Ukrainian events had caught them quite unprepared and without any consistent policy. "The mass of the Russian revolutionaries, which consists [to a large extent] of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, was confused by abstract formulas and centralist proclivities, and hence unready to comprehend local social and national relations in their concrete forms."24 In his article, "The Jewish Question in Ukraine," Drahomanov addressed himself to the proclamation issued by the Executive Committee of Narodnaia volia (the terrorist People's Will Party) on the occasion of the pogroms. The proclamation, which was written in Ukrainian, elaborated on the exploitation of the popular masses by the "Jewish kulaks," and advised the peasants to revolt not only against the Jews, but also against the landowners, the officials, and the tsar. Drahomanov commented that some of the facts mentioned in the prclamation were "basically correct," but that "the altogether inexcusable side of the proclamation was its complete disregard of the fact that among the victims of the riots there were also poor people, and that in many places, particularly in the towns, they were the only ones to suffer. These were people engaged in the same productive physical labour as the Christian peasants and craftsmen."25 In another article, written at about the same time and dealing with general issues of revolutionary strategy, Drahomanov called the proclamation of Narodnaia volia "ill-considered" and pointed out that, because of the low educational and civic level of the masses, elemental popular riots and revolts were bound to be "of purely negative significance."26

Passing now from the critical to the constructive side of Drahomanov's program, one may ask what measures he proposed toward the alleviation of the distressful condition of Ukrainian Jewry and an improvement of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. He certainly supported full emancipation of the Jewish people from all legal restrictions, which he dubbed "medieval survivals." He cautioned, however, that the granting of equal civil rights "would in itself change but little the condition of the Jewish masses and their relations with the Christian masses"; an immediate benefit would accrue only to the minority of well-to-do and Western-educated Jews.27 He rebuked the liberal Russian-Jewish press for concentrating solely on the single issue of emancipation, while neglecting other, equally vital dimensions of the problem.28 What was needed, according to Drahomanov, was action on several fronts simultaneously, in order to achieve results "beneficial to the majority of both Christians and Jews."29 The areas of action included: first, a raising of the Ukrainian people's educational and socio-economic standards, second, a weakening of the Jewish workingmen's dependence on their own wealthy bosses and obscurantist religious leaders, and, third, comparatively the simplest task, the emancipation of the Jews from legal discrimination, "until the time comes, which has already been reached in other European countries, when persons of all religious denominations possess equal rights."30

Drahomanov believed that there was an urgent need for a specifically Jewish socialist movement. He noted that many participants in Russian and Polish socialist groups were of Jewish origin, but that these were assimilated Jews who had lost touch with their own people and who, therefore, were unable to influence and guide them. "This is why Ukrainian socialists consider it a matter of major importance that a propaganda campaign be organized with a double objective: first, to separate Jewish workers from Jewish capitalists, and, second, to bring together Jewish workers with workers of other nationalities."31 This called for the formation of Jewish socialist organizations, and, first of all, of a socialist press in Yiddish, the Jewish vernacular.

During his Geneva years, Drahomanov undertook certain steps, which I shall not discuss here, to start a Yiddish-language socialist press. The attempt failed because of the opposition of Russian and Polish socialists, among whom those of Jewish background were often most hostile.32 Thus his efforts had no immediate practical result. Still, Drahomanov's biographer, David Zaslavsky, hails him as the precursor of Jewish socialist and labour movements:

It is hardly necessary to stress the profundity of these observations [of Drahomanov's on the Jewish question]. Drahomanov perceived phenomena and processes in the life of the Jewish people which the Jewish socialist intelligentsia began to see only ten or fifteen years later [that is, by the 1890s].... It would be impossible to formulate more clearly and precisely the tasks which subsequently became the foundation of the first Jewish labour groups, and still later of the Bund, and of other socialist and communist organizations working among the Jewish proletariat.33
Let us also consider the long-range perspective in Drahomanov's ideas concerning the future development of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Here the originality of his conception is most strikingly apparent. The common assumption of nineteenth-century Western liberals was that the Jewish problem would ultimately be solved by the assimilation of the Jewish minorities to the respective host nations. Drahamanov demurred. He maintained that the assimilationist program, whatever its merits in the West, was impractical under East European conditions.
In respect of the Jews, Russia is no Switzerland, nor even Germany. In any event, in the western half of Russia there live more than three million Jews. This is an entire nation. Somebody should be concerned about them, particularly as they find themselves in the most abnormal relations with the other nations who live there.34
The crucial point in the cited statement is the thesis that the Jews ought to be considered a distinct nation, and that in Ukraine, as well as in other East European lands, they constitute an ethnic-national minority. This basic position entailed portentous practical consequences.

Drahomanov defended the notion that after the coming overthrow of the tsarist autocracy Ukraine's national minorities, prominently including the Jews, should not only possess equal civil rights with the Ukrainians, but also be endowed with national-cultural rights of self-government, protected by appropriate constitutional guarantees. In those communities and regions where the minorities formed local majorities or a sizeable portion of the population, their respective languages ought to have official standing.35 In other words, Drahomanov was a pioneer of the concept which in our time has become known as multiculturalism.

Their [national minorities'] societies and communities ought to be free from any compulsion toward [conformity with] the customs and language of the Ukrainian people. They must have the right to establish their own schools—elementary, secondary, and institutions of higher learning—and to associate freely with those nations [outside Ukraine] whence they came. These labouring people of foreign extraction will serve as a link between the Ukrainians and their neighbours, with whom the Ukrainians ought to join in a great international federation.36

I propose to conclude the presentation of Drahomanov's ideas on the problem of Ukrainian-Jewish relations by submitting a few critical observations. Certain limitations of his thought are obvious. Thus Drahomanov tended to speak much too sweepingly of Jewish "parasitism." In this one can discern a reflection of the prejudice common to Ukrainian and Russian populists of his time, who often equated productive work with physical labour. Another blind spot in his thinking was a lack of appreciation of the spiritual value of Judaism as a religion and of its irreplaceable function in the preservation of Jewish national identity. In this respect, Kostomarov's insight was better than that of Drahomanov. One can only add that Drahomanov, the agnostic and militant anti-clericalist, displayed the same bias in his treatment of the role of religion in the life of the Ukrainian people. Drahomanov's shortcomings, however, are amply compensated by the manifestly high merits of his intellectual attainment. The pioneering nature of his conception has been recently stressed by the Israeli historian Moshe Mishkinsky: "Indeed, Drahomanov was apparently the first radical political thinker to try to formulate a comprehensive view of the Jewish question in the empire and particularly in the Ukraine."37 Drahomanov rightly maintained that the normalization of Ukrainian-Jewish relations depended on the socioeconomic restructuring of both the Jewish community and Ukrainian society at large; with his proposal for an institutional system of national-cultural pluralism he was far ahead of his time. Most praiseworthy and exemplary is his basic humane and democratic orientation and his striving for objectivity and rationality in dealing with a problem of whose complexity he was fully aware.

The third figure whose ideas I shall discuss was the Galician Ukrainian writer and scholar, Ivan Franko. He was a man of truly prodigious productivity and versatility. His oeuvre included poetry, prose fiction, literary criticism, historic and folkloristic studies, and political journalism. In all these fields he made outstanding contributions. Ideologically, Franko was a disciple of Drahomanov, who exercised a formative impact on his intellectual development. In his later years, however, Franko moved gradually away from the pure Drahomanovian doctrine. The political philosophy of the mature Franko may be defined as democratic nationalism.

Jewish topics of various kinds occupy a prominent place in Franko's writings.38 Thus in his scholarly works he studied Hebrew influences in Old Rus' literature and Ukrainian folklore. Biblical motifs loom large in Franko's poetry, as exemplified by the narrative poem Moisei (Moses, 1905), which is considered his masterpiece. In his novels and short stories based on contemporary Galician life, Franko frequently depicted Jewish characters. All this, however, falls outside the scope of the present paper.

Here my concern is with Franko the social and political thinker, not the man of letters and the scholar. In his publicistic writings, he repeatedly dealt with the problem of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Franko's earlier pronouncements on this subject have a Drahomanovian flavour, although they refer specifically to Galician conditions, while Drahomanov had in mind primarily Russian Ukraine. Franko's later statements are more original, and hence of special interest to the historian of ideas.

The article "Semityzm i antysemityzm v Halychyni" (Semitism and Anti-Semitism in Galicia, 1887) is representative of Franko's Drahomanovian phase.39 In it the following declaration of his political faith can be read: "No religion, no persuasion, no race, and no nationality has ever been or can ever become the object of our hatred. Such an object was and shall forever remain only every kind of oppression, exploitation, and hypocrisy."40 Franko expatiated on the preponderance of Jews in Galicia's economy: nearly all of the province's commerce and industry was in Jewish hands, and a growing portion of landed estates were also passing from Polish nobles to Jews. In the author's view, these phenomena threatened not only Galicia's non-Jewish nationalities, but also the Jews themselves. Ukrainians and Poles should strive to become equal to the Jews in the economic sphere, and the provincial government ought to support these efforts. The internal reform of the Jewish community was the responsibility of the Jews themselves, but relations between Jews and non-Jews must be settled by mutual discussion. Finally, in reviewing some recent Polish proposals, Franko expressed himself on the issues of Jewish assimilation and emigration. He gave a restrictive interpretation to the concept of assimilation, reducing it to "the task of [achieving] civic equality on the basis of equal rights and equal duties."41 He stressed that assimilation rightly understood implied neither religious apostasy nor absorption of the entire Jewish mass into the host nations, which, under Galician conditions, was unfeasible and undesirable. As to emigration, it might be useful as a safety valve, and, therefore, would be welcome, provided that it was partial, gradual, and well planned; it might also serve as a basis for the future national independence (samostiinist) of the Jewish people.42

The hint at possible Jewish national independence is intriguing^ but Franko did not elaborate on it in the 1887 article. He confronted this issue nine years later in a review of Theodor Herzl's celebrated treatise, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896).43 We know that Franko and Herzl (1860-1904), the founder and prophet of Zionism, met in Vienna in February 1893, and were mutually favourably impressed.44 Franko's review appeared only three weeks after the publication of Herzl's work, which not only testifies to his extraordinary intellectual alertness, but also suggests that the book must have struck a responsive chord in his mind. Franko sympathetically recapitulated Herzl's arguments; his only reservation was that Herzl probably underestimated the practical difficulties of the establishment of a Jewish state. The conclusion of the review reads: "The plan, however, undoubtedly has a future before itself; and if the present generation turns out to be yet immature for it, it is bound to survive to see, in the course of time, young people who will be willing and able to implement it."45

The positive evaluation by Franko of the idea of Jewish statehood must be seen in the context of the evolution of his Ukrainian national-political program. After the death of Drahomanov in 1895, Franko dissociated himself from his mentor's philosophical anarchism and embraced the concept of Ukrainian state independence. We can only wonder whether his reading of Herzl's Der Judenstaat prompted him to move in this direction. But it is significant that in his defence of the idea of Ukrainian statehood Franko advanced arguments which closely paralleled those in his review of Herzl's work. In the case of Ukraine, as in that of the Jewish nation, Franko believed that the idea of independence was unrealistic, "beyond the bounds of the possible," from the viewpoint of current practical politics. At the same time, he asserted that this idea, or rather ideal, could provide an inspiring beacon for the national-liberation movement, and that its future realization ultimately depended on the dedicated will of the Ukrainian people itself.46

The fullest formulation of Franko's thoughts concerning the Jewish question and Ukrainian-Jewish relations is to be found in the novel Perekhresrii stezhky (Crossroads, 1900).47 They are voiced by one of the novel's protagonists, Wagman, but we have the full right to assume that they represent Franko's own position. Let it be said by way of introduction that Wagman is a Jewish money-lender who at first is presented as a supposedly sinister character, but then is gradually revealed in the course of the narrative as a wise and good man. He discreetly helps the novel's hero, a young Ukrainian lawyer, in defending the peasants' interests against the local Polish landowners. The action is set in an unnamed Galician provincial town in the early 1880s. Wagman expresses his ideas during an encounter with the city's mayor (burmistr), an assimilated Jew and former participant in the Polish insurrection of 1863.

The discussion between Wagman and the mayor turns on the issue of Jewish assimilation. The mayor confesses that all his life he has tried to eradicate in himself the feeling of Jewishness, but has not yet fully succeeded. Wagman replies:

— "These modern Jews of yours, the assimilants or assimilators, have split their old Jewish soul into two halves [by rejecting the better, and retaining the worse part].... You have started assimilation by throwing out from your heart the remnants of the community spirit that used to be the strength of our nation.... You ceased to love your people, its tradition, and to believe in its future. From all the nation's treasures, you retained only your ego and your family, like a splinter from a wrecked boat. You cling to this splinter, and try to attach it to another boat, to find a new fatherland, to buy another mother who is not your own. Do you not deceive yourself in thinking that a strange mother will love and fondle you as if you were her own? Do you not deceive this adoptive mother when you assure her that you love her more than your true mother?... But I also see certain good sides in your as-similationist movement, although they are small.... You are our tribute to those peoples and countries which gave us shelter and sanctuary in hard times, but you should not demand that this tribute be excessive. It is unreasonable to ask of a wanderer who has drunk water from a well that in repayment he should jump into the well and drown in it. What you are doing and what others like you often have done before is justified and necessary from the historical point of view, and is even beneficial for the Jewish nation, but it cannot be its program, because this would amount not to a program, but to suicide."

"What is this benefit to the Jewish nation?" asked the mayor without any shade of mockery in his voice.

"What, indeed? That is quite clear. You are the intermediaries between us and those nations which have received us. You are the bridge over the chasm.... Formerly, in the Middle Ages, when we lived completely isolated among foreign peoples, we were much worse off than today.... Now you will concede that I am no such enemy of your assimilation as the ordinary Hasidim, and that I recognize to some extent its rationality and usefulness. But there is one thing which largely detracts from its value and reveals its insincerity. This is the circumstance that the Jews usually assimilate not to those nearest, but to those more powerful. In Germany they are Germans—this I understand. But why are they also Germans in Bohemia? In Hungary they are Magyars, in Galicia Poles—but why are they Russians in Warsaw and Kiev? Why do the Jews not assimilate to those nations that are weak, oppressed, injured, and poor? Why are there no Slovak Jews, Ruthenian Jews?" ...

"Listen, Wagman! This is really too much. You begin to talk like that Ruthenian lawyer who upbraided me for my Polish patriotism."

"And rightly so," said Wagman, "because Polish patriotism is somewhat out of place here, on Ruthenian land."

"In the end you will try to convert me to Ruthenian patriotism!" guffawed the mayor.

"God forbid! In my opinion, no Jew can or should be either a Polish or Ruthenian patriot. And there is no need that he be one. Let him be a Jew—this will be enough. However, one can be a Jew and yet love the country where we were born, and be useful, or at least not harmful, to the people who, although not our own, are closely connected with all the memories of our lives. It seems to me that if we were to uphold this view, the entire assimilation would become unnecessary.... You see, the pogroms in Ukraine showed me that we, Jews living on Ruthenian land, are collecting the fire of Ruthenian hatred over our heads. Even when we strive to assimilate, we do so only to those who oppress and exploit the Ruthenians, and thus we increase the burden which weighs them down. We forget that more than half the Jewish people now live on Ruthenian soil, and that their hatred, accumulated over the centuries, may well burst forth into such a flame and assume such forms that our protectors, the Poles and the Russians, will be unable to help us in any way. This is why I felt the need to start building a bridge from our shore also to the Ruthenian shore, in order that the Ruthenians keep us not only in bad memory. I know well that as soon as they advance a little and attain some strength, more and more Jews will begin to incline to their side. But, in my judgment, it is important to assist them now, when they are still weak, downtrodden, and unable to straighten up.48

Franko's quoted passages were written at the very turn of the century. Thus it seems fitting to end with them this survey of nineteenth-century Ukrainian thought on the problem of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. I hope that I will not stand alone in the belief that they might still today, more than eighty years later, serve as a starting point for a continued fruitful debate on a subject of vital importance to both nations.


Notes

1.  M. Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (Bloomington, Ind. 1962), 32.

2.  W. A. Serczyk (Koliszczyzna [Cracow 1968], 97) estimates the number of Jewish victims in the Uman massacre at c. 3,000.

3.  See V. Zhabotynsky, Zibrani statti z natsionalnoho pytannia, ed. I. Kleiner (n. pi. 1983).

4.  Reprinted in M. Kostomarov, Naukovo-publitsystychni i polemichni pysannia Kostomarova, ed. M. Hrushevsky (Kiev 1928), 111-23.

5.  The exchanges between Osnova and Sion are summarized in M. Hrushevsky's introductory essay, "Z publitsystychnykh pysan Kostomarova," ibid., xiii-xv.

6.  Ibid., 123.

7.  Ibid., 122.

8.  Ibid., xiii.

9.  The following account is based on my earlier, more detailed article, "Mykhailo Drahomanov and the Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 283-97 of this volume; certain passages from it have been incorporated into the present paper. See also E. Hornowa, "Problem zydowski w tworczosci Dragomanowa," Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, no. 57 (January-March 1966):3-37.

10.  See I. L. Rudnytsky, "Drahomanov as a Political Theorist," 203-53 of this volume.

11.  Reprinted in M. P. Dragomanov, Politicheskiia sochineniia, ed. I. M. Grevs and B. A. Kistiakovsky (Moscow 1908), v.l (all published):217-67. "South-Western Land" was the official administrative term for the three provinces of Kiev, Volhynia and Podillia, the territory commonly known as Right-Bank Ukraine.

12.  Reprinted in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii M. P. Dragomanova, ed. B. A. Kistiakovsky, 2 vols. (Paris 1905-6), 2:525-40.

13.  M. P. Drahomanov, "Ot gruppy sotsialistov-evreev," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2:327'.

14.  M. P. Drahomanov, "Evreiskii vopros na Ukraine," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2:540.

15.  Ibid., 534.

16.  Ibid., 534 and 537.

17.  Drahomanov, "Ot gruppy sotsialistov-evreev," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2:321.

18.  Drahomanov, "Evreiskii vopros na Ukraine," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2:539.

19.  Ibid., 527.

20.  Ibid., 539.

21.  Ibid., 529.

22.  See M. Mishkinsky, "The Attitude of the Southern-Russian Workers' Union Toward the Jews (1880-1881)," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 6, no. 2 (June 1982):191-216.

23.  R. Serbyn, "In Defense of an Independent Ukrainian Socialist Movement: Three Letters of Serhii Podolynsky to Valerian Smirnov," Journal of Ukrainian Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall 1982):11.

24.  M. P. Drahomanov, "Istoricheskaia Polsha i velikorusskaia demokratiia," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 1:235.

25.  Drahomanov, "Evreiskii vopros na Ukraine," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2:531.

26.  M. P. Drahomanov, " 'Narodnaia volia' o tsentralizatsii revoliutsionnoi borby v Rossii," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2r394, n. 1, and 399.

27.  Drahomanov, "Evreiskii vopros v slavianskom kruzhke v Londone," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2.542.

28.   "Evreiskii vopros na Ukraine," 531.

29.  Drahomanov, "Evrei i poliaki v lugo-Zapadnom krae," in Politicheskiia sochineniia, 226.

30.  Ibid., 227.

31.  Drahomanov, "Ot gruppy sotsialistov-evreev," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2:328.

32.  For details, see Rudnytsky, "Mykhailo Drahomanov and the Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 288-9 of this volume.

33.  D. Zaslavsky, M. P. Dragomanov: Kritiko-biograficheskii ocherk (Kiev 1924), 111 and 112-13.

34.  Drahomanov, "Evreiskii vopros v slavianskom kruzhke v Londone," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2:542.

35.  Drahomanov's proposal of provisions that would secure ethnic minorities' rights is contained in his draft of a democratic-federalist constitution for Russia, "Volnyi soiuz—Vilna spilka: Opyt ukrainskoi politiko-sotsialnoi programmy," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 1:273-375; see esp. 280, 316.

36.  M. P. Drahomanov, "Prohrama 'Hromady'," in M. P. Drahomanov, Vybrani tvory (Prague 1937), v.l (all published), 149.

37.  Mishkinsky, 193.

38.  See P. Kudriavtsev, "Ievreistvo, ievrei ta ievreiska sprava v tvorakh Ivana Franka," Zbirnyk prats ievreiskoi istorychno-arkheohrafichnoi komisii (Kiev 1929),2:1-81.

39.  Originally published in Polish, under the title "Semityzm i antysemityzm w Galicji," Przeglad Spoleczny (Lviv), no. 4 (1887):431 — 44. The Ukrainian version, in the author's translation, in I. Franko, V naimakh u susidiv (Lviv 1914), 115-31.

40.  Franko, V naimakh u susidiv, 117.

41.  Ibid., 129.

42.  Ibid., 131.

43.  I. Franko, "Panstwo zydowskie," Tydzieh. Dodatek literacki "Kurjera Lwowskiego," 9 March 1896. The original Polish text, with an English translation, is reprinted in A. Wilcher, "Ivan Franko and Theodor Herzl: To the Genesis of Franko's Mojsej," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 6, no. 2 (June 1982):238-43.

44.  The encounter between Herzl and Franko is described in the first half of A. Wilcher's article, cited above, 233-8.

45.  Ibid., 243.

46.  See I. Franko, "Poza mezhamy mozhlyvoho," Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, no. 10 (1900): 1-9.

47.  Reprinted in I. Franko, Zibrannia tvoriv upiatdesiaty tomakh (Kiev 1979), v. 20.

48.  Ibid., 389-93, condensed.