Trotsky the Jew

Trotsky—the satanic “Bronstein of Russian anti-Semites”—was deeply offended whenever anyone presumed to call him a Jew. When a visiting Jewish delegation appealed to him to help fellow Jews, he flew into a rage: “I am not a Jew but an internationalist.” He reacted similarly when requested by Rabbi Eisenstadt of Petrograd to allow special flour for Passover matzos, adding on this occasion that “he wanted to know no Jews.” At another time he said that the Jews interested him no more than the Bulgarians. According to one of his biographers [Baruch Knei-Paz], after 1917 Trotsky “shied away from Jewish matters” and “made light of the whole Jewish question.”

So, it is questionable whether Trotsky can be properly treated as an “eminent Jewish figure.” He certainly would have resented it. He had no idea what caused anti-Semitism, claiming it to be “one of the more malignant convulsions of capitalism’s death agony,” as if it had not existed in the Middle Ages, long before capitalism was born.

He was a renegade. This did not help him to make a successful career in the party. He was resented as a Jew as well as someone who during the decade preceding the Bolshevik power seizure relentlessly criticized Lenin and his followers. His prickly personality also was of no help, contrasting with Stalin’s joviality during the years the two struggled for power.

The situation for Jews in pre-1917 Russia, which shaped Trotsky’s personal and political trajectory, was very difficult. Except for rich merchants and those with a university degree, they were confined to the so-called Pale of Settlement. They were excluded from government posts and altogether treated as second-rate subjects. On occasion, they were victims of vicious pogroms in the course of which they were beaten and killed and their homes looted. This caused many of them to emigrate and the rest to turn to left-wing ideologies. The prevalent opinion was that the Bolsheviks were heavily supported by Jews, but the results of the only free elections held under Bolshevik rule, those to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, revealed that the Bolshevik vote came not from the Pale of Settlement but mainly from the armed forces and the cities of Great Russia, where hardly any Jews lived. The census of the Communist Party conducted in 1922 showed that only 959 Jews had joined it before 1917. If subsequently the proportion of Jews in the Communist Party exceeded their proportion in the country’s population, so too was that the case in Italy under Fascism. It simply attests to the fact that the Jews are a very articulate and politically engaged people.

Rubenstein, the author of a life of the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, has written a competent summary biography of his protagonist. The book adds little that is new to the existing literature, and it has some strange omissions. Trotsky’s role in the Civil War during which he commanded the Red Army—arguably his main contribution to the Bolshevik cause—is disposed of in a few cursory pages. I also found strange the author’s offhand assertion that under the Bolsheviks “the proletariat had succeeded in gaining control of the government.” Where and when? The workers had next to no influence on the policies of the Soviet government, which were managed by intellectuals.

In view of the murderous paranoia of Stalin, it is tempting to gloss over Trotsky’s own ruthlessness and to depict him as a humane counterpart to his rival. This is quite unwarranted. Without a question, Trotsky was better-educated than Stalin and was altogether a more cultivated human being. But his radicalism was not much different than Stalin’s. Rubenstein cites a statement by Trotsky as the motto of his book: “Nothing great has been accomplished in history without fanaticism.” Really? In art, in science, in economics? In fact, fanaticism, which is uncritical belief in something, has always obstructed true accomplishment.

Let us scrutinize briefly Trotsky’s views on such key issues as forced labor, terror, and concentration camps—the outstanding features of the Stalinist regime. On forced labor, Trotsky had this to say in 1921:

It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nation-wide economic plan.

I imagine that if Stalin was present at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, at which Trotsky made these remarks, he must have nodded in agreement. In view of Trotsky’s own sentiments, it is likely that if he had succeeded Lenin, we would have witnessed in the Soviet Union much the same oppression of labor as he did under Stalin.

Trotsky had no qualms about introducing into Soviet Russia political terror. Barely two months after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he said:

There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant … at the petty terror which we direct at our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.

He defined the guillotine (plagiarizing the French revolutionary Jacques Hébert) as a device that “shortens a man by the length of a head.” This grisly remark, incidentally, is cited by Rubenstein.

Trotsky demonstrated that this was not empty rhetoric during the rebellion at the Kronshtadt naval base in February 1921. The sailors of Kronshtadt were early and prominent supporters of the Bolsheviks, helping them in October 1917 to seize power in Petrograd and later to defend that city from the Whites. But the sailors gradually became disenchanted with the new regime. In March 1921 they formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and refused to obey Moscow’s orders. Upon arriving in Petrograd, Trotsky demanded that the mutineers throw themselves on the mercy of the Soviet government and ordered that the families of the mutineers be taken hostage; one of the regime’s appeals to the rebels threatened that if they continued to resist they would “be shot like partridges.” Trotsky organized the military assault on the island where the base was located: When some of the Red Army soldiers defected to the rebels, he ordered the execution of every fifth soldier who disobeyed orders. The island eventually fell. Trotsky was not proud of his role in this event, as demonstrated by the fact that in his memoirs he hardly mentioned it.

Though the fact is little-known, it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who introduced into Soviet Russia the concentration camp, an institution that under Stalin developed into the monstrous Gulag empire. Trotsky did this in May 1918 in connection with a rebellion of Czech ex-prisoners of war who, en route to the Far East to sail to the western front, rebelled when an attempt was made to disarm them. In August of that year, to protect the railroad line running from Moscow to Kazan, Trotsky ordered a network of concentration camps to be constructed to isolate “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators” who were not executed or subjected to other penalties. Lenin fully agreed with these measures. By 1919, concentration camps were established in every provincial capital. In 1923, Russia had 315 concentration camps with 70,000 inmates.

These facts will not be found in Rubenstein’s book, which, without being an apologia, nevertheless tends to glide over the more savage features of Trotsky’s thought and behavior. My own judgment of Trotsky coincides with that of George Orwell, made in 1939 when Trotsky was still alive and cited in this book:

[Trotsky] is probably as much responsible for [the Russian dictatorship] as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind. The essential act is the rejection of democracy—that is of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin—or any rate someone like Stalin—is already on the way.

A Soviet tourism advertisement for Odessa.
Boston Public Library

How many ways can you say “They killed everybody”? Historians have measured with increasing meticulousness the degrees of eagerness or reticence, popular fervor or bureaucratic discipline, with which the various regions of Europe collaborated in the murder of their Jews during the Second World War. Sometimes they outstripped their Nazi occupiers in the zeal with which they killed. Sometimes they merely acquiesced in the roundup of every man, woman, and child of Jewish ancestry they could find. A few places defied or obstructed the machinery of death.

Odessa was not one of those places. No surprises here: The city had distinguished itself, in 1905, as the site of the deadliest pogrom in Russian history. Its inhabitants, as Charles King observes in his survey of that remarkable city’s wonderful, horrible life, also acquired the habit, under Soviet rule, of tattling to the secret police. After the Romanians and Germans rolled into town in 1941 and the Romanians set themselves up as the new bosses, the language you would use to denounce your real and imagined enemies changed (where once the Jewish merchant was a capitalist expropriator, now your Jewish neighbors were crypto-Communist subversives), but “the paranoia, the self-serving indictments, and the mania for unmasking, exposing, and rooting out potential enemies of the state,” remained the same.

King quotes a series of these denunciations, which document the demented projection that allowed victimizers to cast themselves as righteous victims. “I would like to bring to your attention,” wrote one Valery Tkachenko, “that in the basement of 13 Tiraspol Street a group of yids get together and discuss political issues, and they say that the Romanians and the Germans are drinking our blood by the glassful but that we will drink theirs by the bucketful.”

The destruction of the Jews of Odessa, and in the Romanian-occupied region of Transnistria of which it was a part, executed through “mass shootings with rifles and machines guns, immolation with blazing oil and gas, and the bombing of buildings packed with Jewish citizens,” wasn’t even one of the primary goals of the occupiers. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu refused Nazi orders to deport Romanian Jews to the concentration camps and killing factories of Poland and Lithuania. He did this even as his brutal campaign of counter-insurgent pacification in the formerly Russian lands he controlled erased the distinction between partisan and Jew, yielding “the largest wartime program of planned killing committed by a country other than Nazi Germany.”

To the victims of Romanian terror, these contrasting motives and means are a distinction without a difference. But it meant in practice that the scale of killing of Transnistrian Jews was “orders of magnitudes” smaller than in other parts of German-occupied Eastern Europe. Where 90 percent of the Jews in some areas of German occupation were killed, 40 percent of Jews under Romanian occupation died. But between the killing, expulsions, and those who fled in advance of the invasion, the Romanians left the city of Odessa, where one out of every three residents had been a Jew, entirely Judenrein. Soviet officials counted 48 Jews living there in 1944.

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams traces the familiar trajectory whereby a “mixed and rambunctious city” situated on the periphery of the old world’s great multinational empires splinters into genocidal faction on its path to modernity. After a long detour into political extremism and massacre that left it free of its Jews, the city found itself stripped of its roiling diversity and aching for the memory of what its Jewish spirit, now long snuffed out, had meant. It is a carefully judicious work that indulges in nostalgia for the lost world even as it identifies the dark undercurrents that portended the loss of the delicate equilibrium once maintained by that “island of difference perched between sea and steppe,” that teetered “between genius and devastation.”

King waxes lyrical over the “golden thread that bound Odessa’s quilt-like population together,” in the 19th century, creating a special Odessan identity based on a shared marginality. In Odessa, one became “a progressive Jew as opposed to a traditionalist, a German farmer on the far-flung Eurasian steppe rather than the floodplains of Northern Europe, a free-holding peasant working one’s own land rather than toiling exclusively for a distant noble landlord; a Greek or Italian, clinging to the same seacoast once visited by ancient Aegean seaman and medieval Genoese merchants.”

The city prospered hugely as “the breadbasket for much of the Western world” but also played host to a demimonde seething with “criminality, disease, conspiracy, and revolution.” It was incubator to the maskilim, exponents of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, which eschewed the self-imposed insularity of traditional Jewish life, but also to the “culture of self-confident thievery” chronicled in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales. The “preeminent port of the Yiddish speaking world” was home to “a special community of progressive, optimistic, and economically successful Jews,” who were never confined to a single neighborhood prior to the fascist occupation, but also to the machinations of one of the sons of the city’s Jewish middle class, Lev Bronstein, later known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky, apostle of permanent class warfare.

The easily penetrated port, with its notoriously corrupt customs officials, was a congenial operating base for Greek, Italian, Russian, and Ukrainian nationalists, who taught an attentive Jewish journalist—Vladimir Jabotinsky—that “the veneers offered by assimilation, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism could not disguise the age-old yearning for nations to express their own unique genius.” Jabotinsky would become the champion of the “right wing, antisocialistic, militaristic, and uncompromising commitment to a Jewish homeland on both banks of the Jordan River.” Though Ben-Gurion reviled Jabotinsky as “Vladimir Hitler,” today his vision is part of the Israeli mainstream. “I learned how to be a Zionist from the gentiles,” he wrote.

When the Jews were free to leave post-Soviet Odessa, most of them did. They left behind a city that had, by means of popular movies and songs, become “an object of schmaltzy and melodic longing.” Decades of propagandistic history had effaced the collective memory of what the Romanians had done to the Jews, with the help of native Odessans. The exuberant, ribald Jewish heritage of that city was “celebrated mainly in code,” King writes, “in countless stories, novels, plays, films, jokes books, concerts, musicals and other ribaldries”—that evaded the fact that it “had been actively erased in the living memory of those who now sought to re-create it.”

Their survivors and descendants were elsewhere—in many cases, at the far end of the Q line in Brooklyn. King closes his book with a Proustian evocation of the “fishy sea air, a whiff of old cooking oil, the sweetness of overripe fruit, dark traces of motor oil and axle grease, the tang of dill and parsley, the alcoholic sting of cheap perfume, and the assertive revival of vintage sweat, all braided like a garland of garlic, silent as to source or cause,” that greets the olfactory apparatus of the visitor to Brighton Beach, also known as “Little Odessa by the Sea.”

‘Beginning of the Sabbath,’ published by Anton Hohenstein c. 1868
CREDIT: Library of Congress

Shabbat, that microcosm of God’s seventh-day rest, is the subject of Judith Shulevitz’s graceful, erudite new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (the subject of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast). But the weekly renewal of candlelighting, winedrinking, and the eating of challah is only the most obvious Jewish contribution to the science and history of Time. The division of primeval void into moons and then those moons into meaningful phases; the sectioning of the week to recapitulate the week of Creation; the days themselves maintained by rulings pertaining to work and play as much as by commandments to the performance of hours of prayer—such are just the beginnings of an immense, horizon-sized scroll that also introduced the world to concepts of eschatology and messianism. What follows is a brief, 12-part clocking of Jewish Time, focusing on theology but also widening to accommodate secular theories from the likes of Einstein, Marx, and Proust.

Extra Days in the Diaspora

The Jewish calendar, which is lunar, is a calendar of witness. The Sanhedrin, Jewry’s Congress, met in Jerusalem toward the end of every month to wait for the new moon. Once the moon was sighted—or, rather, as it was a new moon, once the moon was not sighted—the Sanhedrin’s rabbis would declare the beginning of the new month, and fires would be set outside the city’s walls to alert distant Jewish communities. Often, however, these fires were snuffed or obscured, or their message falsified by neighboring sects, and, since only the Sanhedrin could pronounce the new moon (though the sages were aware, of course, that the moon in their sky was the very same moon in every sky, Jewish Law required witnesses and consensus judgment), Diaspora communities were regularly confused as to when festivals and holidays would fall within the month. Though the Torah ordains single-day observances for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Shavuot, and Shemini Atzeret, Diasporites began celebrating them for an extra day as a precautionary measure—in order to better ensure that, regardless of any miscommunication as to which was the first of the lunar month’s 29 days, the festivals would be celebrated for at least one correct day.

Shmita

The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for  “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the  agricultural component of the shmita year still is.

Joshua at Gibeon

The Canaanite kings were warring against the Gibeonites, who appealed to Joshua ben Nun, successor to Moses, for help. We are told in Chapter 10 of the book that bears his name that Joshua led his army of Israelites to Gibeon to face the Amorites first and routed them. The four armies of four other kings followed, and Joshua’s Israelites fought every one. However the day of the battle was soon ending. Loath to let the day end without complete victory, Joshua asked God to still the sun above Gibeon and the moon above the valley of Ajalon—effectively extending the daylight of this decisive battle “until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.”

Hebrew Clock, Jewish Town Hall, Prague

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right—as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet. However, Prague’s Židovská radnice or Jewish Town Hall, seat of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry, built in the 16th century and extensively renovated in the 18th in the rococo style, features on its cupola “a Hebrew clock,” whose numbers are represented by Hebrew letters, and whose gears turn the hands counterclockwise. The time of Jewish Prague, then, runs in reverse—into the past. Paul Celan refers to this timepiece in his poem “In Prague,” where he memorializes two lovers, two dreams “tolling / against time, in the squares.”

Hershele Ostropoler

Hershele Ostropoler, Jewish trickster, was perhaps a fictional or composite character associated with the court of Rabbi Baruch of Medzhybizh, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. It is said that one day, in need of meal money, he pawned his sole possession: a gold pocketwatch. Later that night the pawnbroker was awakened by a noise and went down to his shop to investigate. Hershele had broken in. “Thief!” the man shrieked. Hershele said, “I’m no thief, I just wanted to know what time it was.” “And for this you woke me up?” “I’m sorry,” Hershele said, “but I only trust my own watch.”

Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), French-Jewish philosopher, believed that since time was always in motion, the single moment was unknowable. Just as one attempted to grasp an individual moment or thought, it would be gone—not necessarily replaced by another, but lost to the flow of all moments, all thoughts. While physicists of Bergson’s day, which saw the perfection of the microscope and the first experimentation with subatomic particles, observed objects and events in fixed, finite relationships, Bergson invoked a Zeno’s Paradox applied not to spatial or chronologic infinity, but to the mind itself. Bergsonian consciousness, forever eluding mensuration, would instead be characterized by what he called la durée, which has been translated as “Duration,” implying that ceaseless, Heraclitean flux of indivisible experience in which each instant becomes, instantaneously, the stuff of yesterdays, and every yesterday accrues to the account of oblivion. For Bergson it was Intuition (l’intuition), and not any intellection or formula, that would interpret the world, while such interpretation could only be expressed indirectly, symbolically—as memory, or through its practice: reminiscence, or reflection. Bergson’s vertiginous metaphysic, in which nothing is knowable, and in which consciousness can lead only to consciousness-of-consciousness, and so on in a regressus ad infinitum, brings us back to an original garden where memory frolics with fantasy, and where what we know of our pasts is forever being revised by the personalities we are always becoming.

Marcel Proust

In the opening of his vast, sevenfold novel, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), or the narrator “Marcel Proust,” dips a madeleine into his tea, which parlor ritual was a Big Bang for both literature and mind. This dipped biscuit triggers a memory, which in turns triggers another memory, which in turn triggers yet another, until thousands of pages later we realize we have read not only one the great novels of the 20th century but also a grand dramatization of Bergsonian theory (Bergson was Proust’s cousin by marriage). À la Recherche du Temps Perdu explores the world—or merely the memories displaced by the dunking of that teatime treat—through a somnambulistic, or deathly, consciousness, both timeless and without space. One never knows who, where, or when “Marcel Proust” is, what he’s doing or what his life is like while he is telling his story. Childhood experiences are seen through childhood eyes and then, in another paragraph, as if through the eyes of an adult; love is experienced as a teenager experiences love, and then lust is philosophized about in a way befitting a man of experience and wisdom. The gaze of Proust’s masterwork is synoptic, even while the irreducible point at center—the force binding together the novel’s narrator in all his ages and selves, with the writer who, lying abed in Paris, narrates the narrator—remains an insufferable cipher. In Proust, memory becomes modernity’s ultimate and terminal dimension, while the remembrancer himself seems as absent, or as deceased, as God.

Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski

For centuries Galilean and Newtonian physics had proved that it was impossible for a body to measure its own motion. By the 19th century Newton’s theories had become Laws implying that no one thing could determine its own velocity or the velocity of another without reference to an exteriority, without comparison. In applying this idea to the entirety of the cosmos, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) insisted that a comparison of velocities could be made with the use of a universal constant, which he would discover in the speed of light, the c—for Latin’s celeritas: a hurtling at 299,792,458 meters per second—of his famous formula that related energy, E, to mass, m: E=mc². Einstein’s theorizing held that there was no one temporally or spatially stationary perspective in the universe by, or from, which all motion could be judged and that because the universe’s only constant seemed to be the speed of light, it could be theorized that space and time were experienced differently—relatively—by bodies in different states of motion. The very constancy of this lightspeed, when taken in the context of Einstein’s abstract conclusions, illuminated a wholly new field of being, an imperceptible alterity previously unexplored outside of esoteric religion or mysticism—a Fourth Dimension, first postulated by Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), Einstein’s former mathematics instructor at the Zürich Polytechnic. Inextricably coiled within the three normative dimensions of space, which are length, width, and depth or height, was this new (or oldest) dimension of Time, or the superseding dimension of “Spacetime.” It was Minkowski who transmuted the two strands of Einsteinian thought, the physical and temporal, into a precious amalgam that provided the best setting for the jewel of Relativity.

Émile Durkheim

While the Hebrew root kdsh is traditionally translated as “holy,” it actually means something closer to “separate”—to remove something from the context of the everyday being to specialize it, to render sacred by means of occasion or locale. Wondering what it is that makes us conscious of time, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French Jew and the father of sociology, found himself attracted to the study of differentiation, in particular to the palpable differencing of the religious calendar, which serves to separate mundane time from religious occasion and so structures the unconscious life of the community by mediating between holiness observed privately or parochially and the public workaday. Durkheim, who more than any other thinker quested after the societal effects of time-marking and time-management, concluded that the recurrent calendar was the major force behind religion’s survival and that it was so by dint of being religion’s foremost socializer.

Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin

Franz Rosenzweig (1887-1929) of Kassel, Germany, believed not in Jewish history but in Jewish ahistory. In Rosenzweig’s prescription, the ideal Jewish life must seem achronologic—as the religious calendar re-embodies Creation, each year can mark only a new cycle of the same rituals and laws in which progress does not, indeed must not, obtain. Rosenzweig understood that each generation of Jewry achieves its own balance of sacred (specific) and secular (universal) times and that, while creation and redemption are the only two fixed points of rupture along the timescale of any religion, revelation of God’s Law had been addressed to the Jews alone and so allowed Jewry to experience elements of creation and redemption in this world, the here and now. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) of Berlin was an atheist who, toward the end of his life, began experimenting with Jewish belief, perhaps informed as much by his early-century Zionism as by the perils of a war that eventually caused his suicide. One of his later, underdeveloped theories comprised a Marxist approach to Jewish Messianism, or Messianic Time. Benjamin was particularly exercised by memory and nostalgia and considered the past the essential purview of the Jew. Citing Biblical proscriptions against soothsaying, or divining the future, Benjamin instead proposed a sort of permissible foretelling: a before-telling; an inquisition of the past that deprived that hesternal sphere of its historicism, of its entropic sense of momentum and advancement, in favor of asserting time’s eternality and the enduring value of skepticism as a mechanism for redeeming the self. Because the future was so unknowable, or taboo, for the Jew, it acquired, in Benjamin’s thought, an auratic, fetishistic mystery, a fraught potentiality—at any moment the neat, orderly progress of our collective narratives might end, and what Benjamin called the Angel of History, a Messiah previously incapacitated by our political and technological ideas of progress, might finally be actualized, redeeming us from causality.

Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky

Karl Marx (1818-1883) regarded the regulation of time with ambivalence if not suspicion; a position best characterized by his insight that when time becomes decontextualized and so commodified as money, noncommodified time—what we might call personal-time, or family-time—becomes devalued. Marx envisioned a classless future, a mechanized utopia in which historical progress could be measured, and then nullified, only by human equality. The Revolution would come, and all men would be set free in his uniquely profane, but hopefully bloodless, eschatology. But Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) doubted the permanency of Revolution and instead called for “Permanent Revolution.” (Die Revolution in Permanenz was originally Marx’s formulation, though the idea is most closely associated with Trotsky.) Marx thought that a revolutionary class could achieve its emancipation by constantly pursuing its interests through ideological education and occasional resistance, whereas Trotsky believed that one-country socialism was impossible, and that the global proletariat had to seize power over and forcibly dismantle the bourgeoisie, imposing the communist agenda from above in a newer hegemony. Marx’s relationship to Time was traditionally Judeo-Christian: cyclical but redemptive, to be resolved in a future Messianic Era whose inherent egalitarianism would militate against the personality cult of any despotic Messiah; whereas Trotsky’s relationship was one of regular violent Apocalypse as necessary and even salutary.

Death, Afterlife, Messiah

When a person dies he or she is mourned for seven days at shiva (literally, “seven”), usually at the home of the principal mourner, in visits accompanied by food and prayer. For 30 days after the death, the mourner is prohibited from marrying, for 12 months the mourner is prohibited from enjoying public entertainment. Yahrzeit, Yiddish for “time of year,” is the word for an anniversary of a death. One year after burial a gravestone can be “unveiled,” but this is custom only and not a commandment. Jewish bodies must be buried as soon as possible. While the body is being prepared—washed, dried, and dressed—it may never be left unattended. Notions of the Jewish afterlife are disputed. Reincarnation seems a possibility to some, an apostasy to others. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer said the days of the Messiah will last 40 years, Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah said 70 years; Rabbi Hillel said there will be no Messiah, and Rabbi Joseph asked that Rabbi Hillel be forgiven. The prophet Zechariah—the name means “God has remembered”—speaks of two Messiahs.

To the small but influential group of his American admirers, Trotsky appeared as a kind of Soviet Garibaldi or George Washington, fighting for freedom against an evil empire. The problem, as Robert Service shows in his new biography Trotsky, is that Trotsky himself was one of the men chiefly responsible for that evil. In the October Revolution of 1917, he was second only to Lenin in leading the Bolshevik coup to success. In the years of civil war that followed, Trotsky, as commissar for the Red Army, designed the campaigns that inflicted horrific suffering on the civilian population of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. None of the Soviet leaders outdid him in zeal for collectivization and terror, or in his commitment to spreading the Communist revolution across Europe and the world. Service, one of the leading historians of the Soviet Union and the author of biographies of Lenin and Stalin, sums up his verdict on Trotsky this way: “He was close to Stalin in intentions and practice. He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism.… He reveled in terror.”

How, then, did Trotsky become a symbol, to some of the most intelligent American leftists, of a more humane and democratic Communism? In part, as Service writes (and the Farrell essay demonstrates), it was because of “their naivety. They were blind to Trotsky’s contempt for their values…. Like spectators at a zoo, they felt sorry for a wounded beast.” But for the Jewish intellectuals who clustered around Partisan Review, he was an especially irresistible figure, since Trotsky himself was the most powerful Jewish intellectual who ever lived. While this part of Trotsky’s legacy is incidental to Service’s book, it is a significant chapter in the political history of American Jews, and Trotsky helps explain both the allure and the danger of the mass murderer who was affectionately known to his followers as “the Old Man.”

He was born in 1879 as Leiba Bronstein—the name Trotsky was a nom de guerre, like Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) and Stalin (Iosif Dzugashvili). Bronstein’s parents, unusually for Jews in the Russian Empire, were farmers; they belonged to a colony of Polish Jews who had settled in the Ukraine, as part of a czarist project for dispersing and assimilating the Jewish population. As Service shows at the beginning of his book, this meant that Bronstein “did not have a life associated mainly with fellow Jews.” His parents were not devout, and Leiba was sent to a Lutheran German school in Odessa.

Very quickly, like many young, secular Jews of his generation, Bronstein was drawn to the Communist revolutionary movement—partly out of Marxist idealism, partly out of disgust at the reactionary and anti-Semitic czarist government. He was only eighteen when he was arrested, with other members of his small, amateurish revolutionary cell, and exiled to Siberia. As with so many Russian radicals, however, Siberia was less a prison for Bronstein than a kind of finishing school. Bronstein married a fellow prisoner, Alexandra Sokolovskaya—also Jewish, like several other members of his cell—and had two children. He made contact with other Communists, and began to read the clandestine newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which he received hidden in the binding of an innocuous book.

Iskra was edited from London and Geneva by a group of Communists including Vladimir Lenin, and Bronstein decided he had to join them. With surprising ease, Trotsky—as he was now known on his forged or stolen passport—escaped from Siberia and crossed Europe, presenting himself in London as a new recruit to the cause. (It is ironic that, compared to the later brutality of the KGB and the Gulag, the czarist police system looks like benign neglect.)

It soon became clear that Trotsky was a brilliant writer: at their first meeting, Lenin greeted him with the words: “Ah, the Pen has arrived!” And it was by his pen that he became to known to revolutionaries inside and outside Russia, writing for Iskra and other illegal, but widely read, publications. In 1905, when the first Russian Revolution broke out, Trotsky smuggled himself back into St. Petersburg, where he discovered that he was equally magnetic as a platform orator. Still just 25, he became head of the Petersburg council, or Soviet; when the revolution was crushed, he was arrested again and escaped again.

By 1917, Trotsky’s peregrinations and expulsions had led him to New York, where he arrived “to a hero’s welcome among emigrant socialist sympathizers from the Russian Empire,” especially Jews—he wrote a series of articles for the Forverts, the socialist Yiddish daily. Indeed, one of the ironic themes of Service’s Trotsky is the way the revolutionary kept finding himself in Jewish milieux, despite his adamant refusal to claim a Jewish identity. As Service explains, in his chapter “Trotsky and the Jews,” he followed an orthodox Marxist line on matters of nationality and religion: “In his own eyes, he had ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins.” He detested Zionism and the Jewish socialist Bund. Yet it is striking how many of Trotsky’s closest comrades were non-Jewish Jews, just like himself. One might even say, though Service does not pursue the subject this far, that the aggressive rejection of Jewish particularity was the form in which Trotsky, and many Jews like him, lived their Jewishness.

When the czar was overthrown, in February 1917, Trotsky immediately began planning to get back to Russia, and he arrived at Petersburg’s Finland Station on May 4, a month after Lenin. Service traces the complex, ever-shifting circumstances of that revolutionary year, the advances and feints and retreats of the Bolsheviks, until they finally seized the capital, under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, in October. Then came the years of triumph and power and cruelty; and then came the great fall, which turned Trotsky the commissar into the socialist martyr described by Farrell.

Starting in 1923, as Lenin was crippled by strokes, Trotsky and Stalin waged a bureaucratic and propaganda war over who was entitled to succeed him. Trotsky entered the battle with many advantages. His highly visible role in the Civil War had made him iconic; he was still a brilliant and popular writer. Most important of all, he was Lenin’s own choice. The ailing leader dictated a “testament” in which he warned that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky had the potential to split the Communist Party, and he came down firmly on Trotsky’s side: “Stalin is too crude and this inadequacy…becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary.”

The real question, as Service convincingly frames it, is why Trotsky, given all these advantages, allowed Stalin to outmaneuver him so decisively—to the point that, by 1928, Trotsky had been stripped of office, expelled from the Party, and finally exiled from the USSR. Service concludes that Trotsky, perhaps unconsciously, did not really want to replace Lenin as sole leader of the country; that is why he “lacked the decisiveness for a concerted advance on power.” While Stalin expertly manipulated the Communist Party apparatus, packing the Politburo with his supporters, Trotsky remained aloof, arrogant, inflexible. When it came to making speeches to big crowds or writing scorching pamphlets, no one could beat Trotsky. When it came to making friends and allies, he could not be bothered.

And there was one other factor in Trotsky’s failure of will. In 1917, just after the revolution, Lenin had wanted to appoint him as Commissar for Internal Affairs, which would have made him head of the secret police. Trotsky refused, on the grounds that “it would be inappropriate for a Jew to take charge of the police in a society pervaded by anti-Semitism. If Jews were seen to be repressing Russians, a pogrom atmosphere might be provoked.” For the same reason, he initially resisted taking charge of the Red Army, and rejected the invitation to become Lenin’s second-in-command in 1922. “The party’s leadership was widely identified as a Jewish gang,” Service writes, and “Trotsky continued to believe that his own prominence in government, party and army did practical damage to the revolutionary cause.”

If Trotsky allowed Stalin to get the better of him at the crucial moment, it may have been because he still feared the consequences of a Jew heading the Soviet government. Of course, such scruples made no difference to the enemies of the Jews. By the time Hitler took to power, thanks in part to the Germans’ fear and hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Trotsky had long since been made a non-person in Stalin’s USSR. The rabbi who made the famous quip was right: “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins who pay the price.”

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

The normally camera-shy Albert Kahn outside his office in the rue de Richelieu in Paris in 1914, on the only occasion he agreed to pose formally for the camera.

Inspired by a breakthrough in photographic technology, Kahn was determined to document humankind using autochromes—vividly colored photographs made with a transparent film of dyed potato starch. Beginning in 1909, he spent his enormous fortune on a small army of photographers dispatched to 50 countries across every continent. Over the next 22 years, until 1931, he created one of the largest photographic collections in the world: 72,000 autochromes that document the everyday life of ordinary people from Ireland to Iran, Montenegro to Mongolia, and Vancouver to Vietnam. To celebrate a century of the little-known collection, Princeton University Press has issued an impressive new monograph, The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet.

The photographs depict a world we have only known in black and white. Kahn’s images present that world rich with the colors of life, and the autochrome’s uniquely vibrant, warm, and evocative hues deliver an emotional charge. They bridge the century that has passed and erase the sense that these people from an earlier time were somehow not like us. Perhaps this special color, long celebrated by connoisseurs of the autochrome, is what inspired Kahn to spend and spend until he was bankrupt, to spend even after the stock market crash of 1929, when most of his wealth evaporated and it was clear he could no longer afford to indulge this extraordinary passion. The autochromes depict their human subjects with a tender sympathy that is a perfect partner to Kahn’s own devotion to his fellow man. “I work for humanity,” he wrote in 1908. “I serve the human race.”

In a 1914 photograph from Paris, a young woman, part of a family posing outside their home, leans forward in her chair and fixes the viewer with an attractive face animated by intelligence and curiosity. In another image, two boys in Spain—arms draped around each other’s shoulders—strike the jaunty attitude familiar to best friends everywhere. Some photographs overwhelm us with their exoticism: the elaborate costumes worn by Serbian women in Macedonia obscure individuality under white kerchiefs, long white skirts covered by heavy red aprons, red jackets embroidered with gold thread, and necklaces of large gold coins. Such detailed documentation is part of what Kahn was after. He wrote that he wanted to “fix in the memory once and for all the different aspects of human activity, the customs and practices, the inevitable disappearance of which is only a question of time.” Recognizable human faces help ground these distinctive customs. In one photograph, a young man is dressed with simple formality in white pants, shirt, and hat, all trimmed in blue. He stares at the viewer with defiance and suspicion, unafraid but sullen. It is Hanoi, Vietnam, 1915, and the young man and his fellows pull the rickshaws of funeral mourners. Their world is now history, but the young man’s expression is timeless.

The new book is the first widely available collection to reproduce Kahn’s photographs from every region of the world. While earlier volumes were published with the cooperation of individual countries, those books tended to reproduce images that abetted nationalism (an irony that would not have amused the internationalist Kahn). But the new volume is perhaps too true to Kahn’s ideals. In favoring the universal over the particular, it largely overlooks the role played by Kahn’s Jewish origins, and the Jewish historical moment he so clearly typifies.

The special attraction universalism exerted on Jews has been on the academic radar for decades. “Everywhere, Jews played a leading role in universalist political movements, liberal, socialist, and, later on, communist too,” noted historian Michael Walzer in 2001. And it’s been almost 40 years since the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in an article about Karl Marx and Benjamin Disraeli, shrewdly observed that politically emancipated Jews “longed to identify with the majority” because they desired a more profound emancipation, a “liberation from their anomalous, and often inferior, social status.” That analysis sums up Kahn’s life.

He was born Abraham Kahn on March 3, 1860 in the Alsace region of France. His father was a well-to-do cattle merchant who sent the boy to a Jewish primary school, then to a local gymnasium, and at age 16 to Paris. The last was a popular move among Alsatian Jews who, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, found themselves living under German rule. Secular republican France and the opportunities available in Paris attracted many. Kahn lived at the Pension Springer, a boarding house for Jewish students, earned his baccalaureat, and joined the Jewish banking firm of Goudchaux. But despite his close association with the Jewish community, Kahn changed his name to Albert and took steps to distance himself.

He had good reason. Just as Kahn began making his fortune in banking, French anti-Semitism was gaining strength. The fame and wealth of the Rothschild family made it easy to associate French Jews with banking, and in 1882 and 1892 financial crises were blamed on Jewish bankers. Kahn, who had already begun what would be a lifetime correspondence with the French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson, refused to acknowledge these events. Their letters never mentioned the growing anti-Semitism, and the two friends maintained this silence even during the infamous Dreyfus Affair of 1897–99. But Kahn did respond to the Dreyfus Affair in his own singular way—in 1898 he founded the Scholarship for World Travel, which funded academic study abroad to foster international understanding and friendship. Thus, Kahn the universalist was born. He escaped the burdens of being in the Jewish minority by joining the greatest majority of all: humanity.

Though Kahn did not take any of the photographs himself, and assigned the selection of photographers to the project’s director, the Archives of the Planet was the product of his individual vision. And Kahn’s choice of photography as the medium for his greatest project is as fascinating as his universalism. Scholars and practitioners wonder at Jews’ extraordinary participation and achievement in photography, represented by the photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Diane Arbus, and Richard Avedon, to name just a few. In January 2003, photographer William Meyers wrote in Commentary that photography operated as a branch of leftist politics, which gave Jewish photographers “a way of seeing.” For Jews eager to escape what they considered a parochial background, this political vision allowed them to focus on the world’s (non-Jewish) poor and dispossessed. In her 2004 article about Lotte Jacobi, University of Wisconsin professor Lisa Silverman suggests that Jews valued photography for its ability to portray them as acceptable German types. Art historian and photographer Max Kozloff was co-curator of a 2002 photography exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, and in the exhibit’s accompanying book he claimed that Jewish photographers produce intrinsically Jewish photographs, that there is a “Jewish eye.” Meanwhile, in a 2000 article for Photo Review, author and scholar A.D. Coleman wrote that photography attracted Jews because “the camera helps conscience shoulder the burden of memory.” And who has a greater burden of memory than the Jews?

But there is yet another aspect of photography that enticed so many: it is the ultimate universal language. The medium speaks to everyone, no translation needed; the great German photographer August Sander praised “photography’s universal comprehensibility.” Early on, photography raised hopes that a new age of greater understanding among nations would arise. And it is that quality that attracted Albert Kahn.

For groups often viewed as pariahs, championing universalism could be a form of self-interest. Photography, like Esperanto, socialism, and communism, held a special appeal for Jews because it exemplified an ideal of brotherhood so expansive it might accommodate even them. Most internationalist programs erased individuality in the name of unity. Socialist utopias were bland agglomerations of homogenized workers. But Kahn’s photographic project was different—by its very nature, his Archives of the Planet could not gloss over the differences among the world’s cultures. Instead, it recorded those differences and presented the evidence of a diverse humanity without any theorizing. Its only argument, implicit and powerful, is that all people have a right to exist.