6 - The General Jewish Workers’ Bund

Summary

The Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Rusland un Poyln (the General Jewish Workers’ Bund in Russia and Poland),¹ widely known as the Bund, which grew to be a major movement first in tsarist Russia and later in the Second Polish Republic, had its roots in the circles of Jewish workers and intellectuals active in the 1880s and 1890s in Vilna, Minsk, Kovno, and elsewhere. The adherents of these circles, which operated underground, and which were initially devoted primarily to creating groups devoted to studying revolutionary literature, ultimately turned to an emphasis on agitation.² The local organizations created in a handful of cities and towns in the Pale of Settlement () in the wake of this shift both supported and were supported by waves of strikes by Jewish workers in, among others, the textile, cigarette, bristle-making and tanning industries – many of which succeeded, at least temporarily, in obtaining higher wages and shorter working hours. The industries in which Jewish socialists engaged in organizing in the 1890s included fields in which a high proportion of those employed were female. Buoyed by victories in specific strikes, Jewish social democrats became determined to create a unified organization.