Yiddishkayt and class consciousness: the Bund and its minority concept

摘要

This article presents an historical predecessor to modern multiculturalism that arose in the multi-ethnic context of the Russian empire and was transferred after the First World War to the Second Polish Republic - the concept of the national-cultural autonomy of the Jewish Workers' Union, known as the Bund. Bundists developed a specific Yiddishkayt as a trademark of their party, and with the Bund's programme of national-cultural autonomy, the Jewish minority was to gain its place in the multi-ethnic context of the Russian Empire. The guiding principle of national-cultural autonomy retained its validity in the altered context of the Second Polish Republic. The Bund called for state recognition of the right to the free development of ethno-cultural identity, and in so doing developed the first modern concept of ethnic pluralism on the basis of a collective cultural autonomy of minorities, which strikingly resembles current theories of multiculturalism. Like the latter's left liberal supporters, the Bundists included in their conception the socio-economic components long ignored in the moderate liberal multiculturalism discourse.