Bund i Sverige - en judisk arbetarrörelse i diasporan (The Bund in Sweden – a Jewish Labour movement in the Diaspora)

Håkan Blomqvist

The purpose of the following project is to study a forgotten chapter of the labour movement: the Bund in Sweden. Der "algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland" was the largest Jewish labour party in Europe from the turn of the century 1800-1900 up until the Holocaust. Located mainly in the Russian empire it organised - as a transnational movement - Jewish followers in many parts of Europe. Ideologically it combined internationalism with the notion that the Jewish people had the right to autonomy around the culture and language of Yiddish within existent states. In the early 20’s, as the Bolsheviks stabilized power in Russia, the mainstay of the Bund was Poland. There it built its own cosmos of Yiddish labour organisations and gained a mass following. With World War II and the Holocaust the Bund lost its mass base and split during the cold war. While remnants in Poland joined the communist party the Bund in exile sided with the western world. Originally firmly opposed to the Zionist project the Bund successively accepted the new state of Israel. In Swedish labour historiography a group of the Bund in Stockholm during 1902-10 is known although not thoroughly researched. But at the YIVO, Institute for Jewish Research, in New York, there exists an archive hitherto unknown, from the Bund in Sweden 1947-51(54). During at least those years there was a branch in Sweden with locals in several cities. They seem to have consisted mainly of Jewish refugees from the Polish and German camps on their way to the US or Israel. In the midst of transmigration they organised party and cultural activities and took part in the debates on the future of their movement and of socialism. A study of the Bund in Sweden will not only narrate a forgotten experience in the international labour movement. It will confront many of the ideological and theoretical questions raised at the crossroads of ethnical, national and political perspectives as a labour movement from the Jewish world across the Baltic met with a nationally hegemonic and well politically integrated social democracy in Sweden.