With hindsight the Dreyfus case can be seen as an ominous foretaste of the power and ferocity of anti-Semitism in this centurv. Not least because it occurred not in feudal Russia - the land of the pogroms - but in modern industrial democratic France.
It lead Theodor Herzl, who witnessed the affair, to write his famous book The Jewish State, which has become the founding text of modern Zionism. He concludes that it is impossible for jews and non-Jews to live together - instead an exclusively Jewish state should be established. Israeli left continues to fight expansionist Zionist project The social democrats of the time rejected this. They saw it as a self-imposed isolation -a diversion from the socialist struggle. They saw anti-semitism as a feudal product destined to die away. Under conditions of advanced capitalism the Jews would be gradually assimilated and absorbed. Eventually they would cease to be a distinct group.
Lenin
This assimilation was seen as a desirable outcome. The Jews were not considered a nation because they did not possess a common language and territory. Such an outlook was shared by socialists as diverse as Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky.
Russian social democrats assumed that assimilation would proceed in their country in the same way as Western Europe and North America.
Opposition to this approach came mainly from the Jewish Bund. This organisation developed a programme opposed to assimilation demanding recognition of the Jews as a nation.
At the 1903 congress of Russian social democrats they demanded the right to be recognised as the sole repreSOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.77. 11 February 1995, Page 13