Self-Defence as an Emotional Experience

Abstract

Youth who left their communities and declared independence from communal values and norms of behaviour found that family and communal ties were much too strong to be easily cut. Considering that at the time all Jews, including secular revolutionary Jews, had to deal with the same anti-Semitism, some level of allegiance of the revolutionaries towards the Jewish community was to be expected. Young revolutionaries did not leave behind the individualistic idea of self-development, but they learned that the way to self-development was through communal solidarity. They expressed this solidarity not as traditional Jews would, through allegiance to communal and religious values and behavioural practices, but in ways legitimate to the new youth culture that they had developed. They presented themselves not as renegades, but as people with a new Jewish identity, the identity of a Jewish revolutionary. This new identity found its utmost expression in two emotion-laden political struggles — the struggle for self-assertion against the revolutionary intelligentsia and self-defence against pogroms.