Writing the Paris Commune in the Warsaw Ghetto

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the emergence and abrupt disappearance of discourses about the Paris Commune in the global Yiddish public sphere during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing upon publications produced in transnational centres of Yiddish culture, it traces the rise of the Paris Commune as a historical trope through which Jewish authors sought to make sense of the class and anti-Jewish racial violence that erupted throughout the era of social revolution. As a narrative of class violence that exploded within the national body, the Commune also provided a political framework to critique dominant structures of power and privilege within Jewish society. Writing and re-writing the history of the Commune thus became a central mechanism to inculcate the politics of socialist internationalism among Yiddish readers. With the onset of the inter-war crisis and the rise of fascism, the Commune returned as a key trope through which to comprehend the existential threats to Jewish life and the politics of internationalism, globally, culminating in a remarkable retelling by Abraham Blum, written in the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, which laid bare the political and class dynamics at the core of Nazi eliminationist violence.