The author was born in Paris in 1926 of Jewish parents from Poland. His father was deported during the war and was murdered in Auschwitz. The fate of his father and so many of his family and friends inspired him to dedicate his life to the history of the vanished world of his ancestors. He studied social sciences and history, became a journalist and author of many works on the history of the Jews in Poland and Lithuania. He was particularly interested in the history of the Jewish workers’ movement, and published his Histoire générale du Bund: un mouvement révolutionnaire juif in 1995. This was the first integral history of the movement in all its international ramifications. After more than twenty-five years of preoccupation with the subject, Minczeles aims in this book to recapitulate the origins of the movement up until the foundation of the Bund in Vilno in 1897.

The book starts with an overview of the history of the Jews in the Russian empire. After the division of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Jews from Poland, the Ukraine, and Lithuania were incorporated in the Russian empire, it was the intention of the tsars to induce the Jews to convert to the Orthodox faith and give up their own language and culture. But the Jews resisted every attempt of forced Russification and were punished by ever-growing restrictions in all spheres of life. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russian Jews lived crammed in great poverty with little or no hope to better their lot, crowded as they were in the Pale of Settlement, a restricted area which they were not allowed to leave to settle in other parts of the empire.

Though quite a few Jewish students and young intellectuals were attracted by the underground Russian socialist movements, the new ideologies only slowly found support among Jewish workers in the tobacco and textile industries and in the many small workshops. From 1870 onwards, the struggle for better working conditions started and several strikes occurred in the industrial regions of Poland and the Pale. In spite of the constant danger of arrest and exile to Siberia, the socialist movement took hold of the minds and hearts of the Jewish workers.

The foundation of the Jewish Workers’ Union in Russia and Poland, shortly called Bund (Yiddish for Union) in Vilna in 1897 was the result of a long and difficult process of growing awareness of the particularity of the situation of the Jewish workers in the Russian empire. The early Russian socialists and populists, among whom were some Jewish revolutionaries, thought that political and social reforms in Russia would put an end to discrimination and persecution, so that Russians and Jews could unite in building a better future together.

Reality proved to be less simple. Russian Jews, who had been denied for so long access to Russian life and culture, had created a modern secular literature and culture of their own in Yiddish. More than 90 per cent of the Jewish population of the Russian empire only spoke Yiddish and had no or little command of Russian, Polish, or other languages of the empire. Socialist propaganda among the Jewish workers was only possible in Yiddish. Even when the Jewish religion slowly lost its hold on the workers, they remained firmly bound in an Jewish society with a defined national consciousness.

Minczeles describes with great insight and detail this development up till 1897. But he overlooks (and this is a missed chance), the question of why the Jewish workers turned away from the religion which had bound them together for so long. In other works on the history of the Bund this question has been already broached and partly answered: when during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855) every year the Jews were required to deliver a number of their young boys for military service of twenty-five years in the army, the Jewish establishment sacrificed the orphans and the children of the poor, and even used armed kidnappers to fulfil the yearly quota. This was the origin of the ever-growing rift between the upper and lower classes in the Jewish communities.

At the end of the book there are short biographies of the most important founders and leaders of the first hour, illustrations, and a detailed bibliography.