The paper analyses a specific form of revolutionary collectivity referred to as akhdes by Jewish militants of 1905. This peculiar political subjectivity, which emerged independently of mass political parties, could hardly be recognized and apprehended by historians. However, it was perceived by some Yiddish writers who instantaneously fictionalized revolutionary events of 1905. The way the revolted crowd (oylem) was rendered both in historical and literary works is reconsidered with reference to the concepts coined by recent political philosophy (particularly, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Paolo Virno). The paper is composed of three parts. The first part reviews briefly some of the attempts at writing the history of crowds. The second part is devoted to revolutionary events of 1905 in a specific place, the shtetl of Krynki, which—due to the intensity of the revolt there—attracted particular attention of historians. The third part focuses on Isaac Meir Weissenberg’s novella, A Shtetl, published in 1907, to suggest a political reading that could inform historical narrations insofar as they try to apprehend the dynamics of the revolution itself.

Focusing on the period surrounding the revolution of 1905 in Warsaw, this article examines the relationship between four different types of violence—urban, revolutionary, governmental, and interethnic—that repeatedly influenced the lives of many of the city’s 775,000 residents. As part of this contextual approach to studying and understanding  intergroup violence in an urban setting, the author maintains that while the causal relationship between social, political, and interethnic violence in Warsaw was never linear, its influence was very often reciprocal and incremental, if not, at times, exponential. This synchronic analysis of the different types of violence is critical for understanding the rising tensions between Poles and Jews in turn-of-the-century Warsaw as well as Jewish interpretations of these developments. In addition to shedding much light on key social and political developments during this period, this contextual analysis of various types of intergroup conflict in one city also challenges the two predominant scholarly paradigms for studying moments of anti-Jewish violence: the longue durée school of antisemitism and the theme of Polish-Jewish coexistence.

This article addresses meanings of localized political violence among working-class youth in the Pale of Settlement and the Kingdom of Poland during the late period of the 1905 Revolution. The author claims, using contemporary debates and personal documents, that localized political violence became at that time an important expression of working-class militant identity, though its meanings varied with location and ethnicity. Localized violence became a statement of the militants’ newly acquired dignity as revolutionaries within their local communities as well as a statement of their higher revolutionary commitment vis-à-vis the established revolutionary parties and the better-educated revolutionaries. While the article addresses violence of militants of all stripes, it particularly focuses on the meaning of localized violence among anarchists, since their uncompromising rejection of all social hierarchies combined with anti-intellectualism pushed them into perceiving violent confrontations with the authorities as the ultimate
expression of their political and personal identities, more so than for other militants. The anarchists perceived themselves at war against the authorities and saw their war as an apocalyptic struggle of the good against the evil. The emphasis of the article is on working-class Jewish militants from the Pale of Settlement and from the Kingdom of Poland, who constituted a substantial minority within anarchist groups and who had to struggle against a combination of class and ethnicity- based discrimination which, as the author claims, affected their identity as militants and the meaning of localized violence for them.

This study of Vladimir Jabotinsky in the years 1905–1907 reveals a developmental leap in his evolution as a politician, thinker, and Zionist leader. In this context one should view his political activities and his writings as two elements of a united system that had the goal of advancing Zionism in Russia. Although this observation might seem self-evident, it has epistemological significance because it warns us against exaggerating Jabotinsky’s importance exclusively as a thinker. At that time Jabotinsky was an inexperienced political strategist and politician of middling, but growing, importance. However, he learned quickly and advanced in the leadership during this short period. The author examines how he succeeded satisfying his ambitions through practical affairs and literary polemics

The revolution of 1905 had a significant impact on the social and political life of the Kingdom of Poland. Not only did it lead to the emergence of the foundations of civil society, but it also contributed to the emergence of a new political scene. Jan Jeleński, the publisher of the antisemitic Rola weekly, was also an active participant in those transformations. He got involved in many activities, including organizing the Polish Catholic Association, an election campaign to the Duma, or publishing a new newspaper. According to him, similarly to the opinion of other conservative and Catholic milieus, the revolution had a clearly negative influence on Polish society. He perceived it as a result of behind-the-scenes machinations of Germans and, above all, of Jews who supposedly drew profit from the chaos in the Kingdom. According to Rola, Jews were also responsible for the emergence of socialist parties which, while focusing on Jewish interests, brought harm to Polish workers. And thus, in Jeleński’s weekly, at the threshold of the twentieth century, antisemitism became a convenient tool of political strategy. It served as a means of deprecating political adversaries, strengthened the stereotype of the Jew as an enemy, and the rhetoric shaped at that time became deeply rooted in the Polish public discourse for many years to come.

An anonymous letter to the general-governor of Vilna was sent in 1903. It concerns the permission to establish Jewish self-defense groups regardless of the political intentions of the Bund or Poale Zion. The author represents a loyalist attitude and shows ideological nuances within the Jewish community prior to 1905

During March–April 1905 and from October 1905 until February 1906, Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936), a renowned journalist, editor, Zionist and public figure who lived and was active in Warsaw, stayed in St. Petersburg. During that time he wrote almost every day in his diary about the political meetings he attended and the existence of the city during those crucial moments. Most of the diary is written in Polish, and some parts are written in Hebrew and Yiddish. His notes indicate that he was fully aware of being a witness to significant historical events and saw them as an opportunity to gain some advantages for the Jewish residents of the Russian Empire and for himself. As a result we can learn about the daily life of the city and get a sense of how the political life was conducted in the shadow of the revolution. Although Sokolow was fully aware of the significance of the 1905 events for the entire Russian Empire, he was not aware of the transition that was taking place in the Jewish public sphere. He believed that the old political methods were still relevant and did not realize that a new era in the Jewish political life in the Russian Empire had begun. Sokolow’s diary provides an opportunity to learn of the events that took place in St. Petersburg from the perspective of a journalist and political activist who knew the city quite well, but nevertheless remained an outsider.