Ber Borochov

Who was Ber Borochov?

Dov Ber Borochov was a Marxist Zionist and one of the founders of the Labor Zionist movement as well as a pioneer in the study of Yiddish as a language.

He was born in the town of Zolotonosha, Russian Empire. As an adult he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party but was expelled when he formed a Zionist Socialist Workers Union in Yekaterinoslav. Subsequently, he helped form the Poale Zion party and devoted his life to promoting the party in Russia, Europe, and America. When the Russian social democrats came to power, Borochov returned to Russia in March 1917 to lead the Poale Zion. He became ill and died in Kiev of pneumonia in December 1917.

Borochov became highly influential in the Zionist movement because he explained nationalism in general, and Jewish Nationalism in particular in terms of Marxist class struggle and dialectical materialism. Borochov predicted, correctly, that nationalist forces would be more important in determining events than economic and class considerations, especially as concerned the Jews. Borochov argued that the class structure of European Jews resembled an inverted class pyramid where few Jews occupied the productive layers of society as workers. The Jews would migrate from country to country as they were forced out of their chosen professions by a "stychic process" which would ultimately force migration to Palestine, where they would form a proletarian basis in order to carry out Marxist class struggle.