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A Russian city, Moscow, and the people there are real Russians who speak Russian worthy of the name. How lovely the tones of this language are! It is altogether unlike the distorted, wretched Russian spoken in “our northwestern districts”. . People speak in other tones that do not resemble the Jews’ tones. Ninety percent of our Jews speak in bad, stammering, weak voices that lack flash and tone. The Russian voice, in contrast, is a loud, full-throated voice. . I must admit, however, that after spending a few weeks there, I felt a pro- BETWEEN CLASS AND NATION 31 found inner nostalgia for the twisted, dirty alleys of Vilna and the unwashed, impoverished Jews of Vilna.

20 CONVERGING ALTERNATIVES At the initiative of John (Dzhan) Mill, Zhitlovsky’s article was published in advance of the third Bund convention, held in 1899 in Kovno. At the convention, Mill himself fought for a resolution stressing the need to furnish Jewish workers with national rights so that they could defend their proletarian interests. Mill’s opponents preferred to struggle for Jews’ civil rights and believed that a demand for national rights would fragment and, thereby, vitiate the political struggle.

In fact, it aims to create unity in the long-term historical process. In response, Dubnow ruled on principled and historical grounds that a national policy that integrates the interests of all national strata is totally at odds with the Marxist-style class philosophy. By so stating, Dubnow transformed the Jews’ anomalous state into a categorical worldview of sorts that should dictate the particular national policy of the Jewish people. This being the case, Dubnow sought to base Jewish nationhood in the Diaspora (as he termed it) on the subjective wish for national unity— a wish that, when implemented through a comprehensive autonomous community organization, would provide a substitute for the territorial setting that “normal” peoples have.