Jewish Autonomism

The movement's beliefs were similar to those of the Austro-Marxists who advocated national personal autonomy within the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire and cultural pluralists in America such as Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen.

Kohn argued that Jews shared not only a religion, but were connected by a long, deep-rooted ethnic history of centuries of discrimination, attempts at assimilation and exile.

Notable philosophical thinkers from Eastern and Western Europe including Ernest Renan, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Auguste Compte are cited to have influenced Dubnow's ideas.

[13] Dubnow feared that the Jews of the Diaspora would lose their spiritual connection with one another through assimilation, going so far as to claim that "no self respecting minority will take notice of such accusations [of separatism] because it considers its free development to be a sacred and inalienable right.

[15] Oscar Janowsky perhaps most influentially advocated American diaspora nationalism; yet his version of Jewish Autonomism differed in key ways with Dubnow.

Janowsky believed that if autonomism could be successful in meeting Jewish national demands in Eastern Europe, it could also present a solution for the Arab population of Palestine.

[20] One of the primary functions of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was to grant new states international recognition as the successors of failed and outdated multi-ethnic empires.

[22] Jewish leaders demanded that they be recognized as an autonomous group with the right to organize its own religious, cultural, philanthropic, and social institutions.

[24] While these represented important achievements, some Jewish leaders who took a more maximalist view of minority rights saw the Paris Peace Conference as insufficient.

Despite successes of Jewish citizenship and linguistic and cultural rights, membership in the League of Nations, reparations, and self-regulated emigration were all ideas that were not adopted.

Unfortunately, even the limited objectives won by diaspora nationalists were not realized, as the Peace Conference relied on either nation-states to enforce these rights themselves (which they were never keen to do) or let the League of Nations punish violators (which never occurred due to its gridlock and incompetence).