I'm reading A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes at the moment, which is about the Russian Revolution, and I came across this:
Is there any plausible way in which a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic could have been established? Where would it be? What would it be called? And what would be the effect on subsequent history?
The Jewish Bund was Russia's first mass-based Marxist party. Established in 1897, it had 35,000 members by 1905. It declared the Jews to be a 'nation' and demanded full national autonomy for them, with Yiddish as the official language, within a Russian federation. Such demands were rejected by the Russian Marxists (including Iulii Markov and Leon Trotsky, who were themselves Jews), who put class interests above nationalist ones, and who, in any case, were deeply hostile to the Jewish nationalism of the Bundists (Georgii Plekhanov accused them of being Zionists who were afraid of sea-sickness). The result was that the two Marxist movements went their separate ways.
Is there any plausible way in which a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic could have been established? Where would it be? What would it be called? And what would be the effect on subsequent history?