Jewish Anarchists in Eastern Europe’s Melting Pot. The Case of Max Nacht (Nomad)

Abstract

The article traces the linguistic choices Max Nacht (later Nomad, 1881-1973) made during the period of his intense involvement in the anarchist militancy in the Habsburg Empire and Switzerland between 1902 and 1908. Nacht was a prominent figure of Eastern and Central European radical milieus in the first decade of XX century, specifically during the Revolution of 1905, and an exemplary case of multilingual anarchist. His autobiographical book, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues (1964) is a treasury of information about Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and German radicals at the time. Born and raised in Buczacz, a Galician town at the north-eastern peripheries of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Nacht was a careful and critical observer of the nationalisms tearing Galicia apart – in particular the politically dominant Polish nationalism. The article focuses on Nacht’s collaboration with the Ukrainian anarchist Mychajlo Lozyns’kyj, with whom he published, in 1904, the only issue of an anarchist newspaper in Polish, “Wolny Świat”, until their paths diverged due to Lozyns’kyji’s involvement in the left-wing Ukrainian national movement, and subsequent Nacht’s adherence to the ideas of the Polish revolutionary Jan Wacław Machajski. Nacht and Lozyns’kyj’s political strategies and their linguistic choices are embedded in the theoretical framework developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly the distinction between majority, minority and minoritarian becoming.