Anarchism and Orthodox Judaism - Orthodox Jews and Anti-authoritarian Left

Orthodox Jews and Anti-authoritarian Left

British Orthodox Rabbi Yankev-Meyer Zalkind, was an anarcho-communist, a close friend of the anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker, and an active anti-militarist, who was jailed by the British authorities for his anti-war activism. Rabbi Zalkind was also a prolific Yiddish writer and a prominent Torah scholar, who authored a few volumes of commentaries on the Talmud. He believed that the ethics of the Talmud, if properly understood, are closely related to anarchism.

The famous Kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag believed in a religious version of libertarian communism, based on principles of Kabbalah, which he called altruist communism. Ashlag supported the Kibbutz movement and preached to establish a network of self-ruled internationalist voluntary communes, who would eventually dismantle the government and the system of law enforcement. However, most contemporary followers of the Ashlagian Kabbalah seem to be unaware of his anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian political stance.

Russian revolutionary and Territorialist leader Isaac Nachman Steinberg, whose ideas were essentially anarchist, although he defined himself as a left eser or left narodnik, was an Orthodox Jew. Like Martin Buber, Steinberg supported the idea of binational solution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and tried to establish a compact self-ruled Jewish settlement somewhere else outside the Middle East.

Rabbi Abraham Yehudah Khein (1878–1957), a prominent follower of the Hasidic Chabad tradition, was eloquently committed to pacifism and non-violence during the days when the Jewish community in Palestine was battling the Arabs and the British. He tried to relate his readings of Leo Tolstoy and Pyotr Kropotkin to Kabbalah and Hasidism. Rabbi Khein deeply respected Kropotkin, whom he called "the Tzadik of the new world", whose "soul is as pure as crystal"

Rabbi Yehudah-Leib Don-Yakhia from Chernigov, another Chabadnik, was known as a Tolstoyan and frequently quoted Leo Tolstoy in his synagogue sermons.

Rabbi Shmuel Alexandrov, also close to Chabad Hasidism, was an individualist anarchist, whose religious thought was marked by some degree of antinomianism.