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Chapter 1: rising expectations and dashed hopes

The casual observer could be forgiven for reading in Philip Josephs’ 1926 naturalisation papers nothing more than an Eastern European immigrant looking for the stability and closure of citizenship. Occupation: tailor; Height: 5’9”; Colour of Hair: grey; Colour of Eyes: brown; Any special Peculiarities: a bit round shoulders [sic]; Place of birth: Latvia; Children: eight. Do you swear to be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth and his heirs and successors, according to law? yes.1 The reader, and the bureaucrat wielding the stamp, could never know that from the very hand that supplied these details had come powerful and unrepentant denunciations of government in all its forms, calls to go beyond man-made laws that served one class above another, and the propagation of social revolution. Indeed, the photographs of an aged Josephs that have come to light portray an avuncular, friendly demeanour—his thick, wavy, white hair framing a kind and gentle face that, according to his grandchildren, would always greet them with a smile on visits to his Sydney tailor shop. Yet as an anarchist communist and co-founder of one of New Zealand’s first anarchist collectives, Josephs had forcefully agitated against all forms of authority and did not hesitate to meet ideological fire with fire. Between the lines of his naturalisation papers lies a tale of struggle for social change; a life lived through revolutionary times and bitter upheavals. Between the lines lies a biography of one of New Zealand’s most consistent, pioneering, and pivotal anarchists.

Philip Josephs (Feivel Ben Yacov in his native language) was born in the Latvian port city of Liepaja (Libau) on 25 November 1876. Apart from this, there is very little information about Josephs’ family, his ­upbringing, and what caused him to leave for Glasgow, Scotland at around twenty years of age. Some educated guesses can be employed however, for Liepaja was not free of the persecution inflicted on the wider Jewish population by the Russian government—persecution that produced violence, massive migrations, and the seeds of revolutionary thought.

Situated in southwest Latvia and straddling the Baltic Sea, the port city of Liepaja—known as ‘the city where the wind is born’ due to its trademark coastal breeze—was the third largest city in Latvia. Along its spacious but busy harbour were rows and rows of warehouses, bordered by unbroken white dunes and sandy shores. Unlike neighbouring ports of Riga and St. Petersburg, Liepaja remained ice-free during the winter months, making it a crucial site for the shipment of goods and capital. Its geographical importance was bolstered by the arrival of the railway in 1880, confirming the port as a significant economic centre for both Russian merchants and the Jewish community. By 1897, Liepaja had become the second largest Jewish port community in the Baltic.2

Life for a Jew in Liepaja was more stable and less restricted than for most in Latvia. Jewish merchants contributed to the thriving portside economy, and as a result, were allowed to reside outside the so-called Pale of Settlement—a band of territory made up of shtetls (small towns) and inner-city ghettos in which Jewish communities were normally forced to reside. In Liepaja, Jews “were free to trade and achieved a degree of cultural assimilation with their gentile neighbours that distinguished them from their Yiddish-speaking co-religionists in the Pale.”3 There were public Jewish schools for both boys and girls, a Talmud Torah (school focussing on rabbinical teachings for students of modest means), and prior to 1893, an influential Rabbinical School.4 The cultural influence of German Jewry was present, and as well as more traditional religious bodies, institutions dedicated to the ideas of the Haskalah movement—enlightenment values, the study of secular subjects, and assimilation—could also be found in the city.5

Modernisation, combined with the influence of Haskalah, meant “more and more young Jews began to aspire to a secular education and a place in the general society.”6 However, the Russian government, and Alexander III’s reign (1881–1894) in particular, ensured that discrimination, repression, and violence were part-and-parcel of Jewish life. Jews were restricted from certain occupations, universities, and geographical movement. The laws designed to restrict Jews to designated areas made travel especially precarious—one man, who had left his place of residence for a few days in order to get married, “was described on his return as a ‘new arrival’ and was consequently expelled [from the town].”7

These “dark clouds of reaction shrouded the [entire] country,” and despite their relative freedom, the Jews of Liepaja did not completely escape the turmoils of their co-religionists.8 As well as the denial of other rights, Jewish children, unlike their gentile playmates, were forbidden to play on the sands of Liepaja’s shores. It seems they could only experience the shoreline when they were stepping off it; in 1890, the Tsarist regime enforced the Regulations on Passports, expelling large numbers of Liepaja’s Jews who were not registered in the census of 13 April 1835.

Before the turn of the twentieth century, this empire of the tsars underwent “a vigorous period of challenge and upheaval” characterised by violence, a growing interest in socialism, and a fledgling labour movement, “created by the state as a by-product of its large-scale industrialisation program of the nineties.”9 It was in this atmosphere of “rising expectations and dashed hopes” that Josephs would have received some kind of education.10 It was also this clash of modernism and repression that gave rise to Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland (The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), known simply as the Bund. Officially formed in 1897, the Bund was a classical Marxist organization that sought to organize Jewish workers across the Russian empire. Its Marxist outlook meant the Bund was critical of Jewish traditionalism, especially Zionism—­believing the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine was escapist and utopian. The Bund “also opposed the revival of the Hebrew language, as most Jews spoke Yiddish, and Bund members, being atheists, believed that religious books in Hebrew were not needed anyhow.”11 At one stage the membership of the Bund exceeded 30,000, but their cultural and social impact was much larger due to their populist propaganda and involvement in a number of significant strikes.

The conditions of economic stress and overt oppression also gave rise to a strong nihilist sentiment among workers, students, and peasants—a radicalism that led to the rejection of social democratic organizations (such as the Bund) in favour of more direct political action. The Bund’s opposition to individual acts of violence helped to ferment “small groups of young rank-and-file Bundists [who] formed a radical ‘opposition’ within the movement and proclaimed a program of ‘direct action’ against the state and private property.”12 In the eyes of the nihilists, social democrats and their organizations were too intellectual, too reformist, and too accommodating of the state—a movement locked in a “mighty torrent of words” that lacked action and neglected anyone who was not a skilled or educated worker.13 They increasingly “accused all the socialist groups of temporizing with the existing social system. The old order was rotten, they argued; salvation could be achieved only by destroying it root and branch. Gradualism or reformism in any shape was utterly futile.”14 Such a critique led the proponents of total revolution away from the Marxists of the Bund, and towards the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin and Pytor Kropotkin—two Russian proponents of the flowering international anarchist movement.

Although the Bund and the anarchist movement crystallized in Liepaja after Josephs’ departure, the circulation of revolutionary material, radical reading and discussion circles, and the social conditions that created the Bund would have permeated his youth: “there was virtually no way a Jewish youngster could escape appreciating the civil liabilities of his Jewishness or avoid a sense of outrage.”15 Likewise, the Latvian anarchist movement, which came into existence in 1906 as a result of the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution—such as the ‘Pats, Vards un Darbs!’ (The Same, in Word and Deed!) Group—missed Josephs by ten years.16 Yet his lived experience surely moulded his outlook on the nature of government and the state, creating a space that anarchism would later fill.

Indeed, around the time Josephs was coming of age, waves of mob violence directed against Jewish communities swept through the Russian empire, leading to government-sanctioned torment and terror. “While the immediate plan may have been the seizure of Jewish property,” notes Kenneth Collins, “the action quickly turned to murder, rape and child mutilation.”17 As William Fishman explains, the Tsarist regime used the pogroms as an “in-built safety valve” and “turned them to their own political advantage. In a climate of growing political opposition, the pent-up hatred and frustrations of the peasantry could be diverted to a ready-made scapegoat—the Jew.”18

Draconian laws, and a blind-eye to the pogroms, meant the Russian government succeeded in making the Jewish position in the empire altogether untenable. “Crowded into ghettos, subjected to religious persecution, largely barred from higher education and professional careers, their traditional occupations increasingly circumscribed, the Jews faced the total collapse of their economic and social structure.”19 As a result, the exodus of exploited Jews reached massive proportions, and although emigration from Russia without an exit permit was technically forbidden, “the authorities placed few obstacles in the way of would-be Jewish émigrés.”20

For the desperate who fled the Tsarist regime and anti-Semitic violence, Liepaja was the first point of departure. Travel from Latvia was becoming more and more integrated with the wider world, and emigration from Liepaja was less arduous than from other ports. Russian gendarmes were particularly open to bribery, medical examination was less rigorous, and Western officials rarely policed access to the vessels moored in Liepaja’s Winter Habour.21 Its railway connections to wider Russia further solidified the port’s role as the central departure point for emigrants making the direct journey to South Africa or America.

However, many Jews preferred the three- to five-day journey to Britain, which was cheaper than the direct route to the ‘New World.’ The journey may have been cheaper, but it came with a different price. Once through Russian customs (still a feat in itself) immigrants faced a sojourn riddled with sickness, overcrowding, and filthy, cattle-like conditions. On a voyage lasting from forty to sixty hours depending on the weather, passengers were herded together and made to sleep on fouled rags, dirty blankets, or in the small spaces between decks. As Rose Robins, a member of the London anarchist group Arbeter Fraynd (Workers’ Friend), later recalled:

all of us slept overcrowded in bunks, stretched side by side over the whole length of the ship. We lived in hot, stuffy, filthy conditions. We ate salt herring out of barrels distributed by ordinary seamen. My young brother, one year old, was sea sick, in agony all the time. We scratched while we slept. For the nights were a nightmare.22

Despite the ordeal, the desire to escape Russia and the possibilities of a new life free of discrimination meant aliens arriving in Britain from Liepaja rose from 429 in 1893 to 5,805 in 1897.23 And Philip Josephs was one of them. Around 1897, Glasgow, the centre of Scottish radicalism, became his new home.