Yankev-Meyer Zalkind

Yankev-Meyer Zalkind (16 August 1875 – December 1937) was a British Orthodox rabbi, an anarcho-communist, a close friend of Rudolf Rocker, and an active anti-militarist.

He was born in Lithuania, and both his merchant father and mother were both descendants of numerous famous rabbis. Zalkind was well versed in Jewish texts, and was a graduate of the Volozhin yeshiva, where he learned with Hayim Nahman Bialik. He also had a broad education and he was knowledgeable in over 20 languages and was able to write about a dozen with ease. He studied in western Europe and obtained a doctorate in philosophy.

In Britain, he served as a community rabbi in Cardiff and worked as an editor in the East End of London. Zalkind's early political leanings were as a Zionist, and was active in his attempts to help set up a settlement in Israel, and to that end studied agronomy in Glasgow. However, in 1916 he became an opponent of the war and returned to London to campaign as an anti-militarist.

Biography Family and early life Zalkind was born in 1875 in the city of Kobrin in Belarus, then in the Russian Empire. Zalkind's father, Mortkhe-Yehude-Leyb Zalkind, was a merchant and an adept of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment who was said to descend from the Baal Shem Tov (the founder of Hasidism) and from Rabbi Mendele Don Yeḥia, a rabbi in Verkhnedvinsk who came from a prominent Jewish family in Portugal. Zalkind's mother, Khaye-Ester, was great-granddaughter of the rabbi of Lublin, Meshulem-Zalmen Ashkenazi, who was also from a distinguished rabbincal family, said to include Ḥakham Tsvi Ashkenazi, Maharshal, Tosefet-Yom-Tov and Rashi.

His wife sued him for being the “kept man” of a wealthy businesswoman named Pauline (Puah) Wengrover; after the marriage was dissolved, he and Pauline both took the name “Wengrover Zalkind” and had a child, leading to the religious authorities attempting to strip him of his rabbinical status.

Ideas According to Yiddish scholar Anna Elena Torres, In the early twentieth century, Zalkind developed a political philosophy of anarchism from his study of Talmudic ethics, retaining the particularity of Jewish identity and cultural autonomy within a vision of life liberated from capitalism, militarism, statism, and institutional oppression. His capacious politics dissolve the binary between religious conservatism and leftist atheism, anticipating the rise of the “spiritual Left” and critiques of political secularism. Zalkind drew political inspiration from the condition of diaspora, forging a theory of anti-statism from his experiences of statelessness. Rather than retrofitting secular radicalism or “judaizing” anarchism, Zalkind articulated his anti-statism through the language and logics of Jewish scripture while fiercely opposing contemporaneous anarchist strains of atheism, universalism, and antisemitism.