ABSTRACT
The Jewish Labor movement in Russia is fifty years younger than the Russian Labor movement, yet has had interesting aspects from its very beginning. The Women’s Tailors Association functioned not only as a regular fraternal organization, offering financial aid or sick and death benefits to its members, but also led the struggle of the workers against the employers. The first traces of economic struggle in Jewish industry appeared in the seventies. In 1875 a very interesting correspondence from southwest Russia was published in Vpered. One finds very little information about the Jewish weavers of Bialystok in the first issue of the illegal Bialystok Worker. The Polish socialists began to organize the Jewish proletariat of Galicia early in the 1890s. In 1894 in Amsterdam, the first general strike of Jewish diamond workers broke out and resulted in the organization of the powerful Diamond Workers Union.
