Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924)

Syrkin was raised in Mohilev (now in Belarus). He went to secular school, but he was expelled for objecting to anti-semitic remarks. He finished school in Minsk where he got involved with Hibbat Zion (love of Zion) and the revolutionary underground, for which he was jailed for a bit.  He went to Berlin to study, and the schools in Germany and Switzerland were filled with Jews like himself who'd been banned from universities in Russia.

His views were mostly Socialist-Zionist, and Territorialist (the idea that a Jewish stated could be founded anywhere, and not only in the traditional homeland). He was also big in the Labor Zionist movement and moved to the US in 1907 as an official of that movement.  He died in New York in 1924.

Some Syrkin quotes...

"While ghetto Jewry was a homogenous, though isolated, nation, emancipated Jewry soon disposed of its nationalism in order to create for itself the theoretical basis for emancipation.  This same Jewry, which but recently prayed thrice daily for its return to Jerusalem, became intoxicated with patriotic sentiments for the land in which it lived."
-"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"

Syrkin here is commenting on the phenomenon that when Jews are accepted in a society their Jewishness and Zionism wanes.  He goes on to say this emancipation is short lived and a bit of an illusion.

"Anti-semitism... reaches its peak in declining classes: in the middle class, which is in process of being destroyed by the capitalists, and within the decaying peasant class, which is being strangled by the landowners. In modern society, these classes are the most backward and morally decayed. They are on the verge of bankruptcy and are desperately battling to maintain their vanishing positions."
-"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"

Basically Syrkin wrote about how middle class merchants and peasants hated Jews because they saw Jews as competitors and they were already under economic duress.  The upper classes didn't feel threatened enough in general to feel threatened by Jews, and the proletariat dissolved most race/religious differences between people anyway.

But he then says that as class tensions escalate, upper classes will band together against race/religious groups to distract from class upheaval that would threaten their position:

"The more the various classes of society are disrupted, the more unstable life becomes, the greater the danger to the middle class and the fear of the proletarian revolution (directed against Jews, capitalism, the monarchy, and the state) - the higher the wave of anti-Semitism will rise. The classes fighting each other will unite in their common attack on the Jew. The dominant elements of capitalist society, i.e., the men of great wealth, the monarchy, the church, and the state, seek to use the religious and racial struggle as a substitute for the class struggle."
-"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"

"A classless society and national sovereignty are the only means of solving the Jewish problem completely... The Jew must, therefore, join the ranks of the proletariat, the only element which is striving to make an end of the class struggle and to redistribute power on the basis of justice... Zionism must of necessity fuse with socialism, for socialism is in complete harmony with the wishes and hopes of the Jewish masses."
--"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"