Germinal was a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 edited by the German-born Rudolf Rocker

Rudolf Rocker

Johann Rudolf Rocker was an anarcho-syndicalist writer and activist. A self-professed anarchist without adjectives, Rocker believed that anarchist schools of thought represented "only different methods of economy" and that the first objective for anarchists was "to secure the personal and social...

. It appeared from 1900 to 1903, and then again from 1905 to 1908.

In 1898, the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Arbeter Fraynd hired Rudolf Rocker, a non-Jew, who had just started learning the language, as its editor. However, despite an intervention by Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....

 and the devotion of many activists trying to save the paper, it had to be shut down for financial reasons in January 1900. Yet, the Jewish anarchists who published Arbeter Fraynd were unwilling to be left without any means of spreading their message. Therefore Rocker, with the assistance of a young printer known as Narodiczky, founded the sixteen-page journal, which was published every fortnight

Fortnight

The fortnight is a unit of time equal to fourteen days, or two weeks. The word derives from the Old English fēowertyne niht, meaning "fourteen nights"....

 and named after Émile Zola

Émile Zola

Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

's novel of the same name. Compared to Arbeter Fraynd, it was directed at a more intellectual audience and dealt with philosophy and literature using libertarian concepts to analyse them. In 1903, it also had to stop publication for lack of money.

In January 1905, Germinal was revived by Rocker and his comrades. The Jewish anarchist labour movement in London was on the rise, so the journal was able to reach a demand of 2,500 by the following year, when it was expanded to forty-eight pages. Publication of Arbeter Fraynd had resumed in 1903, so Germinal now had the role of the more intellectual equivalent of that newspaper, which was the more widespread of the two.

The journal's influence reached far beyond London. Most cities in the world with a considerable recent Russian or Polish Jewish settlement had Germinal readers: most of the larger cities in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, Bucharest

Bucharest

Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....

, Sofia

Sofia

Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...

, Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

, Alexandria

Alexandria

Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...

, Johannesburg

Johannesburg

Johannesburg also known as Jozi, Jo'burg or Egoli, is the largest city in South Africa, by population. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...

, Cape Town

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

, and Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

. Alexander Granach

Alexander Granach

Alexander Granach was a popular German actor in the 1920s and 1930s.- Biography :Granach was born Jessaja Granach in Werbowitz to Jewish parents and rose to theatrical prominence at the Volksbühne in Berlin...

, one of the leading actors of Weimar Germany

Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...

, was introduced to the world of literature by Germinal.

Nevertheless, publication of Germinal ceased in 1908.