I agree it seems unlikely that many Jews were agricultural labourers before the Communist era. But even kulaks were "peasants", right?
Grant. ---
That's getting into iffy semantic territory, since "kulak" was an invented category.
To my way of thinking, "peasant" involves a certain position in the tsarist-era social order; it doesn't just mean agricultural laborers. Cossacks were also agricultural laborers, but were not peasants.
Russia acquired almost all of its Jews when the Empire assimilated (PC word there) Poland, didn't it? Presumably that population would have retained its previous way of life, or at least parts of it. What was the mode of life of the Polish Jewish population at that time?
I'm trying to picture a Ukrainian muzhik with a yamucha and internally laughing.
There _is_ a (very small) Jewish agricultural population in the Caucasus, the so-called Mountain Jews, but I believe they have a different origin than Jews in Central-Northern Russia.
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