--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Well, I was only speaking about Russia, which was
> the last piece of
> Europe to enfranchise the Jews in 1917.
>
> Joanna
>
This is 99% true but not 100% true. I don't know the details of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, but as far as I can tell they were not viewed in the same way as the Jews of the Pale. Ditto for Georgian Jews. (Obviously this is true, or they would have been _in_ the pale.) The Karaite Jews of Ukraine obtained full rights from the Empire by successfully arguing that they were Jewish only by religion, not ethnicity (since ethnically they are a Turkic people related to the Crimean Tatars). There were Karaite officers in the tsarist army, they supported the Whites in the Civil War, and used the same "Jewish by religion, not by race" tactic successfully with the Nazis. (Probably helped in this because they were closely allied to the Crimean Tatars, who were fighting alongside the Germans, and the Nazis didn't want to alienate their allies.)
If my memory is not mistaken, the arch-enlightened-despot Catherine the Great banned the use of the term "Zhid" (Yid), probably under the influence of her lover, the Judeophile Prince Potemkin, a friend of Jeremy Bentha,. Potemkin actually had unassimilated Jews and even rabbis in his entourage -- unheard-of for 18th-century Russia. His enemies in Russia sometimes accused him of liking "anybody with a big nose" (he was also accused of being "a Cossack-lover" and of having other unhealthy attachments to the Empire's smaller minorities).
It was presumably under the advice of his close Jewish friend whose name I can't remember (I'm going by Montefiore's Potemkin bio here) that Potemkin actually had a short-lived project of creating a Jewish military regiment he called the "Jewish Cossacks," whose goal would be to liberate Jerusalem for the Jews alongside the liberation of Constantinople for the Orthodox. They were called the Izraelovskii regiment.
Interesting guy, Potemkin.
BTW it has been argued not implausibly that both the Karaites and the Crimean Tatars are descendents of the Khazars, the latter having converted to Islam. Solzhenitsyin asserts this, citing Russian historians, in 200 Years Together, which I am reading right now. If true, this is probably ammo for Ukrainian historians I've seen who assert a connection between the Khazars and the Ukrainian Cossacks, given the close relationship between the latter and the Crimean Tatars.
God, Russia's interesting!
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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