I'm just pointing out that the Pale was not a giant bantustan. There were in fact many Jews living outside it, such as Lenin's grandfather (greatgrandfather?). This is a historical fact, and does not diminish the also historical fact that Jews were an oppressed group in the Russian Empire.
I would hazard a guess that the attitudes toward Ashkinadze Rabbinical Jews in the Western Empire (i.e., where the Pale was) were influenced by their being associated with Poland. Maybe. Possibly. I have no evidence to back it up, but it sounds plausible. I know that the "Polish/Catholic-Jewish Other," as it were, plays a large role in 19th-century Russian discourse. (Wojtek?) In Gogol especially.
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> This is like picking about the exceptions to the
> Nuremburg Laws. Yeah, there were exceptions. Of all
> kinds. Technically Jews couldn't own farmland, but
> Trotsky's family were fairly big Ukrainian farmers
> --
> kulaks, matter of fact.
>
> Main thing: there was a Pale with a zone to which
> most Russian Jews and virtually all Ashkenazi Jews,
> subject to certain exclusions, were restricted. And
> the key thing, Sholom Alechem's Tevye stories were
> written about life in the Pale, so described. Next
> thing you are going to go on a Solzhenitsyn rant
> about Czarist antisemitism was positively benign
> compared to Soviet antisemitism.
>
> Keep to the point. Yiddishkeit is in part general
> cultural attachment to and in part sentimental
> nostalgia for Ashkenazi life in the the Pale and the
> Eastern European shtetl generally. Yiddishkeit is
> not
> really part of the culture of, nor does it involve
> particular attachment to, the Judaism of the
> Caucasian
> Mountains or Karaite Jews.
>
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