It would be ironic if Russians hated Jews in part because they were "Poles," something which the Poles would have passionately rejected. The old country, feh. On the other hand my Hungarian grandmother had a real attachment to her old country, but the Magyars weren't Slavs and had far less prejudice. (The Nazis had to actually overthrow the fascist Arrow Cross regime to enforce the deportation of the Hungarian Jews.) My understanding is that her own grandfather was the mayor of their little town, and it wasn't a shtetl, just a town with a majority Catholic population.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
>
> Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo, lyubo, bratsy, zhit!
>
> ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ËÞÁÎ, ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ÆÈÒÜ!
>
>
>
>
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