--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> I think that's very true. The East European Jews
> lived in their own
> communities and had a distinctive Yiddish-speaking
> culture, qualifying them
> as a nation, albeit an oppressed one which didn't
> enjoy sovereignty over its
> own territory.
Yeah. When an Eastern European (a Russian or Pole, say) pre-Holocaust talked about "Jews," he or she usually meant not an adherent of some religion, but a member of an ethnic group that generally lived in their own communities, spoke a different language, and had very different customs from the majority nation -- just like Tatars and Chuvash and all the other separate minority nations of the Russian Empire.
To give some idea of just how horrifically effective the Nazis were, according to the Russian Empire 1897 census there were 5 million Jews living inside the Pale of Settlement and 200,000 living outside it. According to the 1989 Soviet census (http://www.nupi.no/cgi-win/Russland/etnisk.exe?total ), there were a bit over 200,000 in the entire USSR.
Some of that is due to emigration and some to Jews ceasing to designate themselves as such, but the great majority is due to the Holocaust in the former territory of the Pale.
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