It makes sense, but I just want to point out a couple of other factors (which Leon may address) perhaps moving in different directions.
1) The huge increase in anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire after the assassination of the Tsar-Liberator and corresponding attacks on the shtetl communities (and Jews in general). I would imagine this strengthened Jewish identity -- wasn't this after all one of the formative experiences of Zionism?
2) By the time the Holocaust happened, the Jews in the USSR (not in Poland or the Baltic States) had been living under the Soviet government's policies, which though they were contradictory in general aimed ultimately at eliminating national-cultural differences, and this was accompanied by the replacement of precapitalist relations with whatever you want to call the Soviet ones. I doubt much "progress" had been made by that time though I suppose.
In any case, if the Holocaust hadn't happened, would you hear Yiddish spoken on the streets of Kiev today? I think you probably would. These things outlive the social formations that gave birth to them.
--- Russell Grinker <grinker at mweb.co.za> wrote:
> I prefer Abraham Leon's 'people-class' idea (see his
> *The Jewish question: A
> Marxist interpretation*). And I tend to go along
> with his argument that this
> people-class was already being wiped out (as a
> social formation) by the
> erosion of pre-capitalist social relations in the
> east in the late 19th
> Century as it had been at an earlier stage in
> Western Europe where Jews had
> long been assimilated. Dispersed across Eastern
> Europe and moving into the
> west, these 'luftmenschen' became a visible and easy
> scapegoat in an era of
> economic depression and social dislocation which was
> also eroding other
> archaic social formations. In other words, the
> shtetel was already on its
> way out before these communities bore the brunt of
> the Final Solution.
>
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