--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
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.
I think I have to take some issue over the last bit. The Jews didn't have their own territory to be sovereign over -- though something like 95% of the Jews of the Empire lived in the Pale, they were only 10% of the population in the Pale (much larger in some of the cities). The population was overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belorusian, etc, depending on where you were. If you were to travel through Ukraine c. 1900, you would pass by a Ukrainian village where everybody spoke Ukrainian, then maybe a Yiddish-speaking Jewish village, and then maybe a Tatar village if you were in Crimea. They all inhabited the same territory. Some of these villages would also be multiethnic (Lazar Kaganovich was from the Jewish community inside a larger ethnic Ukrainian village, for instance. Very close to Chernobyl, by coincidence.).
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com