> --- 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...
==================================
So would I take issue with that idea! - and with anyone I thought was
suggesting that the Jews oversee the whole of the Ukraine, Belorussia,
Moldovia, etc. I was noting the characteristics which made the
Yiddish-speakers a nation without a state. In fact, they remained a people
without a state until they were wiped out by the Hoilocaust. A surviving
fraction of that people reconsituted itself as a Hebrew-speaking nation with
its own colonial-settler state in Palestine.
In theory, the Jews could have enjoyed statehood or some form of political autonomy within Eastern Europe in the areas where they constituted a majority. Birobidzhan was an experiment with this form of self-government within the USSR. Trotsky's position on black self-determination in the southern states also drew on this concept. While he didn't think socialists should promote black statehood, he accepted the right of blacks to carve out political jurisdictions where they were a majority. Different varieties of black nationalism have promoted forms of black political control even though they are not a majority within the United States.