> Marvin Gandall:
>
> 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.
>
> [WS:] I do not think that Western concepts of nation-state sovereignty
> fits
> well the 19th century Eastern European reality. None of the people in the
> 19th century Eastern Europe enjoyed sovereignty of the territory they
> occupied- at least in today's Western sense of the word. Eastern Europe
> is
> was, and still is, an amazing diversity of more-or-less ethnic groups
> living
> under the imperial rule of the Romanov or Habsburg empires, and on the top
> of it, under the feudal rule of the landed gentry. Serfdom (not much
> different from North American slavery) was abolished in Russia only in
> 1861
> but the de facto domination of the landed gentry persisted until 1917.
> Unlike EE peasantry, Jewish communities were at least exempt from the
> latter, and enjoyed considerable level of local autonomy.
==============================
I should have just stopped the sentance at "albeit an oppressed one...". The
intent was to endorse Chris' observation that the Yiddish-speaking Jews
constituted a nation which disappeared in the Holocaust, and to show by
comparison that the Zionist-inspired fiction of a multicultural Jewish
nation across the Disapora was a fiction. Political sovereignty over their
own communities, so far as I know, was never an issue for the EE Jews
perhaps because, as you point out, they already enjoyed a degree of local
autonomy. That would have further underscored that it was not a practical
solution to pogroms and poverty, and that their only alternatives were to
emigrate or join political organizations working to overthrow the Tsarist
order.