[lbo-talk] Anti Semitism in East Europe and Russia

[Marvin Gandall]

Chris Doss writes:
>
> --- On Thu, 8/7/08, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
>> Good point. How much of this was due to the fostering of a
>> secular political
>> culture by the Communist parties and regimes which,
>> whatever it's other
>> deformations, stressed the responsibility of the
>> "nationalities" to each
>> other in the common task of forging a new society?
>
> I'm sure it accelerated rapidly during the communist period, but it was
> not exactly uncommon before. Lenin was the product of such a family.
>
> Gogol is a Chuvash name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuvash_people ).
> Bukharin, Kutuzov, Rimsy-Koraskov, and Rachmanninov are all Tatar names.
> Where do you think they got them from?
=====================================
Sure, intermarriage is almost always a byproduct of contact, but it's the
"acceleration" of the phenomenon, as you say, which counts. In any case,
this thread has been about the tortured ethnic relationship between the Jews
and their Christian Slav neighbours which has loomed larger on the
historical stage than that between the Chuvash and the Tatars. There was
very little if any intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews prior to the
Russian Revolution, but a great deal of it afterwards. There was a reason
Jewish communities were notably "soft on Communism". Doctors' Plots and
Slansky trials notwithstanding, the Communist parties denounced antisemitism
and recruited heavily among East European Jews, and the USSR alone provided
sanctuary to the remnants fleeing the Nazis and their pro-fascist
collaboraters, the latter drawn from the same social classes as the old
pogromists.