--- On Thu, 8/7/08, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
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.
Well, it probably looks that way to non-Eurasians, because there is no Chuvash or Tatar Diaspora, so events pertaining to them are not widely known (although there are, in fact, six times as many Chuvash in Russia as there are Jews and 20 times as many Tatars). For Russians or Tatars, the taking of the city of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible (and corresponding massacre of the inhabitants) is a pretty major event, and the expansion of Russia into Tatar territories the main story of the 1500s-1600s.
There was
> very little if any intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews
> prior to the
> Russian Revolution, but a great deal of it afterwards.
I have no figures, but there certainly was some. Such as the part-Jewish Ulyanov (Lenin) family. (Lenin, incidentally, is commonly believed to have been part Chuvash. Since he looked pretty Chuvash, and since Ulyanovsk is located in Chuvash territory, this is not unlikely.)
I am not contesting that it accelerated immensely post-1917, but it did exist. You can see this among the Cossacks in the Caucasus, for instance. It was common practice for people who migrated into Cossack territory and became Cossacks themselves to take new names, often signifying their ethnicity. So, you have the Cossack names "Grecheskii" ("of the Greeks"), "Tatarovskii" ("of the Tatars"), or "Zhidovskii" ("of the Jews"). (Cossacks existed largely outside of Imperial society of course, but my point still stands.)