On 2010-01-31, at 6:54 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
> The only thing I am accepting is the fact that Jews in Russia do not consider themselves to be Russians, nor do Russians consider Russian Jews to be Russians. You may not like it, but that's the way it is. I am not making up that "Jew" is a separate ethnic category on the 2002 Russian Federation census, just like Tatar and Cossack and Bashkir and Chuvash...
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> I never said anything about Swedish or Algerian Jews. I am specifically talking about the Jews of the Pale and their descendents, that is, Yiddish-speaking Jews in Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus and whatever offshoots they might have in Russia (the Pale not being part of what is now modern Russia).
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> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>
> Of course, religious Jews, like devout Christians or Muslims, were apt to give primacy to their faith, while secular Jews regarded themselves as Poles or Russians first, having common national and class interests with other non-Jewish Poles. It wasn't until the triumph of the Zionists that Judaism was recast in national rather than religious terms - a claim that ironically yourself and Chris seem to accept - but it would still take a lot to persuade me that Swedish and Algerian Jews have anything more other in common than their religion and an historical memory of the persecution of their scattered co-religionists.
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I don't doubt there are some Jews in Russia and some, perhaps many, non-Jews in that country who don't accept that Jews are Russians just as there are, for example, Muslims in France who do not consider themselves to be French and other of their fellow citizens who refuse to acknowledge them as such, but this does not make it so. So long as Jews, like the other national minorities you mention, have Russian passports and enjoy the full rights of citizenship, the world will be properly understand them to be Russians and will treat them as such, ethnic hyphens notwithstanding.
How "authentically" Russian or Jewish are Russian Jews, whether they were born of a Jewish mother or another parent or grandparent was Jewish - that is to say, is the blood coursing through their veins "Jewish" blood or "Russian" blood? - is a question of importance only for traditional antisemites and Zionists and, it would appear, those like yourself who have a peculiar but mainly innocently interest in Jews and other national minorities as exotic Others.
You now disingenuously claim your reference is only to the pre-war Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews "and their descendents". But this discussion began when you cast your net more widely in asserting that Jews in France and Germany equally did not consider themselves to be French or German, the inference being that all Jews were a race or nation apart - and by choice - despite their long histories of assimilation and attempted assimilation into these and other societies. That you have now retreated back into the old Russian Empire, where the then Yiddish-speaking Jewish community did have more of the characteristics of a distinct nation is, I suppose, progress of a sort.