----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Thu, February 4, 2010 7:29:58 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Enough With the China Shtick Already!
(I was too persistent because I was 1) really really frustrated at not being understood and 2) drunk, which probably contributed to not being understood.)
What you say was part of my point. The word we have been bandying about, "Jew," actually doesn't have an equivalent in Russian, which is where a lot of this confusion is coming from. There is one word that means "member of ethnocultural group of historically Yiddish-speakers" and another, totally unrelated, word that means "member of the Jewish religion." (For instance, in the former USSR, Georgian Jews and Mountain Jews and the Crimchaks and Karaim practice Judaism, but are not Evrei, since they never spoke Yiddish and are Turkic -- at least Crimchaks and Karaim are Turkic, I'm not sure about the others.)
Similarly, English uses only one word, "Russian," to describe what are two words in Russian, "russkii" and "rossiyanin" (of which the adjectival form is "rossiskii"). "Russkii" means "those Slavic guys" and so is roughly comparable to "Caucasian" in English (in the sense of "person of European ancestry"). "Rossiyane" means "person who lives in the Russian Federation" and is equivalent to "American." "Russkii Evrei" sounds as nonsensical to a Russian ear as "Afro-Caucasian" would sound to a typical American, people of mixed parentage notwithstanding. "Rossiskii Evrei" sounds fine, as does "African American." Again, Russia does not have a titular nationality in the Russian language.
So, saying that Evrei are not Russkie is not at all equivalent to saying that e.g. Black people are not American. It is equivalent to saying that white people are not Black people.
This division is of course arbitrary, but all ethnic divisions are.