On 2010-01-31, at 9:22 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
> Being a chosen people is an intrinsic part of religious Judaism, which is most Judaism before pretty recently.
>
> Dammit Marv, you have stated in several posts that there was a Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Are you now going to take that back? E,g,.:
>
> "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. " http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-October/020123.html
>
> "I've also believed for
>> some time
>> that the Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe constituted a nation, a
>> part of which reconstituted itself as a Hebrew-speaking nation in Israel. " http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-July/014419.htm
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There is no contradiction here. I'm not quarreling with the distinctive national characteristics of the East European Jews, with their own language, religion, history, and institutions. I'm objecting to the inference on this thread that they were an insular people with an innate sense of superiority who would not or could not develop wider allegiances - which was patently not the case. As you know, the Soviet Union was a multinational federation, comprising Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Ukranians, Tajiks, etc. The Jews arguably identified more strongly with the USSR than members of some of the other national minorities. This was also the case outside of Eastern Europe, in the more bourgeois and cosmopolitan Jewish communities in Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, and Britain, where, like all second and subsequent generation immigrants, the Jews shed the language and culture if not the religion of their ancestors and sought to assimilate into their host countries. Where they did not succeed in doing so, it was not because they were unable to transcend an overriding loyalty to their own "nation" or a sense of themselves as a "chosen people", but because the church and right-wing political parties and demagogues would not permit it.
I'll address James' comments later.