On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:22:10 -0800 (PST) Chris Doss
<lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> writes:
> 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,.:
As I think Marv well knows, eastern Europe was quite different from western Europe. Jewish experiences in eastern Europe were quite different from those in western Europe. In western Europe, Jews experinced emancipation as they gained legal and political equality with gentiles, starting from the end of the 18th century. As you pointed out, there was no Jewish emancipation in Russia until the October Revolution. It's therefore hardly surprising that when the Zionist movement arose to the end of the 19th century, its strongest base of support was in eastern Europe, not in western Europe. BTW it should also be pointed out that Jewish nationalism in eastern Europe did not always take on the form of Zionism, since there also appeared in easter Europe, the Jewish Socialist Bund, which was nationalist but anti-Zionist. The asserted the national rights of Jews within Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, instead of pushing for the creation of a Jewish state elsewhere.
Jim F. http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
>
> "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.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>
> In the predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in which I grew up, most
> immigrants described themselves as not simply as "Jews", but as
> "Polish Jews", "Russian Jews", "Romanian Jews" "Litvaks" (ie. Baltic
> Jews) etc., in the same way Irish immigrants identified themselves
> as "Irish Catholics". I don't recall the Jews being any more
> conscious of belonging to a "chosen people" than any other religious
> or national group which invariably flatters itself as possessing
> unique virtues. A large minority of left-wing Jews, in fact,
> insistently saw themselves as workers first and Jews second, and
> generally viewed ethnic affiliations as parochial and reactionary.
> They dwarfed the influence of the Zionists until the facts of the
> Holocaust became known. In any case, there's simply no basis to
> single out the experience and behaviour of Jewish immigrants and
> subsequent generations as being substantially different from that of
> other immigrant groups - certainly not after
> they emigrated from the!
> shtetls to the cities. At worst, it can be construed as an echo of
> the old antisemitic trope of the Jew as Alien which was promoted
> outside of rather than within the Jewish communities.
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