On 2010-01-31, at 9:25 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Marv, I can see where you are coming from, but I don't mean it as an endorsement of the idea of ethnic or racial identity to say that it was largely held to. And it is a big qualifier to say that all kinds of people dealth in lots of different ways with the question of identity, there is no absolute rule. Your example
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> '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".'
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> I am not sure what country your neighbourhood was in (America, Canada?) but I can see that your Jewish neighbours did not identify themselves as American Jews (or Canadian Jews).
It was in Montreal, James. An interesting sidenote is that it was the only riding to send a Communist MP, Fred Rose, to the federal House of Commons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rose_(politician)). Rose lived in our apartment building before being deported to his native Poland for alleged espionage during the postwar witchhunt of reds. My older brother recalls playing with his daughter. (I wasn't a red diaper baby, BTW, like many radicals I later met in university; my parents were apolitical.)
> Might their Polishness or Russianness have been a post-immigrant identification? Would they have identified themselves as Polish Jews in Poland, or Russian Jews in Russia?...It is on migrating that the different Jewish communities felt ties of national origin to be valuable - shared language and experiences.
I don't see why it is so difficult to suppose that Polish or Russian Jews would have self-identified by both country and religion in the same way as did Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox, both at home and as immigrants. 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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> You say '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.' Yes, that is true. Certainly it was in East London, where many Jews settled.
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> I once went to a talk by Teodor Shanin where he went into the question of ethnic identity in the USSR. His passport, he noted, bore a stamp 'J' for Jew against 'nationality'. He did not think that in itself represented persecution, as he said, in the USSR everyone had a 'nationality', what we would call an ethnic identification, underneath their citizenship of the USSR, like Russians, Kazakhs ... and Jews.
My point to Chris earlier.
> We asked him about the ideal of living without nationality. He said yes, you could see that there was a point in the 1920s when bolsheviks had tried to live the ideal of internationalism, to have no nationality, but that it had not survived the 1930s.
Sadly, yes. And the Jews arguably suffered the most from national chauvinism, which is why their bourgeoisie and intelligensia so desperately tried to assimilate and why Jewish workers tended disproportionately towards the internationalist left. Which is why I felt it necessary to counter the suggestions on this thread that the opposite obtained: that the Jews, regarding themselves as the "chosen people", walled themselves off from the other national minorities they encountered in their nation states, that they were, you might say, "clannish". From here, it is a short leap to conclude that they somehow brought their fate down upon themselves, a classic case of blaming the victim, although I don't believe for a minute that you believe that. But others outside our circles could well draw that conclusion - and have.