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).
I actually have kind of a cool story related to this. A friend of mine married an Israeli woman about a year ago (he's not Jewish, so they had to get married in Cyprus). Her grandmather emigrated to Palestine from what is now Ukraine in the late 20s (a good time to get out of Ukraine, especially if you are a Jew). She was a monolingual Yiddish-speaker, knowing no Russian or Ukrainian. Anyhpw, through some mechanism obscure to me she wound up in Moscow. She walked up to the Kremlin, into the Kremlin, and into Kalinin's office. She said to Kalinin, "Comrade Kalinin, I would like to emigrate to Palestine?" in Yiddish. They had some sort of conversation, in Yiddish obviously, and Kalinin said, "OK, you can go."
What really amazes me about this is the laissez-faire attitude around the Bolshevik leadership at the time. Until Kirov's murder, they didn't have bodyguards. Stalin was walking around Moscow unaccompanied.
----- 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.
>