am05@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
: On Jul 8, 11:56=A0pm, bm2...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
: > Assume No Hitler, and that a war vs the Red Menace doesn't take the
: > place of OTL WWII: at most, a limited Cold War of sorts and perhaps
: > some sort of dustup in the Pacific with Japan vs Whoever. Stalin, if
: > he gets around to seriously persecuting Soviet Jews, doesn't kill more
: > than, say, 25% of them.
: >
: > Under this sort of scenario, what odds that a high percentage of the
: > Yiddish-speaking Jews of eastern Europe still are doing so in 2008?
: Close to zero.
: > Given nationalist pressures to assimilate, and efforts to make them
: > proper Soviets in the USSR, possibly at gulag-point, one would think
: > there would be a serious drop in the number of Yiddish-speakers:
: Did you ever bother to check OTL reality? The Russian Jews had been
: moving out of the traditional 'Yiddish-speaking' areas even during the
: Russian Civil War. And for the person to get job and to be 'upward
: mobile', this person had to speak a language of majority. Russian and/
: or Ukrainian.
: > and
: > not only by assimilation, but also by emigration (in a WWII-free
: > world, how long does the US keep its immigration as restricted as it
: > was during the 30's?).
: >
: Even longer?
: > Even with no Holocaust, it seems likely that the old world of Yiddish-
: > speaking ghettos and shtetls would still be a largely "lost world" by
: > the present date: how far assimilated would the Jews of Poland,
: > Romania, the USSR, etc. be? (Those who hadn't moved to the US,
: > Australia, France, etc.)
: >
: The ghettos did not exist in the SU so this part of a question does
: not make sense.
: > OTOH, might the Soviets, always happy enough to ID their population by
: > nationality, decide that the "Jewish nationality", although of course
: > having to learn Russian in school like anyone else, needed their
: > culture protected and promoted in the usual faux-multicultural style
: > ("traditional" clothes and dances, godawful socialist realist
: > paintings, etc.) for international consumption, including the use of
: > the Yiddish language?
: Games of this type mostly came to the end in the early 50's. Of
: course, Jewish Autonomous Oblast remained in existence. Only
: approximately 1% of its population are Jews.
Yiddish remains alive and well among many orthodox Jews both in Israel and
outside of Israel. There are probably more children speaking Yiddish in
the USA than at any time in the past, and there is a growing literature
serving that community. If there is no WWII (or at least, no holocaust),
there would have been more a higher percentage of orthodox Jews within the
Jewish community (secular Jews were more likely to survive for a
combination of geographic, political and social reasons). Also, among
orthodox Jews, it was Hebrew rather than English that was the chief
competition for Yiddish, and the larger Jewish population, the higher
percentage of Asheknazi over Sefardim among orthodox Jews, and the reduced
im****tance of Palestine, would all sup****t Yiddish over Hebrew.
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