bm2617@[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.
Stalin is unlikely to do anything
that drastic. A purge of Jews in
the upper ranks of the USSR - quite
possible - but a general massacre, no.
He was suspicious but not violently
paranoid of Jews, and even among his
cronies there was resistance to any
such program.
There were several million Jews in
the USSR before WW II; Stalin could
have himself a huge pogrom/bloodfest
with coming anywhere near 25%.
>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?
Where was the Yiddish community living?
Poland, and Lithuania, certainly.
Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary?
Romania, Yugoslavia?
>Given nationalist pressures to assimilate...
Nationalists who objected to a separate
Yiddish community mostly wanted Jews to
leave (or convert).
>how long does the US keep its immigration as restricted as it
>was during the 30's?).
The U.S. did not restrict immigration
that tightly in the 1930s - it was the
severe economic conditions that crushed
it so low. (AIUI) The restrictions came
into force in 1925, but immigration
continued at about 50% of the previous
level (300K/year) till 1931, when it dropped
to under 100K, and then to 30-35K in 1932-36.
In 1937-40, it was 50-70K, ~30K during the
war, and 100K rising to 250K in 1946-50.
AFAIK there were no major changes in U.S.
immigration restrictions through this period.
>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.)
There are still substantial "unassimilated"
Yiddish communities in the U.S., mostly
around New York. The Satmar Hasidim, for
instance. I don't suppose any save the
elders don't speak English, but many live
in all-Jewish towns in the suburbs.
In Poland or wherever, this would still
be true also, and even more so than in
the U.S.
There would also be a large intermediate
population of Jews who were bilingual,
living in Jewish neighborhoods and speaking
Yiddish with their co-religionists, but
also part of the larger society.
The persistance of ethnic minorities in
Europe can be astoni****ng. There was, in
living memory, the remnant of a Jewish
community in the Greek Islands that dated
back to the Hellenistic Era. There were
Greek-speaking towns in Italy. There are
still remnants of the Transylvanian Germans.
The much larger Yiddish community, absent
OTL's extraordinary violence against it,
would survive in substantial part.
Bear in mind that assimilationism has been
replaced by particularism in Europe for
most of a generation. Note the British
government's subsidies for Welsh and Scots
Gaelic, the revival of Galician regionalism
in Spain, and so on.
>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?
They did. See Birobidzhan.
--
| People say "There's a Stradivarius for sale for a |
| million," and you say "Oh, really? What's wrong |
| with it?" - Yitzhak Perlman |
|
