Patterns of Jewish Identity in the Modern World

American and Israeli conceptions of Judaism have salient differences. Each culture has reinterpreted in its own way the pre-modern Jewish tradition that is common to both, and the reinterpretations diverge sufficiently to warrant their being called new constructions of Judaism.1

This statement opened a series of publications, conferences, symposia, and debates devoted to the problem of divergent Jewish identities in the modern world and their impact on the major issues of Jewish politics of today, such as Israeli-Diaspora relations, the peace process in the Middle East, and the religious vs the secular nature of the Jewish state.2 As a rule, identities of Israelis and American Jews are compared, with a presumption that European and other "Western" patterns (Australian, Latin American, etc.) follow the basic traits of the American model. Although the number of analyses is scarce, contemporary development of European Jewish identities shows that thereÕs no such phenomenon, and the Western European model, which probably forms some kind of unit, is certainly not identical either to the American or the Israeli model.

Another problem is the content of Jewish identity. What is the self-perception of a given community, where the content of its Jewishness specifically lies? Usually one finds several components: Judaism as religion, the Holocaust, Zionism in its secular and religious forms, the recognition of Israel as a center of Jewish life in Diaspora. These are the main points that matter for Western Jews, and they vary from community to community in different understandings of these variables. As for the Eastern European types of identity, they remain largely unknown, and only a few publications of the last several years shed some light on the problem.3

The majority of analytical studies of Jewish identity are based on empirical sociological studies in the form of questionnaires and similar surveys. It is my intention to add some socio-anthropological observations of a general nature, as well as empirical findings from working within the Jewish community of Russia for more than 25 years.

For the sake of logical ease, we may consider, as an initial stage in the development of todayÕs diverse types of Jewish identity, the relatively non-broken, monistic pattern of pre-modern Jewish identity of the so-called Derekh-ha-SHAS (DHS) model, which prevailed in the medieval world and represented a type of identity specific for a feudal society based on corporate rights. The basis for the DHS-type was not merely religious; rather, it corporatized social separateness, exemplified in religious specificity. This pattern included first of all a certain sense of separation, the sense of lehavdil, i.e., a physical, social, and religious isolation from the surrounding neighborhood; a consciousness of being subject to a specific internal law based upon Jewish halacha and tradition; a consciousness of being exiled; a perception of the social surroundings as hostile and persecutors as GodÕs whip; a shared knowledge of how to escape from minor discrimination and persecution; a shared victimized self-consciousness, i.e., a self-perception as eternal victim; the presence of a specific Jewish vernacular, and of Hebrew as a language of civilization; a shared belief in the forthcoming Geulah (Redemption) and the Messianic future. This model was quite non-controversial, because it was fully consistent with the general model of social structure in the European and Near Eastern Middle Ages, as based upon the notion of corporate rights.

Not surprising, the collapse of the ancien rŽgime resulted in the decay of the DHS pattern of Jewish identity. It did not disappear at once; the first blow came in Europe, where the whole medieval corporate society was defeated in the late 18th- early 19th centuries. In fact, it was preserved in countries and in situations where the legal or the political position of the Jews as a group was specified separately. Such are, for instance, the oriental group of Soviet Jews, where the host societies (Daghestani, Kabar-dini, Azerbaijani, Tajik, etc.) retained, in spite of the Soviet regime, certain traits of a pre-modern social structure, where the position of heterodox groups was specified by the local adats. This basic condition for the DHS was strengthened by the specific antisemitic policy of the Soviet regime. We may still find remnants of the DHS model in Iran, in the remnant Jewish communities in Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, and other Arab countries. All of them are doomed as examples of survivals of the DHS pattern of identity, if not as communities as such.

It should be noted that contemporary Jewish groups known as ultra-Orthodox in Israel and in Europe are not bearers of the DHS pattern, because they are no longer parts of archaic corporate social structures. It is important to mention that the Jewish pattern of identity (which is but one of the ideological principles of the social organization of the Jewish minority in the Diaspora) always corresponds to the general social structure of the society and changes together with it. Even the most isolationist or bizarre types of social organization in modern society are still elements of this modern society that found its specific niche in it, and not just alien elements artificially incorporated in a foreign structure. That should be taken into account, since Jewish perception about Judaism and the place of the Jews in the non-Jewish society are determined by the general identity of the society in a given country, no less than by Jewish specificity.

The monistic cumulative DHS identity where there was no place for questions about the difference between Jewish religion and Jewish ethnicity Ð or "Who is a Jew?" Ð was replaced shortly after the emancipation of the Jews of Western Europe in the early 19th century by a flexible scale where the two poles were, respectively, religion and ethnicity.

This means that, in extreme rare cases, Jews considered themselves either as a purely religious or a purely national entity. We know instances of both cases, but usually the modern Jewish identity presents a mixture of both elements. The balance between them depends more upon the rules of the given society of which the Jews form a part than of the specific will of the Jews themselves.

In the case of the so-called Haskalah (Enlightenment) identity, these Jews proclaimed themselves to be a religious group forming a part of the nation of their particular country. A good example of that attitude is known from the history of the "Jewish question" in the National Assembly of France during the French Revolution. Crucial here was the European perception of a nation as not an ethnic, but a political and administrative entity with shared ideology. The Jews who were inspired by the shimmering Fata Morgana of emancipation, certainly adopted the dominating understanding of what a nation was. Germany and even France proclaimed themselves early in the 19th century as multireligious entities. Religious emancipation and equality of religions, not of "peoples," was the main achievement of the French Revolution. That meant that Jews could become full citizens of European countries as a religious minority, e.g., like German-Catholics and German-Protestants. They could not do so as "Jews but not Germans." That is why the generations of Haskalah Jews and their descendants insisted upon the denationalization of Jewry.

This idea is, as is the DHS-model, still alive in some of the Western European countries, mainly in those that were not occupied by the Nazi regime (Switzerland, Great Britain, Ireland). But even here it is doomed, because it contradicts the modern trend of the so-called "multicultural society," gaining popularity as one of possible solutions of post-war European problems. This solution is opposed by conservative nationalism of the French National Front type; Jews are traditionally hostile to this approach as a natural response to the antisemitism of these groups. So, the old identity of "Deutsche des Moses-Gesaetzes" remains now almost without any social base, and is popular probably only among the Jewish aristocracy (notables, millionaires, grandees, some rabbis, etc. ).

Haskalah came to Eastern Europe later, in the second half of the 19th century, when the idea of religious emancipation was no longer inspiring. The Western European nations more or less achieved it, despite constant disillusionments like the Dreyfus affair in France. The motto of the time in Europe was "national liberation fight." The Eastern European Ashkenazi possessed many ethnic features that caused them to be treated by the larger society as a separate national entity: they possessed a specific language, Yiddish, which was absolutely alien to the surrounding Slavic or Romance vernaculars; a special territory Ð the Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire; and a specific folk culture, which included, among other traits, the Jewish religion. The whole of Eastern Europe was involved in a constant struggle for the liberation of different minorities of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Otto-man, and Russian empires. Jews could Ð theoretically (and, as it turned out later on, not without reasonable grounds) Ð become full citizens of their countries, but not as a pure religious minority, only as a national minority with its own rights and claims. Unlike Western Europe, in Russia (or Turkey) there was no de-ethnicized notion of "super-Russians" Ð plural in religion, but united in nation.

Every religious minority had at the same time their "national" or ethnic specificity. The Muslims were not Russian Ð they belonged to different peoples of the Volga, Ural, or Caucasus regions. The Buddhists, again were not Russian Ð they were Kalmucks or Buryats. The same with the Jews Ð they were not regarded as Russians, and with some exceptions did not strive to be. They wanted to be acknowledged in the Russian state as a separate national group Ð the Jews.

Again, this was determined not so much by a free choice of strategies by the Russian Jews themselves as by the nature of political philosophy in Russia and other Eastern European countries, where the world had been viewed as consisting of a finite number of nations understood as ethnic units, and where the idea of national self-determination was one of the sacred cows of Russian progressive and later Soviet ideology.4 This intrinsic nationalistic ideology caused many specificities of the Soviet Empire, including its administrative division; when the Soviet Empire fell apart, it left Ukraine and Belarus outside the national unity (in the Western sense of the word) as foreign countries. The position of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union was, and still is, one of the results of this general situation.

These few examples give us an idea that various Jewish identities, as often happens, cannot be understood in isolation from the general trends and ideologies in the countries of the Jewish Diaspora.

Parameters of Jewish identity determined by the scale presented above are manifested differently in different ethnic Jewish communities and in different chronological environments. One of the most controversial components is religion. Superficially it is very simple. Judaism is the religion and the modus vivendi of the Jews, and every Jew, since he is a Jew, should confess Judaism as his religion, at least formally. LetÕs assume that was really so in the DHS model. Modern Western identities as well as the Israeli identity, as they are widely believed to be, are also religiocentrist in the sense that they acknowledge the central part of religion in the Jewish self-consciousness. Or at least that appears to be so after the Holocaust destroyed the ethnic foundations of Jewish Diaspora life in Eastern Europe. "Judaism is viewed as a religious culture by most Jews in the United States and perhaps by most Jews in Israel," state two prominent American Jewish sociologists as a matter of fact.5

Let us try to examine to what extent this statement can be applied to contemporary East European Jewry. As mentioned above, the Eastern Ashkenazi, unlike the Western Ashkenazi, still retained a number of features, in the early and mid-20th century, that could Ð and have Ð been treated by the Jews themselves and by the surrounding gentile society as ethnic features, or, using the accepted form in that part of the world Ð national features. As late as the 19th century, and probably earlier, Jews began to consider themselves in not purely religious terms but in a "national" sense. Perhaps the clearest analysis of this perception had been presented by the great Jewish historian and public leader S. Dubnov in his famous "Letters on Old and New Jewry" (1907, Russian language). He formulated a theory of a "Spiritual Nation," of which the Jews (in his view, European Jews) presented the best example. (Needless to say, the early Zionists based their understanding of the nature of Judaism also on the notion of nation, although they didnÕt understand it in the same way as Dubnov.6)

According to Dubnov, a nation undergoes different stages in its development; it gradually diminishes the material, or tribal, components of its being. The highest level is reached where there are no longer obvious vulgar ethnic traits but mere spirituality only. Dubnov classifies the "spiritual" nation of the Jews as this type. The Zionists, on the other hand, declared the Jews to be "from the very beginning," i.e., from the era of Ancient Israel, an ordinary nation, which, by the vicissitudes of history, was dispersed at a certain period of its life but always fought to overcome dispersion and restore its ordinary national being as a separate nation, with its own territory, language, and culture. Religion was understood as part of that culture.

Thus, on the verge of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which resulted in a virtual prohibition of religion as a social institution, there were already at least two well-formulated theories about the national character of Eastern European Jewry, if not of Jewry worldwide. Religious life as such deteriorated to a great extent at that time due to a continuing process of emancipation of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Romanian Jewry. That was the historical background for the seizing of power by the Communists and their direct attack on religion. Religion as a unifying factor was removed from Jewish consciousness by their policy. More important was the elimination of religion as a social institution in the social structure of Soviet Union.

After World War II, the social role of partly resurrected religion was strikingly different from what it had once been. Remaining theoretically as an individual choice for underdeveloped or backward persons, religion has become much more a question of belief than an element of social structure that determines the behavior of its adherents. The idea of the backwardness of religion was accepted to a certain extent by the younger Jewish nonbelievers in the 1940s and 1950s. For the Jewish population of the capitals (Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, etc.) adherence to religion, accompanied by corrupted Yiddish-accented Russian, typical Jewish names, non-intellectual professions (traders, accountants, craftsmen, etc.), in-deed became a sign of backwardness. To the same extent, a Russian intellectual would view his compatriot from a rural area, strangely dressed, speaking a dialect, sometimes traditionally religious, as a backward muzhik.

In the 1950s, with the so-called thaw of the Khrushchev epoch, the attitude of Soviet intellectuals toward religion changed slightly, due to the reevaluation of different values and a disappointment in communist ideology. By that time, Judaism was barely remembered as a living religion by the majority of Soviet Jews. It was treated in pejorative terms. But the idea of religion not embodied in some specific religious institution became cautiously popular. The Russian intelligentsia, the Jewish component of it included, gradually developed an attitude of respecting religion without joining it. That allowed for a specific manifestation of agnosticism in religious matters by declaring respect toward someoneÕs belief while remaining a materialist nonbeliever. The generation of the "sixties" (shestidesyatniki) became involved in an attempt to replace the corrupted communist ideology by some kind of religious or pseudo-religious search. It began with Christian-ity in its Pravoslav denomination, a native religion of the Russians, which was more or less known to all Soviets due to the heritage of classical Russian culture. Christianity was also persecuted, and that made it a "suffering ideology" in the eyes of Russian intellectuals. Some of the Jews (among them such prominent persons as Father Alexander Men, the poet Alexander Galich, and others, whose influence on the Russian Ð and Jewish Ð intelligentsia was immense) began preaching the baptism of the Jews and the establishment of a special brand of Judeo-Christianity that could combine Jewish nationhood, and even Zionist ideology, with a combination of Judaic moral heritage and the teaching of Christ. This preaching was quite successful among the Jewish intelligentsia of the capitals, and the influence is felt even now.

It was at that time that the first sociological survey of Soviet Jewry took place. In 1976, a group of scholars undertook an attempt to distribute a sociological questionnaire among Jews who were not involved in the movement for freedom of emigration. I compiled this questionnaire. The survey was conducted illegally, which is why not all sampling conditions were strictly observed. Still, the results are quite interesting, specifically if we look at the broad trends, which coincide more or less with general sociological and historical observations.

One of the questions was about attitude toward Judaism as religion. It is worth mentioning here that the Russian language, unlike other European languages, makes a terminological difference between the word Judaism "Judaism as religion," and Yevreystvo, "Judaism or Jewry as nation." Seven percent of the 1,191 respondents declared themselves believers. The older age category (60 and above) demonstrated the highest proportion of believers. Belief was also more frequent among respondents with no formal education or only elementary Jewish education. The majority, 53 percent, demonstrated the trend that I characterized above Ð respect toward a personÕs belief, but not sharing it. Of the rest, 32 percent stated that they had no knowledge of religion or were indifferent to it, and 3 percent believed that it was necessary to oppose the Jewish religion.7 Thus, in the mid-1970s, 93 percent of the respondent Jews in USSR denied that they were adherents of Judaism as a religion. Only about one-third manifested a negative attitude toward religion, but that is certainly not enough to conclude that Soviet Jews viewed Judaism as a religious culture, in the way American Jews and Israeli Jews viewed it. For some of the Jews, then, religious Judaism was already being approached from a nationalistic, rather than a purely religious point of view. The authors of the analytical part concluded that

... for older Jews religious practice is primarily a manifestation of religious position, while Jews under 50 are more likely to use religious practice [including the attendance at the synagogues and Jewish holidays Ð M.C.] to express other aspects of Jewish identity 8

When asked about the sources of Jewish unity, the majority of respondents pointed to "oppression and discrimination" (68 percent) and "lineage and historical fate" (63.5 percent). Much lower in numbers were those who thought that the source of unity was the "high intellectual level of the Jews" (35.5 percent), and finally, "common religion in past or present" (28 percent). Again, we see that the religious common denominator was acknowledged by less by one-third of the population.9

So that was the situation in 1976. Other surveys were done in the midst of revolutionary dramatic changes undergone by Soviet Jewry in the early 1990s. But the main characteristics established by the survey of 1976 seemed to remain.

A joint American-Russian group of scholars conducted a survey on Jewish identity in Russia in the early 1990s. They concluded that "Today no more than 6 percent of the adult Jewish population can be safely classified as believers in Judaic religion."10 More than that, only about one-third of the respondents answered that they favored Judaism as a religion, while not less than 13 percent favored Christianity more, thus demonstrating the influence of the Soviet dissident-baptizers, and also one of the most significant corollaries of the non-religious identity Ð religious tolerance.11

Also in the early 1990s, another modern sociologist, R. Ryvkina, conducted a similar survey. She found that 16 percent of her Jewish respondents considered themselves "religious, but only 24 percent of them, i.e., about 4 percent of the general population, profess Judaism, and 31 percent, or 5 percent of the general population, Orthodox Christianity.12

In summarizing all these and other data, we inevit-ably come to a conclusion that when Soviet or Russian Jews speak about being Jewish they mean something different from what American or Israeli Jews mean by the term. The Soviet type of identity was based upon the notion of "nationality," which was almost totally alienated from Jewish religion. The national, or ethnic dominance of Jewish identity in the USSR was not only the result of the political discrimination against religious institutions in that country but was also rooted in the social philosophy acquired by Soviet society. The society was considered on all levels as a set of "peoples of the USSR," theoretically equal in rights and status. In fact, there were many gradations of different kinds of "peoples." Various categories were distinguished, like "socialist nations," which had the right to have their "own" first-grade Soviet socialist republics within the USSR, or second-grade autonomous Soviet socialist republics with-in one of the Soviet socialist republics; "socialist narodnost (peoplehood)" which formed third- or fourth-grade "autonomous regions" or "autonomous districts" as parts of ordinary administrative divisions; "small narodnost," which had no administrative divisions of their own, etc. This system collapsed in the early 1990s, resulting in a number of large or small ethnic conflicts that have been so characteristic of post-Soviet Russian history.

But such was the perception of society that consisted of a finite number of peoples. It presupposed a certain type of national, or ethnic exclusivity, in the sense that a person was not supposed to belong simultaneously to more than one nationality. Membership in a nationality was regulated by the state; there was a special registration on the internal IDs of oneÕs nationality ( the so-called "paragraph 5").

Russian Jews have always considered themselves Jews, and never Russians Ð unlike American Jews, who are both Jews and Americans. National exclusivity was one of the main features of the Soviet pattern of Jewish identity.

Another feature, logically resulting from the first, was religious tolerance, or inclusivity. The main problem was oneÕs nationality. Since that was fixed, other types of behavior seemed irrelevant, including attitudes toward religion. Most of the Jews were indifferent to and illiterate about all religions, including Judaism. But traditional religions of a "people" were known and recognized. So a Russian by nationality, if he were religious, most naturally would be a Pravoslav Christian, and a Tatar a Sunni Muslim. But they could belong also to other religious groups. There were many Russians who professed all kinds of Protestant Christian denominations, or Tatars who were adherents of Orthodox Christianity. By doing so, they did not lose their Russian or Tatar nationality. The Jewish attitude to this problem was more or less the same. By professing another religion you would not necessarily lose your Jewish nationality. The traditional Jewish approach towards meshumadim was either forgotten or ignored by those who underwent baptism and became Christian. Baptism at a certain period in the mid-1970s was considered even by some groups of Zionist activists as a specific Soviet-Jewish response to particular challenges within Soviet society.

Another feature of the ethnic pattern of Jewish identity (as well as other nationalities within the Soviet Union) was its passive character. A person was either born within a certain nationality, or if he was an offspring of a nationally mixed marriage, acquired his nationality by choice at the age of 16. He was not supposed to be ideologically oriented to confirm his nationality. He simply belonged to it. It was considered not bad if someone knew the language of his nationality, its habits, history, etc., but that was not crucial for the identity itself. The identity was fixed, registered, and known to the state and to the non-Jewish environment. One did not need "to be Jewish," he simply was. That also differs in a striking way from the American pattern, although it is quite similar to the Israeli model. When American Jews speak about continuity and ask themselves what would make the next generation of American Jews "be Jewish" in the hospitable and democratic American social environment, they mean not just the existence of the unity called "Jews" but the active participation of the people in some ideologically, or religiously oriented activity. Why should future American Jews attend synagogues and help keep them alive, why should they abstain from intermarriage with non-Jews, why should they prepare their children for the bar/bat mitzvah, etc? In the very question of continuity, we find a hint that Jewishness should be active; it is a kind of social activity aimed at continuation, not a matter of identity or self-consciousness, but an elaborated set of behavioral patterns considered vital for the continuation of the community. Not so was (and still is) the Soviet pattern. It is passive, because it is ethnic in the very perception of the majority of the ex-Soviet Jews.

I suggest another dimension to add to those identified earlier: the inclusion of Jewish life into the life of the gentile society. In fact, in the Diaspora, the Jewish community always forms a part of the non-Jewish society. It may join the larger society in various ways Ð from a corporate unit in the medieval world to almost total dispersion in Soviet Russia, where the Jews lost all corporate traits Ð but it is always included into the social network of its neighbors.

The only case of non-inclusion today is the modern Israeli society. There we have a Jewish identity which can be characterized as "national" in the English meaning of that word. It is exclusive socially, because the Israeli society does not form a part of another state unit. On the contrary, other minorities are included into it, and Israel tries Ð not always successfully Ð to organize this inclusion. The presence of other minorities in Israeli society presupposes the importance of the ethnicity, or nationality, variable in the Israeli Jewish identity pattern. As in the Soviet Union, it is exclusive, since a Jew can be only an Israeli, and not a member of any other nationality. Israeli society, unlike the American or some Wes-tern European societies, is not based upon the notion of a "multicultural" model and does not recognize multiple ethnic affiliation. Not surprisingly, in Israel we find the same regulation as in the former Soviet Union Ð the administrative registration of nationality in the internal ID. At the same time, Israel has acquired, in its administrative policy, an archaic system which was used by both the Ottoman Empire and British mandatory authorities. Israeli policy makes no distinction between religion and nationality, singling out official minority groups on a basis of a mixed ethnic-religious criterion. Officially, the Israeli authorities recognize as minorities some religious entities Ð Muslims, Christians; some ethnicities Ð the Circassians and Armenians; some ethno-confessional Ð Druze and Samaritans; and one specific type of folk economy Ð the Bedouins. In this system, religion forms one of the features of a minority, and that is why it is exclusive, as in the Jewish Western diasporal identity pattern. A Muslim, since he is a Muslim, as a member of a specifically recognized group is not supposed to profess another religion, the same as with a Jew. A converted Jew should be transferred into another group. But since these groups are more or less fixed, the membership in them, as in other groups can be passive. A Muslim or a Jew has no obligation to preserve the continuity of his group by some overt activity. He can be absolutely passive and still remain a Muslim and a Jew. One of the results of this ethnic passivity is the well-known concern that Israeli society is losing its Jewish nature, that Israeli youth are illiterate in the basic symbols of Jewish culture, etc. But this passivity comes from the national character of the Israeli identity Ð the State of Israel is responsible for continuity. and not the self-organized activity of the communities.

In our attempt to analyze the components of contemporary patterns of Jewish identity worldwide, we have singled out several that play, in my opinion, a crucial role for proposed typologies. Rather than consider the role of different religious and secular cultural items in Jewish identity, as the majority of scholars of this topic do, we suggest singling out the following variables:

1) Ethnicity, being a notion of a Jewish people as an ethnic or national entity based upon the idea of common origin and shared past and present experience; in the case of Jews, this notion often includes victimization traits characteristic for Jewish civilization, i.e., perception of shared sufferings and discrimination.13 Ethnicity can be either exclusive, so that it can not be simultaneously combined with another affiliation, or inclusive, so that it can be combined with other ethnic or national affiliations.

2) Religiosity, being a notion of the Jewish religion as a main characteristic and uniting feature of the Jewish unity, may also be either exclusive, meaning that the profession of Judaism as religion is binding for a Jew, no other religion being tolerated inside the Jewish unity (although people of other origins who profess Judaism, if approved, may be included into the Jewish entity); or inclusive, meaning that this type Jewish unity may include people belonging to different confessions.

3) Social structure of the Jewish community may be either exclusive, in the sense that it does not form a part of a larger society Ð this type exists only in the State of Israel Ð or inclusive, as included in the social structure of a larger non-Jewish society.

4) Social behavior may be either passive, in the sense that a member of the Jewish entity is not necessarily supposed to demonstrate activity of an ideological or religious nature, or be active, which means that the community must necessarily organize such activity.

Using these variables we can present the following typology of three main contemporary patterns of Jewish identity in comparison with the traditional DHS-type:o

Ethnicity Religiosity Social Social

Structure Behavior

Western Diaspora Inclusive Exclusive Inclusive Active

Soviet/Russia Exclusive Inclusive Inclusive Passive

Israel Exclusive Exclusive Exclusive Passive

DerekhHa-SHAS Exclusive Exclusive Inclusive Active

Notes

1. Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Ed. and Introduction by Arthur Hertzberg. New York: Atheneum, 1986, p. 157.

2. See Jonathan Webber (ed.), Jewish Identities in a New Europe. London, Washington: Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994, 307 pp., index, note on contributors.

3. See Webber, 1994, op. cit.; Benjamin Fain and Mervin F. Verbit, Jewishness in the Soviet Union: Report of an Empirical Study. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs, Association for Jewish Self-Education/Tarbuth Foundation, 1984; Z. Gitelman, V. Chervyakov, and V. Shapiro, "Religion as a Component of Jewish Identity in Russian Jewry" (Russian language), Bulletin of the Jewish University in Moscow (Russian language), No. 3 (7), p. 121-144; R. Ryvkina, et al., Postsoviet Russian Jews Ð Who are They? (Russian language)

4. Michael A. Chlenov, "Jewish Communities and Jewish Identities in the Former Soviet Union," in Jewish Identities in the New Europe, ed. by Jonathan Webber, op. cit.

5. Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli & American Experiences. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 5-6.

6. Arthur Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. New York: Atheneum, 1986, p. 21.

7. Benjamin Fain and Mervin F. Verbit, Jewishness in the Soviet Union: Report of an Empirical Study. Op. cit., p. 66.

8. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

9. Ibid. pp. 24-26, 99.

10. See Z. Gitelman, V. Chervyakov, V. Shapiro, "Religion as a Component of Jewish Identity in Russian Jewry" (Russian language), in Bulletin of the Jewish University in Moscow (Russian language), No. 3(7), pp. 121-144.

11. Ibid., p. 136.

12. R. Ryvkina, "Postsoviet Russian Jews Ð Who Are They?" (Russian language) Moscow: URSS Publishers, p. 59.

13. Michael A. Chlenov, "Jewish Civilization: A Socio-Anthropological Reexamination," in Jewish Studies in a New Europe: Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of Jewish Studies in Copenhagen, 1994, under the auspices of the European Association for Jewish studies, ed, by Ulf H. Axen. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel A/S International Publishers, 1998, Det Kongelige Bibliote k, pp. 128-141.

MICHAEL A. CHLENOV teaches at the State Jewish Maimonides Academy, Moscow, Russia. For many years he was a researcher in the ethnography department of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, as well as being a leading cultural figure in Soviet Jewry since the 1970s.