Abstract
Estimates of the number of Jews in the former Soviet Union range from about 3 million to well under 1 million.1 The low estimates are based on a strict interpretation of census returns. The high estimates are based on the assumption that an enormous number of Soviet citizens concealed their Jewish roots under the Soviet regime. Presumably, those people are now free to identify as Jews and, increasingly, do just that. In my judgement, neither estimate is accurate although census figures are much closer to the mark.
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Notes
Zvi Gitelman, “Recent demographic and migratory trends among Soviet Jews: Implications for policy”, Post-Soviet Geography, vol. 33, no. 3, 1992, 142.
Mark Tolts, “Jewish marriages in the USSR: A demographic analysis”, East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 22, no. 2, 1992, 9.
Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry Since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 18–19, 22–3.
See, for example, Stanley Lieberson and Mary Waters, “Ethnic groups in flux: The changing ethnic responses of American whites”, Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science, no. 487, 1986, 79–91.
A study of emigrants headed to the West in the years 1976–79 found that over 19 per cent of them were non-Jews according to their passport registration. However, many of them were spouses of Jews according to passport registration. See Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J. Brym, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy (London: Macmillan, 1983), 52–5.
See G. F. Morozova, “Refugees and emigrants”, Sociological Research, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, 93.
Sidney Heitman, “Jews in the 1989 USSR census”, Soviet Jewish Affairs, vol. 20, no. 1, 1990, 23–30.
Steven M. Cohen, American Modernity and Jewish Identity (New York and London: Tavistock, 1983).
The North American data are from Jay Brodbar-Nemzer et al., “An overview of the Canadian Jewish community” in Robert J. Brym, William Shaffir and Morton Weinfeld (eds.), The Jews in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43, 46, 48, 61.
Zvi Gitelman, “The evolution of Jewish culture and identity in the Soviet Union” in Yaacov Ro’i and Avi Beker (eds.), Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union (New York and London: New York University Press, 1991)
Richard Pipes, “The Soviet Union adrift”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, no. 1, 1991, 80.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1965 [1948]), 143.
Michael Hechter, “Group formation and the cultural division of labor”, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84, 1978, 293–318.
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© 1994 The Institute of Jewish Affairs Limited
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Brym, R.J. (1994). Identity. In: Spier, H. (eds) The Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13515-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13515-8_3
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