Before Crimea Was an Ethnic Russian Stronghold, It Was a Potential Jewish Homeland — Jews have lived in the area since ancient times and leaders from Catherine the Great to Stalin encouraged their settlement there. Crimean Jews were largely divided into two communities: the Krymchaks, who followed rabbinical Judaism, and the Karaites, who rejected the Oral Torah. Soon after Catherine the Great conquered the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, she opened it up to Jewish settlement, hoping that the Jews would serve as a bulwark against the Turks. Although Jews were later barred from living in the major cities, the peninsula promised open spaces and freedom to adventurous Jews seeking new frontiers and willing to take up a spade. Tens of thousands of mostly young Jews settled in this part of New Russia over the next century. The Crimea became so identified with Russia’s Jewish history, in fact, that Jewish activists in St. Petersburg pointed to the long legacy of Crimean Jews as an argument for Jewish emancipation in the empire. After all, they claimed: Jews had been living there longer than Russians. Now, as the new government in Kiev struggles to find its footing, Russians occupy the Crimea in the name of protecting ethnic Russians and combating anti-Semitic ultra-nationalists —an ironic twist less than a century after the Kremlin contemplated the peninsula as the site of a potential Jewish homeland.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 17:50:53 +0000
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