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LITHUANIAN JEWRY AND THE LITHUANIAN NATIONAL MOVEMENT MORDECHAI ZALKIN It is fascinating to note that there are virtually no references to the Lithuanian national movement or to the idea of the possible establishment of an independent Lithuanian state in the pre–World War I history of Lithuanian Jewry. In the wide range of contemporary Jewish press, literature, autobiographies , personal letters, communal documentation, rabbinical literature ,1 and public sermons, one can find just a handful of references, mostly of an indirect nature, to these two phenomena, which played a central role in the Lithuanian public discourse since the last quarter of the nineteenth century.2 Even though it is understandable in the context of the sensitive political situation prevalent in the then Russian Czarist empire, the absence of Lithuanian national aspirations from the non-Russian Jewish press and literature is quite surprising.3 Likewise, the Lithuanian national movement was hardly discussed in the local Jewish press even during the 1920s and 1930s independent Lithuania, except for a few published essays and textbooks used in Jewish schools.4 Moreover, this chapter in the history of the Lithuanian nation is almost completely missing from the historiography of Lithuanian Jewry. The only few historians and Jewish publicists who paid attention to the attitude of the Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) toward the Lithuanian national movement did not dedicate a thorough and a comprehensive discussion to this subject but limited themselves to general comments and unproved assumptions .5 Thus, for instance, Jacob Robinson, a well-known Jewish attorney and a supporter of the Lithuanian national aspirations, argued that “the vast majority of Lithuanian Jews identified themselves with the national aspirations of the Lithuanian majority, even prior to the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state.”6 Other historians argue that the cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the 1905 elections to the first Duma, and the political cooperation in post–World War I years,7 were, to a certain extent, an outcome of many Litvaks’ support of the 22 A Pragmatic Alliance Lithuanian national aspirations.8 This support was primarily based on practical and political considerations. In general, most historians of Lithuanian Jewry were not interested in the Lithuanian-Jewish relationships and in the Litvaks’ attitude toward the Lithuanian national aspirations , and limited themselves either to other aspects of the local Jewish history9 or to the interwar period and the Jewish autonomy in independent Lithuania.10 Such “silence of sources” draws attention to a substantive distinction between the involvement of pre–World War I Lithuanian Jews in their immediate surrounding political arena, and that of their coreligionists in Poland, Hungary, and other Central and Eastern European states.11 Apparently , this phenomenon is understandable, at least according to the popular assumption that the Litvaks limited their contact with the local Lithuanian society to a minimal, mainly in the economic sphere.12 This dichotomy between the Jews and the local population—popular in the ultra-orthodox Jewish historiography—has very little to do with the historical reality, mainly due to the unique settling character of the Litvaks. Because of the general socio-economic conditions in the Lithuanian land, more than anywhere else in Europe the most prevalent type of Jewish settling in these territories was the rural one. Throughout centuries tens of thousands of Litvaks lived in farms, villages, and small towns in the Lithuanian countryside,13 and established different types of relationships with their neighboring non-Jewish Lithuanian farmers and villagers. It is true that this coexistence was characterized by religious and ethnic differences, as well as by mutual stereotypes of the “other,” which was mostly negative.14 Yet one cannot underestimate the different forms of closeness, cooperation , mutual recognition and mutual influence between these two groups. A good example of this closeness is the unique occupational character of Lithuanian Jewry in general, and especially the proportionally high percentage of Litvaks who earned their living, directly or indirectly, by farming . By the end of the nineteenth century about six percent of the Jewish population in the Vilnius district and nine percent in the Suwałki district farmed grains and vegetables. Other Jewish farmers owned orchards or were occupied with lake fishing, dairy farming, and so on. Another ten percent of local Jews were owners of gristmills, exporters of agricultural products, suppliers of seeds, fertilizers, and agricultural machinery. One result of such extensive involvement of the Jews in agriculture and farming was close acquaintance with the local non-Jewish society, certainly beyond the basic economic needs. “Six hundred years, maybe...

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