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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The relationship between the Jewish nation and the governing systems of Central and Eastern Europe has long fascinated, and bedeviled, contemporary observers and modern scholars alike. Numerous problems continually seem to defy convincing resolution. Among them are such key questions as these: Which factors can be used to define the Jews — i.e., linguistic, religious, ethnic lineage, custom and tradition — or a combination of these? Can the Jews become trusted loyal citizens of a secular state wherein they form a distinct ethno-religious minority? How can the government and/or its supporting majority determine at what point the Jews cease to be productive, contributing members of society, and become instead a harmful burden to the state and its people? Nowhere, it seems, has this collection of thorny issues, conveniently known as the “Jewish Question,” enjoyed such widespread attention and concerted concern from both official and general sources as in the lands ruled by the Russian tsars and, after 1917, by the Soviet commissars.
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5. Selzer's observation pertains to the period from 1815 on, when the earlier sources of Jewish communal legal and socio-political strength, cohesion, and considerable autonomy — the kahal and the Vaad — had ceased to possess any of their former power of legitimacy, and, where they acted at all, acted informally and as something of an underground operation. The “reforms” of Catherine II had doomed the kahal and Vaad system to extinction as obstacles in the path of total consolidation of state and society under the autocrat's control.Google Scholar
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7. Ibid., pp. 111–12.Google Scholar
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