ებრაული იდენტობა საქართველოში საბჭოთა ოკუპაციის შემდეგ

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the construction of Jewish identity in Georgia in the fi rst decades after sovetization. From the end of the 1920s, the Soviet policy of the indigenization was replaced by the new ideology of internationalism – creation of the unified Soviet people. Consequently, the revival of Jewish national identity in the first half of the 1920s gradually weakened. Main line which became apparent in the periodicals by the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s is the formation of the new Soviet Jewish identity. This idea is expressed in a clear way in the following phrase from one of the articles published in the governmental newspaper “Komunisti” (“Communist”) in 1931: “there is born a new man: the Jewish worker, the Jewish peasant”. In Soviet Georgia several organizations were formed aiming to establish Jewish kolkhozes – collective farms. The new kolkhozes were built in the places different from the traditional Jewish villages/towns. The Jews were immigrated to those new places where they had to start farming. Naturally, there were no synagogues in the new settlements. The main aim of the policy was to form a “new epoch” in the history of the Georgian Jewry. This meant to overcome the “cultural backwardness” of the Jews, to change in a radical way the traditional Jewish lifestyle. It should have been implemented in two ways: the first was to detach the Jews from synagogues and secondly, to change their economic activity – trade – which according to the Soviet ideology was illegal and bore a “reactionist” character. New perspectives of the Jewish life in Georgia were expressed not only in newspapers which were the main tool of Soviet propaganda, but in literary works as well.