ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a specific religion, Judaism, in a specific modernizing environment, the Soviet Union, while paying some attention to comparable phenomena—other religions in the USSR, and Judaism in other national settings. It assesses the relative impact on Judaism of antireligious policies and of general modernizing processes, and to point to some post-modernizing phenomena affecting Judaism in the USSR. Before the emancipations of the eighteenth century, neither Jews nor others differentiated between Judaism as a religion and Jews as an ethnic group. The relationship of modernization to Judaism is more complex than correlations between education, urbanity, and lack of religiosity. For the Jews of the Soviet Union, modernization meant migration out of the former Pale of Settlement and to the larger cities of Belorussia and the Ukraine, and, for the first time, to the larger cities of the Russian Republic.
