ABSTRACT
The Jewish identity in the Soviet Union allows historians of Eastern Europe to understand the concepts of 'national' and 'ethnic' embodied in Russian history, culture and literature in the light of collective myth formation. The assimilated and tabooed Judaism of the Soviet Empire was scarcely able to contrast its own fundamental values with those of the Russian national majority; Jewish images acquired a particular impact and distinctiveness. This chapter explains how the simultaneous assimilation and marginalisation of Jews defined the ambivalence of their boundaries to non-Jews in the Soviet Union. These boundaries were not visible in the official social discourse and yet in reality were always present, rendering both the merger of the Jews into the majority and their cultural alterity impossible. The phenomenon of Jewish intellectual and cultural mimicry in the Soviet Union can be interpreted in terms of its connection with the image and the fact of Jewish intellectualism.
