history of the Jews was reactionary. While many events in the history of the Jews could be adapted to fit within the Soviet programme, such as the endless persecution of the Jews, and be highlighted accordingly, denouncing antisemites as enemies and oppressors of humanity, it so happened that Russian antisemites such as Khmelnytsky445 or Peter the Great446 were portrayed as Soviet heroes. Khmelnytsky was a fighter, fighting against Polish masters forthe freedom of the Cossack people, and Peter the Great was a god in the eyes of the Soviet people. So there could be no question of stigmatising those figures as antisemites, and the history of the Jews had to be omitted by necessity. The same applied to Suvorov,447 painted by the Soviet regime in a halo of glory, while Napoleon I,448 fighting in the name of revolutionary ideals, was considered imperialist. It is understandable that in such circumstances teaching history would have been unthinkable, [3] and it should be added at this point that Jewish communists believed that all national tendencies among the Jews constitute a crime committed against the party.
Jewish literature in the Soviet Union recognised Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and Mendele449 and more recent writers. Peretz and Mendele were consideredto be the men of the masses, who wrote exclusively for the people. Hebrew literature was rejected as “reactionary”.
As for the Jewish education in Vilna, after the invasion of the Bolsheviks, old Yiddish schools were re-opened, and Hebrew schools were changed to Yiddish ones. But even there the turnout was much lower than it had been before the war. The assimilation of Jewish youth in Vilna progressed quickly. The Jews were the only people in the Soviet Union who had neither a history
