The Jewish parliament in Lithuania and Belorussia in its legislative activity, 1623-1721

ENFor this section, his article below offers a view of the overall functioning of an autonomous Jewish council during the period of its successful operation. Like his other early works, many of which deal with Jewish social and economic history in Lithuania and Belorussia, it avoids the overtly Marxist bias of his later works. Sosis rejects Dubnow’s idealist, “whole Israel” approach to Jewish history (which emphasized national unity over class distinctions), but at this early date was not compelled by official Soviet policy to seek only social conflict and economic determinism in Jewish history. Nevertheless, his collegiality with Dubnow and his failure to distance himself early enough from the “objective” norms of “bourgeois” historiography in the West led to his denunciation as a “non-Marxist” and his expulsion in 1931 from the Communist Party and academic Jewish studies. [p. 9-10].