With the destruction of the Third Reich and subsequent establishment of two separate and sovereign German states, different perspectives on society and class have resulted in differences in German-Jewish affairs. The Jewish communities in the Federal Republic of Germany, while predicated on the principles of religious corporations, became oriented toward the World Zionist Organization and the State of Israel. Indeed, Jewish life in West Germany soon represented expatriate Israeli existence, and the religious, cultural and political organizations of West-German Jews have become largely extensions of Zionist and Israeli purposes.

Before engaging in empirical treatment inherent in the title, I will outline the model on which my analysis is based. I begin with the observation that natural languages are codes which groups of people have conveniently adopted for the purposes of communicating and of information storing. The costs, both explicit and implicit, associated with a given code can be divided into two categories.

The protection of Imperial Russian territorial integrity was, when the peace conference convened in Paris, one of the firmest and least ambivalent elements of Woodrow Wilson's Russian policy.1 The Russia to which he applied this policy was in fact an empire, including nationality groups incorporated, often forceably, during the 17th and 18th centuries. Many of these ethnic nationalities — and especially those with which Wilson and his fellow peacemakers were familiar — were concentrated along the borders of European Russia. Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine were perhaps the best known of the ethnic nationalities, each with defined geographic areas, which had formed part of imperial Russia. Such nationality centers, many of which had long established administrative borders which changed little as a result of the peace conference, are the Russian borderlands to which this paper refers.