every other people of that part of the world. Indeed, the level of anti-Semitism in the pre-war period generally rose or fell with the proportion of Jews in the general population. Thus there was a great deal of anti-Semitism in Poland, where there were many Jews, and relatively little in Bulgaria, where Jews accounted for less than 1 per cent of the population.
The question, then, is whether a people’s past history of anti-Semitism renders current ambitions for sovereignty illegitimate. Here, it seems, one worthwhile measurement is whether the current leadership is willing to own up to the mistakes of the past and to adopt policies and a vocabulary of tolerance. By this standard, the current Ukrainian leadership scores rather impressively. The government, for example, has encouraged Jews to remain and help build the new nation, rather than emigrate to Israel. Interestingly, influential Ukrainian émigrés rank among the strongest advocates of inter-ethnic cooperation.
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