This book is an important addition to recent work on Galicia, the northeastern border province acquired by the Habsburgs during the Partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century. During the course of the nineteenth century, this largely agricultural province characterized by linguistic and religious diversity would see the rise of competing Polish and Ruthenian/Ukrainian national movements. Joshua Shanes's study embeds the story of the development of Jewish nationalism in Galicia in this Habsburg context, even as he engages with broader discussions of the rise of nations and nationalism in Europe.
The book begins with an excellent and concise overview of the first century (1772–1883) of Jewish life in Habsburg Galicia. Shanes lays out the social and economic profile of the Galician Jewish community. He briefly considers Habsburg absolutism and the Jewish Enlightenment in the province, the trend toward Germanization, the constitutional era (post-1867) and the turn toward Polonization, as well as the beginnings of specifically Jewish politics in the province. Shanes identifies two groups among the first Zionists in Galicia: integrationists dismayed by anti-Semitism abroad (the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s) and at home in Galicia, and “ethnicists,” Jews “who came to Zionism from within traditional Jewish society in order to revitalize Jewish culture through the integration of secular knowledge” (49). In the early 1890s, Jewish nationalists tried to reach a wider audience than their small constituency of secular intellectuals and students by producing Yiddish-language newspapers aimed at the Jewish masses. These publications interpreted Jewish nationalism as an authentic expression of the Jewish tradition. Shanes illustrates the sudden and profound transformations of Galician Zionism after Theodor Herzl's publication of The Jewish State and the subsequent First Zionist Congress. Local independent and Galicia-wide Zionist institutions largely accepted the umbrella of the new Vienna movement. They also accepted, if hesitantly, the Vienna-based movement's focus on Palestine and international politics over efforts at strengthening Jewish culture at home and competing in Galician and Habsburg political contests. The final chapter looks at the turn of Jewish politics toward national recognition and rights within Galicia in response to the institution of universal mass suffrage in the Austrian half of the monarchy and the first elections under the new suffrage laws in 1907.
The book concludes by engaging the theoretical scholarship on the rise of nations and nationalism. Shanes believes that the case of Diaspora Jewish nationalism in Galicia confirms the arguments of Anthony Smith. In Galicia, Shanes contends, modern Jewish nationalism developed out of a preexisting Jewish ethnie. Jewish nationalism in Galicia gained the emotional attachment of wider circles by drawing from familiar Jewish symbols, holidays, and practices, even if informing these Jewish traditions with new content.
Among the most effective passages in the book are those tracing the spread of Jewish national culture far beyond the limited numbers of self-identifying Zionists. Shanes maps out the development of Jewish institutions and organizations that were sympathetic in different ways to a Jewish political program, mirroring the kinds of associational networks that spread a sense of national belonging within and outside of the Habsburg provinces. The sections on the Yiddish press, the portraits of important Jewish nationalists, and specific political campaigns integrate these significant and long overlooked publications, individuals, and events into Jewish history, as well as into the history of the region.
Like Simon Rabinovitch's Jews and Diaspora Nationalism (Brandeis, 2012), this book joins other recent publications that explore the many Jewish nationalisms and understandings of Jewish peoplehood that arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Shanes shows that the lines dividing Zionism, Diaspora nationalism, and assimilationism in Galicia were blurry; individuals and groups moved from one to the other and, at times, struck seemingly unlikely alliances. For example, in the 1890s and early 1900s, “assimilationists” could support Jewish nationalist candidates, including Zionists, because of their mutual interest in practical programs to further Jewish political, economic, and cultural interests in Galicia and the Habsburg monarchy. At the same time, some orthodox leaders urged their followers to vote against candidates promoting specifically Jewish agendas, in favor of Catholic politicians promising to work closely with the dominant Polish Catholic leadership in the province and with the government in Vienna.
Shanes is suggestive concerning the influence of the Polish and Ruthenian/Ukrainian national movements on Jewish nationalism; however, he does not engage questions of Polish-Jewish or Ukrainian-Jewish relations in great depth. Indeed, the book would have been even stronger had it drawn a more complete picture of Jewish national culture and Jewish-Christian relations at the local level. Shanes asserts that the Galician case offers insight into Jewish nationalism in Europe as a whole; however, as Shanes writes, the Galician Jewish community was in many ways unique: “religiously and economically similar to Russian Jewry, but legally more like their Western brethren” (4).
This book succeeds in setting Jewish nationalism in Galicia firmly in the context of the European national movements gaining adherents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This very fine study will prove of interest to scholars and students of Habsburg Central and Eastern Europe, Jewish history, and nationalism.
