The 408 anti-Jewish riots of 1898 in Polish-speaking West Galicia—entailing great material damages (especially of Jewish-run taverns), eighteen Christian deaths from Habsburg soldiers’ bullets (but no Jewish fatalities), and more than five thousand rioters’ arrests and two thousand jail sentences—were Austria-Hungary's greatest pre-1914 wave of popular ethnic violence. They revealed the fragility of Austrian rule in the Galician countryside, but also the capacity of Francis Joseph's state to expeditiously suppress grassroots disorder and to efficiently and condignly punish its instigators (while shoring up sagging conservative structures and lashing out at the rising Polish Social Democratic movement, innocent of the mayhem).

Not before the monarchy's 1918 fall was Polish Galician susceptibility to judeophobia's siren song able to defy state power to replicate, more bloodily, the 1898 riots. These latter events mapped themselves closely onto the peasant explosion (rabacja) of 1846, in which Polish subject villagers, enflamed with class hatred and believing, not wrongly, that Austrian officials tolerated their violence, slaughtered landlords in the course of a misbegotten attempt at Polish nationalist uprising. In that bloodletting, the rebels ignored the Jews’ presence, but a half-century later, it was their target.

In accounting for this fateful change in the Christian-Jewish relationship in Galicia, Daniel Unowsky's well-researched book highlights the “transnational Catholic anti-Jewish message” he finds to have spread eastward from late nineteenth-century western Europe, where Leo XIII's “social Catholicism” employed antisemitic propaganda to reach the masses (as in Captain Alfred Dreyfus's France). Unowsky charges Galician churchmen with pumping “Catholic-inflected modern antisemitism” into the countryside, as evidenced not by demonstrable strategies of episcopal leaders but rather by the spread of antisemitic publications (notably priest Mateusz Jeż’s Jewish Secrets (Tajemnice żydowskie) [1898]) and the saturation of emergent priest-led peasant populist political parties with hierarchy-blessed judeophobic spirit (86, 4).

Unowsky sees his contribution to the burgeoning recent literature on 1898's events in his proposal to locate them in this larger transformation, emanating from the West, of Catholic politics in late-nineteenth-century industrializing, urbanizing, and democratizing Europe. The Galician rioters’ minds and hearts may have been darkened by “medieval Catholic superstitions,” but they inhabited a world lit by “modern political mobilization”—universal suffrage, demotic parties and press, and peasant tribunes’ voices at village rallies and in Vienna's Reichsrat (184). This juxtaposition signals interpretive difficulties. The new populist parties and the Catholic antisemitic press counseled plainly against anti-Jewish violence (98), yet it broke out on a vast scale, entailing great Jewish material loss, emotional devastation, and physical injury just short of murder. What moved the rioters, against their church's remonstrances, to destroy, rob, mock, and pummel? Unowsky concedes that the plunderers’ actions “were not direct reflections of existing agendas propagated by peasant politics” (90), and that “the ideas of populist politicians and Catholic theorists” exerted but “limited attraction” among villagers (178). In the riots’ aftermath, Christian patronage of Jewish taverns resumed. Jewish migration from village and shtetl to larger towns and cities accelerated, but not overseas. Unowsky does not illuminate the question of peasant indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders, often tavern keepers, who sometimes kept debt registers (which rioters in 1918 sometimes destroyed). He concludes that, rather than maiming their neighbors or driving them from the land, “they wanted to teach the Jews a lesson,” demanding that they “stop cheating and work as we work” (178). For this unlettered villagers’ resentful and contemptuous attitude, undoubtedly pervasive, Unowsky offers but one documentation in a book that, despite its sources in courtroom records, is surprisingly bereft of first-person peasant testimony.

To wonder about the rioters’ inner triggers of aggression is to bend interpretation's arc away from the “transnational Catholic anti-Jewish message” toward their “medieval Catholic superstitions.” It was—as it seems to me—these, whether subconsciously or consciously activated, that warranted 1898's mayhem. Unowsky offers (without commentary) evidence for the view that, as so often in judeophobic actions, a dark wellspring of murderousness was bubbling in the psychic depths. A gendarme, probably peasant born, reckoned rocks “the size of human heads” (57) were hurled through synagogue windows. Among the many rumors of secret official permission for “three days” (or more) of plunder was that long dead (by his own hand) Archduke Rudolf was alive and hiding in Brazil, from where he was paying 1.5 cents per Jewish head (81). (In 1846, local Austrian officials had, infamously, exchanged coins for Polish noble heads.) Jews were charged with poisoning water and food and with abduction of Christian children for “ritual murder.” Rioters threatened Jews, amid cannibalistic overtones, with being “butchered and salted” or with being killed with scythes (58, 78, 93). A synagogue desecrator, having torn up a Torah roll, shouted out that “I have destroyed the Jewish God” (96).

Influential peasant populist leader Jakub Bojko wrote that “anyone with God in his heart” will distinguish between Jewish malefactors and “an honest Jew. We cannot just murder or rob the dishonest Jews of whom there are a great many” (151). Galician populist deputy Franciszek Winkowski said in the Reichsrat: “I do not know whether one can say this openly in the Austrian Parliament, the Jews are also human beings,” so that “one cannot bring the Jewish question to a resolution by butchering them like cattle” (160). Such disclaimers signal turmoil of desire and denial.

Unowsky's stress on Catholic Church complicity in the politicization of judeophobia among the unlettered laity will encounter no rebuttals among scholars of the subject. The disjuncture between church propaganda, by press and priestly word, and the rioters’ own inner aggressions, both by word and fist, may be overcome, I believe, if it is accepted that antisemitism's ground floor is a complex of unreflected-on fears and antagonisms, which find occasional naïve expression in riots and pogroms. Its superstructure is “print-antisemitism,” in which the same subconscious anxieties find mediated expression in the educated classes’ intellectualized judeophobic ideologies. In this light, we can view the intrusion into Galician political life of Catholic anti-Judaism as a secondary form of the demotic or folk-antisemitism acted upon in popular violence.

Unowsky's worthy and interesting study would have benefited from deeper engagement with the arguments—harmonizing with his own—concerning the 1898 rioters’ motives and symbolic behavior, and the judicial and parliamentary system's discursive construction of antisemitic reality, offered in Tim Buchen's Antisemitismus in Galizien. Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin, 2015). Future work on the subject will require framing in response to both works, as well as to other recent research usefully cited—though a bibliography is lacking—in Unowsky's well-produced, illustrated, and indexed book.