Joshua Shanes's new book is an ambitious and important study of Jewish nationalist sensibility and political mobilization in Habsburg Galicia. It should substantially recast how Jewish historians imagine the relationship of both assimilationist and traditional east European Jews to ideas of Jewish nationhood; how we understand the character of Jewish nationalism in eastern Europe in the age of mass politics; and how we think about early Zionism itself. In the broadest sense, Shanes emphasizes the second of these dimensions: he devotes much of his study to tracing the ways that “nationhood” could be said to have become “the key category of Jewish self-understanding in Galicia” (1) between the 1890s and 1914, and to elaborating some of the causes of this “nationalization” of Galician Jewish (political) identity. Shanes's book is an important work of Jewish political history in the classical and narrower sense too: throughout the study and especially in its culminating fifth chapter, he is attentive to Jewish political mobilizations around parliamentary elections. But his more fundamental concern is to anatomize a process of political mobilization, to show and try to explain why that mobilization was channeled through rhetorics of nationhood, and to revise accounts of both Zionism and of non-Zionist politics by arguing that all Jewish politics (at least in Galicia) tended toward a fundamentally typical form of nationalist claims making in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This politics, in Shanes’s telling, pivoted not on a politics of Jewish mass reterritorialization to Palestine, but on the assertion of “Jewish national rights” in place; it operated as a complement to (rather than against) Austrian imperial citizenship; and it was framed by the standard idiom of ethnonationalist autonomism that permeated Austro-Ukrainian and Austro-Polish politics at the same place and time.
After an introductory chapter, chapter 2 traces the ways in which Zionist and nationalist sensibilities found discursive and institutional footing among a small but growing community of modernized Galician Jews, and reconstructs their tense but surprisingly complicated relations with their assimilationist peers. With the third chapter, the study's main arguments come into focus. Chapter 3 recovers what Shanes calls a “Yiddish populist press”: a bevy of Yiddish-language newspapers that appeared in Galicia in the 1890s. Two men stood behind a fair number of these newspapers: a folksy Zionist orator, Laibel (Leybl) Taubes, and a self-proclaimed defender of “Orthodoxy,” Shevach Knoebel, son of the 'av bet din of Roznitov and someone at home with the emerging world of ultra-Orthodox politics. Though the distinction between the Zionism of the former and the Orthodoxy of the latter might seem to prefigure deep divisions in the papers’ editorial line, Shanes in fact makes the opposite argument. What is striking, in his view, is that the two editors converged on a single populist politics: all of the Yiddish newspapers in question cast themselves as newspapers for a posited Jewish folk, critiqued assimiliationism as an ideal, and prescribed a new politics in which the “regular Jews” of Galicia's shtetlekh and provints-shtet would proudly articulate what the papers conceived as collective Jewish interests. The interests in question—for instance enforcement of the habitually violated right to demand alternatives to schooling on the Sabbath—were framed, in Shanes's reading, in inextricably religious and national-cultural terms (though Taubes, a scion of rabbis on both sides and a Zionist who remained religious in an east European Jewish mode, went further than Knoebel in making an expressly nationalist claim of the compatibility of Judaism and nationalist concepts: “nationalism leads to faith, faith leads to nationalism” [140]). A third editor-entrepreneur who appears in chapter 4, one Osias Wilf, combined an outspoken Orthodox anti-Zionism with “emphatic” embrace of the view that “Jews constituted a nationality” and should demand their equal national rights in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (189).
Chapter 4 is in some ways the pivotal chapter of the book. Here Shanes argues that when Zionist orators and organizers turned their attention to speaking to the mass of the Galician Jewish population, particularly in the decade between the First Zionist Congress and Austria's 1907 elections, they met with surprisingly high levels of popular support, or at least interest, in a population that is generally conceived as a bastion of hasidic enthusiasm and antimodern Orthodoxy. Most strikingly, Shanes pulls together an impressive corpus of sources that show express support for specifically Zionist and nationalist ideals in hasidic, Orthodox, and small-town settings. Thus, 1904 press reports from a number of Galician towns describe “the heavy participation of Hasidism or other traditional elements” in public mourning for the newly deceased Theodor Herzl (167); many other towns saw appearances by Zionist preachers with only intermittent opposition by hasidic leaders, local rabbinic figures, or other mobilized Orthodox actors. In that respect, the evidence brought here maps closely and compellingly on Yossi Goldstein's findings for the exact same period regarding the Russian-Jewish borderlands (Goldstein, Bein ẓiyonut medinit le-ẓionut ma‘asit [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991]). Shanes's book should go a long way toward finally laying to rest the manifestly false notion that traditional east European Jewry was intrinsically primed to reject Zionism, or that Zionism was an intrinsically antitraditional movement.
That said, Shanes also demonstrates the very real limits to this rapprochement, showing in detail how activists speaking in the name of tradition worked to disrupt Zionist events or suppress embryonic Zionist institutions (sometimes violently), anathematized Zionism in particular and sometimes rejected any whiff of nationalism in general. Activism along these lines was the province of local klei kodesh and crowds, hasidic leaders with regional reach, and the leadership of Galicia's precocious Orthodox political party Makhzikei Ha-das, which fired and anathematized the aforementioned Osias Wilf for his nationalist rhetoric despite his anti-Zionist bona fides. Shanes is not altogether clear on why he thinks that Zionist and nationalist ideals sometimes generated enthusiasm and at other times resistance in what would seem to be fairly similar small-town settings, and his account reminds us how desperately we need more research into what “being hasidic” meant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, he brings us a striking story from the town of Gliniany in which a local Zionist group faced off against the local rebbe and his Hasidim but in which the key players proved to be what a native text of the time and place construed as a distinct third group, namely “the simple Jews of the town” who were “not followers of the rebbe” and who were not sharply opposed to Zionism until local Zionists attacked the rebbe (175). An anecdote like this one also suggests the need for more anthropologically minded research into the mentalité of traditional east European Jews, including inquiry into whether—as this case suggests—local receptivity to or rejection of new ideologies like Zionism could turn less on coherent ideological views than on mores concerning appropriate and inappropriate behavior, networks of respect, the workings of social capital in intensely familiar and personalized social relations, etc.
Finally, chapter 5 brings the threads of the preceding two chapters together in tracing the very robust Galician Jewish support for declared Zionist candidates in Austria's 1907 elections. A rich political history in its own right that reconstructs some striking forms of Jewish-Ukrainian political cooperation against the dominant Poles, this chapter's more fundamental concern is to show that by 1907 a Jewish nationalist sensibility had become naturalized in wide swaths of Galician Jewry—something that electoral mobilization in 1907 both reflected and helped further catalyze and disseminate. Bound up in this argument about the mainstreaming of the nationalist idiom is a continuation of Shanes's argument about openness to nationalist ideas among traditionalist actors: Shanes shows that by common testimony and indeed by quantitative definition, a good number of those who voted Zionist or came out to demonstrate in favor of Zionist candidates must have been the self-same Orthodox and hasidic Jews that made up a large part of the Galician Jewish population.
This is a rich book with a number of distinct but closely nested arguments that historians of east European Jewry and modern Jewish nationalism will want to consider carefully. Insofar as Shanes seeks to explain why nationalist ideals found an eager audience in Galicia, he tends to focus on the ideological impact of nationalist discourses borne by the popular Yiddish press and other sorts of popular institutions (Zionist-sponsored gymnast clubs and “Toynbee halls” and reading rooms). This certainly seems sensible, but in focusing on these active tradents of nationalist ideas, Shanes sometimes pushes into the background an arguably more basic institutional point, namely, that the Austro-Hungarian Empire's legal-institutional context both encouraged and allowed nationalist mobilization in a way that, of course, the Russian Empire did not. As Shanes reminds us (119), by Austrian statute, national minority rights legally awaited Jews if they could convince the crown to define them too as “nation”—that is, there were institutionalized rewards for self-mobilization as a “nation.” And second, there was a working electoral system with a gradually expanding franchise, coupled with state allowance of mass political organization and participation (albeit with a lot of chicanery). Shanes's analysis suggests that it was this, no less than “deep” reformation of political imagination, that pushed Galician Zionists to see the need for Landespolitik earlier than other Zionists.
One of Shanes's critical agendas is to decenter or “provincialize” Zionism by arguing that in Galicia it was really a species of a larger Diaspora nationalism: he aims to “shed light on the nature and development of Jewish nationalism beyond the Zionist movement by examining how a Diaspora Jewish nationalism came to dominate the entire spectrum of Jewish politics […]” (1). But I think this is a bit misleading: at the core of Shanes's study is not Diaspora nationalism as a species of nationalism at odds with Zionism, but rather a careful reconstruction of how Galician Zionism itself developed an increasingly robust Diaspora politics due to factors specific to the Galician and larger Austro-Hungarian political scene. Granted, Shanes shows how nationalist rhetoric played out in non- and even anti-Zionist political settings both Orthodox and assimilationist. In chapter 5, for instance, he shows that even so-called assimilationist figures of various sorts increasingly adopted political language of Jewish “solidarism” (Shanes's felicitous term) and ideals of a shared Jewish political interest (249, 255).
Yet this claim seems to me to obscure some important points. For all Shanes's emphasis on deemphasizing Zionism, he shows us clearly that most Jewish mass politics in Galicia was declaredly Zionist. In Galicia, the large majority of the “Diaspora nationalists” Shanes describes were declared Zionists who embraced the term. To insist that they were “really” Diaspora nationalists without knowing it obscures the more straightforwardly historical question of what this fact tells us about Zionism itself. To my mind, it tells us that Zionism could be just as accommodating of Diaspora-focused practical politics as of antidiasporic cultural politics—something that we know well about Zionism a decade later from work like the late Ezra Mendelsohn's Zionism in Poland. One might also push back against Shanes's emphasis on Galician Zionism's uniqueness and precocity by noting that, after all, Russian Zionism embraced Diaspora-nationalist politics no later than 1906—hardly a huge gap relative to the 1897–1907 range in Galicia. Indeed, at times Shanes shows that Zionism was more central to larger Jewish social and cultural processes than much recent historiography seems to think; he notes (178) that most of the libraries, readings rooms, and other secular cultural institutions created in turn-of-the-century Galicia—what Jeffrey Veidlinger has elsewhere called “Jewish public culture”—were created and dominated by grassroots Zionists.
Moreover, it bears noting that Galician Zionists didn't have to proclaim Zionism. There were, as we know, plenty of people in the Russian Empire who made an effort to create distinct non-Zionist Diaspora nationalist organizations (most obviously the Folks-Partey). Yet Galician Jewish nationalists did so, and Shanes gives us no reason to think that they didn't mean it. The point here is both a historicist one—historians should generally define a movement at least in part in terms of what its adherents actually said and thought they were doing—and a more focused point about Zionism's place in the historiography. A drive to “provincialize Zionism” within Jewish history might be useful, but it's arguably more teleological (a favorite term of those who critique Zionism's historiographical centrality) than Zionist historiography itself insofar as at some level it boils down to the weird argument that really historically existing Zionism is not “really” Zionism because it doesn't look like Zionism today. (Though one might note that actually Shanes's account of a Zionism that was a fairly normal mode of ethnonationalism sounds a lot like increasingly dominant variants of Zionism today: open to and shot through with frank religious sensibility, unapologetically committed to the ostensible interests of the ethnoreligious community.)
One might also take partial issue with a second aspect of Shanes's stated agenda, namely, to show that Zionism was by and large a “normal nationalism”—“part of the rising nationalist movements in Eastern Europe and not simply a reaction to them” (1). The strong version of this claim is that Zionism was not a reaction to others' nationalisms and to anti-Semitism, but a simultaneous product of the same forces (an argument also made powerfully in Scott Ury's recent Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012]). There is certainly some truth in this claim. Shanes powerfully undercuts the notion that east European Judaism as such was intrinsically antinationalist, and by the same token his careful excavation of the largely forgotten Galician Yiddish-language popular press points to the ways the Jewish press functioned much the same way as other ethnolinguistically identified presses to give nationalism a common-sense heft in the social imagination of readers.
However, two partial critiques might be offered. First, much in Shanes's own chapter 5 suggests that Galician Jewish political mobilization was profoundly shaped as a response to an already existing and quite dominant Polish nationalism (as was Ruthenian or Galician-Ukrainian nationalism). Second, other aspects of his argument suggest the many ways in which Zionism and indeed Jewish nationalism were atypical nationalisms: the felt belatedness of Jewish nationalism (127), the interpenetration of Jewish nationalist rhetorics with a distinctive ethnoreligious identity facing modern challenges (121ff), and above all the unique territorial dimension of Zionism that Shanes shows to have been deepened by traditional Judaism's primary connection to the Land and its colonization. Some of Shanes's sources suggest that traditional Jews were attracted to Zionism primarily because of its adoption of this traditional ideal and not because of the normal diasporic ethnicism or “solidarism” that Shanes wants to foreground (cf. Yosef Salmon, ’Im ta‘iru ve-’im te‘oreru: ’Ortodoksiyah bi-meẓare ha-le’umiyut [Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2006], esp. ch. 8–9 and 13–15).
But these concerns attest to the provocative and rich character of the book rather than to any flaws. Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia not only restores a critical but neglected history to the center of the east European Jewish story but compels us to think anew about the central ideology of the Jewish twentieth century, Jewish nationalism.
