Abstract
The idea of Galicia was a transnational political concept which represented a multinational coexistence in a situation of irrevocable national divisions and growing nationalist tendencies in the Austrian province called the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The Jewish variant of this idea was connected with the emergence of a specific Jewish-Galician identity which enabled the Galician Jews to identify with the province, in all its national and religious diversity, and with the Habsburg empire as a whole. The destruction of the Jewish idea of Galicia was connected with the outpouring of anti-Semitism expressed in the form of violence and pogroms after 1914. That tragic phenomenon was described, among others, by Ansky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport), Abraham Insler, Icchak Grünbaum, and Emil Tenenbaum. The most catastrophic event for the Galician Jews was the pogrom in Lviv in November 1918, which followed the outbreak of the Polish-Ukrainian War, and which was long falsified by Poles, the winners in the said war. The pogrom began an immense growth of anti-Semitism in the Second Polish Republic which signalled the end of the Jewish idea of Galicia.
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Notes
- 1.
Together with the protection of national rights, enacted in the article 19th of the constitution form 1867, appeared a question whether the Jews constituted a separate nation. In the census run in the Habsburg monarchy once a decade, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, nationality was defined in terms of the language. Although within the confessions in the census, there was a “mosaisch” one, Yiddish was not included in the list of tongues a respondent could indicated, as it was not consider a separate language. That was the reason why Jews in the Habsburg monarchy were considered a religion minority but could not be officially acknowledged as a nation. In the census they often chose Polish language, what fostered a fictional vision of Polish majority in the whole Galicia.
- 2.
The English translation of Der Judiszer hurbn fun Pojlen, Galicje un Bukowina by Ansky is not a full text of the original. The translator omitted many fragments or even full chapters without marking it. If the quotation is absent in the English version I use Polish version of the book—Tragedia Żydów galicyjskich w czasie I wojny światowej—which is the closest to the Yiddish original.
- 3.
Such a town does not exist. It is probably Iwonicz.
- 4.
Most likely, the authors made a typographical error, meaning Mszana Dolna.
- 5.
In the interwar period Polish authors’ insistence on calling the Ukrainians “Ruthenians” was a political manifestation and often meant the denial of the Ukrainian national identity, especially that representatives of this group used the term “Ukrainians” to emphasize their growing national aspirations.
- 6.
There were also some pogroms perpetrated by Ukrainians in the part of Easter Galicia controlled by the West Ukrainian People’s Republic until the mid-July 1919. According to Prusin, however, that they were less acute than pogroms organized by Poles; what is more, the Ukrainian authorities, unlike the Polish authorities, officially condemned such riots (Prusin, 2005, pp. 92–113).
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Wierzejska, J. (2018). The Pogrom of Jews During and After World War I: The Destruction of the Jewish Idea of Galicia. In: Barker, A., Pereira, M., Cortez, M., Pereira, P., Martins, O. (eds) Personal Narratives, Peripheral Theatres: Essays on the Great War (1914–18). Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66851-2_11
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