Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy by Tim Buchen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy by Tim Buchen Joshua Shanes Tim Buchen. Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Translated by Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller. New York: Berghahn, 2020. 326 pp. In 1898, anti-Jewish violence exploded in over four hundred communities across western Galicia, an ethnically mixed province on the outer rim of the Habsburg Empire. Throughout the spring, Polish Christians attacked their Jewish neighbors, destroying and looting Jewish-owned homes and businesses. By late June, the emperor had declared a state of emergency in thirty-three counties and martial law in two others, and over 5,000 perpetrators were charged in court. [End Page 213] Tim Buchen's fascinating book is one of a few recent publications that finally address this understudied episode. Buchen uses this moment to rethink the nature of antisemitism itself, offering a new methodological approach that sees it as a "social process" rather than as an object or ideology. Following Rogers Brubaker's postmodern reframing of nations as "a situational experience that must be constantly reproduced, each time differently," Buchen presents antisemitism similarly, as a "process" enacted by non-Jews in an evolving dynamic of speech and action. This perspective follows David Engel's pathbreaking essay, "Away from a Definition of Antisemitism," which argued similarly that the term has been too reified by historians, though Buchen surprisingly does not engage with Engel here. Buchen identifies three foci of power in Habsburg Galician discourse—print media, physical violence, and the imperial diet—each of which, in turn, constitutes one of the three main chapters of the book: agitation, violence, and politics. The chapters are roughly chronological—negative ideas about Jews are introduced and encouraged, leading to violent conflicts on the ground that then play out on the imperial stage—but Buchen emphasizes that they overlap as processes resulting from the "interplay between political meaning-making and social practice" (27). Chapter 1 focuses on the first leg of power, agitation, "speech or writing that addresses a public with the intention of inciting it to act" (44). Buchen moves quickly from 1868—when the Galician diet overwhelmingly voted to confirm Jewish emancipation at the provincial level—to the rise of new peasant and Catholic political parties in the 1890s. The breakdown of the feudal order and loosening of traditional economic roles of Jews and Christians might have led to a notion of Polishness that included Jews, but instead—as Brian Porter has documented—it went the other way. New economic rivalries and the centering of the Polish peasant in nationalist agitation led to antisemitism forming the basis of the entire spectrum of Polish politics, most obviously with the rise of three competing Polish peasant parties, all of which defined themselves as anti-Jewish. Whereas Polish nationalists in the 1860s expected Jews to assimilate into the Polish nation, as many Jewish elites intended to do, a generation later they feared and rejected such assimilation, deliberately seeking out tension with Jews in the only venues they could then access: popular newspapers and rural meetings. Buchen then moves to discuss the violence itself, which he argues was a kind of "theater," almost literally a drama following a script with roles assigned to perpetrators and victims that allowed them to make sense of their new world. In one case, the end of an incident of looting was literally announced with a blast of a trumpet (139)! In other words, he argues, the violent outbreaks were not primarily a result of economic tensions between Christians and Jews due to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but rather were spectacles that served to define Christian communities. The pogroms, he insists, did not reflect a breakdown in Jewish-Christian relations and did not intend to inflict permanent destruction, but rather were a performance designed to define Christian communities in this new environment. "By jointly committing crimes against the others," he writes, "the Christian peasants experienced themselves as a community. They became a village unit" (150). He particularly emphasizes the role of rumors in this regard, [End Page 214] especially the rumor of warrant by the state...