Article:2.5.4

Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Late Habsburg Galicia

     Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Late Habsburg Galicia

Daniel Unowsky

       Topics
       Jews and Their Surrounding - Acculturation and AssimilationEconomics

       Period
       1772-1914

       Region
       Galicia

       NLI Code
       997013604471305171

Extensions

• The Ritter Ritual-Murder Accusation

Related Entries

• Article:1.5.2
• Article:1.4.3
• Article:2.4.7

Map

• Major sites of anti-Jewish Violence in Galicia, 1898

Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Late Habsburg Galicia

Daniel Unowsky

[The Jews’] national customs, age-old traditions and religious regulations teach them to conduct trade in such a way that it destroys the “goyim.” Even the most honest Talmud Jew will not trade in any other way because he does not know how to do otherwise […]

Country inns and Jewish taverns are one of our worst social diseases, an eternal wound that poisons and spreads in the body of our nation, materially destroying and morally degrading the most numerous classes of the population.

(Teofil Merunowicz, Żydzi (Lwów: 1879), 176, 178)

 

Political antisemitism emerged in Galicia shortly after it surfaced in Central and Western Europe. Teofil Merunowicz, a Greek Catholic Polish nationalist, journalist, and democratic politician from Lviv, was among the first in the province to formulate a modern political program centered on anti-Jewish charges. In his 1879 publication, Żydzi [The Jews], as well as in subsequent speeches, articles, and pamphlets, Merunowicz leveled attacks on the organized Jewish community (kahal) as a source of hidden conspiracies. Merunowicz responded to the infamous Ritter case (1882–1886), in which a Jewish couple was accused of murdering a pregnant peasant woman, by claiming that Jewish religious texts sanctioned inhuman crimes. He petitioned the government to fund a translation of the Talmud to bring its imagined dangerous secrets to light. From the floor of the Galician Diet (Sejm), he called for the reversal of the Jewish emancipation. Above all, Merunowicz believed Jews had to be ousted from the Galician economy to open a pathway toward successful modernization for Christians.

Merunowicz was far from alone in holding such views in the 1870s and 1880s; Widespread anti-Jewish politics, however, arrived in the province only in the mid-1890s. This transformation of politics in Galicia traces chiefly to three overlapping sources. First, the economic stagnation and social dislocation that followed the 1848 elimination of the robot (free labor services owed by peasants to noble landowners) worsened in the following decades. Overpopulation, extreme parcellation, poor harvests, famine, and outbreaks of disease led to rural bankruptcies and impoverishment—famously dubbed “the Galician misery” by Stanisław Szczepanowski, a politician, engineer, and leading figure in the Galician oil industry. Second, in the early 1890s, journalists and religious leaders demanded a specifically Catholic answer to economic and social crises. Third, new populist political movements utilized virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric in their quest for votes. These developments contributed to the outbreak and spread of the 1898 anti-Jewish riots, the largest wave of violence that Jews in the Habsburg Monarchy experienced in the constitutional era (1867–1918).

Jews and Christians in Late Habsburg Galicia

The Habsburg census of 1900 identified 3,350,512 of Galicia’s 7,315,939 inhabitants as Roman Catholics, 3,104,103 as Greek Catholics, and 811,371 as Jews. Most people living in western and central Galicia listed themselves as Roman Catholic Polish speakers. Jews accounted for significant percentages of town-dwellers (20–70 %) in the towns most affected by violence in 1898. In larger towns and cities in the east, Polish and Yiddish speakers predominated. These eastern cities were surrounded by villages populated overwhelmingly by Ukrainian-speaking Greek Catholics (referred to by the state and often by themselves as Ruthenians) and by market towns, many of which had Jewish majorities. 2.5.4-Violence-1

Jews comprised fewer than two percent of those who labored in agriculture but a majority of those working in commerce and trade. Jews owned 75% or more of the dry-goods, clothing, furniture, and other shops that lined town squares. Jews were also conspicuous among merchants who set up temporary stalls on market days. Polish nobles (szlachta) still enjoyed a monopoly on the sale and production of alcohol (propinacja) and regularly leased these rights to Jews. More than 80% of those who produced or sold alcohol were Jews. Over 19,000 tap rooms, saloons, and taverns dotted the Galician landscape in 1902; more than 17,000 of them were located in villages and small towns. Many Jews lived in isolated groups of houses on the edges of villages, often inhabiting cramped rooms above or adjoining modest taprooms and tobacco shops. 2.5.4-Violence-2

Cultural contrasts between Christians and Jews underscored this economic divide. Increasing numbers of Polish-speaking Jews inhabited larger cities like Kraków and the provincial capital Lviv. In the countryside, however, language (Yiddish), dress, and religious practice made differences between Jews and Christians clearly visible. Such differences did not invariably translate into hostility. Some Jews later referred to the decades around 1900 as a time of close relationships and regular interaction with Christians, albeit punctuated by moments of increased tension. Economic networks in which Jews played prominent roles linked the towns and villages of western and central Galicia where most of the 1898 riots took place. Peasants traveled by cart on rural roads or by rail to regional fairs and markets. Jewish-owned shops were sources of manufactured goods and credit. Jewish merchants purchased crops and livestock from peasants. Taverns administered by Jews were important meeting places. In his memoirs, one village mayor noted that “Weddings were usually celebrated in the taverns. […] In the whole district there was no other place in which to entertain.” 2.5.4-Violence-3

Economic crisis heightened strains between Christians and Jews. Peasants unable to succeed in the cash economy sought employment as rural laborers or as seasonal workers on railway and river projects or abandoned the countryside altogether. The disastrous harvest of 1897 resulted in more dislocation. Jews were prominent among those who purchased land from bankrupt peasants and nobles. In the same period, Jews themselves experienced increasing impoverishment as commerce and banking moved to larger towns and competition with Christian stores intensified. Over 235,000 Jews departed Galicia for the United States between 1881 and 1910.

Catholicism, Antisemitism, and Populist Politics

Catholic social and political institutions that aimed to attenuate or eliminate the perceived negative influence of Jews appeared in the 1890s. On May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the Rerum Novarum encyclical, which addressed economic development and labor from a Catholic and anti-Marxist perspective. The papal pronouncement inspired the organization of a Catholic Congress in Kraków in 1893. There, Count Stanisław Tarnowski, one of the leading voices of Polish conservatism in the province, declared racist antisemitism to be un-Christian. Concurrently, however, he proclaimed it a “sin” to lease or sell land to non-Christians and urged Polish Catholics to support Christian businesses. Activists set up Catholic workers’ associations and political organizations such as Kraków’s new Christian Social movement that cultivated ties with the antisemitic Mayor Karl Lueger of Vienna.

Divided by bitter personal conflicts and rivalries, these organizations were united in opposition to the Jews. They demanded the separation of Jewish and Christian children in schools. They supported temperance movements with sharp anti-Jewish rhetoric. Polish Catholic publications such as the popular Kraków daily Głos Narodu (Voice of the people) and Prawda (Truth), aimed at the Roman Catholic peasantry and produced under the protection of the church hierarchy in Kraków, pressed their readers to “Buy only from Christians!” In effect, they sought to reverse Jewish emancipation, not as part of a wholesale rejection of modernity but as central to an emotional plea for a fundamentally Catholic (not Jewish) modernization. 2.5.4-Violence-4

One of the most venomous examples of this Catholic antisemitism was the pamphlet Jewish Secrets, authored by Mateusz Jeż, priest and catechist at St. Anne’s Church in Kraków. Jeż asserted Jewish collective responsibility for the death of Christ and detailed the Jews’ “repulsive” physical attributes. He cited Iacov Brafman, author of Kniga kagala [The Book of the Kahal]; the Austrian priest Josef Deckert, author of Der Ewige Jude "Ahasver" [The Eternal Jew "Ahasver"]; and August Rohling, a Prague professor of theology in German and Czech universities and author of Der Talmudjude [The Talmud Jew], to prove the “truth” of the blood libel and the evils of the Talmud. For Jeż, the Dreyfus Affair in France exposed Jewish power and perfidy. Nearer to home, Jeż charged Jews with corrupting the peasantry through alcohol, taverns, usury, and hidden control over politics. Jeż distanced Catholicism from racial antisemitism and instead promoted “asemitism,” which he defined as a complete separation and liberation from Jews. For Jeż, it was “Either us or the Jews!”

The arrival of mass politics in the Galician countryside forged new possibilities for the dissemination of political programs highlighting Jewish–Christian division. In the late 1880s, peasant political movements sought to wrest a handful of seats in the Galician Diet from Polish conservatives who maintained their dominant position in part through corruption and the famous distribution of beer and sausages at election time. The election law of 1896 established a fifth curia based on universal (male) suffrage in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, though the franchise remained heavily weighted until 1906.

The changes in the electoral landscape sparked a dramatic upswing in political agitation. Three new Polish peasant parties, all of which supported anti-Jewish boycotts, vied with the Social Democrats for the votes of the newly enfranchised. The Peasant Party Union was founded in 1893. The party leadership cultivated a close relationship with the Roman Catholic hierarchy and primarily represented the well-off peasantry of the Nowy Sącz region. The party organ, Związek Chłopski [Peasant Union], warned of Rothschild conspiracies to control the world and other Jewish dangers. The People’s Party, formed in 1895, was far more secular, Polish nationalist, and socially radical. It condemned the nobility and the state for failing to improve the lives of rural people. The charismatic priest Stanisław Stojałowski founded the Christian People’s Party in 1896. Stojałowski had promoted rural interests for decades. He was one of the leading figures in the movement to create Agricultural Circles, rural cooperatives intended to improve economic opportunity and undermine Jewish influence. Stojałowski edited rural publications including Wieniec Polski [Polish Wreath] and Pszczółka [Bee]. Long a critic of the Polish nobility and the Catholic hierarchy, he worked closely with the Social Democrats before reconciling with the Catholic Church and denouncing all his enemies and rivals as tools of the Jews. Stojałowski’s was the most successful of the three peasant parties in the 1897 parliamentary election, the first held with the new fifth curia.

Competition among the peasant parties crested in two by-elections that took place in the first half of 1898 to replace recently deceased parliamentary representatives. The first was held in February for a rural commune (fourth curia) seat from the Łancut-Nisko electoral district. The peasant parties and the Social Democrats held numerous rallies, a few of which witnessed violent attacks on Social Democrats by adherents of Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party. Stojałowski himself emerged as the winner. The second election took place on June 23 for a universal manhood suffrage seat (fifth curia) representing western and central districts. Stojałowski’s party accused Jan Stapiński, the secular People’s Party candidate, of being a servant of the Jewish “leeches” who “suck[ed] the blood” of Christians. Stapiński emerged victorious. Months of campaigning spread intensely anti-Jewish messages. For all of their mutual animosities, the competing movements agreed that a reduction in the influence of Jews in the countryside was necessary to overcome economic misery.

The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots

From early March through the end of June 1898, western and central Galicia experienced waves of anti-Jewish attacks. The violence often began in towns that filled with peasants from surrounding villages who had come to buy and sell on market day, attend holiday church services or Sunday mass, or participate in newly invented Polish “national” celebrations. Rioters trashed Jewish booths in central squares, ransacked stores and taverns, and chased and assaulted Jewish passersby. Participants then made their way back to their home villages, storming isolated Jewish homes and businesses in their path. Numerous incidents started in villages after news about events elsewhere arrived. Peasants drinking in rural taprooms refused to pay, broke glasses, and thrashed Jewish publicans in front of their children. Attackers stole alcohol, furnishings, bed linen, and food. Peasants loaded their loot onto carts to transport back to their homes.

The first incidents of this kind took place in March in the salt-mining town of Wieliczka. There and in the surrounding West Galician countryside, the heated rivalry between the Social Democrats and the peasant parties inflamed anti-Jewish sentiments. From late May through the first week of June, anti-Jewish violence struck communities south and west of Kraków, first erupting in the Catholic pilgrimage town of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska KalwariaZebrzydowska during commemorations in honor of the centenary of the birth of the late Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Corpus Christi celebrations on June 9 marked the beginning of a series of incidents in the second and third weeks of June. Dozens of taprooms, inns, and other Jewish-owned businesses were looted near Jasło. From June 23 to June 30, thousands of people participated in urban riots and village raids in and around Limanowa, Stary Sącz and Nowy Sącz, and Brzeszko. On June 28, with events spinning out of control, Emperor Franz Joseph, then at his summer residence in Bad Ischl, signed an order to institute a state of emergency in the thirty-three westernmost counties of the province and martial law in the political districts of Limanowa and Nowy Sącz. NowySanczRynek

In 1898, anti-Jewish violence took place more than in 400 locations. Just over twenty of these occurred in Eastern Galicia, the most serious of which took place on July 17 in Burshtyn, and the rest broke out in western and central districts. Many Jews suffered injuries. Gendarmes and soldiers killed at least eighteen rioters and bystanders and wounded many others. In the most serious confrontation, twelve people were shot down in Frysztak, a small Jewish-majority town near Jasło. Six months of trials followed. Almost 5,200 people faced preliminary charges; more were arrested and released. Hundreds of cases played out in courtrooms. Some focused on a handful of defendants. In others, prosecutors indicted hundreds of people for various offences. Judges sentenced more than 2,300 people to prison terms ranging from time served to more than three years. BurshtynMarket

Who were the perpetrators? Journalists and politicians depicted them as young, illiterate, inebriated, ignorant victims of Jewish alcohol, economic mismanagement, and educational failure. In fact, the most active were often older and well-established members of their communities. They had connections with populist political movements, subscribed to the new rural press (and were therefore not illiterate), or held positions of trust as rural police, village councilors, and small-town mayors. They read aloud passages from newspapers associated with Stojałowski’s party and from Jewish Secrets and urged their fellow peasants to action. Some simply took revenge on specific Jews who had purchased their small plots or to whom they owed money. Violent rioters also included criminals with long records of theft, physical assault, and public drunkenness. Others came only to watch and then decided to enter Jewish homes and businesses behind those who broke through doors and windows.

Participants were united by rumors that seemingly justified and authorized violence. Followers of Stojałowski in Wieliczka cited stories about Jews’ ostensible planning to beat Andrzej Szponder, a local priest and a representative of Stojałowski’s party, because he had disseminated Jewish Secrets. Others claimed the Pope had granted indulgence for beating Jews because they had poisoned wells or sold rotten baked goods. The most widespread rumors referenced alleged imperial permission to assault and rob Jews. According to one of the most fantastic stories that circulated widely around Jasło, Emperor Franz Joseph’s barber had been paid off by Jews to slice the imperial throat when tending to his majesty’s famous mutton chops. The frightened hair stylist broke down and confessed. In response, Franz Joseph entreated his loyal subjects to attack Jews. Other rumors asserted that specific populist politicians conveyed imperial permission directly from Vienna to Galicia’s rural settlements.  

Why were such outlandish claims believed? Official permission seemed plausible at this specific moment. In the 1880s and 1890s, the rural press and populist politicians disseminated “news” about ritual-murder accusations, the Dreyfus Affair, and the purported power of the Rothschilds. At local political meetings, politicians from populist parties competed to blame all problems on the Jews. Catholic priests repeated the same in sermons every Sunday. The light police and gendarme presence in rural counties deprived the state institutions of the means to counter the violence in the first weeks, seemingly signaling their approval of anti-Jewish actions.

Many refused to participate, of course. Some peasants insisted that stories about official permission could not be true and tried to persuade others to cease. Scores joined citizens’ guards to maintain order and drive mobs out of small towns. In a few incidents, armed village leaders protected Jewish homes and property at great risk to themselves. During the trials, witnesses publicly reported the misdeeds of people they knew well.

How did Jews respond? Jewish leaders and organizations such as the Austrian-Israelite Union lobbied the government in Vienna to ban Jewish Secrets and employ force to protect Jews. They begged Jews throughout the monarchy and abroad to donate funds to compensate those whose property had been destroyed or plundered. Individual Jews reacted in sundry ways. Learning in advance of planned attacks, some merchants locked their shop doors and traveled to relatives and friends in larger towns.

Jewish innkeepers satisfied the demands of rowdy customers for vodka and then fled through doorways or windows to seek police assistance or hide in fields or attics. Others stood their ground, calling out those whom they knew among the marauders. In a much-publicized incident, Mendel Kraus of Wieliczka was arrested and placed on trial for rescuing his father from a stone-throwing mob by brandishing his butcher’s knife. Jewish butchers and craftsmen in eastern Galicia offered equally muscular defense.2.5.4-Antisemitism-9

Local officials were slow to react at first. The district captain of Wadowice, for example, dismissed concerns about pending violence as nothing more than the tendency of Jews to “invent fairy tales.” As the riots escalated and spread, however, local, regional, and state-level authorities mobilized gendarmes and soldiers to patrol market squares, public buildings, and train stations. District captains pressed village leaders, city mayors, and priests to convince the population that there was no permission to beat Jews and that any such action would result in severe penalties. The authorities arrested thousands. Many were held in local jails for months awaiting trial. Defense attorneys pleaded extenuating circumstances: their clients were drunk on vodka that Jews had pushed on them; they were ignorant and so were easily misled by rumors of Jewish culpability and imperial permission; they had been caught up in a mob and had no ability to think or act for themselves. Even as prosecutors vigorously pursued charges against rioters, they conceded that Jews played negative roles in commerce, moneylending, and alcohol consumption and that Jews such as Mendel Kraus had provoked otherwise innocent Christians to violence.

Few attacks took place in the eastern districts of the province. Most persons arrested in Przemyśl, Tovste, and Burshtyn were Polish-speaking Roman Catholics working in the east on construction, railroad, or river-regulation projects. These incidents were not followed by raids in surrounding villages. Few members of the Ukrainian-speaking Greek Catholic majority participated. Social and economic segregation of Jews and Christians, however, was greater in eastern Galicia. The predominance of Jews as shopkeepers, leaseholders, and publicans was more visible there.

Why then was there such a disparity in levels of violence in western and central Galicia versus the eastern districts and why did few Ruthenians participate? There are several possible explanations. In the 1890s, stores, credit institutions, and agricultural cooperatives run by Polish-speakers became more common in central and western Galicia, making economic competition between Poles and Jews more intense. Fewer Greek Catholics entered into such direct economic rivalry with Jews. Ruthenian politicians, journalists, and activists—Ukrainian nationalists as well as more Russian-oriented Russophiles—did beseech the population to boycott Jews and push them out of the rural economy. However, while Ruthenian politicians viewed Jews negatively, they also saw Jews as potential allies in their struggle against the Poles. The focus of rural Polish political agitation in the 1890s was directed against the Jews; in the east, Ruthenian politics centered on the Polish not the Jewish enemy.

Aftermath

Thank God our party has been active for over twenty years and through all this time has fought against the Jews and has always been antisemitic but has never beaten Jews.

Stanisław Stojałowski, Stenographische Protokolle. Haus der Abgeordneten. XV. Session, 22. Sitzung, November 24, 1898, p. 1481

The long-term effects of the 1898 riots are not easy to evaluate. To the immense frustration of populist politicians, peasants continued to hold weddings in Jewish-owned inns, drink heavily in village taprooms, and seek credit from Jewish merchants. At the same time, the Galician administration subjected Jews’ applications for new taverns to increased scrutiny. Complaints about the character of those applying to renew licenses to sell alcohol led to rejections. The Governor of Galicia, Leon Piniński, boosted subsidies in support of Agricultural Circles and pushed to phase out the propinacja. There was no measurable upswing in Jewish emigration, although thousands of Jews did leave villages for the relative safety of larger towns in the years that followed.

The political movement that defined itself as antisemitic, Stanisław Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party, lost the June 23 election to Jan Stapiński, the candidate from the less crudely anti-Jewish People’s Party. By then, however, anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies had moved to the center of populist political programs. In the November 1898 sessions of the Vienna parliament devoted to debating the riots, the trials, and the state of emergency, representatives of all three peasant parties distanced themselves from the violence but empathized with the perpetrators. They asserted that the Jews themselves were ultimately responsible for the attacks. Farm workers, day laborers, and others had, after all, lashed out in a misguided but understandable act of desperation. The politicians as well as the Catholic press argued that only by overcoming the barriers to progress—the Jews’ shops, taverns, usurious credit, alcohol—could a modernization that worked for “us” and not for the hated Jewish other be realized. The socialists effectively agreed with this. In his speech, Ignacy Daszyński, the leader of the Galician Social Democrats, excoriated Jewish innkeepers and money lenders for working in alliance with nobles to the detriment of the poor rural population even as he emphasized the larger economic developments that caused the Galician misery.

Aside from Emil Byk, a prominent leader of the Jewish community in Lviv and a long-time parliamentary representative, Austrian Minister President Count Franz von Thun put forth the strongest opposition to this narrative. Thun defended the efforts of the central administration and the Galician authorities to end the attacks:

[This movement] was directed against a religious community, against the Jews, and the Jews are completely equal citizens of this state (Bravo!), and whether one is a Jew or a Christian, whether he belongs to this or that nationality, it is the duty and task of the state to protect that person to the fullest measure and to ensure the maintenance of law and order (lively agreement from the right; heckling from the left). [Italics in the original]

Some Jews took comfort from the restoration of law and order. Others, however, found the situation unsettling. The Habsburg state—embodied by the Emperor, the military, and the Justice Ministry—had succeeded in quelling the violence only by instituting a state of emergency that temporarily set aside constitutional limitations on executive power. The lack of local allies and dependency on Vienna underscored the dangerous political and social isolation that the Jewish population in Habsburg Galicia faced in the years before the First World War.

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