Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia
"Shanes reintegrates the story of Galicia's Jews (roughly 11 percent of the total population) into the history of the province and of the Habsburg Empire more broadly. This is not the kind of gap in the literature that it seems to be a luxury to have the time to fill. This is a glaring, unforgivable gap, and this book fills it. The field has been in desperate need of this study." - Alison Frank, Harvard University"While we know what Zionism is today, we know little about what Zionism was the moment it emerged. Using Galicia as a case study, this book turns our vision of Zionism upside down. Zionism in this book is a Jewish national-democratic movement that seeks to secure equal political and cultural rights for the Jewish people. It tends to prove the normalcy of the Jews in a larger European context, rather than their exceptional status. Ultimately, this book shows how Jewish nationalists in Galicia rallied other Jews around their mottoes, transforming an ethnic group into a modern nation with a high level of political self-awareness." - Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies, Northwestern University"Joshua Shanes has written a compelling and interesting study of how Jewish nationalist activists worked to nationalize and politicize the traditional Jewish masses of Austrian Galicia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing, Shanes convincingly demonstrates how Zionism and diaspora Jewish nationalism resembled other nationalist movements in East Central Europe. At the same time, he makes it abundantly clear that Jewish nationalism was not simply 'constructed,' but rather derived from Jewish ethnicity embedded in Jewish religious tradition and the realities of Jewish life in Galicia. Shanes's careful analysis of the Yiddish-language Jewish nationalist press, of the choreography of Zionist rallies during the tumultuous election of 1907, and of the ways that Jewish nationalists tried to recruit Orthodox traditionalists into their ranks makes an extremely important contribution to our understanding of Jewish and East European nationalism." - Marsha L. Rozenblit, Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Jewish History, University of Maryland, College Park