The painted ceiling of the Chodorow synagogue (17th c., reconstruction  of Bet ha-Tefutzot).The Temple of Lwow. Postcard, early 20th c.Maurycy Gottlieb.  Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, 1878

Lesson 6: "Jewish Life After Emancipation: Economic Development and Anti-Semitism"

 

 

Summary: As we move beyond the Habsburg period of Galician Jewry, we see a community greatly transformed by nearly 150 years of Austrian rule, as well as the unique context Galicia’s ethnic triangle of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians. In many ways Galician Jewry remained similar to Jews in other formerly Polish lands – Yiddish speaking, heavily Hasidic, still dominant in the commercial class – but it is a community also marked by important differences, as will become clear in our analysis of interwar Poland.

Recommended Reading:

Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz, “Yiddish as an Expression of Jewish Cultural Identity in Galicia and Vienna,” in Polin 12: Focusing on Galicia (1999), 164-176
Dan Unowsky, “Local violence, regional politics, and state crisis: the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in Habsburg Galicia,” in Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880-1918, 13-35
John-Paul Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia,” Polin 12 (1999), 25-48