Lesson 5: "Modern Jewish Politics: Jewish Nationalism and its Opponents"
Summary: By 1907, the year of Austria’s first democratic elections (for men) to the imperial parliament in Vienna, Jewish nationalism had emerged as the most influential ideology on the Jewish street. All forms of modern Jewish politics – integrationism, Orthodoxy, socialism, and many forms of Jewish nationalism - thrived at that time, but nearly all of them accepted some measure of Jews constituting a people deserving national rights. “Zionism” remained a small party until after the First World War, but the idea of Jewish nationhood had achieved far broader acceptance among Galician Jews.
Recommended reading:
Ezra Mendelsohn, “From assimilation to Zionism in Lvov: the case of Alfred Nossig,” Slavonic and East European Review 49 (1971), 521-34
Ela Bauer, “The Intellectual and the City: Lwow (Lemberg, Lviv) and Jehoshua (Ozjasz) Thon” in: Michal Galas and Shoshana Ronen (Editor), A Romantic Polish-Jew: Rabbi Ozjasz Thon from Various Perspectives, Jagiellonian University Press, 2015, 11-26
Joshua Shanes, “Fort mit den Hausjuden!”: Jewish nationalists engage mass politics,” in Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, 153-78
Rick Kuhn, “Organizing Yiddish Speaking Workers in Pre-World War One Galicia: The Jewish Social Democratic Party” in Yiddish Language and Culture Then and Now (1996),
