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The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia

Online ISBN:
9781503606104
Print ISBN:
9780804799829
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia

Daniel Unowsky
Daniel Unowsky
University of Memphis
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Published online:
24 January 2019
Published in print:
17 July 2018
Online ISBN:
9781503606104
Print ISBN:
9780804799829
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book examines the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in western and central Galicia, the Habsburg province acquired in the eighteenth century partitions of Poland and now divided between Poland and Ukraine. This volume explores how Jewish-Catholic relations functioned; how antisemitic tropes and writings gained traction at local levels even in regions with high rates of illiteracy; how the Habsburg state provided or attempted to provide stability and law and order to its far-flung provinces in the decades before World War I. At the center of interest are the choices made and actions taken on the ground by peasants, townspeople, Jews, local officials, as well as the interpretations imposed on these actions by interested parties farther removed from the scene. This book considers the new forms of political organization and virulent Catholic antisemitism that facilitated the transformation of confrontations between Catholics and Jews into a series of attacks moving from town square to village tavern while drawing ever greater numbers of people as participants in or objects of communal violence. The 1898 anti-Jewish riots and their aftermath—mass arrests, trials, political mobilization, and government and military intervention—did not simply arise from Galician backwardness. This examination of the experience of anti-Jewish violence in this rural corner of the Habsburg Monarchy is a local study of European-wide political, economic, social, and cultural transformation.

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