Jewish Politics in Austrian Bukovina: Czernowitz Yiddish Conference of 1908
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JEWISH POLITICS IN AUSTRIAN BUKOVINA: CZERNOWITZ YIDDISH CONFERENCE OF 1908 By Karina Shyrokykh Submitted to Central European University Department of Nationalism Studies In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Professor Michael L. Miller CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2010 Abstract Austrian Bukovina was known as a tolerant, multiethnic crownland where at the beginning of the twentieth century Jews constituted one-third of the total population. In addition, this crownland represented political cooperation of different nations’ political movements, where one of the most successful cooperation took part between Ruthenians (i.e. Ukrainians) and Jews in the context of the discussion of electoral reforms of the local diet (1903-1910). The study focuses on Czernowitz Yiddish Conference of 1908, which nowadays is considered to be the watershed moment in the development of Yiddish language and culture, and the analysis of the discussion of the event in the local Ukrainian and Jewish periodicals of 1908. The analysis of the local press has demonstrated that, despite political importance of Yiddish promotion in Bukovina, the local Jewish periodicals did not actively discuss the Czernowitz Yiddish Conference of 1908; despite Jewish-Ukrainian political cooperation, there was no discussion of the Conference in the local Ukrainian press. This could be explained by the fact that the local Jewish elite did not take part in the organization of the conference, and did not appreciate it a lot. However, the research focuses only on the local press published in 1908 which could be non-representative for the general evaluation of the Conference in Austrian press. CEU eTD Collection ii Acknowledgements I want to express my earnest gratitude to my supervisor, Michael Laurence Miller for his assistance; CEU Academic Writing Center and Robin Bellers in particular for useful comments; Zvi Gitelman for valuable suggestions; Mykola Kushnir and David Rechter who made my archive research easier. Also I want to thank to Carsten Wilke, whose critique and advice aided my thesis considerably; the Jewish Studies Project at Central European University for the travel grant that made my archive research possible. A special thank to my family and friends for their love and support. CEU eTD Collection iii Table of contents List of Tables ........................................................................................................................v List of Figures..................................................................................................................... vi Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1. Political Context of Jewish National Movements in the Late Habsburg Monarchy............................................................................................................................11 1.1. Politics of Nationality Recognition in Habsburg Monarchy........................................11 1.2. The Jewish Population of Bukovina in the Turn of the Twentieth Century ..................15 1.3. Jewish Nationality Politics of Austria in Bukovina and the Bukovina Compromise of 1910 .................................................................................................................................20 Chapter 2. Jewish National Political Movements in Bukovina during the Late Habsburg Monarchy............................................................................................................................27 2.1. The Context of the Emergence of Jewish National Politics in Bukovina......................30 2.2. Diversity of Political Parties and Their Political Orientations in Bikovina.................36 2.2.1. Zionism...............................................................................................................38 2.2.2. Jewish Socialism and Diaspora Nationalism........................................................42 2.3. Differences and Commonalities between Jewish National Political Movements in Bukovina ..........................................................................................................................43 Chapter 3. The First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz (1908) .....................46 3.1. Czernowitz Conference: Politics at the Language Conference....................................51 3.2. Ideology of Yiddish as a/the National Jewish Language .............................................53 3.3. Review of Evaluation of the Results of the Conference in the Press ............................57 Conclusions.........................................................................................................................63 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................65 Periodicals .......................................................................................................................65 Books and Articles............................................................................................................66 CEU eTD Collection iv List of Tables Table 1. Population of Bukovina in 1869-1875 (in absolute numbers)……..………...……...16 Table 2. Percentage of Jews in the largest cities in Austria…………………..…...……..…...19 Table 3. Criteria for Austrian Compromises 1867-1910……………………………………..23 Table 4. Urbanization of Central European Jews…………………………...………………..33 CEU eTD Collection v List of Figures Fig.1. Photo of the Conference Participants with Members of Jüdische Kultur……………....3 Fig.2. Advertisement of Trips to America and Canada in Yiddish Newspaper Yidishes Vokhenblat (May, 1905)……………………………………………………………………...35 Fig.3. Mandate of a Participant of the Conference…………...…………………………....…48 Fig.4. Card of a Conference Visitor………………………… …………………… …..…..…48 Fig.5. Photo of L-R: H.D. Nomberg, Haim Zhitlovsky, Shalom Ash, I.L. Peretz, A. Reisen at Czernowitz Conference (1908)…...……………………………………………………….….50 Fig.6. Jewish National House in Czernowitz (1910)………………………………….…...…52 Fig.7. Czernowitz Music Society (Postcard, 1908)………………………………………..…53 CEU eTD Collection vi Introduction During the nineteenth century, together with the rise of industrialization, secularization, imperialism, and dissemination of print, the rise in use of vernacular languages took place in Eastern Europe. All of these factors led to the rise of national identification which superseded local, religious and other kinds of identities.1 Additionally, starting from 1880s political anti- Semitism became a significant political feature of Austria and Russian. All over Europe, the growing anti-Semitism and flourishing national movements of the surrounding nations influenced the formation of Jewish Diaspora nationalism. Thus, under all these conditions Jewish national movements appears, where the main trends were Zionism and Socialism, mainly represented by The Bund. Both movements rejected assimilation and struggled for modernization and secularization of European Jewry, aiming at the creation of modern Jewish culture. Similar to other national movements, Jewish national revival was based on the idea of national language, history, and group unity.2 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Veso, 1991), p.82. 2 Mostly each person has a feeling of belonging to family, friends, relatives, etc. The feeling could be transmitted to a bigger ‘imagined’ number of people, namely nation (See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.140, 160-162; see also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), p.6.). The unity has some attributes which are shared—culture, language, history, possibly religion etc. The definition of a nation I refer to is also mentioned by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson; according to them, a nation is an ‘imagined community’. The main argument why nation is imagined is that a person can not know face-to-face everyone from the nation; the person can not make the transfer of deviation feeling from the family to the entire nation without imagining it. A nation is a ‘community’ of people, a unit of people within which individuals imagine themselves as a big family. Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities defines the term nation as: “…a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a CEU eTD Collection common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.” (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 14) Anderson’s definition of a nation has a ‘territory obsession’ that does not always take place in national movements. For example, in the case of Diaspora Jewish Nationalism in Austro-Hungary, Nationalism was non- state seeking; the movement was deprived of ‘territory obsession.’ Jewish Diaspora National Movement in Bukovina in beginning of twentieth century was not strongly attached to one particular land with could be their native land. Ethnic group differs from nation because it lacks the political self-consciousness of a united group and certain view on group-interests. If ethnic group becomes politically self-conscious with its own politic agenda (autonomy, independence, struggle for own interests and