The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia 9781503606104

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The Plunder

Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe Edited by Norman Naimark and Larry Wolff

The Plunder The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia

Daniel Unowsky

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Some of this material originally appeared in “Local Violence, Regional Politics, and State Crisis: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia,” pp. 13–35, in Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918, edited by Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, published by Brandeis University Press in 2014. Reprinted with permission. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Unowsky, Daniel L., 1966– author. Title: The plunder : the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in Habsburg Galicia / Daniel L. Unowsky. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Series: Stanford studies on Central and Eastern Europe | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017056338 (print) | LCCN 2017058934 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503606104 (e-book) | ISBN 9780804799829 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Riots—Galicia (Poland and Ukraine)—History—19th century. | Antisemitism—Galicia (Poland and Ukraine)—History—19th century. | Political violence—Galicia (Poland and Ukraine)—History—19th century. | Jews—Crimes against—Galicia (Poland and Ukraine)—History—19th century. | Galicia (Poland and Ukraine)—Ethnic relations—Political aspects—History—19th century. | Europe—Politics and government—1871-1918. Classification: LCC DK4600.G3475 (ebook) | LCC DK4600.G3475 U56 2018 (print) | DDC 947.7/9083—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056338 Cover design: Angela Moody Cover image: Detail from “The Unrest in Galicia.” Die Wiener Bilder, 10 July 1898. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library. Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/13.5 Adobe Garamond Pro

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgmentsiv On Place Names and Translations Introduction

xi 1



1 Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

11



2 The Plunder

43



3 Rioters, Jews, and the State

73



4 The Trials

115



5 Politics, Policy, and Christian-Jewish Relations

147

Conclusion Archival Abbreviations

177 187

Notes189 Index227

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Illustrations

Maps 1. Austria-Hungary, 1867–1914 2. Galicia

xiii 10

Figures 1. Handwritten flyer from Szczurowa

xiv

2. Galician Jewish shop

15

3. Tavern in Spytkowice

15

4. Jews in front of a tavern

16

5. Wooden tavern in Orawka

16

6. A and B. Jews from Cracow and the surrounding region; Peasant family from the Cracow region

18

7. Grand Synagogue, Nowy Sącz

20

8. “Buy only from Christians”

23

9. Mateusz Jeż, Jewish Secrets

24

10. St. Anna Church, Cracow

27

11. “Away with hypocrisy”; “Away with the sausage election!” Galician Election Advertisement

29

12. Stanisław Stojałowski

32

13. “Long Live the First of May!” Prawo Ludu

34

viii Illustrations

14. Jan Stapiński

40

15. Frysztak’s main market street around 1900

61

16. Nowy Sącz town hall and square

66

17. “The Unrest in Galicia,” Die Wiener Bilder

67

18. A and B. Town square, Stary Sącz

68

19. The well on the market square of Stary Sącz

69

2o. Telegram to the governor’s office from the Jewish community leadership of Andrychów

100

21. “State of Emergency in Galicia,” Kikeriki

105

22. Military Situation Map of June 27, 1898

106

23. Lutcza indictment

130

24. Compilation of all criminal court procedures related to the antisemitic unrest

142

25. “The Situation in Galicia,” Kikeriki

152

26. “November Storms in Parliament,” Wiener Bilder

155

27. “Model Letter for Removing the Saloon Keeper,” Związek Chłopski

172

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people and institutions for help and advice without which this book could not have been realized. I first came across references to the events at the center of this study while conducting research on my dissertation on Habsburg imperial celebrations written under the guidance of Columbia University’s István Deák, admired mentor and advisor to me and so many in the field of central and eastern European history. I am fortunate to teach at the University of Memphis, which generously supports the humanities and social sciences. The Professional Development Assignment Program, the Travel Enrichment Fund, the Faculty Research Grant Program, and the Department of History at the university provided vital funding for my research. I thank the many scholars of Habsburg, Polish, and Jewish history who read sections of the book, offered advice and assistance, and saved me from numerous errors (of course, I alone am responsible for those that remain): Natalia Aleksiun, Harald Binder, Tim Buchen, Gary Cohen, Laurence Cole, Mark Cornwall, Patrice Dabrowski, John Deak, John Fahey, Anna FrajlichZając, John-Paul Himka, Pieter Judson, Jonathan Judaken, Börries Kuzmany, Hugo Lane, Artur Markowski, Marsha Rozenblit, Tamara Scheer, Christoph Schmetterer, Erwin Schmidl, Ostap Sereda, Joshua Shanes, Nancy Sinkoff, Marcin Soboń, Kai Struve, Veronika Wendland, Nancy Wingfield, Nathaniel Wood, Piotr Wróbel, and Tara Zahra. For answers to endless questions regarding my research and my quest to find historical images related to the 1898 events in Galicia, I am grateful to the Austrian State Archives, the Jagiellonian University Library in ­Cracow,

x Acknowledgments

the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Central Archive of Historical Records in Warsaw the Regional Museum of Nowy Sącz, and the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in L’viv. My thanks also to Hans Petschar of the Bildarchiv of the Austrian National Library, Tomasz Okoniewski, and Agnieszka Gajek. I thank the very professional editors, mapmakers, and production staff at Stanford University Press. I am indebted to Larry Wolff, whose work has been and continues to be a great inspiration to me. I am especially beholden to Keely Stauter-Halsted and Alison Frank Johnson, who offered valuable insights and suggestions for revision as manuscript reviewers for Stanford University Press. Many years ago my mother Noel Rosenbaum overnighted me a new laptop after mine had been stolen in Cracow. For this, and for so much else, I thank her every day. To Keri and our children, Sarah and Micah: thanks for your love and understanding.

On Place Names and Translations

Many cities, towns, and villages in central and eastern Europe had three or even four place names in the languages spoken by inhabitants and contemporaries. I employ common English names for Cracow and Vienna. Following most of the documents and newspapers on which this book is based, I use Polish place names for the smaller towns and villages that experienced anti-Jewish violence in 1898. The capital of Habsburg Galicia poses a special problem: Lemberg in German and Yiddish; Lwów in Polish; L’viv in Ukrainian. The capital of Habsburg Galicia became a provincial city in interwar Poland. Today it is the major urban center in western Ukraine. In the text, I use Lemberg almost exclusively when referring to the city in the period prior to the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy. Before World War I, the Ukrainian-speaking population constituted a minority of the city’s population. Designating the city L’viv when discussing 1898 would be anachronistic; however, utilizing Lwów might suggest a Polish partisan position in the long dispute over the city’s “real” ownership. Lemberg, the German and Yiddish designation, offers a relatively neutral option and also maintains the focus on Habsburg history. Another complication concerns the proper designation for Ukrainian speakers. Aside from quotations, I refer to the Ruthenian people before World War I.1 Habsburg official documents as well as many contemporaries used this term. I refer to Ukrainians after the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy.

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Unowski - Map 1 4th proof Bill Nelson 11/1/17

0

G E RM A N E M P I RE

0

Prague SILESIA

B OH E MIA

Cracow

N VORALBERG

A U S T R I A - H U N G A R Y T YRO L

ST YRIA

AD RIA TIC S EA

HU N GA RY

CROATIA-SLAVONIA

DA L

M A A TI

Austria Hungary Bosnia-Herzegovina: occupied in 1878; annexed in 1908

MAP 1. 

BUKOVINA

CARNIOLA

ISTRIA

IT AL Y

RUSSIA N EMPIRE

Budapest

CARINTHIA

Trieste

100 mi 150 km

LOWER AUSTRIA Vienna

UPPER AUSTRIA SALZBURG

100

Lember emberg/L g/Lw wów/L w/L’viv viv G ALI CIA

MORA VIA

50 50

Austria-Hungary, 1867–1914

ROM A NIA

BOSNIAHERZEGOVINA

S E RBI A B UL GA RIA

BL A C K SE A

Handwritten flyer from Szczurowa. Courtesy of the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine.

FIGURE 1. 

Introduction Hurrah! Hurrah! at the Jews. Since it is happening all over Galicia, we should be ashamed if we do not also brush away their stinking kaftans, and therefore drive them away, let them then take up the flails, scythe, and skeins and let them work as we do. And still the Jews have not taken enough. You have shed the blood of our Savior, you have shed our blood, you have dishonored our country, you rob our people, you enrich yourselves from our labor, you are everywhere. Go to Palestine already; there your Messiah is looking for you—So away with you scabs, away you infection, we despise you, as God despised you—we will not stop beating and burning you until we can no longer see you. We will blow you up with dynamite and you will fall down from the clouds like frogs. Hurrah brothers, Hurrah at the Jews, Hurrah!! The Holy Father has granted a complete indulgence to those who drive the Jews from among the Catholics. Rally together, and you know when. Do not forget about the fair. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Translation of a handwritten flyer (see Figure 1) posted on houses in the village of Szczurowa, a few miles north of Brzesko, end of June 18981

IN 1898 ANTI-JEWISH VIOLENCE swept across the western and central districts of Galicia, the Habsburg province acquired in the ­eighteenth-century Partitions of Poland and today divided between Poland and Ukraine. Bands of peasants broke into shops and taprooms administered by Jews on the outskirts of small villages, bashing in windows and knocking in doors with scythes, hatchets, canes, iron spikes, and rocks. They drank copious quantities of vodka and beer, shattered glasses and destroyed furniture, and ransacked chests of drawers. Attackers beat Jews with sticks and hit them with rocks. They assaulted mothers in front of cower­ ing children. In towns like Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Frysztak, and Stary

2 Introduction

Sącz, peasants joined artisans, shopkeepers, and members of town councils to break into and plunder Jewish-owned businesses. Some loaded their spoils—flour, vodka, clothes, kitchen utensils, mattresses, pillows—onto carts driven into town for this purpose. A few attacks took place in late February, mid-March, and early April. From late May until the end of June when Galician Governor (Statthalter) Leon Count Piniński announced the institution of a state of emergency, anti-Jewish violence erupted in 408 communities (21 in eastern Galicia, the rest in the western and central districts of the province). Scores of Jews were injured. The gendarmes and the army killed at least eighteen people and wounded many others in their efforts to quell the violence.2 By January 1899 prosecutors had charged 5,170 people, mostly Polish-speaking peasants, day laborers, miners, and railroad construction workers as well as city council members, village leaders, teachers, and shopkeepers; men in their late teens, but also fathers in their forties, village elders in their sixties and seventies, and women of all ages—with a variety of offenses. Galicia’s courts tried 3,816 people and sentenced 2,328 to prison terms lasting from a few days to three years.3 As attested by the Jewish historian Raphael Mahler in the Sefer Sandz, the post-Shoah Yizkor book of recollections of the life and death of the Jewish communities of the Nowy Sącz area, Galician Jews would remember this outbreak of violence and robbery as “The Plunder.”4 Antisemitism and its use as a political weapon did not distinguish the lands of partitioned Poland from the rest of late-nineteenth century Europe. In the decades around 1900, ethnic violence in Galicia and elsewhere in Austria-Hungary paralleled the violence and antisemitism experienced in other parts of Europe.5 The Dreyfus Affair in France reminds us that the 1898 Galician riots should not be understood as leftovers from the medieval world that continued to characterize backward eastern Europe while the progressive West had moved past such ancient hatreds. Antisemitic politics and anti-Jewish violence in the decades before the First World War reflected instead a European-wide trend toward mass political mobilization. According to historian Theodore Weeks, one of the key differences between the Polish lands and the rest of Europe—in addition to higher ­levels of illiteracy and poverty—was not antisemitic politics as such, but rather “the simple fact that Jews lived in far greater numbers among Poles than among the French, Germans, or even Austrians.”6 Weeks and others link



Introduction 3

antisemitism in the Russian partition to specific political developments in the Russian Empire (such as the assassination of Alexander II and the Revolution of 1905) and to underlying social conflicts exacerbated by increased industrialization. In contrast, until very recently the few studies that made mention of the 1898 Galician riots all but ignored the Habsburg context.7 Yet, the outbreak, course, and suppression of the 1898 riots were shaped by the changing political realities of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy (Cisleithania) in the late nineteenth century: suffrage reform and mass political mobilization, economic transformation, nationalism in the countryside, antisemitism, efforts by entrenched elites to counter and harness popular political movements, and ongoing conflicts concerning the respective roles of central and regional governing authorities. Scholarly literature continues to grapple with the problem of antisemitism in Europe in the modern period. Much of this work has centered on well-known incidents and the intellectual origins and spread of antisemitic ideas. My main concern here is very different. At the center of interest are the choices made and actions taken on the ground by peasants, towns­people, Jews, and local officials as well as the interpretations imposed on these actions by interested parties farther removed from the scene. This ­micro-historical study of one wave of antisemitic violence in one “backward” agricultural corner of the Habsburg Monarchy follows David Nirenberg and others by arguing that perceptions of Jewish-Christian difference and long-standing anti-Jewish discourses become powerful influences on behavior only in moments when people find those discourses useful.8 Popular and publicized assumptions about Jews posing a collective threat, the asymmetry of power between Christians and Jews, the relatively low level of organization and the episodic nature of the Galician violence largely conformed to the pattern of “exclusionary violence” seen in many parts of Europe in the decades around 1900.9 By analyzing the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in Galicia as an example of exclusionary violence, this book offers new insights into the upsurge of the antisemitism that accompanied the emergence of mass politics in Europe in the decades around 1900.10 This volume looks closely at events on the ground and the ways the new popular media of the day shaped and interpreted those events. The chapters presented here explore how JewishCatholic 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

4 Introduction

order to its far-flung provinces in the decades before World War I. This book considers the new forms of political organization that contributed to the transformation of confrontations between Catholics and Jews in western Galicia—the kind of local incidents that took place before and after the spring and summer of 1898—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. Scholars studying ethnic violence face many challenges if we seek to do more than narrate drunken disturbances.11 One approach is to recount the social, economic, and ideological background and then assume that the combustible situation described needed only a spark to set it off. Such an approach would inevitably smooth over jumbled and chaotic events, diverse motivations, and choices made that might conflict with the coherent narratives constructed by interested partisans. Still, this book begins with those contexts, not because they are in and of themselves explanations for the outbreak and course of violence, but because they form the backdrop against which the riots took place. Chapter 1 provides an overview of social, and economic relations in the mostly Polish-speaking small towns and villages where the majority of the 1898 attacks took place. What were the small towns of the region like? Who lived in them? What were the Jewish communities like, and how did Jews and Catholics interact and in what locations and contexts? In this period in Italy, France, and elsewhere, Catholic institutions propagated new and virulent forms of antisemitism. Galicia’s Roman Catholic hierarchy and clergy translated and transferred this Catholic-inflected modern antisemitism into the Galician countryside beginning in the early 1890s. This took place at the very moment when mass politics arrived in Habsburg central Europe. The suffrage reforms of the 1880s, and, more importantly, the 1890s, opened up the political process to millions of potential new voters in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy. New political parties raced to mobilize potential constituencies. The resulting “politics in a new key” as historian Carl Schorske labeled this phenomenon in relation to urban Vienna, brought a strident, aggressive style of political action, rhetoric, and organization.12 While a great deal of recent Habsburg scholarship has considered some of these developments in the Bohemian lands, Galicia has drawn much less attention.13 In the 1890s in western Galicia, social democratic activists and leaders of new peasant parties, all damned by the conservative establishment



Introduction 5

as irresponsible demagogues, competed aggressively for the ballots of rural and small-town voters. The new Catholic antisemitism played a central role in this competition as it did in two fiercely fought elections for parliamentary seats that took place in the first half of 1898.14 Chapter 2 begins the close examination of the violence itself. This chapter traces the course of the 1898 events from the relatively isolated violence in the salt-mining town of Wieliczka and the surrounding area in mid-March to the first major urban anti-Jewish riots in Przemyśl and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in late May, the numerous raids around Jasło in mid-June, and the most intense violence of the period in and near Nowy Sącz and Stary Sącz, Limanowa, and Brzesko in the last week of June. These attacks convinced the Galician governor and the Vienna cabinet to declare a state of emergency in western and central Galicia. Representative riots and attacks are described in detail to provide the reader with a sense of how incidents related to each other. Chapter 3 centers on the participants themselves. Who led the riots and why? What motivated people to join the action? The dissemination of outlandish rumors played a pivotal role in the formation of communities of anti-Jewish action during and after the violence as did the constant efforts at mobilization by new political parties. What were the confrontations between Jews and Christians like? Many of the rioters and Jews knew each other. How did this familiarity affect events? I also look at the defensive actions taken by Jewish individuals, families, small communities, and organizations (political and religious /ethnic/ social) in Galicia as well as in the monarchy as a whole. This chapter considers the roles played by various arms of the state, from local administrators and gendarmes to the Galician governor, military commanders and troops, and the ministries as they sought to restore order in the Galician countryside. The final section of the chapter looks at the persistence of anti-Jewish incidents in eastern Galicia in July. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators in the 1898 riots were Polish speakers. Here I briefly consider the relative lack of participation on the part of the Ruthenian/ Ukrainian population. Chapter 4 turns to the search for justice. In the Habsburg Monarchy all citizens were, at least in theory, subject to the rule of law. The Galician courts, closely watched by the Ministry of Justice in Vienna, assessed personal responsibility for individual acts of violence and disturbance of the peace. The first major attacks took place in mid-March; five weeks

6 Introduction

of sustained violence began in the last week of May and ended only in late June. The first trials opened in the beginning of July; courts issued the last judgments in January 1899. Appeals continued for several more months. Each case was a drama that played out in local courtrooms, on the street, and in the press. What were the claims of the prosecution and the defense? How did defendants and witnesses describe the violence and their own actions? How did newspapers portray the trials and engage in questions of guilt and responsibility? Chapter 5 explores efforts to inform the events with political meaning. Galicia’s major Polish-speaking political players assigned blame and incorporated explanations for the riots into preexisting narratives about the past, present, and future that bolstered their respective appeals for political support. I consider the debates on the violence that dominated the last sessions of the Vienna parliament held before the celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s December 2 Golden Jubilee. This was a dramatic moment. Just a few months before, peasant party deputies and socialists had been elected to parliament under the newly expanded franchise. Now, from the floor of the parliament building on Vienna’s Ringstraße, the symbolic center of power in the monarchy, they put forward their competing interpretations of the genesis and course of the anti-Jewish attacks. This chapter reveals the abyss that lay between the smooth and coherent framing narratives that emerged during and after the riots and the much murkier events, motivations, actions and reactions of participants on the ground described in earlier chapters. The final section considers how the riots altered patterns of Christian-Jewish interaction. The Galician events have been overshadowed by far more deadly examples in central and eastern Europe. Many books and articles document anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire in the decades surrounding 1900: the waves of pogroms in the 1880s; the bloodshed in Kishinev (Chișinău) in 1903; the anti-Jewish attacks during and after the 1905 revolution.15 There is an increasing literature on ritual murder charges around 1900.16 Recent work has turned to the murderous anti-Jewish outbreaks that marked the end of World War I in central and eastern Europe.17 Scholarly and more popular publications continue to concentrate on the Shoah. Such works focus on the German factories of extermination and the Nazi killing fields located on the lands of interwar Poland as well as the emotionally charged and seemingly endless debates about Polish-Jewish relations under Nazi occupation and in post-World War II Poland.18 There



Introduction 7

have been far fewer efforts to look at earlier moments of anti-Jewish violence in the Polish past.19 Historians of the Habsburg Monarchy have viewed tensions and conflicts in Galicia as marginal to the history of Austria-Hungary in comparison with German-Czech street clashes in Bohemia. Yet the 1898 riots constituted the most extensive anti-Jewish attacks in the Habsburg lands in the post-1867 constitutional era. Antisemitic tropes, toxic ChristianJewish relations, local contexts, rumors, religiosity, press coverage, and government intervention shaped the outbreak, course, and aftermath of the violence. The 1898 Galician violence challenged the image of AustriaHungary as a Rechtsstaat, a state governed by the rule of law. While certainly a contribution to Habsburg historiography, this close study of the 1898 Galician riots and their aftermath is far more than an account of obscure moments of violence in a backward region of Europe or another example of national conflict in Austria-Hungary. This examination of the experience of anti-Jewish violence in this rural corner of the Habsburg Monarchy is a local study of Europe-wide political, economic, social, and cultural transformation.

A Note on Definitions This volume employs riot and anti-Jewish attacks—not pogrom, the term so often used in relation to anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe, to describe the events under analysis here. Scholars have made many attempts to define pogrom and to distinguish it from other manifestations of violence against Jews or non-Jews. The term continues to be used to designate the vicious anti-Jewish attacks in the Russian Empire, such as the wave of violence in 1881–1882 as well as the brutal and deadly assaults on Jews in 1903 and 1905–6. Popular understanding of pogrom has long assumed that the attackers had explicit or implicit government support or were even directly spurred on by the authorities. If one accepts this definition, Polish historian Franciszek Bujak was certainly correct when he penned the following about the 1918 anti-Jewish attacks by Polish-speakers in the eastern districts of Habsburg Galicia: “As a matter of fact there were no pogroms in Galicia, that is to say, no systematically organized massacres and robberies carried out with the aid of an indifferent attitude, or even of a co-ordinate action of the police authorities, as was the case in Russia; all that occurred there were comparatively insignificant riots, which would often break out

8 Introduction

very suddenly.”20 Bujak was trying to convince the participants at the peace treaty discussions in Versailles after World War I not to pressure the new Polish government to grant minority rights to Jews. Russia had pogroms; civilized Poland had “insignificant riots.” Bujak would certainly have written the same about the 1898 events considered here. In recent decades, research by John Klier and others has transformed how we understand the Russian pogroms. Historians are now mostly united in rejecting the earlier thesis of governmental organization of or backing for the Russian pogroms of the 1880s.21 Reflecting this consensus, Jonathan Dekel-Chen and colleagues argue simply that “Although pogroms could affect any targeted group, in normal usage the word has come to denote an anti-Jewish riot.”22 Historian Gerald Suhr has put forward this definition: “Pogroms may be thought of as counterrevolutionary outbursts, the largest number of whose supporters believes that they are defending tsar, country, and sometimes religion by attacking their enemies, most commonly interpreted as Jews, but including others.”23 If we accept these seemingly straightforward definitions, then the events of 1898 in Galicia do appear to fit the category of pogrom. In popular memory however, pogrom continues to evoke the deadly anti-Jewish riots of Russian history. In the 1898 Galician case no Jews died— although at least eighteen Christian rioters and bystanders were killed by the authorities in efforts to restore law and order. In light of these complications, I most often utilize riot, the term found in the Polish-language press (rozruchy) and employed by the Habsburg authorities (Ausschreitungen) in 1898. By using riot instead of pogrom the events in Galicia can be viewed in their very specific Habsburg context as well as within the larger history of anti-Jewish violence in Europe while avoiding the specific definitional problems posed by pogrom.24 Of course riot is also a highly contested term. Riot is used in this volume to most closely reflect how contemporaries wrote and spoke about the events of 1898, not as a reflection of a specific theoretical position. A second definitional problem involves antisemitism. Contemporary government documents and the German- and Polish- language press most often referred to the events at the center of this volume as antisemitic riots, anti-Jewish riots, antisemitic unrest, antisemitic excesses, or excesses of antisemitic origin. Scholars of antisemitism have long perceived a sharp divide between premodern anti-Jewish violence, hatred, and persecution on the one hand and modern antisemitism on the other. The former focused on



Introduction 9

religion (Jews as Christ-killers; Host defilers; etc.); the latter on perceived economic, social, and racial divisions and categories. Others have questioned this clear division.25 In this book, as was the practice of contemporary observers, I utilize antisemitic and anti-Jewish violence interchangeably. Those implicated had a variety of motivations; observers, journalists, and politicians had their own reasons for characterizing the 1898 violence as they did. My use of both antisemitic and anti-Jewish violence is intended as a reflection of the usage common in 1898, not as an intervention into current scholarly debates. I will return to the question of contemporary usage in the conclusion.

Unowski - Map 2 3rd proof Bill Nelson 10/31/17

R U S S I A N

E M P I R E

Tarnobrzeg Nisko

Chrzanów

Oświęcim

Dąbrowa

Cracow Podgórze

Wieliczka

Brzesko

Bochnia Kalwaria Zebrzydowska

Wadowice Biała

Myślenice

Żywiec

Kołbuszowa

Limanowa Nowy Sącz Nowy Targ

Ropczyce Tarnów Pilzno Frysztak Gorlice Grybów

LH

N Y

N

I

A

GERMAN EMPIRE

SILESIA

VO

Mielec

Jasło Krosno Żmigród

Łańcut

Rzeszów Strzyżów Brzozów Sanok

Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv

Przemyśl Dobromil

Tarnopol Drohobycz

Chodorowie

OLIA

Schodnica

POD

Lisko

Jarosław

Bursztyń

Tłuste

H U N G A R I A N K I N G D O M

0

30

0

MAP 2. 

50

Galicia

Zaleszczyki Kołomyja Śniatyn

60 mi 100 km

BUKOVINA

1 Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia The strength and weakness of the Jews is their economic specialization in commerce and finance.1 The population of the districts Nowy Sa˛cz and Limanowa are characterized by their hatred toward Jews.2

THESE QUOTATIONS from Franciszek Bujak, perhaps the most important historian of Galician rural life working around 1900 and later a prominent politician in the Polish People’s Party, introduce the themes that begin this chapter: rural life and the complexities of Roman Catholic– Jewish relations in western Galicia. Bujak was born in 1875 in Maszkienice, a village near Brzesko. His books drew from his scholarship and his own experiences. These publications offer a unique picture of economic and social life in the rural areas affected by violence in 1898. In them Bujak championed the hard-working peasantry even as he documented the poverty that plagued Galicia. Bujak’s biographer, historian Anita Shelton, referring to Bujak’s work as a politician and university professor in the interwar period, maintained that Bujak “believed deeply in democracy, in the pluralism of Poland’s ethnic and cultural traditions.”3 Still, Bujak, like so many other peasant politicians, held extremely negative views of the Jewish presence in the countryside. Jews, he wrote in 1919, “busy themselves mainly in undertakings in which invention and cunning have a fairer play than capital and physical work.” Bujak argued that only the emigration of much of the Jewish population could lift the barriers holding back the progress of the Polish peasantry.4 To change the countryside, then, meant removing people who had lived there for centuries. Bujak understood that the world he had grown up in was disappearing. The 1898 anti-Jewish riots took place as demographic, economic, and cultural transformations reshaped rural Galicia. This chapter explores these changes and then turns to the rise of new and virulent forms of Cath-

12

Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

olic antisemitism and popular politics. Constant agitation by new political parties and ferocious campaigning for two specific parliamentary elections in the first half of 1898 saturated the region with anti-Jewish rhetoric. To simply present some of the background of the period—new and aggressive political parties, the spread of Catholic antisemitism, economic crises, governmental suspicion of radical movements, and so on—is not to explain the outbreak and course of the riots. Still, the anti-Jewish attacks cannot be understood outside of the wider context in which they unfolded.

Catholics and Jews in rural western Galicia Scholarship on Galicia often describes the vast majority of inhabitants of the province as fitting into three mutually exclusive ethno-religious or national categories: Poles, Ukrainians/Ruthenians, and Jews.5 The 1900 Habsburg census recorded that 7,315,939 people lived in Galicia. Of these, 3,350,512 defined themselves as Roman Catholics, 3,104,103 were Greek Catholics, and 811,371 were Jews.6 Most of the population resident in the central and western districts listed themselves in the census as Polish speakers (with no option to choose Yiddish or multiple languages, most Jews were entered as speakers of Polish). In larger towns in the eastern districts, Jews and Polish-speaking Roman Catholics often predominated; however, a majority Ukrainian-speaking and Greek Catholic countryside surrounded these urban islands.7 In the second half of the nineteenth century, competing Polish and Ruthenian activists imagined their respective national communities to consist of (at least) all those speaking Polish and affiliating with Roman Catholicism or all those speaking Ukrainian and attending Greek Catholic Churches. Of course, many thousands of Ukrainian speakers prayed in Roman Catholic churches and many Polish speakers belonged to Greek Catholic parishes. In addition, a significant portion of the population rejected the totalizing claims of national exclusivism promoted by self-appointed nationalist leaders. As Bujak wrote of a small village just a few kilometers north of Limanowa at the center of the region wracked by antiJewish attacks in 1898, “There are still many people in Zmiąca and the surrounding area who, after some pondering, respond to the question ‘Who are you’ (what is your national identity) by saying they are Catholics, as opposed to Lutherans and Jews, or that they are peasants, or that they are, above all, ‘imperial,’ and will storm off and refuse to speak with anyone who tries to convince them that they are Poles.”8 According to Bujak, While



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younger people who had received some formal schooling tended to identify themselves more often as Poles, many of them remained indifferent to their supposed nationality. They described members of other social groups—­ including those who were Catholic Polish speakers—as obcy (foreign).9 Caught between the increasingly antagonistic Polish and Ruthenian/ Ukrainian national movements, some Jewish students and intellectuals in Cracow, Lemberg, and a handful of smaller towns joined Zionist organizations beginning in the early 1880s. Affiliation with Zionism should not be exaggerated, however. Historian Joshua Shanes has recently shown, for example, that Nowy Sącz, one of the larger towns plagued by anti-Jewish violence in 1898, was “a city dominated by the Hasidim of the local rebbe and absolutely free of Zionist activity until the first years of the twentieth century.” Zionism in Galicia as elsewhere “generally remained a fringe political movement until 1917.” While Zionism may have made only minor inroads into Galicia by 1898, increasing numbers of Jews nonetheless embraced the idea of a specific Jewish nationality or peoplehood, at least in part in reaction to the Polish and Ruthenian national movements. Many Jews called for a vigorous response to antisemitic threats and supported politicians who addressed specifically Jewish issues in the decades around 1900.10 The geographic distribution as well as the social and economic profile of Galicia’s Jewish inhabitants contrasted sharply with that of their Christian neighbors. As was the case elsewhere in central and eastern Europe, the Jews of Galicia were far more likely to live in towns than non-Jews. Some threequarters of the Jews of Galicia lived in the eastern districts of the province, where they made up about 13 percent of the population and nearly half of all those living in larger towns and cities. In western Galicia, Jews constituted less than 8 percent of the population; however, 20 to 30 percent or more of the inhabitants of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Jasło, Limanowa, Nowy Sącz, and Stary Sącz, all centers of violence in 1898, were Jews.11 While true that Jews often lived around town squares, in few if any of these towns did Jews exclusively inhabit specific sections or streets. Jews did not live their lives in economic or social isolation from the larger population.12 Some Christian merchants and tradesmen resided in the towns at the center of the 1898 events, and their numbers increased in the decades before World War I, which led to more direct economic competition between Christians and Jews. Still, in 1898 the overwhelming majority of Catholics in western Galicia labored in the agricultural sector. Jews made up less than 2 percent of the total number of agricultural workers in the province, but constituted a conspicuous majority of those engaged in trade and commerce.13

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Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

In larger towns, 75 percent or more of the taverns, inns, and restaurants; clothing, furniture, and shoe stores; bakeries; and artisan shops that lined the ubiquitous market squares of the region were owned or administered by Jews.14 Jews were prominent among the merchants buying and selling in the temporary stalls set up in town centers on market days. Jews living in towns regularly interacted with their Christian neighbors as well as with peasants from surrounding villages who journeyed to town to purchase goods at shops and to sell their agricultural produce and handmade crafts. Much of the Jewish population of Galicia lived outside large towns. In 1900, about a third of west Galician Jews lived in rural areas.15 Many rural Jews resided in market towns with populations below 2,000. In 1910, for example, Jews made up more than 70 percent of the 1,506 residents of Frysztak, the site of the bloodiest single moment of the 1898 riots. Thousands of Jews also lived in small enclaves on the edge of or between villages otherwise inhabited exclusively by Christians. Rural taverns and shops administered by Jews were sources of spirits and tobacco, as well as manufactured goods and credit in the relatively new cash economy that began to develop only in the decades after serfdom in Galicia came to an end in the 1848 revolutions.16 Jewish-administered village taprooms were popular destinations for peasants traveling to and from towns for Sunday church services and market days. Until 1889, the szlachta (Polish nobility) enjoyed a monopoly on the production and sale of alcohol (propinacja) and often leased these rights to Jews.17 After 1889, noble control was gradually loosened as the state pledged to buy out the noble monopoly for 124 million crowns. This sum was to be paid over the next decades. Alcohol sales and production became a complete state monopoly in 1910.18 Even then, Jews continued to play a predominant role in this sector of the Galician economy as nobles leased the propinacja back from state authorities and subleased to Jewish tavern keepers—often at a higher rate than had been the case under the old noble monopoly system. The rising price for such leases and higher taxes on distilleries drove those who held the subleases to open yet more venues in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1902, government statistics counted an astounding 19,148 taverns and taprooms in Galicia. Some 17,000 of these were located in villages and small towns. More than 80 percent of all people who worked in the production and sale of alcohol were Jews.19 Thousands of Jews in western Galicia lived in rooms adjoining their taprooms, tobacco shops (trafiken), taverns, and inns like those in the figures below.

FIGURE 2.  Galician Jewish shop. Photograph by Erwin Dietl, 1917. Bildarchiv, Austrian National Library.

Tavern in Spytkowice constructed in the second half of the eighteenth century. A letter from a reader in Spytkowice, a small town west of Cracow, published in Prawda on June 4, 1898, crowed that local efforts against drunkenness spearheaded by a Catholic brotherhood had been so successful that the Jewish innkeeper there lamented that now he would lose the propinacja because the population has stopped drinking vodka. Photograph by H. Poddębski, 1933. Courtesy of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

FIGURE 3. 

Jews in Front of a Tavern, Apoloniusz Kędzierski, 1879. Courtesy of the National Museum in Kielce.

FIGURE 4. 

Wooden tavern in Orawka, approximately twenty-four kilometers south of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. Courtesy of the District Museum of Nowy Sącz. A replica of this “Jewish tavern” is included in the Ethnographic Park in Nowy Sącz.

FIGURE 5. 



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Many of the towns, villages, and hamlets of western and central ­Galicia where the violence of 1898 took place were linked by webs of economic connections in which Jews played central roles. An economic subculture encompassed the Nowy Sącz, Stary Sącz, Limanowa, and Brzesko districts, as peasants, Jews, products, news, and rumors moved across this space of interaction.20 Some of the towns, such as Limanowa and Nowy Sącz, were the sites of regional fairs and markets. Next to the fair in ­Grybów, Limanowa hosted “the most important market for cattle in the mountainous part of western Galicia.”21 Peasants traveled by rail and road to buy and sell produce and livestock on regularly scheduled market days in town squares and along the main streets. There, Jewish butchers, dealers in cloth, livestock, and grain, storekeepers, and publicans came into contact with Christian peasants and merchants. Limanowa and Nowy Sącz were connected to Cracow and Lemberg by the Carl Ludwig Railway. Analogous economic relationships linked the small towns and villages surrounding Kalwaria and connected scores of hamlets with each other and with the market towns of Jasło and Strzyżów. The commodification of land after the lifting of the robot (compulsory labor)in 1848 had wide-ranging effects on rural life. In the decades that followed, many peasants were unable to compete in the new economic environment; many lost their permanent hold on the land and became rural wage laborers. The economic crises of the 1890s worsened what Stanisław Szczepanowski, engineer, chemist, entrepreneur, oilman, liberal democratic politician, and editor of Słowo Polskie (Polish Word), had famously dubbed “The Galician Misery.”22 The failing economy deepened the divide between Catholics and Jews. The disastrous 1897 crop yields in some districts plunged as much as 75 percent from the previous year, leaving many hungry.23 Overpopulation and the division of land into increasingly small plots (­parcellation) also contributed to a wave of bankruptcies among Christian peasants. There was relatively little industrialization in Galicia, so those pushed off the land had few options for employment. Thousands of peasants became seasonal laborers on railway expansion and river regulation projects or took jobs in the oil industry in central Galicia. Others made their way to larger towns, hoping for work. Jewish businesses, trading networks, and craft production in small towns and rural areas weakened as trade, commerce, and banking moved to larger towns and cities connected by major rail lines and as mass produced goods flooded into local markets. Competition with Christians increased. Large sections of Galicia’s Jewish popula-

Jews from Cracow and the surrounding region and peasant family from the Cracow region. Österreichische Monarchie im Wort und Bild, Bd. 19 “Galizien” Vienna: 1898, 251 and 239. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library.

FIGURES 6A AND 6B. 



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tion became impoverished. Many Jews and Polish-speaking peasants from Galicia joined the growing wave of mass emigration to the United States. More than 235,000 Jews left Galicia for the United States between 1881 and 1910.24 At the same time, with legal restrictions on Jewish ownership of land removed after the constitutional settlement of 1867, Jews became prominent among those purchasing the land of bankrupt and financially strapped peasants and nobles. By the 1890s, Jews owned approximately 15 percent of estate lands and leased over 50 percent of rented estates.25 Sharp social and economic differences between Catholics and Jews corresponded with a strikingly visible cultural divide. Some Jews had identified with German culture before 1867 and continued to do so even after World War I. However, following the 1867 constitutional compromise that created Austria-Hungary and the subsequent institution of effective Polish autonomy in Galicia, growing numbers of Galician Jews adopted a Polish cultural orientation. This was especially the case in the two major cities, Cracow and Lemberg, as well as in larger towns in eastern Galicia.26 Economic and social changes did not leave Jews living in the villages and the small and mid-sized towns of central and western Galicia untouched. Nor were they isolated from the outside world, as evidenced by letters written to Jewish newspapers in Vienna and in Germany about their experiences during the 1898 violence. Many Jewish families in the region had one or more members who had migrated to Cracow, Lemberg, Vienna, or the United States. Nonetheless, Jewish acculturation was less evident in the rural areas that experienced attacks in 1898 than in major urban centers. The images of Jews and Catholic peasants from the region around Cracow (see Figures 6A and 6B) appeared in the 1898 volume of the Austro-­ Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image, a series of ethnographic studies of the Habsburg provinces initiated under the auspices of Crown Prince Rudolf in the 1880s.27 These illustrations, while romanticized and stereotyped, reflect the fact that religion, dress, and language as much as occupation still clearly distinguished Jews from Christians in the countryside. Jews certainly spoke Polish; however, most spoke Yiddish at home and with each other. Polish-language literature, humorous weekly publications, and newspapers frequently lampooned the Yiddish-inflected Polish allegedly employed by Jews when interacting with Christians.28 Strict forms of Jewish religious practice prevailed.29 Among the largest towns of the region, Nowy Sącz had 15,724 residents in 1900, of whom 4,687 were Jews.30 A minority among the shopkeepers, tradesmen, and artisans adhered to more “progressive” forms

20

Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

of Jewish practice. The majority, however, remained followers of the very conservative Sandz Hasidic dynasty. Hasidic men wore black hats, robes, and earlocks ( peyes). Jewish women covered their heads. The celebration of Jewish holidays—weekly Shabbat at a neighborhood prayer room or local synagogue, Passover, the High Holy Days, Sukkoth—governed the weekly and monthly rhythms of daily life.31 In Limanowa, Bujak estimated that 50 percent of the Jews of the town were moderate Hasids, 25 percent “rigorous Hasids,” and the rest divided between the poor with little time for prayer and a few German Jews who did not have peyes, preferred to speak German, and seldom attended religious services.32 While it may be an exaggeration to assert that around 1900 “Jews lived in a universe of their own,” clearly a sense of profound difference between Christian and Jew was not an import from the big city or from abroad.33 This marked otherness of outward appearance, language, religion, social status, and economic role, as historian Hillel Kieval has argued, did not inevitably translate into antagonism between Jews and Catholics.34 Many Catholic peasants viewed the Jews as collectively responsible for the death of Jesus; at the same time, some sought protective and healing amulets from the courts of Hasidic masters.35 Priests and Catholic reformers decried the ubiquitous Jewish taverns as sites of moral ruin and spiritual pollution and denounced Jewish publicans as agents of corruption. Yet the Jewish tavern and shop served important roles as meeting places and zones of interaction between travelers, local society, peasants, and Jews. They were sources of news

FIGURE 7.  Grand Synagogue, Nowy Sącz. Formerly the central house of worship for the Sandz Hasidic Dynasty and today a museum. Photograph by author, 2010.



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for the rural population. Jewish merchants purchased peasant-produced crops and livestock and offered manufactured goods (and alcohol) on credit. In his memoirs Jan Słomka, mayor (wójt) of the village of Dzików in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, charged that “in business the Jews were crooks and unreliable.” However, Słomka also remembered that “Weddings were usually celebrated in the [Jews’] taverns also. From the church all the guests would go straight there in great style, for in the whole district there was no other place in which to entertain.”36 Wincenty Witos, a Galician peasant politician who became leader of the Piast faction of the Polish People’s Party in 1913 and served three times as prime minister of interwar Poland, was born in 1874 in Wierzchosławice, just a few kilometers west of Tarnów. He personally held strong anti-Jewish views. Witos wrote in his memoirs that Jews long constituted “a daily nuisance” for the peasant. He considered the Jew “a leech that sucked the last drop of blood from him [the peasant].” Yet, he conceded, “a large portion” of the peasantry looked to Jews for economic, political, and even family advice. They related to Jews with “sympathy and even trust.” “They [the peasants] also used to go to their [the Jews’] place for Shabbat and matzah, they went with them to fairs and wedding celebrations, even during [Jewish] holidays [when Jews were required to avoid work the peasants] did not refrain from carrying out every possible chore for them, ignoring embarrassment or mockery.”37 For their part, Jewish memoirists and writers depicted the hazy miasma of tobacco smoke, sweat, and liquor pervading the dark spaces of the taprooms. They wrote about the supposedly shrill and animalistic utterings of depraved Christian drunkards who refused to pay for vodka, beat the innkeepers, and broke glasses and fixtures. The next day, however “Yesterday’s pogromczyk was once more a customer in the Jewish inns, stores, and at the market place.”38 Other Galician Jews would later remember this period as one characterized by close and friendly relations with Catholic peasants and townspeople. Joseph Margoshes, who was born in Lemberg 1866 and moved to a small village about thirty kilometers north of Tarnów, later recorded that “during the period between the 1880s and the War, this part of Galicia was true paradise for Jews in some respects. . . . On the rare occasions that some of the gentiles got drunk and did start beating the Jews or breaking dishes in a tavern, they faced nasty consequences.” In this estate owner’s view, “The Jew and farmer lived in a state of perpetual friendship and helped each other out the same way as Christian neighbors.”39

22

Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

The mass migration of Jews from Galicia to the United States from the 1880s on demonstrated the “extreme poverty” of Galicia’s Jews, but did not reflect a flight from government-tolerated antisemitism.40 After 1867, the state recognized Jews as equal citizens, even if some provincial and local communal officials proved on occasion less than enthusiastic about such equality.41 For many Jews, the aging and saintly Emperor Franz Joseph embodied the generally benevolent Habsburg state. The emperor had shown public favor to Jews on his many trips to the province and had refused three times to confirm the antisemitic Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna.42 Joachim Schoenfeld grew up in small towns in Galicia and survived the Holocaust. In his Shtetl Memoirs, Schoenfeld recalled witnessing Franz Joseph’s passage through his small Galician town in 1908 as the emperor traveled to observe military maneuvers. “Austrian Jews were patriots. They loved their Kaiser, whom they nicknamed ‘Froyim Yossel.’”43

Catholic Antisemitism and Asemitism The friends of Jews [judophiles] assert further that antisemitism is rife with racial and tribal hatred toward the Jews, and as such cannot be reconciled with the Christian religion. The Jew is a human being and needs to live. It may be that someone does not like the Jewish nose, or peyes, or filthy clothes; however, for a Christian to not be able to stand the Jew because he is a Jew, or because his nose is different, or because of his black or red hair that smells different than other people, this is not right. We Christians love people, but we hate their errors. As for the Jews, we cannot tolerate their deception and wickedness! But asemitism means much more [than antisemitism]; it means to dispense with Jews altogether, to use them for absolutely nothing, and not to need them, and so in other words it means down with the Jews! Prawda, January 15, 1898, 3; republished in Mateusz Jeż, Jewish Secrets, 77.

In the 1890s, Catholic organizations and peasant-oriented political parties transferred “knowledge” from other regions of Europe into the Galician countryside that confirmed the pervasive local recognition of Jewish-Catholic difference and increasingly interpreted that difference as danger.44 This vision found a very positive reception in Habsburg Galicia.



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Pope Leo XII’s 1891 encyclical addressing Catholicism, politics, economic development, and modernity inspired Galician Catholics to organize a Catholic Congress in Cracow in 1893. At this meeting, leading Cracow conservative Count Stanisław Tarnowski,45 professor of history at the ­Jagiellonian University and president of the Cracow Academy of Arts and Sciences denounced antisemitism as fundamentally evil and un-Christian. Yet he also argued, “It is a sin—today unfortunately all too common—to donate or sell land, or even just to let its lease slip into non-Christian hands.” Such actions go against the “duties of the Catholic and Polish conscience.” Tarnowski urged the establishment of additional Christian stores and implored Galician Catholics to patronize Catholic merchants even if Jews offered goods at lower prices.46 The 1893 Catholic Congress effectively endorsed a general boycott of Jewish businesses. In the aftermath of the congress, Polish-speaking Catholics founded workers’ associations, a Christian Social movement in contact with Karl Lueger’s successful political organization in Vienna, and publications like the popular antisemitic Cracow daily Głos Narodu (Voice of the People). Prawda (Truth), issued three times a month under the protection of the Catholic hierarchy in Cracow and established in 1896, regularly included viciously antisemitic articles and commentary intended for the Catholic peasantry. These new organizations and publications, despite their many differences and often bitter rivalries, defined their respective missions as anti-Jewish at the core. They agitated for the separation of Jewish and Christian pupils in public schools. They exhorted their readers to vote only for Christian candidates in the new political landscape created by suffrage expansion (discussed below). They touted anti-alcohol drives using antiJewish rhetoric and called on peasants to stop reading the Jewish press. They promoted boycotts of Jewish businesses—the motto “Buy only from Christians!” was printed in the urban and rural press every day. In essence, these new Catholic-oriented institutions agitated for the reversal of Jewish emancipation.47 They utilized traditional anti-Jewish Christian imagery

FIGURE 8.  “Buy only from Christians,” a motto that appeared daily in Polish-language Catholic and antisemitic newspapers in Galicia in the 1890s. This example is from Cracow’s popular Głos Narodu.

Mateusz Jeż, Jewish Secrets. Cracow, 1898. Courtesy of the Jagiellonian University Library, Cracow.

FIGURE 9. 



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to attract a wide audience. Yet the main thrust of their message was not backward-looking or a rejection of modernity however defined, but was instead a passionate and emotional plea for a modernization that worked for Catholics and not for the hated Jewish alien.48 Jewish Secrets was a particularly striking example of this powerful transnational anti-Jewish Catholic influence on public opinion in G ­ alicia—and one very closely related to the violence in 1898. The pamphlet was authored by Mateusz Jeż, a priest and catechist at Cracow’s St. Anna Academy. Jeż challenged his readers to wake up and recognize the nefarious nature of Jewish power in Galicia and beyond. The poem on the title page shown above translates as follows: We rage that Russia and Prussia took Poland from us And for this we feel disgust for them in the depths of our soul; Today, the Jews are dismantling our fatherland, But few Poles feel it or see it!

In brief chapters written in a pseudo-academic style, Jeż drew from the publications of Polish priests, the notorious Russian-Jewish apostate Jacob Brafman, German “scholars” of Jewish practice, French texts from the early nineteenth century, and The Eternal Jew by the Austrian priest Fr. Josef Deckert. The pamphlet purported to document the truth of the blood libel from early medieval times. Jeż cited the Talmud and the “academic” work of Prague professor August Rohling, an “expert” witness in several ritual murder trials in the Habsburg lands. Rohling’s theories had been publicly and repeatedly debunked but, like the undead, rose again and again.49 Jewish Secrets asserted that Jewish law permitted Jews to cheat, rob, or even kill Christians. The Zohar, Jeż insisted, advised Jews to “throttle [Christians] like cattle, in order to kill without noise or screaming.”50 Jewish Secrets was far more, however, than a mere critique of alleged Jewish religious practices and beliefs. The pamphlet urged Christians to break completely with the Jews. Jeż found the origin of the corrupting nature of the Jewish tavern, Jewish usury, Jewish control over politics and the economy of Galicia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Europe as a whole in the Jews’ essential nature. The deviant character of the Jews was supposedly evidenced by their eternal responsibility for the death of Christ and their inherent and repulsive physical characteristics (including a special Jewish smell that could not be washed away by baptism). The Galician

26

Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

press followed Dreyfus Affair closely. In Jewish Secrets, Jeż charged that the scheming Jews had paid off Émile Zola and other French citizens to call for the release of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer accused of passing military secrets to the Germans. This was only the latest example of a supposedly age-old Jewish tactic. Jeż aimed at motivating peasants to take action to improve their lives. Fighting rural alcoholism and purchasing goods at Catholic-controlled rural cooperatives was necessary for economic and social progress. Of equal importance, such actions would weaken the plotting Jewish tavern keepers. While the pamphlet underscored that Christianity recognized Jews as human beings—although Jews were alleged to view “goyim” only as animals—it expressed sympathy for a physical defense against the Jews and quoted from Martin Luther, “burn the synagogues with sulfur, tar, and hellfire, demolish the houses of the Jews, take away their cash, expel them from the country like dogs for the glory of God and Christianity.” Today, Jeż insisted, opponents of the Jews, even the antisemites in Vienna, did not call for such attacks: “However, it is not possible to insist again from Christians that they only have sensitive words, patience, and tender affection for the Jews. The issue is immediate and vitally important. It is about the rescue of our property and our national life. It is about saving the Christian religion, whose oldest and worst enemies are the Jews. Either us or the Jews!”51 Much of the pamphlet originally appeared as a series of articles in 1896 and 1897 in the Catholic Prawda as “About the Jews.”52 Jeż repackaged these pieces with some new material and released Jewish Secrets in January 1898. The first printing of 5,000 copies sold out quickly.53 Jeż and other priests read explosive anti-Jewish passages to pupils in grammar and high schools in Cracow.54 Jewish Secrets was offered at discount prices in the regions where the 1898 Galician riots would take place. Copies were available in rural reading rooms, passed from hand to hand, or read out loud to illiterate or semiliterate listeners (despite recent improvements, in many rural districts only 20% of the population could both read and write).55 The popular bimonthly rural publication Wieniec (The Wreath) recommended the pamphlet to its readers for revealing “the naked truth about [the Jews’] principles and their hostile intentions toward the Polish people.” Wieniec maintained that Jeż had based his work entirely on facts about the Jews, Judaism, and the Talmud.56 Prawda also recognized the pamphlet as the revealed truth.57 After the first anti-Jewish attacks in midMarch, the perceived effects of this pamphlet on peasant attitudes led the



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Galician authorities to ban the dissemination of the second, expanded edition of 10,000 copies. Despite this effort, many copies continued to find their way into the hands of Galicia’s rural population (see Chapter 2 for more on the relationship of this pamphlet to the riots).58 Jewish Secrets cannot be dismissed as just an isolated work by an individual priest. Jeż was not the only member of the Roman Catholic clergy who promoted asemitism. Marian Morawski, a Jesuit and a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, coined this term.59 While confirming that Jewish perfidy was innate, Morawski, Jeż, and others insisted that theirs was not an attack on the Jews as a racial group. Racism could not be supported by the Christian notion of conversion, the cleansing of baptism, and the creation of all humans in the image of God. Instead they pushed for a radical division between Christians and Jews. They urged good Catholics to avoid any contact, economic or social, with Jews and to support businesses run only by their fellow Catholics. By shunning Jews and supporting Catholics, Christians could break the alleged power of the Jews over the countryside and take control of their own lives. The asemi-

St. Anna Church, Cracow. Mateusz Jeż, author of Jewish Secrets, served here as priest and catechist. Photograph by author.

FIGURE 10. 

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Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

tism promoted by Morawski and Jeż differed in some respects. Morawski and most supporters of this idea juxtaposed their own relatively mild and religiously rooted anti-Jewish position with the racist and violent anti­ semitism of Germany, Vienna, and elsewhere. In Jewish Secrets, however, Jeż posited that asemitism was the stronger and more radical idea. Głos Narodu rejected the term asemitism even while agreeing with the need to separate from the Jews. The paper insisted on opposing the Jews, peacefully and legally. After all, those fighting against liberals did not label themselves “aliberal” but rather “anti-liberal.” This popular Catholic-­ oriented Cracow daily pressed the faithful to embrace antisemitism as compatible with the Christian faith and not to be afraid of the term.60 It is not necessary to accept historian Robert Michael’s assertion that “two millennia of Christian ideas and prejudices, their impact on Christians’ behavior, appear to be the major basis of antisemitism and of the apex of antisemitism, the Holocaust” to recognize the power and pervasiveness of Catholic anti-Jewish propaganda of the years around 1900 in much of Europe.61 Endorsed by new associations and institutions, Catholic antisemitic publications and sermons as well as reports about ritual murder accusations from other parts of Europe found popular resonance in western Galicia. Jeż and others urged the rural population to recognize the Jew as the source of all misery and to take vigorous and uncompromising action against the real enemy of the Christian population.

Rural Politics in a New Key Unceasing mobilization by new political parties amplified this virulent Catholic antisemitism and brought it to the villages and towns of western and central Galicia in the late 1890s. These new parties held scores of local meetings in the last months of 1897 and the first half of 1898. They also competed in two elections for open parliamentary seats that took place in February and June of 1898. The anti-Jewish attacks erupted in the midst of this intensifying political activism. In the 1890s, an informal coalition of Cracow conservative noble reformers (Stańczycy), like Stanisław Tarnowski, eastern Galician magnates ( podolacy), urban intellectuals, and Polish officials in the Galician administration still dominated provincial political life. The Stańczyks derided the revolutionary tradition of Polish uprisings as a failed and damaging path. They instead supported compromise with and loyalty to Austria. By the



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29

1860s they had rejected the Polish revolutionary tradition and strove for accommodation with the Habsburg state.62 These conservatives and their allies benefited from the restricted provincial franchise. Approximately 10 percent of adults qualified to vote in the four weighted curiae for the Galician Diet (Sejm). Between seats reserved for the chambers of commerce, the Catholic Church, the heads of the universities in Cracow and Lemberg, the Lemberg Polytechnic, and the Cracow Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as those elected by great landowners and well-off urban populations, the Galician elites enjoyed a guaranteed majority in the Galician Sejm. Electoral manipulation—including the distribution of vodka and kiełbasa on election day—further minimized Polish and Ruthenian peasant representation. Not one peasant was elected to the Galician Sejm between 1877 and 1889.63 The Polish elites also controlled the Polish Club, the grouping of most of Galicia’s representatives to the parliament in Vienna.64 The Polish Club supported the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise transforming the Austrian Empire into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. In return

FIGURE 11.  “Away with hypocrisy”; “Away with the sausage election!” Advertisement for elections in Galicia. Illustration by L. Winterowski.

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Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

for cooperation with Vienna, the Polish elites secured a series of concessions often termed Galician autonomy. Polish became the official language in most schools, the courts, and the provincial administration. The universities in Cracow and Lemberg became Polish-language institutions. The Vienna cabinet added a minister for Galicia. The post of Galician governor, while still appointed by the crown, was held exclusively by Polish speakers until World War I. Polish conservatives pointed to these achievements as the basis for their own political legitimacy. They compared these measures favorably to the political and legal situations faced by Polish speakers in the Russian and German partitions. The conservatives also used their strong position to defend noble privileges deriving from feudalism: control of over 90 percent of forests in private hands; hunting rights; exemptions from education and communal taxes; noble monopoly on alcohol. These and other structural advantages ensured the continuation of noble economic and social primacy.65 By the late 1890s, however, suffrage expansion at the parliamentary level threatened the Polish conservatives’ monopoly on power. The broadening of the franchise for the Vienna parliament sparked a wave of activism throughout the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy (Cisleithania) that linked local and regional issues to Austria-wide politics. The weighted ballot system for parliamentary elections divided eligible voters into four electoral curiae: estate owners, chambers of commerce, towns, and rural communes. A succession of Cisleithanian minister presidents beginning with Eduard Taaffe in 1882 hoped that the inclusion of the allegedly loyal lower strata in the political process would create more stable majorities in the Vienna parliament based on non-national common interests. Taaffe decreased the amount of paid taxes that qualified citizens to vote in the town and rural commune curiae to five gulden.66 The addition of these “five-gulden men” further weakened the position of the Austro-German liberals, who had already lost their majority in the Vienna parliament in 1879.67 In 1896, Kazimierz Badeni, the Cisleithanian minister president and a former governor of Galicia, added a fifth curia to the Reichsrat electoral system based on universal manhood suffrage. Voters in this curia cast ballots for electors who in turn chose deputies to parliament. The 5.5 million voters of this fifth curia indirectly elected 72 representatives, 15 of these from Galicia. The 1.7 million voters in the other four curiae combined to elect 353 deputies. The 1896 reform, far from quieting tensions in Bohemia as Badeni had hoped, was seized upon by Czech and German national-



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ists as a new field for intense competition. This rivalry paved the way for the violence and parliamentary paralysis that characterized the crisis over ­Badeni’s language laws in 1897 and 1898.68 The expansion of the suffrage for the Vienna parliament further inflamed furious rivalries between three new peasant parties and the Galician social democrats.69 In 1898, newspapers in Vienna as well as the conservative and radical Polish press in Galicia agreed that the populist Christian People’s Party (Stronnictwo Chrześcijańsko-Ludowe) was one of the major forces behind the violence. The charismatic Catholic priest and former Jesuit Stanisław Stojałowski founded this party in 1896. Stojałowski’s new party took the side of the common peasant folk (lud ) against the nobility, the bureaucracy, the Catholic hierarchy, and the Jews. Stojałowski’s movement, it was charged, employed antisemitism as a political organizing tool and wielded it as a weapon against its competitors.70 Stojałowski had been a popular and controversial figure in Galicia’s countryside for decades. He inspired intense loyalty and equally passionate opposition. From the 1870s Stojałowski edited several peasant-oriented Polish-language journals, including Wieniec and Pszczółka (The Bee), the most widely disseminated rural publications in western Galicia.71 His papers consistently championed peasant interests, although, at first, their motto was “The Polish people are with the Polish nobility.” He later turned sharply against noble hegemony. Stojałowski organized mass pilgrimages and peasant participation in national celebrations. These actions challenged the right of the conservative elites and urban liberal-democratic nationalists to define the nature of Polish identity, which Stojałowski held should be based on the Catholic and rural culture of the Polish-speaking peasantry. In the 1880s, Stojałowski and others founded stores and reading rooms. Stojałowski also helped establish and promote the agricultural circle movement. More than 2,000 agricultural circles (rural cooperatives) dotted the Galician countryside by 1900. The agricultural circles were billed not simply as a means of securing better economic livelihoods for rural people, but as a way of minimizing Jewish influence.72 Stojałowski also encouraged temperance movements, which were directed against the conservatives as well as the noble’s traditional manager, administrator, ­alcohol leaseholder and, therefore, the rural enemy of the Catholic lud: the Jew.73 Stojałowski’s criticisms of the Galician political and economic elites, denunciations of the impact of capitalism in the countryside, and support

FIGURE 12. 

Stanisław Stojałowski. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library.



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of measures to improve the lives of the peasants brought him close to social democracy, at least temporarily. In the summer of 1896, the Catholic Church pronounced a ban on Stojałowski in response to his radical social vision and his incessant attacks on the Polish nobility and the princes of the church.74 Stojałowski vowed that “We will not go to Canossa,” a reference to the eleventh-century penitential journey of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to kneel before the pope, who in return lifted his decree of excommunication from the emperor. In early January 1897, Stojałowski wrote to Ignacy Daszyński, leader of the Social Democratic Party of Galicia, founded in 1892. Stojałowski noted “only the gospels separate me from the Social Democratic Party.” Stojałowski even asked Daszyński to edit his newspapers during one of the priest’s more than two dozen stays in jail.75 Stojałowski’s party forged an informal alliance with the Social Democrats for the 1897 parliamentary elections, the first in Habsburg Austria that included the fifth curia based on universal manhood suffrage.76 The Social Democrats overlooked Stojałowski’s long history of anti-Jewish rhetoric and action. They hoped to use the priest’s popularity and to expand their own following in Cracow as well as in smaller towns and regions that had significant numbers of Catholic wage laborers (for example, the salt mines of Wieliczka and the petroleum fields of central and eastern Galicia).77 It was possible to hear the following cheers for Catholicism, imperial loyalty, peasant populism, and socialism at rural political meetings in the lead-up to the 1897 parliamentary elections: Long Live the Holy Father! [called out a peasant leader] Long may he live!—roared hundreds of peasant voices. Long Live His Imperial Majesty [Franz Joseph]! Long may he live! Long Live Father Stojałowski! Long may he live! Long Live Daszyński! Long may he live!78

As a result of this cooperation as well as his own personal charisma and popularity, Stojałowski’s party gained six mandates to the Vienna parliament, making his the most successful of three new peasant parties. The rival People’s Party, while strong in the Galician Diet, gained only three parliamentary seats; the Galician Social Democrats secured two, including

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Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

Daszyński, who was elected from Cracow. The victories of the new mass political movements—the populist peasant parties in the countryside and the Social Democrats in Cracow—shocked the Catholic establishment. Stojałowski’s cooperation with social democracy was, however, short-lived. The priest soon embarked on a long and never fully successful process of reconciliation with the church and downplayed his disputes with the Badeni government. By the fall of 1897, the anathema pronounced on Stojałowski had been lifted. Stojałowski now vilified social democracy, and his Christian People’s Party became the main vehicle for promoting an anti-Jewish agenda in the countryside.79 For Prawo Ludu (People’s Right), the Social Democratic Party newspaper for rural readers, Stojałowski, a one-time ally, was now nothing but a “criminal in a cassock” who “deceives the lud and spreads ignorance among them.”80

“Long Live the First of May!” Prawo Ludu, the Social Democratic Party newspaper founded in 1896 and directed toward small towns and rural populations.

FIGURE 13. 



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In 1893, just a few years before forming his own party, Stojałowski had been one of the founders of the Peasant Party Union (Związek ­Stronnictwa Chłopskiego), the first formally organized peasant political party in Galicia. The brothers Stanisław and Jan Potoczek led the Peasant Party Union. Stanisław Potoczek was a Sejm deputy in 1898 and edited Związek Chłopski (Peasant Union), the official press outlet of the party. Later, in 1907, he was elected representative to the Reichsrat in the first elections after the abolishment of the curial system and the institution of universal and direct manhood suffrage. Jan Potoczek had been elected a representative to the Reichsrat in 1891 from the rural commune curia. He still served in the Vienna parliament in 1898. The Peasant Party Union cultivated close ties with the Catholic clergy. Pressure from the Catholic bishops of Galicia had contributed to the break between the Peasant Party Union and Stojałowski in 1894.81 Still, the Potoczeks resisted efforts to subjugate the Peasant Party Union more directly to the interests of the church. The brothers concentrated control of the party in the hands of the wealthy peasantry in the Nowy Sącz region. They also had many supporters in the Limanowa district. These two regions experienced the most intense violence in 1898. The Peasant Party Union was virulently antisemitic. Every edition of Związek Chłopski called for boycotting the Jews. Articles decried the presumed international power of the “Jewish Dynasty” of the Rothschild family, demanded the separation of Jewish and Christian pupils, and denounced the Jewish tavern, Jewish credit, and Jewish economic domination.82 The paper praised Jewish Secrets and the “asemitism” of Mateusz Jeż. The party alternately supported and opposed candidates from Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party, which had a more radical social program centering on the plight of lower strata in the countryside.83 Despite these differences, the Peasant Party Union, like Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party, blamed rural poverty on the tavern-owner/money-lending/social-democratic/­ liberal/anti-Polish Jew and his alleged allies. Peasant Party Union politicians and journalists framed campaigns against alcoholism and rural indebtedness as part of the battle of the pure and innocent Catholic peasant against the Jews: “Do we have the right to defend ourselves against Judaism, or do we have the duty to die from love of the Jews? . . . The tavern is the fire that consumes the happiness and wealth of our people. The Jew-innkeeper is the demon who spreads corruption, exploitation, and drunkenness in all directions. . . . The Jew’s taproom is the place where arguments, court cases, murders, and other brutalities originate.”84

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From its inception in 1895, the People’s Party, the third peasant party, was more secular and more explicitly Polish nationalist. The People’s Party secured nine seats in the Galician Diet elections of 1895. This party was closely allied with the democratic movement in Lemberg, the provincial capital. Polish liberal-democrats such as Henryk Rewakowicz, the editor of Kurjer Lwowski (Lwów Courier); secular and nationalist radicals such as Bolesław Wysłouch; and peasant politicians such as Jan Stapiński played major roles in organizing and shaping this party. Wysłouch, editor of the rural Przyjaciel Ludu (Friend of the People), and his wife, Maria, one of the initiators of the Galician rural women’s movement, came to Lemberg in the 1880s fleeing the censorship of Russian Poland. The couple authored numerous pamphlets and books aimed at a rural audience. Like the other peasant parties, the People’s Party supported the foundation of new selfhelp organizations, credit unions, and reading societies. The People’s Party focused on creating one unified peasant political movement: “Peasants, vote for your own!” was its motto for the 1895 Galician Diet elections.85 Initially Stojałowski worked closely with the People’s Party, which had a social and economic program similar to his own. However, personal rivalries and the question of the relative importance of Catholicism ultimately led Stojałowski to sever his ties to the party and form his own grouping.86 The People’s Party was somewhat less fixated on the Jews as the enemies of the peasants than were Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party and the Peasant Party Union.87 Each of the parties blamed the others for the divisions that undermined all efforts to create a unified peasant political movement.88 After their success in the 1897 elections, the peasant parties and the Social Democrats organized scores of political gatherings in western and central Galicia in the second half of 1897 to consolidate and expand their respective constituencies. Early in 1898 many of these events became campaign rallies as these parties came to view elections to replace two deceased west and central Galician deputies to the Vienna parliament as battles for the political souls of Catholic peasants and small-town voters. In February, Stojałowski himself competed with candidates from the People’s Party and the Social Democratic Party in the west Galician ŁancutNisko electoral district for a fourth curia (rural commune) seat. The seat came open after the death of Count Ferdynand Hompesz, a Polish conservative. Stojałowski directed his election campaign against the Jews. Why were peasants so poor? There were five reasons: lack of education, bad laws, Jews



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and their exploitation, unemployment, and lack of land. The Jews, who lived off the labor of the peasant, were buying up everything. Too many Christians in the countryside helped to solidify Jewish domination. If peasants would only shop at the agricultural circles and boycott the Jews, the despised Israelites would all depart for Argentina.89 Despite their rivalry, Potoczek’s Peasant Party Union supported Stojałowski’s candidacy: “We view voting for Father Stojałowski as a wise and good thing for the people’s interest.” 90 Stojałowski’s election gatherings often began with a celebratory Mass in the local parish church followed by speeches in a nearby hall reiterating the same anti-Jewish themes. Christian People’s Party leaders damned the socialists as defenders of the Jews and enemies of the peasantry.91 Letters and editorials printed in Stojałowski’s papers labeled People’s Party leader Stapiński and his allies liars and enemies of the people.92 On January 24 followers of Stojałowski physically attacked and harassed leaders of the People’s Party and the Social Democratic Party in Ulanów. Socialist Kornel Żelaszkiewicz was severely wounded; People’s Party leaders Stapiński and Dr. Franciszek Winkowski received minor injuries. Józef Jachowicz, the candidate from the People’s Party, “stopped organizing gatherings after several attempts on his life.”93 Because these attacks came in a heated election campaign, the justice and interior ministries in Vienna demanded a full investigation. Fourteen people were indicted. The trial concluded in December 1898 with guilty verdicts for eight people, some of whom were sentenced to five weeks in jail. One of the fourteen men indicted escaped the trial by fleeing to America. In a related incident in Rudnik on January 23, Stojałowski followers attacked three other socialist politicians and one, Józef Sziffler, was seriously wounded. Social democrats charged that Stojałowski himself had pointed out the socialists in the audience and urged his own followers to deal with them. Those who assaulted Sziffler were never identified.94 Stojałowski won handily on February 3. The social democrats regretted that “Stojałowski was elected as representative with the help of clubs and rocks.” Not long before, he had posed as a champion of the common folk against the abuses of the clerical and noble elites. Naprzód (Forward), the social democratic paper, asserted that Stojałowski now enthusiastically pursued and received the backing of bishops and the noble-controlled Central Election Committee. By doing so, he had betrayed Galicia’s working people.95 The political gatherings did not cease with the February 3 election. Two days later in Sieniawa, a few kilometers southeast of Jasło, more than a

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thousand people cheered the victorious Stojałowski. Jan Chmieł, a popular politician in the party, urged his audience to boycott the Jews, who oppressed Catholics and had taken over the rural economy. This gathering, like other political meetings, was open to all comers. Here as elsewhere some Jews attended and protested against the anti-Jewish charges. Chmieł shouted down the objections and declared that the “meeting is Christian, and so Jews have no voice.”96 The second special parliamentary election in Galicia in 1898 was for a fifth curia (universal manhood suffrage) seat representing Jasło-SanokKrosno-Brzozów-Lisko-Dobromil-Staremiasto, an election district that sprawled across the western and central regions of the province. The seat was left vacant after the death on March 19 of the conservative parliamentary deputy Stanisław Wysocki. The election was set for June 23. The two main Polish peasant parties aggressively contested this opportunity to replace a conservative with a populist. Lawyer Włodzimierz Lewicki stood for the Stojałowski party. Jan Stapiński, an energetic peasant journalist, “a pure Mazurian” (here meaning authentic Polish-speaking and Roman Catholic peasant) and a leader of the People’s Party, competed with Lewicki for the favor of the Roman Catholic peasantry and small-town residents.The dynamic and youthful Stapiński (he was only thirty years old in 1898) would become the leading figure in the People’s Party in the early twentieth century. Stapiński enjoyed the backing of urban liberals and seemed poised to attract the town-centered Jewish swing-vote alienated by Stojałowski’s stridently anti-Jewish rhetoric.97 The parties held rallies, often in the halls and rooms of agricultural circles, throughout the election district.98 Stojałowski’s party distributed Jewish Secrets (offered at low cost) and other Catholic antisemitic /­asemitic tracts. Before thousands of peasants, Stojałowski and others railed against Jewish corruption of Christian morality through liquor and capitalism. They urged peasant crowds to defend themselves against the Jewish “leeches” who “suck the blood” of the Christian people.99 Dr. Michał D ­ anielak, a representative to parliament from Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party, directed his voters to support Lewicki. Lewicki’s victory, Danielak contended, would “bring victory over Judaism and the Jews’ lackeys.”100 On Easter Sunday, April 10, Stojałowski’s Pszczółka pronounced the upcoming election a symbol of the unity of all workers and peasants. The divisions among the peasantry he blamed on Stapiński’s People’s Party had to be overcome: “We are all Christians, followers and servants of Christ and his



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church—for this reason there should only be one people’s party—and that should be ‘Christian.’ . . . Long Live the Christian People’s Party!”101 The final edition of Wieniec published before ballots were cast addressed “Brother voters! Brothers! In this decisive moment of the elections, remember that we are Christians and that we have a duty when it comes to Christian affairs.” The paper deemed the politicians of the People’s Party serfs of their “Jewish Friends.” Wieniec warned its readership that “The Jewish kahals and rabbis are sending out the command throughout the villages to vote only for those peasants [serving as electors] who will cast their votes for Stapiński [candidate for the People’s Party].” The same edition printed a poem by Andrzej Mikrut that assured the readers of this Christian People’s Party paper that “Włodziemierz Lewicki is known to be a Christian,” but “Know this, that Stapiński has no religion.” Everyone should know “He sincerely defends the status of the Jews.” The election was a clear choice “between truth and lies; between the candidate of the Christian people, Dr. Włodziemierz Lewicki, and the candidate of [the Lemberg urban, liberal-democratic newspaper] Kurjer (Courier) and of the Jews, Stapiński.”102 Naprzód (Forward) the main social democratic newspaper in Galicia, summarized the Christian People’s Party’s campaign: “Instead of a program, [they] put forward the principle that whoever is with [Lewicki] is a Christian, everyone else is a Jew.”103 The People’s Party parried these attacks and implied that the Stojałow­ski party itself was in league with the Jews. After all, Lewicki, unlike the genuine peasant Stapiński, was a lawyer from a town. “Where are the majority of Jews if not in towns?”104 Christian People’s Party politicians and journalists invented stories that Stapiński regularly drank with Jews and had pledged to protect Jews if elected in return for payments. For their part Stapiński’s supporters accused Lewicki and his associate Danielak of being close friends with Jews and correspondents for the Dziennik Krakowski (Cracow Daily), a “purely Jewish” publication.105 As Michal Rzym, wójt and member of the Rzeszów district assembly, wrote in Kurjer Lwowski (Lwów Courier), the democratic-liberal paper close to the People’s Party: “Lewicki is unknown to the people, no one knows who he is.”106 Stapiński, “in whose chest beats the heart of a peasant” loved the common people, had an “iron character” and lives for the truth.107 He was “blood from blood, bone from bone” a brother of the peasants, and the best choice for both Poles and Ruthenians.108 Do not be fooled: “no lawyer or notary can defend peasant interests.”109

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Voting took place on June 23, a day that corresponded with the beginning of the most violent phase of the 1898 riots. In the first round of voting, both the Greek Catholic priest of Zagórze, who worked to attract the support of Greek Catholic Ukrainian speakers, and Stapiński received more votes than Lewicki. Stojałowski’s party encouraged its supporters to cast ballots for the Greek Catholic priest, deemed the “chief lover of Moscow” by Stapiński, in the second round. However, despite this effort Stapiński received the most votes and declared victory.110 The Jews, Stojałowski’s party

FIGURE 14.  Jan Stapiński, People’s Party leader and rival of Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party in the June 23, 1898 election. Image printed in the Peoples’ Party newspaper Przyjaciel Ludu, June 20, 1898.



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paper bitterly asserted, had purchased the votes of the Ruthenians with beer and cigars in order to ensure the triumph of their political stooge, Jan Stapiński.111 After the election, a defeated Lewicki took comfort in his “moral victory”: “as your candidate, not one Jewish vote was cast for me, no kahal promoted my candidacy, and no Jews bought votes for me.”112 For his part, Stapiński hoped the election campaign and outcome would mean the end of Stojałowski’s political success and the emergence of a unified peasant movement led by the more secular People’s Party: “That bastard Stojałowski impeded [our] work in some counties for a few years.”113 This upsurge in political activism in Galicia took place within the “dualtrack” framework of the Habsburg state, labeled by historian John Deak as “the defining feature of Austria’s administration and government in the constitutional era.”114 Law and administrative practice fleshed out this system from the 1860s on.115 In Galicia, as in the other provinces in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, nominally autonomous elected bodies— provincial, municipal, and village—shared responsibility with a governor appointed by Vienna. The Ministry of the Interior supervised the governors and their staffs as well as the district captains (German Bezirkshauptmann; Polish starosta). The district captains oversaw county-level administrative organs and reported to the governor. After 1867 the Galician administration was swiftly polonized, its employees drawn largely from the province’s educated Polish-speakers and its governors from Polish noble families. The administration remained responsible to the ministry in Vienna, however, and it was committed to the maintenance of law and order. The administration looked with suspicion on the agitation of the people’s tribunes seeking to mobilize potential voters behind radical political programs. .

.

.

The 1898 election campaigns were certainly not the first time Galician politicians used antisemitism as a political weapon. In the 1870s and early 1880s a handful of journalists, politicians, and artists influenced by new antisemitic movements in Germany and elsewhere, warned of alleged Jewish conspiracies and Talmudic religious practices. They seized the opportunity to stir up anti-Jewish sentiments during the 1881–82 pogroms in Russia, the 1882 Tisza-Eszlar ritual murder accusation and trial in Hungary as well as the Galician ritual murder accusation and subsequent series of trials against Mojżesz and Gittla Ritter of Lutcza that began in 1882 and lasted until the final dismissal of the case by the Vienna Supreme Court in 1886.116

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The 1898 events took place in very different circumstances however. The elections of 1897 and 1898 in Galicia were the first truly modern political campaigns in the history of the province. Even the poorest peasants’ votes for parliamentary candidates counted—if indirectly (voters in the fifth curia voted for electors) and diluted by a curial system that gave more weight to the ballots cast by the wealthy. Government penetration at the local level, the post-emancipation capitalist and cash economy, the expanding rail system, and advances in education were transforming the Galician countryside. Bewildering long-term changes and immediate economic crises threatened social stability. Beginning in the early 1890s, Catholic sermons and publications damning the Jews as the source of social dislocation bombarded western and central Galicia. From the mid-1890s on, new political parties and their partisan press outlets blamed economic stagnation on the Jews. Views linking anti-Jewish attitudes, skepticism toward the nobility, and political action were widespread in and around Nowy Sącz. Just after the 1897 parliamentary elections, in Nowy Sącz Mieszczanin (The Burgher), a paper that dubbed itself the organ of smaller towns and hamlets, warned of the “Jewification (zżydzenia) of Galicia.”117 The paper advised peasants and burghers always to vote for one of their own: “For the Stańczycy it is better to have a Jew in the [Polish] Club [in parliament] than a burgher or peasant. . . . Remember! The club does not serve Polish national interests in Vienna but only the interests of the szlachta.118 The fiercely fought 1898 campaigns pitted Stojałowski’s Christian populists against Stapiński’s peasant party and the social democrats. It should be no surprise that in 1898 politicians seeking the support of rural people set adrift by social dislocation and economic stagnation drew from the new Catholic antisemitism. The anti-Jewish riots of 1898 took place in this charged political context. The following two chapters bring us closer to events on the ground. Chapter 2 follows the path of the violence from a few relatively isolated incidents in February and March to the culmination of the attacks in the last week of June. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the participants and their actions during the many confrontations between Jews, Christians and representatives of state authority.

2 The Plunder Haven’t you beaten your Jews yet? Beat them because it is allowed. Take the road that leads to the market. Bring your scythe and slit their heads since you are allowed to beat them until they bleed. Kunegunda Lisowa, seventy-one years old, and a participant in the June 25, 1898, riot in Stary Sa˛cz.1 The clear light of the sun [on Sunday June 26, 1898] revealed a horrible picture of desolation. Warehouses and shops completely devastated, shattered glass covering the square, shelves and store equipment smashed, doors and windows shattered into splinters.2 Kurjer Lwowski correspondent writing the day after more than 3,000 townspeople rioted and plundered Jewish-owned shops and taverns in Stary Sa˛cz.

plagued the Habsburg Monarchy in the late nineteenth century, many of which included vicious attacks, rhetorical as well as physical, on Jews. Most well-known, perhaps, were the Czech-German street fights in Prague in the late 1890s.3 Some German-Czech battles in Moravia in the same period also turned against Jews. In the 1880s and again in the early 1900s, Croatian nationalists assaulted Jews as agents of “Magyarization” in Croatia-Slavonia.4 Galicia itself experienced several large-scale localized anti-Jewish attacks in the 1880s and 1890s.5 Two of the most important of these—the 1897 Easter attacks in C ­ hodorowie and the June 1897 “Mongolian orgy” of violence in Schodnica,6 took place in the eastern districts of Galicia.7 These involved mostly, but not exclusively, young male Polish-speaking Roman Catholics (referred to as Mazurians) from western Galicia. These men were, according to Dziennik Krakowski (Cracow Daily), “generally known for their hatred of Jews.”8 Thousands of these self-styled baraby traveled from rural areas in western Galicia to these boom towns in the east to work in mines, CASES OF COMMUNAL VIOLENCE

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in oil fields, on rail lines, and on river regulation projects.9 They lived in wretched conditions far from their homes and families. Hundreds of people participated in each of these events, which resulted in many injuries and at least two deaths in Schodnica, one a Jewish baby dropped by its mother who was being savagely beaten, the other a rioter killed by the gendarmes. These remained isolated incidents, however, concentrated in specific towns. They were perpetrated by people who had no roots in the local region. Anti-Jewish attacks did not spread into the surrounding communities and ended within a few days. A handful of incidents in the eastern districts of Galicia in 1898 had much in common with the Chodorowie and Schodnica attacks, and contemporaries commented on these similarities. Overall, however, the 1898 anti-Jewish riots present a sharp contrast to these earlier incidents. In 1898, anti-Jewish violence took place over many weeks and in hundreds of communities in rural western and central Galicia. Most of the perpetrators lived with their families within easy walking distance of the attacks in which they took part. The 1898 anti-Jewish attacks constituted the most widespread and sustained example of communal violence experienced in Austria-Hungary before World War I. As such, they posed a serious challenge to the image of the benevolent Habsburg state projected in myriad ways during the emperor’s jubilee year.10 This chapter traces the 1898 anti-Jewish attacks from Wieliczka in March to those that took place in the villages and countryside near Stary Sącz and Limanowa in late June just prior to the institution of a formal state of emergency in western Galicia.

Peasant Politics and Catholic Antisemitism: Wieliczka Wieliczka, a few kilometers southeast of Cracow, was the site of the incident which would later be considered the first of hundreds of violent attacks perpetrated by Polish-speaking Christians on their Jewish neighbors in Galicia in 1898.11 Wieliczka’s mine attracted landless peasants seeking employment in difficult times. Here Christian-Jewish social, economic, and cultural differences, Catholic anti-Jewish propaganda, local circumstances, and the new mass politics contributed to an outburst of violence. Jews made up about 16 percent of Wieliczka’s population (981 of 6,293) in 1900.12 Andrzej Szponder, a member of the inner circle of



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Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party, was the Wieliczka parish priest. ­Szponder had been elected to the Vienna Reichsrat in 1897 with some Jewish support, even though he was widely regarded as a more active and consistent propagator of antisemitism than Stojałowski himself.13 A leading political proponent of asemitism, Szponder laced his sermons with attacks on the Jews. He called for the complete separation of Christians from their Jewish neighbors and, eventually, the elimination of Jews from the Galician countryside altogether. Szponder spoke at many peasant political rallies in late 1897 and the first months of 1898. He touted Jewish Secrets to his flock as the key to exposing the evil plotting of the Jews. Jewish leaders in the Wieliczka area confronted local authorities in early March about Szponder and the potential danger of Mateusz Jeż’s pamphlet. The Jewish leaders wanted the state prosecutor to ban the brochure for provoking ethnic and religious hatred. News about the complaints from the Jewish community concerning Jewish Secrets and Szponder spread among his congregants, many of whom had, no doubt, listened to his anti-Jewish sermons and orations in praise of Jewish Secrets (even if many were functionally illiterate and could not read the pamphlet for themselves). By Friday evening, March 11, Jewish complaints about this anti­ semitic pamphlet had transformed into rumors that Jews were plotting to waylay Szponder and beat or kill him at the train station when he returned from Cracow. Riled up by these tales, scores of young salt mine workers met at Szponder’s church and proceeded to the Jewish prayer house in Wieliczka, where many Jews had gathered for Shabbat services. A crowd estimated at 300 strong by Die Welt (The World), the Vienna-based organ of the Zionist movement founded by Theodore Herzl, surrounded the synagogue. Some hurled rocks through the windows while Jewish worshipers hid behind benches and in a back room. Attackers yelled “Death to the Jews! Murder and destroy the leeches!”14 The “siege of the synagogue” and the “rock bombardment” lasted for 1.5 hours before district captain Szczerbiński and a few gendarmes arrived and dispersed the mob. The assailants then stormed through the streets of the town looking for Jews to beat up and Jewish-owned property to despoil.15 When Szponder returned unhurt from Cracow the next morning, Szczerbiński requested that the priest use his Sunday sermon to calm the populace. Szponder touched on his favorite themes at vespers in the parish church on March 13. He urged his followers to subscribe to the program of

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asemitism and avoid Jewish stores and taverns altogether. Such shunning would weaken the Jews’ power by undermining their usury and promotion of alcoholism. They should not however, Szponder preached, smash windows or thrash Jews with sticks.16 It soon became clear that Szponder’s parishioners had not processed the last part of his message. The congregants, consisting mostly of young day-laborers from the salt mine, streamed out of the church and armed themselves with sticks and spikes. Knowledgeable about the ethnic geography of Wieliczka, they rampaged through the town breaking the windows of some twenty homes inhabited by Jewish families. The rioters then headed to Klasno, a small and largely Jewish settlement to the southwest, today part of greater Wieliczka. Klasno’s bi-weekly market was taking place. As was often the case in rural Galicia, Jews ran most of the temporary stalls set up for buying and selling. The crowd, now swelled by the curious as well as by eager new participants, trashed Jewish businesses. Some Jews, including small children, were injured by rocks thrown into their faces and by flying shards of shattered glass. The riot ended only with the arrival of the handful of gendarmes stationed in the area.17 An official investigation, including interviews with Szponder himself, determined that the rumors of Jewish threats to the priest, first told by a journeyman shoemaker and others who shared a “religious fanaticism,” had no basis in reality.18 Before this investigation was completed and its findings made public, however, the Catholic and pro-Stojałowski press had already publicized their own truth: the Jews had conspired to harm Szponder. These papers interpreted the Wieliczka anti-Jewish violence as a justifiable if misguided defense against the Jews who “dominated” the innocent Christian population. Głos Narodu (Voice of the People), the most widely read newspaper in Cracow and its surroundings, informed its readers that Jewish plans to spy on Szponder had incited the perpetrators.19 Stojałowski’s popular rural paper Wieniec (The Wreath) printed a letter from a supporter, one Józef Windak, “your brother from the Wieliczka district.” Windak affirmed that “Father Szponder brought the ‘Jewish Secrets’ to the people, so the people would know what the Jews do to Catholics, and he passed the brochure around to the parishioners. When the Jews heard about it, they began to persecute and to plot against him. But the parishioners rushed against the Jews, and some of them began to beat up Jews in the streets and to break their windows.”20 The stories verifying the “truth” of a Jewish conspiracy to attack a



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priest and to protect Jewish secrets became part of the canon of rumors, innuendo, false charges, exaggerations, and distortions that rioters would disseminate, draw from, and recombine throughout the wave of rioting. This incident is telling in several ways. Anti-Jewish literature, like Jewish Secrets, produced and distributed by elements of the Catholic Church since the early 1890s and drawing on an international group of “scholars” and theologians claiming expertise on the “Jewish Question” had penetrated into the daily lives of the inhabitants of western Galicia’s villages and small towns like Wieliczka despite lingering illiteracy. Weekly sermons quoted the “facts” presented in this literature. In 1898, this Catholic antisemitism now formed the core of a specific political message delivered within the framework of the new mass politics and, in this case, by the person of Andrzej Szponder. Szponder was at once the town priest, a leading member of the Stojałowski party, and a representative to the distant Vienna parliament. Szponder was a link between rural communities, Galician and state-level politics, and the new populist Catholic antisemitism. While certainly true that neither Szponder nor Stojałowski advocated for physical attacks against Jews, the illiterate and barely literate followers of these politician-priests interpreted the employment of ever more virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric as approval or at least toleration of violent anti-Jewish actions undertaken in difficult times. Three weeks before Palm Sunday, a period in the Christian calendar leading up to Easter and often marred by increased anti-Jewish incitement, scores of people took out their frustration and rage on the synagogue and the market, two of the local symbols of Jewish power as defined by S­ zponder, Stojałowski, and Jeż: the synagogue, where Jews read from their secret books and became initiates of Talmudic immorality; the marketplace, where Jews sold goods at allegedly inflated prices to peasants unable to pay except by taking high-interest loans from Jewish moneylenders. Frustration at the rise of food prices was easily displaced onto local Jewish merchants at a time when priests were directing the attention of their congregants toward the Passion story. As would become clear as the attacks intensified in May and June, the rioters did not strictly adhere to the anti-Jewish programs laid out by the new political parties and by some Catholic priests. They translated the anti-Jewish messages into their local contexts: economic crisis, frustration, and resentment. The attackers lashed out physically for a limited time. Although the violence had significant ramifications in Galicia, in 1898 the mass of peasants did not join

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ongoing efforts by organized political movements to create an enduring economic infrastructure that would isolate the Jews. The gendarmes played a central role in restoring order in ­Wieliczka, as they would elsewhere in 1898. Larger municipalities in Galicia and other provinces maintained professional police forces, but in small communities the police were often thinly staffed, worked part time, and were ineffectual. To maintain order the Ministry of the Interior, the governor, and the district captains could call on the gendarmes (and did so in 1898). The gendarmerie was a militarized law enforcement institution, originally part of the army, and after 1898 under the authority of the Cisleithanian Ministry of National Defense (Ministerium für Landesverteidigung). Gendarmes underwent six months of training. They lived in barracks, dressed in army-style uniforms, patrolled local communities in twenty-four-hour shifts, and were subject to military discipline.21 According to Joseph Margoshes, a Jewish estate lessor, the gendarmes “were considered very capable, and it was largely thanks to them that calm and order prevailed in all of the provinces and that security of person and property was never disturbed” in Austria-Hungary.22 In times of emergency, as would be the case later in 1898, the provincial administration could also request the deployment of military units stationed in the province. The Wieliczka and Klasno events in mid-March were the most serious of several attacks on Jews and their property from late February through the first week in April. In Dobczyce, just a few kilometers south of Wieliczka, unknown youths assaulted a group of Jews on March 13. The attackers threw stones through windows and yelled “We will set things to right with you so that none of you remain here.” On the night of March 15–16, several Jewish homes were burned down in Ryczów, a village to the west of Cracow. Ryczów had already experienced anti-Jewish violence a few weeks earlier. On February 24, after the Jewish community had appealed to the district captain about threatening rumors, 15–20 Ryczów villagers broke all the windows of several Jewish homes with canes and rocks.23 On April 3, Palm Sunday, some 200 people gathered in Klasno. Again stones were thrown through windows of Jewish homes. One woman was struck in the face and injured.24 In response, the district captain in Wadowice immediately increased gendarme patrols in these towns. Later investigations suggested that the cause of the violence in Ryczów was personal animosity toward one Daniel Thaler, a private teacher of Judaism who was “hated in the village” owing to



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his “greed” and tendency toward “exaggeration” and was generally viewed as “ridiculous.” Supposedly, even his Jewish pupils made fun of him, and some of them had stoned his house in the past. The unfortunate teacher first turned to the village mayor, who was, “unfortunately a drunkard” and shirked his responsibilities. The local priest blamed other anti-Jewish attacks on the boisterous nature of the village youths and a general lack of oversight. Witnesses stressed that the burning down of Aron Elsner’s house was not connected to the other excesses but rather the work of persons from outside the village; no citizen of Ryczów, they averred, would have set fire to a Jew’s house that stood close by other homes that could easily also catch fire. Indeed, the investigation discovered that one of those responsible had fled to Russia. In the face of these facts, the district attorney closed the investigations in both Ryczów and Dobczyce and dismissed all charges against those arrested.25

Silencing Jewish Secrets The hostile disposition against the Jews has been affected by the brochure from Ks. M.J. Jewish Secrets is very widespread among the miners and rural people. Report on Important Events, Galician Governor’s Office, March 13, 189826

After the incidents in and near Wieliczka, no major violence took place in Galicia until the May 23–24 attacks in Przemyśl and the May 25–26 riot in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska discussed below. The Wieliczka events, however, received a great deal of media attention because of efforts by Jewish communities and the chief state prosecutor in Cracow to stop the distribution of Jewish Secrets, which they blamed for inflaming the emotions of the rural population against the Jews. Jews in Galicia and beyond became concerned that the Wieliczka violence might be just a prelude to a much broader wave of anti-Jewish actions in the Christian Holy Week and Corpus Christi season. Jews demanded more vigorous action from Jewish representatives to parliament. Siegmund Rosenzweig, the head of the Jewish community of Wieliczka and a man who had been recognized by the emperor for his service to the state, wrote a letter to Die Welt.27 Stojałowski, Rosenzweig charged, was trying to hide his reconciliation with the Catholic Church and the conservatives by attacking the Jews; Szponder and others preached hatred

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from the altar and distributed brochures filled with lies, including a fastspreading rumor that Jews were poisoning foodstuffs to kill Christians. Against the background of the Dreyfus Affair in France, an upswing in ritual murder accusations, the rising Christian Social movement in Vienna, and anti-Jewish Catholic and electoral agitation in Galicia, Rosenzweig was hardly alone in fearing the possibility of a rash of anti-Jewish attacks.28 The Galician provincial administration responded very actively to the Wieliczka events. Already on March 12, the district captain of ­Wieliczka called for military support. The military command deployed half of a cavalry unit to Wieliczka and strengthened the gendarmerie. Wieliczka’s mayor put up posters on March 14 threatening young people with arrest if they were found in the streets after 6:00 pm.29 Dr. Władysław Wędkiewicz, the chief state prosecutor in Cracow, immediately opened a formal investigation. He determined that Jewish Secrets had in fact been disseminated extensively just prior to the violence in both Wieliczka and Dobczyce.30 On March 22, just days after the Wieliczka events, Wędkiewicz moved to ban the circulation of Jewish Secrets. The Fundamental Laws of 1867 guaranteed freedom of the press; however, with court approval publications determined by the state prosecutor to break the law could be taken out of circulation. In this case, the Provincial and Press Court in Cracow ruled that Jewish Secrets violated paragraph 302 of the criminal code, which prohibited incitement against a nationality or religious group or the incitement of one class against a second.31 The antisemitic press denounced this effort to halt the pamphlet’s warnings about the “moral gangrene and physical destruction” wrought by Jews, and interpreted the actions of the Cracow prosecutor as proof of Jewish power. According to Prawda (Truth), Jeż’s pamphlet only told the truth and did not encourage “violent assaults or the beating of Jews.” The people waited with “impatience” for “our representatives” to the Vienna parliament to act.32 Dziennik Polski (Polish Daily) also pressed Stojałowski and the other Christian People’s Party representatives in Vienna to lobby for the reversal of the ban.33 Another letter to brother readers published in Wieniec summarized the banned brochure for those no longer able to purchase it. Paraphrasing,  the author conceded that the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew bible were good, but the nefarious Talmud classified Christians as animals in human form and taught Jews to cheat and kill Christians. He demanded that village mayors (wójtowie) fine Christians caught making purchases in



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Jewish shops or drinking in Jewish taprooms. Such action would threaten the Jews’ livelihood and lead to their disappearance from the countryside within a year.34 Stanisław Stojałowski himself had a troubled relationship with Catholic leaders and the church hierarchy in Cracow. They had pushed repeatedly for Stojałowski’s arrest and had succeeded in convincing the pope to excommunicate him. Still, it is clear from his Christian People’s Party’s circulation of Jewish Secrets and the many positive references to it in his newspapers that the anti-Jewish message his movement brought to rural communities in western and central Galicia in 1897–1898 was essentially the same.35 A second printing of 10,000 copies of Jewish Secrets was published on March 11, and many copies had already been sold and passed from hand to hand before the ban on its circulation took effect. The Jewish leadership of the town of Andrychów complained to the Austrian-Israelite Union in Vienna, the central defense organization of Habsburg Jewry, in late April about the continued dissemination of the pamphlet despite the prosecutor’s ruling. This group then pressed Vienna’s Ministry of Culture and Education to take action. The ministry looked to the state prosecutor in Cracow to determine why the ban on the brochure, which among other things had apparently been distributed widely to school children by religious teachers, had been so ineffective.36 In the meantime, Father Mateusz Jeż, the author of Jewish Secrets, appeared before the press tribunal in Cracow on April 16 to challenge the ban on the second edition. Catholic clergy and laity as well as many Jews packed the courtroom, clearly indicating the perceived influence of the leaflet. Jeż argued that as required he had set the first edition before the state prosecutor for review. There had been no objection and the pamphlet had been approved for publication. Jeż pointed out that he based the brochure on publications by Fr. Josef Deckert, Teofil Merunowicz, and others, that had never been banned. Jeż brought examples and showed them to the court. Jewish Secrets drew from these previously approved sources and had itself been officially deemed acceptable for public consumption. Therefore, Jeż argued, his pamphlet could not now be judged to foster ethnic hatred. Jewish Secrets, he insisted, focused on economic injustice not religious or national conflicts. Instead, the authorities should remove the Talmud and other Hebrew and Yiddish works from circulation.37 “Semitism oppresses our entire national, social, and political life. This question cannot be pushed aside by confiscations, and cannot be papered over with silence; one must

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regulate this issue in legal ways, as this has for the most part already been done in Vienna.”38 Assistant State Prosecutor Kazimierz Czyszczan countered that from the first page to the last Jeż’s brochure was nothing more than a sustained attack on the Jews. It labeled Jews the “plague of humanity” and called for eliminating them with “fire and brimstone.” The three-judge panel accepted most of Jeż’s arguments and lifted the confiscation of the brochure as a whole. The presiding judge, Vice President of the Provincial Criminal Court Julian Morelowski, noted that it only advocated antisemitic consciousness (Gesinnung) and a legal defense against “Semitism,” but did not call for anti-Jewish attacks. Nonetheless, the judges ordered all copies returned to the publisher who was then required to eliminate five sections of the pamphlet that had not previously appeared in Prawda. The court ruled that these additional sections could inspire the uneducated to take violent action.39 Both sides appealed. In early June the Higher Provincial Court in Cracow reinstated the ban on the entire pamphlet, but this ruling was hardly an unambiguous victory for the prosecutor. The court acknowledged that the pamphlet only presented “repeated facts or statements previously published in print” and that relaying this information “was not in and of itself ” punishable by law. Still, by bringing these anti-Jewish quotations and arguments together in one place, Jeż portrayed “Jews as a dangerous people” in their majority and as the implacable enemies of Christians. This justified the confiscation of the pamphlet. In effect the appeals court banned Jewish Secrets in the interest of maintaining calm while appearing to verify the validity of its anti-Jewish charges—charges echoed over and over in speeches by peasant politicians and in the pages of the antisemitic press.40

Przemys´l In the weeks that followed the Wieliczka and Klasno incidents and coinciding with the proceedings surrounding Jewish Secrets, Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party continued holding political meetings and publishing anti-Jewish articles, editorials, and letters to “brother” readers by peasant contributors. In the context of the increasingly strident tone of peasant politics, intensifying anti-Jewish attacks in the Catholic press, and the ongoing economic crisis heightened by the previous year’s poor harvest, a demonstration by unemployed construction laborers for food and jobs in



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Przemyśl, transformed into a riot aimed at Jewish bakers, merchants, and townspeople. Beginning in the 1870s, Austria-Hungary expanded military installations in Przemyśl, making this city the site one of the largest and strongest fortresses in either half of the monarchy. In 1898, more than 8,000 soldiers were based in this rapidly growing city located in the geographic center of Galicia (defined, however, as within eastern Galicia’s judicial jurisdiction).41 Military projects had attracted large numbers of low-skilled construction workers to Przemyśl. Merchants and speculators followed. They invested substantially in what they saw as a boom town. When the military construction projects were completed, however, the investment bubble burst. With no construction projects “on a larger scale” in the second half of May, the authorities viewed the usual flow of people seeking work in the city to be a threat to law and order.42 “The proletariat found no work; in the streets and alleys hunger was lurking,” one newspaper reported.43 Violence began around 5:00 am on May 23 in one of the main streets. The military police reported that “a mass of unemployed workers supposedly motivated by hunger” attacked an “unknown Israelite from the surrounding area.” They cut open his sack of bread with a knife and stole its contents. In front of city hall in response to the cries of the crowd for bread and work, the city magistrate began handing out loaves of bread and offered to hire some of the workers. Early in the morning of May 24 some 600 workers plundered the bread wagon of the Jewish baker Izak Kleinhaus and assailed other Jews. The military police broke up the crowd. After negotiating an agreement with local social democratic leaders, the mayor again offered to hire dozens of unemployed laborers to work in the city parks. Even so, the afternoon was marked by attacks by hundreds of workers on Jewish homes and businesses. At about the same time, a large group of women confronted the baker, Schmuel Bittner, and his wife Chaja and stole twenty loaves of bread from Bittner’s wagon. Altogether, the military police arrested twenty people. Fifteen were eventually brought to trial.44 The Przemyśl events differed in several ways from most of the antiJewish attacks that would follow.45 First, in Przemyśl the perpetrators were unemployed construction workers with some connection to social democracy; elsewhere attackers were most often agricultural laborers, peasant farmers, and small-town Roman Catholic shopkeepers whose votes new populist peasant parties endeavored to attract. The military police cited

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hunger as a central factor in the attacks. The state prosecutor, however, maintained that the rioting in Przemyśl arose less from the economic crisis, lack of employment, or specifically anti-Jewish sentiments and more from “the agitation of the Social Democratic Party.” The Galician governor’s office blamed Siła i Brüderlichkeit (Strength and Brotherhood), the local social democratic club, for organizing and inspiring the workers to demonstrate and turn to violence.46­ Whether this was true or not, two leaders from the social democratic club tried to calm the crowds, the only such case reported in 1898. The social­ist leaders also represented those in the streets in negotiations over work and bread with the authorities. As in the 1897 incidents in Chodorowie and Schodnica, here the perpetrators were young itinerant laborers. Violence did not spread out from Przemyśl to nearby villages as was the case in most of the other town-centered anti-Jewish riots in 1898. Five of the fifteen later tried for participation in the May 23 and 24 events in Przemyśl were Greek Catholics. Very few Greek Catholics took part in other 1898 incidents aside from those that occurred farther east in July after the major waves of rioting in central and western Galicia had quieted down. The final section of Chapter 3 will return to the question of Ruthenian participation in the anti-Jewish riots. Despite these significant divergences, those prosecuted for participation in the Przemyśl riot were included in the government lists of persons later tried and sentenced for anti-Jewish disturbances in 1898.47 The events in this military town also influenced what would follow. The fact that rioting against Jews could be sustained for hours in a town in which soldiers outnumbered civilians three to one and that violence could occur “before the eyes of the armed authorities” begged an explanation.48 Under the circumstances, widely-disseminated rumors that the authorities—even the emperor himself—supported or at least tolerated such attacks swiftly gained credence. For the Österreichische Wochenschrift (Austrian Weekly), the violence in Przemyśl, like that elsewhere, arose directly from the efforts by the dominant conservative Polish nobles to turn anger at their own ruthless exploitation of the town and rural proletariat onto the Jews. This Vienna Jewish journal argued that the continuous anti-Jewish propaganda in publications financed by the nobility had incited ignorant peasants and workers against the Jews.49 For Echo Przemyskie (Przemyśl Echo), a fiercely antisemitic Catholic paper in Przemyśl, the Jews represented both the abuses of capitalism and the irreligion of socialism. The desperate workers, despite



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their adherence to social democracy, recognized “justice” and had lashed out at the true source of their oppression.50

Kalwaria Zebrzydowska: National Pilgrimage and Urban Riot Mass anti-Jewish attacks took place in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska on May 25 and 26. Five weeks of nearly uninterrupted violence followed. The authorities and contemporary observers often referred to Kalwaria as the real beginning of the 1898 anti-Jewish riots. Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, an important Catholic pilgrimage town west of Cracow, is the location of a seventeenth-century church and monastery housing a supposedly miraculous portrait of Mary and a series of chapels marking important moments in the Passion story. Near the end of May, a celebration of the 100th birthday of Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish romantic poet, drew hundreds of peasants to Kalwaria. Committees of Polish speakers organized festivities in towns throughout Galicia.51 In synagogues and Roman Catholic churches, rabbis and priests spoke of Mickiewicz’s legacy. Jewish leaders highlighted Mickiewicz’s expansive vision of the Polish nation, recognizing the diversity of the peoples who inhabited the P ­ olish-Lithuanian state as a source of strength. For M ­ ickiewicz, Jews were “the older brothers” of the Poles. Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz’s 1834 masterpiece, opened with the cry “Lithuania! My Fatherland!” and featured the patriotic Jankiel, a Jewish tavern keeper.52 Der Israelit (The Israelite), the Lemberg Jewish bimonthly which, by the 1890s, exhorted its readership (in German) to identify with the Polish nation, celebrated Mickiewicz: “Adam Mickiewicz was the nation, he alone inspired an entire civilized epoch. .  .  . In him and through him the Polish people climbed to the heights of national consciousness and glory despite the partitions . . . in times of emergency . . . his light counters jealousy, party politics, racial hatred, and religious conflict. . . . We yearn to be Poles, just as our teacher and master Adam Mickiewicz desired and just as he taught us.”53 The editors of Der Israelit and others who hoped to overcome the cultural divide between Jews and Poles sharing the physical space of partitioned Poland could have imagined few moments more promising. The 1898 Mickiewicz celebrations might have contributed to a positive collective memory that included other evidence of Polish-Jewish mutual under­ standing and acceptance. One might point to the solidarity, however

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fleeting, during the 1863 uprising in the Russian partition or Jewish attendance in Polish-language schools. 54 But the story of the Mickiewicz celebrations does not end here. On May 24, even as events turned violent in Przemyśl, residents of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska put the finishing touches on preparations for two days of festivities. On May 25, encouraged by advertisements in rural publications and posters in village centers, hundreds of peasants from the surrounding area came to town. After strolling through the streets during the city illumination and joining in a torchlight parade, revelers threw rocks at Jewish-owned houses, shattering dozens of windows and seriously wounding at least one Jewish man. The Mickiewicz celebrations the following day commenced with a morning Mass and the unveiling of a plaque in honor of the poet. That evening more than a thousand people gathered in the town center. Cries of “Hurrah, boys! Get the Jews!” rang out as the clock tower struck eight. The crowd then divided into three groups and proceeded to break the windows of every Jewish home in the town center and to ransack Jewish businesses. Eight gendarmes, two local policemen, and thirty members of the fire department strove to restore order. At 11:30 pm the handful of gendarmes fired on the mob, wounding several people and killing one, Michał Balik, a thirty-eight-year-old peasant and father of three from Strzyżów. At least 1,000 people participated.55 According to the Dziennik Polski, a very trustworthy witness attested that the cause was “the provocative behavior of the Jews.”56 People in the surrounding villages, many of whom had been present during the riot in Kalwaria, expressed anger that the gendarmes sided with the Jews.57 As Prawda would interpret events to its readership, “On the day of the Mickiewicz celebrations, Christian blood was shed in order to safeguard the Jews.”58 News about the riot and the deadly confrontation between the gendarmes and the crowd traveled with peasants along the train lines and roads as they returned home. The following days saw many small-scale attacks on Jews and Jewish property, much of it undertaken by people who had been in Kalwaria or heard about the violence and Balik’s death. In late May, incidents took place in Brody (Kalwaria district), Jastrzębia, K ­ rzywaczka, and Sułkowice (Myślenice district) and in early June in Skawina and Zator, among others.59 Perhaps the most serious of these events took place in Radziszów on June 4 and 5. In this small town, approximately halfway between Kalwaria and Cracow, several Jewish homes were laid waste by



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mobs of peasant attackers. The gendarme who first saw the damage there when walking home early on the morning of June 5 noted that many rocks “the size of human heads” littered the interior of a small prayer house. A plundered taproom resembled the aftermath of a “Tatar” attack.60 On June 8, the district captain of nearby Biała heard rumors of pending attacks against Jews in Kęty and Oświęcim (Auschwitz). He advised rabbis to beg Jews to close their shops on Corpus Christi and to avoid showing themselves in public during the religious processions in order not to provoke the Catholic population.61 News about the riot and Christian casualties in Kalwaria traveled swiftly to eastern Galicia, including to the town of Tłuste. In the early eighteenth century Tłuste was home to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. In 1898, Polish speakers (Mazury) with close ties to village life labored to construct the new Czortków-Zaleszczyki rail line. In Tłuste, price rises on bread and meat had increased tensions between buyers and sellers in local markets. On May 25, reports reached the district captain in Zalesczyki and the Galician administration in Lemberg that rail workers planned to plunder the Jewish population. The laborers openly threatened a repeat of the 1897 anti-Jewish attacks in Chodorowie. Violent confrontations took place on May 27 and 28, including a riot of more than 500 rail workers and locals against the Jewish population. The windows of the synagogue, several hotels, and the Baron Hirsch School, one of a network of elementary, technical, and agricultural schools founded by the Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Galicia, were shattered. The gendarmes brought an end to the attacks by firing on the rioters. They killed at least one and wounded several others.62 As had been the case in Przemyśl, the violence did not spread into the surrounding countryside. Reports differ on the immediate cause of the riot in Tłuste. ­Dziennik Polski maintained that it began when Jews exiting a synagogue beat up drunken rail workers who had verbally abused them. The Zionist paper Die Welt described the confrontation as one more carefully planned and reflective of the tensions arising from the arrival of the railroad connecting this formerly isolated region with the “world of culture.” “It is symptomatic that this cultural work was inaugurated with Jew-baiting ( J­udenhetze).” The local administration in Tłuste informed the Ministry of the Interior that tensions had long existed between local Jewish merchants and the rail workers, and that the violence erupted spontaneously after Jews destroyed a bowling alley used by the workers.63

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The Blood of the Martyrs: The Jasło District While violent incidents took place in many locations in western Galicia and a smaller number in the eastern districts, the most intense wave of attacks on Jews in the second and third weeks of June occurred around Jasło. Jasło itself, which counted 6,571 inhabitants in 1900, 1,524 of whom were recorded as Jews on the census, was one of the larger towns in the election district contested by Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party and Stapiński’s People’s Party.64 Incidents in the area began on the night of June 9–10 in Kołaczyce, a village about northwest of Jasło along the winding Wisłoka river. Just a few weeks earlier, on May 19, Kołaczyce had hosted a political meeting headlined by Stojałowski and other leaders of the Christian People’s Party and attended by approximately 2,000 people. As usual, the series of speakers denounced their rivals in the People’s Party as tools of the Jews. Peasant leader Jan Chmieł insisted that “as Christians, we must defend ourselves against Jewish exploitation.”65 This assembly was just one of dozens held in the area in the run-up to the June 23 election. On June 9, people from surrounding hamlets came to Kołaczyce to mark Corpus Christi, a Catholic feast day celebrating the Host, an object often associated with alleged Jewish attacks on Jesus, Christians, and Christianity.66 Jews in Kołaczyce telegraphed to Jasło on June 9 to request protection after two journeymen potters were overheard gossiping about upcoming anti-Jewish attacks. Gendarmes determined the two craftsmen themselves had in fact been agitating for anti-Jewish attacks and placed them under arrest. Newspaper accounts and internal communications from the Jasło district captain to the governor’s office in Lemberg agreed that some Jews clapped and cheered as the arrested men were dragged out of town. This “provocative display” supposedly infuriated Christians within earshot. They then responded by damaging Jewish homes, and sacking a taproom. Reportedly, the raiders stole everything.67 The gendarmes fired on the crowd but no one was injured. The Kołaczyce Jews fled to Jasło. Some who had taken their children and possessions away from Kołaczyce were caught, dragged from their wagons, beaten, and robbed by gangs of peasants.68 Stories about the attack in Kołaczyce as well as the fantasy that Jews had poisoned wells thereby killing people and livestock swiftly reached small towns and villages in the neighborhood. The rural press printed ar-



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ticles and letters about the “provocative” and “arrogant” Jews of Kołaczyce. Scores of attacks on Jewish taverns, homes, and individuals took place around Jasło in the days that followed. Several taprooms were burned to the ground; assailants ransacked and plundered many others.69 The district captain informed the governor’s office of the arrival of 140 soldiers to restore order as well as his efforts to create a citizen’s guard. He also maintained that the Jews themselves, with their “ostentatious” displays of fear, were to blame for the continued unrest: “the demands of the local Jews were so ludicrous and so exaggerated that managing them is impossible.”70 On June 13, crowds of peasants looted and burned down a distillery and a mead brewery in Ulaszowice, a settlement just a few hundred steps north of Jasło across the Jasiołka river. The series of attacks began in a Jewish-administered taproom in Kowalowy, some five kilometers north. A group of men under the leadership of one Jan Jawor pushed into the saloon. They refused to pay for vodka, broke bottles and glasses, stormed into the attached apartment, and from there headed off to Izrael Löw’s tavern in nearby Ulaszowice to the south. A few drunken customers of Löw’s, including Florian Mroczkowski, a thirty-eight-year-old father of four and clerk from Jasło, and several “gypsies,” one of whom had served a twenty-year sentence for murder, were discussing the recent anti-Jewish events in Kołaczyce and their own eagerness to engage in similar attacks when Jawor’s group entered. Together, Mroczkowski’s and Jawor’s groups soon departed for Jakób Frant’s compound, which included the distillery, a small shop, and a facility for producing mead. The crowd broke into the dark distillery. Someone lit a match; another smashed bottles of spirits. A fire ignited. Outside, the crowd caught Frant and his family fleeing, threw Frant to the ground, and beat him.71 A correspondent for the liberal-democratic Cracow Nowa Reforma was on the scene and went to the bridge over the Jasiołka river. He described the huge conflagration at the distillery that lit up the sky. Townspeople watched the flames from the bridge, less than 200 meters from the fire, and saw some 200 people surround the distillery and brewery. They broke windows, looted the small shop located next to the burning facility, and beat up Jews. The district captain, soldiers, a hastily organized citizen guard, and a group of twenty-four armed members of the local hunting club threatened to shoot to kill, and prevented rioters from crossing the river and entering Jasło.72 The Jasło fire department could not get through the crowd. Frant’s buildings burned to the ground. Two boilers were still

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smoldering more than twenty-four hours after the attack.73 Kurjer Lwowski informed its readers that the rioters “consisted of adherents of Stojałowski (Stojałowczyków) from the Jasło and Kołaczyce areas.”74 In a letter to the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Jakób Frant wrote that “I was not even able to save the Torah scrolls from the flames. . . . Within a few blinks of the eye I became a beggar.” He estimated that the damage to his property exceeded 60,000 gulden.75 A correspondent sent in a series of articles from the towns hit by anti-Jewish attacks to the Vienna Jewish journal, the Österreichische Wochenschrift. This journalist spoke with Frant just days after the destruction of his livelihood: “An elderly Jew with the beard of a venerable patriarch and long side-locks stands before us. His features were angry, but unbroken courage flashed from his eyes.”76 Frant vowed that he would find some means of supporting his seven children. On the same night that Frant lost his distillery, bands of plunderers raged through the countryside, having been blocked from entering Jasło itself. Attacks continued for the next few days in nearby towns and villages. In Dębowiec, just south of Jasło, gendarmes fired on the plunderers. One peasant rioter was killed by gendarmes in Świerchowa, between Dębowiec and Żmigród. A group of more than 400 peasants destroyed a tavern in Lipinki and then raided Jewish stores in Biecz, a few kilometers to the north. Gendarmes stationed in the neighboring Gorlice district patrolled the borders with Jasło to keep the violence from spilling over and disrupting oil and paraffin production.77 In Krosno gendarmes and citizens guards prevented rioters from plundering the town, but many succeeded in their attacks on Jews and Jewish property in other villages. Hundreds of soldiers and gendarmes were deployed to the area in an effort to suppress the violence. 78 By June 15 more than thirty taverns around Jasło had been attacked. Most of them were completely trashed and some had been burned to the ground.79 The district captain of Krosno contended that Stojałowski’s election agitation had caused the violence. This Habsburg official specifically blamed the anti-Jewish sentiment on the accusations put forward by Stojałowski and other leaders of his party at rallies before thousands of peasants that the People’s Party was in the pay of the Jews.80 The single deadliest event of the 1898 Galician riots occurred on June 16. Kurjer Lwowski, the democratic Lemberg paper supportive of Stapiński’s People’s Party, immediately dubbed this incident “Bloody Vespers in ­Frysztak.”81 Frysztak is a small town just fifteen kilometers northeast of Jasło.



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Jews constituted more than 70 percent of its approximately 1,500 inhabitants.82 Every second Thursday, Frysztak hosted a regular market that served the surrounding region. Jews owned or operated most of the permanent stores and temporary market booths set up on the main street. Such was the situation on June 16, 1898. Hearsay about the rampage at Ulaszowice and in nearby towns coursed through the region even as Jews from the Kołaczyce area flocked to Frysztak for protection. On June 14, Abraham Rössler, the deputy head of the community of Frysztak and the leader of the Jewish congregation in the small town, approached Johann Winiarski, district captain of the Strzyżów political district, which included Frysztak. Winiarski launched an investigation into Rössler’s concerns that peasants planned to attack Jews at the fair scheduled for June 16. He confirmed that peasants were recounting tales about governmental permission allegedly conveyed by Stojałowski to the people of Kołaczyce for assaulting and robbing Jews (these and other rumors are discussed in Chapter 3). Winiarski increased the number of gendarmes and ordered them to patrol the town the following day. On the morning of June 16, Winiarski himself arrived in F ­ rysztak on an early train from Strzyżów. He proceeded to the court building, where he conferred with clergy and local authorities, including representatives

FIGURE 15.  Frysztak’s main market street around 1900. Postcard courtesy of Tomasz Okoniewski.

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from surrounding communities. He petitioned them all to work together to maintain calm and appealed to the Jewish leadership to prevent Jews from provoking the peasants.83 In the early afternoon townspeople and visitors to the market in Frysztak crowded into Naftali Löw’s tavern and shop. Peasants, many from the hamlet of Huta Gogołówska, began smashing glasses and bottles. With difficulty the gendarmerie cleared the pub of troublemakers, but the crisis did not end. Some of those evicted from the tavern yelled “Let’s go beat up the Jews.” Avowing that official permission had been granted for antiJewish attacks, they ransacked Löw’s store. Hundreds raced through the streets, smashing windows and breaking into Jewish-owned stores, helping themselves to vodka and other items. All the market stalls were plundered. Again and again, six gendarmes would disperse the crowd, estimated at more than 2,000, a number larger than Frysztak’s population, only to see the crowd gather again a few streets away. In a dramatic confrontation, cane-wielding rioters faced the outnumbered and panicking gendarmes. One gendarme was slashed in the left hand by a scythe. A dozen or so shots were fired; six people were killed, including elderly residents who happened to be exiting a nearby church. Six others died from gunshot wounds in the days following.84 Press reports declared that “among the fallen not one was at fault.”85 The state prosecutor in Jasło agreed: “This incident made an embarrassing impression on the population, since most of those killed had, beyond any doubt, taken no part in the excesses and were family fathers.”86 Tales about the Frysztak events traveled rapidly. Already on the evening of the sixteenth, just a few hours after the events in Frysztak, peasants in Wielopola spoke of bands of rioters supposedly making their way to the area to give the Jews of their village similar treatment. Wielopola had no telegraph and the closest train stations were ten kilometers distant. The Jewish population panicked. The parish priest tried to calm his parishioners as well as the Jews. A group of Jews went to Ropczyce and pleaded with the district captain to provide protection. The official believed the Jews were exaggerating, however, and he insisted that the Jewish community cover the costs for any added security.87 Józef Konarski of Gogołów and others familiar with the events in Frysztak tried to rouse the population in the countryside against the Jews, crying “Hurrah peasants! The bill comes due today!” In response hundreds set upon Jewish settlements, taprooms, shops, distilleries, and homes



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in Huta Gogołówska, Łęki, Pietrusza Wola, Zagórza, Pielgrzymka near Żmigród, and other villages surrounding Jasło and Strzyżów.88 Peasants, rail workers, and townspeople heard about these incidents, and everywhere people insisted that events proved the rumors to be true: “it was permitted to beat and plunder Jews for fourteen days without penalty.”89 The final tally around Jasło included at least twenty-four taprooms plundered and damaged, four taverns demolished, four Jewish homes decimated and many more looted, and Frant’s distillery burned to the ground. The gendarmes arrested more than 330 people in this area within a week of the confrontation in Frysztak.90 Leon Piniński, the newly appointed governor of Galicia, visited Jasło in the wake of the carnage. He called for an increase in gendarme and military deployments to the district. He ordered all district captains to create local voluntary citizens’ guards.91 Soon the region reportedly looked like a war zone, with troops at every train station and public building in the area. In Frysztak and surrounding villages hundreds of foot soldiers patrolled the streets. “An effective state of emergency rules over us!”92

Spinning out of Control: Nowy Sa˛cz, Stary Sa˛cz, Limanowa, Brzesko Now we have cleaned up with the Jews, next we will deal with the lords, and in the end we will take care of the Freemasons. Wojciech Mucha, thirty-six-year-old peasant and father of four, participant in the June 26 attack in Kamienica.93 For countless Jewish children in Galicia the unforgettable visions of horror from the Sanok-Jasło districts will remain for their entire lives a deeply disturbing impression from childhood. Die Welt, June 24, 1898, 2.

The security measures taken by the provincial government, local authorities, and the military did seem to calm the situation in the Jasło area; however, the anti-Jewish riots would soon culminate in a chaotic carnival of violence in the Nowy Sącz, Limanowa, and Brzesko triangle in the last days of June. The first of scores of connected incidents erupted on the night of June 22–23 in Kamionka Wielka, a village to the southeast of Nowy Sącz. Several participants later said that on June 19 Piotr Rumin, a village official

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(podwójci) in Kamionka Mała, told several peasants that he had received an authorization permitting the beating of Jews. The origin of this story may have been the arrival of Governor Piniński’s missive calling on local authorities to step up security measures. In any case, on June 22, at 10:00 pm, those informed by Rumin about pending attacks along with others from Kamionka Mała and neighboring Jannica walked to Kamionka Wielka. There they plundered taverns and stores owned by Jews. Those leading the group told others that the emperor had allowed the robbing of Jews. The attacks continued until three in the morning.94 The looting in Kamionka Wielka did not lead to a cancelation of the popular monthly fair in nearby Zbyszyce, some ten kilometers north along the Dunajec river from Nowy Sącz.95 On Thursday morning, June 23, just hours after the events in Kamionka Wielka, Jewish merchants from Nowy Sącz arrived at the market in Zbyszyce with bread, flowers, silks, linens, and other goods, to sell. By 10:30 the market square was full of people. “In the blink of an eye,” a dispute between a Jewish seller and peasant buyer transformed the commercial center into the scene of a mass anti-Jewish attack.96 Hundreds of people took part.97 Jews were thrashed with sticks. At least one man, Markus Epstein, was seriously injured by a blow to the head. By the time a handful of gendarmes arrived an hour later, all Jewish merchants’ booths had been completely plundered.98 The military refrained from firing on the attackers although “one peasant was accidentally wounded in the eye with a bayonet in such a way that he immediately expired.”99 The subsequent investigation turned up many of the stolen goods in the houses, barns, and haystacks of the rural population. When questioned, some responded that they had not participated in any violence but had simply picked up what seemed to be abandoned items in the streets, ditches, and fields. Those who knew about the sacking of the market in Zbyszyce carried knowledge of the events with them as they returned to surrounding villages. That night and the next day Jewish homes and village shops were looted.100 One group of rioters targeted the Jews of Podole and Posadowa. Hearing talk that they would be next, Jews in these villages hid their valuables and fled. Not all were able to leave in time, however. For example, mobs attacked the combined home, taproom, and small shop of Abraham Rückel in Podole on the night of the twenty-third. The Rückel family ran to the fields. Emilia Rückel was hit in the face by a rock. When son Mojszez tried to help her, he was badly beaten. The mob continued on to



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Posadowa, where they ransacked the house of Marguli Rücklowej, who ran a taproom and traded in textiles, spices, and other goods.101 On Friday morning, June 24, a group approached the house of Hersch Hochberg, a farmer in Posadowa. There, witnesses would later testify, riot leader Antoni Kozik, a thirty-seven-year-old father of four, struck Hochberg multiple times on the head and back with a staff, tore his beard, and choked him, rendering him unable to work for more than two weeks. In the same attack, Józef Kozik struck Chaja Rückel on the head with a stick. The victims recognized their assailants. Subsequent investigations discovered many of the stolen goods hidden among crops, strewn about fields, and littering forests surrounding the villages. One participant later told authorities that “someone riding a bicycle had told them it was permitted to rob Jews and passed out some pamphlet.”102 Intervention of the gendarmes and military patrols halted the attacks in Podole and Posadowa, but groups of peasant rioters soon reconstituted, determined to set upon Jews in nearby villages. When police and gendarmes prevented a mob from plundering a tavern in Paleśnica, Antoni Kozik, now leading more than fifty ruffians, declared that “if you, sir, do not allow us today, we will come tomorrow or a week from now or even one or two months from now, and we will not forgive the Jews of Paleśnica, because it is permitted to rob the Jews.”103 In another typical incident, after the violence in Zbyszyce and the raids in Podole and Posadowa, Józef Feserko and Nicefor Jeż, father of four and previously convicted of theft and public drunkenness, entered Matylda Führer’s tavern in Gródek, a village on the Dunajec river. They told her about the violence elsewhere and swore to Führer that it was permissible to rob Jews. They demanded vodka if she did not want her bar to be sacked. Führer did serve the vodka, not out of kindness, but only to avoid an incident. Earlier, on June 24, Nowy Sącz, the largest town in the region, had been the site of a mass riot. Hearsay about anti-Jewish attacks around Jasło as well as the Zbyszyce incident on the previous day led to increased tensions in Nowy Sącz in advance of the regular Friday market. The event that set off the violence was an early morning dispute between a Jewish merchant and a peasant over a grain sale. The argument drew attention, and peasants and Jews joined the fray. A combined force of police and the fire brigade failed to disperse the crowd. Things turned violent, and all the

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FIGURE 16.  Nowy Sącz town hall and square. This was the location of the temporary stalls set up by Jewish merchants on market day. The Nowy Sącz riot began here. Photograph by author, 2010. After Cracow’s Rynek Główny, this was the second largest market square in the lands of partitioned Poland.

stalls in the market were stripped of goods. Nineteen Jews and twenty-two peasants were arrested. Two peasants were injured, one seriously.104 Townspeople and peasants forced their way into Jewish stores and looted them. In one instance reminiscent of the scene printed in a ­Vienna illustrated newspaper (see Figure 17), a group of peasants demanded that shopkeeper Abraham Spira “Open up, Jew, or risk death!” The mob pushed in. They shattered the windows of the store and adjacent apartment, strewing broken glass on the Spiras’ one-month-old baby in its crib. Everything in the store was stolen and loaded onto horse-drawn-carts.105 Later in the morning of June 24, participants in the Nowy Sącz events were joined by others and ransacked Jewish houses, stores, and taverns in Biegonice, Cyganowice, and other nearby communities. Some looted and burned the pub called At the Kamieniec near the bridge over the Poprad river on the main road between Nowy Sącz and Stary Sącz. The attack began with one Piotr Nowak threatening the bartender, Simon Becz, and



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FIGURE 17.  “The Unrest in Galicia.” Upper left caption: “Rescue of a Jew by the gendarmes.” Upper right caption: “Plundering of a Jewish tavern in Nowy Sącz.” Die Wiener Bilder, July 10, 1898. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library.

ordering “Jew, give beer and do not ask for money.” The marauders in turn informed anyone who would listen that permission had been granted to beat the Jews of Stary Sącz the following day.106 The largest single riot of 1898 took place in Stary Sącz on the night of Saturday, June 25. The tavern At the Kamieniec was still smoldering in the morning as peasants arrived in Stary Sącz for market day. They gossiped about the happenings in Zbyszyce, Limanowa, Nowy Sącz, and surrounding villages. A nervous mayor ordered the crowd gathering in the market

FIGURES 18A AND 18B.  Town square, Stary Sącz. Postcard from the 1890s courtesy of the District Museum of Nowy Sącz. Photograph by author, 2010.



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to leave the city by eight in the evening or face forced expulsion. The warning was not heeded. Instead, the expectation rose that something of significance was going to happen at eight. Still more people came. Town residents mixed with those from the countryside. They stood in groups, sat on the ground near the public well, or leaned on the walls of shops and stores that lined the square. The signal for the anticipated action arrived. The cloister tower clock struck 8:00. One peasant raised his cudgel to the sky and cried out “Let’s get to work, I will lead you.” To shouts of “Hurrah, to Holländer’s!” (a Jewish shopkeeper), the crowd broke into the thirty-one Jewish-owned businesses lining the square and pillaged them. More than 2,000 people took part, either actively looting or passively observing. Most were peasants from small communities outside Stary Sącz, although some witnesses said that artisans and shopkeepers, members of the Stary Sącz town council, and even the m ­ ayor’s son were among the rioters.107 Entire families joined in. Looters heaved flour, vodka, clothes, kitchen utensils, mattresses, and pillows

FIGURE 19.  The well on the market square of Stary Sącz where groups of peasants and townspeople waited before the mass riot on June 25, 1898. Photograph by author, 2010.

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through broken doors and shattered windows. Some then loaded their spoils onto carts, drove home to their villages, and then returned for more. Christian merchants lit candles in store windows as a sign for the rioters to spare their property. Many Jews hid in the homes of Catholic neighbors in basements and under tables. Those sheltering in attics could look out and watch the destruction of their businesses. The value of the material losses suffered by the twenty-six Jewish families that ran the devastated shops and stalls around the market square totaled about 99,000 gulden.108 The looting and destruction of property lasted past midnight. Eventually soldiers arrived from Nowy Sącz, and cavalry units returned to Stary Sącz after investigating reports of violence in the surrounding area. These forces finally put an end to the pillaging.109 In the following days witnesses recounted that soldiers, police, and firefighters on the scene at first struggled to disperse the crowd, then stood by with complete indifference; some even assisted the plunderers.110 Others stated that each time troops and gendarmes confronted a group of looters, fellow rioters made their way to the opposite side of the square and continued their looting spree.111 After the riot, bands of peasants committed dozens of attacks in the surrounding countryside from Limanowa and Stary Sącz to Brzesko. In Kamienica on June 26, assailants raided the manor buildings leased by Aron Lustig. Lustig and his family lived in one building, which also housed a taproom, liquor store, and trafik. A second building served to store and sell grain. Both buildings came under siege by some 600 to 800 people. Lustig tried to close his stores and appealed to the gendarmes, the local priest, and the administrator of the estates in the village, all of whom rushed to Lustig’s aid. Even their collective efforts failed to deter the mob. Someone broke an oil lamp in the taproom, another started a fire that destroyed the building, damaged a nearby church, and threatened other structures.112 At the end of June, military units exchanged fire with armed bandits who disappeared into the forests.113 While the area around Nowy Sącz and Stary Sącz experienced waves of urban riots and rural attacks, the towns and villages near Limanowa were also sites of anti-Jewish violence. Like Jasło, however, Limanowa itself was largely spared. Limanowa had 1,790 residents in 1900, 785 of whom were Jews.114 Limanowa held a regular market, where Jewish merchants purchased hides, wool, chickens, calves, and agricultural products and sold clothes and other manufactured goods in return. News of nearby violence rumors that socialists in uniform might march through the town and at-



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tack Jews drew a larger than usual crowd of peasants from the surrounding villages (some traveled two or more hours to get to town) to Limanowa’s market day on June 24, the same day as the Nowy Sącz riot.115 Many carried canvas bags and drove wagons in anticipation of loot. Late in the day, a large military force and citizens’ guard expelled the unruly crowd from the town. People left Limanowa and dispersed in various directions. Some joined in several series of attacks on Jews in small villages. Around eight o’clock, one group of those expelled from Limanowa completely surprised the three Jewish families of Modarka, a settlement just to the southeast of town. Soldiers from Limanowa soon dispersed the mob, but not before all three Jewish families’ homes and businesses had been plundered. Much of the band then reconstituted and proceeded to sack in succession every home, apartment, shop, and taproom owned by the nine Jewish families of Pisarzowa, the five Jewish families in Męcina, and both Jewish families of Kłodne. All these families ran shops and taprooms on the outskirts of these small villages. The attackers shattered windows, broke locks, and knocked in doors. Once inside, they drank vodka and beer, broke glasses and destroyed furniture, and ransacked chests of drawers. Women joined in, yelling “Hurrah! On to the Jews!” and took everything they could carry—beans, flour, olives, dresses, potatoes, lamp oil, kaftans, jewelry, pillows, blankets, and even curtains. Altogether, some 300 to 500 people participated in these raids. Other marauders conducted similar attacks on Jews living in small villages near Brzesko. .

.

.

On June 28, the Galician authorities and the Vienna cabinet reacted to the rapidly spreading and intensifying attacks in late June by declaring a formal state of emergency for the thirty-three western-most districts of the province and instituting martial law in Limanowa and Nowy Sącz. By this time, anti-Jewish violence had struck hundreds of communities. Attacks had taken place in many towns and villages simultaneously, although most major incidents occurred in four chronologically and geographically overlapping waves: (1) In late February through the first weeks of April, the anti-Jewish attacks in and near Wieliczka seem to have been closely related to the election rivalry between Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party and Stapiński’s People’s Party.

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(2) From the end of May through the first week of June, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and other towns to the south and west of Cracow witnessed anti-Jewish violence. (3) Near Jasło in the second and third week of June, many Jewish businesses, taprooms, and homes were looted and some burned to the ground. (4) From June 23 to 30, urban riots, roving bands of attackers raiding isolated Jewish settlements, and clashes between marauders and the military plagued the region around Limanowa, Stary and Nowy Sącz, and Brzesko. Attacks were concentrated in certain areas. Anti-Jewish incidents had taken place in sixty-nine district court jurisdictions, fifty-nine of them in the western sections of the province and ten in the east. Violence was especially widespread in the jurisdictions of eleven district courts, however. In the Jasło, Strzyżów, and Nowy Sącz districts “excesses” occurred in more than 40% of all villages and towns.116 The next chapter looks more closely at the actors involved and the choices they made during the riots before examining the efforts made by governmental authorities to restore calm.

3 Rioters, Jews, and the State And so an example had to be set and, in the interest of public order, the criminal excesses had to be opposed with all energy and all available means, because otherwise it would not have been possible to gain control over the dangerous movement. Public Prosecutor Józef Sułkowski, Wadowice, July 23, 18981

overviewed in the previous chapter took place in specific settings. Major incidents most often commenced in towns flooded with visitors from surrounding areas during markets days, Corpus Christi and other Catholic holidays, regular Sunday church services, or newly minted Polish “national” festivities. Violence began in taverns or market squares, sites of regular Jewish-Christian interaction and economic exchange. Later they extended into adjacent streets where Jewish homes and businesses were located. From towns, rioters fanned out into the countryside. As loosely organized groups made their way homeward, they ransacked houses, taverns, and stores owned by Jews and relayed news about anti-Jewish violence to those they encountered. When news and rumors reached villages and regions many kilometers removed, small-scale attacks and even mass assaults on isolated Jewish homes and shops erupted. The central government, Galician administration, and officials close to the scenes of violence such as Wadowice State Prosecutor Sułkowski strove to understand and to counter the riots. The motivations and choices made by perpetrators, victims, and those who intervened belied the coherent narratives about communal violence created by partisans and self-styled ethnic spokespeople that integrated such moments into larger stories of ethnic conflict.2 This chapter explores the actions of the attackers, Jewish reactions in the face of the violence, and the role of state institutions in the restoration of order. THE VIOLENT EVENTS

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Participants Who participated in the violence and why did they join in the riots? Recently, historian Gerald Surh distinguished three strata of participants in his analysis of pogromists in the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century.3 Those active in the 1898 events in Galicia can also be divided loosely into these three overlapping categories. The most enthusiastic riot leaders distinguished themselves by their conduct. Fellow participants, victims, and security forces pointed them out at the time and in subsequent trial testimony. These leaders raised expectations about upcoming attacks they hoped to initiate, urged onlookers to join in, and spearheaded the violence by giving signals for the attack (Hurrah! At the Jews!). Such riot leaders were also the first to smash glasses in taprooms, break down doors and shatter windows to gain entry to stores, and physically confront Jews. Sometimes they baited those less eager to join in or egged on their companions with threats. Looters constituted the second, more numerous stratum. The looters followed behind the riot leaders, stole from Jewish shops and taverns, and often ended up engaging in some destruction of property. Third were the curious crowds. A large number of people wanted to witness violent actions initiated by others. These curious crowds observed the leaders and the looters and by doing so constituted a sympathetic and supportive audience. On occasion some of the curious did take part in urban riots and mass raids on isolated Jewish-owned homes and businesses Typically, they entered stores and taprooms after the riot leaders and looters, gleaning items left behind or discarded by other, more aggressive plunderers. Some of these curious onlookers were themselves inspired to engage more actively in subsequent anti-Jewish attacks. They talked about the events they had witnessed, citing their own experiences as proof that the authorities approved of or were indifferent to violence against Jews, and then led others in similar assaults. Many riot leaders and organizers came from the more educated sectors of rural society. They had identifiable connections with peasant political movements or were regular readers of the partisan antisemitic Catholic press. These people brought to the villages and small towns of western Galicia the pleas of Catholic and political party firebrands for anti-Jewish action in order to better the lives of the peasantry. In the village of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, for example, one Heinrich Fialko, a thirty-year old



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employee of the local criminal court, incited the crowds to rob Jewishowned property and to attack the gendarmes who protected Jews during the May 26 riot. Fialko insisted to those around him that the gendarmes did not have permission to fire on the rioters—those who did so had been bribed with alcohol by the Jews.4 Two days after the Kalwaria attacks, four copies of a notice were hung on Jewish houses and another posted on the community chancellery building in Maków, approximately sixteen kilometers south of Kalwaria. The gendarmes suspected that Johann Pieróg, a clerk in the local savings and loan bank, along with a handful of colleagues, wrote, printed, and distributed these notices.5 Despite the misleading reference to a social committee, these flyers paralleled the language of the antisemitic Catholic press, the Christian Socialists, and Stanisław Stojałowski, the founder of the Christian People’s Party: “Announcement!!! Away with the Jews, with those leeches of Christians, because if we don’t exterminate the locust, we will perish. Onward peasants to the sticks, flails, and scythes in order to exterminate this locust.”6 Michał Miczkowski played an important role in anti-Jewish attacks in the small villages of Łęki Stryżowskie, Pietrusza Wola, and Wysoka Stryżowska near Jasło in mid-June. He owned a mill in Węglówka, about eight kilometers southwest of Frysztak. Miczkowski was known to be a supporter of the Christian People’s Party and a reader of Stojałowski’s publications.7 Miczkowski read aloud from one of Stojałowski’s rural papers, Pszczółka, which in turn quoted a speech made in the Vienna parliament by Josef Gregorig, a prominent politician in Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party. Gregorig had asserted that the inflated price of grain would fall if 3,000 Jewish speculators were hanged. One of Miczkowski’s illiterate listeners then told others that Stojałowski’s newspaper had verified the official permission for robbing and beating Jews.8 Thomas Olchawa, a literate 68-year-old peasant father of six, was among the leaders of several large bands of rioters that committed some of the most brutal acts in the last days of June in the villages and small towns dotting the countryside between Limanowa and Brzesko. On June 24, ­Olchawa and two companions came to Iwkowa, just across the Łososina river from their home village of Witowice, some eighteen kilometers north of Nowy Sącz. They brought with them a copy of Fr. M ­ ateusz Jeż’s brochure Jewish Secrets, which had been endorsed in the Catholic and anti­semitic press and distributed by Stojałowski’s party. Olchawa and the others read aloud from the pamphlet, which, they said, confirmed the o­ fficial autho-

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rization to assault and rob Jews; however, they contended, no one was allowed to beat Jews to death. Then, Olchawa yelled “Hurrah, Beat the Jews” and led many villagers on a rampage in and around Iwkowa. The attackers broke into Jewish houses and shops and stole meat, clothing, alcohol, and household goods. They grabbed a Torah from a private prayer room, stomped on it, and threw it into muddy water.9 Agitators, organizers, and promoters of violent action against Jews were often people known and respected by many of the looters. These leaders persuaded others to join in the plundering either by direct exhortation or simply by being models for violent behavior. Most riot leaders were married men between thirty and fifty. Some held local offices, served as village headmen (wójtowie), members of village councils, or local police officers. Many traveled in groups of family and friends to larger towns on market days or festivals. Jan Miras, the forty-five-year-old illiterate mayor of Huta Gogołowska, is an example of such a riot leader. District Captain Winiarski identified Miras as “the chief ringleader” of the June 16 Frysztak riot. In Löw’s tavern, Miras assured his fellow drinkers, many of whom came from his and nearby villages, that “we have it on paper that it is permitted to rob the Jews.” Miras’s leadership and the villagers’ willingness to follow him were significant factors in the transformation of a drunken tavern disturbance into a large-scale riot. The disorder was suppressed only when the gendarmes fired on the crowd, resulting in twelve deaths and many injuries.10 On June 17, now back in Huta Gogołowska, Miras cried out for revenge for the shedding of Christian blood in Frysztak and proclaimed to anyone willing to listen that “I have a notice to beat the Jews.” Miras then led a physical assault on a Jewish publican in the village and the plundering of his tavern.11 In Lutcza, the site of another mass riot just days after the Frysztak shootings, the activities of Mateusz Urban, a thirty-year-old married man and father of one, a community policeman and well-known and successful peasant farmer from nearby Domaradz, became proof of official approval for anti-Jewish violence. The district captain of Strzyżów had tasked Urban to inform the mayor of Lutcza about the violence elsewhere and the measures to be taken to confront it. Instead, as witnesses would later attest, Urban waved around a sheet of official-looking paper—perhaps the very approval from higher authorities to move ahead with preventive measures—before a group of illiterate peasants. Urban said that the district captain had given him the document: “Peasant, see for yourself, it is permitted to beat the Jews.” This local policeman was one of several who



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blew trumpets to attract a crowd that swelled to approximately 400 before a series of attacks began that destroyed the property of several dozen Jewish families in Lutcza. Urban also trumpeted a signal to end the attack.12 Among the Jews under siege in Lutcza was the Ritter family. Mojżesz and Gittla Ritter had been sentenced to death in a widely-publicized case of ritual murder in the 1880s. The sentence was appealed three times to the Supreme Court in Vienna before the Ritters were finally declared innocent on March 3, 1886.13 Now in 1898 he and his family were forced to hide from a crowd of assailants. While for some participants, antisemitism and asemitism (the doctrine of total separation from Jews) and political agitation were clearly motivating factors, this does not appear to have been as central for other riot leaders. Participants in one of the few incidents of anti-Jewish violence in Cracow as well as some of the peasants and “gypsies” who raided Frant’s distillery in Ulaszowice and Jewish enclaves near Limanowa in late June had spent time in prison for a variety of crimes, including assault and battery and murder.14 Grzegorz Tokarczyk and Michał Szczygły, both of whom had long criminal records, sacked a tavern in Przysietnica, a village just south of Stary Sącz.15 These and many other repeat offenders may have simply taken advantage of the breakdown in law and order to pursue an agenda of alcohol, violence, and theft. The desire for personal revenge against specific Jews also factored into some of the most serious incidents. In Dzierżaniny, a village a few kilometers north of Nowy Sącz, for instance, Abe Platner tried to padlock the door of his farmhouse when he saw a crowd rushing toward his property. After breaking in, Jan Dziedzic beat Platner bloody with a stick and yelled: “Beat this dragon, because he has money.” How did he know? Platner had recently bought the farm from Dziedzic and the fog of the riots, apparently, provided the perfect cover for Dziedzic to avenge his humiliation.16

Rumors Those among the educated, village police, clerks, heads of households, and violent criminals as well as those seeking to settle personal scores who encouraged and led anti-Jewish attacks could not have achieved the critical mass that transformed otherwise isolated incidents into waves of anti-Jewish assaults without another striking reality already raised in the discussion of participation above: rumors of official permission. The looters and the curi-

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ous who heeded the calls of riot leaders and joined the crowds moving along the roads from market towns to village taverns almost universally justified their actions by citing the “fact” that violence against Jews had been sanctioned by the highest authorities. Scholars of collective violence often refer to rumors as important factors in the outbreak and dynamic of ethnic conflict.17 False reports of violent acts, inflated and exaggerated stories about numbers of casualties, and lurid tales of secret and ritualized blood-letting often feature prominently in such incidents. Stories like these, repeated in the press, accompanied outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence such as the Russian pogroms of the 1880s as well as ritual murder accusations in the Habsburg Monarchy and Germany.18 Rumors like these are frequently crucial to the mobilization of large numbers of people to take part in specific incidents of violence.19 The importance of rumors in motivating and uniting the attackers in Galicia in 1898 was clear from the very first incidents. In early March in Wieliczka the story circulated that Jews were plotting to attack A ­ ndrzej Szponder, the local priest. Szponder was a member of the Stojałowski party, a representative to the Reichsrat, and a charismatic speaker known for his antisemitic sermons. According to the tale, the Jews, incensed by ­Szponder’s distribution of Jewish Secrets, planned to murder the priest upon his return from Vienna. This was only one of several rumors about purported Jewish crimes against Catholics circulating in the early days of the riots. Other stories maintained that Jews had poisoned wells, sold rotten baked goods that had caused deaths, killed a priest, and so on. In response to these (fabricated) Jewish acts, the Pope allegedly issued a call for his flock to beat up the Jews.20 In the last days of March, a few weeks after the Wieliczka riot, a new take on the old charge of Jewish ritual murder circulated in the Nowy Sącz region. The area buzzed with the tale that a Christian child from some unknown community had been kidnapped by Jews, stuffed into a crate, and sent by rail to Nowy Sącz or to Cracow. The crate was accidentally opened at the station and a living child found inside. The “lowest classes of the population” imagined that “with consideration of the approaching Easter holidays” Jews schemed to murder the child for ritual purposes. In another version of the story, a dog owned by a Christian woman who was riding the train from Nowy Sącz to Cracow began to bark furiously at a Jew’s luggage. Christians on the scene demanded that the train director open the case. Inside was a four-year-old girl destined for ritual slaughter in Cracow.



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The crafty Jew paid off the station manager with a thousand-gulden note and slipped away.21 At first the state prosecutor ignored these fantasies since “such rumors can be heard from time to time, and without disturbing public order and peace.” He saw no need to counter anti-Jewish sentiment, only to ensure calm. The prosecutor did initiate an investigation, however, after a subsequent report arrived from the district court of Mszana Dolna, a small town with a rail connection. Marie Jackowiec, a two-year old girl, was reported missing from the village of Łostówka. The rumor that Jews planned to kill her for ritual purposes had arisen in Mszana Górna, a hamlet on the road from Łostówka to Mszana Dolna. Investigators confirmed that the child had in fact disappeared, but then clarified that the story about her turning up alive in a crate had no basis in fact.22 This ritual murder allegation had no direct connection with the violence in Wieliczka or the waves of anti-Jewish attacks in late May through the end of June. Like the rumor about the Jewish plot to waylay Andrzej Szponder, this story faded away as other rumors began to circulate. Later perpetrators did not refer to this supposed attempt at ritual murder as a motivating factor in their behavior. This incident does, however, suggest something about how fast and how far anti-Jewish rumors could travel. Talk of attempted ritual murder arrived in Nowy Sącz before the official report from Mszana Dolna. Many people accepted this story and retold it until it reached the ears of the state prosecutor. The Nowy Sącz prosecutor, clearly inundated with such gossip, at first shrugged it off as just another anti-Jewish fantasy from the countryside. He felt such rumors did not threaten public order so they could be ignored. Once information arrived that seemed to corroborate some aspects of the rumor, however, the prosecutor set in motion an official investigation. Rumors linked to anti-Jewish violence, especially fragmentary information about attacks and tales concerning future violence traveled dozens of kilometers very quickly. Rumors spawned new rumors, which in turn led to gatherings, heightened expectations, and plans for attacks, as well as Jewish responses. The violence in the Jasło region in mid-June offers a clear example. Just a few hours after the riot and deaths in Frysztak on June 16, these tragic events were already widely known in the village of Wielopole Skrzyńskie, fifteen kilometers north and east of Frysztak and ten kilo­meters from the nearest railroad station. With the reports came rumors that a band of peasants from Frysztak were going to attack Jews

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in Wielopole Skrzyńskie the following day, June 17, and then move on to Ropczyce. Most of the Jews in the area immediately packed up and fled. Groups of local peasants gathered near Jewish property on the seventeenth eager to witness an attack. The Jews who remained were spared, however, by the active intervention of the parish priest, the administrator of the Wielopolski family estate, and the village headman.23 The most persistent and widely disseminated rumors concerned official or even imperial permission to rob and assault Jews. Usually, but not always, this imagined permission expressly forbade the killing of Jews. In the case of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, mentioned in the previous chapter, physical evidence seemed to confirm that Emperor Franz Joseph himself had authorized attacks against Jews. For weeks prior to the Adam Mickiewicz celebrations, word had circulated about an attack on Jews set for May 26. The authorities later discovered the origin of this story. When interviewed by the local arm of the Galician provincial government, Kalwaria rioters referenced the red posters and other flyers advertising festivities in honor of the great Polish poet. They interpreted these promotional materials distributed throughout surrounding villages as coded messages from the authorities calling on the peasants to come into town to take revenge on the Jews. “Who, after all, was this Mickiewicz?” asked the witnesses. None of these Polish-speaking peasants had heard of him. Instead, they held that the posters and pamphlets were signs from the good emperor to take revenge on the Jews. This was evidently the context for a stream of people who came to Leo Kąkol’s store in the days before the May 25–26 violence. Kąkol, a Kalwaria merchant, had received leaflets from the Baumann firm declaring that “the newly invented product Statin removes every ink stain.” These advertisements about removing ink stains—the word in common use at the time for stain (żyd ) is also Polish for Jew—quickly transformed in the imagination of many people in this semiliterate society into official documents providing the bearer with immunity from prosecution for assaulting and robbing Jews.24 Other rumors coursed through Kalwaria just before the major urban riot there in May. Railroad employee Franz Hamer reported that his maid, Maria Wróbel, informed him that peasants planned to come to Kalwaria to get back at the Jews. Apparently, some held that a priest had been beaten in nearby Sułkowice, and that the district captain was allowing Jews to be assaulted in response.25 Peter Burczak, among those caught breaking windows during the riot, swore he overheard “a discussion among some unknown people” that an attack on Jews was to take place in K ­ alwaria and



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that it had been approved by the authorities. Some attackers said they had heard that if only 3,000 Jews were hanged then everything would be in order. This rumor echoed the speech by the Christian Social Party deputy delivered in the Vienna parliament that blamed Jews for inflated grain prices. Catholic and antisemitic publications in Galicia had repeatedly referred to this speech.26 Although gendarmes in Kalwaria fired on the crowd and killed one person, a fact that might have been interpreted as clear evidence that the Galician authorities wished to restore law and order, the stories of imperial sanction became more entrenched and more fantastic in the following weeks. One particularly colorful tale seems to have originated near Jasło. In this story Jews bribed the Vienna court barber to slit Franz Joseph’s throat when touching up the emperor’s signature muttonchops. When the moment came to do the deed, however, the imperial hairstylist broke down and confessed to the plot. The emperor, enraged, ordered the Jews to be beaten for thirty days. Empress Elisabeth, however, prevailed on her husband to show mercy, so Franz Joseph reduced the sentence to two weeks.27 Other rumors suggested that Crown Prince Rudolf, Franz Joseph’s son who had committed suicide in 1889, was alive and living in Asia (or America or Canada). Rudolf now urged his loyal peasants to lash out for three days (or two weeks, or one month, or on the next market day) against the Jews who were keeping him from resuming his rightful place. In Radziszów in late May and early June, reports circulated that the young emperor (presumably the deceased Rudolf ) was in Brazil, was offering one-and-a-half cents for each Jewish head and was calling for beatings because Jews in Wieliczka had reportedly sold poisoned flour, resulting in several deaths.28 Rumors about Rudolf were most pervasive among Ruthenians in eastern Galicia and continued to be repeated in Żydaczów and other towns long after the violence had been suppressed in central and western districts.29 Some of the rumors concerning imperial permission reflected the months of constant political agitation and electioneering in the region. According to these stories, politicians, well known as antisemites, conveyed approval from Vienna to the smallest Galician hamlet. Two days before the riot and deaths in Frysztak, investigations in the towns and villages around Jasło, strongholds of the Christian People’s Party, confirmed that peasants believed “the Jews would be beaten because Father Stojałowski wrote about this to Kołaczyce, that the imperial-royal government has permitted peasants to carouse for three to fourteen days.”30 One riot leader, Stanisław

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Szeliga, an employee of the Jasło courts, reportedly went to several villages to inform the population that Stojałowski and fellow Christian People’s Party politician Tomasz Szajer had been told that the emperor would soon resign and task the military with assisting the peasants in beating the Jews. One possible origin for such reports is that, according to the Jasło district captain, “there has not been a week in which two or three rallies were not held in the district” since March 19, the day conservative representative Stanisław Wysocki died.31 Flyers and pamphlets such as Jewish Secrets passed from hand to hand at these gatherings. Kurjer Lwowski (Lwow ­Courier) charged the Christian People’s Party with handing out materials that denounced peasant journalist Jan Stapiński as the Antichrist and claimed that His Imperial Majesty supported their Christian candidate.32 This agitation and these materials certainly contributed to the content and spread of the anti-Jewish rumors.33 In the Nowy Sącz region, the home of the Peasant Party Union’s leadership, a rumor credited one of the Potoczek brothers as the intermediaries conveying the approval to attack Jews from the good emperor in Vienna to the people of Galicia.34 In other cases, rioters explained that approval for their actions had made its way to Galicia by some less clearly delineated route. In the Gorlice district in mid-June, rioters stated that the pope and the emperor had sanctioned attacks on Jewish homes and property for fourteen days or until St. John’s Vigil (June 23), the day of the election for the fifth curia seat in parliament being contested between Stapiński and Włodzimierz Lewicki.35 In Dzierżaniny, just north of Nowy Sącz, attackers justified their actions in similar terms: some unnamed Jew somewhere had thrown something at a priest. In response the pope and the emperor had authorized Catholics to beat Jews for fourteen days.36 In many cases, outsiders portrayed as town dwellers or mysterious strangers were reported to have brought permission from elsewhere to the countryside. Peasants who attacked Jewish families and homes in the villages of Podole and Posadowa asserted that “some man riding on a bicycle said it is permitted to beat up the Jews and distributed some pamphlets.”37 In other incidents people swore that an unknown man on a wagon or dressed in city clothing brought news of imperial or papal permission. Rioters swore they overheard others talking about special cards or flyers they had seen in some village or town that granted the bearer the right to rob and beat Jews. Assailants claimed they or someone they knew had seen official notices and posters in town centers to the same effect.38 The day before and the morning of the riot in Stary Sącz, Ludwik Koron



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“heard that peasants were traveling through villages and recruiting people to come to town for robbery.”39 Journalists and government officials reported on the transmission and content of these rumors. Rioters were typified as a dark mass of ignorant, backward people who blindly accepted fables of official authorization, acted brutally, and clung to their belief in the legality of their actions. The ubiquitous nature of the rumors and their key importance to the participants themselves raise an important question: did the rioters really consider these stories to be true? What insights, if any, does the existing documentary record offer? There is no reason to doubt that many people believed the rumors. The authorities who arrested and interviewed rioters were certain that people found them credible. To cite an example already referred to above, several people in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska tried to get flyers from the merchant Kąkol, demonstrating that at least some were convinced that advertisements for a new stain remover could in fact be official notices authorizing the bearer to attack and rob Jews. Belief that violence had been permitted by some authority—sometimes the pope, sometimes unnamed officials, most often from the emperor himself—persisted even after gendarmes and soldiers had confronted rioters and even as arrests mounted and trials commenced. In July, weeks after military deployment and intervention had largely succeeded in deterring new outbreaks in central and western Galicia, a correspondent from Nowa Reforma in Nowy Sącz witnessed cartloads of peasants being delivered by gendarmes to overcrowded jails. The prisoners were in a festive mood. They were certain that they would be released soon: “We will be free, because the emperor permitted” the plundering of the Jews. The prisoners were certain their arrest had been in error and against the will of the emperor and the state authorities.40 Not all of those who participated in the riots were completely sure, however. Some newspaper accounts distinguished between those who did and those who did not believe the stories. Journalists who journeyed from the urban islands of civilization of Cracow and Lemberg to explore the wilds of the rural areas of western Galicia did not doubt that the most ignorant, amoral, alcohol-indulging, and illiterate peasants did indeed accept these stories. Słowo Polskie (Polish Word), the liberal paper produced in Lemberg, published some of the most interesting such reports. As the riots increased in intensity, Słowo Polskie sent out a correspondent to Jasło and Nowy Sącz to determine just what was happening. His eyewitness reports

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from the districts seized by riots read like the journals written in the eighteenth century by western European travelers to eastern Europe and quoted by historian Larry Wolff in Inventing Eastern Europe.41 The journalist was surprised at how “intelligent” the peasants were, how much they knew about the province, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the world. The local people in and around Jasło with whom he spoke considered Stojałowski a prophet and rejected the more secular People’s Party. Słowo Polskie’s correspondent asked locals the question he thought would be of greatest interest to his readers: how could so many believe and act on the bizarre rumors about imperial permission to rob and attack Jews, the stories of the emperor’s barber, Crown Prince Rudolf, the pope, and so on. Some expressed their own surprise at the rumors; they assumed outsiders who had some stake in creating disturbances were spreading them. They were of the opinion that only the poor and unemployed and those with little to lose participated in the violence. Like the peasant parties, they argued that the best way to combat the poisonous influence of Jews was not through burning and looting and beating, but by self-help, boycotts, and the like. They regretted that the most backward could not understand the need for systematic, constructive action rather than random violence. The correspondent made a visit to church in Frysztak just days after the confrontation between rioters and gendarmes; he was both impressed and repulsed. Peasants packed the church. They held prayer books and hymnals and looked like they were reading and singing from them. They were respectful, quiet, disciplined. But then, when the church service was over, to the disgust of the writer, the bulk of the worshippers went directly to Jewish-owned taverns, drank heavily, and became rowdy. Women sat at tables with men and told lewd stories while downing vodka after vodka. Nonetheless, the journalist wrote, “Overall, the people here have left me with mixed impressions of disadvantages and advantages, more of the latter than the former.” He felt that the right combination of work and education could elevate the backward villagers who had behaved so barbarously in the taverns of Frysztak and who had unthinkingly accepted outrageous rumors of official permission to attack Jews. Efforts at raising the cultural level of the peasantry promised to benefit the rural population and “through the lud, the nation.”42 Reports in other publications were similar. Journalists writing for Cracow’s conservative Czas assured their readers that only young people, the illiterate, and the uneducated accepted the rumors as factual. Specu-



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lation was that riot leaders had manipulated the poor into believing the Jews had caused their troubles and the good emperor approved anti-Jewish action.43 Employing similar arguments, writers for Rabbi Joseph Bloch’s Österreichische Wochenschrift, the Vienna Jewish weekly that espoused a muscular self-defense against antisemitism, imagined that a secret szlachta (noble) committee in league with Stojałowski was promoting the rumors to incite the ignorant to violence for political ends.44 This division between the purportedly more intelligent elements who did not believe the rumors and the poor, ignorant, backward peasants can be too easily overdrawn. Not all willing to consider the rumors as reflective of reality came from the lowest strata of the rural population. Jan Madejczyk, a prominent politician in interwar Poland, was born and raised in Wróblowa, a small village near Jasło. He wrote about the 1898 violence in his memoirs. In mid-June, Madejczyk remembered, he and a friend attended church services in Kołaczyce. Shortly afterward they witnessed the plundering of a Jewish tavern. A few days later, Madejczyk was present at a meeting of the community council of Wróblowa chaired by his father, the wójt. Most of the council believed the rumors. Since Jews were being robbed in all neighboring villages, the Wróblowa elders wanted to do the same to the single Jewish resident in their hamlet before outsiders took advantage of the situation. According to his memoirs, Madejczyk interrupted the meeting: “I was already eighteen and understood that this supposed imperial ‘authorization’ had to be a fraud, that in a country like Austria, where order was observed, the issuing of such permits [to beat and rob Jews] was not possible.” The young Madejczyk convinced the council to wait for written authentication of such permission, which of course never arrived.45 The Wróblowa Council of Elders was willing to act on the authority of rumors alone at least in part because of events around them and concern that ­others would loot their Jew before the villagers could do it themselves. Here we see rumors and immediate interest come together. Słowo Polskie and other newspapers inside and outside Galicia depicted the participants as a collective, brutal, dark, and violent force. Still, illiteracy did not equate to ignorance or innocence. Some of the most active riot leaders were themselves illiterate. Jan Miras at the center of the Frysztak events could not read or write; yet, this handicap did not prevent him from swearing to have received official documents proclaiming imperial permission nor from leading at least two anti-Jewish riots. Did Miras accept as true the rumors he so enthusiastically propagated? The answer

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is not clear; however, he and others, literate and illiterate, did creatively adapt the ever-expanding set of rumors to pursue their own immediate interests in spurring on anti-Jewish attacks. Several factors contributed to the apparent plausibility that official permission could have been given for attacks on Jews in this region at this time. In the 1880s and 1890s, the rural press published news about ritual murder trials in Galicia and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe. Updates on the Dreyfus Affair and the electoral success of the Christian Social Party in Vienna gave witness to the “fact” that people beyond ­Galicia faced a Jewish problem. In western and central Galicia the constant campaigning of the new political parties carried the transnational Catholic antiJewish message to towns and villages in scores of political gatherings in 1897 and the early months of 1898. Many thousands of peasants and smalltown inhabitants attended these meetings. Others read about them in the newspapers or heard about them second or third hand. Politicians who sought to represent the peasantry, those with the closest connection to rural life, defined the Jew as the cause of all misery and laid out a political agenda of “self-defense” against the crafty enemy. Certainly, the Stojałowski party proved itself more uncompromising in its focus on the Jew as the symbol of peasant problems than did the People’s Party, whose leaders Stojałowski denounced as lackeys of the Jews. The People’s Party, however, did not seriously oppose antisemitism. In April, during the campaign pitting the Christian People’s Party candidate Włodzimierz Lewicki against Stapiński, Grzegorz Milan of the People’s Party urged his “brother peasants and townspeople” to remember how traitors used to “buy us off with sausages, vodka, beer, and Judas money.”46 The same paper soon employed the term Semitism when referring to Jews, Judaism, and those who did not work to counter supposed Jewish influence. In a letter Stapiński referred to Józef Zipser, a Jewish journalist close to the Polish democratic movement in Lemberg and a former coeditor of Przyjaciel Ludu (Friend of the People), the main rural newspaper of the People’s Party, as “A disgusting man, Jew to the marrow of his bones.” 47 Even the Catholic Church itself seemed to approve this message. While some priests tried to stop the attacks, other local clergy, who were also often leading members of agricultural circles, preached against Jewish perfidy every Sunday, linking the supposed eternal evils of the Jew to present-day economic and social crises, quoting from the purportedly scholarly work of Jacob Brafman, August Rohling, and Mateusz Jeż. Prawda and other papers repeated these charges.



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The failure of the military to prevent anti-Jewish violence in the fortress town of Przemyśl and the inability of the light gendarme and military presence in the province to offer a vigorous response to local violence could be easily cast as proof of approval (in fact the Galician administration had long complained that the number of gendarmes was far too small to deal with serious threats to public order and had pressed, to no avail, for larger budgets to support more substantial policing forces). Most participants in violent anti-Jewish incidents left the scene without being arrested. This was the case in the first incidents around Wieliczka as well as many later disturbances. Participants would then travel by road or rail and convey news of what they had seen. They could say that in their own experience the authorities did not oppose such actions. When gendarmes and the military intervened energetically, jails soon filled beyond capacity. Large numbers of those detained had to be released immediately, which seemed to confirm the support of official circles for robbing and attacking Jews.48 When urban and rural newspapers described the rumors, riot leaders and agitators presented these accounts as additional evidence that such tales were in fact true. This was clearly the case in Zagórze, a village and rail hub near Sanok in the eastern part of the election district contested by Stapiński’s People’s Party and Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party. Newspaper accounts about the violence in the Jasło region reached Zagórze almost immediately. Travelers, local residents, and rail workers gathered in town on June 19. Many discussed a specific article printed in the Lemberg Kurjer Lwowski titled “Disorders in Jasło district.” The story reported on the large number of violent incidents nearby, including the fatalities in Frysztak. The Kurjer Lwowski correspondent recounted some of the rumors about imperial permission to beat and rob Jews, including the charge that village mayors and district captains were refusing to let people know that imperial permission had been given to attack the Jews. The paper also detailed the fantastic story about the emperor’s barber. The article claimed that agitators with close ties to the Stojałowski party related the rumors and encouraged people to attack Jews—and to intimidate potential Stapiński voters.49 Inspired by the newspaper article, peasants in Zagórze began throwing stones at Jews’ houses as night fell. The participants included young people as well as laborers and farmers. Someone posted a leaflet written in large letters on the railway ramp: “Hurrah at the Jews at 8:00 pm tonight—Long Live Lewicki!” (the Stojałowski candidate for the fifth curia seat in the Vienna parliament). When the gendarmes a­ rrived to

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restore calm, rioters pointed to the Kurjer Lwowski article as evidence that beating Jews had in fact been declared legal.50 Stories about imperial permission for violence were not new to the region or unique to Galicia. Similar tales were told during the 1881–82 pogroms in the Russian Empire and earlier in Galicia itself, during the 1846 peasant massacre of noble landowners. The region of the 1846 rabacja (slaughter) largely overlapped with the areas that experienced the most violence in 1898. Local officials as well as conservative, nationalist, antisemitic Catholic, liberal, and Jewish journalists plus at least some townspeople explicitly compared the 1846 events and fictions about imperial permission with those of 1898.51 Historians have also confirmed that the 1846 events remained very much alive in the collective memory of the rural and small-town residents of the region in 1898.52 In 1898, the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of Franz ­Joseph’s accession to the throne, publicized from pulpit, town hall, and newspaper pages and present in the form of an endless series of jubilee souvenirs and pamphlets sold everywhere, brought to life again the myth of the good emperor who had freed the peasants from serfdom decades before.53 In this context many believed, or found it convenient to believe, these stories even when confronted by official force and authority. Administrators, priests, and gendarmes seeking to calm the crowds or pleading for the violence to end found themselves mocked as tools of the Jews.54 At the end of June around Nowy Sącz and Limanowa, after gendarmes and soldiers had arrested hundreds and injured many others, word circulated that such actions could only have been taken without the knowledge of Franz Joseph. The good emperor would not have allowed security forces to act with such brutality against his beloved people. Franz Joseph would certainly have permitted a reckoning with the rural enemy of the Catholic lud. On June 26 on the street in Tymowa, a few kilometers south of ­Brzesko, one Anton Szpila wondered aloud why people participated in violence even after so many arrests. Jakób Zwoleń assured him “it is permitted to rob Jews but not to kill them—the army is here because they have been bought by the Jews.”55 Blasius Dudzic laughed at a group of peasants in front of the church in Łąkta Górna, a village near Limanowa. They had told him the local authorities created a community guard to preserve order. Dudzic responded, “The Jews bribed District Captain Hajecki, and only for this reason is he protecting the Jews from the rioters.”56 Everywhere the explanation was the same: police, gendarmes, soldiers, priests, members of town and village councils, district captains, and newly formed



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citizen guards who tried to end the attacks had all been paid off by the Jews and their flunkies to oppose the imperial will.57 The rumors were central to the creation of communities of violence. Some used them in efforts to gather a critical mass of people for attacks. Others were willing to consider the possibility that there was some truth behind them. Whether they fully accepted the rumors as fact or not, participants in anti-Jewish attacks in 1898 were united by the tales of official permission to get even with the Jews. The rural population of western and central Galicia heard rumors of imperial permission and news of events elsewhere. Many were tipped off about upcoming riots while on the way to or from an agricultural circle or local political meeting.58 Single men and women as well as married couples with children saw large crowds yelling about Jews, often led by prominent local figures, elders, or criminals. They followed behind to find out what was going to happen. In Limanowa for example, tales about upcoming anti-Jewish violence at the hands of socialists in uniforms attracted a large crowd of peasants who had never seen a socialist before. In a dynamic that played out in numerous incidents, many of those who came out of curiosity to see whether predictions about pending violence would be fulfilled, would themselves come to constitute an aggressive crowd and instigate and participate in the violence that they had originally hoped to observe.59 Katarzyna Koron and Wiktorja Nowak, who were arrested and later tried for participation in the riot in Stary Sącz, would maintain on the witness stand that they had walked the three kilometers from their village of Moszczenica Niżna to town because they heard fellow villagers saying that “today we will set things right with the Jews.”60 Like many others, these women swore they only came to see what was going to happen. They stood outside the Jews’ taverns, businesses, and homes and watched while the mob broke through windows and doors. Again, many of those who joined Tomasz Kasprzycki in attacks on Jews in villages near Brzesko insisted they had followed the ringleader and his gang only out of curiosity after hearing from others about upcoming anti-Jewish violence. They testified that after the rioting broke out, the Jews pleaded with them to take various items in order to prevent “foreign attackers from taking them.” Others who had originally intended only to observe the happening, swore they were forced to join in the looting. Kasprzycki and other riot leaders had threatened to define anyone hesitating as a “friend of the Jews who deserved to be whipped.”61 Some bystanders then took a few items, perhaps not entirely

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convinced by the assertions that official approval had in fact been given, yet unable to resist temptation.62 Newspaper reports and rumors—repeated, excerpted, recast—only added to the inflammatory material on which would-be riot leaders could draw. Their actions were not direct reflections of existing agendas propagated by peasant politics, self-help movements, and adherents of ­asemitism. Rioters did not organize systematically to isolate and eventually push the Jews from the countryside. Their propagation and creative elaboration of rumors of official permission for upcoming anti-Jewish violence did, however, build on those and other existing sources.

Jewish and Christian Encounters The nature of the interactions between Christians and Jews during the riots varied greatly from efforts to literally drum Jews out of towns and villages (Katzenmusik or caterwauling) to the desecration of Jewish religious buildings and cult objects, to plunder, arson, and brutal physical assaults. Many perpetrators knew their victims. This was most often the case in the raids in small villages or on the edges of towns. Regular and occasional customers attacked Jewish proprietors they had previously interacted with peacefully. They despoiled the Jewish-owned and leased taprooms, inns, stores, and distilleries they had themselves frequented. In some cases, this familiarity led attackers to blow out candles and break lamps. They sought to hide in the dark and strove to remain anonymous. In other incidents, perpetrators seemed not to care that those they beat and robbed could easily identify them by name to investigators. Participants in larger urban riots, including many peasants in town for religious events, market days, or local festivities, were less likely to know their victims well; although, even in places like Nowy Sącz, many attackers and victims were familiar with each other. The authorities showed leniency toward those involved in caterwauling. From June 10 to 21, Jews living in several communities around Żywiec were terrorized by successive nights of Katzenmusik.63 In 1898, inhabitants prided themselves on their town’s centuries-long “success” in preventing the development of a Jewish presence. A peasant from a nearby village wrote in to Stojałowski’s Wieniec in June 1898 praising Żywiec as a Jewfree paradise. He despaired over what he viewed as Jewish domination of his own village and the purported corruption and complicity of local



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Christians that had delivered his village to the Jews. This peasant, at least, considered Żywiec a model town whose leadership had not accepted Jewish bribes to work against Catholic interests.64 Beginning on June 10 and ending only six days later, scores of people “laid siege” to the home of Samuel Feiner in Targanica, a village northeast of Żywiec. Reportedly they made a hellish clamor by “screaming, hooting, clapping with boards, drumming on boxes they brought with them as well as various other wood and iron objects.” The mob demanded cigars and alcohol, broke in windows with rocks and banged on doors with sticks. Feiner pleaded with them, some of whom he knew and would later denounce to the gendarmes. The attackers refused to stop even when Feiner begged them to calm down out of respect for his ill, bedridden wife. Others, including Moses Schöngut in nearby Jastrzębia, the Gross family in Sułkowice (in the neighboring Andrychów district), and Jewish families in Jeleśnia, Kzyżowa, and Sporysz received the same treatment. In each case hundreds of people participated actively or came out to observe the caterwauling. Jewish witnesses identified village mayors and community representatives among the “musicians.”65 The longest-running example of Katzenmusik took place in K ­ oszarawa, approximately fourteen kilometers east of Żywiec, and lasted from June 11 through 21. Here, a village elder and a community council member appealed to the crowd of 200 to lift their siege of the home of Vadie Rumpler. The assailants ignored these local authorities, broke all the windows and subjected the Rumplers to three days of caterwauling. The response was, “Hurrah against the village elder, we will play for the Jewish village elder” and “Okay, let’s play music and beat the Jew.” The attackers also laid a siege to Jakób Rosenthal’s house. Three men waiving hatchets through shattered windows threatened him with “Jew, now we will also dismember and salt you.” The story had spread in Koszarawa that the district captain had approved caterwauling and had told the village elders so. Those spreading this rumor blamed the village headman for refusing to announce the news.66 In Zabłocie, a small community separated by the Soła river from Żywiec, Moses Mahler returned from market on June 16 at 10:00 pm. He found his house surrounded by forty people pounding on various objects and smashing windows. Someone struck Mahler on the head with a rubber hose until his nose bled. Twenty attackers gave similar treatment to the homes of Emanuel Löwy and Anna Haas. Later, rioters raided a wagon car-

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rying Jews from the market. The attackers struck them with home-made “musical instruments” and cudgels.67 In most of these incidents the local police did little, evidently considering Katzenmusik to be harmless, good-natured fun or else identifying with the anti-Jewish sentiments of the attackers. The arrival of a few gendarmes at any particular location had little effect, as the crowds simply melted away and reemerged around other Jewish residences. Hundreds of people participated in these incidents; a few score were arrested. The latter were set free pending further investigations. In a report to the chief prosecutor in Cracow, the Wadowice state attorney, Józef Sułkowski, sharply criticized the failure of gendarmes to arrest more “musicians.” He regretted that courts immediately set free most of those apprehended, who then went back to take part in more caterwauling, which again only seemed to confirm the rumors that the authorities really supported anti-Jewish actions. In July, all of those brought before the court for caterwauling were acquitted. A disgusted Sułkowski appealed the verdicts to no avail.68 Caterwauling was largely limited to the area around Żywiec. Violence targeting isolated taverns was much more common, and many such attacks appear to have been spontaneous. Typically, a small handful of drinkers in a Jewish-administered taproom ordered and drank alcohol and then refused to pay. Citing violence against Jews elsewhere, the customers lashed out at the tavern keeper, breaking glasses and stealing tobacco and other items. One such instance took place on the morning of June 18 just outside Cracow. At 7:00 am, four workers returning home from the night shift in a cement factory stopped for breakfast and vodka at an inn run by Mina Goldberg. The workers proceeded to beat Goldberg and her assistant, broke bottles, glasses, and lamps that caught fire. The four workers later tried to justify themselves by claiming that they were drunk, remembered nothing, and woke up the next day in a field ignorant of their own actions. 69 The following night, less than two kilometers away in Łagiwniki, the brothers Michael and Josef Witas threatened tavern keepers Osias Grosbart and Elias Gewürz: “Jew, open the tavern up, we want to drink, otherwise we will break the windows and plunder [the tavern], because it is permitted to beat Jews and plunder and in other places taverns have been sacked, and so we can do the same.”70 Another typical attack on an isolated group of Jewish families took place just to the east of Strzyżów. Three Jewish families lived in Żarnowa. The Flammenhaft and Steinmetz families ran the tavern called The Bar-



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racks; the store and house of Szymon Gross was just a few steps away. On Wednesday, June 15, a group of peasants came to the bar and shouted for free drink. One Stanisław Sinta pushed Flammenhaft’s young son in the chest, brushed a hand through the boy’s hair, and said: “Boy, you will be butchered with a scythe.” Another peasant warned of an imminent attack. All three Jewish families fled to Strzyżów, leaving their establishments in the hands of Christian friends and employees. That evening, a hundred men, women, and children pushed their way in. The five Christians who tried to protect Szymon Gross’s place were assaulted by the crowd, which ransacked Gross’s shop and home.71 Near Jasło, before and after the confrontation in Frysztak, more than two dozen taverns were plundered and several were burned down. It is difficult to assess whether the arson was intentional or the result of inebriated attackers breaking bottles of spirits and oil lamps in the course of general mayhem, as may have been the case with Frant’s distillery in Ulaszowice described in the previous chapter. Most pubs that came under anti-Jewish attacks were plundered and their furnishings, glassware, and even the taps themselves destroyed—but the buildings were typically not burned down. Assaults on taverns and Jewish shops in other rural areas showed some evidence of prior planning, often inspired by news about violence in nearby communities. In Lutcza, for example, a village east of Jasło, a huge crowd sacked a series of Jewish homes and businesses, including Soloman Diamant’s tavern on the night of June 18. The crowd gathered for several reasons. On June 16 and 17 two rumors circulated in the area. One tale, propagated by Jędrzej Szurlej, concerned the emperor’s barber. The other one may have originated with Mateusz Urban, the policeman from Domaradz, who retold the tale of official sanction to beat the Jews over a period of three to fourteen days. He even produced a document he claimed contained this permission. Many of the men, women, and teenagers who would eventually participate claimed to have heard about pending attacks from Urban. They just wanted to see for themselves whether in fact anyone would beat and rob Jews on the night of the eighteenth. Also several people had come back from Strzyżów and relayed what they had heard about anti-Jewish attacks in that district. That the authorities had authorized anti-Jewish actions, and that police and gendarmes had not intervened demonstrated the truth of this assertion. O ­ thers joined after learning about the deaths on June 16 in Frysztak. Finally, many people walked from

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their homes to an election rally in Domaradz at which Stojałowski himself was to speak. The meeting was canceled. Some of those who had hoped to see and hear Stojałowski deliver his standard speech peppered with antiJewish charges now crossed paths with and joined one of several gathering groups of peasants led by those most actively disseminating rumors of official permission to attack Jews.72 A significant crowd gathered around Diamant’s saloon in anticipation of violence. Once it began, scores joined in, completely trashing the bar. One of Feige Diamant’s children was hit with a rock. The Nürnberg family lived in the building and received more of the same. Meilach Nürnberg was hit in the head with a rock and struck with a stick when he tried to shut the door to his apartment. At the same time it is clear that the rioters were most interested in destruction of property and did not, with the few exceptions mentioned here, commit physical assaults. Feige Diamant repeatedly tried to light candles to illuminate the taproom only to have them blown out so the rioters could continue destroying her property unrecognized, but she herself was untouched. Participants stole money, tobacco, alcohol, sugar, and other items. The rioters continued from the Diamants’ to damage and plunder other Jewish homes and businesses nearby.73 The marauders did not kill Jews in any of the 1898 attacks—a point repeated in the populist and antisemitic press and also emphasized by scholars who have touched on these events. Instead, attackers targeted Jewish businesses, booths in market squares, and Jewish-owned or administered pubs and shops. The state prosecutor of Rzeszów believed that while “preserving the life and well-being of the Jews”, those implicated in the Lutcza violence intended only “to destroy their [the Jews’] economic predominance.”74 In hundreds of attacks, including most of those mentioned thus far, participants stole and destroyed property. Many Jews suffered devastating monetary losses. Scores of Jewish publicans and shopkeepers reported modest damages totaling a few gulden. For others, however, the cost of property stolen or destroyed added up to hundreds or even thousands of gulden. Jakób Frant’s losses from the looting and burning of his distillery and other property in Ulaszowice added up to 60,000 gulden. Twenty-six Jewish families suffered a combined 99,000 gulden in property damage and stolen goods when the raiders invaded their thirty-one stores on the Stary Sącz market square. These represent very significant sums. Historian Raphael Mahler estimated that “the stock of the average Jewish shop in Galicia was worth



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about $20, and frequently no more than four dollars.”75 Die Welt reckoned that an average Jewish tavern keeper earned between 1.2 and 2.2 gulden per week.76 The modest incomes of rural Jewish businesses reflected the poverty of their customers. Less than one percent of Galicia’s population earned the minimum taxable annual salary of 600 gulden. More than 80 percent of peasant landholdings yielded less than twenty gulden (forty crowns) in profit per year.77 Although there were no Jewish fatalities, confrontations were often personal, physical, and terrifying. Assailants beat Jews bloody with rocks and farm implements. They pulled beards, forced men to crawl like animals, and threw women to the ground.78 Assaults on Jews similar to what took place on June 19 in Turaszówka occurred over and over. In this small village a few kilometers east of Jasło, one Wojciech Mazur grabbed Majzesz Berger by the beard, hit him several times in the face and yelled that “he had to kill him and bury his knife in him.”79 On June 23 in Wielogłowy near Nowy Sącz, three assailants struck innkeeper Leib Wasserlauf on the head until he lost consciousness; his son, who tried to intervene, was hit hard enough on the back of the head that he also dropped to the ground. The attackers returned a few hours later—after having plundered a Jewish bakery, where one of the attackers choked the proprietor—and again struck Wasserlauf in the head with a rock.80 A particularly savage series of attacks took place on Friday, June 24. That evening soldiers and a citizen guards pushed a large and unruly crowd out of Limanowa. Scores of those expelled emerged from the darkness of night and surprised the nine Jewish families of Pisarzowa, the five families living in Męcina, and both Jewish families of Kłodne, all of whom ran small businesses and lived on the premises on the outskirts of these small villages. Women joined in, yelling “Hurrah, at the Jews!” and taking everything they could carry. In Męcina, Michał Krzyzak used a cobbler’s knife to threaten Jakób Blaulauf in his store, screaming, “Damn you, I am going to kill you!” Jan Smoleń beat Blaulauf with a stick and forced him onto all fours. In Pisarzowa, Beila Federgrünn grabbed her children and ran to her neighbor, Piotr Dutki, a Christian, to escape the mob looting her family’s butcher shop. Marauders chased her there, however, and assaulted Beila Federgrünn. During this attack, Jędrzej Wróbel and his wife Katarzyna, themselves parents of two, did nothing to help Federgrünn or her children and instead stripped the Dutkis’ house of valuables. F ­ ranciszek Fraczek convinced the mob not to burn down one Jewish family’s home in Pisar-

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zowa since that might have resulted in the destruction of his own house next door.81 Almost all the attackers lived in these villages. In the days following the urban riots in Nowy Sącz and Stary Sącz, Tomas Kasprzycki led a large band in a series of serious of vicious assaults on Jews in stores, homes, and shops between Sącz and Brzesko. In P ­ taszkowa they beat several Jewish men and women with spikes and sticks.82 He insisted that since the gendarmes had done nothing, the events in Zbyszyce proved the government approved the beating and robbing of Jews. Then, with many others joining out of curiosity, Kasprzycki’s group headed north and west in the direction of Brzesko. Witnesses later estimated that the mob grew to some 400 people. In Będzieszyna, they threatened a widowed storekeeper with scythes and hoes. In Iwkowa and several other villages, they attacked and ransacked Jewish homes and businesses and assaulted and threatened Jews with hatchets and sticks. Józef Stop, the parish priest in Czchów, hearing wild rumors and seeing a crowd beginning to assemble, implored them to disperse, but crowd leaders insisted the emperor and pope had sent official writings giving permission to beat the Jews.83 Some of the anti-Jewish attacks also involved religious desecration. In Wieliczka in March, a synagogue filled with Jews attending Friday evening prayers was surrounded, and rocks were thrown through windows. In late May in Skawina, youths threw rocks through the synagogue windows.84 In Tłuste, railroad workers shattered the windows of the synagogue. Attackers heaved huge stones into the prayer house in Radziszów and defiled the Torah with mud. In late June in Iwkowa, assailants led by Kasprzycki and others trashed a small prayer room and threw Torah scrolls into the dirt. Jędrzej Opyd, a 64-year-old father of two previously convicted of public drunkenness, joined a crowd ransacking a prayer house in his home village of Kamienica. He went inside, grabbed the Torah, ripped it apart, tossed the shredded scrolls in the mud, and yelled, “I have destroyed the Jewish God!”85 Not all Christians believed or acted on the stories of imperial permission to assault Jews. Some defended Jews and their property at great risk to themselves. Rioters often threatened to attack any Christians who helped Jews.86 One example comes from a village near Jasło and took place at the most intense period of violence in that region. Almost buried on page 3, the 23 June edition of Słowo Polskie printed a letter about this event. Słowo Polskie identified it as a “typical letter”; however, it is the only example of its kind that I have found published in the Polish-language press in 1898. In



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the letter, Samuel Jakób, a Jewish tavern keeper from Hankówka, a small settlement just to the east of Jasło, described events that took place on June 18. Jakób wrote that “peasants from here (włościanie tutejsi)” demanded vodka, plundered the pub, and threatened him, his wife, and children. The family fled out the window. “In the entire village there could be found only two God-fearing people, and their names are: Jędrzej Kosiba and Jan Buba.” These two men entreated the attackers to show mercys and helped the Jakób family escape and hide. Buba was assaulted for having protected Jews. Jakób was stunned by the fact that neighbors he had long known had destroyed his livelihood “in the village where I was born.” Buba tried to offer some comfort by assuring Jakób that “it was not true, what the others say, that they have permission [to beat and rob Jews]. . . . They will have to face punishment.” Jakób sent his letter to Słowo Polskie for one reason: “to publicly thank Jan Buba and Jędrzej Kosiba for saving the lives of myself and my family . . . May God Bless!” There were a few cases of Christians protecting Jews even in the Sącz region, the center of the most widespread and intense violence. On June 24 in Barcice, a community just south of Stary Sącz, a band of more than a hundred would-be plunderers and onlookers gathered at David Weinberger’s tavern. They found the tavern guarded by a group of armed men led by Leopold Jenschke, a forester, Michał Garwol, the newly elected wójt of Barcice, and his father, Franciszek, the former wójt. Despite bitter taunts that their actions proved that they were Jewish foresters and Jewish mayors and therefore enemies of Catholics, the defenders protected the inn until dawn.87 A similar if less successful effort by locals to guard the property of a Jewish innkeeper took place in Miłkowa, a village to the north of Nowy Sącz. Christians such as Jan Buba and Michał Garwol who tried to protect Jews or their livelihoods can only be identified today because Jews testified in court, sent letters to the Galician authorities, and wrote to the press praising their defenders as righteous people whose deeds merited recognition.88 Not all of those who resisted the violence opposed antisemitism, however. After the riots, the town council of Nowy Sącz granted the Peasant Party Union newspaper Związek Chłopski a subvention for its efforts to convince the peasants to reject violence.89 The editors of this publication could hardly have been accused of philosemitism. Before, during, and after the riots, every edition of this newspaper suggested that the most

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effective way to push Jews out of the economy and out of the countryside was through systematic action instead of crude physical attacks. Związek Chłopski implored its readers to reject violence and instead to isolate the Jews by supporting the cooperative movement and voting for political parties dedicated to this goal.90 Citizen guards, in some towns including Jews, patrolled the streets. Numerous village headmen, priests, and prominent members of local communities did try to calm the crowds. They usually did not denounce violence against Jews as immoral, however. They attempted to convince would-be rioters that the authorities did not condone such attacks, which would only lead to dangerous confrontations with the army and police. In Jasło for example, a hastily organized protection force blocked the bridge leading into town from Ulaszowice, where a huge crowd of peasant rioters looted and burned down a Jewish-owned distillery. Jasło’s residents did not mount a rescue mission to protect the Jewish proprietor from being beaten. More likely, as town dwellers, they simply hoped to preserve their homes from the peasant masses. Such mobs, after all, might just as easily burn down the entire town as surgically strike at the Jewish population.91

Jewish Responses What choices did Jews make when faced with symbolic savagery (Katzenmusik and desecration of Torah scrolls) and very real physical violence against their persons? In a recent article about Jewish organizational responses to Russian pogroms in the early twentieth century, Vladimir Levin posited three categories of measures Jewish organizations took to “prevent the next pogrom, which was expected tomorrow or in the near future.” The categories of responses were “intercession, self-defense, and systematic struggle against antisemitism.” 92 Some responses by Jewish organizations and individuals in Galicia in 1898 fit into these three categories. Jews were attacked where they regularly interacted with non-Jews: market squares, inns, village taverns; however, Jewish efforts at intercession did not focus only on local communities or even on Galicia itself. Beginning with the earliest incidents in small towns in the western districts in late February and in Wieliczka in mid-March, the Jewish communities of the region contacted the Austrian-Israelite Union in Vienna, which immediately lobbied the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Religion to ban Jewish Secrets. Galician Jews viewed the pamphlet as an important propa-



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gator of anti-Jewish sentiments.93 The Vienna Commercial Association, prompted by a letter from Jewish businessmen in Cracow and Tarnów about the attacks in Stary Sącz, petitioned the Vienna Ministry of the Interior to restore order. The Central Association of Industrialists of Austria responded to “urgent pleas from a large series of the most reputable firms represented in Vienna.” The industrialists complained that “business people were mishandled in barbaric ways . . . the security of life and property, which every state as such provides, appears to be endangered to the highest degree.”94 Jewish businessmen were prominent in both of these influential economic associations. Jewish politicians led by Emil Byk, a Galician deputy in the ­Vienna parliament, head of the Lemberg Jewish community, and president of Schomer Israel, the leading liberal Jewish association in the provincial capital, implored regional and state authorities to protect the Jews. They also appealed to the Jews of the monarchy and beyond to donate money to compensate Galician Jews for lost property. This effort was not without controversy. These Jewish leaders required that anyone accepting money from the fund pledge not to sue perpetrators for damages out of concern for the “innocent families of the misled rioters.” This decision repulsed some Jewish journalists and organizations. The Jewish publication Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, edited by Byk’s fierce rival Joseph Bloch, decried this move as “self-abasement” and an unprecedented “humiliation.”95 The Vienna Zionist organ, Die Welt, lampooned this effort at remembering “the holiest qualities of the golus [diaspora] Jew”, which is to give money to “the poor misled plunderer.”96 Jewish leaders in Galicia pressed local and regional authorities to protect the Jewish population. The Sandz Hasidic dynasty in Nowy Sącz petitioned the district captain to investigate violent incidents.97 Jewish community and synagogue presidents sent letters and approached police and district captains requesting assistance. Some sent telegrams from the sites of violence, or in anticipation of attacks, asking for immediate military protection, which invariably arrived too late. The Jewish leaders of Brzostek, a small town north of Jasło, attempted to prevent anticipated attacks by publicizing indisputable proof of the falsehood of one specific rumor. In mid-June, after a series of raids on nearby estates, taverns, and businesses owned or operated by Jews, foot soldiers arrived in Brzostek and began patrolling the area. Nonetheless, “a great panic” set in among the Jewish population. Fr. Antoni Stańki,

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FIGURE 20.  Telegram to the governor’s office from the Jewish community leadership of Andrychów, June 26, 1898. The text reads “Representative Stojałowski is expected at today’s People’s Assembly, with very likely 1,000 attendees summoned by provocative posters. The city appears very threatened due to the absence of the mayor. We request most humbly for the speediest and necessary security measures. Jewish Community Board.” TsDIAL, 146/4/3122, 49. Courtesy of the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in L’viv.

the parish priest, passed away suddenly. Rumors spread quickly that Jews had poisoned him. The Brzostek Jewish community anticipated the likelihood of renewed attacks after the funeral. Lazar Licht, head of the Jewish community, appealed to Słowo Polskie, the liberal Lemberg daily with the largest circulation of any newspaper in Galicia, to refute this “fabrication devoid of any basis.” Słowo Polskie published Licht’s letter as well as a statement from Dr. Kazimierz Czerwiński, the Brzostek town and court doctor. Czerwiński certified that the priest died of “a sudden hemorrhage from a peptic ulcer (ulcus ventriculi rotundum s. sequente Haemorhagia).”98 This newspaper appeal had a limited effect. Persistent rumors proved convincing (or threatening) enough to prompt the district court to order the priest’s body exhumed. The district captain and the commander of the military forces deployed in Brzostek feared the exhumation might provide



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more fodder for creative rumor-mongers and lead to another round of disturbances.99 Individual Jews took a variety of actions. Those who had advanced warning often abandoned vulnerable Jewish enclaves for the perceived security of larger towns. The “men, women, and children who fled Strzyżów, Frysztak, and Jasło ahead of the furious peasant bands” and sought refuge in the garrison town of Rzeszów reminded one Jewish journalist of what had happened at “the Galician main train stations at the time of the Russian persecutions.”100 Some of these people were ambushed, assaulted, and robbed on the way to what they believed were safe havens.101 When possible, Jews padlocked front entrances as well as doors between shops/taverns and living quarters. Other Jewish innkeepers, confronted by unruly clients, satisfied demands for drink and, as soon as they could, escaped out windows to find police and gendarmes. Women and children ran into the fields or hid themselves in neighbors’ attics.102 Some, like Feige Diamant who faced down rioters on the night of the June 18–19 in her tavern in Lutcza, stood their ground, shaming those familiar to them among the looters.103 Some Jews did not hesitate to insist on their rights even to callous military commanders whose task was to protect Jews from further attacks. Perhaps the most widely publicized case of such Jewish “provocation” was that of Jakób Hagel, a forty-seven-year-old father of nine, dealer in pelts, and caretaker of the old Jewish cemetery in Strzyżów, a small market town near Jasło. Hussars (light cavalry) were deployed to the town to counter the riots. The officers needed to graze their horses, so the mayor directed them to the Jewish cemetery. Hagel objected, and demanded that the troops instead use the Christian cemetery. Gendarmes arrested him for insulting a house of worship and inciting the peasant onlookers to riot. The Rzeszów district court tried, convicted, and sentenced Hagel. Głos Narodu cheered that a “typical Jewish provocateur” had received justice.104 Other Jews reacted more aggressively. A number of Jewish butchers were among those who responded with a muscular self-defense. On March  13 a large crowd left services at the Wieliczka parish church and attacked Jews and their houses in the town and nearby village of Klasno. There butcher Mendel Kraus faced down a mob of stone throwers. He rushed out of his stall, knife in hand, and grabbed one of the leaders by the throat. He and Hirsch Königsberger, an assistant baker who had retaliated by heaving a rock back at the crowd, were arrested and tried along with those who had attacked them. They were denounced in the press for

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their aggressiveness and provocative behavior. (For more on the Kraus and Hagel cases, see Chapter 4.) Jewish butchers in Nowy Sącz and Bursztyń, the latter in eastern Galicia, also reacted with violence to their attackers. They too had to contend with a justice system that equated Jewish efforts at self-defense with the assaults of their attackers.105

The Habsburg State and the Restoration of Order The district captain in Wieliczka and the Cracow state prosecutor did respond swiftly to the Wieliczka events in mid-March. Galician authorities and the ministries in Vienna, however, were slow to recognize the magnitude of the threat to domestic order posed by the violence of May and June. Officials at all levels took anti-Jewish rumors seriously only when they were followed by evidence originating from sources other than peasants or uneducated day-laborers that a crime had been committed or a real threat to public order existed. Charges of Jewish perfidy, ritual murder, and the like were common and normally not linked to violent acts; therefore, such allegations were initially brushed aside by the authorities. Negative stereotypes about Jews also led some local officials to discount Jews’ concerns about pending violence. The district captain of Wadowice, for example, explained his failure to act when a delegation of Jews came to him on May 20 with information about rumors that anti-Jewish violence would take place on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth in Kalwaria: “knowing, however, the cowardly nature of Jews and their national inclination to make up fairy tales, there was all the more reason for me not to believe them, at least in relation to the rumors of there having been riots, nor did it occur to me to take any measures.”106 This local official, like many others, required proof from nonJewish sources before taking action. Some officials did react vigorously and mobilized available resources to counter anti-Jewish attacks. District captains, mayors, and headmen in Sanok, Jasło, Tłuste and elsewhere included Jews in local self-defense units.107 Wadowice State Prosecutor Sułkowski denounced the tendency to take the events lightly and hoped authorities would work “with all energy and all means allowed by law against [the violence]” and “in the interest of state order.” Whenever arrests were made, Sułkowski affirmed, the violence ceased. None of those arrested should be released pending trial. As it was, many of those let out took part in subsequent incidents. Holding them would have prevented such recidivism and served as a more serious deterrent.108



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Whatever were individual officials’ views about the Jews, the limited forces of gendarmes, army troops, and local police (some of whom took part in anti-Jewish acts) in Galicia’s rural areas hampered the effectiveness of any possible response. Count Leon Piniński, the newly appointed governor, complained to Vienna about the inadequate numbers of gendarmes. This situation prevailed in other provinces, but was especially problematic in Galicia owing to a large rural population spread across a sprawling geographical area. The district captain of Tarnów had only sixteen gendarmes under his responsibility. The county of Tarnów had more than 107,000 inhabitants in 1900.109 Only three gendarmes confronted hundreds of riot­ers in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. Nine gendarmes, the full complement available to district captain Johann Winiarski, attempted to restore order in Frysztak and in the process killed twelve people. The district captain of Ropczyce required the Jewish community to pay for any extra security forces mobilized for its protection. Piniński regarded the dearth of security forces as one of the reasons for the proliferation of attacks.110 In mid-June, as the riots spread out like tentacles from market towns into villages and from there to other towns, the Galician authorities began to panic. The sense of crisis was evident in the communications between gendarmes, district captains, and the central Galician administration. The breakdown of public order prompted vigorous government action that overcame the barriers of anti-Jewish sentiment within the state bureaucracy and the lack of policing power in the affected regions. Governor Piniński visited Frysztak immediately following the June 16 bloodshed. He also toured the Jasło region. He judged that the “excitation of the population against the Jews did not appear to be without foundation.” “The Jews’ many years of exploitation . . . caused such fury that the slightest pretext suffices to give rise to violent riots.” This sentiment was intensified by the systematic “agitation by radical and social democratic party leaders.”111 Piniński assured the Vienna ministries that the institution of a formal state of emergency or the suspension of the jury system was not necessary at that time nor, he hoped, would it prove to be so in the future. The governor did, however, order an immediate increase in the gendarmerie in the area. He also requested the Galician military command to move seven companies of foot soldiers into the area. Gendarmes and soldiers were soon patrolling every town square, train station, and public building.112 In Frysztak and nearby environs hundreds of soldiers were guarding the train station and streets by June 19.113 Under pressure from

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oil and paraffin companies in nearby Gorlice, where Jews constituted a significant percentage of the workers, the governor bolstered the gendarme and military presence there.114 Piniński urged every wójt, district captain, and town mayor to create citizen guard units. The governor also pressured local notables to try to convince the population that rumors of imperial permission were dangerous fictions, that violence against the Jews was against the law, and that offenders would be dealt with severely.115 District captains, state attorneys, gendarmes, military officers, and the governor’s office hunted the elusive individuals and conspirators who, they at first assumed, were behind the seemingly coordinated and organized anti-Jewish attacks. The chief state prosecutor in Lemberg demanded that all state attorneys swiftly pursue investigations of violent incidents and seek stiff punishments in order to deter the population from threatening the secure order of society.116 These actions, along with curfews and night patrols, calmed the situation around Jasło. Nonetheless, these measures did not keep the violence from being carried to other districts. They did not prevent the mass riots involving thousands in Nowy Sącz and Stary Sącz on June 24 and June 25 or the raids by large bands on Jews living in isolated communities in villages around Limanowa, Nowy Sącz, and Brzesko. These late June attacks prompted Governor Piniński to telegraph the cabinet in Vienna for authorization for more serious actions.117 On June 28, while in Nowy Sącz to view the aftermath of the major urban riots in that region, Piniński received word that the Vienna cabinet and Emperor Franz Joseph had approved his request to issue a state of emergency for thirtythree political districts—the thirty districts in western Galicia plus three neighboring districts in the east.118 In these districts, some constitutional protections were suspended. Freedom of assembly and postal privacy were curtailed. Home searches were conducted without warrants. Publications were subjected to censorship controls. The measures required Głos Narodu and Prawda and other newspapers to submit editions to the prosecutor three hours prior to publication. Socialist publications including Naprzód and Prawo Ludu as well as the antisemitic Hasło were suspended from publication altogether. Piniński ordered district captains to compile lists of those who subscribed to rural newspapers.119 The police hired private detectives to identify the “agitators” believed to be responsible for the mass attacks in Stary Sącz.120 The liberal press announced to its readership: “For three million citizens the constitution has been abolished.”121

FIGURE 21.  “State of Emergency in Galicia.” Cartoon printed in Kikeriki (Cock-adoodle-doo), a Viennese satirical magazine. The headline and dialogue read: “State of Emergency in Galicia. Article 430: State of Emergency, Murder, Robbery . . .” and “Look, you Galician swindler, there it says ‘Plunder’--that refers therefore also to you!” Kikeriki, July 10, 1898, 1. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library.

FIGURE 22.  Military Situation Map of June 27, 1898. ÖSTA/KA/MKSM, 28-4/4-7, 1898, k.u.k. 1. Corps-Commando zu Präs Nr. 1298 v. 1898. Courtesy of the Austrian State Archives.



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Franz Joseph also authorized the declaration of martial law for the political districts of Limanowa and Nowy Sącz, inhabited by more than 180,000 people.122 In accordance with paragraph 430 of the 1873 Code of Criminal Procedure, to mark this suspension of constitutional norms, at 5:30 pm in the town square of Nowy Sącz, the site of the June 24 riot, an armed military guard marched with great formality. The commander of the guard called for attention. Trumpeters blew three times in all directions. District Captain Julius Friedrich then announced to the gathered crowd that anyone apprehended for the crimes of murder, robbery, arson, or public violence in the districts of Limanowa and Nowy Sącz would be arrested, tried before a special tribunal, and executed within two hours of the announcement of a guilty verdict. There would be no possibility of appeal.123 Karl Selinger, Vienna’s chief state executioner, traveled from Vienna with two assistants to carry out these sentences on anyone who dared to defy the government.124 In his memoirs socialist leader Ignacy Daszyński described Governor Piniński’s first meeting with the hangman. Selinger arrived just as Piniński sat down to dinner with the wife of the Nowy Sącz district captain. She was so frightened of Selinger that she entreated Piniński to send him elsewhere. Piniński complied, transferring Selinger to Tarnów, where the executioner stayed in an elegant hotel. When the other hotel guests recognized him at breakfast, however, they all left. The irate noble hotel owner telegraphed the governor, who immediately ordered Selinger to return to Vienna. Whether the stories about the Galician elite’s confrontations with Selinger are completely accurate or not, none of the accused faced the death penalty, and Piniński soon sent the under-utilized Selinger back to Vienna.125 The military presence in the towns and villages of western and central Galicia had been bolstered before the formal institution of the state of emergency in reaction to the complete breakdown of law and order in the triangle bounded by Limanowa, Nowy Sącz, and Brzesko. By June 27, General Major Hyacinth von Schulheim had taken command over all forces in Limanowa and Nowy Sącz and held the authority to take all necessary steps to restore order. The army now deployed thousands of Habsburg soldiers throughout the region (see Figure 22). Foot soldiers and cavalry officers were visible in and outside of every train station; they patrolled villages and stood watch in market squares. Schulheim blamed local leaders for the chaos his troops now had to deal with: “in many cases the local authorities [village headmen, local police] not only failed to do their

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duty, but through passivity and yes, even though participation encouraged the rioting and plundering.”126 Notwithstanding Schulheim’s confidence in the army, the mobilization and employment of military force against rioting civilians did not go entirely smoothly. On several occasions, soldiers opened fire on crowds, wounding and in a few cases killing rioters. On June 26, a mob assailed an infantry patrol outside Zbyszyce; soldiers fired and killed one man and severely wounded another. A military patrol fired on attackers in Łącko, about fifteen kilometers west of Stary Sącz, killing one and wounding seven. Near Siekierczyna, between Limanowa and Łącko, an armed band of approximately thirty peasants shot at soldiers, then fled into the forest.127 Soldiers from a regiment of dragoons rioted against the Jewish population in a village south of Tarnopol on the night of August 1–2. The gendarmes, police, and firefighters stepped in to end the dragoons’ physical attacks and looting of Jewish property. No local inhabitants took part in this assault. Clearly embarrassed, the military immediately transferred this unit to Moravia.128 The emergency measures introduced by Piniński and the army reduced the violence to manageable levels. Still, a few confrontations did take place in western Galicia in July. In a typical case, several drunks threatened a female Jewish tavern keeper in Skawica, just south and east of Myślenice. One of the troublemakers asserted that “we socialists will put things to right,” another that it was now forbidden to beat up Jews “because Jews are beasts, they bribed the courts and the Emperor.” 129 There were similar events in Łańcut, Wieliczka, and other towns An attack in the Wadowice district at the end of July gave rise to the most forceful example of self-defense by a Jew in this fateful year. On July 30 Bernard Bachner, a tavern keeper in Hecznarowice, just south of Oświęcim, fired a revolver three times at several guests in his establishment. Those fired upon maintained that Bachner had acted for no apparent reason. Bachner’s own version of events was very different. He said he was asleep after dinner when the sounds of people looting his taproom woke him up. He went to the bar in the room next to the family apartment and saw three men as “they made a fuss with his mother-inlaw.” When Bachner yelled at them, the attackers grabbed him by the throat, punched him, and hit him over the head with a bottle. He grabbed his gun and threatened that he would shoot if the three did not leave. Two of the men charged him, brandishing knives. Bachner fired, hitting



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both attackers. The incident was investigated by Wadowice prosecutor Sułkowice. Bachner’s pub had been attacked three days earlier, and this, it was charged, was evidence of his predisposition to commit murder. On July 27 someone had broken the windows of his house. Witnesses said that Bachner then swore to a neighbor that had he been home when the vandalism had taken place, he would have used his gun and either shot the attacker or been shot himself. Based on this earlier testimony, Sułkowice had Bachner arrested and tried for attempted murder. The court found Bachner innocent of this crime, although he was convicted of causing serious bodily harm in the course of “excessive self-defense” and sentenced to nine months in prison.130 These and other anti-Jewish incidents that took place after the institution of the state of emergency in western Galicia involved small numbers of people and did not inspire waves of attacks in nearby villages and towns. Still, local authorities continued to fear that Christian peasants would again resort to violence the moment the government determined to end the state of emergency and to withdraw the soldiers.131 The district captain in Limanowa believed there was “no doubt that the quiet has come due to the threat of martial law and the state of emergency.”132 In Jasło the authorities requested that a strong military presence be maintained until the end of the trials still months away.133 The governor’s office supported efforts to bolster local security forces with troops as long as the trials were under way.134 In his memoirs Ignacy Daszyński, the most prominent leader of Galician social democracy, reacted with some confusion to the vigorous, if less than perfect, efforts by the arms of the state to stop the anti-­Jewish riots: “Count Thun and Count Piniński were silent adherents of the anti­ semitic movement. It was strange then the energy employed by the government against the reactionary antisemites.” But, he noted, their real agenda was soon revealed when the Galician administration used the state of emergency to shut down socialist organizations and publications that had nothing to do with the anti-Jewish violence.135 In Cracow, for example, the authorities closed socialist organizations including Proletariat, Brotherhood, the Israelite Association of Commercial Apprentices, the Association of Working Women, the Association of Construction Workers, the Association of Coal Workers, the Association of Tailors, and the Association of Metallurgy Workers.136 On July 2, Hermand Diamand, the leading Jewish member of the Social Democratic Party of Galicia wrote bitterly about this

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to his wife. While the social democratic newspapers directed toward rural populations and the People’s Party press had been shut down, “the antisemitic publications were all untouched, with the exception of Hasła, some obscure journal unknown even in Cracow. Every publication that wrote against the rioting was crushed . . . and the parties that provoked the riots enjoy the support of the authorities.”137

July in Eastern Galicia A few isolated anti-Jewish incidents took place in eastern Galicia in late June and July. Emergency measures had not been instituted in the east nor had the military presence been significantly enhanced. Some Greek Catholics in Lemberg and a handful of smaller towns, building on tales conveyed by travelers on the railroad and articles in the Ukrainian-­language press, spread rumors about Crown Prince Rudolf. They insisted on the existence of imperial permission for attacking Jews, and they threatened Jews in taverns. District captains acted swiftly to counter any possible disturbance, and the gendarmes arrested a few people.138 The most serious anti-Jewish riot in the eastern districts took place in Bursztyń on July 17. Bursztyń was a majority Jewish town of approximately 5,000 people southeast of Lemberg. Around eighty Polish-speaking west Galician laborers and another three hundred locals, many of whom “do not even have a permanent place to live,” worked in Kuropatniki on the regulation of the river Gniła Lipa. The west Galician laborers (referred to as Mazurians or baraby) and some of the local Greek Catholics came to Bursztyń to shop for supplies and got into a street fight with Jewish butchers and merchants. The confrontation began with a dispute over the sale of meat. Jewish butchers seriously injured two Polish workers. One laborer was hit so many times in the head and body he could not work for twenty days. When word of this event circulated, hundreds of workers, peasants, and townspeople rioted against the Jewish population. Attackers knocked out the teeth of the rabbi and broke his hand. The baraby severely injured a Jewish woman and wounded five other Jews. Calm was restored by the arrival of military forces. The district captain believed the Bursztyń riot had only one feature in common with the antisemitic riots elsewhere in Galicia: “the provocative and brutal misbehavior of the local Israelites.”139 The Bursztyń incident, the last major attack in 1898, raises an important question: why did anti-Jewish violence fail to take hold among the



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Ruthenian communities in eastern Galicia? Polish-speaking laborers spearheaded most of the incidents—in Przemyśl, Tłuste, and Bursztyń—that had significant numbers of Ruthenian perpetrators. In these places though, there were no follow-up attacks in the surrounding, largely Ruthenian villages. Yet if anything, Jews were more visible in petty trade, commerce, money-lending, and tavern keeping in eastern Galicia. Here Ruthenian Greek Catholics constituted the majority of the rural population, while Jews often comprised the majority of citizens living and working in market towns. Greek Catholic priests, like their Roman Catholic counterparts to the west, decried the Jewish publican, shopkeeper, and leaseholder as negative forces in the countryside. Ruthenian activists called for boycotts and for an end to all economic relations with Jews. By the 1890s, all the political parties representing Polish peasants and the Ruthenian national movement aimed at pushing the Jews out of the rural economy if not out of the countryside altogether.140 One possible explanation for the divergence in the levels of anti-­Jewish violence experienced in Polish-speaking western and ­Ukrainian-speaking eastern Galicia in 1898 lies in the more intense economic competition between Polish-speakers and Jews in western Galicia. In the 1890s agricultural circles, credit cooperatives, and stores run by Roman Catholics became more common in western Galicia. Increasing numbers of Poles sought to enter economic sectors in which Jews were the prime competitors. In the less advanced economy of eastern Galicia, smaller numbers of Ruthenians entered commercial sectors in the 1890s, so fewer came to see Jews as direct competitors.141 Another factor appears to have played an equal or greater role, however. Jews became the central object for the political parties seeking rural votes in Polish-speaking Catholic western and central Galicia in ways that had no parallel among Ruthenians in eastern Galicia at this specific time. Some Ukrainian-speakers lived in districts that experienced violence in 1898; however, Stojałowski and other rural politicians did not rail against Ruthenians as a social or economic challenge to Polish-speaking peasants and small-town inhabitants. Instead, in speeches, newspaper editorials, and election materials, these populists aimed their invective at the Jews. They drew on the work of Catholic writers such as the priest Mateusz Jeż, who penned toxic combinations of standard anti-Jewish charges (ritual murder, Host desecration, and so on) with contemporary economic and political themes. Politicians and Roman Catholic writers agreed that confrontation

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with the Jews was the key to the modernization of the Polish peasantry. Peasant tribunes, partisan newspapers, and political campaigns repeated this again and again. Ruthenian political movements in eastern Galicia certainly regarded the Jews in largely negative terms, often focusing rhetorical attacks around the role of some Jews in the manipulation of local, provincial, and parliamentary elections in cooperation with Polish elites. As historian Andriy Zayarnyuk has argued, however, “the foremost concern of the Ukrainian national movement was not the Jews but Polish landlords.”142 .

.

.

On the ground, then, the evidence points to a chaotic situation, one in which people acted out of a variety of motivations: personal revenge, search for loot, social and economic distress, a sense of helplessness in the face of perceived injustice. Although riot participants did not adhere closely to the agendas of the political parties seeking to represent them and to justify their actions, political mobilization and electioneering as well as the increasingly virulent antisemitism propagated from Catholic circles deepened the divide between Christians and Jews. Every day for months, Stojałowski party spokesmen denounced their rivals as servants of the Jews, the real cause of all evil in the countryside. Catholic priests attested to the truth of the blood libel and Talmudic immorality. The partisan, Catholic, and antisemitic press reiterated these messages over and over. In this context, the rumors of imperial permission to get even with the Jews, the visible Other so intimately connected to daily life in rural Galicia (and the supposed source of instability, poverty, hunger, indebtedness) were credible. Stories of official and even imperial dispensation bound the rioters together and separated them from the Jewish objects of their action. The party and antisemitic press repeated the tales, which were picked up, distorted, exaggerated, and offered as proof that official approval was a fact. Riot leaders and those eager for loot employed these stories, believed by many and considered at least possible by many others, in order to attract the curious, thereby creating crowds of supportive onlookers, who themselves became tentative or even eager participants in anti-Jewish actions. In late May, Galician authorities failed to respond rapidly to rumors of coming violence. This weak response arose in some cases from the apparent conviction that what appeared to be the usual anti-Jewish chatter did not represent any real threat to law and order. In other cases, antisemitism and sympathy with the attackers led to indifference on the part of the



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authorities. As the violence intensified, however, the Galician administration, the Vienna government, and the military took forceful measures to restore calm and reassert the rule of law by enhancing the gendarmerie, deploying thousands of troops, and declaring a formal state of emergency. Court proceedings against thousands of participants in the riots constituted the most significant effort by the authorities to gain control of the situation. The attention of the province was riveted by the dramas that unfolded over the course of more than six months in courtrooms as the Galician and Viennese authorities sought to deal out justice. The trials and reaction to them are the subject of the following chapter.

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4 The Trials The Jews have protection: gendarmes, military, district captains, prosecutors, courts, state of emergency, etc. Where is the defense of the people from Jewish villainy?!! The people are asking themselves: where?? Zwia˛zek Chłopski, December 1, 1898 The trials against the [rioters] that have slithered along for months like a sea snake are finally coming to an end. Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, January 20, 1899, 46.

of those who took part in anti-Jewish attacks opened before the regional court of Rzeszów in the beginning of July, just days after the declaration of the state of emergency. For the next six months, the Galician and Viennese press reported in detail on court proceedings. The last major case was tried in January 1899. The proceedings were public events. The Galician (and to a lesser degree Viennese) press described arrests, detailed hunts for stolen goods, and printed extracts from the indictments. Newspapers provided descriptions of the accused and their victims as well as excerpts from witness testimony, verdicts, and sentences. The cast of characters (gendarmes, prosecutors, defense attorneys, accused, witnesses, victims of the crimes) was similar in most of the court cases. The plots of each incident appear as variations on the same essential themes. The trials were part of a broader effort by various arms of the Habsburg state to end the riots, restore law and order, and prevent such dangerous events from occurring in the future. Historians have analyzed trials in the age of mass media and mass politics as dramatic representations that construct rather than simply reflect perceived reality. In his fascinating Crime, Jews and News, Vienna 1895–1914, Daniel Vyleta argues that new styles of reporting on trials did not merely reference village life, social upheavals, politics, Jewish-ChrisTHE FIRST TRIALS

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tian relations, and so on, but instead created the discursive image of the “Jewish criminal.” The interaction between the media, antisemitic politics, and antisemitic action at the local level combined to form narratives or “stories that order and construct knowledge about criminals and Jews.” Reporting about Jews on trial in Vienna, Vyleta finds, did not spotlight perceived biological difference or Judaism. Instead, sensationalized and salacious trial accounts centered on alleged Jewish corruption and subversion of justice. Newspaper stories about trials depicted Jews as amoral and cunning scammers. These narratives portrayed the Jews as rational, but criminal, threatening, scheming enemies who were adept at using modern economic developments, technologies, and new institutions to their own advantage, and who aimed at the corruption of society and justice itself. The only difference between the Jew on trial and the Jew next door: the one on trial got caught.1 In his work on ritual murder in the Czech lands, Hillel Kieval has explored the ways in which Czech nationalist assumptions about Jews as unreliable in the national conflict with the Germans complemented new information about purported ritual murders elsewhere in Europe. Each type of knowledge reinforced the other, contributing to the “establishment of a structure of plausibility (one may say irresistibility).” Kieval continues, “Political ‘realities,’ then—together with history, collective memory, popular wisdom, and scientific analysis—provided a context that translated the ritual murder accusation from the realm of fantasy to that of the mundane. In so doing, they rendered the accusation [of ritual murder] eminently plausible, as a hidden manifestation of general, national enmity.”2 My argument in relation to the trials of 1898 owes much to both Vyleta and Kieval. The trials, experienced directly by thousands of people and mediated to the broader public through the partisan press, did not simply reflect events on the ground. They were morality plays depicting Jews as the enemies of the Polish-speaking Christian population. In 1898 the search for evidence, the confiscation of stolen goods, the arrest and transport of suspects to jail, and the trials held in courts packed with onlookers and journalists, fed competing partisan narratives about the Galician past, present, and future. The “knowledge” derived from these sources “made eminently plausible” the notion that Jewish difference equaled Jewish danger. Even as those who attacked Jews had to face legal consequences, the search for justice seemed to confirm that provocative,



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immoral, and arrogant Jewish behavior caused the 1898 violence. In this way, the trials were as profoundly exclusionary as the violence itself.3

The Judicial System and the Riots The justice system became engaged with the riots from the first arrests, long before the state of emergency was declared. The chief state prosecutors of Cracow and Lemberg, who were accountable to the Ministry of Justice in Vienna, and the higher provincial courts (Oberlandesgericht) in Cracow and Lemberg took the leading roles. In a directive sent on June 20, 1898, the Lemberg prosecutor pushed state attorneys in western and central Galicia to dispatch investigative committees to the sites of violence. He demanded that all local prosecutors act swiftly to bring those responsible to justice. They were to oversee the collection of evidence (including stolen goods, confessions, and witness statements), censor the press that propagated hatred among the lower classes, and coordinate their efforts with administrative and security personnel. The district prosecutors were to identify the “intellectual fathers” of the violence and bring them to justice. It was believed that severe sentences would serve as public examples and deter the population from continuing the attacks. The chief Lemberg state prosecutor expected all district state attorneys to head the prosecution personally during the trials.4 Trials took place under the authority of eight circular court (Landesgericht or Kreisgericht) jurisdictions: Cracow, Jasło, Nowy Sącz, Brzeszów, Tarnów, Wadowice, Przemyśl, and Sanok. While anti-Jewish incidents had occurred in 408 communities from May through June, approximately 88 percent of all those arrested in that period were seized within the geographical jurisdictions of sixteen district courts (Bezirksgericht): Nowy Sącz, Stary Sącz, Jasło, Limanowa, Frysztak, Strzyżów, Krosno, Gorlice, Grybów (halfway between Nowy Sącz and Gorlice), Brzesko, Wojnicz (a few kilometers east of Brzesko), Bierz (fifteen kilometers west of Jasło), Myślenice (approximately twenty kilometers south of Wieliczka), Sanok, Żmigród (sixteen kilo­meters south of Jasło), and Pilzno. These court jurisdictions constituted the “actual focal point of the excesses.”5 The Habsburg judicial system had achieved formal separation from the state administration and bureaucracy in the Fundamental State Law of 1867. The regulations that governed the trial system were issued in May 1873 and provided for jury trials. A two-thirds majority of twelve jurors

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decided guilt or innocence; judges determined the sentence and also had the prerogative of setting the jury decision aside and ordering a new trial. Liberals celebrated these acts structuring the judicial system as examples of the “triumph of constitutional Austria” over the arbitrary administrative governance that had characterized the justice system before the 1860s.6 The 1898 trials of those implicated in the anti-Jewish riots, however, diverged significantly from the normal course of affairs. Invoking emergency provisions of the constitution, the usual judicial procedures were set aside. Jury trials were suspended, undoing the separation of the determination of guilt and innocence, normally in the hands of the jury, and the sentencing, reserved to the judges.7 The fate of the defendants, then, was left entirely in the hands of the professional judges assigned to various cases. This was intended to avoid the partiality of potential jurors and facilitate a swifter path to justice and the eventual lifting of the state of emergency.8 Some of the practical problems facing the overwhelmed Galician justice system can be demonstrated by a brief look at the situation in Nowy Sącz. More people were arrested within the jurisdiction of the circular court of Nowy Sącz than any other court. Nowy Sącz hosted some of the largest trials and also experienced extensive administrative chaos. The pressures involved in trying the participants in the 1898 violence worsened the chaotic state of this judicial district. The president of the Nowy Sącz circular court had been forced out just prior to the first trials—newspaper reports claimed that the Ministry of Justice fired him for his slow response to the declaration of emergency.9 The new court president had not yet formally taken office and had never presided over a trial. The judicial senate of Nowy Sącz normally consisted of twenty judges; however, five justices were deemed unfit to serve, one was an “Israelite” and so, presumably, not entirely objective. Another could not be spared from other duties. The lead prosecutor was ill and his substitute was on vacation. This left the Nowy Sącz court woefully shorthanded just as gendarmes were delivering hundreds of rioters to jail, often without filing any formal criminal complaints. In these circumstances the Nowy Sącz jail simply held those arrested for a week or ten days without any due process. As late as November the Higher Provincial Court in Cracow determined that Nowy Sącz was still incapable of dealing with the situation and ordered the transfer of more judges from Cracow, Tarnów, and Wadowice to Nowy Sącz.10



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Arrests and the Collection of Evidence The continuing searches and investigations are keeping the population in a state of fear.11 Nowa Reforma, July 12, 1898

The arrests of suspected perpetrators and the collection of evidence became very public moments of tension between the authorities and rural and small-town Christian populations. Gendarmes and soldiers took thousands of people into custody. Many had been caught in the act of committing violence; more were arrested after they were found in possession of stolen goods or when witnesses attested to their involvement.12 Many of those taken to jail maintained then and later “Hurrah! It is not permitted to make arrests or to shoot—we have permission today” for attacking Jews.13 The peasant and antisemitic press contended that the furious response of the population to the arrests and collection of evidence, often supposedly accompanied by Jewish displays of delight in their apparent power and disdain toward the humbled Christians, was the main reason that otherwise insignificant and harmless incidents exploded into riots. The arrest of two apprentice potters in Kołaczyce on June 9 received the most press attention of any incident of Christians being taken into custody. For several days, rumors about coming violence had saturated the area around the village. Some Jews petitioned for protection. Local authorities immediately investigated, discovered that two journeymen potters were the main culprits agitating for anti-Jewish action, and seized them. The district captain of Jasło reported that at least some Jews laughed, jeered, and cheered as gendarmes escorted the two men through the town to the train station to be transported to the jail in Jasło.14 The authorities blamed the Jews’ behavior for what followed: the smashing of hundreds of windows and attacks on taprooms and Jewish property. The Polish press highlighted the arrest of the journeymen and the satisfaction purportedly expressed by some Jews during this particular incident. Liberal Słowo Polskie (Polish Word) informed its readers that the humiliation of the two craftsmen by the Jewish onlookers in Kołaczyce inflamed public opinion. Journalists also related that a confrontation between a priest and a Jewish woman trying to use a public well gave rise to rumors that Jews were poisoning wells, echoing medieval accusations. The behavior of these Jews, it was contended, led directly to attacks over the next week.15 The Catholic Prawda (Truth) also cited the Kołaczyce events

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as evidence that the Jews themselves were to blame for the violence in the Jasło area.16 According to Związek Chłopski (Peasant Union), the cunning Jews clapped their hands and announced to other residents that “such is the state of things with all the goyim in Kołaczyce.”17 The Galician press repeated the conviction that Jewish arrogance had precipitated the violence and that this arrogance stemmed from real Jewish power and Catholic weakness and humiliation. For example a peasant wrote this letter to Związek Chłopski in September 1898: And also when the Jews heard about those riots, they went at once to the village headman [of Łukowica] in order to get him to bring in the military, although until then no one had thought about any riots. And so it happened. The military came, and the Jews raised their hands to the sky [thankful] that the army would defend them. When Sunday came, the people went to church, and Jews walked along the road and harassed the people: they said “you will see the military go at you, robbers, come at me, bash in my windows, and right away you will be taken to the detective. You see how our emperor honors us, not you, just try to touch me, and immediately a gallows will be prepared for you.” That is how they mocked and blasphemed—and his honor the village headman went drunk among the population and said: oy, yes, the poor Jews, they need to be protected—and the Jews stroked their beards.18

Efforts to find evidence and arrest perpetrators led to many confrontations between various representatives of law and order and the rural population. Everywhere the arrival of the gendarmes and court investigators swiftly followed the trashing and plundering of Jewish-owned property. The suspension of constitutional protections allowed the authorities to search homes and private property and to open letters without court orders.19 Investigators discovered stolen items in barns, storage rooms, ditches, and stables. Some had buried the plunder. Others had thrown their spoils into ponds and wells or stashed them in fields.20 The partisan press emphasized every perceived injustice inflicted by overzealous investigators who seemingly worked on behalf of the Jews. To cite one example, in late June, Związek Chłopski published the story of Jędrzej Janas of the village of Pisarzowa. Janas not only suffered inconvenience and shame but was required to pay the expenses resulting from an investigation even after his innocence had been established. Janas traveled to Cracow for a job. He asked his brother to send his clothes and personal effects in a package by rail from Pisarzowa to one Piotr Dudka, the switchman at the station in Podgórze just outside Cracow. When



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Janas came to collect his goods from Dudka, he discovered that his property had been confiscated in Sucha and diverted to the district captain in ­Limanowa. Why? Samuel Lustgarten and other Jews in Pisarzowa who had been robbed by peasant plunderers charged that Janas’s package in fact contained goods stolen from them. When inspected in Limanowa however, none of the missing items was found. The package was sent on to Podgórze. Yet, Janas could only collect his things if he first paid the cost of transporting his items from Pisarzowa to Sucha, to Limanowa, and back to Podgórze. Związek Chłopski informed its readers that such outrages occurred in many locations, exacerbated tensions, and could lead at any moment to another explosion of righteous rage against the Jews.21 On July 10, Kurjer Lwowski detailed seven incidents of abuse by gendarmes and soldiers in the small villages of Moszczenica and Cyganowice. The soldiers and gendarmes were searching for goods stolen from Jews during the riot in Stary Sącz and brought by peasants to their homes in surrounding hamlets. Marjanna Nowak of Moszczenica stated that a soldier suddenly accosted her on the road as she returned from hoeing her cabbage patch on July 2. He struck her several times in the ears and broke her arm as he demanded she reveal the location of stolen goods. The soldier hit her nine-year-old son on the head. Nowak later claimed that the military doctor who treated her identified the soldier involved as a Jew named Bleiman. In the same village, soldiers and gendarmes threatened and assaulted Józef Jop, his wife, and his son. These security officers ransacked the Jop home. One soldier pressed his bayonet against the chest of Salomea Jop. Again in the same village, two soldiers pushed into the home of Kunegunda Konstanty. One of the two, “blackish with warts,” beat her despite her visibly advanced pregnancy. She fainted. In Cyganowice on the morning of July 4, a “blackish, short and freckled” soldier came to the door, hit Jędrzej Gieniec in the face, and hammered him in the legs with the butt of his gun. Franciszek Sieliński identified the same soldier as the one who struck his ten-year-old stepson in the face twice and threatened the boy with a bayonet if he did not reveal where his father had hidden the loot. All of the victims gave notarized statements about the events in question. When informed of these abuses, the gendarme commander put a halt to all similar investigations in these two villages. People’s Party representatives to the Vienna parliament cited these and other such cases in a parliamentary inquiry that pressed for explanations from the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Justice.22

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By July jails held thousands of people arrested during attacks or as a result of subsequent investigations. With so many incarcerated farmers unable to reap their fields, the liberal Nowa Reforma (New Reform) and other papers raised the specter of famine: “The harvest has already begun and there are no available hands to do the work.”23 After two years of poor yields, a third undermined by the arrests and trials of thousands of peasants would be an avoidable tragedy. The desperate need to bring in the harvest was among the many reasons defense attorneys cited for postponing cases or justifying leniency.24

Jewish Provocation: The Trials of Jakób Hagel and Mendel Kraus Very few of the scores of trials included Jewish defendants. The trials of Jakób Hagel and Mendel Kraus received particularly close scrutiny. In the series of hearings concerning Jewish Secrets held in March and April and discussed in Chapter 2, the Cracow Higher Provincial Court had banned the sale of the antisemitic pamphlet even as it conceded that the brochure’s major contentions were “well-known facts.” The court had effectively declared Jews and Judaism guilty of the charges Mateusz Jeż and politicians such as Andrzej Szponder and Stanisław Stojałowski had made. Like the Jewish Secrets proceedings, the trials of Hagel and Kraus conveyed mixed messages to the population. The proceedings made clear the opposition of the state to public disorder; however, these trials also reinforced the impression that Jews themselves were responsible for the violence perpetrated upon them. On July 5 in the Rzeszów district court, the second trial related to the riots opened. The case centered on Jakób Hagel. It reveals some of the contradictions inherent in the efforts to achieve justice and restore law and order in Galicia. Clearly the government in Vienna and the Galician governor saw the violence as a challenge to the definition of the monarchy as a well-run state committed to the rule of law. At the same time the authorities wanted to avoid being perceived as protectors of the Jews. This attitude influenced the decisions to try and convict a small number of Jews and prove that Habsburg justice was indeed blind. Hagel, a 47-year-old father of nine and a dealer in pelts, served as the caretaker of the old Jewish cemetery in front of the synagogue in Strzyżów. On June 17, the day after the riot and fatalities in Frysztak, cavalry troops



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deployed to Strzyżów. A town official, Władysław Wyżykowski, led the officers and their horses to the old Jewish cemetery, which was no longer in use and overgrown. Wyżykowski considered it an ideal location for grazing the horses. This desecration of the Jewish cemetery infuriated Hagel. Within earshot of Catholic peasants and townspeople as well as the cavalry officers, he demanded that Wyżykowski “Lead the horses to your own church or to your own cemetery—it will be better there.”25 Hagel was arrested. Głos Narodu described the courtroom and the defendant for its readers: “The hall of the proceedings began to fill with intelligent listeners—a sight rare among us—Jews were not lacking among the public, weighted down with gabardines, and their own special stench made staying in the hall almost impossible. . . . The accused himself had the usual look of the Galician type of Jew—long peyes, and an even longer black beard decorating his pale face. His beady eyes cast glances in all directions.”26 State Prosecutor Jakowski challenged the court to convict Hagel of insulting a “legally recognized church or religious community” under paragraph 303 of the criminal code.27 The defense conceded that Hagel had in fact committed this transgression, an offense that plainly did not apply to insulting Jews and Judaism as the cavalry officers and Wyzykowski had done. The prosecutor was not satisfied, however, and accused Hagel of deliberately inciting Catholics to violence. For this reason he also charged Hagel under paragraph 87, which dealt with acts of violence that threaten life, public safety, and significant damage to property. The prosecutor proclaimed Hagel’s case proof that justice in Galicia was not biased and that Catholic peasants were not solely responsible for the outbreak of the riots. The Jews and their arrogance were equally if not more to blame.28 The novel contentions put forward by the prosecution shocked Hagel’s defense attorney, Dr. Józef Michał Rosenblatt, a professor of law at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Until this moment, Rosenblatt exclaimed, one could only encounter such outrageous statements in the “third-rate boulevard press.”29 In the end, the panel of judges accepted the prosecution’s theory and convicted Hagel on both counts. He was sentenced to one year in prison, among the harshest of all the sentences pronounced in any of the scores of trials. On the same day Hagel’s sentence was issued, a peasant was found guilty of ransacking an inn, breaking into its cellar, causing serious damage, and threatening the Jewish owner with physical violence. He received a two-month sentence.30 In September the High Court of Appeals (Cassationshof ) reduced Hagel’s sentence to two months, but by then the

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“fact” of Jewish provocation had long since been “proven” in the Habsburg courts of justice—and in the court of public opinion.31 Not surprisingly, the antisemitic press applauded the tactics and arguments of the state prosecutor in the Hagel case: “The court has issued the word of truth: and that word is a clear condemnation of the provocative behavior of the Jews, their perfidy, and their confidence in their impunity.”32 The trial of Hagel confirmed instead of challenged popular assumptions about Jewish guilt and Catholic innocence. The case stunned the Jewish press in Galicia and elsewhere. Österreichische Wochenschrift in Vienna expressed revulsion and outrage at the message conveyed by this trial. Especially galling was the apparent legal innovation. Hagel had not issued a public call for violence. Rather, the court charged and convicted him because some people had overheard his anti-Catholic retort and that his words might have resulted in a rise in anti-Jewish sentiment and, therefore, a physical threat for Jews: “One can rate the malice of the Jews as highly as one might want; that it is so great, however, that [the Jews] would purposefully incite the plundering of their own property or the beating of their own person seems most unlikely.”33 The Hagel case was not the only trial that publicized supposed Jewish arrogance and provocation. Two weeks after this verdict, the trial of those involved in Wieliczka in mid-March opened in Cracow. Chapter 2 detailed the course of the Wieliczka events—the rumor that Jews planned to waylay the parish priest and Stojałowski party member Fr. Andrzej Szponder over his dissemination of Jewish Secrets as well as the related attacks. The state attorney indicted twenty-five people on July 21 in Cracow’s district court. Most of the accused were among the hundreds of salt miners and peasants who participated in a series of violent attacks on Jews and Jewish-owned property, including throwing rocks through synagogue windows on March 11 during Shabbat evening services. The prosecution also charged them with breaking the windows of Jewish homes and businesses after leaving Szponder’s church following services on March 13. Finally, the indictment implicated some of the defendants in the disputed incident that became the most publicized moment of the case. On March 13, a crowd arrived in Klasno after ransacking Jewish businesses in Wieliczka. (See the discussion of the Mendel case in Chapter 3.) There too they broke windows, threatened and beat Jews, including butcher Mendel Kraus’s father Józef. A rock injured Mendel Kraus’s brother Izrael. Mendel ran out of his stall holding his butcher’s knife and



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grabbed one of the leaders of the mob, Andrzej Konopka, by the throat. Kraus then threatened to run Konopka through.34 Gendarmes arrested Mendel Kraus and Hirsch Königsberg, a baker accused of flinging rocks back at the attacking mob. The court put these two Jews on trial in the same proceeding as the Christians who rioted in Wieliczka. This was one of only four major cases (Wieliczka, Tłuste, Nowy Sącz, and Bursztyń) in which courts tried Jews along with their attackers. Contradictory testimony about the events was elicited by the prosecutor, the judges, and the three defense attorneys: Dr. Adam Bobilewicz, who represented the Christians; Dr. Frühling, Mendel Kraus’s defender; and Dr. Bader, the attorney for Hirsch Königsberg. Izrael Kraus testified that he did not see who hit him with rocks, but did witness Andrzej K ­ onopka leading the crowd and yelling “Hurrah! At the Jews!” Stefan J­akobowicz confirmed that Konopka had thrown the rock that struck ­Izrael. ­Franciszek Sarnicki swore that Konopka had never hurled rocks or exhorted others to hurt Jews. The prosecutor demanded to know why Kraus had pulled a knife. The state’s attorney did not believe that Mendel Kraus had acted out of concern for himself and his family: “a person hides out of fear, and does not go with a knife at another.” Mendel Kraus responded: “so I had to get killed with rocks?”35 The lawyers defending the two Jews requested that the court suspend the proceedings, separate the case against the rioters from those against Kraus and Königsberg, and send a commission of inquiry to investigate the incident systematically. This was rejected by the tribunal, and the prosecutor entreated the judges to pronounce all the defendants guilty, Christian and Jew alike. In his final statement, defense attorney Dr. Adam Bobilewicz set the violence in another context: he asserted that the Jews had taken advantage of the riots to make Poles look bad in world opinion. The Jews, he contended, sent exaggerated telegrams about this first of the many riots in Galicia to Vienna; the Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press) then proclaimed to the world that Galicia was “the Asia of Europe.” The facts were very different, Bobilewicz argued. The Wieliczka events started with a handful of elementary school children throwing stones and breaking windows. His clients had only been involved in innocent hazing—nothing d ­ angerous— until Mendel Kraus came at them for no discernible reason. Kraus’s provocative act inflamed the Christians, who only then began to ransack Jewish property.

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This convoluted argument clearly carried weight with the judges. They sentenced Mendel Kraus to two months in prison, a stiffer sentence than the one month received by Andrzej Konopka, a man most witnesses agreed was among the most active leaders of the assault on Jews and J­ewish-owned property in Wieliczka and Klasno on March 13.36 The court condemned Kraus and Königsberg for defending themselves and their families. The Kraus case affirmed the narrative pushed forward by the Hagel trial, peasant politicians, and the antisemitic press: Jews and their actions gave rise to anti-Jewish attacks. Jews had provoked otherwise innocent Catholics to acts of violence. Prosecutors accused Jews of lies, arrogance, and provocative behavior in a handful of other trials that received press attention. On July 15 the Jasło court sentenced Jakób Enemann, a publican from Glinnik Niemicki, a few kilometers southeast of Jasło, to six months in prison. He was declared guilty of fraud for staging a robbery on June 14 and then accusing a handful of peasants of the crime. He attempted but failed to convince a Catholic waitress to support his side of the story; she refused and pronounced him a liar.37 The Cracow paper Głos Narodu reported, “the trial of Enemann in Jasło revealed that Jews knew how to take advantage of [the riots], and in turn the Hagel trial [demonstrated] that they [Jews] did not even refrain from provoking acts of hatred against themselves.”38 In a similar case in January 1899, the Rzeszów district court pronounced Wolf Baum guilty of “slander and fraud.” He received a sixmonth sentence for falsely swearing that he had been robbed. Christian witnesses testified that Baum had been asleep in bed at the time of the alleged crime.39 Gendarmes in Gorlice arrested some locals for threatening Jews during the Corpus Christi procession. On June 17 gendarmes escorted them through the center of town to be jailed. A crowd of Jews, including 18-year old Chaja Sperling, a mother of two, gathered to watch. Witnesses averred that she had compared the parade of those arrested to the Corpus Christi procession. The district attorney successfully tried her for publicly insulting religious sentiments.40

The Trials: Christian Innocence Confirmed? Trials with Jewish defendants were rare. Most cases featured Jews only as witnesses against Christians accused of a variety of crimes including lèse-majesté, theft, public violence, and even attempted murder.



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Some trials dealt with little more than two or three drunks in a village taproom refusing to pay for vodka, threatening the proprietor with the same kind of violence known to have occurred elsewhere, and breaking some glasses. Others grouped together large numbers of people involved in major urban riots, attacks in small villages, or isolated raids on individual taverns and homes. Many of the trials took place in administrative courtrooms with few observers. Others were public events that attracted substantial audiences. In early September, for example, hundreds packed a Cracow courtroom, including the families of the forty-five people on trial for the June 24–25 attacks led by Tomasz Kasprzycki and Tomasz Olchawa on villages in the Brzesko district.41 On October 3 in the trial of the miller Michał Miczkowski and seventy-nine others for raids in three hamlets just southwest of Frysztak in mid-June, the defendants alone took up every seat in Jasło’s main courtroom.42 In December hundreds of ­locals and many journalists attended the four trials of two hundred fortynine people accused of plundering Jewish-owned businesses in Stary Sącz on June 25. The source material available to analyze the trials is rich if uneven. The indictments (akty oskarzenia) and some related documents for most of the trials can be found today in the Central Archives for Historical Records (Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, or AGAD) in Warsaw. 43 Transcripts of the trials themselves do not exist; however, for the mass trials as well as many of the smaller cases, newspapers published selections from the indictments, excerpts from witness testimony, prosecution summaries, defense attorney arguments, questions and comments posed by judges, sentences, and so on. Some of this material is cited in earlier chapters. Below, I offer a collective portrayal of the trials. Although this close study draws from scores of proceedings, I rely most heavily on material related to nine specific cases (one of the nine was divided into four separate trials but is treated here as one case): (1) The main proceeding against those involved in the Frysztak violence in mid-June that led to twelve deaths at the hands of the authorities commenced on August 17, 1898.44 This case left the most complete trial record. There was great public interest in Frysztak owing to the bloody nature of the events as well as the subsequent accusations by politicians of misconduct. Newspapers printed more witness testimony from the Frysztak trial than for any other.45

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(2) The trial of eighty-two people for the June 18 attacks in the village of Lutcza opened on August 22.46 The Lutcza events were among dozens of attacks in villages that followed the Frysztak riot and that took place around Jasło. Both participants and arrestees were particularly numerous; in fact, the Lutcza case saw the highest number of defendants of all court proceedings. (3) The case concerning events at Wola Duchacka opened on August 2. The incident was very similar to many other isolated attacks on Jewish-owned businesses in villages and on the outskirts of towns that were not directly related to other cases. (4) The Zbyszyce riot was the first of three significant urban riots that took place between June 23 and 25. The violence centered on the square, where, as was usually the case, the regularly scheduled market drew many Jewish traders as well as thousands of villagers from the surrounding region. Only thirty-three of several thousand who took part were brought to trial.47 (5) Nine of the twenty-three people on trial for their actions in the Nowy Sącz central square on June 24, the day after the Zbyszyce riot, were Jews. No other case included more than three Jewish defendants.48 The verdicts were delivered on December 13. (6) The June 25 mass riot in Stary Sącz involved more than 2,000 people, lasted several hours, and devastated more than thirty Jewish-owned businesses. It was by all available accounts the largest single riot of 1898. The gendarmes arrested hundreds of people; although the jails released many without charge. The prosecution ultimately indicted 249 people, dividing them into separate trials. The first of the four Stary Sącz trials opened before six judges on December 4 in a packed Nowy Sącz courtroom; the verdict in the last of the proceedings was pronounced on December 22.49 (7) On June 24 and 25, Tomasz Kasprzycki led a group of marauders in the looting of Jewish homes and businesses in numerous villages in the Brzesko district. These incidents were among the most brutal attacks of 1898. The trial of Kasprzycki and forty-four others took place on September 5.50 (8) In late December Jan Smoleń and sixty-four other men and women were tried for attacks on isolated Jewish homes and businesses in the



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villages of Modarka, Pisarzowa, Męcina, and Kłodne just outside of Limanowa on June 24. (9) Materials from the trial of twenty-six people accused of being part of a crowd estimated at eight hundred that laid siege to the taproom, trafik, grain storage buildings, and manor house administered by Aron Lustig in Kamienica, a village south of ­Limanowa. The defendants were accused of looting Lustig’s businesses, setting a fire that burned down his buildings and caused damage to a nearby schoolhouse and church, plundering the homes, business, and property of several Jews, and physically assaulting Lustig and others. This trial took place in early January 1899 and was the last major court case related to the 1898 violence.51 The nine attacks took place in a variety of localities and contexts. The cases involved 504 defendants, about 10 percent of all those accused of committing crimes during the 1898 anti-Jewish violence. While each of the scores of trials concerned unique events, individuals, and contexts, these nine reflect the major issues at the center of most of the trials.

The Prosecution The prosecution set the tone for each trial. As early as June 1898, local state attorneys were tasked by Philipp Woroniecki, the chief state prosecutor in Lemberg, to push forward swift investigations, to find the “intellectual fathers” behind the riots, personally to represent the state in all major trials, and to ensure that the penalties imposed should serve as examples both to hold people accountable for their actions and to deter future threats to law and order.52 For each of the proceedings, from those with one or two defendants to those with many accused, state attorneys drew up a detailed indictment based on investigations and witness statements. The indictments opened with a list of the defendants and normally included age, occupation, marital status, number of children, religion, place of birth, place of residence, and criminal record. Presentation of this information was followed by a breakdown of the specific crimes committed and the defendants involved in each. The indictments added a list of witnesses whose testimony would be heard or whose sworn statements would be submitted at trial. Finally, the prosecution offered a chronological narrative account justifying the charges.

Lutcza indictment. First page of the indictment of those charged in the Lutcza violence drawn up by the Imperial-Royal State Prosecutor in Rzeszów. AGAD, C. K. Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości, box 308, file 242, 1432. Courtesy of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw.

FIGURE 23. 



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These narratives varied in length from a single sheet to dozens of handwritten pages. For the most part, the prosecutors enthusiastically endeavored to fulfill their mandate. They pleaded for stiff punishments, and denounced or appealed many light sentences.53 The indictments included dramatic language that heightened the stakes and sought to convince the judges of the necessity of holding defendants accountable for their actions. The prosecution in one trial argued that “the Frysztak events were wilder than others and were executed by landholders, with even a village headman among them, and therefore [the prosecutor] asks for all of the accused to be punished more harshly than in other cases.”54 In a striking example of prosecutorial theatrics, the prosecutor for one of scores of cases treating violence in the Jasło area in mid-June pronounced that “In the annals of the sad history of the antisemitic uproar in the western part of the province, the antisemitic excesses that erupted in the night of June 17–18 in the village of Żarnowa occupies one of the most prominent places.”55 The indictment prepared by the state prosecutor in Nowy Sącz for the final major trial was even more dramatic. He pointed out that even as anti-Jewish attacks were taking place in nearby Nowy Sącz, Stary Sącz, ­Limanowa, and scores of villages on June 23–25, those days “passed peacefully for the community of Kamienica. . . . It was, however, the quiet before the storm, which burst several dozen hours later than in other neighboring villages” and would have caused greater damage if not for the eventual intervention of the army.56 Even as the state prosecutors denounced the actions of those who physically assaulted Jews and ruined their livelihoods, however, many indictments expressed a belief widespread within the judiciary and the Galician administration that, ultimately, Jews themselves bore a share of the responsibility for the 1898 riots. The indictment for the Lutcza trial for example, blamed Jews for the violence directed against them. The Christian villagers of Lutcza were among those most prone to “show dislike and hatred toward their Semitic neighbors.” The manor house and the estate lands had fallen into “Israelite hands [Chaskel Wallach].” In a part of ­Europe where older people still recalled the abuses of serfdom, Wallach, the prosecutor asserted, extracted farm labor services in return for loans. Aside from the Wallachs, Lutcza had a substantial Jewish population composed of a few dozen Jewish families, a rarity in the Galician countryside. The courts had previously charged Hersch Felber, a tavern

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keeper and prominent local Jewish leader, with usury. “In these conditions, rumors about attacks on the property of Jews and the destruction of their belongings found fertile soil and eager listeners.” The story that permission to beat Jews and destroy their property for thirty days had been given by Franz Joseph “spread like lightning among the population.”57 The antisemitic press seized on this official statement submitted to the court as confirmation of Jewish criminality and corruption. Głos Narodu and Dziennik Polski considered the Lutcza indictment “a truly important historical document” which offered “any future historian” a clear account of the genesis and course of the attacks. These publications lauded the state prosecutor of Rzeszów for bringing to light the “shameful exploitation of our unlucky peasant by the leaches of the countryside, by the Jews.” In Lutcza and wherever else Jews had taken over estates and manors, these places, once the “last refuge” for the helpless, had become the “legitimized base for a bloodthirsty vampire.”58 Indictments such as these reflected the sentiments expressed internally by the state prosecutors in their communications with the Ministry of Justice. The chief state prosecutor in Cracow for example, made it clear that ultimately the hatred “on the part of rural people, the workers, and the impoverished small-town inhabitants against the Israelites” derives from the “notorious, unscrupulous exploitation” of these people by the Jews. “Antisemitic newspapers and brochures have contributed to a sharpening of this hatred.”59

The Defendants Newspaper correspondents described the defendants as common rural folk dressed in clothes marking them as peasants and day laborers. They were typically unemployed or underemployed farm laborers, unskilled workers, or street youths.60 Those tried for the Frysztak riots were similarly depicted: “All of the accused, apart from Jan Miras, made a very sympathetic impression, testifying with great fear and timidity.”61 Newspaper accounts highlighted a classic measure of Galicia’s backwardness: many of the simple people on trial could not read or write. Their illiteracy defined them as victims of the economic and social failures of the province, of the state itself, and of the clever Jews. As Cracow’s conservative Czas (Time) noted, all four of those on trial in Cracow for the June 18 sacking of a tavern in Wola Duchacka were illiterate. They all insisted they had been



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too drunk on spirits sold in the Jewish tavern to be responsible—or even to remember—their actions.62 Marciń Mróczków, who struck a soldier arresting him with a stick, as well as seven others on trial with him for attacks in a village north of Tarnów, were uniformly labeled illiterate laborers.63 None of the fifty-nine people brought before the courts in two trials for their participation in the series of attacks led by Tomasz Kasprzycki near Brzesko could read.64 The press also contended that most of the accused were passionate young people, even teenagers, who could neither be fully responsible for their actions nor representative of rural society as a whole. In other words, newspaper accounts presented those on trial as a collective composed of ignorant innocents. No one could expect such people to react rationally to the alleged domination of the Jews. The information presented about the defendants by the prosecution to the courts, however, reveals a much more varied picture. Certainly, many of those accused were illiterate, and in a handful of cases, like that of Wieliczka, a significant number of those brought to trial were in their teens or twenties. However, a description of the perpetrators of the violence as little more than a collection of young illiterates is a mischaracterization. Those brought to trial comprised, as a whole, a very different group of people. Young, single, unattached youths did not form the majority of those indicted. The plurality were men (and to a lesser degree women) in their thirties and forties, with many in their fifties and even eighties. The majority of those tried in the nine cases mentioned above were married and had more than one child. Although the prosecution defined a few defendants as “gypsies” and many more as laborers without consistent employment, drunkards, and ex-convicts previously tried for assault and theft, others were village smiths, headmen, bakers, shoe-makers, journeymen, and craftsmen. Those tried for anti-Jewish attacks in small villages and towns were almost invariably born, raised, and still lived in those very villages and hamlets or in similar locales just one or two kilometers from the site of the attacks. Those on trial were established and rooted in the local scene even if in most cases they did not count as members of the highest strata of rural society. Two cases can serve here as representative examples of the social profiles of the accused. The Cracow court prosecuted sixty-five people along with Jan Smoleń for the raids on a string of villages outside of Limanowa in late June. At least thirty-eight of the sixty-six on trial were between thirty and fifty years old. Fifty of the defendants were married; thirty-four

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had at least one child. Those tried included nine married women ranging in age from twenty to forty-four. One of five men described as either a “musician” or a “gypsy” was originally from Hungary. The other sixty-five had been born and raised in one of several villages in which Jews were assaulted (and for which these sixty-six people were on trial) or nearby. Those indicted for the attacks in Lutcza had a similar profile: all eighty-two lived in Lutcza itself or in neighboring villages. Forty-one were between thirty and fifty years old; forty-eight were married; forty-five had between one and seven children. Peasants and laborers made up the majority, although two served as community policemen, one was a village elder, and one worked as a blacksmith. Most of those arrested for attacks on Jews in rural areas came from lower strata of rural society. Relatively few, however, were the ignorant and innocent but misguided youths so often cited by politicians and journalists. Siblings, married couples, fathers and sons, and cousins participated together. Many were respected residents of the same villages as the Jews they attacked. In other words, many of those on trial looted and trashed the property of Jews they knew and regularly interacted with, and they did so in the company of family, friends, and neighbors. While many were referred to during the trials as illiterate, some of the accused could in fact read. The ability to read, however, did not prevent them from believing higher authorities had sanctioned their actions. The presiding judge asked one of those on trial in late December to explain what had given rise to such hatred against the Jews and describe his part in attacks in the small settlements of Sowliny, Łososina Górna, Młynne, and Żmiąca outside Limanowa on June 24 and 25. The defendant responded that “since the government had not banned Głos Narodu (Voice of the People) and Związek Chłopski from writing such things about the Jews, we thought everything those newspapers printed was the truth, and therefore that it was permitted to rob and ruin the Jews. Now that we have found out that these newspapers write falsehoods, however, we will not trust them again, since through them the innocent have had to suffer.”65 The social profile of the defendants reveals a sharp town-countryside divide. Peasants from surrounding communities comprised most of those tried for taking part in riots that started in town market squares. The four trials concerning events in Stary Sącz included many from the same ­social categories as other trials—married men (and some women) between thirty and fifty, most from the lower and middle levels of rural society,



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but also a handful of village elders and rural police. In these four proceedings, however, 107 of the 259 tried resided in Stary Sącz itself. Defendants included butchers (one of whom served as the head of the town volunteer fire fighters), furriers (one plundering furrier owned his own store and, most likely, competed with Jewish merchants for customers), smiths, journalists, cobblers, postal workers, carpenters, brick layers, junk dealers, servants, tanners, bakers, seamstresses, cattle dealers, and real estate owners. Town council members shouted that “robbery was allowed”; high school students looted while wearing school uniforms. Hundreds of people participated in the riot in Nowy Sącz; however, the prosecution put only twenty-three on trial. They included fourteen Roman Catholics from the surrounding communities clearly having come into town for market day, and nine Jews, all of whom resided in Nowy Sącz. The indictment described all of the Jews as working in the crafts or the free professions (watchmaker, painter, cobbler, baker, or doctor) or commerce (salesmen or merchant). This and the eastern Galician cases of Tłuste and Bursztyń were among the few instances in which prosecutors charged a significant number of Jews for violent acts along with those who plundered their businesses.

Witnesses: Jews and Christians The indictments read out in court summarized the prosecution’s case. The evidence supporting the indictments included witness statements, protocols of interviews with those under arrest, lists of stolen goods discovered in the possession of the accused, and so on. Court testimony bolstered—or at times put into question—this evidence. The defense attorneys (when those on trial did not serve as their own representation, which happened most often in cases with few defendants), prosecution, and the judges themselves all posed questions to those on the stand. The indictments did not provide the same kind of demographic information about the witnesses as they did about the defendants. Counting just those witnesses with identifiably Yiddish or Germanic names (such as Naftali Löw, Jude Teitelbaum, Mendel Neugut, Taube Weissberger, Baruch Steinreich, Izaak Steinmetz, or Mojżesz Ritter) and those specifically referred to as Jews in the indictments or in published testimony, Jews comprised the majority of witnesses. Jewish victims of assault or robbery played a significant part in every trial. The other Jewish witnesses included family members,

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neighbors, coworkers, and employees of those attacked. At least twenty-four of the thirty-four witnesses listed in the Frysztak indictment were Jews; at least eighteen of the twenty-nine witnesses for the trial of Tomasz Kasprzycki and colleagues were Jews66; a minimum of seventeen of the twenty-two witnesses called to the stand for the Zbyszyce trial were Jews; no fewer than forty-two of the fifty-six witnesses for the trial of those who attacked small villages outside of Limanowa were Jews; at least sixty of the one hundred six witnesses listed for the first of the four Stary Sącz trials were Jews. In pretrial affidavits Jews identified their attackers and detailed their material losses. They also related the physical violence they had experienced. Newspapers summarized but rarely quoted testimony provided by Jews. Still, as a few examples demonstrate, journalists did occasionally relate the experience of the riots from the perspective of Jewish witnesses. During the Frysztak trial, Izrael Löw stated that he knew some days before that there would be an attack on Jews during the market on June 16. His father, tavern keeper Naftali Löw, told him to pretend he was not afraid when dealing with customers on the day violence was expected. When asked where he was at the moment the gendarmes fired on the crowd, Izrael Löw offered a two-word answer: “in hiding.” In the same trial, Anna Herbach testified how Jan Papuga, “whom I know well and is in debt to me,” “slipped” into her store, demanded an umbrella, and pilfered other items. Other raiders broke in and began looting as well. Herbach, her husband, and an employee fled to the basement and locked the iron doors.67 Through tears she told the court of the panic her family experienced. Herbach blamed this incident for the subsequent illness and death of one of her children.68 On September 5 before the Cracow district criminal court, Alka Tauger related how, having heard about the trashing and plundering of taverns and homes nearby, she and her husband frantically worked to hide some of their goods in the home of a Christian neighbor. Her husband then sought help and she hid in a field. They both spent the night in a neighboring farm. In the morning, the Taugers found their home “a complete ruin.” She estimated their losses at nearly 900 gulden.69 On August 15 in a Cracow courtroom, eighty-six year-old Gitla Kaufer narrated the assault on her and her family that had taken place on June 28. She recounted sitting on the threshold of her home next door to her son Hirsch Kaufer’s tavern in a small village outside of Brzesko, when Jan Chudyba screamed “Hurrah, peasants! Let’s get the Jews, today it is allowed to kill them because the emperor has permitted it!” She fled to the



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room she shared with her daughter, Schaindla Teichler, her son-in-law, tailor Jakób Teichler, and their five children. Chudyba shattered her window, came in, blew out the candle Schaindla Teichler was holding, and assaulted both women. ­Schaindla Teichler in turn testified that when Chudyba left the scene, she hid her children under the bed. Soon, however, fearing ­Chudyba’s return, she helped her mother and five children through the window. They escaped and hid in the surrounding forest. From there “they heard the clattering of breaking glass” as raiders destroyed their livelihood. Gitla Kaufer was confused on only one point. She was not certain whether her attacker had struck her and her daughter with a rock or an iron tool.70 Press accounts of the mass trials for the Stary Sącz riot did not include excerpts from courtroom testimony by Jews. They did, however, quote extensively from the indictment itself, which cited pretrial interviews with Jewish witnesses: “Terrified Jews fled with their families to the apartments of Catholics. They hid wherever they could, in basements, attics, chambers and pigsties; others hid in closets or on roofs, from where they observed the destruction of their homes.”71 Defense attorneys and journalists covering the trials depicted Jewish witnesses in ways that differed sharply from the view they presented of the defendants. On one side stood the naive, ignorant, drunk, exploited, simple-hearted peasants, manipulated by politicians and journalists, unable to discern truth from fantasy. Arrayed against them, testifying against them, and ensuring that they were subject to harsh sentences stood the Jews, uniformly represented as other, alien. Descriptions of Jewish witnesses during the Frysztak trial in midAugust were typical. Sixty-eight-year old Naftali Löw took the oath and recounted what happened when Miras and others entered his tavern on June 16 in “a weak, barely audible voice, with bad Polish.” His son testified with equally “poor Polish” skills. The Jewish witness Anna Herbach was “very chatty.” Aron Herbach was characterized as “a thirty-five-year-old typical small town Jew, with long peyes, hunched over, wildly gesticulating” as he gave his testimony. “The witness Pinkas Dawid Stein, a sixty-year-old ‘citizen’ who had been sentenced in 1885 to three months arrest for false testimony . . . told how Miras gave away vodka.”72 Courtroom reporters portrayed the character of the Jewish witnesses in almost wholly negative terms. Jakób Hagel, the cemetery overseer in Strzyżów who insisted that the cavalry officers not graze their horses in the Jewish cemetery, was a typical arrogant and provocative Jew. Mendel Kraus,

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the butcher who defended his wounded father by threatening one of his tormentors in the Wieliczka-Klasno attack, was a typical violent Jew. Much more often, however, the press depicted Jews as weak, fearful, greedy, and without honor—all held to be typical Jewish traits. The Wola Duchacka attack reflected this trend. When the four men began their attack, Leib Goldberg first ran to find the village headman; failing to locate him, Goldberg sought help at a military base. While he was gone, his wife confronted the violators and suffered a physical assault. At trial, the chair of the panel of judges took over the questioning of Goldberg, clearly blaming him as much or more than the attackers for the beating his wife suffered. The four accused men, after all, claimed to know nothing of their actions owing to excessive alcohol intake: Judge: Why did you flee when your wife remained in the tavern, that was not, however, the chivalrous way to behave. Witness [Leib Goldberg]: I fled because they would have killed me, they would have murdered me. Judge: Even so, you should have defended your wife. Witness: Now what was I supposed to do with those four peasants?73

A judge also interrogated Mina Goldberg. He asked if she felt that her honor had been offended by her husband’s cowardice. Dziennik Polski (Polish Daily) quoted her response: “I already do not have any honor, what is honor to me, my honor is completely compromised.” Głos Narodu quoted her differently: “‘What is honor to me when they are destroying my wealth?’ and she insisted on compensation for the damage done to her health.”74 Although it is not clear which version correctly conveyed her testimony, in both the judge questioned her honor, Mina Goldberg dismissed the issue, and she appeared most concerned with material possessions and revenge. Despite the preponderance of Jewish witnesses at the 1898 trials, the testimony of non-Jewish witnesses seemed to carry more weight with the prosecution and the judges. Defendants often denied any wrongdoing; they had merely observed and may have removed property but only to keep it safe at the request of Jewish friends. Prosecutors turned to Christian witnesses to refute such professions of innocence. In some of the largest trials, such witnesses included gendarmes, mayors, vice mayors, and local police. They described their own confrontations with the accused and attested to the discovery of stolen goods in the defendants’ possession. They identified individuals responsible for disseminating rumors of official



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permission and those seeking to lead others against Jews and Jewish property. They also corroborated the descriptions presented by Jewish witnesses of personal physical assaults. The Christian witnesses included friends and drinking partners of those on trial as well as neighbors of the Jews whose homes and taverns had been plundered. Christian employees of Jews also testified. The case of the four men on trial for their actions in Wola Duchacka offers several examples of the kinds of evidence locals provided. Jan Rusek, Wojciech Kowalski, Jan Gawlik, and Jan Kosab returned home early in the morning after working the night shift in a cement factory. They entered Goldberg’s saloon and ordered a breakfast of sausages and vodka. They subsequently broke bottles of vodka and grain alcohol and, perhaps accidentally, set fire to the establishment. Stanisław Pzewłocki testified that he had left the cement factory in the company of the accused. They revealed to him their intention to attack the Jews’ tavern, but Pzewłocki refused to join in. According to her testimony, Anna Barcik, a barmaid at the Goldberg’s, returned to the tavern after pasturing the Goldberg’s cow. She found two men beating the proprietress to the ground with a broken table leg. One of the men then dropped the table on her. The men threw Anna Barcik herself to the ground, but she still saw enough to speak out and identify the perpetrators when she took the stand. Another witness told the court that he had been walking by the Goldbergs’ tavern, heard “the lament of the Jewess” pleading for help. He told the marauders to stop and warned them their actions would bring the army. Józef Dyna testified that one of the attackers handed him tobacco and cigars stolen from the Goldbergs.75 During violent incidents, attackers had lambasted, threatened, and assaulted those who defended Jews. In a few cases, riot leaders even struck observers reluctant to join in the looting. Government reports and newspaper accounts, however, relate no cases in which trial witnesses were harassed for their willingness to stand up for Jewish victims in court. Nonetheless by testifying, these witnesses did risk the condemnation of acquaintances, coworkers, and neighbors.

The Defense The defense attorneys in the mass trials tried to establish mitigating circumstances that would lessen the responsibility of their clients. The defense put forward such arguments in several ways. First, they highlighted the

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fact that most of the accused could not read. They were simple folk, innocent and naïve, unable to think critically. For these reasons, they could easily be manipulated by journalists and politicians. The defense also pointed to the influence of alcohol. Their clients were victims of the purveyors of immorality in the countryside—the Jewish tavern keepers themselves. Defense attorneys questioned Jewish publicans as to whether their attackers had been drinking heavily before the attacks. Their clients claimed to have been drunk and to have woken up in fields. They insisted they remembered nothing of their activity. For example, Jan Miras, the illiterate village headman from Huta Gogołowska who played a central role in the Frysztak violence, denied having anything to do with any attacks, or any that he remembered anyway, “because I was completely drunk.”76 Without success, defense attorney Franciszek Baranowski pressed witness Izrael Löw, son of the tavern owner Naftali Löw, to admit that Miras was a known drunkard who should not have been served.77 Again and again defense attorneys identified the Christians on trial as the true victims. In the trial of mostly young people who harassed Jews in Wieliczka and Klasno in mid-March, defense attorney Dr. Adam ­Bobilewicz claimed that Jews themselves had provoked this first violent outbreak. Jews in Vienna then used their power over the world press to damn Galicia as the “Asia of Europe” and the Poles as barbarians. Jewish arrogance, not his clients, caused the riots. In his view, the Jews after all had endured only minor damage, while the peasants on trial sat in prison, unable to work their farms, maintain their properties, or care for their families. For Bobilewicz, only those accused of anti-Jewish attacks truly suffered from these events.78 The willingness of the defendants to believe outrageous rumors derived from illiteracy and endemic alcoholism. One of the attorneys d ­ efending Jan Miras and others for their violent acts in Frysztak on June 16, 1898 offered an extreme version of this defense. Baranowski denied that his clients should be termed robbers by the prosecution. He proclaimed all of his illiterate, uneducated, inebriated, and misled clients to be the real victims of the rioting. Their very debased nature and their material and moral poverty marked them as victims. Baranowski noted that fifty years of constitutional life had not improved conditions in the countryside. He begged the court for “understanding and indulgence for the victims of ignorance.” The state itself perpetuated the terrible situation in the province, including the continuation of the alcohol monopoly. Society as a whole, Baranowski pro-



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claimed, shared in the blame.79 As another attorney for the defense, put it with melodramatic flair, “How ignorant, how very ignorant is our people.” The accused were young, illiterate, and “mentally weak.”80 Tadeusz Dwernicki, a defense attorney in the Frysztak trial, put forward the most creative argument on behalf of the rioters. He conceded that his clients had in fact broken the law. However, he claimed that “academic research” questioned the notion of assigning individual responsibility for actions taken in a crowd: “The individual in a crowd loses the capacity to reason.” People are predisposed to evil inclinations, and in the midst of a crowd cannot resist them. The misery of the population, the arrogance, exploitation, and usury of the Jews, brought on the desire to lash out. “However can one individual be responsible for the actions of the crowd? After all, the individual in a crowd is like a drop of water in an overflowing mountain stream that breaks and destroys everything in its path. Can one argue that this drop of water, this specific one—causes havoc? The individual in the crowd disappears, dies, and is reborn within a new organism whose name is the crowd.” The court, Dwernicki continued, could not assess personal responsibility without understanding the power of crowd behavior. “An individual cannot be made to answer for the actions of a crowd.” In consideration of the powerful influence of crowd dynamics, the attorney declared, the court should provide full “relief for [my clients] in the name of fairness and justice” irrespective of the letter of the law.81

The Verdicts The number of people put on trial certainly did not reflect the full dimension of those who had taken part in anti-Jewish attacks or gathered out of curiosity to witness them. The Cracow chief prosecutor noted that the thousands processed through the legal system “by no means exhausted the number of actual participants; one need only consider the example of the two mass riots in Kalwaria, where the military had to deploy, but only five participants were arrested.”82 In Wieliczka, hundreds of people surrounded the synagogue on March 11. Scores were chanting and yelling and throwing rocks at Jews in Krosno on the thirteenth; yet, only a handful were arrested. In the towns around Żywiec, hundreds of people had joined in the caterwauling in mid-June, but no one was convicted. In Jasło, the state prosecutor sought permission to use the fire department and the military barracks to house those arrested after the jail had exceeded its capacity.83 An estimated

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800 people participated in the sacking of a tavern in Kamienica, but only twenty-six were put on trial.84 Overwhelmed, the court system was forced to concentrate its resources on bringing the worst offenders to justice.85 Despite these limitations, courts in Galicia did in fact try and convict a significant number of people. As of January 5, 1899, prosecutors had pursued criminal investigations of 5,170 people involved in anti-Jewish violence between late May and July 1, from the Kalwaria riot to just after the imposition of the state of emergency. They indicted 3,816 people. Panels of judges convicted 2,328 of a wide range of offenses, from insulting the person of the emperor (Majestätsbeleidigung)—usually for those insisting that Franz Joseph had personally given permission for the beating of Jews,86 to theft, public violence, and assault. The Galician courts condemned hundreds to at least one month in prison. Sentences longer than a year were rare. The Nowy Sącz court handed Grzegorz Tokarczyk the single most severe punishment received by any at-

Compilation of all criminal court procedures related to the antisemitic unrest as of January 5, 1899. The first three numbers on the bottom row: 408 communities in which attacks took place; 611 court cases (many were consolidated); 5,170 charged. These numbers did not include attacks in February and March. AGAD, C. K. Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości, box 307, 106. Courtesy of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw.

FIGURE 24. 



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tacker. On June 23, Tokarczyk and Michał Szczygły boasted that they planned to “cut and rob Jews.” In the end, they cut no one and made off with just two sacks of potatoes and one goat from their two raids on Dawid and Dorka Zornów’s tavern in Przysietnica, just south of Stary Sącz. Tokarczyk’s previous convictions for theft and inflicting severe bodily harm evidently weighed heavily with the court. The judges condemned him to three years in prison. Szczygły, who had also served time for serious crimes, received a ten-month sentence.87 Aside from Tokarczyk and Szczygły, only the most violent offenders and leaders of groups that attacked isolated Jewish settlements received sentences between five and seventeen months in prison with one day each month in severe conditions and with one fast day every two weeks. The week-long trial of eighty-two people for the Lutcza attacks produced the largest number of long prison sentences. Three of those accused of physically assaulting Jews with rocks and sticks received one-year sentences; fourteen of the guilty faced five to ten months in prison. One of these, Mateusz Urban, the local policeman who proclaimed the “fact” of imperial permission to rob and plunder and blew a trumpet to attract participants, was sentenced to seven months. Witnesses agreed that Jędrzej Szurlej told and retold the story of the emperor’s barber and of imperial permission, but he received only six weeks in jail. The criminal court in Cracow condemned Tomasz Kasprzycki, the leader of a band that plundered isolated Jewish business and homes near Brzesko, to ten months in prison. Five of his forty-four codefendants received three- to six-month sentences; nineteen others faced a few days to two months in prison. A panel of judges in Nowy Sącz found twenty-seven-year-old Jan Brzeczek guilty of leading a mob in looting and burning down Aron Lustig’s tavern in Kamienica. Brzeczek started the fire by throwing a lighted match into a puddle of lamp oil. Before igniting the tavern, Brzeczek had demanded that the wójt Józef Faron hand over the official “permission for robbing Jews.” He “growled” and threated Faron, who “feared for his own skin” and fled; while the single unarmed gendarme present withdrew to fetch his gun.88 The judges sentenced Brzeczek to one and a half years in prison. Seven of those on trial with him received sentences of two to fourteen months, fifteen others received twoto six-week sentences, and two were declared innocent. Michał Krzak, one of the leaders of a band that beat Jews and plundered homes and businesses in Modarka, Pisarzowa, Męcina (his home village), and Kłodne outside of Limanowa received eleven months in prison; five of his codefendants were sentenced to between two and seven months.

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With the exception of Frysztak, for which Jan Miras was condemned to one year and three others to between five and nine months in prison, large-scale riots in market towns resulted in fewer cases of physical assault and arson and, therefore, fewer lengthy prison sentences. The court convicted 208 of the 249 people indicted for the Stary Sącz riot. Only forty-six of these were punished with prison terms between two and five months. The rest of those judged guilty, most for acts of theft and destruction of property, spent a few days to a few weeks in jail. Populist politicians responded with outrage at the number of those tried, the extended time those arrested spent in jail awaiting court proceedings, and what they considered the overly harsh sentences imposed. In the Nowy Sącz circular court’s jurisdiction alone, judges sentenced 998 people to a total of 44,695 days in jail or prison, an average of almost 45 days behind bars for each of those judged guilty.89 In January 1899, socialist and People’s Party representatives led by Stapiński and Daszyński submitted a formal parliamentary inquiry calling on the minister of justice to order the Galician courts to defer imprisonment of those convicted until a final decision could be made on a possible imperial pardon. The Galician prosecutors and the Ministry of Justice in Vienna rejected this demand. They feared such a pardon would appear to verify that the 1898 “disturbances” enjoyed official sanction. Such a blanket pardon would fail to distinguish between those who had committed serious crimes and those convicted of lesser offenses. Also, such an action in January 1899 would have resulted in an unequal application of the law: those convicted in the first trials would already have served most of their sentences; those tried later would have received no punishment. Offering amnesty to those who had been rightfully condemned would have constituted a travesty of justice and encouraged future threats to law and order. Finally, the Ministry of Justice and the Galician prosecutors believed that with a very few exceptions sentences were “very mild, and it is completely without any doubt that if [the cases] had been handled as individual incidents and not as mass riots, the punishments would have been considerably harsher.” Local authorities had released many from overfilled jails; state prosecutors let off lesser offenders such as those involved in caterwauling.90 The Rzeszów court allowed fathers and sons as well as sets of brothers convicted in the Lutcza case to serve their sentences consecutively. All of those found guilty in this case were let out for the month of November to bring in the harvest.91 In other trials judges allowed those pro-



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nounced guilty to postpone their sentences for six weeks and more for the same reason.92 .

.

.

On July 21, Governor Piniński announced to Cisleithanian Minister President and Minister of the Interior Thun that the efforts to restore order and administer justice in Galicia had been a great success: “The institution of martial law, through which the goal was supposed to be attained, and in fact was attained, that the bewitched population would be convinced of the criminality of the incited excesses, did not fail to exert a shocking and lasting effect.” The gendarmes and the military had quelled the violence. The courts would eventually convict thousands. Future attackers would not as easily believe tales of imperial and official permission for mass unrest.93 Yet, the emergency measures and court proceedings increased the divisions between Jews and Christians in Galicia. A correspondent for the liberal Nowa Reforma expressed a widely perceived sense of injustice, as millions of people who had not participated in any anti-Jewish violence found themselves suffering under the emergency measures. He noted that the closure of local markets had made it “impossible for the people [in villages near Limanowa who were innocent of any rioting] to sell cattle or to acquire cash.”94 At the end of July the antisemitic Catholic paper Głos Narodu asked “How much did the riots cost?” The paper estimated the losses suffered by those accused of having taken part in the riots (not the Jews) at 250,000 gulden.95 The People’s Party organ Pryjaciel Ludu valued the total financial cost of investigations, and military and gendarme deployments, lost work days, court expenses, at over one million gulden— and blamed the Polish conservatives (Stańczycy) and the Jews for this waste of precious resources in a region plagued by poverty.96 By the time the last mass trial ended in January 1899, scores of court dramas had been observed by thousands of people. The press had covered the efforts by the state to bring the guilty to justice almost every day for six months. Journalists, politicians, defense attorneys and prosecutors had portrayed the attackers as the true victims. The same voices repeated over and over that Jews were ultimately responsible for the sorry state of morality and social relations in the countryside. They were arrogant, provocative, destructive. The suspension of due process, the intrusive searches for stolen goods, and the arrests were all cited as proof of Jewish power. As Jan Potoczek, representative of the Peasant Party Union, stated on the floor of

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the Reichsrat in Vienna on November 24, “It was enough then if an innkeeper pointed at someone for that person immediately to be arrested; the fate of the citizens was in the hands of the innkeepers.”97 A correspondent for Dziennik Polski covering the case of the Strzyżów Jewish cemetery overseer Jakób Hagel expressed his outrage: “The long arm of the law touched Jakób Hagel, but what about the others!?” 98 Ultimately, the state itself appeared to concede the arguments of attorneys defending Christians who had assaulted and robbed Jews. The prosecution did appeal a number of innocent verdicts to the Supreme ­Cassations Court in Vienna, which in turn sent some cases back to the local courts for retrial. However, Galician prosecutors’ enthusiasm to ensure that perpetrators served time for their crimes waned in the first months of 1899. In one Wadowice case, for example, the prosecution appealed verdicts of innocence for fourteen accused. The Supreme Court in Vienna agreed, and the case was retried in early March 1899. The fourteen defendants were again declared innocent. The lead prosecutor of Wadowice prepared to appeal a second time. However, the chief state prosecutor in Cracow opposed an appeal and urged recognition of the verdict for several reasons: “Although there is no doubt that the nullity complaint is completely justified,” the prosecutor said, he feared that a retrial would only produce the same result. This prosecutor seemed to agree with defense attorneys that the accused belonged for the most part to the laboring classes, had “a low level of education,” and were therefore easily confused by “evil influences.” They had already suffered material losses and a third trial would only increase the bitterness of the population. Revisiting cases like these would do little more than threaten peace, order, and quiet.99 The trials were conceived of as part of a broader governmental effort to bring calm and restore the rule of law to Galicia. The legal proceedings made it clear that the Habsburg Monarchy would not tolerate theft, rioting, or physical violence. At the same time, the thousands of convictions, protracted discussions about guilt and innocence, and accusations of blame and responsibility did not result in any unequivocal refutation of anti-­Jewish charges. Nor was such a refutation among the aims of the institutions seeking to quell the violence. Even as those who attacked Jews had to face legal consequences, the search for justice only served to confirm for many that arrogant and immoral Jewish behavior had caused the 1898 violence.

5 Politics, Policy, and Christian-Jewish Relations Not one hair fell from a Jewish head, but many innocent peasant victims fell, their deaths mourned by widows and orphans, and over half of the province has been deprived of civil rights. Antoni Fibich, Rozruchy antyz˙ydowskie, 1898, 4. Your Majesty! The grace of almighty God has brought you to the fiftieth anniversary [of your] accession to the throne! Lower yourself to remember your faithful Galician people, and how at one time you mercifully consented to order the liberation of this people from the yoke of serfdom—just so may you now mercifully consent to order the lifting of the law of propinacja in Galicia. Zwia˛zek Chłopski, August 21, 1898. Riots will not help at all, only unity! Zwia˛zek Chłopski, July 21, 1898

THE VIOLENCE AND ITS AFTERMATH deeply affected the political landscape of Galicia. The rise of the mass-circulation press and the expansion of political mobilization paralleled the changes in parliamentary suffrage. In this context political actors took advantage of the violence and the trials for partisan gain. They put forward competing explanations for the genesis of the riots and identified very different means for overcoming the problems that gave rise to the chaos. The Habsburg state—here meaning both the ministries in Vienna and the Galician administration— could not ignore the pressure of public opinion and political agitation. The central administration pressed the Galician authorities to undertake a series of investigations in response to charges of government failures made in the press and in the parliament by new populist and socialist Reichsrat deputies. The Galician governor’s office (namiestnictwo) developed its own

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understanding of the origins of the violence and a set of measures designed to prevent future threats to civil order. The violence and the changing political context also contributed to ominous changes in Christian-Jewish relations in western and central Galicia.

Controlling the Narrative The competition to define and profit politically from the riots commenced as soon as the violence itself began, emerging seamlessly from ongoing political agitation and the two specific parliamentary campaigns discussed in Chapter 1. From March 1898 through the end of the trials in January 1899, journalists and politicians from all over the political spectrum assessed responsibility for the upheaval. They offered themselves and their party colleagues as the only leaders whose programs promised to cure the ills that sparked the riots. Stanisław Tarnowski, among the most prominent of the Cracow conservatives, published a series of essays in his monthly Przegląd Polski (Polish Review) and the Cracow daily Czas (Time) in mid-July. He later issued these editorials as a pamphlet. Tarnowski’s was the most cited conservative interpretation of the anti-Jewish violence.1 Tarnowski identified the cause of the riots in dangerous political changes that challenged conservative hegemony: the expansion of the suffrage and the resulting irresponsible and deceitful populism that challenged conservative hegemony. Demagogues— and for Tarnowski there was no difference between the Christian populist Stanisław Stojałowski, the peasant tribune Jan Stapiński, and the socialist leader Ignacy Daszyński—agitated unceasingly among the ignorant rural people, convincing them the rich were the enemy and that the szlachta (Polish nobility) and the Jews had caused all their suffering. This gave rise to the barbaric rumors about Rudolf being alive and the emperor permitting violence. In order to prevent anarchy, Tarnowski fully supported the state of emergency and increased controls over electoral activity. Tarnowski feared for the great progress secured by Polish noble leadership in league with the emperor since the 1860s, for which there was no parallel in the Russian or German partitions of Poland. To dampen the attraction of radical politics in the countryside, Tarnowski advocated for a more vigorous and influential church hierarchy. He called for a patriotic movement to inspire young people to become more educated. He wanted increased government support for inexpensive sources of rural credit. These policies would require



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hard work and take time, he felt, and only dangerous demagogues pointed to easy and immediate solutions. Tarnowski especially rebuked those who evoked Christianity to justify violence. Jesus, he reminded his audience, would not have countenanced a politics of hate.2 Non-Jewish urban-based liberal democrats blamed the riots on the failures of the conservative leadership of the province. For the democrats, decades of conservative stewardship had only succeeded in preserving the privileges of the traditional elites and suppressing social progress. The Jews’ supposedly debased culture and morality, their usury, and their promotion of rural alcoholism stemmed from a lack of economic development and opportunity. The same problems were behind the poverty and stubbornly high rates of illiteracy of the backward Catholic population. In mid-­August, leaders of the democratic left and of the People’s Party (overlapping categories) gathered in the Lemberg town hall. These hundred liberal luminaries denounced the state of emergency and szlachta mismanagement and sent a petition to the government in Vienna. They argued that the conditions giving rise to the riots—economic stagnation and ignorance—could be combated by greater government support of investment in industry and education. They also criticized the measures taken by the government against the socialist movement. Socialists, they contended, had nothing to do with antisemitic agitation prior to the riots, so shutting down socialist clubs and banning socialist publications would have no impact on future tensions in the countryside. The moves against socialists demonstrated that the conservatives were using the riots to curb constitutional freedoms in order to bolster their fading position in Galician politics and society.3 Liberal journalists also accused Stojałowski and his followers of anti­ semitic agitation and of directly organizing the violence. In addition, they called out the Jews for reacting “improperly” to every situation. They argued that the Jews displayed arrogance when their position was advantageous and “ridiculous cowardice when they felt weaker. They caused the riots in many cases.”4 Ignorance, the legacies of serfdom, and the Jews’ distaste for hard work and preference for usury all contributed to economic backwardness and moral crisis.5 Before the state of emergency was lifted, the publishing arm of the liberal Lemberg daily Słowo Polskie (Polish Word) issued Antoni Fibich’s short pamphlet Rozruchy antyżydowskie (Anti-Jewish Riots), quoted in the opening of this chapter. Fibich did not ascribe most of the responsibility to peasants or working people. Nor did he consider the gendarmes and mili-

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tary to have acted incorrectly by firing into mobs of marauders in their efforts to restore law and order. He also made clear that those who had been active in the plunder and destruction were guilty of their own individual choices. Fibich agreed with other liberals that the bankrupt policies of the conservatives had victimized both Jews and Christians in the Galician countryside. Unlike the conservatives or the other liberals, however, he focused on the Jews themselves in terms that echoed themes from ­Mateusz Jeż’s Jewish Secrets. Fanatical rabbis, he asserted, used the Talmud to cultivate a visceral hatred of non-Jews. In general, the Jew has a disgust of productive labor, he rarely takes to the plow and never to the flail. Today, when equal before the law, it is the most exclusive tribe, distinguishes itself carefully from others through language, dress and customs, creating a new “ghetto” which separates it from the rest of the world. Do not be surprised that [the Jew] is the subject of general hatred.6

Unlike Jeż, however, Fibich remained firmly in the liberal tradition: he considered economic development and education to be the keys to solving the Jewish problem. “Above all,” Fibich advised, “battle the Jews’ defects.”7 In this effort, it was possible to ally with “educated” Jews.8 Fibich lauded enlightened Jewish institutions like the philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s network of trade schools designed to diversify the occupational profile of the Jewish population by turning them away from petty commerce and toward the crafts. Fibich encouraged Christians to compete with Jews in the economic field by building up “our [Christian-owned] credit institutions and industry.” “Such a battle cannot be permitted to take on antisemitic attributes,” he added.9 The new peasant parties also incorporated the violence into their existing agendas and rivalries. People’s Party leaders implicated Stojałowski in the organization of the violence, charging that he had taken advantage of social and economic tensions in the countryside to rile up the peasantry for his political purposes. In this interpretation, when Stojałowski realized that his candidate would likely to lose to Stapiński of the People’s Party in the June 23 election for the fifth curia seat to parliament, he fomented public violence in a last-ditch effort to keep voters away from the polls. The anti-Jewish attacks were “the fruits of Stojałowski’s labor.” People’s Party leaders agreed with the necessity of breaking the alleged Jewish domination of the rural economy, but rejected Stojałowski’s overly simple solution (violence) to the complex social problems of the countryside. They



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demanded an increase in discipline, self-help, anti-alcohol campaigns, government support of and expansion of rural credit, and the establishment of more agricultural circles. Only such a balanced and disciplined approach would result in the goal they shared with Stojałowski’s party: the weakening of the Jews’ stranglehold on the countryside and the promotion of a healthy peasant economy.10 The People’s Party newspaper, Przyjaciel Ludu (Friend of the People), damned Jews as the “kings of capital” whose economic domination had given rise to anti-Jewish hatred. Przyjaciel Ludu urged the peasantry to stop frequenting taprooms and cease purchasing goods from the Jews.11 For Jakub Bojko, a leading figure in the People’s Party who became a prominent peasant leader in interwar Poland, “The Jews have the greatest part of the blame, but everyone who has God in his heart and not in the mouth has to know how to distinguish between a Jewish crook, thief, or swindler and an honest Jew. We cannot just murder or rob the dishonest Jews of whom there are a very great many.”12 On June  29, Stojałowski’s Christian People’s party held a meeting of its new Polish Christian People’s Parliamentary Club in Cracow. The party issued a statement about the riots that was published in Wieniec (The Wreath) on July 1. For the Christian People’s Party, it said, the ultimate inspiration for the “the anti-Jewish movement in Galicia was the many years of Jewish exploitation,” their usury, and the corrupt acquisition of Christian property. Christian People’s Party leaders denied the charge that they had organized the anti-Jewish violence. The conservatives in the Polish Club, allegedly influenced by its Jewish members, had failed the people of Galicia by ignoring the true causes of the violence and consenting to the unconstitutional measures taken by the government. Wieniec maintained that the events in Kalwaria in May began with a handful of young people breaking a few windows of Jewish homes that were not festively lit in honor of the Adam Mickiewicz centenary celebration (see Chapter 3). The Jews then exaggerated the danger and called in the gendarmes. The gendarmes carried out the Jews’ agenda by firing on the crowd, resulting in the first fatality in the 1898 violence. As news spread about the death of an innocent, more Christians vented their fury against Jews and Jewish property. By resorting to deadly force against unarmed peasants, the gendarmes in Frysztak and elsewhere revealed the hidden influence of the Jews in the highest levels of the Galician administration: “not one drop of Jewish blood had been shed, [yet, the violence had resulted in] almost thirty Christian corpses, scores of seriously wounded people, and around

FIGURE 25.  “The Situation in Galicia,” printed in the satirical Kikeriki (Cock-a-doodle-doo) associated with Vienna Mayor Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party, mirrored the interpretation of the violence put forth by Stanisław Stojałowski and his Galician Christian People’s Party. The rooster, the mascot of the magazine, points to the natural state of things in Galicia: the innocent peasant reaches out for help as he is tied up and controlled by the traditional Jew on the left, symbolizing small-town and village shopkeepers, publicans, and moneylenders, and the capitalist Jew on the right. Kikeriki, July 7, 1898, 2. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library.



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800 imprisoned people or more.”13 As one peasant letter to Pszczółka (The Bee) put it, the army has mobilized to protect the Jews, who “already go about as though they are higher than all Catholics.”14 The Peasant Party Union disseminated a similar narrative: the Jew was the cause of all ills in the countryside. The party’s spokespeople declared that “The Jew is simply a vampire and a moral poisoner of the rural population.”15 To improve conditions in rural Galicia, the Peasant Party Union proposed the reversal of Jewish emancipation, restriction of Jewish property rights, and boycotts of Jewish businesses as well as government support for rural credit institutions, agricultural circles, Christian shopkeepers, and Christian industry.16 The Peasant Party Union also attempted to organize a new umbrella political movement, the Catholic-National Party, to unite all populist and anti-Jewish political forces in the province to work together for a better future.17 Antisemitic Catholics and Polish nationalists also placed the responsibility for the violence on the Jews. They expressed great sympathy for the righteous rage of the peasantry. They insisted that antisemitism and Catholicism could be compatible. They quoted the Church fathers, finding support for the need for self-defense against the national, religious, economic, and cultural enemy. Their publications warned that Jews were purchasing estates, accumulating vast quantities of money, living in the nicest areas, and sitting on municipal councils in dozens of towns. In fifty years, the papers lamented, all of the Catholic population would be servants of the Jews. The riots, therefore, were in fact only a form of self-defense against Jewish power. Like the peasant press, however, these sources also endorsed a more disciplined approach to replace random and counter-productive campaigns of violence that only allowed the international Jewish press to twist the truth and depict Catholic Poles as barbaric Asiatic hordes.18 While the state of emergency held, the socialists had more difficulty presenting their interpretations of the riots to a broad audience. Socialist newspapers were banned and freedom of assembly was suspended for many socialist organizations. In July, in the face of this regime of censorship, less than two weeks into the state of emergency and even as the first trials were taking place, Słowo Polskie (Polish Word) invited the socialist leader Ignacy Daszyński to use its pages to present his interpretation of the riots.19 The paper proclaimed that “every voice that could contribute to explaining the situation, irrespective of which camp they come from” should be heard.20 Daszyński, however, used his editorial “Galician Society and Social De-

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mocracy” to refute what he saw as false charges against his movement: that it was antinational, characterized by “Jewification” (żydzenia), propagated anarchy, and took financial advantage of workers. He burnished his Polish national credentials by noting that it was only his party that worked for solidarity among workers in all three partitions and those who had emigrated. He also pointed out that social democrats had turned out in massive numbers for the celebrations honoring Adam Mickiewicz. He was even more eager to demonstrate that the social democrats were not controlled by Jews: only 20 percent of executive committee members were Jews, only one of five party papers were Jewish, and only one in fifteen members of the regional committee were Jews. “Our party is not antisemitic,” but “unfortunately, there are too few poor Jews in it, not too many.” Daszyński slammed the hypocrisy of the Polish conservatives. He charged that they had supported the antisemitic Catholic newspapers such as Prawda (Truth) in order to gain popular support for their failed leadership and now backed the government’s emergency measures to halt the attacks.

Parliamentary Performances The long-running public discussions over the riots culminated in more than ten hours of debate held in the Chamber of Deputies in ­Vienna on November 22 and 24, 1898. The November debate in the Vienna parliament was a debate about political legitimacy. The March 1897 parliamentary elections in Cisleithania, the first since the inclusion of the fifth universal male suffrage curia, had resulted in the election of Polishspeaking socialists, most importantly Daszyński, as well as peasant representatives from Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party and the People’s Party. Stojałowski and People’s Party leader Stapiński gained their own seats with victories in the two special elections that took place in western and central Galicia in 1898. These representatives refused to follow the lead of the Polish Club. In November, deputies from all of Galicia’s major parties, Austro-German representatives from competing movements, and Czech politicians debated the issue of the violence. The high drama in the Reichsrat offered an unprecedented opportunity for the new socialist and peasant party deputies to project an image of activism, concern, and effectiveness from the center of power in Vienna back to their constituencies in far-off rural Galicia. They presented themselves as the true representatives of the Polish-speaking people of Galicia and insulted their rivals. They



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­ emanded that Minister President and Minister of the Interior Franz Thun d und Hohenstein be forced to answer for the Galician catastrophe. The interpretations of the violence, its causes, and the actions taken by the government varied, but nearly all the major parliamentary addresses had a few elements in common. Politicians depicted Catholic Galician peasants as innocents manipulated for nefarious ends. Jews were portrayed only as moneylenders, alcohol-sellers, and unscrupulous abusers of the

FIGURE 26.  November Storms in Parliament. Illustration from Wiener Bilder, November 20, 1898, depicting a confrontation between Galician socialist leader Ignacy Daszyński (pointing finger) and pan-German representative Karl Hermann Wolf in the Chamber of Deputies, November 8, 1898. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library.

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rural population who were essentially responsible for the violence. The most important exception, aside from Emil Byk, a Jewish representative from Lemberg who sat in the Polish Club, was Minister President Thun himself. Thun delivered a sharp defense of the state of emergency and the actions taken by the Vienna ministries. The debate opened when socialist representative Ignacy Daszyński put forward a ministerial accusation about the state of emergency. Had Daszyński’s proposal garnered a majority, a parliamentary committee of forty-eight members would have investigated Thun’s actions related to the state of emergency and required him to respond. Daszyński’s oration was a structural critique of social, political, and economic relations. The violent attackers hardly featured as significant actors. Instead he offered an uncompromising indictment of the Cisleithanian government, the justice system, the state and Galician administrations, and, above all, the Polish szlachta. He accused them all of corruption and abuse of power, failure to administer the provinces in an unbiased fashion, and economic malfeasance. Daszyński’s speech and his longer follow-up on November 24 sharply criticized Minister President Thun. The socialist press in Vienna and Galicia printed and disseminated Daszyński’s speech widely.21 Daszyński railed against the state of emergency that had been declared in thirty-three counties in Galicia on June 28 and was still maintained in a handful of districts in late November. He claimed that this was the first time in the history of Austria-Hungary (and of the Austrian Empire that preceded it) when legal norms and protections had been set aside for three million people for months on end. The government had justified this radical step as a way to give the authorities the necessary means to restore law and order and to identify and bring to justice those who inspired and actively encouraged the violence. However, Daszyński declared, despite security measures, arrests, and court cases, the government had failed to find those truly responsible. Daszyński promised that he and the socialists could easily do what the government had failed to do. The socialists could assess responsibility for “the suffering, the peasant excesses, and the political machinations” that afflicted Galicia. First, Daszyński blamed the state itself. Austria had paid the nobility 200 million gulden in 1856 in compensation for the end of forced labor the peasantry had owed until emancipation from serfdom in 1848. In 1889, Cisleithania handed wealthy magnates millions more gulden



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to end the noble monopoly on alcohol. Yet, Daszyński noted, poverty remained endemic, agricultural productivity anemic, industrial development almost nonexistent, illiteracy shockingly high (76 percent in rural areas), and the number and quality of schools extremely low. The Habsburg state could not find the money to ameliorate the terrible conditions in the province, but it had little difficulty in finding the funds to compensate the nobility for the loss of privileges and direct power over the peasantry— powers that they had originally obtained through violence and oppression in centuries past. For Daszyński the noble conservatives were as equally responsible for the tragedy of Galicia as the institutions of the Habsburg state if not more so. The szlachta controlled the real levers of power in Galicia and had great influence in Vienna as well. Nonetheless, the Polish elites had failed to use their vast financial resources or their undeniable political influence to improve the situation for the Galician poor. The magnates had not invested the massive funds extorted from the state for the loss of their seigniorial rights in industry, which might have offered employment to those pushed off the land. Neither had they devoted significant capital to institutions designed to improve the conditions of the population. Instead, the szlachta continued to work with Jewish usurers and liquor purveyors to fleece the rural population. Daszyński did not spare the Jews. Jewish laborers, he conceded, were also victimized by Jewish capitalists.22 This distinction faded, though, as Daszyński lambasted Jewish tavern keepers for pursuing their dubious practices in league with and at the bidding of the Polish nobility. “There exists a very close connection between the village lords and the village Jews.” When accused by innocent peasants of illegal activities, Jews simply turned to their patrons, the szlachta. The magnates then pressured the district captains, the local representatives of the central administration, to overlook any allegations of illegal actions undertaken by Jews: “The system of concessions, protection, corruption, bribery, connection, nepotism devours our body in Galicia.” These abuses, Daszyński observed, set the stage for a peasant rebellion. Daszyński conveniently overlooked his own movement’s recent history of effectively allying with Stojałowski’s anti-Jewish party.23 Daszyński contended that the hated szlachta backed Stojałowski’s party and the Peasant Party Union, evidence that neither truly promoted the interests of the peasantry. The Polish conservatives endeavored to inoculate the popula-

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tion against the spread of social democracy by injecting Galicia with the “poison” of antisemitism. For Daszyński, the szlachta were “parasites.” Jewish publicans and moneylenders exploited the peasantry while enjoying protection provided by the szlachta, who cared nothing for the Polish-speaking people they claimed to lead. The military and police abused the population. The state and Galician bureaucracy tolerated the terrible conditions in the province, supported szlachta domination, and facilitated the mutual corrupt relations between tavern and noble court. Minister President Thun himself was ultimately responsible for suspending civil rights in order to prevent the spread of social democracy—the one movement that offered a promise of positive transformation. Twenty-nine socialist organizations, twentyfour of them unions, had been shut down when they had contributed nothing to the antisemitic movement. Only the emperor and the dynasty were left out of Daszyński’s otherwise all-encompassing indictment.24 Thun responded in person to Daszyński with a forceful justification of the government’s actions. Daszyński had impugned the state, the szlachta, the Polish Circle, the military authorities, the administration, and the judicial system, and Thun himself. Thun noted that only in parliament, where representatives enjoyed immunity, could such personal attacks be made in public. As to the ministerial accusation itself: Thun insisted that such an accusation could only be brought if a minister had committed negligence or had acted unconstitutionally. Violence, Thun summarized, had started in mid-March in Wieliczka with the breaking of windows. By mid-June the situation had required more extreme measures. The Galician authorities tried to stop this “movement of the misled people” with warnings as well as an increased gendarme and military presence. However, this did not suffice. Masses of people “had turned themselves against the adherents of a religious community, against the Jews, and these are fully equal citizens of this state (Bravo! ), and whether someone is a Jew or a Christian, whether one is a member of one or another nationality, it is the duty and task of the state to protect that person to the fullest possible means and to ensure calm and order.” This, Thun made clear, was the context for the declaration of the state of emergency. He, the Vienna ministry, and the Galician governor as the guarantors of order and equality before the law, had acted in accordance with the constitution to ensure the safety of the citizenry. He proudly insisted he would do the same again in similar circumstances.



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The Peasant Party Union, unlike the People’s Party and Christian People’s Party, sat with the conservative Polish Club. On November 24, 1898, party cochairman Jan Potoczek spoke in opposition to Daszyński’s motion and in defense of the government. However, Potoczek made very clear whom he and his party sympathized with: the peasants who frequented Jewish taverns and became indebted to Jewish moneylenders. Potoczek blamed the riots on the Jews themselves. He focused specifically on the Jewish role in the production and sale of alcohol. Potoczek resented that thousands of innocent people had been arrested and suffered for weeks or even months in jail based solely on unsubstantiated charges made by vengeful Jewish dealers in spirits. Potoczek repeated as truth the rumors that “a well-dressed and intelligent man,” or some other unidentified persons had provoked the peasants to act. Above all Potoczek attributed the Galician crisis to the ubiquitous village taproom, where adulterated liquor led to the ruination of health and “dulling of the mind.” The Jewish tavern keepers only “reaped what they had sown” when peasants drunk on vodka dispensed in Jewish-owned taverns destroyed Jewish property. Even as he sympathized with the assailants and showed understanding for their anti-Jewish fury, Potoczek spoke against physical violence. Good Christians had to love their neighbors. Instead, he begged the rural population to stop purchasing goods and alcohol from the Jews. Potoczeck recognized that Thun and Count Leon Piniński had taken some modest steps since the riots to clamp down on the taverns. However, the population could only be saved by the creation of a total state monopoly on the sale and production of alcohol.25 Stapiński, the People’s Party victor in the June 23 election, advocated for Daszyński’s motion in his own eloquent speech. A gifted orator, Stapiński would become known as the People’s Tribune. He quoted from the Lutcza indictment, in which the state prosecutor had decried Jewish domination and linked alleged Jewish exploitation directly to the outbreak of violence.26 Stapiński made clear, however, that the justified and widespread hatred toward the Jews had resulted from the failure of Galicia’s political class to protect the lud (peasant folk). Stapiński contended that much of the exaggerated violence against Jews consisted of nothing more than misguided young people engaged in harmless caterwauling, isolated window-breaking, and the pilfering of a few cigarettes. The courts, he asserted, failed to hold Jews accountable for their criminality: “In Myślenice county a Jew committed odious crimes on an eight-year-old girl who be-

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came seriously ill. The court sentenced him to two months in prison. The people considered this sentence to be too low.” The refusal of the legal system to hold Jews accountable led to frustration and anger. The same justice system, however, proved eager to “bring the people to justice for the anti-Jewish riots.” Innocent rural people who had been misled to act against the Jews found themselves sentenced collectively to hundreds of years in prison. They faced the prospect of being unable to take in the harvest while incarcerated. The search for stolen Jewish property had become a series of abuses bordering on “bestiality.” Every year state prosecutors brought up more than 20,000 people on criminal charges related to alcohol consumption. The governor, district captains, and gendarmes knew this, Stapiński insisted, but they did nothing. While Count Stanisław Tarnowski and the Stańczycy favored an extension of the state of emergency, the People’s Party wanted it lifted. Thun himself should have to answer for his negligence. Stapiński’s People’s Party colleague, Franciszek Winkowski, a representative from Tarnów, censured the government for the unnecessary state of emergency and demanded a return to normal procedures. He accused Vienna and Lemberg of conspiring with the Stańczyks to support antisemitic agitation in order to deflect the ire of the population away from government failures. Once the rioting started, the forces of order used their power to set aside the constitution and institute repressive measures against the true voices of the suffering people of. In Galicia, antisemitism had thus become “nationalized.” Winkowski conceded that he himself had long been a “half antisemite.” He opposed the corrupt Jews controlling local politics in his region, yet at the same time recognized that Jews had “a good side” that Christians should emulate—their relative immunity to alcohol and their almost universal literacy: “I do not know whether one can say this openly in the Austrian Parliament, the Jews are also human beings . . . [and for this reason] one cannot bring the Jewish question to a resolution by butchering them like cattle.” Winkowski’s party preferred to use the “good sides of the Jews for the general welfare” and “overcome their bad characteristics.” Emil Byk, the most prominent Jewish representative from Galicia, was a liberal who sat with Potoczek and the conservatives in the Polish Club. Byk defended the government.27 He praised the efforts of Piniński and Thun to restore law and order. For Byk, Daszyński’s “inflammatory speech” threatened “to set fire to our entire province, perhaps our entire bourgeois society.” Byk contrasted Daszyński’s sharp denunciations of the



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governor, the marshal, autonomy, judges, prosecutors, all classes of society with the willingness of socialists in other countries to work with middleclass parties. Byk considered himself the representative of urban professionals. He insisted he did not take orders from the szlachta, but saw unity as a more effective way to influence state policies toward Galicia than to be splintered into small parties and parliamentary clubs. Byk did not deny the need for investment and development in the province, but underscored the great advances secured by Galicia’s political establishment since the 1860s including road construction, railroad expansion, support for the crafts, creation of welfare institutions, building of schools, restructuring of the universities, and founding of learned academies, and the designation of Polish as the official language of the Galician administration. Byk pointed to the increased profile of Poles in the central state apparatus. “The Poles have become carriers of the Austrian State idea and this in a truly loyal and honorable fashion.” Byk criticized Daszyński for the callous way he spoke about Jews and his failure to support the state of emergency. The socialist leader had expressed no concern for Jewish victims. Daszyński had mentioned Jews only as usurers. Byk argued that the resort to force against the rioters had been appropriate, and, if anything, should have been applied sooner. Hundreds, then thousands of peasants had attacked Jews, destroyed their property, burned down a distillery, and plundered the town of Stary Sącz. The government of Austria, which “after all still claims to be a Rechtsstaat,” had the obligation to step in to protect the life and property of its citizens. Byk absolved the Polish conservatives of the charge that they had made common cause with antisemites. Instead he blamed Stojałowski’s party for the violence. Stojałowski and his party had incited anti-Jewish hatred with their political campaign of antisemitic slogans, speeches, and meetings. Stojałowski and other antisemites blamed any wrong done by one Jew on all Jews. Jews were, Byk conceded, moneylenders, but they were also handworkers, doctors, bureaucrats, and beggars. Byk excoriated Stojałowski and his party for introducing the brutal antisemitism of Vienna to the Galician countryside. For Byk, Stojałowski’s brand of antisemitism reflected none of Poland’s historic tolerance or the love of one’s neighbor at the center of Christianity.28 “Polish-Christian-Social. But what is Polish? What is Christian? What is social about this party?” Before the political agitation of the Christian People’s Party, relations between Jews and Christians had been “tolerable, and often friendly.”

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Stojałowski took the floor and spoke only a few words to counter Byk and others from the Polish Club. He refused “to be instructed by Byk as to what is Christian and what is Polish.” He observed that the other speakers had referred very little to “those who provoked and caused the state of emergency, the Jews.” He denied that his party had introduced antisemitism into Galicia, but “thank God that our party has been active for over twenty years and through all of this time has fought against the Jews and has always been antisemitic, but has never beaten Jews.” He claimed his party had never endorsed violence against Jews, but admitted that he and his colleagues did tell their followers to “Not let yourselves be exploited by the Jews!” By conveying this message, Stojałowski exclaimed, he was not appealing to base instincts but rather exposing the truth in order to awaken people to a real danger. This is the “duty of a man of the people and [parliamentary] representative,” he said. Stojałowski expressed pride in his movement’s anti-Jewish positions. In the course of the debate, representatives from rival parties heckled and interrupted Byk. Antisemites from Vienna and Galicia tried to provoke him. A Polish conservative and a Ruthenian representative shouted at each other over whether or not there had ever been true serfdom in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. German liberals attacked Viennese Christian Social Party deputies, and German nationalists denounced Young Czechs. The discussion of Daszyński’s petition ended when People’s Party leader Stapiński called the question. Stapiński was clearly addressing an audience far from Vienna: “I know that the battle waged between us and the Stańczyks in the province [Galicia] will not be decided in this high house. However, so the people will know who is against the people and who is for the people, I call for a vote by name.” Daszyński’s petition failed to gain a majority. The last speaker of the day was Pan-German leader Georg von Schön­erer. He did not engage the Galicia debate, but rather proposed that the House of Deputies vote to install a plaque commemorating November 26, 1897. That day, a year before, police had entered the chamber to break up floor battles between Czech and German representatives at the height of the conflict over ordinances determining official language usage in Bohemia. Schönerer’s motion was ignored and the session was gaveled to a close. The representatives came back in session for just a few minutes the following day but only to recognize the fiftieth jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign.



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Jewish Interpretations Emil Byk’s parliamentary speech was not the first or last time that prominent Jewish personalities and institutions engaged in debates over the genesis and meaning of the riots. In July, Byk and other Jewish leaders had gathered in Cracow to form a charitable organization designed both to compensate those suffering material losses and to raise enlightenment and morality among the Jews. As part of this effort, those present agreed that any Jews who accepted donations would have to pledge not to seek redress from their attackers in the name of good Christian-Jewish relations.29 Rabbi Joseph Bloch condemned what he considered Byk’s passive defense of the Jews and his humiliating deference to the authorities. Bloch blamed the outbreak of the riots on Stojałowski’s populists and Byk’s Polish conservative allies. As early as June 10, Bloch, in terms similar to those used by Daszyński in his July Słowo Polskie editorial and again in November, charged the same Polish conservatives that Byk was defending with the “sublime notion” of using the violence to overcome their isolation from the masses in an era of expanding suffrage. After the social democratic victories in the 1897 elections the conservatives came to terms with Stojałowski in order to harness antisemitism as a political weapon against rising social democracy. Bloch speculated that a secret “szlachta committee” had encouraged rumors and then prevented police and military from moving decisively against the mob.30 He expressed astonishment that previously independent liberal publications such as Kurjer Lwowski (Lwów Courier) and Słowo Polskie were involved in the “witches’ sabbath” of anti-Jewish propaganda. Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift (Dr. Bloch’s Austrian Weekly) linked the antisemitic rhetoric and politics of Lueger’s Christian Social Party in Vienna with the violence as well. Lueger and his partisans had long been known for spreading lies, blaming Jews for everything, and even calling for the removal of Jewish children from schools attended by Christians.31 Bloch vehemently objected to the idea that Jewish behavior had provoked antiJewish attacks. The real provocation for those assaulting Jews and for those who backed anti-Jewish political programs “consisted of the mere existence of the Jewish population.”32 The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (General Newspaper of Judaism), the progressive Jewish paper published in Germany and read by Jews all over central Europe, echoed Bloch’s interpretation. This German-Jewish publication insisted that Galicia’s Jews “enjoyed calm years” until “last year, when a complete transformation occurred through

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the awakening of a feeling of independence in the Polish people.” The subsequent electoral success of socialists panicked the conservatives who determined to use “antisemitism as an antidote against socialism!”33 The Zionist Die Welt tied the anti-Jewish attacks directly to Stojałow­ ski’s party and the June 23 election campaign. In this view the Christian People’s Party incited attacks against the Jews in an effort to increase the turnout of their potential voters and to frighten Jews away from the ballot box. They took advantage of “the old spirit of rebellion of these Slavic peasants.” In the aftermath of the violence the Austrian-Israelite Union, based in Vienna and the most active supra-provincial Jewish organization working to confront antisemitism in the Habsburg lands, sent a representative to Galicia to investigate the violent outbreak. The agent consulted with Galician Jewish leaders and government officials. He did not ignore political developments, but he determined that the violence was “a symptom of a deeply embedded social and economic disease” infecting “the entire population of the province without differentiating belief or estate.” This research spurred on a larger effort at the center of which was the Survey on the Situation of the Jewish Population of Galicia. The Austrian-Israelite Union distributed this questionnaire on Jewish-Christian relations to Jewish and non-Jewish parliamentary representatives (including the socialist Ignacy Daszyński) as well as Jewish leaders from all over the province. Respondents were asked for their thoughts on how to overcome the problems afflicting the Jewish community and causing harm to the population of Galicia in general. Most of the survey questions focused on the social, cultural, and economic profile of the Jewish population and were worded so as to lead the respondents’ replies: (1) What are the causes of the economic crisis of the Jews of Galicia? (3) To what degree does this crisis arise from the actions of the Jews with respect to the relations of employment in which they live; namely, what effect do the relations of employment of the Jews have on the peasant population? (15) What effect does Hasidism have on the morals of the Jews? (16) Should Hasidism be fought and by what means? (20) In what ways and to what degree did the [political] behavior of the Jews before or after the last parliamentary elections promote antisemitism? (22) What are the direct causes of the latest antisemitic peasant disturbances in Galicia?



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Dr. Siegfried Fleischer, secretary of the Austrian-Israelite Union, analyzed the survey answers. The responses pointed out several factors contributing to Jewish impoverishment and emigration, notably rising salt and tobacco taxes and fewer licenses awarded to Jews to engage in trading these lucrative products, increases in the fees for alcohol sales, scarcity of Jewish employment opportunities in the provincial government, overpopulation, overwhelming concentration of Jews in petty commerce, lack of industrial development, the increasing threat of Christian boycotts of Jewish businesses, government favoritism toward Christians, and religious backwardness. In Galicia, Fleischer wrote, Catholicism enslaved Christians just as Hasidism enchained the Jews. Jewish secular “general education was the only means of countering the darkness of Hasidism through the light of general education.” The study praised efforts by the Baron Hirsch trade schools to train women and girls to make hairnets, and boys and men to carve puppets, dominoes, chess pieces, and other toys from wood. “The standard of life increases with the penetration of culture and with the increase in employment possibilities. The one depends on the other. This is demonstrated by the comparison between the living standards of today’s central and west European Jews with those of the old Ghetto era.”34 Other Jewish liberal voices were less sure that the recipe of education and economic development would have such positive effects. Der Israelit (The Israelite), founded in Lemberg as a proponent of a German cultural orientation among progressive Jews and by the 1890s a strong advocate for a Polish cultural identification (though published in German), reacted with alarm to the events: And all of this, namely the plundering of the Jews and such opinions in the press, unfortunately took place in the week of the Centenary Jubilee celebration of a poet [Adam Mickiewicz], who in one of his best works showed and glorified two figures from the ­Polish-Jewish lower middle class as most noble and ideal, the very figures from Jewish circles that in this jubilee week were systematically subjected to robbery, plunder, and ridicule. Oh the evil and blindness! What use are so many thousands of gulden that are given out every year to elevate the educational level of the people—what use are the most beautiful speeches at public festivals?—when back home in one’s own soil the seed of a moral poison has been sown, which deadens the sense of right and justice and order, barbarizes and makes impossible social life, and in this way threatens the future of the country and of the nation.35

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The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums also interpreted the Galician violence as a reflection of backwardness and barbarism. This journal reacted by evoking (and going beyond) Austrian novelist Karl Emil Franzos and his famous “cultural images” from 1876: “On the Silesian-Galician border begins not half- but full Asia.”36 These were certainly not the only Jewish explanations for the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence. The Zionist press excoriated the reaction of the influential Sandz Hasidic dynasty based in Nowy Sącz. According to reports, Rabbi Aaron Halberstam had proclaimed that disaster had come upon the Jews because more and more Jewish women exposed their hair in public and wore jewelry instead of covering their heads completely and comporting themselves with modesty. If Jews corrected this moral lapse and prayed for forgiveness, “God will not withhold His supportive hand from you.”37 Vienna’s Zionist club Bar Kochba expressed disgust at this obscurantism. The members of Bar Kochba instead applauded a group of Nowy Sącz secondary school students who responded to the violence by demanding that the Jewish community provide education in modern Hebrew and Jewish history.38 Bar Kochba also lambasted Byk and his charity drive intended only for Jews who promised not sue their attackers for lost property. The Zionists interpreted the riots as the latest proof that Jews would never be accepted in Europe. They urged Jews everywhere to embrace Zionism, learn Hebrew, and prepare for a life elsewhere.39

State Response and Public Scrutiny The branches of the Habsburg state reacted in a variety of ways to the public debates about the anti-Jewish attacks. As shown above, Thun spoke briefly but forcefully in the Chamber of Deputies in defense of the state of emergency. The administration defended its actions less publically as well. The office of the Galician governor also instituted measures intended to prevent future violent outbreaks. Here, I will briefly explore two cases in which violent clashes between crowds and gendarmes resulted in deaths and injuries. In both instances populists and antisemites accused the ministry in Vienna and the Galician administration of malfeasance. The parties were in effect demonstrating that they, not the Polish conservative elites or the Galician administration, truly championed the people. In response, the government launched its



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own investigations to determine whether the charges made by the politicians in the press or in parliament had any merit. The first participant in the 1898 events to be killed by the authorities was one Michał Balik, who was shot on May 26 by a gendarme in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. This incident became the center of two investigations arising in reaction to the June 9 edition of Głos Narodu (Voice of the People). The popular Cracow daily printed extensive excerpts from a statement by Jan Kubik and Andrzej Szponder, Christian People’s Party Reichsrat deputies from Wadowice. These two politicians had traveled to Kalwaria on June 4 to interview “credible eyewitnesses to the happenings.”40 Their statement making public what they called the results of their careful investigation seems rather to have been based on allegations conveyed by a Bernardine monk from the Kalwaria monastery to the district captain of Wadowice on May 30: that one young, poorly trained gendarme had ordered the others to fire on the crowd; that another body, a man killed by the gendarmes, had been found; that Balik had died from a bayonet wound to the eye; that the gendarmes had flirted with loose women during church services and had been drinking beer supplied to them by the Jewish propinacja lease-holder; and that Jan Wilk, the Jewish watchman commander, had acted improperly toward Catholics. Local authorities had investigated and dismissed these charges before the arrival of the parliamentary duo. They found that only one gendarme had fired, there was no second body, Balik died of a bullet to the chest, the gendarmes did not flirt while on duty and were not drunk nor did they receive barrels of beer from the Jewish leaseholder— they always purchased beer in bottles form the Christian store; the commander of the gendarme post, Jan Wilk, “was not and never has been a Jew, does not descend from a Jewish family, but is Catholic, of Roman Catholic persuasion.”41 Austrian press law required newspaper publishers to submit a copy of each edition to the state prosecutor simultaneously with its distribution to the public.42 In this case, at the request of the state prosecutor the Cracow court ordered the confiscation of the original edition of Głos Narodu that included the most incendiary charges—no gendarme had been in danger or wounded by the crowd of rock throwers; Balik had been bayoneted in the eye; a Jew had given the order to fire. The prosecutor did permit Głos Narodu to print that the populist parliamentary deputies had proven that the peasants in the town for the Mickiewicz festivities had been peaceful until the Jews themselves sparked the attacks with their provocative

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behavior. The article in the edition without the offending passages still contended that the gendarmes acted improperly, were incompetently led and had fired on peaceful gatherings, and had killed two people and injured others. Stojałowski’s popular Wieniec (The Wreath) charged that the authorities had “confiscated the truth,” resorting to the heavy-handed methods of control utilized by the “old Galician government” of ­Kazimierz Badeni. During his tenure as governor (1888–1895), Badeni had been infamous for censoring the press and making liberal use of the powers of arrest to control public opinion. The local investigation by the authorities countering the charges never became public.43 A second investigation of the same incident was undertaken in the fall. On October 4, representatives Szponder, Kubik, and others filed a parliamentary inquiry (interpellation) directed to the minister of the interior. Representatives from the Christian People’s Party, the People’s Party, and the Christian Social Party signed the inquiry. The interpellation quoted from the debunked earlier report by Szponder and Kubik and concluded: (1) That it was not the Christians, but the Jews who were the instigators; (2) that the measures taken by the district captain were not necessary but have instead been proven damaging because they led to the shedding of blood; (3) that in no way was the employment of the military justifiable because this only served to increase the provocative and impudent behavior of the Jews; (4) that the behavior of the commissar was a tactical disaster, illegal, and unbearable; and (5) that the gendarmes, which through the entire event behaved provocatively and without any understanding, were the direct murderers of innocent people, but that District Captain Franz [was] indirectly [responsible].

The representatives then posed two questions for Minister President Thun: (1) Whether His Excellence the Minister President is well acquainted with the events in Kalwaria? (2) Whether His Excellence, in order to calm the bitter feelings of the people, is inclined to bring the district captain of Wadowice to justice and to punish him appropriately?44

Neither the archives of the Galician administration nor the Ministry of Justice collections offer hints to the resolution of the inquiry. It is possible to conclude, however, that whatever investigation the adminis-



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tration undertook, it did not weaken the efforts by the populists to position themselves publicly as defenders of the Christian lud and opponents of the Jews. A more extensive series of administrative investigations concerned the bloodiest single incident of 1898: the fatal shootings of twelve people by gendarmes on 16 June in the small market town of Frysztak. The Frysztak investigations went on for two years.45 In the immediate aftermath of the Frysztak events, the populist press pilloried Johann Winiarski, district captain of Strzyżów. These attacks were renewed in the days surrounding the Frysztak trial. On September 30, Christian People’s Party representatives Danielak and Szponder initiated a parliamentary inquiry in Vienna. Fifteen deputies including Karl Lueger, cosponsored this interpellation. Here again, anti-Jewish politics united German-speaking and Polish-speaking deputies. The inquiry was addressed to the ministers of interior, justice, and defense. The inflammatory charges included that the gendarmes killed twelve innocent peasants on the direct order of Strzyżów district captain Johann Winiarski, that two of those killed were over seventy and blind, and that four peasants were “completely peacefully seated on the steps of the church with prayer books” when they were shot to death. The interpellation portrayed Winiarski as genetically predisposed to violence: “There is something in the blood of this district captain that drives him to commit murder. This year his brother murdered his young wife and his elderly uncle . . . with a knife.” The authors of the inquiry were offended that Winiarski remained in office and none of the gendarmes had faced justice. “Public opinion justifiably demands atonement. The innocently shed blood cries out to Heaven for revenge.” In light of these findings, the signatories asked (1) Does the government intend to retain a district captain in his post when in fact twelve innocent peasants were murdered at his order? (2) Whether Winiarski as the true instigator of these murders will face legal responsibility? (3) Whether the actual murderers, the gendarmes, will be punished?

Winiarski himself submitted an extensive account to his superiors immediately following the events in question. The press published excerpts on June 24.46 The Galician governor called Winiarski in on January  25, 1899, again to answer for his actions. As he explained, on June 15 he heard that rumors were circulating through the Frysztak area about attacks on Jews planned for the June 16 market. He immediately mobilized all nine

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available gendarmes. He arrived in Frysztak in the morning and held a meeting at the town hall with Father Prusak, the parish priest, and the headmen from the surrounding villages, with the exception of Jan Miras of Huta Gołuchowska, who was later identified as the “chief ringleader.” When Winiarski learned of the violence at Naftali Löw’s tavern, he tried to persuade Father Prusak to join him to confront and calm the mob. The priest refused and, fearing for Winiarski’s life, attempted to prevent the district captain from going. Winiarski braved the crowd, however, saw things were spinning out of control, and told the gendarmes to proceed tactfully and prudently. He and the priest hurried to the telegraph office to call for military backup. While they were there, three gendarmes were injured. The other officers, fearing for their lives, fired on the crowd. The wounded received immediate medical attention but twelve persons died. Witnesses, including gendarmes, city officials, and telegraph employees, corroborated Winiarski’s story. He was with the priest at the telegraph station when the shooting took place. The ranking gendarme on the scene, Staff Sergeant Nicholaus Kisz, not Winiarski, issued the order to shoot in a life-threatening situation. The chief prosecutor of Cracow, the Vienna ministries agreed: Winiarski, Kisz, and the gendarmes had acted with great dedication to duty and there were no grounds for punishment. These investigations proved beyond doubt that the accounts put forward by populist politicians had little relationship to the events on the ground. Still, official efforts to thwart false narratives had far less public effect than did the charges that prompted the investigations. In a declaration on January 25, 1899, an enraged Winiarski noted a final dishonor. In the days after the Frysztak tragedy, the Christian People’s party representative Tomasz Szajer had visited the town to collect information. After conducting his inquiry, Szajer assured the district captain that the evidence exonerated Winiarski. Szajer asked for permission to hold a public assembly at which he would clear Winiarski’s name. Because of efforts to limit such assemblies in the context of ongoing anti-Jewish attacks, Winiarski denied permission. Still, Szajer vowed he would let the truth be known. Months later, however, instead of exculpating Winiarski, Szajer joined his fellow Christian People’s party representatives in signing the interpellation that accused Winiarski of wrongful behavior in the incident.47 These investigations aimed at justifying actions taken by the authorities. The Galician governor also implemented new policies to address what he viewed as the causes of the violence.



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Following the March violence in Wieliczka, officials in the Galician administration linked the outbreak of the riots to the spread of anti-Jewish Catholic tracts (most prominently Jewish Secrets). The Galician authorities also tied the constant electioneering of the new peasant political movements to the violence. In mid-June, days before the 23 June vote, the district captain of Krosno reported that “the source of them [the riots] lies in election agitation,” specifically the repeated accusation by Stojałowski’s supporters that their People’s Party rivals were the tool of the Jews.48 Still, from early on, the Galician governor’s office and justice system placed much of the responsibility for the attacks on the Jews themselves. Based on the investigations undertaken by district attorneys, the state prosecutor of Cracow agreed that in some cases agitators were spreading rumors and leading violent acts, but he did not believe that the attacks were centrally organized. Instead, “the basis of the manifest hatred against the Jews” derived from “the notorious and unscrupulous exploitation of the rural population by the Jews.”49 Governor Piniński himself repeatedly confirmed Jewish responsibility as fact. In late July, the governor reported to Minister President Thun that “aside from the economic exploitation, the arrogant and provocative behavior of some Jews contributed significantly to the hatred of the peasant population for the Jews.”50 Having imposed the state of emergency, deployed the military and gendarmerie, and held trials, Piniński believed he had fulfilled his primary responsibility: to restore “the trust of the population in the force and power of the government” by putting an end to the rioting. Piniński then drafted a series of measures to improve public confidence in his administration and in the state itself by countering the sources of unrest. He wanted to maintain some emergency measures even after the formal lifting of the state of emergency in order “to cripple the efforts at agitation by a few party leaders and the partisan press.” 51 At the same time he proposed action in the economic field to combat poverty. For this he sought to reduce the parcellation of land, lower taxes and fees, and institute public works projects. To enhance security he lobbied to fill open positions in the provincial administration as well as in the offices of the district captains. He entreated Minister President Thun for a significant expansion of the gendarmerie in Galicia. Other measures taken by Piniński’s administration were aimed at countering perceived Jewish predominance and exploitation of the Christian population. Piniński increased support for Christian stores and agricultural circles, and directed

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. “Model letter for removing a saloon keeper: Excellent imperial-royal office of the District Captain! Saloon keeper . . . . . . . in . . . . . committed the following abuses: . . . .” Związek Chłopski, September 11, 1898, 222.

FIGURE 27. 

district captains to fight drunkenness and demoralization in the countryside by investigating the administration of taprooms and the qualifications of those who ran them (Jews constituted approximately 80 percent of those involved in the alcohol industry). If any legal problems were found, permission to sell alcohol could be denied.52 Such official actions only seemed to confirm the charges against the Jews made by politicians who claimed to represent the people. Der Israelit (The Israelite) feared that they would lead to the impoverishment of thousands of Jews.53 For the editors of Związek Chłopski (Peasant Union), the organ of the Peasant Party Union, however, Piniński did not go far enough: “no Jew should be accepted as a publican.” To this end Związek Chłopski printed sample letters and encouraged its readership to use them to denounce Jewish tavern keepers for fraud, usury, and abuse. District captains would thereby be pressured to reject applications from Jews to sell alcohol.54

Jews and Christians in Western and Central Galicia New political movements exploited the riots and their aftermath to enhance their own legitimacy and to communicate their efforts at representing the interests of the Polish-speaking peasantry and small-town inhabitants to their actual or at least potential constituents. Local, provincial, and Vienna authorities had restored law and order and brought thousands of assailants to justice. The authorities also reacted to pressure from the new political movements and public opinion (mass press) and attempted to act in ways that avoided the impression that the administra-



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tion cared only for the interests of the Jews. In this context, did ChristianJewish interactions change in meaningful or permanent ways due to the 1898 events? In some areas and for many individuals—especially in small Jewish enclaves on the edge of or between villages—life after the riots could not return to what it had been. Campaigns to push Jews out of the economy gained new momentum in some localities in the wake of the violence. Moses Schöngut, owner of a small shop in Jastrzębia, and Samuel Feiner, who lived in Targanica, both victims in June of many consecutive nights of caterwauling, window shattering, and assaults around Żywiec, fled these villages with their families. In the face of hostility from neighbors with whom they had long interacted, the Feiners and Schöngut relocated to other towns and never returned.55 Głos Narodu praised leaders in Monowice, a village near Oświęcim. They had succeeded in setting up an agricultural circle and pushing the Jews out of the village.56 In his 1903 monograph on Żmiąca, historian Franciszek Bujak related that the only Jew in this village, a business owner, faced two years of boycotts and increased competition from Christian stores in the immediate aftermath of the 1898 events. Young people broke his store windows, vandalized the interior of his business, and set their dogs on the owner. This sustained hostility effectively drove the family out of Żmiąca. After the anti-Jewish attacks in Limanowa subsided, the first Christian-run stores opened owing to reenergized efforts to create a non-Jewish economic infrastructure.57 The liberal Nowa Reforma (New Reform) noted that priests in the Nowy Sącz district pressed to establish Christian stores, called for boycotts against Jews, and spread the motto: “No Catholic worker or servant should work for Israelites.”58 Wieniec also documented successful attempts to establish agricultural circles and force Jews out of the economy and out of rural areas.59 Despite these examples, the preponderance of available evidence shows that the riots did not lead to a dramatic alteration in economic relations. Overall, they did not inspire significantly greater adherence to the various religious and political campaigns to boycott Jewish stores and to spurn the Jews’ liquor. The number of Christian stores and taverns did continue to increase, as they had before the 1898 violence; however, Jews continued to play dominant roles in alcohol, lease-holding, and commerce.60 Jewish newspapers took note of the swift return of the rural population to Jewish businesses and taverns.61 In Nowy Sącz, peasants were frequenting Jewish stores again by early July and openly expressed their

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regret for recent events.62 In the post-World War II memorial book for Strzyżów, survivor Itzhok Berglass remembered no upswing in anti-Jewish sentiments after the riots of 1898: “After the 1898 pogroms the situation improved a little. Liberal winds were blowing from higher up, and the inter­ relationship between the two nationalities, the Jews and the Poles, were cordial, and both respected each other.”63 The antisemitic press expressed great frustration with this state of affairs. Prawda, perhaps the most antiJewish of all the new Catholic publications in the 1890s, interpreted the violence as a misguided expression of the desire to be rid of the Jews, and pleaded with its readers, “We have plenty of Catholic stores in nearly every village . . . but despite that we run to the Jew. Unfortunately even members of the agricultural circles go to the Jew . . . Brothers!”64 There was no consequential uptick in the number of Jews leaving the province following the 1898 attacks. Historian Raphael Mahler argued that “Jewish emigration from Galicia [to the United States] was entirely motivated by poverty, by the economic depression in the country which affected particularly the Jews.” He contrasted economically motivated Galician emigration with his understanding of the case of Russia, where, he wrote, “pogroms and civil disabilities, in addition to poverty” resulted in “sharp curves upward” of Jewish emigration in years immediately following waves of anti-Jewish violence (1882, 1891, 1904, and 1906). Mahler acknowledged, however, that Jewish emigration from Galicia to the United States in 1899 and 1900 almost equaled that of the previous four years, suggesting that Jews left the province at a rate twice as great in the two years immediately after the riots as before.65 Official Habsburg statistics complicate the picture Mahler offers of the spike in emigration and contention that emigration increased consistently from 1880 through 1910 and beyond. Official Austro-Hungarian statistics show that Jewish emigration from Galicia to all destinations more than tripled from the decade of 1881–1890 (36,660) to 1891–1900 (114,000). Almost all the increase was attributable to emigrants from the eastern districts of the province, which were relatively unaffected by the 1898 events. Jewish emigration fell to 85,844 in the following decade (1901–1910). Some 25,700 Jews emigrated from the districts of western Galicia between 1891–1900, but only 14,125 Jews left the same districts from 1901–1910. The number of Jews leaving western Galicia decreased in the decade following the 1898 violence.66 At the same time a tendency already discernable in the 1890s did accelerate specifically in western Galicia: the “abandonment of the villages



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of western Galicia by Israelites and their concentration in towns.” In 1880 approximately 38 percent of the Jews of western Galicia lived in rural areas; in 1910 only 28 percent remained. In the same period the percentage of Galicia’s Jews living in Cracow and the other eleven largest towns in western Galicia rose from 30 percent to 39 percent. This movement was more pronounced in some of the districts where multiple attacks occurred. The increases in the Jewish populations living in the towns of Nowy Sącz, Jasło, and Wadowice was greater than the growth of the Jewish population in those counties overall. In other words, these years witnessed a “very strong movement of this population” from isolated settlements in and between villages to towns and cities. Much of this migration resulted from the steady increase in Christian cooperative stores and from new regulations concerning the sale of alcohol, tobacco, and salt. The state granted fewer licenses to Jews for the sale of these products and awarded more to Christians. Some of this movement to larger settlements also stemmed directly from the violence itself and from local anti-Jewish boycotts that intensified in certain areas immediately after the 1898 riots.67 .

.

.

The riots sparked a series of reactions that had short- and long-term effects in Galicia and beyond. Most clearly, populist and socialist politicians in the province availed themselves of the grand political stage, the floor of the Vienna parliament. They delivered spirited addresses to a lively audience of hooting deputies. They contrasted their own seeming activism with the inaction of the Polish Club and the failure of state institutions. The major urban and rural newspapers brought the words they spoke in the symbolic center of Austrian politics to the villages and towns of their constituencies, significantly enhancing their profiles and bolstering their respective claims to act as the guardians of the people’s real interests. Jewish politicians, organizations, community leaders, and religious figures viewed the violence with trepidation. Liberals like Emil Byk, the major institutions of the Galician Jewish community, and even the A ­ ustrian-Israelite Union, the self-defense organization, interpreted the events as evidence that the Jewish population faced an economic and social crisis. These Jewish leaders conceded that the solution lay in part with the Jews themselves: Jews would have to find ways to reduce their reliance on petty commerce, trade, moneylending, and tavern keeping in order to improve their own economic status and reduce friction with their Christian neighbors. Dr. Joseph

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Bloch and the Zionists blamed conservatives and demagogues for the spread of antis­emitism, denying that Jewish behavior had provoked the attacks. For antisemites the mere existence of Jews was in and of itself provocation enough to engage in anti-Jewish violence. The Galician administration and the Vienna ministries acted to quell the violence, deter the population with shows of force, and arrest and try those responsible for disorder. Investigations disproved the wild charges made by politicians in legislatures and in the press, but could do little to reestablish popular trust in the forces of law and order. Galicia’s governor and justice system agreed with the populists’ view that the problem lay with the Jews. Prosecutors conceded that Jewish dishonesty and immorality was at least in part responsible for the chaos. Consistent with this interpretation, Governor Leon Piniński attempted to reduce the number of Jews involved in alcohol sales and offer greater government support to Christian stores and credit institutions. During the riots Jewish-owned and -leased property and businesses had been damaged and looted by Christian neighbors. Jews themselves had been threatened and physically assaulted. In response some Jews left villages and rural areas for larger towns and cities, never to return. Others may have taken solace in the vigorous efforts by the state to protect them and to bring the guilty to justice. Competition from new Christian shops and credit associations gradually increased; yet, efforts by politicians and Catholic journalists to convince large numbers of people to boycott Jewish taverns, stores, distilleries, and marketplace booths enjoyed only limited immediate success.

Conclusion I have never been an antisemite, but at the sight [of the arrogance of the Jews in response to the deaths of innocent people in Frysztak] disgust and loathing is awakening in me. Letter from Frysztak, Kurjer Lwowski, June 24, 1898

THE ANTI-JEWISH RIOTS IN GALICIA were closely connected to the new and vehement anti-Jewish hatred propagated in some Roman Catholic circles in the 1890s and to the arrival of modern political mobilization in the Galician countryside. Promoters of asemitism such as Fr. Mateusz Jeż and populist politicians such as Stanisław Stojałowski drew from traditional anti-Jewish charges: ritual murder, Talmudic immorality, and Jewish corruption. Their common program was, however, a modern and a radical one. They encouraged peasants to break with traditional rural society and embrace a new discipline. They agitated for rural solidarity, hard work, sobriety, and literacy. They advocated for Christian banking, credit, commerce, and trade. This populist and fundamentally anti-Jewish program questioned the ability of the Vienna ministries, the provincial administration, and the conservative elites to secure public safety and to ensure a stable social and economic order. In one of their first opportunities to stand at the center of politics and to be seen acting on behalf of their constituencies, populist deputies proclaimed this program from the House of Deputies in Vienna. The media amplified and carried this message and the populists’ claims to political legitimacy back to the villages of western and central Galicia. In the context of this dynamic, the usual tensions in the marketplace, taverns, and shops, exacerbated by economic crises, took on heightened significance. Galicia’s state prosecutors had been instructed to seek out the “intellectual instigators,” “agitators,” and organizers of the violence. They quickly recognized, however, that there was no central organization of the anti-Jewish attacks. The trials demonstrated that there were ringleaders in

178 Conclusion

various locations, but no one person or discrete group of persons purposefully pulled the strings or pushed the riots toward specific goals. A handful of rioters led more than one attack, but in no case did these individuals travel more than a few kilometers from their own homes in search of plunder. The Galician prosecutors believed that antisemitic brochures and political agitation greatly sharpened existing frictions between Christian and Jews. Incidents took place in specific locations for specific reasons. Then, attacks “were set in motion and spread to neighboring places in part by idle laborers and tramps who took the opportunity to fish in murky waters with the assurance of impunity.”1 The evolving and multiplying rumors cited in government documents, newspapers, and at trial as contributing factors certainly drew upon the new politics and the new Catholic antisemitism. The flyer reproduced on the opening page of this book referred to Jews as scabs and infections, parroting the language and imagery printed regularly in Stojałowski’s publications and in Związek Chłopski (Peasant Union), the most widely circulated rural publications in the districts beset by anti-Jewish attacks. Yet the violent acts themselves were not so obviously the direct reflections of a specific political program or an affirmation of the new Catholic social doctrine. The evidence suggests that the ideas of populist politicians and Catholic theorists of asemitism had only a limited attraction for the Polishspeaking peasantry. The anti-Jewish attacks were not understood by most participants as a means of altering the structure of the countryside in ways that conformed to partisan visions. The rumors that helped inspire and expand the waves of attacks—that Jews conspired to hurt priests and that the pope or the emperor sanctioned the robbing and beating of Jews by Christians for three days, two weeks, or one month did not aim at a permanent transformation of rural life but rather a temporary settling of scores, real or imagined. Jews were assaulted, threatened, and humiliated, but not killed. Those who participated, as leaders or looters, or were drawn in by curiosity, did so for a variety of reasons. Many wanted to lash out at those they thought were profiteering in times when peasants were facing bankruptcy, crop failures, and famine. They wanted to teach the Jews a lesson and demanded that they “stop cheating and work as we work.”2 Some sought revenge for personal grievances against specific Jews. Others took advantage of the tales of violence elsewhere and official permission to engage in criminal behavior—caterwauling, plunder, violence—whether they be-



Conclusion 179

lieved the rumors or not. Many of those joining in had heard one or more of the scores of speeches delivered by populist tribunes at local political rallies. The press recounted the speeches and rumors, which were then repeated as truth by semiliterate newspaper subscribers to their less literate colleagues who, in turn, passed them on from town square to village path. After the violence subsided, Christians once again frequented taverns, inns, and shops administered by Jews. There was no dramatic upturn in adherence to the systematic agenda pushed by some Catholic journalists and populist political parties. Yet by actively participating in the riots, rumormongering, or simply joining the mob to see what was going on, then helping themselves to Jewish-owned property since everyone else was doing it, Polish-speaking Catholic peasants and small-town dwellers created a community defined by violence against Jewish neighbors. During the months of trials, newspapers published testimony as well as statements by both prosecution and defense recounting again and again the story that the Catholics were the real victims and the Jews the provocateurs. The attacks as well as efforts by the Habsburg state to restore law and order and to seek justice contributed to a powerful and cohesive narrative about the 1898 anti-Jewish riots: Jewish difference equaled Jewish danger. Their provocative behavior infuriated the Christian population, which comprised misled, ignorant illiterates who lashed out at their oppressors and believed fantastic rumors that justified their attacks. The debased status of the peasantry was cited as evidence of the corrosive influence of the Jews. By the turn of the century the influential cultural and political institutions (with the partial exception of the social democrats) that took the part of the Polish-speaking Roman Catholic peasants and townspeople of western Galicia all lifted the responsibility for anti-Jewish violence from the rioters and placed it on the Jews themselves. After all, who could criticize young farmers, workers, or day laborers who had been kept ignorant, poor, and inebriated by the Jews for wanting to get even? Their methods were counterproductive. Catholics must become disciplined, sober, hardworking modern people. They must shun the Jews’ taverns, alcohol, credit, and shops. They must become more like the Jews themselves: We must join forces to promote our own industry and commerce like the Jews do. The Jews know . . . what it means to unite and with that unity they are victorious over us. Jews do not buy from Catholics, and us? We do not know, we do not have love of community. We each only look after our own interest and not that of our community. They will leave. They will get their own country purchased by [Baron Hirsch].3

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The political movement closest to the violence and most vocally anti­ semitic, whose leaders regularly declared their opponents to be lackeys of the Jews and who blamed all ills of the countryside on Jewish leeches, Stojałowski’s Christian People’s Party, lost the special election of June 23, 1898. Still Stojałowski’s popularity endured. He continued to serve in the Reichsrat and the Galician Diet. In the last years before his death in 1911, Stojałowski and his followers increasingly cooperated with Roman Dmowski’s National Democracy. This signaled the compatibility of Stojałowski’s Catholic populism with Dmowski’s ethno-nationalist vision for a new Polish state. In the interwar period Dmowski’s integral nationalism would vie with Józef Piłsudki’s dream of a Poland that remained open to Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belarusians.4 Jan Stapiński emerged victorious in the June 23 vote. His People’s Party, Stojałowski’s major rival, remained the strongest political force in rural western Galicia from 1898 until 1913, when it split into left- and rightleaning parties. Though more secular and tolerant than Stojałowski’s movement, People’s Party spokespersons still voiced support for a countryside free of Jewish economic and cultural influence during the riots and from the floor of the Reichsrat. This vision of modernity without Jews, with the possible exception of those who had fully assimilated, was incorporated into the official party program in the first years of the twentieth century. Socialist leaders spoke against antisemitism. They argued that Jewish capitalists exploited Jewish and Christian laborers alike. In parliament, however, Ignacy Daszyński, leader of the Social Democratic Party of Galicia, portrayed Jews (or at least the only Jews he mentioned in his widely-disseminated speech) in solely negative terms. The Jewish liberal Der Israelit (The Israelite) responded to Daszyński with indignation. In the 1897 parliamentary election, the first with a universal manhood suffrage curia, most Jewish voters in Cracow cast ballots for Daszyński, helping to assure his victory. Jews voted for him because of the socialists’ stance on equality. Now, in 1898, the socialist leader denounced the state of emergency and apparently did not see any need to protect Jews from robbery and violence.5 Austria-Hungary was a Rechtsstaat. The constitutional structures set in place in the 1860s, fleshed out in the following years, and guarded by the Vienna ministries, the administrations of the provincial governors, and the district captains guaranteed equality before the law. In 1898 Governor Leon Piniński endeavored to restore the rule of law in Galicia. He



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increased gendarme patrols, pressed district captains and state attorneys to respond forcefully, and, after mid-June 1898, called for the formation of citizens’ guards. These efforts, however, proved inadequate to counter spreading and intensifying anti-Jewish attacks in the region around Nowy Sącz, Limanowa, and Brzesko. The Vienna ministries and the ­Galician administration had to set normal constitutional niceties aside and declare a state of emergency in thirty-three districts. Censorship was authorized, socialist organizations shut down, jury trials suspended, postal privacy cancelled, and the freedom of assembly denied. Public prosecutors led intrusive searches conducted without warrants to locate stolen goods. At the urging of Minister President Thun, Emperor Franz Joseph authorized the military to take all necessary action, including the use of deadly force, to put an end to the attacks. Martial law was imposed on Nowy Sącz and L ­ imanowa. For the next six months, the Ministry of Justice closely watched the proceedings in Galicia’s courtrooms. The anti-Jewish unrest had been suppressed, if only temporarily, by suspending some of the major achievements of Galician autonomy. Emperor Franz Joseph, “Froyim Yossel,” invited Jewish clergy to his table when traveling to Galicia.6 Three times he had refused to confirm the election of the antisemite Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna. Now, this embodiment of the supranational state that many Jews identified with, authorized the ministries in Vienna and the Galician governor to employ extraordinary measures to ensure calm in Galicia.7 As one Jewish journalist wrote: “One must give credit to the Vienna central government for confirming the authority of state power immediately and in the most energetic fashion without even a feeble regard for the highly questionable achievement of “Galician autonomy.”8 The state’s clear interest in restoring quiet and suppressing violence, however, did not translate into any effort to combat the spread of antiJewish sentiment. In May, some district captains hesitated to act regarding Jewish pleas for protection from rumored attacks. They viewed such petitions as nothing more than the usual Jewish exaggerated fears spurred on by commonplace anti-Jewish discourse. As violence spread, officials expressed little if any public sympathy for Jewish victims. By June the Galician governor’s office proved eager to stem the attacks; however, the administration was also eager to avoid the impression that it sided with the Jews. Social democratic party organs were silenced; most antisemitic publications and organizations continued propagating their anti-Jewish messages without

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serious impediment. Judges and prosecutors blamed Jews for provocations. They considered drunkenness and Jewish exploitation as mitigating circumstances strong enough to reduce sentences. Later in the year, Governor Piniński directed the district captains of ­Galicia to look more critically at applications to open and administer taverns. Complaints by locals about the character of an applicant or court cases pending against said applicant would now lead to the rejection of requests by Jews to renew licenses to sell alcohol and tobacco. Piniński pushed to phase out the propinacja (alcohol production and sales monopoly) altogether by 1910, even as he acted to increase subsidies and support for agricultural circles and credit unions organized by peasants, small-town dwellers, and local clergy. The dependence on government force for protection offered little comfort for some Jews. Rabbi Joseph Bloch believed that the anti-Jewish attacks could only have broken out and spread for one of two reasons: either the authorities were surprised by the events, in which case they were revealed as incompetent and could not be depended upon, or they were not surprised by the turn of events, an option he saw as “even more dreadful.”9 The mass violence did not give rise to a new economic and social situation in the countryside, but it did advance some existing trends including the founding of agricultural circles and Christian credit associations and the migration of Jews from outlying settlements to larger communities. In much of western and central Galicia, peasants and small-town customers returned again to patronize Jewish-owned taverns and shops; in other communities, however, Jewish victims of violent neighbors packed up and left. Of course, there were Christians who defended Jews in 1898, often at great risk to themselves. Priests, village mayors, employees of Jewish businesses, neighbors, and strangers were among those who refused to believe or pretend to believe the fantasies of imperial permission. Instead, they faced down mobs and tried to protect Jews and Jewish property. The attackers assaulted them and denounced them as lackeys of the Jews. Some Christians proved willing to identify rioters on the witness stand in front of courtrooms packed with journalists and defendants’ family members. The Social Democratic Party opposed the violence. Liberal journalists wrote in condescending tones about the ignorant and dangerous rural masses. Nonetheless, efforts to restore order and punish the perpetrators contributed to the hardening of the barriers between Christians and Jews in the Polish-speaking rural areas of western and central Galicia as profoundly as had the violence itself. These included investigations by the



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gendarmerie and court officers, discovery and recovery of stolen goods, arrests and transport to jails, the trials themselves, and the portrayal of these efforts in the partisan and antisemitic press. The events of 1898 gave rise to a vigorous public discussion about the deepening divides between Christians and Jews. The pages of the Galician press debated the genesis of antipathy toward Jews and the centrality of anti-Jewish sentiments and action for the Polish Catholic future. At the center of this public conversation was the question of antisemitism and racism. Mateusz Jeż, the Cracow priest and author of Jewish Secrets, held that racial animus could not be reconciled with Catholic doctrine. He and others continued to push asemitism, a vaguely defined term meaning essentially to live life completely separated from and independent of the Jews. Other voices within Catholic circles did not hesitate to embrace antisemitism as a rallying cry reconcilable with Christianity. In Głos Narodu, Fr. Józef Sowiński, a priest from the Russian partition who was oppressed under the tsar and emigrated first to Rome and then to Cracow, excoriated those opposing antisemitism out of adherence to Catholic doctrine on baptism. Sowiński pronounced himself an adherent of antisemitism. To him asemitism was just another way of calling for equality (if separation) between Catholics and Jews and as such was “the fruit of liberalism.” In his November parliamentary speech, Stojałowski proudly declared his party to be antisemitic. These and other priests and many Polish-speaking Catholics felt that antisemitism was “defense against the ruinous Jewish actions” as well as an obligation for Catholics seeking the promotion of specifically Polish interests.10 For Dziennik Polski, Lemberg’s Polish nationalist newspaper, “You may then claim not to be an antisemite, dear reader, and you may even snicker at that word, but know this: if that is truly the case, then you have no right to call yourself a good Catholic or even a good Pole.11 Some scholars continue to posit a sharp division between premodern forms of “Judeophobia” and modern antisemitism. The former relied on theologically based charges that Jews carried a collective guilt for the death of Christ and for rejecting the Messiah. In theory, conversion to Christianity could remove the stain of Jewishness. Modern antisemitism on the other hand, draws from secular theories about race and is less flexible: baptism cannot, after all, wash away the taint of inherent characteristics. However, as historian Brian Porter has argued, and public discussions about antisemitism arising from the 1898 violence confirm, antisemitism was not (and is not) monolithic. While “secular racism and Catholic antisemitism

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remained different . . . the Church provided fertile ground for modern antisemitism to flourish . . . there was a lot of overlap between these two forms of Judeophobia.”12 The 1898 anti-Jewish riots and their aftermath did not simply arise from Galician backwardness. Swiftly spreading and constantly evolving rumors, slogans shouted by attackers, and statements made to investigators and on witness stands revealed a rural world rife with ignorance, drunkenness, and illiteracy, as well as medieval Catholic superstitions about Host desecration, ritual murder, well-poisoning, and the like. Yet, the specific form that antisemitic violence took in Galicia in 1898 and the dynamics of its spread and duration reflected a lively and expanding partisan press, new Catholic social movements, government intervention, and the arrival of modern political mobilization in the Galician countryside. The exploration of Galician politics around the 1898 anti-Jewish riots offered here complements a recent trend in Habsburg historiography. Scholars have drawn attention to the emergence of vigorous regional and municipal politics and to the development of civil society. They have shown that, with some radical exceptions, nationalists in Cisleithania did not agitate for the dissolution of the monarchy. Rather they jockeyed for control over the institutions of the state. In 1898, populist parties and the Social Democratic Party of Galicia contested the conservatives’ right to define and lead the Polish nation; however, they sought greater power and influence within the monarchy and within Galicia’s institutions and structures. They claimed to have solutions for problems that the conservative nobility, the provincial bureaucracy, and the central ministries had failed to resolve. They pointed to the anti-Jewish attacks and the state of emergency as evidence of this failure. These new political voices demanded the reinstitution of the constitutional order. They promised to use the constitutional structures to improve the lives of their constituents.13 Habsburg authorities learned important lessons in 1898, and the Galician population did not soon forget the actions taken by the state to restore order. In April 1903, murderous pogroms erupted on Easter Sunday in Kishinev (Chișinău), the capital of the Russian Governorate of Bess­arabia. The anti-Jewish attacks raged for two days before the Russian authorities intervened. Dozens of Jews were killed; hundreds wounded.14 News of the events swiftly crossed the border into Galicia. In the eastern districts of the province, information about Kishinev merged with a dangerous wave of strikes. In western Galicia, tales spread about upcoming



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violence. Notices and flyers were distributed encouraging attacks on Jews. Polish nationalist organizations such as the Sokol gymnastics association disseminated this material. There was no major wave of violence however. The authorities in Lemberg and local district captains took immediate measures. Gendarmes and military formations mobilized; prosecutors’ offices searched for the ringleaders behind the spread of anti-Jewish rumors. Perhaps most importantly, the memory of the deaths of rioters at the hands of security forces, the arrests, trials, and imprisonment of thousands just five years before left few willing to believe or act on assertions that antiJewish attacks enjoyed official approval in the Habsburg Monarchy.15 Austria-Hungary collapsed at the end of World War I, two decades after the 1898 riots. Habsburg Galicia, first invented in 1772 when Empress Maria Theresa participated in the first Partition of Poland, its borders adjusted until settling into their final form after the incorporation of Cracow in 1846, disappeared. Its people now found themselves inhabitants of the reborn “nation-state” of Poland. Some of these former Galicians carried an ominous message into the new Poland, a message propagated by populist politicians whose careers continued into the interwar period: the modernization of the countryside would come about only when the rural masses joined in systematic efforts to realize a future free of Jewish domination.

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Archival Abbreviations

AGAD, CK MS

Archiwum Główny Akt Dawnych, K.k. Juztizministerium/ C. K. Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości: Central Archives for Historical Records in Warsaw, Imperial-Royal Ministry of Justice

APKr, DPKr

Archiwum Panstwowe w Krakowie, Akta Dyrecji Policji w Krakowie: State Archives for the City and District of Cracow, Director of Police in the Cracow District

HHStA

Haus-, Hof, und Staatsarchiv: Family, Court, and State Archives of the Austrian State Archives

ÖSTA, KA, MKSM

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv: Austrian State Archives, War Archives, Military Chancellery

ÖSTA, AVA, MI

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Ministerium des Innern: Austrian State Archives, General Administrative Archive, Ministry of Interior

TsDIAL, 146

Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Istorychnyi Arkhiv Ukraïny, m. L’viv, Fond 146 (Galizische Statthalterei/Namiestnictwo Galicyjskie, 1772–1918): Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in L’viv, Fond 146 (Administration of the Galician Governor, 1772–1918)

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Notes

Notes to Acknowledgments 1.  John-Paul Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 (Montreal; Kingston, Ontario; London; and Ithaca, NY: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1999), 8–9. See also Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15.

Notes to Introduction 1.  Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in L’viv (TsDIAL)146/4/3124, 87. Courtesy of the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine. 2.  The Galician administration did not produce a list of all those killed by gendarmes and the army. The peasant journal Pszczółka claimed that a total of thirty Catholics had been killed (Pszczółka, Addendum to second Sunday of July, 1898, no. 13). Other publications cited twenty dead. Reports from district captains, the gendarmerie, and the army confirm at least eighteen deaths at the hands of soldiers and gendarmes. Six were killed in Frysztak on June 16 and another six died later due to wounds sustained on that day. At least six others were killed by the authorities in Kalwaria and Tłuste at the end of May, in the Jasło area in mid-June, and in the region around Limanowa in the last days of June. 3.  These figures are incomplete. As of January 5, 1899, 531 accused still awaited verdicts. The total number of those accused and tried represents only a fraction of those who took part. To give just one example, in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, the site of a mass anti-Jewish attack in late May, only five out of hundreds of participants were ever brought before the court. With the exception of a handful arrested for anti-Jewish attacks in March in ­Wieliczka, none of the scores of people who participated in anti-Jewish attacks in late February and March were arrested or tried. The Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw (AGAD), C. K. Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości (CK MS), box 307, files 106, 93, 135.

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4.  Rafael Mahler, ed., Sefer Sandz (New York: Sandzer Society, 1970), 237–43. The original Yiddish printing of this book is accessible online through the New York Public Library. Excerpts have been translated into English and are available at http://www.jewishgen.org/ yizkor/Nowy_sacz/nowy_sacz.html. Mahler was himself born in Nowy Sącz. 5.  On antisemitism and mass politics in France, see Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1982); and Michael Burns, Rural Society and French Politics: Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, 1886–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). On Germany, see Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002); and Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Violence in Modern German History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). In the Habsburg Monarchy, see Hillel Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). For Russian Poland, see Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Among many important general studies of antisemitism, see Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schoken Books, 1991); Jakob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 6.  Theodore Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 171. 7.  When I began researching this project, only a few articles on the 1898 riots had appeared. Two scholars have since published treatments of these events. Tim Buchen’s Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol, 2012) looks at many of the issues central to my work. He concentrates to a much greater extent on parliamentary inquiries put forward by Galician politicians and devotes less attention to events on the ground, the trials, and the Habsburg context than I do here. Marcin Soboń’s study of antisemitism in Galicia concentrates on Jewish-Polish relations in Galicia from 1868–1914. His book includes a section on the 1898 riots: Polacy wobec Żydów w Galicji doby autonomicznej w latach 1868–1914 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Verso, 2011). See also Kai Struve, “Gentry, Jews, and Peasants: Jews as Others in the Formation of the Modern Polish Nation in Rural Galicia During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Frank Golczewski, “Die Westgalizischen Bauernunruhen 1898,” in Golczewski, Polnisch-Jüdische Beziehungen, 1881–1922 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981), 60–84; and Golczewski, “Rural AntiSemitism in Galicia before World War I,” in Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, eds., The Jews in Poland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 97–105. General studies of the rise of peasant politics in Galicia take little if any notice of the 1898 violence. See, for example, Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) Stauter-Halsted did later publish “Jews as Middleman Minorities in Rural Poland:



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Understanding the Galician Pogroms of 1898,” in Robert Blobaum, Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 8.  David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 6. 9.  For a discussion of “exclusionary violence” and its occurrence in German history, see Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Violence in Modern German History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 10.  These issues are explored in a series of case studies in Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, eds., Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014). 11.  On issues related to scholarly approaches to collective violence, see Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control,” Sociological Forum 11:1 (1996); de la Roche, “Why is Collective Violence Collective?” Sociological Theory 19:2 (July 2001), 126–44; Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Paul R. Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms (New York: NYU Press, etc., 1996). 12.  Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980). 13.  The most comprehensive study of formal politics in Galicia is Harald Binder, Galizien in Wien. Parteien, Wahlen, Fraktionen und Abgeordnete im Übergang zur Massenpolitik (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005). 14.  See also Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 15.  On anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire, see John Doyle Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meier, and Israel Bartal, eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Robert Weinberg, Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 16.  On ritual murder accusations in the Habsburg lands, see Hillel Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000); and Kieval, “The Importance of Place: Comparative Aspects of the Ritual Murder Trial in Modern Central Europe,” in Todd M. Endelman, ed., Comparing Jewish Societies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 135–65; Robert Nemes, “Hungary’s Antisemitic Provinces: Violence and Ritual Murder in the 1880s,” Slavic Review 66:1 (Spring 2007), 20–44; and Susanna Buttaroni, Stanislaw Musial, Ritualmord: Legenden in der Europäischen Geschichte (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003). 17.  Alexander Victor Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); and Piotr J. Wróbel, “Foreshadowing the Holocaust: The Wars of 1914–1921 and Anti-Jewish Violence in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Jochen Böhler, Włodzimierz Brodoziej, and

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Joachim von Puttkamer, eds., Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War (Munich: De Gruyter, 2014). 18.  Among many recent examples, see three titles by Jan T. Gross: Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and also Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 19.  The June 10–12, 2015, conference and planned publication project sponsored by the Department of History at the University of Warsaw on “Pogroms: Collective Anti-Jewish Violence in the Polish Lands in the 19th and 20th Centuries” represents an attempt to consider anti-Jewish violence in a broader perspective. 20.  Franciszek Bujak, The Jewish Question in Poland (Paris: Imprimerie Levé, 1919), 31. 21.  For scholarly discussions of the role of the Russian government in anti-Jewish attacks in the Russian Empire, see John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: AntiJewish Violence in Modern Russian History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 22.  Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meier, and Israel Bartal, eds., AntiJewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 4. 23.  Gerald D. Suhr, “Duty and Ambivalence: The Russian Army and Pogroms, 1903– 1906,” in Nemes and Unowsky, Sites of European Antisemitism, 234. 24.  Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 25. Vicki Caron, “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale,” in The Journal of Modern History 81:2 (June 2009): 294–346; Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and David I. Kerzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

Notes to Chapter 1 1.  Franciszek Bujak, Galicya I, Kraj, ludność, społeczeństwo, rolnictwo (Lwów: H. Altenberg, 1908), 101. 2. Franciszek Bujak, Zmiąca: Wieś powiatu Limanowskiego: Stosunki gospardarcze i społeczne (Cracow: G. Gebethner, 1903), 105. This book is considered the first such study of village life and economic relations in the era of the Polish Partitions. Bujak authored many works on economic and social relations in the Galician countryside focused on the region that experienced violence in 1898. During his long career, he held professorships at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Warsaw University, and the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. On Bujak’s place in Polish history and historiography, see Anita Krystyna Shelton, The Democratic Idea in Polish History and Historiography: Franciszek Bujak (1875–1953) (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1989).



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3.  Anita K. Shelton, “Franciszek Bujak (1875–1953),” in Peter Brock, John Stanley, and Piotr J. Wróbel, eds., Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 280–96. 4.  Franciszek Bujak, The Jewish Question in Poland (Paris: Imprimerie Levé, 1919), 31. Bujak presented this pamphlet at the Paris Peace Conference. He opposed proposals to recognize Jews as a separate nationality within the new Poland. 5.  One of the best introductions to the topic remains John-Paul Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia,” Polin, 12 (1899), 25–48. 6.  Österreichische Statistik, vol. 63 (Vienna, 1902), Table XXII, page XXXIV. 7.  On Ukrainians/Ruthenians, see Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846–1914 (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2013); Anna Veronika Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien: Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich und Russland, 1848–1915 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001); John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, London: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); and Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 (Montreal; Kingston, ON; London; and Ithaca, NY: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1999). 8. Bujak, Zmiąca, 131. 9.  On national indifference in other regions of central Europe, see Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Michał Łuczewski, “Ultramontańskie zródła ruchu ludowego: Studium realizmu politycznego,” in Jacek Kloczkowski i Michał Szułdrzyński, eds., Patriotyzm i zdrada: Granice realizmu i idealizmu w polityce i myśli polskiej (Cracow: Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej; Wyższa Szkoła Europejska im. ks. J. Tischnera, 2008), 79–102. Andriy Zayarnyuk argues that while the number of Ukrainian speakers in contact with the Ukrainian national movement grew in the 1890s and 1900, “the possibility of avoiding the tenets of the national projects” ended only in interwar Poland (Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry, 380–85). 10.  Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Quotations on pages 172 and 284. 11.  Andrzej Laskowski, Jasło w dobie autonomii galicyjskiej: Miasto i jego przestrzeń (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Naukowego “Societas Vistulana,” 2007), 51. Laskowski notes that Jasło experienced a rapid influx of Jews in the constitutional era. 12.  On the gap between popular literary imaginings of shtetl life and scholarly reconstructions, see Jeffrey Shandler, Shetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Steven Katz, ed., The Shtetl: New Evaluations (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

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13.  For a concise discussion of the economic profile of Galician Jews, see Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism, 15–19. 14. Laskowski, Jasło. 15.  Sławomir Tokarski, Ethnic Conflict and Economic Development in Galician Agriculture, 1868–1914 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2003), 72. Here by “rural areas” I mean towns and villages with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. 16.  On Jews and credit in small towns and rural areas, see Franciszek Bujak, Limanowa: Miasteczko powiatowe w zachodniej Galicyi: Stan społeczny i gospodarczy (Cracow: G. Gebethner, 1902), Chapter 9. 17.  With more than 10 percent of the population, pre-Partition Poland had one of the largest percentages of people formally recognized as “noble.” A small number were magnates controlling extensive lands and in possession of significant wealth. The majority of those recognized as nobles lived in much more modest circumstances. On the history of the Polish nobility, see Krzysztof Ślusarek, Drobna szlachta w Galicji 1772–1848 (Cracow: “Księgarnia Akademicka,” 1994; 2nd ed., Jędrzejów and Cracow: Wydawnictwo Nowa Galicja, 2011); and Hugo Lane, “Szlachta Outside the Commonwealth: The Case of Polish Nobles in Galicia,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 52:4 (2003), 526–42. 18.  Alfred Nossig, ed., Jüdische Statistik (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag,, 1903), 216. Writing in 1903, Nossig calculated this sum in crowns, which replaced the gulden as the monarchy’s currency in 1892. Two crowns equaled one gulden. Gulden continued to circulate in Galicia, however, until 1899. Reflecting contemporary usage, most monetary sums mentioned in this book are in gulden. On the propinacja, see also Rosa Lehman, Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001, 60–61; and Bohdan Baranowski, Polska Karczma: Restauracja, kawiarnia (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1979). The Galician provincial legislature voted to purchase the monopoly on alcohol production and sales from the nobility in 1875; however, Franz Joseph withheld his approval. The noble monopoly gradually loosened after 1889. The state became the complete monopoly holder of alcohol sales and production only after completing all reparations payments to those nobles who formerly held the propinacja. Teresa, Die jüdische Bevökerung im Modernisierungsprozess Galiziens (1867–1914) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 254–56. After the state purchased the monopoly rights on the sale and production of alcohol, the previous owners often leased those rights back and many immediately subleased them to Jews (Tokarski, Ethnic Conflict and Economic Development, 151– 52). On the origins and history of propinacja in the Polish lands, see Marian Szczepaniak, Karczma, wieś, dwór: Rola propinacja na wsi wielkopolskiej od połowy XVII do schyłku XVIII wieku (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1977); and Józef Burszta, Społeczeństwo i karczma: poropinacja, karczma i sprawa alkoholizmu w społeczeństwie polskim w XIX wieku (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1951). 19.  For an overview of the involvement of Jews in the administration of taprooms and in the alcohol industry in Galicia, see Andlauer, Die jüdische Bevökerung, 254–60. On Jews and the alcohol industry in the Russian Partition see above all, Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For the Jewish tavern keeper in Polish literature and culture, see Magdalena Opalski,



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The Jewish Tavern-keeper and His Tavern in Nineteenth-Century Polish Literature (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History, 1986). In 1900 on the territory that would become interwar Poland, there were about fifty taprooms and taverns per hundred villages (Bogdan Baranowski, Polska karczma: Restauracja, kawiarnia (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1979), 70). 20.  Franciszek Bujak detailed these market connections in his books Zmiąca, Limanowa, and Galicya. 21. Bujak, Limanowa, 123. See Chapter 8 for the role of Jews in the Limanowa markets selling food items as well as clothes and manufactured goods. 22.  Stanisław Szczepanowski, Nędza Galicyi w cyfrach i program energicznego rozwoju gospodarstwa krajowego (Lwów: Gubrynowicz/Schmidt, 1888). On Szczepanowski, see Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 82–89. 23. Marcin Soboń, Polacy wobec Żydów w Galicji doby autonomicznej w latach 1868–1914 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Verso, 2011), 239. 24. Martin Pollack, Kaiser von Amerika: Die große Flucht aus Galizien (Vienna: Deutsche Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2010), 80. 25.  Kai Struve, “Gentry, Jews, and Peasants: Jews as Others in the Formation of the Modern Polish Nation in Rural Galicia” in Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 114. 26.  On Brody, see Börries Kuzmany, Brody. Eine galizische Grenzstadt im langen 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011). 27.  Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, Bd. 19 “Galizien” (k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1898). Matthew Rampley, “For the Love of the Fatherland: Patriotic Art History and the Kronprinzenwerk in Austria-Hungary,” Centropa 9:3 (September 2009), 160–75; Paul Baiersdorf, “Kronprinzenwerk and the Nationalitätenproblem in Austria-Hungary,” East Central Europe 32:1-2 (June 2005), 239–47. 28. In Symbiosis and Ambivalence, Rosa Lehmann argues that the social, cultural, and economic divide between Christians and Jews in rural Galicia facilitated a patron-client relationship in rural regions “that was characterized by reciprocity and cooperation rather than conflict.” 29.  Bujak estimates that nine-tenths of the Jews in Galicia around 1900 were Hasidic, the rest either traditional orthodox or progressive. Bujak, Galicya, 118. 30.  Wiadomości Statystyczne o stosunkach krajowych 24:2, Ludność miejska Galicyi i jej skład wyznaniowy (1881–1910) (Lwów, 1912), 32. This is one of several publications produced by the Provincial Bureau of Statistics of Galicia analyzing the statistics for Galicia from the decennial Habsburg census and other sources. 31.  Elżbieta Długosz, Żydzi w Nowy Sączu (Nowy Sącz, Poland: Muzeum okręgowe w Nowym Sączu, 2000). 32. Bujak, Limanowa, 184. 33.  Michael Marrus’s introduction to Joachim Schoenfeld, Shtetl Memoirs: Jewish life in Galicia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the Reborn Poland. 1898–1939 (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House, 1985), x.

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34.  Hillel Kieval, “Middleman Minorities and Blood: Is There a Natural Economy of the Ritual Murder Accusation in Europe?” in Anthony Reid and Daniel Chirot, eds., Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997) 208–33. Kieval considers the question of local knowledge in “Ritual Murder as Political Discourse” in Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000). 35.  Much of the recent work on Jews, antisemitism, and Polish culture focuses on the Russian Partition: Joanna B. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1800 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2006); Theodore Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006); and Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1992). I. Michael Aronson describes a similar ambivalence in the relationship between peasants in Ukraine and Jews on the eve of the 1881 pogroms (Aronson, “The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia in 1881,” in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: AntiJewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 44–62, here 48). See also Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990). 36.  Jan Słomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842–1927, trans. William John Rose (London: Minerva Publishing Co., 1941), 92. 37.  Wincenty Witos, Moje Wspomnienia I (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1988), 179. Zygmunt Hemmerling also quotes this passage from Witos’s memoirs in “Stronnictwa Ludowe wobec Żydów i kwestii żydowskiej,” Kwartalnik Historyczny, 96:1–2 (1989), 159. 38. Schoenfeld, Shtetl Memoirs, 11. For a fascinating discussion of Jewish taverns and literary depictions of Christian-Jewish encounters in them, see Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern, 17–24. 39.  Joseph Margoshes, A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 99–100. 40.  Raphael Mahler, “The Economic Background of Jewish Emigration from Galicia to the United States,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies 7 (1952), 255–67. 41.  Michael Marrus writes that the Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy “enjoyed full civil rights, were admitted to state schools, and achieved a measure of formal integration into society.” (Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War Through the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 32.) 42.  See Unowsky, Pomp and Politics. For more on Franz Joseph and the Jews of Galicia, see Zbigniew Fras, “Mit dobrego Cesarza,” in Wojciech Wrzesiński, ed., Polskie mity polityczne XIX i XX wieku (Wrocław: Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1994), 139–52. On Lueger, see John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: The Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).



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43.  Joachim Schoenfeld in Shtetl Memoirs (xx) describes Jews in his town cheering Franz Joseph passing through on the way to maneuvers in 1908, his 60th Jubilee year. For scholarly discussion of Jewish loyalty to dynasty and state, see Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Alon ­Rachamimov, “Collective Identifications and Austro-Hungarian Jews (1914–1918): The Contradictions and Travails of Avigdor Hameiri,” in Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky, eds., The Limits of Loyalty: imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 178–97. 44.  For an excellent overview of the mythic image of the Jew as the alien and dangerous Other in the Polish-speaking regions of eastern Europe, see Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other. 45. Jakub Forst-Battaglia, “Die polnischen Konservativen Galiziens und die Slawen (1866–1879)” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Vienna, 1975). 46. Stanisław Tarnowski quoted in Forst-Battaglia, “Die polnischen Konservativen Galiziens.” Historian Brian Porter recognizes Tarnowski’s rejection of racial antisemitism but overlooks Tarnowski’s influential call for the economic isolation of Jews from Christian society. See Brian Porter, “Antisemitism and the Search for a Catholic identity,” in Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 106. In 1898, the Zionist press in Vienna cited Tarnowski’s 1893 speech as an effective declaration of economic war on the Jews and therefore a contributing factor in the Wieliczka violence in 1898 (Die Welt, March 25, 1898, 10). The important Jewish historian Simon Dubnov also interpreted this speech as a public attack on the Jews. Dubnov quoted Tarnowski as declaring, “A Catholic who sells or leases a plot of land to a Jew undermines the wealth of our nation.” Although much of Dubnov’s discussion of the 1898 riots was inaccurate, his interpretation of Tarnowski’s speech and the congress itself rings true (Dubnov, History of the Jews V, From the Congress of Vienna to the Emergence of Hitler (London: 1971), 488–93. 47.  On the “antisemitic” turn in 1896 in the Catholic milieu centered in Cracow, see Tim Buchen, “‘Learning from Vienna Means Learning to Win’: The Cracovian Christian Socials and the ‘Antisemitic Turn’ of 1896” in Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, July 2012. 48.  See among others Vicki Caron, “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale,” in The Journal of Modern History 81:2 (June 2009): 294–346; Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and David I. Kerzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). 49.  On Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch’s public humiliation of Rohling in 1882, see Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford and New York: Littman Library by Oxford University Press, 1989); and Ian Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846–1919 (Boulder, CO: 2003). For the specific passages from Rohling that Jeż quotes in Jewish Secrets, see Dr. Blochs österreichische Wochenschrift: Centralorgan für die gesamten Interessen des Judenthums, April 1, 1898, 243–45.

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50.  Mateusz Jeż, Tajemnice Żydowskie (Cracow: W. L. Anczyc i Spółka), 37. 51. Jeż, Tajemnice Żydowskie, 80. 52.  On March 25, 1898, Prawda discussed the popularity of these articles and criticized the confiscation of the brochure by the Cracow state prosecutor’s office. See State Archives for the City and District of Cracow (APKr), Director of Police in the Cracow District (DPKr), box 50, 1312. 53.  Prawda, March 25, 1898, 4. The inside of the back cover of the second edition boasted that the print run of the first edition, 5,000 copies, had been disseminated in less than three weeks. 54.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichsche Wochenschrift, April 1, 1898, 243. 55.  Despite recent improvements, in many rural districts only 20 percent of the population could both read and write. In 1900 more than 60 percent of the Galician population was fully illiterate or semiliterate (defined as able to read but not write). In some Galician districts as well as in smaller villages, 80 percent or more were counted as illiterate or semiliterate. Only 25–35 percent of the population in the Limanowa, Jasło, and Nowy Sącz districts could both read and write. Österreichische Statistik 63 (Vienna, 1902), xlvii, lxii-lxiii. 56.  Wieniec, February 10, 1898, 77. See also Prawda, February 5, 1898, 4. 57.  Prawda, February 5, 1898, 4. 58. AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 358. The Ministry of Religion and Education, prompted by the Austrian-Israelite Union in Vienna, expressed concern to Governor Leon Piniński about Jewish Secrets. TsDIAL, 146/4/3117, 15. For Catholic antisemites, the confiscation of Jewish Secrets only confirmed the truth of the pamphlet’s arguments. Prawda, March 25 and June 5, 1898. 59.  Marian Morawski, Asemityzm: Kwestia żydowska wobec chrześcijanskiej etyki (Cracow: W. L. Anczyc i Spółka, 1896). Michlic contends that the “myth of the Jew as the harmful other in all aspects of Polish national existence emerged in the post-1864 period.” (Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, 24, 57–58.) For a broader discussion of asemitism, see Soboń, Polacy wobec Żydów, 96–101. See also Tim Buchen, “Asemitismus,” in Brigitte Mihok, ed., Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart III, Begriffe, Theorien, Ideologien (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Saur, 2010), 32–33; Szymon Rudnicki, “Asemityzm” in Słowo pojednania. Księga pamiątowa z okazji siedemdziesiątych urodziń Księdza Michała Czajkowskiego (Warsaw: Towarzystwo “WIĘŹ,” 2004), 656–68. 60.  Głos Narodu, December 31, 1898. 61.  Robert Michael, Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism and the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1. Michael sees a great deal of continuity between Catholic anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions in earlier periods and the antisemitism of the modern period. On Catholic antisemitism in the interwar period in Poland, see Ronald E. Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism: Poland 1933–1939 (Jerusalem: Harwood Academic Publishers for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1994). Many of the essays in Nemes and Unowsky, Sites of European Antisemitism, attest to the spread of Catholic antisemitism in much of Europe in this period. 62.  Kazimierz Wyka, Teka Stańczyka na tle historii Galicji w latach 1849–1869 (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Zakładu Narodowego im. Ossolińskich, 1951); and Stanisław Grodziski,



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W królestwie Galicji i Lodomerii (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1976), 237–48. On the Stańczyk interpretation of Polish history, see Wilhelm Feldman, Stronnictwa i program polityczne w Galicyi, 1846–1906 (Cracow: Spółka Nakładowa “Ksika,” 1907) I, 177. 63. Frank, Oil Empire, 38–39. 64.  On the Polish Club, see Binder, Galizien in Wien, especially section III. 65.  For an excellent concise overview of Galician autonomy, Frank, Oil Empire, Chapter 1. 66.  On Cisleithania’s weighted voting system, see Ernst Mischler and Josef Ulbrich, Österreichisches Staatswörterbuch: Handbuch des gesamten öffentlichen Rechtes 4 (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1909). 67.  On the Austro-German liberals, see Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 68.  On Badeni’s language reforms and their aftermath, see Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party, 1874–1901, and the Emergence of a Multi Party System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 245–47; Berthold Sutter, Die Badenischen Sprachen-Verordnungen von 1897: Ihre Genesis und ihre Auswirkungen vornehmlich auf die innerösterreichischen Alpenländer, 2 vols. (Graz and Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1965); and Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2001). 69.  Kai Struve, “Gentry, Jews, and Peasants,” 115. On the three peasant parties and the difference between them, see Jan Konefał, “Katolicko-ludowe organizacje polityczne w zaborze austriackim na przełomie XIX i XX stulecia,” in Stanisław Dąbrowski, ed., Chłopi, Naród, Kultura II, Działalność polityczna ruchu ludowego (Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej, 1996), 35–46. 70.  For some examples, see Nowa Reforma, June 18, 1898, and Neue Freie Presse (morning edition) June 15, 1898, 8. 71.  In the late 1890s some 4,500 people subscribed to these publications. Only 2,400– 3,000 subscribed to the People’s Party’s Przyjaciel Ludu and 1,200 to the Peasant Union’s Związek Chłopski (Łuczewski, “Ultramontańskie zródla,” 97). 72.  Antoni Gurnicz, Kółka rolnicze w Galicji: Studium społeczno-ekonomiczne (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1967). See also Andlauer, Jüdische Bevökerung, 244–50. The agricultural circles backed boycotts of Jewish businesses and received subsidies and low interest rates from the Galician administration. Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence, 80. 73.  For more Stojałowski’s activities and relationship with the Catholic Church, see Tim Buchen, “Herrschaft in der Krise—der ‘Demagoge in der Soutane’ fordert die galizischen Allerheiligen,” in Jörg Baberowski, David Feest, and Christoph Gumb, eds., Imperiale Herrschaft in der Provinz. Repräsentationen politischer Macht im späten Zarenreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008), 331–55; and Franciszek Kącki, Ks. Stanisław Stojałowski i jego działalność społeczno-polityczna (Lwów: Wyd. z zasił. zwrotn. Min. W. R. i O. P., and Warsaw: skł. gł. Kasa Mianowskiego, 1937), see Murray Jay Rosman, The Lord’s Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth During the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 74.  Anna Staudacher, “Der Bauernagitator Stanisław Stojałowski: Priester, Journalist

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und Abgeordneter zum Österreichischen Reichsrat,” in Römische historische Mitteilungen 25 (1983), 165–203. 75.  Ignacy Daszyński, Pamiętniki I (Warsaw: Partia Razem, 1957), 125. 76.  On socialism in Galicia, see John-Paul Himka, Socialism in Galicia: The Emergence of Polish Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1983); Walentyna Najdus, Ignacy Daszyński (Warsaw 1988); and Walentyna Najdus, Ignacy Daszyński, 1866–1936 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1988). 77.  For more on the willingness of the Social Democrats to overlook the antisemitism of Stojałowski’s movement when seen as politically expedient, see Kerstin S. Jobst, “Die Antisemitischen Bauernunruhen in westlichen Galizien 1898: Stojałowski und die polnischen Sozialdemokraten,” in Robert Maier and George Stöber, eds., Zwischen Abgrenzung und Assimilation: Deutsche, Polen und Juden: Schauplätze ihres Zusammenlebens von der Zeit der Aufklärung bis zum Beginn des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Hannover: Georg-Eckert-Institut, 1997), 139–49. 78. Daszyński, Pamiętniki, 1: 112. 79.  On the political changes described here, see above all Binder, Galizien in Wien and Struve, Bauern und Nation. 80.  Prawo Ludu, February 1, 1898. 81.  On Stojałowski’s relationship with the Peasant Party Union and the People’s Party, see Józef Ryszard Szaflik, “Ksiądz Stanisław Stojałowski—prekursor ruch ludowego” in Dąbrowski, ed., Chłopi, Naród, Kultura, 2. 82.  For just two examples, see Związek Chłopski, March 1, 1898. 83.  Związek Chłopski enthusiastically supported Stojałowski’s candidacy in February against People’s Party and Social Democratic opposition, but backed Stapiński as a true son of the peasantry against Stojałowski’s candidate, the attorney Włodzimierz Lewicki, in June. 84.  Związek Chłopski, April 21, 1898, 92–93. The paper went on to charge that the nobility was to blame for putting the Jews in such positions of power. 85.  Krzystof Dunin-Wąsowicz, Jan Stapiński: Trybun ludu wiejskiego (Warsaw: “Książka i Wiedza,” 1969), 91. 86.  Stojałowski claimed the relative emphasis on Christianity was the real point of division between his movement and the People’s Party (Stojałowski, Nasza Stronnictwa Polityczne i ludowcy, ich historya, zasady i dążności (Biała, 1906), 15–21). 87.  See Dunin-Wąsowicz, Jan Stapiński; Peter Brock, “Bolesław Wysłouch, Founder of the Polish Peasant Party,” Slavonic and East European Review 30:74 (December 1951), 139–63; and Dunin-Wąsowicz, Dzieje Stonnictwa Ludowego w Galicji (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza 1956). 88.  Stojałowski described his own efforts at creating unity and overcoming these divisions in his Nasza Stronnictwa, 15–21. 89.  Pszczółka, January 23, 1898, 24. 90.  Związek Chłopski, February 1, 1898, 26. 91.  Słowo Polskie, February 1, 1898, describes Stojałowski’s campaign against the socialists. 92.  Wieniec, February 1, 1898, 58. 93. Stapiński. Pamiętniki, 140. 94.  Prawo Ludu, February 1, 1898, and AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 16–52.



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95.  Naprzód, February 10, 1898, 1. 96.  Wieniec, February 20, 1898, 90–91. This quotation concerns a political gathering that took place in Sieniawa on February 5. 97.  Wilhelm Feldman praises his energy and his devotion to peasant life. Stronnictwa i program polityczne w Galicyi, 1846–1906 II, 64. On “Mazurian” as a reference to Polishspeaking peasants, see Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry, 3. 98.  For examples, see Pszczółka, April 24, 1898, 130; and Wieniec, June 20, 1898, 288. 99.  Dziennik Polski, March 23, 1898, 1; Dr. Bloch’s österreichsche Wochenschrift, May 27, 1898, 415; and Wieniec Polski, April 1, 1898. 100.  Pszczółka, fourth Sunday in May (May 22), 1898, 170. 101.  Pszczółka, April 10, 1898, 106–7. 102.  Wieniec Polski, June 20, 1898. See also the issue of May 20, 1898, 234; and Nowa Reforma, June 19, 1898, 1. 103.  Naprzód, June 23, 1898. 104.  Przyjaciel Ludu, June 1, 1898, 268. 105.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 15, 1898, 1. 106.  Przyjaciel Ludu, May 1, 1898, 197. 107.  Przyjaciel Ludu, June 12, 1898, 260, and April 10, 1898, 162. The paper published dozens of letters with long lists of peasant supporters urging everyone to vote for Stapiński. 108.  Przyjaciel Ludu, April 1, 1898, 2. The campaign for Stapiński positioned him at times as a fellow peasant, other times as a specifically Polish leader. Either way, he was presented as a true born-and-raised peasant who served God and was known to all. See Przyjaciel Ludu, April 20, 1898, 179. 109.  Przyjaciel Ludu, April 20, 1898, 181. 110.  For these dramatic events, see Kurjer Lwowski, June 25, 1898, 1. On Stapiński, see Dunin-Wąsowicz, Jan Stapiński. 111.  Pszczółka, June 26, 1898, 1. 112.  Pszczółka, July 24, 1898, 230. In Wieniec, July 31, 1898, 349–50, it was claimed that the People’s Party and the Jews had handed out free sausages, alcohol, money, and cigars from village to village in return for votes. 113.  Janusz Albin and Józef Ryszard Szaflik, eds., Listy Jana Stapińskiego z lat 1895–1928, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1977, 48. 114.  John Deak, Forging a Multi-National State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 87. I draw this discussion of the dual-track administrative structure of the state from this book. 115.  For the legal position of the Statthalter (governor) in relation to the central administration, see Reichs-Gesetz-Blatt für das Kaiserthum Österreich 44:19 (May 1868), Gesetz über die Einrichtung der politischen Verwaltungsbehörden in den im Reichsrathe vertretenen Königreichen und Ländern, section 3. 116.  On this earlier history of antisemitism in Galicia, see Soboń, Polacy wobec Żydów. 117.  Mieszczaninin, April 1, 1897, 4–5. 118.  Mieszczaninin, March 15, 1897, 1.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1.  This quotation comes from witness testimony included in the indictment of sixty-five people charged with criminal acts in Stary Sącz on June 25, 1898, and presented in court by the State Prosecutor in Nowy Sącz, on December 6, 1898 (Kurjer Lwowski, December 6, 1898, 1). 2.  Kurjer Lwowski, December 13, 1898, 3. 3.  See among many others, Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2001). 4.  See Michal Frankl, “From Boycott to Riot: Moravian Anti-Jewish Violence of 1899 and Its Background” and Marija Vulesica, “An Anti-Semitic Aftertaste: Anti-Jewish Violence in Habsburg Croatia,” both in Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, eds., Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014). 5.  Anti-Jewish agitation, rhetoric, and rumors of coming attacks spread throughout Galicia in the aftermath of the 1881 Russian pogrom and the flight of tens of thousands of Jews across the Austro-Hungarian border. Despite widespread anticipation, however, no major outbreaks took place in Galicia. Marcin Soboń, Polacy wobec Żydów w Galicji doby autonomicznej w latach 1868–1914 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Verso, 2011), 226–36. 6.  Dziennik Krakowski, June 16, 1897, 2. 7. Soboń, Polacy wobec Żydów, 236–38. The press reported extensively on these incidents. For Chodorowie, see Dziennik Krakowski, April 8–9 1897. For Schodnica, see Dziennik Krakowski, June 15–16 1897. An earlier case of violence, the so-called Borysław Wars of 1884, involved Ruthenians and Jews in the oil and paraffin fields. Alison Frank discusses Borysław and Schodnica in her Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 128–33. Localized violence also broke out in 1891 in Kołomyja during a hotly contested campaign that resulted in the reelection of Rabbi Joseph Bloch. See Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Dr. Bloch’s öster­reichische Wochenschrift: Centralorgan für die gesamten Interessen des Judenthums, March 13, 1891. 8.  Dziennik Krakowski, June 15, 1897, 2. 9.  According to one newspaper account the term baraby derived either from the German for railway workers (Bahnarbeiter) or railway ravens (Bahnraben) (Dziennik Krakowski, April 9, 1897, 3). 10.  On the 1898 Jubilee, see Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2005), especially Chapters 4–6. 11.  Although the Ministry of Justice in Vienna and the Galician provincial administration tallied the anti-Jewish attacks from the May 26 riot in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Wieliczka is included in the complete listing of antisemitic excesses in East and West Galicia laid before Franz Joseph (AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 135, 911). In his speech before parliament in November 1898, Minister President Count Franz von Thun und Hohenstein dated the beginning of the riots to the March 11 and 13 attacks in Wieliczka (Neue Freie Presse, November 23, 1898). The trial for the Wieliczka events took place in July at the same time as



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the first trials of those who took part in the other riots. The May 24 Przemyśl riot is also included, as is the violence in Bursztyń in mid-July 1898. 12.  Wiadomości Statystyczne o stosunkach krajowych 24:2, Ludność miejska Galicyi i jej skład wyznaniowy (1881–1910) (Lwów, 1912), 32. 13.  In the fall of 1898, Szponder and Michał Danielak broke from Stojałowski’s party to form their own faction, Defense of the People. Stojałowski’s supposed waffling on Jewish matters was one of the reasons Szponder and Danielak cited for this split (Przyjaciel Ludu, November 20, 1898, 1). Interestingly, one Jewish resident of Wieliczka declared that Jews had supported Szponder’s election in 1897 and were shocked by his turn toward propagating antisemitism. Urzula Żyznowska and Anna Krzeczkowska, eds., Żydzi ­Wieliczki i Klasna 1872–2012: Teksty i fotografie (Siercza: Wydawca Wiesław Żyznowski, 2012), 109–10. 14.  Żyznowska and Krzeczkowska, Żydzi Wieliczki i Klasna, 109. This is quoted from the Hebrew publication Ha-Magid, March 24, 1898, 94. 15.  Die Welt, March 18, 1898, 11. See also Kurjer Lwowski, March 20, 1898, 3. The prosecutor estimated the number of those involved to have been far lower (AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 54–56). 16. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 1–2 and 8. There is no transcript of his sermon. The description here is based on notes taken by an agent of the district captain who observed the service. 17.  AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 70–74, includes a transcription of the gendarmes’ report from April 4 about the incidents in Wieliczka and Klasno. 18. TsDIAL 146/6/3117, 2. 19.  Głos Narodu, March 15, 1898, noted in TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 8. 20.  Letter from Józef Windak, “Your brother from the district of Wieliczka,” Wieniec, April 1, 1898. 21.  Helmut Gebhardt, “The Military Organisation of the Habsburg Gendarmerie from 1849 to 1918,” in SIAK-Journal—Journal for Political Science and Practice (International Edition) 5 (2015), 85–95. 22.  Joseph Margoshes, A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 104. 23.  AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 49–52. 24.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, April 6, 1898, 274. 25.  AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 58–67, 79–85, 87. 26. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 1. 27.  On Rosenzweig, see Żyznowska and Krzeczkowska, Żydzi Wieliczki i Klasna, 111. 28.  Die Welt, March 20, 1898. 29. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 1–2. 30.  For an early example of praise and of commentary about its widespread distribution, see Wieniec, February 10, 1898, 77; and Prawda, February 5, 1898, 4. 31. The Amtsblatt zur Wiener Zeitung announced the finding by the Provincial and Press Court of Cracow from March 24 in its April 2 edition (Kurjer Lwowski, April 19 1898, 4). For text of the 1852 criminal code, see Reichs-Gesetz-und Regierungsblatt für das Kaiserthum Österreich (Vienna, 1852) 36:117. For an overview of press law and censorship in the

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Habsburg Monarchy, see Thomas Olechowski, Die Entwicklung des Preßrechts in Österreich bis 1918. Ein Beitrag zur österreichischen Medienrechtsgeschichte (Vienna: Manz, 2004). 32.  Prawda, March 25, 1898. 33.  Dziennik Polski, March 30, 1898, 1. 34.  Wieniec, April 20, 1898, 188–89. 35.  On Stojałowski’s political agitation, see Daniel Unowsky, “Peasant Political Mobilization and the 1898 anti-Jewish Riots in Western Galicia,” European History Quarterly, 40:3 (2010), 412–35. 36. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 13-15; and Die Welt, March 25, 1898. 37.  Prawda, April 25, 1898. 38.  Die Welt, April 22, 1898, 11; and APKr, DPKr, box 50, 1305. Despite this court case the Ministry of the Interior, the police, and the Galician governor’s office continued to investigate the spread and impact of this pamphlet into June. 39.  APKr, DPKr, box 50, 1305. 40.  The ruling is quoted and discussed in Prawda, June 5, 1898, 1–2. 41.  John Fahey, “Undermining a Bulwark of the Monarchy: Civil-Military Relations in Fortress Przemyśl (1871–1914),” in Austrian History Yearbook 48 (April 2017), 145–58. 42. TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 87. 43.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, June 3, 1898, 424. “An honorable and truthloving correspondent” reported “that one local official had “provoked the workers” and that the police exhorted the crowd, “Bash the Jews! They have bread and rolls!” That police and members of the district administration supported the violence does not appear likely. No other source mentions local government support of the rioting. On Bloch’s political activity and his relationship to Zionism and Jewish nationalism more broadly, see Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 44.  On the course of the violence, see AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 195–211; and TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 87. For another description of the events, see Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, June 3, 1898, 15. 45.  Accounts of the 1898 violence in Galicia have ignored or largely overlooked the Przemyśl events, at least in part owing to the differences from other incidents that I note here. See Soboń, Polacy wobec Zydów. 46.  AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 203. 47.  Fifteen of the participants in the Przemyśl events were tried together. TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 87. Those prosecuted for the Przemyśl events were included in the administration’s efforts to gather information on the trials related to the anti-Jewish violence. AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 86. The Przemyśl events were also included in the lists of 1898 antisemitic excesses compiled by the Galician authorities. AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 135. 48.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, June 3, 1898, 424. 49.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, June 3, 1898, 424. 50.  Echo Przemyskie, May 26, 1898, 1. 51.  On the 1898 unveiling of monuments to Mickiewicz in Cracow and Warsaw, see



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Patrice M. Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 133–56; also Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 52.  On Mickiewicz and the Jews, see Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1992), 19–21. 53.  Der Israelit, May 31, 1898. 54.  Theodore R. Weeks deems the notion of Polish and Jewish fraternal cooperation a myth (Weeks, “Poles, Jews, and Russians, 1863–1914: The Death of the Ideal of Assimilation in the Kingdom of Poland,” Polin 12 (1999), 242–56). 55. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 40–45. 56.  Dziennik Polski, June 3, 1898. 57. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 40–45. 58.  Prawda, June 5, 1898, 3. This was not the only violent incident in conjunction with the Mickiewicz celebrations. On June 20 the head of gendarmes in Biała reported that gravediggers and shoemakers were prominent among the young people who took part in the torchlight parade in honor of the Mickiewicz and the subsequent attacks on Jewish homes and property in Kęty (AGAD, CK MS, box 308, 46). 59.  The public prosecutor of Wadowice detailed these attacks in AGAD, CK MS, box 308. See for example the indictment sheet for the Krzywaczka attack that took place on May 30, (827). 60. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 115–18 and 144–47. 61. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 126. 62. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 94–102; TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 34; Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, June 10, 1898, 439; and Dziennik Polski, June 3, 1898. The Baron Hirsch School in Tłuste was one of a network of Galician elementary, technical, and agricultural schools founded by the Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch. 63.  Dziennik Polski, June 3, 1898; Die Welt, June 10, 1898, 9; and TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 60. 64.  Wiadomości Statystyczne o stosunkach krajowych, 32. 65.  Wieniec, May 20, 1898, 236–39. 66.  Hillel Kieval offers a succinct overview of the topic in “Blood Libels and Host Desecration” in the online YIVO Encyclopedia: www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ Blood_Libels_and_Host_Desecration_Accusations. See also Robert C. Stacey, “From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ,” Jewish History 12:1, 11–28; Miri Rubin, Gentile Tiles: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and Magda Teter, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). See also Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), Chapter 3. 67.  Drohobyczer Zeitung, June 17, 1898, 1. 68.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 320; and TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 136–37. 69. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 129, 136, 144, and 152. For a description even more sympathetic

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to the perpetrators, see Prawda, June 15, 1898. On the rumors about Jews poisoning wells, see Słowo Polskie, June 15, 1898, 2. 70. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 6–10. 71.  Nowa Reforma, September 23, 1898. 72.  Nowa Reforma, June 16, 1898; and Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, July 1, 1898, 495. 73.  Nowa Reforma, June 16, 1898. 74.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 14, 1898, 5. 75.  Quoted in the Judeo-German Drohobyczer Zeitung, July 1, 1898, 2. Vienna’s liberal Neue Freie Presse on June 26 printed a less detailed version of Frant’s letter. According to Frant, the town fire department did in fact arrive at the scene of his burning buildings but did nothing. He appealed to the district captain for help putting out the fire and received the retort that the authorities would do nothing since there should not be a liquor refinery in this area. District Captain Waydowicz wrote to the Neue Freie Presse to counter Frant’s charges. The Habsburg official insisted he was in Kołaczyce dealing with attacks there until 11:00 pm. He never spoke with Frant. Waydowicz found the firemen on the bridge between Jasło and Ulaszowice. He asked them why they did not engage the fire. They pointed out that the fire was in Ulaszowice not Jasło proper and so was outside their jurisdiction. In any case, having heard a rumor that the peasants were going to attack and burn Jasło they needed to remain to protect the town (Neue Freie Presse, June 30, 1898 (morning edition), 3). 76.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, July 1, 1898, 491. 77. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 19, 37–60; TsDIAL 146/4/3121, 38–41. The concern about potential disruption in oil production was felt beyond the borders of the monarchy. The Belgian embassy in Vienna pressed the Ministry of Interior to ensure that Belgian companies would not suffer damage from rioters. HHStA IB, 1898. K. 387. #226/4. 78.  Słowo Polski, June 15, 1898, 2. This paper describes many of these events through a series of telegraph reports by a correspondent in the Jasło area. 79. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 4–5. 80. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 149. 81.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 19, 1898, 1. This phrase became the title for a book about these events written by a supporter of Roman Dmowski and published in the United States in the 1980s: Karol Marcińkowski, Krwawe nieszpory we Frysztaku w 1898 (Philadelphia: Nakład Doraźnego Zespołu w Filadelfii, 1983). In the preface Marcinkowski insisted that “the government of Austria was not so mild and tolerant toward Polishness as the Poles themselves imagine.” Maria Marcińkowska (the author’s older sister) related that the events in Frysztak began in the market with a Jew trying to swindle a Christian peasant: “Jews cheat the Polish people” and “all Austrian authorities always went hand in hand with the Jews.” 82.  Andrzej Laskowski, Jasło w dobie autonomii galicyjskiej: Miasto i jego przestrzeń (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Naukowego “Societas Vistulana,” 2007), 51. 83.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 295. For Winiarski’s version of events, see the subsequent investigation into the actions of the gendarmes and the district captain, see TsDIAL 146/4/3128, 29.



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84. TsDIAL 146/4/3120, 4–7. This report from District Captain Winiarski from June 20 includes the names of all twelve fatalities (AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 298). 85.  Press accounts confirmed that those shot down were innocent (Kurjer Lwowski, June 19, 1898, 1; Dziennik Polski, June 22, 1898; and Słowo Polskie (morning edition), June 20, 1898). 86.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 294, 55. 87. TsDIAL 146/4/3119, 3. 88.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, files 295, 297. 89.  Nowa Reforma, June 18, 1898, 1; and Kurjer Lwowski, June 17 1898, 1. 90.  Newspaper accounts agreed on the numbers (Kurjer Lwowski, July 9, 1898, 1; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, July 15, 1898, 3; and Gazeta Narodowa, July 12, 1898, 1). The largest number of arrests took place in Kołaczyce. 91. TsDIAL 146/4/3122, 28. 92.  Nowa Reforma, June 22, 1898; and Dziennik Polski, June 22, 1898. 93.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 516, 22. 94.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 500. While many incidents like this one included physical assaults, this crowd of approximately fifty people did not attack the Jews. Dawid Hilawicz, a Jewish publican, simply hid himself in a corner and sat down quietly “as if on a holy day” and watched while the crowd broke glasses and stole his property. 95.  Nowa Reforma, July 24, 1898, 3. 96.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 691. 97.  The prosecution estimated that the Jewish shops were sacked by a band of peasants numbering in the hundreds (AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 691). Later newspaper estimates ran as high as several thousand (Słowo Polskie, December 31, 1898, for example), a tally that likely referred to the overall numbers of people present in the marketplace when the violence broke out. 98. TsDIAL 146/4/3121, 19. Telegram from the chairman of the county council of Nowy Sącz to the governor’s office. 99.  Austrian State Archives, War Archives, Military Chancellery of His Majesty (ÖSTA, KA, MKSM), box 734, 28-4/4-5, 1898, k.u.k. 1. Corps-Commando zu Präs Nr. 1281. 100.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 86. This indictment sheet describes a series of attacks on isolated Jewish houses and businesses by peasants who participated in the Zbyszyce and Nowy Sącz riots. AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 584, 1430; file 597. 101.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 589. 102.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 589. 103.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 589. 104.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 612. Kurjer Lwowski, June 27, 1898, 1. Głos Narodu described events quite differently. This Cracow paper related that a Jewish woman beat a peasant while other Jews threw rocks at Christians, one of whom died: “Jewish arrogance has gone beyond all boundaries.” Głos Narodu, June 25, 1898. 105.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 616. 106.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 459. A crowd consisting of a married couple, people in their sixties, and younger drinkers packed the At the Kamieniec tavern. When the riot

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broke out, lamps were smashed and the taproom was burned to the ground. The smoke was visible far beyond Stary Sącz (Słowo Polskie, November 29, 1898; and Słowo Polskie, December 6, 1898). This was one of two inns owned by Jeruchim Steinreich that would be plundered on June 24 and 25. The other bordered Mostki. 107.  APKr, DPKr, box 50, 1726. 108.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 452. The indictment referenced 80,000 gulden, but newspapers estimated material damage suffered by Jews in Stary Sącz at 99,000 gulden. Nowa Reforma, July 10, 1898. 109.  Kurjer Lwowski, December 6, 1898, 1. 110.  APKr, DPKr, box 50, 1715, 1726. 111.  Słowo Polskie, December 6, 1898. 112.  Słowo Polskie, January 3, 1899. 113. TsDIAL 146/4/3124, 18. 114. These numbers are drawn from the Habsburg census in Franciszek Bujak, Limanowa: Miasteczko powiatowe w zachodniej Galicyi: Stan społeczny i gospodarczy (Cracow: G. Gebethner, 1902), 40. 115.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 518. 116.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 93.

Notes to Chapter 3 1.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, 647. 2.  Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Brubaker’s work has been very influential on Habsburg historiography: Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3.  Gerald Surh, “Duty and Ambivalence: The Russian Army and Pogroms, 1903–1906,” in Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, eds., Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 234. 4. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 84; AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 3. 5.  On the spread of such local banks and their competition with Jewish sources of credit in rural Galicia, see Sławomir Tokarski, Ethnic Conflict and Economic Development in Galician Agriculture, 1868–1914 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2003), Chapter 4. 6. TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 46. This quotation is from a copy of another flyer deemed similar in content and handwriting to those authored, reproduced, distributed and posted by Pieróg. 7. In 1890, despite advances in education, more than 50 percent of the population of Jasło was functionally illiterate. 8.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 297; Pszczółka, fourth Sunday in May (May 22) 1898, 159. Other papers also quoted Gregorig’s speech in parliament (Głos Narodu, May 8, 1898). 9. TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 40; AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 358, 340–41.



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10.  For trial testimony, see Kurjer Lwowski, August 18, 1898, 2; Głos Narodu, August 17, 1898; and Dziennik Polski, August 17, 1898, 2. Miras received a one-year term in prison for his leading role in the violence. The incident in Frysztak sparked several internal investigations and were fodder for the leaders of the peasant parties, who repeatedly pressured the government in Vienna to take action against those responsible (TsDIAL 146/4/3128, 26). 11.  On the trial of those involved in the plundering of a tavern and beating of a Jewish publican in Gogołowska, see Głos Narodu, August 20, 1898, 2. Miras received two weeks in jail for his role in these events (Kurjer Lwowski, August 21, 1898, 2; and TsDIAL 146/4/3128, 28). 12.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 242; Kurjer Lwowski, August 23, 1898. On the Lutcza attacks, see also Tim Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 194–209. On the notices sent to local village heads and mayors from the Galician administration, see Kurjer Lwowski, June 19, 1898, 5. 13.  On the Ritter case, see Maria Cieśla, Jolanta Żyndul, “Sprawa Ritterów: Aktualizacja legendy mordu rytualnego w Galicji końca XIX wieka,” in Grażyna Borkowska and Magdalena Rudkowska, Kwestia żydowska w xix wieku: Spory o tożsamość Polaków (Warsaw: Cyklady, 2004), 439–51. This was only one of several ritual murder accusations investigated in the 1880s and 1890s in Galicia. On ritual murder accusations in Cracow and its surroundings, see Andrzej Żbikowski, Żydzi krakowcy i ich gmina w latach 1869–1919 (Warsaw: DiG, 1994), 292–93. The Ritters’ grandson was murdered during the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1942 (Itzhok Berglass and Shlomo Yahalomi-Diamand, eds., The Book of Strzyżów and its Vicinity (Los Angeles: “Natives of Stryzow Societies” in Israel and the Diaspora, 1990; original Yiddish edition published in 1969), 247). 14.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 358. On June 19 one Franz Rychlik, a mason from Czarna Wieś with a long criminal record, threatened Pepi Liebeskind, the proprietor of a pub in Cracow. Rychlik proclaimed that “we will soon completely plunder you and expel you” and that he, Rychlik, “would put nails in my staff and beat [you] to death, it will not be long, because already the Jews in Oświęcim are being beaten.” Rychlik was tried and sentenced to three months in prison. For examples, see AGAD, CK MS, box 309, 205–11; 518. On the trial of those involved in Ulaszowice, see Nowa Reforma, September 23, 1898. 15.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 19, 1898, 4. 16.  Głos Narodu, August 11, 1898, 2; and Głos Narodu, August 13, 1898, 2. 17.  One of the most important works on collective violence considers the centrality of rumors and rumor-mongering. See Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). For a recent effort to understand how rumors spread and why some rumors persist, see Ravi Bhavnani, Michael G. Findley, and James H. Kuklinski, “Rumor Dynamics in Ethnic Violence,” The Journal of Politics 71 (2009), 876-92. 18.  On rumors of tsarist permission for anti-Jewish attacks and the stories about violence to occur on specific days in 1881, see I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 95–96 and 115. 19.  Donald L. Horowitz labels this the “pick-up process.” Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic

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Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 266. Tim Buchen also cites Horowitz on this point. Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 204. 20.  AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 54–56; TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 1–2; Kurjer Lwowski, March 20, 1898, 1. For the trial of those involved, see Głos Narodu, July 21, 1898. 21. See Die Welt, April 22, 1989, 11. 22.  AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 106–10. On April 25 Dziennik Polski, quoting from Głos Narodu, which in turn cited a Berlin newspaper, made this incident briefly front-page news and tied it to the just-completed Passover holiday. This newspaper added salacious details about another alleged failed effort at ritual murder in Szopienice in Prussian Silesia. There, a twenty-one-year-old woman was purportedly found with cuts on her chest after fleeing from a Jewish home where she was a servant. 23. TsDIAL 146/4/3119, 3. 24.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 3, 9–22; and Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien, 176. 25.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 3, 9–22. 26. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 40–45. Stojałowski’s Pszczółka reported on the speech as did other antisemitic papers. Kurjer Lwowski and newspapers in Vienna in turn asserted that Stojałowski’s publications were propagating the idea that 10,000 Jews needed to be killed in order to ease the crisis in food production. 27.  Newspaper reports and trial records locate the origin of this rumor in Pielgrzymka, a small village a few kilometers south of Jasło (Kurjer Lwowski, June 19, 1898, 1; Dziennik Polski, June 21, 1898, 2; and Dziennik Polski, August 23, 1898). Jędrzej Szurlej, a thirty-year-old father of three, disseminated this tale in his village of Lutcza before the mass attack on Diamant’s tavern. This rumor is recounted in the indictment prepared by the prosecutor for the trial of eighty-two participants in the violent events of Lutcza. AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 242. 28.  Nowa Reforma, July 21, 1898, 3. 29.  Dziennik Polski, June 19, 1898, 1; Słowo Polski (morning edition), June 18, 1898; Słowo Polski, June 28, 1898, no. 151; Głos Narodu, June 29, 1898; Związek Chłopski, July 6, 1898; and Słowo Polskie, June 28, 1898, 2. The Galician administration attested to belief in this story in eastern Galicia: 146/4/3124, 67; TsDIAL 146/4/3125, 69–71; and TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 47. 30.  The June 14 Winiarski report is at TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 29–30. 31. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 6–10. 32.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 17, 1898, 1. 33.  Głos Narodu, August 2, 1898, 2. 34.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 597. 35. TsDIAL 146/4/3122, 22. In the Gorlice area rioters threatened to attack any Christians who helped Jews (Nowa Reforma, June 18, 1898, 1). 36.  See the witness testimony in the trial of the attackers printed in Głos Narodu, August 13, 1898. 37.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 589. 38.  The correspondent for Słowo Polskie who traveled to the Jasło area in mid-June collected some of these outlandish stories. Słowo Polskie (morning edition), June 21, 1898, 3.



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39.  Kurjer Lwowski, December 8, 1898, 4. 40.  Nowa Reforma, July 6, 1898, 2. 41.  For examples of such writing, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 42.  Słowo Polskie, June 25, 1898. 43.  Czas, June 21, 1898, 2–3. 44.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, June 10, 1898, 439. 45.  Jan Madejczyk, Wspomnienia (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1965), 53. Madejczyk’s original manuscript is held the Ossolineum library in Wrocław, manuscript 12479. Excerpts were published in the 1940s and 1950s. 46.  Quoted in Kurjer Lwowski, April 2, 1898, 1. 47.  Janusz Albin and Józef Ryszard Szaflik, eds., Listy Jana Stapińskiego z lat 1895–1928 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1977), 61–62. The 1903 program of the People’s Party supported equality for all peoples; however, it also distinguished between Jews who were willing to acculturate and those who retained specifically Jewish national and cultural traits. The latter should be assisted to leave for Palestine. In a very different context, in 1935 the People’s Party integrated into its official program a vision of the Galician countryside entirely free of Jews. Zygmunt Hemmerling, “Stronnictwa Ludowe wobec Żydów i kwestii żydowskiej,” Kwartalnik Historyczny, 96:1-2 (1989), 166. See also Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien, 165, note 205. 48.  The Galician administration and the offices of the state prosecutor wanted to make examples of rioters to deter future violence but also recognized the need to limit arrests and prosecutions to those most responsible due to limited jail space as well as the capacity of the courts to process and try offenders. The courts in Jasło requested permission to use the fire department and the military barracks to house those arrested. AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 67–82. 49.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 19, 1898, 1. 50. TsDIAL 146/4/3120, 37; Słowo Polski (morning edition), June 21, 1898; Kurjer Lwowski, June 22, 1898, 5. 51. The district captain of Krosno noted that this concern was widespread among townspeople. See TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 149; Czas, August 4, 1898, 1; Krakauer Jüdische Zeit­ ung, June 13, 1898, 13–14; and Prawda, July 5, 1898, 2. The editors of Dziennik Polski rejected the fears expressed by Vienna’s Tagblatt that even if the peasants begin with the Jews, they could turn against nobles and other Christians as they had done in 1846. Dziennik Polski, June 24, 1898, 2. 52.  Historian Franciszek Bujak also observed the similarities between 1846 and 1898 in both geographical location and the prevalence of such rumors (Bujak, Limanowa: Miasteczko powiatowe w zachodniej Galicyi: Stan społeczny i gospodarczy (Cracow: G. Gebethner, 1902), 6). For a recent discussion of the 1846 massacres, see Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), Chapter 4.

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53.  I discuss this in Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2005). 54.  In mid-June allegations circulated that village mayors allegedly paid off by Jews, refused to announce the directives permitting attacks on Jews. Kurjer Lwowski, June 19, 1898. 55.  AGAD, CK SM, box 309, file 366. 56.  AGAD, CK SM box 309, file 399. 57.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 29, 1898, and June 31, 1898. One particularly striking example took place at the end of June in Łąkta Górna and other villages that had experienced the worst attacks. On June 29, in front of the church in Łąkta Górna, after the state of emergency had been declared, thousands of soldiers deployed, and district prosecutors had begun the process of collecting evidence and arresting those caught with stolen goods, Blasius Dudric proclaimed before a gathering of peasants that it “was permitted to rob the Jews.” AGAD, CK MS, box 309, 121. 58.  To note just on such example, some of those on trial for participating in anti-Jewish violence in small towns and villages in Brzesko in late June said they had been on the way to an agricultural circle gathering when diverted to follow a cudgel-wielding mob. See Czas, August 10, 1898, 3. 59.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 518. This dynamic of self-fulfilling rumors of pending violence was recognized and feared by local authorities in Nowy Targ at the end of June (TsDIAL 146/4/3124, 3). 60.  Kurjer Lwowski, December 8, 1898, 4; and AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 452/I. 61.  Kurjer Lwowski, September 7, 1898, 2. 62.  For examples of this dynamic, see the testimony given at the trial of the anti-Jewish attacks in Będzieszyna and Czchów, small communities just south of Brzesko (Czas, August 10, 1898, 3; and Kurjer Lwowski, August 11, 1898, 7). Several women on trial made this claim. 63.  A small town in the Beskidy mountains, Żywiec was well-known for its brewery founded by a branch of the Habsburg family whose princes would declare themselves proud Ukrainian or Polish nationalists after the collapse of the monarchy. The brewery still produces one of Poland’s best beers. On these Habsburgs, see Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 64.  Wieniec, June 1, 1898, 275. 65.  Some witness statements concerning the caterwauling events in the villages around Żywiec can be found in AGAD, CK MS, box 308, pages 666, 685, and 695. 66.  Sułkowski detailed the caterwauling in Koszarawa and elsewhere. AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 737–45. 67.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 927–45 includes the indictment of those charged in these events as well as the report by Prosecutor Sułkowski. 68.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, 643–64. For a discussion of the trials, see Chapter 4. 69.  Głos Narodu, August 2–3, 1898. 70.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 14. 71.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 266. For the similar attack on a Jewish family and taproom on the same night in Szufnarowa, a village near Strzyżów, see AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 301.



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72.  See the statement of Mikołaj Chniuk, among those accused of participation in the events in Lutcza, AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 241, 1507. The indictment is AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 242. Seventeen people were charged with propagating various versions of the rumors of imperial or official authorization to beat Jews. 73.  Many newspapers followed this trial, which was held in Rzeszów on August 22 (Kurjer Lwowski, August 23–24, 1898; Nowa Reforma, August 23, 1898; Czas, August 23, 1898; Dziennik Polski, August 23, 1898; and AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 242). 74.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 242. 75.  Raphael Mahler, “The Economic Background of Jewish Emigration from Galicia to the United States,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies 7 (1952), 257. 76.  Die Welt, May 4, 1898, 6. John-Paul Himka also cites this statistic in his “UkrainianJewish Antagonism in the Galician Countryside During the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1988), 137. 77.  Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 43–45. In 1907, laborers in the Galician food industry made about 275 gulden, and workers in the machine industry were paid about 412 gulden a year. See István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 119. 78.  For example, on the night of June 25–26 in Jaśkowice, just twenty-two kilometers southwest of Cracow, Moritz Gaenger was hit on the head with a rock and bled profusely, and David Lerkowicz was also beaten. AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 26, 731–34. 79.  Nowa Reforma, August 2, 1898, 2; Głos Narodu, August 1, 1898, 3. 80.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 24, 1898, 7. 81.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 518. The convictions are listed in Kurjer Lwowski, January 3, 1899. 82.  On Kasprzycki and his followers, see AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 358; and Czas, August 10, 1898, 3. 83.  Many of those tried for these events stated they came to see what Kasprzycki was yelling about or where he and his band were going, but that they personally had not stolen anything, only observed (AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 358; Nowa Reforma, September 7, 1898, 2; Czas, September 7, 1898). 84. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 87. 85.  Słowo Polskie, January 3, 1899. 86.  The district captain of Gorlice recorded one such threat (TsDIAL 146/4/3122, 22). 87. TsDIAL 146/4/3127, 33. 88.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 597. 89.  Archiwum Państwowe, Oddział Nowy Sącz, Protocol Posiedzeń. Rada i wydz powiat w Nowym Sącz. 1898. Wrp-ns 86, July 6, 1898. 90.  Związek Chłopski denounced Stojałowski and his party for spreading false rumors and encouraging violence even as this organ of the Peasant Party Union placed all blame for the riots on the Jews and called for systematic and sustained action against them. See among many examples Związek Chłopski, July 1, 1898.

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91.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 14, 1898; Czas, June 16, 1898; Die Welt, June 17, 1898; and Drohobyczer Zeitung, July 1898. On the trial of those who took part, see Głos Narodu, September 25, 1898. Many of those involved were identified as “gypsies” who had served long sentences in prison for previous violent offenses. For an example of an incident where the burning of Jewish property led to an uncontrollable fire that damaged nearby homes and a church, see Słowo Polskie, January 3, 1899. 92. Vladimir Levin, “Preventing Pogroms: Patterns in Jewish Politics in Early ­Twentieth-Century Russia,” in Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meier, and Israel Bartal, eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 95–110. 93. TsDIAL 146/3117, 2–15. 94. TsDIAL 146/4/3124, 145; and TsDIAL 146/4/3124, 148. 95.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, July 15, 1898, 528; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, July 8, 1898, 3; and Głos Narodu, July 9, 1898, 4. Bloch was born in Dukla, less than thirty kilometers southeast of Jasło. He lived in Vienna but had been elected a parliamentary deputy three times in the 1880s and 1890s to represent Galicia. He had also cofounded the Austrian-Israelite Union. 96.  Die Welt, July 22, 1898, 13. 97.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 35. The grandson of Rabbi Halberstam pressured local authorities to investigate one Roman Pisz, a book printer and merchant, who, Halberstam insisted, drove in his carriage to surrounding villages to whip up sentiment against the Jewish population. The state prosecutor investigated the charge and deemed the accusations against Pisz to be exaggerated. 98.  Słowo Polski, June 25, 1898, 3; Słowo Polski, June 28, 1898, 2. The Pester Lloyd (June 28, 1898, 5) also published Czerwiński’s certification of the priest’s cause of death. 99.  ÖSTA, KA, MKSM, box 734, 28-4/4-11, 1898, k.u.k. 1. Corps-Commando zu Präs 1318. 100.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, July 1, 1898, 404. 101.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 320. In one such incident, Jews who fled Kołaczyce after the violence that erupted there on Corpus Christi were robbed as they sought refuge in Jasło. Jan Madejczyk in his Wspomnienia describes witnessing a similar event in the same area. 102.  See for example AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 452. 103.  The trial of eighty-two participants in the Lutcza events was the largest single trial following the riots. 104.  The antisemitic press greeted the outcome of this trial with glee. Głos Rzeszowski, July 10, 1898, 3; and Głos Narodu, July 7, 1898, 3. 105. TsDIAL 146/4/3125, 86. 106. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 40–45. 107.  In late May the gendarme commander organized citizen guards in Tłuste to protect the town from marauding rail construction workers. Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, June 10, 1898, 439. The vice mayor of Sanok organized some forty Jews into a city guard to protect the town from rioters. Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, July 1, 1898, 494.



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108. AGAD, 308, 643–64. 109.  Wiadomości Statystyczne o stosunkach krajowych 24:1. Najważniejsze wyniki spisu ludnośći i spisu zwierząt domowych według stanu z. d. 31 grudnia 1910 r. (Lwów: 1911), 4. 110. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 96; TsDIAL 146/4/3119, 3; and TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 140. 111. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 144–48. 112. TsDIAL 146/4/3122, 20–31. 113.  According to Nowa Reforma, 450 soldiers were deployed in Frysztak. “A state of martial law rules over us!” Nowa Reforma, June 22, 1898. 114. TsDIAL 146/4/3122, 20–28, 38–41. The district captain of Gorlice ordered all communities in his district to create community guards to patrol and control the area. Even as he took these efforts, he also felt that the Jews themselves acted in insulting ways toward the Christian population. Piniński ordered an increase of three gendarmes as well as military support to help control the situation in Gorlice, where paraffin and oil workers were attacking and threatening to attack Jews. 115.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 19, 1898, 1. It seems likely that Mateusz Urban, policeman of Domaradz and riot leader in Lutcza, pointed to his copy of Piniński’s circular to local authorities when he claimed he held a document authorizing anti-Jewish attacks. 116.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 8. 117.  Austrian State Archives (ÖSTA), General Administrative Archive (AVA), Ministerium des Innern (MI), Präs, 5590, 1898. 118. The political districts affected: Biała, Bochnia, Brzesko, Brzozów, Chrzanów, Dąbrowa, Gorlice, Grybów, Jarosław, Jasło, Kolbuszowa, Cracow city, Cracow district, Krosno, Łańcut, Limanowa, Mielec, Myślenice, Nisko, Nowy Sącz, Nowy Targ, Pilzno, Podgórze, Przemyśl, Ropczyce, Rzeszów, Sanok, Strzyżów, Tarnobrzeg, Tarnów, Wadowice, Wieliczka, and Żywiec. Przemyśl, Sanok, and Jarosław were in eastern Galicia. Neue Freie Presse, June 30, 1898, 1–2. ÖSTA, AVA, MI, Präs nr. 5590. See also Reichsgesetzblatt für die im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder (Vienna: 1898), 30:106, 181. These measures were based on the Emergency Law of May 5, 1869. Reichsgesetzblatt für das Kaiserthum Österreich (Vienna: 1869) 31:66, 304. 119. TsDIAL 146/6/1266, 420. 120.  APKr, DPKr, box 50, 1728 121.  Słowo Polskie, July 1, 1898, 1. 122.  The cabinet based the imposition of martial law on paragraph 430 of the 1873 Code of Criminal Procedure. ÖSTA, AVA, MI, Präs nr. 5590. Reichsgesetzblatt für die im Reichs­ rath vertretenen Königreiche und Länder (Vienna: 1873) 52:119, 397. 123.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 30, 1898; Neue Freie Presse, June 30, 1898, 2. 124. For one newspaper account of Selinger’s arrival, see Kurjer Lwowski, June 30, 1898, 1. In a conference with representatives of the major newspapers on July 1, Governor Piniński expressed his hope that Selinger’s presence would deter the population from acts of violence (Nowa Reforma, July 2, 1898, 1; Głos Narodu, July 4 1898; and Nowa Reforma, July 6 and July 17, 1898, 1). On Selinger, see Hans Veigle, Morbides Wien: Die dunklen Bezirke der Stadt und ihrer Bewohner (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2nd ed., 2014). 125.  Ignacy Daszyński, Pamiętniki I (Warsaw: Partia Razem, 1957), 151. For other ac-

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counts of the hangman’s stay in Galicia, see Głos Narodu, July 3, 1898; Nowa Reforma, July 6 and 17, 1898; and Słowo Polskie, November 23, 1898. 126.  ÖSTA, KA, MKSM, box 734, 28-4/4-21, 1898, k.u.k. 1. Corps-Commando zu Präs Nr. 1388. 127.  ÖSTA, KA, MKSM, box 734, 28-4/4-7, 1898, k.u.k. 1. Corps-Commando zu Präs 1298; ÖSTA, KA, MKSM, box 734, 28-4/4-408, 1898, k.u.k. 1. Corps-Commando zu Präs 1312; ÖSTA, KA, MKSM, box 734, 28-4/4-15, 1898, k.u.k. 1. Corps-Commando zu Präs 1336. 128. TsDIAL 146/4/3127, 21. This looks to have been the only case where soldiers brought in to quell the violence themselves attacked Jews. However, Galician peasant politicians wanted a formal investigation of several alleged cases of abuse by the military and gendarmes against the civilian Christian population. AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 481. 129.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, 969–76. In this case the accused was eventually cleared of the charge of lèse-majesté. See AGAD, CK MS, box 308, 804 for another example of continued threats and violence after the declaration of the state of emergency. 130.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, 923–33. There were several other anti-Jewish attacks in this small village at the end of July. 131.  For examples around Limanowa, see TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 24. 132. TsDIAL 146/4/3125, 55. 133. TsDIAL 146/4/3127: 35. 134. TsDIAL 146/4/3127, 41. 135. Daszyński, Pamiętniki I, 152. 136. See Kurjer Lwowski, July 3, 1898, 3. 137.  Pamiętnik Hermanda Diamanda zebrany z wyątków listów do żony (Cracow: Tow. Uniw. Robotniczych. Oddz. im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1932), 36. With some justification social democrats and the People’s Party complained that the Galician authorities used the state of emergency to act against organizations with little or no connection to the violence. Socialists had been involved in the rioting and aftermath in Przemyśl, however, and there were rumors as well as handwritten notices about pending socialist-inspired anti-Jewish attacks in Limanowa as well as Łącko. AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 470. Binder, “Das Polnische Pressewesen,” 2064–65. 138.  In eastern Galicia, some people disseminated rumors that Rudolf was in the Masurian Lakeland region in the Russian partition and had issued permission for the beating of Jews. Słowo Polskie, June 28, 1898, 2. On June 29 in Czarna, three Ruthenians came into Jankiel Lois’s tavern. They had read about anti-Jewish attacks in Slovo Ruskie and proclaimed that His Imperial Majesty was permitting the beating of Jews for fourteen days. TsDIAL 146/4/3124, 67. The trial of these men took place in Sanok (TsDIAL 146/4/3124, 64). The few incidents that occurred in Lemberg itself concerned people at pubs citing the violence and imperial permission as excuses for not paying for alcoholic beverages. See TsDIAL 146/4/3127, 18. On July 5, the district captain of Borszczów, a town not far from Tarnopol, warned his superiors about the possibility of a confrontation between railroad workers and Jewish merchants. He recommended increasing gendarme and military patrols in squares, markets, and train stations on all religious holidays and other celebrations (TsDIAL 146/4/3124, 134).



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139. TsDIAL 146/4/3125, 77–86; TsDIAL 146/4/3126, 26–32; and TsDIAL 146/4/3127, 61. Kurjer Lwowski (July 21, 1898) agreed that the Bursztyń incident was unconnected with the earlier anti-Jewish rioting. 140.  Kai Struve compares Ukrainian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish relations in Galicia in Bauern und Nation in Galizien: Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 384–434. On the Russophile movement in Galicia, which viewed Ruthenians as part of a greater Slavic community and as a branch of the Russian people and the Ukrainophile or national populist movement, see John-Paul Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 (Montreal; Kingston, ON; London; and Ithaca, NY: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1999); Paul Robert Magocsi, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine’s Piedmont (Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2002); John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, London: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); and Anna Veronika Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien. Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich und Russland, 1848–1915 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001). 141. Sławomir Tokarski argues that economic pressures and competition led to the riots. He sees the 1898 violence as arising from “the pattern of disorders in market places, typical of agrarian sectors entering the phase of commercialization” (Tokarski, Ethnic Conflict and Economic Development in Galician Agriculture, 1868–1914 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2003), 52). 142.  Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846– 1914 (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2013), 257. Himka (“Ukrainian-Jewish Antagonism,” 148–49) suggests that the more advanced political organization among Ruthenian peasants led to the channeling of anti-Jewish sentiments through institutional structures instead of spontaneous anti-Jewish violence. Struve (Bauern und Nation, 422–23) dismisses this contention, noting that the regions hit with anti-Jewish attacks in 1898 corresponded with the central regions of the Polish peasant political movements.

Notes to Chapter 4 1.  Daniel M. Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News, Vienna 1895–1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). Other recent scholarship on Jews and trials in the Habsburg lands, specifically in Galicia, offers similar findings. See Keely Stauter Halsted, “A Generation of Monsters”: Jews, Prostitution, and Racial Purity in the 1892 L’viv White Slavery Trial, Austrian History Yearbook 28 (January 2007), 25–35. The trial and public discourse around the events all but ignored the structural poverty, family encouragement, government and military organization of prostitution, and the women themselves while focusing on “devil’s chain” of Jews involved in the sex trade. See also Nathaniel D. Wood, “Sex Scandals, Sexual Violence, and the World on the Street: The Kolasówna Lustmord in Cracow’s Popular Press, 1905–06, Journal of the History of Sexuality 20:2 (May 2011), 243–69.

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2.  Hillel Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2000), 197. 3.  Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Violence in Modern German History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 4.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 11, 84–91. 5.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 93. For the full listing of those tried, see box 307, file 106. 6. Werner Ogris, “Die Rechstentwicklung in Cisleithanien, 1848–1918,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918 II, Verwaltung und Rechtswesen, (Vienna: Verlag des Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975), 554 and 561. 7.  The Galician administration announced in mid-August that jury trials would be suspended in Jasło, Nowy Sącz, and Tarnów until June 30, 1899. Czas greeted this news as a way of bringing a swifter end to the state of emergency. This measure would facilitate the completion of the trials and avoid the bias and narrow personal interest that often poisoned jury decisions (Czas, August 23, 1898). 8.  Czas, August 23, 1898. 9.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift: Centralorgan für die gesamten Interessen des Judenthums, July 8, 1898, 510. 10.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 86. Czas, July 1, 1898. 11.  Nowa Reforma, July 12, 18981, 1. 12.  For an example of arrests made after stolen goods were found, see Nowa Reforma, July 3, 1898, 3. 13.  For one such example, see Głos Narodu, August 19, 1898, 2. 14. TsDIAL 146/4/3117, 136. 15.  Słowo Polskie, June 15, 1898, 2. 16.  Prawda, June 25, 1898, 7. 17.  Związek Chłopski, July 1, 1898, 146. The same events were described in Czas, June 16, 1898, 1. 18.  Związek Chłopski, September 11, 1898, 202. 19.  Prawda, July 5, 1898, 1, complained about this suspension of civil rights. 20. See Głos Narodu, July 2, 1898, 1. 21.  Związek Chłopski, September 11, 1898, 222–23. 22.  Kurjer Lwowski, July 10, 1898, 7; and AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 481. 23.  Nowa Reforma, July 10, 1898, 1; and Dziennik Polski, July 3, 1898 1. 24.  Nowa Reforma, July 21, 1898, 3; and Wieniec, July 31, 354. 25.  Nowa Reforma, July 7, 1898, 3; Głos Narodu July 6, 1898, 3, and July 7, 1898, 3. 26.  Głos Narodu, July 8, 1898, 3. See also Głos Rzeszowski, July 10, 1898, 3; and Neue Freie Presse (evening edition), July 6, 1898, 2. 27. Allgemeines Reichs-Gesetz-und Regierungsblatt für das Kaiserthum Österreich (Vienna: 1852) 36, item 117. 28.  Neue Freie Presse (evening edition), July 6, 1898, 2. 29.  Drohobyczer Zeitung, July 15, 1898, 2. 30.  Dr. Bloch’s öterreichische Wochenschrift, July 8, 1898, 513.



Notes to Chapter 4

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31.  Die Welt, September 19, 1898, 13. 32.  Dziennik Polski, July 9, 1898. 33.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, July 15, 1898, 531; and Drohobyczer Zeitung, July 15, 1898, 2. The Hagel case was also closely followed in Die Welt, the most important German-language Zionist newspaper (Die Welt, September 19, 1898, 13). 34.  AGAD, CK MS, box 10, 55–57. 35.  Głos Narodu, July 21, 1898; Głos Narodu, July 22, 1898; and Czas, July 22, 1898. 36.  Głos Narodu, July 21, 1898; Głos Narodu, July 22, 1898; Czas, July 22–23, 1898; and AGAD, CK MS, box 310, 92. 37.  Czas, July 19, 1898. 38.  Głos Narodu, July 18, 1898, 1. 39.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, folder 119. 40.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, folder 132. 41.  Nowa Reforma, September 6, 1898, 2. 42. In this case sixty-seven of the eighty people on trial were convicted. Sentences ranged from a few weeks to eleven months (Dziennik Polski, October 8, 1898, 2; Głos Narodu, October 9, 1898; and Nowa Reforma, October 8, 1898, 3). 43.  These materials and other documents from the Vienna ministries dealing with Galicia were transferred from Vienna to Warsaw in the interwar period, back to Vienna by the German occupiers in 1940, and back to Warsaw again after World War II. 44.  The indictment for this case can be found in AGAD, CK MS, box 308, folder 298. 45.  This trial also generated a number of front page commentaries. See Kurjer Lwowski, August 3, 1898, 1; and Kurjer Lwowski, August 7, 1898, 1. 46.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 242. 47.  Słowo Polskie, December 31, 1898, 2. 48.  The case against those involved in the riot in Bursztyń in eastern Galicia included three Jewish defendants. The indictment for this trial can be found at TsDIAL 146/4/3127, 61. 49.  The verdicts are summarized in AGAD, CK MS, box 309, files 447–53. The indictments can be found in AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 452 I-IV. The number of accused listed on the indictments does not match the number quoted in the newspapers. Since the indictments were drawn up in advance of the trials themselves, the count of those on trial given here—249—is based on newspaper coverage rather than the pretrial indictments. 50. The indictment for this trial is found in AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 358. Kasprzycki was one of the most active riot leaders. He headed several different groups that attacked isolated Jewish homes and businesses from June 24 to 29. For another case in which Kasprzycki played a central role in anti-Jewish attacks, see Czas, August 10, 1898, 3. The beautiful hilly and forested rural areas between Nowy Sącz and Brzesko to the west of the Dunajec River witnessed many of the most brutal assaults. A similar series of village raids on Jews and Jewish property on June 23–25 a few kilometers south of Kasprzycki’s attacks in Żbikowice, Ujanowice, and Łososina Dolna was led by one Stanisław Pajor (AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 688; and Kurjer Lwowski, December 25, 1898, 3). Pajor received a fifteen-month sentence.

220

Notes to Chapter 4

51.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 516. Many of those convicted in the 1898 trials appealed, and some of those cases were only decided much later in 1899. 52.  The communication from the state prosecutors to all state prosecutors can be found in TsDIAL 146/4/3119, 16; and AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 11, 86. 53.  Dziennik Polski, July 12, 1898. 54.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 19, 1898, 2. 55.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 266. In this case, as in most, such dramatic statements were quoted in the press coverage of the trial. 56.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 516. 57.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, file 242. Specifically, the peculiar tale about the emperor’s barber was widely disseminated in Lutcza and surrounding villages in mid-June. 58.  Głos Narodu, August 26, 1898, 4; quotes are from Dziennik Polski. 59.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 27, 257. 60.  Dziennik Polski, October 5, 1898, 2. 61.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 18, 1898, 2. 62.  Czas, August 3, 1898, 3. 63.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 17, 1898, 2. 64.  Głos Narodu, August 11, 1898, 2; and September 9, 1898, 2. 65.  Słowo Polskie, January 3, 1899, 4. 66.  Głos Narodu provided this same number: eighteen of twenty-nine witnesses at trial were Jews (Głos Narodu, September 6, 1898, 4). 67.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 18, 1898, 3. 68.  Czas, August 18, 1898, 4. 69.  Kurjer Lwowski, September 7, 1898, 2; and Nowa Reforma, September 7, 1898, 2. 70.  Trial testimony from this case was printed in several newspapers, including Nowa Reforma, July 16, 1898, 2–3. The two assailants were found guilty of public violence, theft, and causing bodily harm. Stachurski received a six-month sentence; Chydyby five. Both these men had long records of previous arrests for theft and drunkenness (Czas, July 16, 1898, 4). 71.  AGAD, CK MS, box 309, file 452; and Słowo Polskie, December 6, 1898, 3. 72.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 18, 1898, 2–4. 73.  Dziennik Polski, August 3, 1898 2. 74.  Głos Narodu, August 3, 1898, 3. 75.  Głos Narodu, August 2, 1898, 2–3; and Dziennik Polski, August 3, 1898, 2. 76.  His testimony is quoted in Głos Narodu, August 17, 1898, 2. 77.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 18, 1898, 2. 78.  Głos Narodu, July 23, 1898; and Dziennik Polski, July 17, 1898, 2. 79.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 19, 1898, 2. 80.  Nowa Reforma, August 20, 1898. 81.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 19, 1898, 2. This is a summary of Dwernicki’s extraordinary argument for the defense. He may have been drawing on theoretical discussions of crowds put forth by Cesare Lombroso in the 1880s and Gustav le Bron in the 1890s. See, among others, Mark S. Micale, “Discourses of Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle France” in Micale, ed., The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America,



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221

1880–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 80; and Jaap von Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The energetic and creative Dwernicki served as defense counsel in several other trials in 1898. He was a member of the executive committee of the People’s Party. As he traveled by wagon to observe the June 23 election in Dobromil, adherents of Stojałowski’s party beat and injured him (Kurjer Lwowski, June 25, 1898, 1). 82.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, files 93 and 106. 83.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 67–82. 84.  Słowo Polskie, January 3, 1899. 85.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 9–11. 86.  On the colorful rumors of imperial permission, see Daniel Unowsky, “Peasant Political Mobilization and the 1898 anti-Jewish Riots in Western Galicia,” European History Quarterly, 40:3 (2010), 412–35. 87.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 19, 1898, 4, and August 20, 1898, 5. 88.  Słowo Polskie, January 3, 1899, 3. 89.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 130, 838. 90.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 114. This and other parliamentary interpellations received a great deal of press coverage. See, among many others, Przyjaciel Ludu, February 1, 1899. 91.  Kurjer Lwowski, September 2, 1898, 6. 92.  For one example, see Nowa Reforma, July 21, 1898, 3. 93.  ÖSTA, AVA, MI, Präs. 6345, 1898. Report from Governor Piniński to Minister of the Interior and Minister President Franz Thun-Hohenstein, July 21, 1898. Thun then brought this report to Emperor Franz Joseph. 94.  Nowa Reforma, July 16, 1898, 2. 95.  Głos Narodu, July 30, 1898, 4. 96.  Pryjaciel Ludu, July 20, 1898, 1. 97.  Neue Freie Presse, November 25, 1898, 2; and Głos Narodu, November 30, 1898, 1. 98.  Dziennik Polski, July 9, 1898, 2. 99.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 126.

Notes to Chapter 5 1.  Stanisław Tarnowski, Skutki rozstroju, rozruchy (Cracow: published privately, 1898). 2.  Czas, July 7, 1898, July 22, 1898, and August 10, 1898; Przegląd Polski, June 30, 1898; and Stanisław Tarnowski, Skutki rozstroju, rozruchy (Cracow: published privately, 1898). 3.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 16, 1898, 1; Nowa Reforma, August 16, 1898, 1. 4.  Kurjer Lwowski, July 17, 1898, 1. 5.  Nowa Reforma, August 24, 1898. 6.  Antoni Fibich, Rozruchy antiżydowskie (Lwów: Nakładem autora, 1898), 13–14. 7. Fibich, Rozruchy, 16. 8. Fibich, Rozruchy, 16. 9. Fibich, Rozruchy, 19. 10.  Kurjer Lwowski, June 23, 1898, 1.

222

Notes to Chapter 5

11.  Przyjaciel Ludu, July 1, 1898, and October 10, 1898, 434. 12.  Kurjer Lwowski, August 9, 1898. 13.  Wieniec Polski, July 1, 1898. 14.  Pszczółka, June 19, 1898. 15.  Związek Chłopski, July 21, 1898. 16.  Związek Chłopski, July 1, 1898, 146. 17.  Związek Chłopski, September 1, 1898. 18.  For a few examples, see Dziennik Polski, June 24, 1898, and June 29, 1898, 2; and Głos Narodu, June 29, 1898, 3. 19.  The paper offered the same courtesy to Stanisław Stojałowski, whose editorials focused mostly on attacking Daszyński and his rival peasant party politicians. 20.  Daszyński’s remarks were printed in Słowo Polskie, July 13, 1898 and July 14, 1898. 21.  Ignacy Daszyński, Stan wyjątkowy w Galicyi przed sądem parlamentu: mowa Ignacego Daszyńskiego wygłoszona w parlamencie dn. 22 listopada 1898 r. (Cracow: “Naprzód,” 1898). 22.  The socialists used this same argument to explain the 1897 violence in Schodnica. See Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 128–33. 23.  Kerstin S. Jobst, “Die Antisemitischen Bauernunruhen in westlichen Galizien 1898: Stojałowski und die polnischen Sozialdemokraten” in Robert Maier and George Stöber, eds., Zwischen Abgrenzung und Assimilation: Deutsche, Polen und Juden: Schauplätze ihres Zusammenlebens von der Zeit der Aufklärung bis zum Beginn des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Hannover: Georg-Eckert-Institut, 1997), 139–49. 24.  The speeches by Daszyński and Thun discussed here can be found in the Stenographisches Protokoll. Haus der Abgeordneten 15:21, November 22, 1898, 1362–79. 25. The speeches given in parliament on November 24 by Jan Potoczek, Stapiński, Winkowski, Byk, and Stojałowski referenced and quoted here can be found in the Stenographisches Protokoll. Haus der Abgeordneten 15:22, November 24, 1898, 1426–87. 26.  Przyjaciel Ludu, December 1, 1898. Stapiński also minimizes the seriousness of the riots and blames the situation on the overreaction of the government and gendarmes. See also Nowa Reforma, November 26, 1898. 27.  Joshua Shanes discusses Byk in Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 28.  Der Israelit, the liberal Lemberg German-language Jewish newspaper, agreed, proposing that Stojałowski had imported hatred of Jews from Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party (Der Israelit, December 15, 1898). 29.  Nowa Reforma, July 10, 1898. 30.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift: Centralorgan für die gesamten Interessen des Judenthums, June 10, 1898, 428, June 24, 1898, 486, and July 15, 1898, 528. 31.  Dr. Blochs österreichsche Wochenschrift, June 3, 1898, 424. 32.  Dr. Blochs österreichsche Wochenschrift, July 29, 1898, 558. 33.  Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, July 12, 1898, 6–7. 34.  Dr. Siegfried Fleischer, “Arbeiten der Oesterreichisch-Israelitisches Union und des Galizischen Hilfsvereins: Enquête über die wirtschaftliche Lage der jüdischen Bevölkerung



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Galiziens,” in Alfred Nossig, ed., Jüdische Statistik (Berlin, 1903), 209–32. The survey was lampooned in the Galician press, for example in Kurjer Lwowski, October 4, 1898, 2, and Głos Narodu, October 4, 1898. 35.  Der Israelit, July 15, 1898. It is not clear which of Mickiewicz’s works the author referred to. Pan Tadeusz included Jankiel, a Jewish tavern keeper, but no other major Jewish characters. 36.  Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, August 12, 1898, 377. The newspaper was referring to Karl Emil Franzos, Aus Halb-Asien: Culturbilder aus Galizien, volume 1 of his HalbAsien: Land und Leute des östlichen Europa (Stuttgart: A. Bonz, 1889. 37.  Die Welt, July 27, 1898, 11. 38.  Die Welt, July 29, 1898, 11. 39.  Głos Narodu, July 30, 1898, 3. 40.  The report on the district captain’s investigation can be found in TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 83. The article including the statement from Kubik and Szponder was published in Głos Narodu, June 9, 1898, 2; and Wieniec, July 1, 1898, 311. 41.  For the discussion of the local investigation of the complaints raised by the priest and for the full Głos Narodu article before it was partially censored, see TsDIAL, 146/4/3118, 83. The final published version of the newspaper article including excerpts from the report by Christian People’s Party representatives Kubik and Szponder can be found in Głos Narodu, June 9, 1898, 2–3. 42.  Harald Binder, “Das Polnische Pressewesen,” in Helmut Rumpler and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vol. 8, Politische Öffentlichkeit und Zivilgesellschaft, part 2, Die Presse als Faktor der politischen Mobilizierung (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), 2064–65. 43.  Wieniec, July 1, 1898, 311–14. 44. TsDIAL 146/4/3127, 117–19. A formal parliamentary interpellation consisted of a set of facts or recitation of events followed by one or more questions directed toward one or more government ministers. At least fourteen deputies had to sign on as cosponsors to require the interpellation to be read into the record and to force a governmental response. Interpellations offered representatives from Galicia who could not speak German the opportunity to demonstrate that they were in fact working on behalf of their constituents. See Tim Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 247–54. 45.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 138. The investigation continued into 1900. See also TsDIAL, 146/4/3128, 26. 46.  For Winiarski’s report from June 20, see TSDIAL 3120, 1–9. It was excerpted in Dziennik Polski on June 24. This was not the only time a district captain justified in the press his actions during a violent incident. District Captain Waydowicz of Jasło wrote to Neue Freie Presse of Vienna to counter Jakób Frant’s account of the burning of his distiller on June 13. Neue Freie Presse (morning edition), June 30, 1898, 3. 47.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 138. 48. TsDIAL 146/4/3118, 150. 49.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, file 220, 37.

224

Notes to Chapter 5 and Conclusion

50.  ÖSTA, AVA, MI, Präs. 6345, 1898. 51.  ÖSTA, AVA, MI, Präs. 6345, 1898. 52.  ÖSTA, AVA, MI, Präs. 6345, 1898. 53.  Der Israelit, September 30, 1898. 54.  Związek Chłopski, October 1, 1898, 222. 55.  AGAD, CK MS, box 308, 643–63. 56.  Głos Narodu, July, 30 1898. 57. Bujak, Limanowa, 118–19. 58.  Nowa Reforma, July 27, 1898, 1. 59.  Wieniec, July 31, 1898, 348. 60.  Franciszek Bujak, Zmiąca: Wieś powiatu Limanowskiego: Stosunki gospardarcze i społeczne (Cracow: G. Gebethner, 1903), 105. 61.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift, August 7, 1898. 62.  Dr. Blochs österreichsche Wochenschrift, July 7, 1898. 63.  Itzhok Berglass and Schlomo Yaholomi-Diamond, Strzyżów (Rzeszów) Memorial Book. New York Public Library–National Yiddish Book Center Yizkhor Project. 64.  Prawda, July 25, 1898, 1. 65.  Raphael Mahler, “The Economic Background of Jewish Emigration from Galicia to the United States,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies 7 (1952), 267. 66.  The Jewish population of western Galicia was listed as 213,269 in 1910, so these numbers suggest that more than 20,000 Jews left rural life for larger towns and cities. See Wiadomości Statystyczne o Stosunkach Krajowych 24:1, Najważniejsze wyniki spisu ludnośći i spisu zwierząt domowych według stanu z dnia 31 grudnia 1910 r. (Lwów: I. Związkowa Drukarnia, 1911), 27. 67.  The analysts of the official government statistics considered this movement to be a result of the increase in Christian rural cooperatives and the changes in the alcohol monopoly (Wiadomości Statystyczne o Stosunkach Krajowych 24:2, Ludność miejska Galicyi i jej skład wyznaniowy (1881–1910) (Lwów: I. Związkowa Drukarnia, 1912), 14–15). Abraham Korkis believed emigration accounted for the relative slowing of the increase in the Jewish population of Galicia as compared to the rise in the Christian population in the 1890s. He wrote that much of the impetus for this wave of emigration stemmed from the lack of industrial development and the “effective exclusion of Jews from holding public office in the administration or in local government, and the increasing competition from Polish and Ruthenian petty commerce.” Abraham Korkis, “Zur Bewegung der jüdischen Bevolkerung in Galizien” in Alfred Nossig, ed., Jüdisches Statistik (Berlin: Verein für Jüdische Statistik, 1903), 311–14.

Notes to Conclusion 1.  AGAD, CK MS, box 307, 257. 2.  Głos Narodu, July 18, 1898, 1. 3.  Związek Chłopski, July 17, 1898. 4.  On the very different uses of Polish history by the two men, see Patrice M. Dabrowski, “Uses and Abuses of the Polish Past by Józef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski,” The



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Polish Review 56:1/2, 73–109. Also, Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Grzegorz Krzywiec, Szowinizm po polsku: Przypadek Romana Dmowskiego (1886–1905) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton: Instytut Historii PAN, 2009). 5.  Der Israelit, December 31, 1898. 6.  Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2005), Chapters 2 and 3; and Unowsky, “‘Our Gratitude Has No Limit’: Polish Nationalism, Dynastic Patriotism, and the 1880 Imperial Inspection Tour of Galicia,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (January 2003), 145–71. 7. On Jewish loyalty to and identification with the Habsburg state, see Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 8.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichsche Wochenschrift, July 8, 1898, 1. 9.  Dr. Bloch’s österreichsche Wochenschrift, July 29, 1898, 558. 10.  Głos Narodu, May 8, 1898, 1–2. 11.  Dziennik Polski, August 19, 1898. 12. Brian Porter, “Antisemitism and the Search for a Catholic Identity” in Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 112. 13.  See most recently, the new interpretation of late Habsburg history, Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press at the Harvard University Press, 2016). Among many other examples, see Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Gary Cohen, “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” Central European History 40:2 (June 2007, 241–78; Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 14.  Monty Noam Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 24:3 (October 2004), 187–225. 15. TsDIAL, 146/4/3128, 37. Tim Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 328–36.

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures; those followed by n refer to notes, with note number. “About the Jews” (Jeż), 26 agricultural circles: antisemitic priests in, 86; as means of reducing Jewish influence, 31, 37, 151, 153, 173, 174; peasant parties and, 38; post-riot increase in government support for, 171, 182; proliferation of, 31, 111; and spread of information on coming attacks, 89, 212n58 alcohol trade (propinacja): Catholic temperance campaigns and, 15, 150–51; Jewish prominence in, 14; Post-riot efforts to reduce Jewish prominence in, 182; state takeover of (1910), 14, 194n18. See also taverns and taprooms, Jewish-run Alexander II (tsar of Russia), assassination of, 3 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (periodical), 163–64, 166 Andrychów, requests for government security measures, 100 anti-Jewish violence after riots of 1898, 173; government’s effective suppression of,

184–85. See also participants in antiJewish violence anti-Jewish violence in Galicia (1898), 1; areas especially affected by, 71, 72; arsons, and potential for wider damage, 98, 214n91; arsons, as potentially accidental, 93; attacks on Jewish businesses, 43, 46, 47, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59–60, 62–63, 64, 65–67, 69–70, 71, 72, 77, 90, 92–93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 124, 136, 207–8n106, 207n94; attacks on Jewish homes, 48, 49, 56–57, 58, 59, 62–63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 87, 91–92, 93, 95, 96, 124, 136–37, 173; attacks on Jewish schools, 57; attacks on synagogues, 45, 47, 57, 96, 124, 141; as attacks rather than pogrom, 7–8; differences from earlier incidents, 44; in eastern Greek Catholic areas, 110–12, 135, 216n138; and fears of repeat of 1846 peasant uprising, 88, 211n51; focus on destruction of Jewish wealth, 94; four waves of, 71–72; Jews injured in, 2, 8, 45, 46, 56, 58, 59, 64, 65, 90, 91, 94, 95–96, 101, 110, 137, 138, 143; Jews’

228 Index

losses, value of, 70, 94–95, 136; lack of central leadership in, 177–78; lack of underlying political program in, 178; as largest attacks in Habsburg constitutional era, 7, 44; limited number of injuries in, 94; motives of perpetrators, 112, 178–79; occurrence on days of public gathering in towns, 73; occurrence over many weeks in hundreds of communities, 44; origins in town squares and taverns, 73; overshadowing by later, deadlier events, 6–7; as part of European-wide trend, 2, 3, 7; public calls for, xiv, 1; religious objects, destruction and desecration of, 76, 90, 96; in Ryczów, 48–49; scholarship on, 190n7; spread of, 73, 93, 103, 104, 178; as “The Plunder,” 2; time period of, 2; in Tłuste, 57; towns experiencing, 1–2; as type of exclusionary violence, 3; variety of participants in, 2; at Wieliczka, 44–49. See also causes of riots, debate on; Christian-Jewish encounters in riots; investigations of anti-Jewish violence; Jewish responses to attacks; leaders of anti-Jewish violence; participants in anti-Jewish violence; trials of anti-Jewish rioters; other specific topics, towns and individuals antisemitic literature: and incitement of violence against Jews, 47; increase in, in late nineteenth century, 49–50; lack of government response to, 181–82. See also Jewish Secrets (Jeż) antisemitic violence, history of, in Habsburg Empire, 43–44, 202n7 antisemitism: asemitism as “Christian” alternative to, 22, 23, 27, 28, 46, 97–98, 177, 183; of court system, 122, 176; premodern vs. modern forms of, 8–9, 183–84; as term, 8–9 antisemitism in Europe: importation into Galicia, 22–23, 41; as political tool, 3;

scholarship on, 3; as type of exclusionary violence, 3 antisemitism in Galicia: arrival of modern press and mass politics and, 184; dramatic changes in society as context for, 42; growth of in late nineteenth century, 41; history of, 41, 197n59; importation of more-virulent European strains of, 22–23, 41; as mainstream Polish Roman Catholic view, 111–12, 183; peasant political parties and, 5, 28, 31, 34, 36–38, 39, 40–41, 42, 47, 74, 81–82, 86, 111–12, 177, 178, 179; and removal of Jews from Catholic lands, as goal, 1, 11, 180, 185. See also Christian People’s Party; Stojałowski, Stanisław Antisemitismus in Galizien (Buchen), 190n7 asemitism movement, 22–28; and boycotting of Jewish businesses, 23, 23, 27, 176; calls for fining of Christians purchasing from Jews, 50–51; as “Christian” alternative to antisemitism, 22, 23, 27, 28, 46, 97–98, 177, 183; Christian People’s Party support of, 38; coining of term, 27; Greek Catholics and, 111; Peasant Party Union and, 35, 159; Stojałowski and, 37 Austrian-Israelite Union, 51, 98, 164–65, 175 Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867: and Jewish right to own land, 19; and Polish autonomy in Galicia, 19, 29–30, 181; Polish Club support of, 29; recognition of Jews as citizens, 22 Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image (Österreichische Monarchie im Wort und Bild), 18, 19 Baal Shem Tov, 57 Bachner, Bernard, 108–9 Bacz, Simon, 66–67 Badeni, Kazimierz, 30, 168 Balik, Michał, 56, 167



baraby, as term, 43, 110, 202n9 Baranowski, Franciszek, 140–41 Barcice, anti-Jewish violence in, 97 Barcik, Anna, 139 Bar Kochba club, 166 Baum, Wolf, 126 Będzieszyna, anti-Jewish violence in, 96 Berglass, Itzhok, 174 Biecz, anti-Jewish violence in, 60 Biegonice, anti-Jewish violence in, 66 Bittner, Schmuel and Chaja, 53 Blaulauf, Jakób, 95 Bloch, Joseph, 85, 99, 163, 175–76, 182, 214n95 blood libel. See ritual murder Bobilewicz, Adam, 125, 140 Bojko, Jakub, 151 Borysław Wars of 1884, 202n7 boycotts of Jewish businesses: asemitism movement and, 23, 23, 27; calls for fining of Christians purchasing from Jews, 50–51; effectiveness of, 173, 175, 176; and Jews’ post-riot departure from villages, 173; Peasant Party Union calls for, 35. See also asemitism movement Brafman, Jacob, 25, 86 Brody, anti-Jewish violence in, 56 Brzeczek, Jan, 143 Brzesko, 10; economic subculture of, 17 Brzesko, anti-Jewish violence in, 63, 64, 70, 71, 96; government failure to prevent, 104; leaders of, 75; participants in, 89, 133; trial of participants, 127, 128, 136, 143 Brzostek, efforts to prevent attacks in, 99–101 Buba, Jan, 97 Buchen, Tim, 190n7 Bujak, Franciszek: career of, 11, 192n2; on Galician incidents as attacks, not pogroms, 7–8; on Jewish emigration from Galicia, 173; negative view of Jews, 11; on religious affiliation of Jews in

Index 229

Limanowa, 20; on similarities of riots of 1898 and peasant uprising of 1846, 211n52; on weak national identities in Galicia, 12–13; works by, 192n2 Burczak, Peter, 80–81 Bursztyń, 10; anti-Jewish violence in, 102, 110–11, 135 Byk, Emil, 99, 156, 160–61, 162, 163, 175 Carl Ludwig Railway, 17 Caterwauling attacks, 90-92 Catholic Church. See Greek Catholics; Roman Catholic Church Catholic Congress (Cracow, 1893), 23 Catholic-National Party, 153 causes of riots, debate on, 147, 148–54; blaming of Jews for, 46, 57, 58–59, 101– 2, 103, 105, 110, 116–17, 119–20, 122–26, 131–32, 140, 145–46, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155–56, 159, 160, 162, 167–68, 171, 176, 179, 182, 207n104, 215n114; blaming of outside elements for, 44, 49, 54, 82, 84; Chamber of Deputies debate on, 154–62, 175; conservative views on, 148–49; in Jewish community, 163–65, 175–76; liberal democrats’ views on, 149–50; peasant political parties’ views on, 150–53; Polish nationalists’ views on, 153; socialists on, 152 Central Association of Industrialists of Austria, 99 central Europe, anti-Jewish violence at end of World War I, 6 Chamber of Deputies, 155 Chamber of Deputies debate on causes of riots, 154–62, 175; conflict during, 162; defenses of government in, 158, 161, 166; heckling of Jewish representative during, 162; Jewish representative on, 160–61; peasant parties’ views on, 159–60, 162; portrayal of peasants as Jewish victims in, 155–56; socialist views on, 156–58

230 Index

Chmieł, Jan, 38, 58 Chodorowie, 10; antisemitic violence in (1897), 43–44, 54 Christ, murder of, as charge against Jews, 1, 20, 25, 58, 183 Christian-Jewish encounters in riots, 90–98; attackers as often known to victims, 44, 90, 133; attacks on Christians helping Jews, 96; caterwauling attacks, 90–92; Christian defenders of Jews, 91, 95–96, 96–97, 182; sieges of Jewish homes, 91–92; terrifying nature of, 95 Christian-Jewish relations: Adam Mickiewicz 100th birthday celebration and, 55–56; and antisemitic attitudes, 21; and compensation fund for Jewish losses, 99, 163; cultural differences and, 18, 19–20; damage of riots to, 148, 172–75, 179; damage of riot trials to, 145–46, 182–83; economic competition and, 13–14, 17, 111, 217n141; economic stresses and, 17–19, 42, 47–48, 52, 57, 111, 177, 217n141; Franz Joseph’s support for Jews and, 22; importation of European antisemitic views and, 22–23; Jewish debate on status and outlook of, 164–66, 175–76; largely cordial daily interactions, 20–22; nationalist movements and, 12–13; in rural western Galicia, 12–22 (See also asemitism movement) Christian People’s Party (Stronnictwo Chrześcijańsko-Ludowe): alliance with National Democracy, 180; alliance with Social Democratic Party, 33–34, 157; antisemitic incitement by, 31, 34, 37, 38, 40–41, 45, 51, 52, 58, 71, 75, 81–82, 86, 87, 112, 151, 171, 180; and blame for riots, 148, 161, 164; on causes of riots, 151–53; criticism of gendarmes’ excessive force, 167, 168, 169, 170; and election of 1897, 33–34, 154; and election of 1898, 38–41, 42, 180; on Jewish

influence on government, 151; as peasant party, 31; Peasant Party Union and, 35; political conflict of 1890s and, 31–34 Christian Social Party, 86; and blame for riots, 163–64; on cause of riots, 152; criticism of gendarmes’ excessive force, 168; incitement of anti-Jewish violence by, 75, 81, 86 Christian Social workers’ associations, 23 Chudyba, Jan, 136–37 citizen guards: in anti-riot efforts, 59, 89–90, 95, 98; communities creating, 102, 214n107, 215n114; governor’s order to increase, 104; inclusion of Jews in, 102, 214n107 commerce, Jewish specialization in: Catholic views on, 11; Christians’ post-riot focus on creating Christian competition for, 150–51, 171–72, 173, 176, 179, 182; criticisms of, 150; and Jewish visibility in public markets, 14; prominence in tavern trade, 14, 15, 16; prominence in tobacco trade, 14; and stores in larger towns, Jewish predominance in, 14. See also credit; taverns and taprooms, Jewish-run conservatives: and blame for riots, 149, 150, 151, 157–58, 161, 163, 164; loss of political dominance, 28–31; and Polish Club, 29–30; and state of emergency, support for, 148; views on causes of riots, 148–49 court system in Galicia: antisemitism of, 122, 176; charges of pro-Jewish bias in, 159–60; laws governing, 117–18. See also trials of anti-Jewish rioters Cracow: anti-Jewish violence in, 77, 92; antisemitic press in, 28; and economic subcultures, 17; image of Jews and peasants from region of, 18, 19; Polish cultural orientation of Jews in, 19 credit: calls for expanded sources for, after riots, 148, 153, 182; and criticism



of Jews’ usury, 25, 35, 47, 132, 141, 147, 149, 151, 152, 155, 158, 159; Jewish merchants’ introduction of, 14, 21; as new concept in late-nineteenth-century Galicia, 14 Crime, Jews and News, Vienna 1895–1914 (Vyleta), 115–16 Cyganowice, anti-Jewish violence in, 66, 121 Czarna, anti-Jewish violence in, 216n138 Czas (periodical), 84–85, 132, 148 Czerwiński, Kazimierz, 100 Czyszczan, Kazimierz, 52 Danielak, Michał, 38, 39, 169, 203n13 Daszyński, Ignacy: antisemitism of, 161, 180; and blame for riots, 148; in Chamber of Deputies, 155; and Chamber of Deputies debate on riots, 156–58; criticisms of government, 153– 54, 160–61; and election of 1897, 33–34, 154, 180; on government efforts to stop riots, 107, 109; objection to trials of rioters, 144; and Social Democrat’s alliance with Christian People’s Party, 33 Deak, John, 40–41 Dębowiec, anti-Jewish attacks in, 60 Deckert, Josef, 25, 51 Dekel-Chen, Jonathan, 8 Diamand, Hermand, 109–10 Diamant, Feige, 94, 101 Diamant, Soloman, 93, 94 dishonesty, as charge against Jews, 21, 25, 50, 151, 176, 178, 206n81 Dmowski, Roman, 180 Dobczyce, anti-Jewish violence in, 48, 49, 50 Domaradz, anti-Jewish violence in, 94 Dr. Bloch’s Österreichische Wochenschrift (periodical). See Österreichische Wochenschrift (periodical) Dreyfus Affair, 25–26, 50, 86 Drohobyczer Zeitung (periodical), 206n75

Index 231

Dubnov, Simon, 197n46 Dudzic, Blasius, 88 Dutki, Piotr, 95 Dwernicki, Tadeusz, 141 Dyna, Józef, 139 Dziedzic, Jan, 77 Dziennik Krakowski (periodical), 39, 43, 50, 57, 132 Dziennik Polski (periodical), 56, 138, 146, 183, 210n22, 211n51 Dzierżaniny, anti-Jewish violence in, 82 eastern Europe, anti-Jewish violence at end of World War I, 6 eastern Galicia, anti-Jewish violence in, 110–12, 135, 216n138 Echo Przemyskie (periodical), 54–55 economic competition: and ChristianJewish relations, 13–14, 17, 111, 217n141; Christians’ post-riot focus on creating Christian businesses, 150–51, 171–72, 173, 176, 179, 182 economic crises of 1890s, 17 economic development, calls for, after riots, 149, 150 economic stresses: and anti-Jewish violence as expression of frustration, 47–48, 52, 57, 111, 216n138; and Catholic-Jewish tensions, 17–19, 42, 177 economic webs connecting villages, Jewish prominence in, 17 education, Jewish, calls for, 165 education of peasants, post-riot calls for, 148, 150 election(s): of 1895, 36; of 1897, 33–34, 36, 42, 154, 163, 180; of 1898, 5, 12, 28, 36, 37, 38–41, 42, 71, 82, 93-94, 150, 159, 164, 171, 180; of 1907, 35; advertisement for, 29; curiae system for, 30, 35, 42; expansion of franchise, and conservative elites’ loss of control, 30–31; manipulations of, 29, 29. See also specific parties Elsner, Aron, 49

232 Index

Enemann, Jakób, 126 Epstein, Markus, 64 The Eternal Jew (Deckert), 25 ethnic groups in Galicia, tensions between, 12–13. See also Jews in Galicia; Poles in Galicia; Ukrainains/Ruthenians in Galicia ethnic violence, approaches to study of, 4 exclusionary violence, anti-Jewish violence in Galicia as, 3 executioner, chief Austrian, visit to Galicia, 107 Faron, Józef, 143 Federgrünn, Beila, 95 Feiner, Samuel, 91, 173 Felber, Hersch, 131–32 Feserko, Józef, 65 Fibich, Antoni, 147, 149–50 firefighters, in anti-riot efforts, 56, 65, 70, 108, 206n75 Flammenhaft family, 92–93 Fleischer, Siegfried, 165 food and water, rumors of Jewish poisoning of, 50, 58, 81, 119, 184 Fraczek, Franciszek, 95–96 Frant, Jakób, 59–60, 77, 94, 206n75 Franz Joseph (emperor): and state of emergency declaration, 104, 107, 181; and state takeover of alcohol trade, 194n18; support for Jews, 22, 181, 197n43; supposed authorization of anti-Jewish attacks, 54, 64, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 96, 178; trial and convictions of those claiming authorization from, 142. See also rumors of government permission to beat and rob Jews Franzos, Karl Emil, 166 Freemasons, as potential target of peasant attacks, 63 Friedrich, Julius, 107 Frysztak, 10, 61; Jewish population in, 14, 60–61; Jews seeking shelter in, 61

Frysztak, anti-Jewish riots in, 1–2, 60–61; and gendarmes, inadequate number of, 103; gendarmes’ report on, 169–70; Governor Piniński’s tour of damage from, 103; incitement of surrounding towns by, 62–63, 79–80, 87, 93; investigation of gendarmes’ use of force in, 169–70; Jewish flight from, 101; leaders of, 76, 85–86; origins of, 206n81; participants, characteristics of, 132; participants, number of, 62; peasant political parties’ incitements and, 81–82; press coverage of, 84; rioters killed in, 62, 103, 151, 209n10; rumors of impending violence prior to, 61; spread of, 128; trial of participants, 127, 131, 136, 137, 140–41, 144 Führer, Matylda, 65 Fundamental Laws of 1867, and freedom of the press, 50 fund to compensate victims of riots, Jewish creation of, 99, 163 Galicia, xiii; collapse of Austria-Hungary and, 185; limited scholarly attention to, 4–5, 6–7; nominal autonomous status of, 19, 29–30, 41, 181; polonization of government in, 41; poverty in, 95; rise of social democratic and peasant parties, 4–5; structure of government in, 41 Garwol, Franciszek, 97 Garwol, Michał, 97 Gawlik, Jan, 139 gendarmes: and anti-Jewish violence after 1898, 185; caterwauling attacks and, 92; claims of excessive force used by, 62, 151, 207n85; and Dębowiec, attacks in, 60; effectiveness of, 48; and Frysztak, attacks in, 61, 62, 76, 169–70; and Gorlice, attacks in, 126; government criticisms of, 92; governor’s order of increase in, 103, 171; injuries to, 62, 170;



investigations of excessive force allegations against, 167–70; investigations of riots by, 120; and Jasło district, attacks in, 60, 63; and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, attacks in, 56, 81; and Kamienica, attacks in, 70, 143; and Kołaczyce, attacks in, 58; lack of resources for adequate response, 87, 103; and Lemberg, attacks in, 110; as militarized law enforcement force, 48; and Podole and Posadowa, attacks in, 65; and Ptaszkowa, attacks in, 96; rescue of Jews by, 67; rioters’ anger at, for defending Jews, 56; rumors of Jewish control of, 75, 88–89, 167; and soldiers’ looting, 108; and Stary Sącz, attacks in, 128; and Tłuste, attacks in, 57; on violence in Radziszów, 57; and Wieliczka, attacks in, 45, 46, 48–49, 50; and Zagórza, attacks in, 87–88; and Zbyszyce, attacks in, 64 Gewürz, Elias, 92 Gieniec, Jędrzej, 121 Głos Narodu (periodical): antisemitism of, 23, 123, 126, 134, 183; and asemitism movement, 23, 23, 28; blaming of Jews for attacks, 46, 101, 126, 132, 207n104; excessive force accusations against government, 167–68; on forcing of Jews from villages, 173; on rioters as true victims, 145; and state of emergency, 104; on trials of rioters, 123, 126, 132, 138 Goldberg, Leib, 138 Goldberg, Mina, 92, 138 Gorlice, 10 Gorlice area: anti-Jewish violence in, 82; increase in gendarme and military presence in, 103, 215n114 government authorities: Jewish concerns about reliability of protection by, 182; lack of response to antisemitic literature, 181–82; participation in riots by, 76–77, 93, 107–8, 134, 135, 143; socialist criticisms of, 156–58

Index 233

government response to riots, 102–10, 176; and acquittals of arrested participants, 92; antisemitism as factor in, 112–13; billing of Jews for additional security, 103; cases of less-than-enthusiastic response, 206n75; claims of Jewish control over, 75, 88–89, 108, 120, 145–46, 151, 167; criticism of, 107–8, 151, 166– 70; defense of, in Chamber of Deputies debate, 158, 161, 166; effectiveness in preventing future outbreaks, 184–85; government investigation of, 147, 167–70, 176; Jewish defense of, 160–61; lack of concern about antisemitic climate, 181; lack of resources and, 03, 87; leniency toward caterwauling attacks, 90–91, 92; martial law in Nowy Sącz–Limanowa–Brzesko triangle, 106, 107–8, 181; number of arrests, 63, 66, 83, 92, 119, 128, 135, 141; number of rioters killed and injured, 2, 8, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64, 66, 76, 189n2; officials’ panic as riots spread, 103; Polish anger at government siding with Jews, 56, 153, 206n81; post-riot measures to address causes of violence, 170–72; prosecution of Jews who fought back, 101–2, 109; release of arrested rioters and, 92, 102, 118, 128, 211n48; reluctance to credit Jewish concerns about impending attacks, 62, 102, 112, 181; reluctance to respond to anti-Jewish rumors, 102; state of emergency declaration, 2, 5, 71, 101, 103, 104, 113; Thun’s defense of, 158, 166; weakness of, rioter’s interpretation as implicit permission, 87, 93, 96. See also gendarmes; soldiers; trials of antiJewish rioters Greek Catholics: and anti-Jewish violence, 54, 110–12; majority of Ukrainians/ Ruthenians in Galicia as, 12; priests’ antisemitic incitement, 111 Gregorig, Josef, 75

234 Index

Grosbart, Osias, 92 Gross, Szymon, 93 Gross family, 91 Grybów, 10; regional market in, 17 Haas, Anna, 91 Habsburg context for anti-Jewish violence: importance of understanding, 3, 4, 12; transformations of late nineteenth century and, 11–12. See also ChristianJewish relations; political conflict of late nineteenth century Habsburg Empire: civil society, scholarship on development of, 184; history of communal violence in, 43–44; riots’ damage to reputation of, 7, 44, 161, 180–81 Hagel, Jakób, 101, 122–24, 137–38, 146 Halberstam, Aaron, 166 Hamer, Franz, 80 Hasidic response to riots, 166 Hasidism, Austrian-Israelite Union on, 164, 165 Hasło (periodical), 104, 110 Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor), 33 Herbach, Anna, 136, 137 Herzl, Theodore, 45 Hilawicz, Dawid, 207n94 Hirsch, Baron Maurice de, 57, 150, 165 Hochberg, Hersch, 65 Hompesz, Ferdynand, 36 Huta Gogołówska, anti-Jewish violence in, 62–63, 76 illiteracy in Galicia, 2, 26, 57, 198n55 Inventing Eastern Europe (Wolff), 84 investigations of anti-Jewish violence, 117; anger of Christian public about, 119–22, 160, 182–83; by Austrian-Israelite Union, 164–65; charges filed in, 119, 126, 142; number of indictments, 142; number of individuals investigated, 142; press on, 119–22; recovery of stolen

items, 64, 65, 116, 120, 160, 181, 183; in Ryczów and Dobczyce, 49; search for instigators of violence, 104, 117, 119, 129, 177. See also trials of anti-Jewish rioters Der Israelit (periodical), 55, 165, 172, 180 Iwkowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 96 Jachowicz, Józef, 37 Jackowiec, Marie, 79 Jakób, Samuel, 97 Jakobowicz, Stefan, 125 Janas, Jędrzej, 120–21 Jasło, 10; blocking of rioters from entering, 59, 98; citizen guards in, 102; economic subculture of, 17; Jewish flight from, 101; Jewish population of, 13, 58; Kołaczyce Jews’ flight to, 58; state of emergency declaration in, 109 Jasło district, anti-Jewish violence in, 58–63, 72; attacks of Jewish businesses, 59–60, 63, 93; beating of Jews in, 95; blaming of Jews for, 58–59, 119–20; burning of Jewish distillery, 59–60, 63, 77, 93, 94, 98, 223n46; charges of Jewish exploitation of, 126; Christians helping Jews in, 96–97; extensive destruction in, 63; government response to, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 104, 206n75; Governor Piniński’s tour of damage from, 103; Jews injured in, 59; Jews’ requests for help, 62; number of arrests in, 141–42; origins of, 58; peasant political parties’ incitements and, 81–82; rioters killed and wounded in, 60, 62; rumors of government permission to rob Jews, 61, 62, 63, 83–84; spread of, 62–63, 65, 79–80, 87, 128; trials of perpetrators, 128, 131. See also Frysztak, anti-Jewish riots in Jastrzębia: anti-Jewish violence in, 56, 91; Jewish post-riot flight from, 173 Jawor, Jan, 59 Jeleśnia, anti-Jewish violence in, 91



Jenschke, Leopold, 97 Jewish businesses: Christians’ post-riot focus on destroying predominance of, 171–72, 175, 176, 179, 224n67; economic stresses of late nineteenth century and, 17–19; importance to community, 20–21; post-riot return of Christian customers to, 173, 182 Jewish culture, and Catholic hostility, 18, 19–20 Jewish religion, as marker of difference, 19–20 Jewish responses to attacks, 98–102; creation of fund to compensate victims, 99, 163; debate on causes and solutions, 163–65, 175–76; efforts to dispel rumors, 99–101; efforts to get help from authorities, 61, 62, 98–99, 102, 112, 181, 206n75; flight to larger towns, 101, 214n101; hiding from rioters, 101; resistance by force, 101–2, 108–9, 110, 124–25; resisting by force, state prosecution of, 101–2, 109 Jewish Secrets (Jeż), 24, 25–28; and asemitism, support for, 22, 25–26, 27–28; Christian press’s support for, 50; government efforts to ban, 26–27, 49, 50, 51–52, 122; influence of, 26, 35, 38, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 75, 78, 82, 86, 111, 150, 171; on Jewish conspiracies, 25, 26; Jews’ complaints about, 49, 51, 98–99; publication history of, 26–27, 51 Jews in Galicia: areas of concentration, 12, 13; concentration in urban areas, 13; economic problems, debate on causes of, 164–66, 175–76; embrace of Jewish peoplehood, 13; emigration to United States, 19, 22, 174; interaction with Catholic population, 13; Polish cultural orientation of, 19; post-riot calls for restricting rights of, 153; post-riot migration to larger cities, 173, 174–75, 176, 182, 224nn66–67; post-riot migration

Index 235

to other countries, 174; religious affiliations of, 19–20; rural residents, 14, 19; tensions with other ethnic groups, 12–13 Jeż, Mateusz, 25, 27, 51, 177, 183. See also Jewish Secrets (Jeż) Jeż, Nicefor, 65 Jop, Józef, 121 Jop, Salomea, 121 Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, 10; Adam Mickiewicz 100th birthday celebration in (1898), 55–56, 80, 151, 154, 165, 205n58; as Catholic pilgrimage town, 55; economic subculture of, 17; Jewish population of, 13; number of rioters tried in, 189n3 Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, anti-Jewish violence in, 1–2, 49, 54–55, 56–57, 72; charges of government overreaction to, 151; and gendarmes, inadequate number of, 103; government failure to heed rumors of impending attack, 102; government reports on, 202n11; government response to, 56, 81; incidents in surrounding communities sparked by, 56, 57; investigations of gendarmes’ use of force in, 167–69; leader of, 74–75; number of arrests, 141; number of participants, 56, 141; origins of, 56; as real beginning of anti-Jewish riots, 55; rioters’ anger at gendarmes for defending Jews, 56; rioters killed and wounded in, 56, 167; rumors of government approval of, 80–81, 83 Kamienica, anti-Jewish violence in, 70, 96; number of arrests in, 142; trial of participants, 129, 131, 143 Kamionka Wielka, anti-Jewish violence in, 63–64 Kasprzycki, Tomasz, 89, 96, 127, 128, 133, 136, 143, 219n50 Kaufer, Gitla, 136–37

236 Index

Kaufer, Hirsch, 136 Kęty: anti-Jewish violence in, 205n58; rumors of impending attacks in, 57 Kieval, Hillel, 20, 116 Kikeriki (periodical), 105, 152 Kisz, Nicholaus, 170 Klasno, anti-Jewish violence in, 46, 48, 140; Jewish self-defense in, 101–2, 124–25, 137–38 Kleinhaus, Izak, 53 Klier, John, 8 Kłodne, anti-Jewish violence in, 71, 95, 128–29, 143 Kołaczyce, anti-Jewish violence in, 58, 81, 119–20 Konarski, Józef, 62 Königsberger, Hirsch, 101, 125 Konopka, Andrzej, 125, 126 Konstanty, Kunegunda, 121 Korkis, Abraham, 224n67 Koron, Katarzyna, 89 Koron, Ludwik, 82–83 Kosab, Jan, 139 Kosiba, Jędrzej, 97 Koszarawa, anti-Jewish violence in, 91 Kowalski, Wojciech, 139 Kozik, Antoni, 65 Kozik, Jósef, 65 Kraus, Izrael, 124, 125, 126 Kraus, Mendel, 101, 122, 124–26, 137–38 Krzak, Michał, 143 Krzywaczka, anti-Jewish violence in, 56 Krzyzak, Michał, 95 Kubik, Jan, 167, 168 Kurjer Lwowski (periodical): anti-Jewish incitement in, 163, 177; on Christian People’s Party incitement, 82, 87, 210n26; and election of 1898, 39; on Frysztak riots, 60, 177; on gendarme abuses, 121; on Jasło riots, 60, 87; and People’s Party, 36; and rumors of permission to attack Jews, 87–88; on Stary Sącz riots, 43

Kzyżowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 91 Łącko, attacks on soldiers in, 108 Łagiwniki, anti-Jewish violence in, 92 Łańcut, 10; anti-Jewish violence in, 108 land: efforts to prevent sales to Jews, 23; Jewish purchases of, as source of resentment, 19, 151; peasants’ loss of hold on, 17 language, as marker of Jewish difference, 19 language laws, conflict over (1897–1898), 31 leaders of anti-Jewish violence: characteristics of, 74–77, 85–86; local officials as, 77; personal revenge as motive for, 77; as respected community members, 76, 89 Lehmann, Rosa, 195n28 Łęki, anti-Jewish violence in, 62–63 Łęki Stryżowskie, anti-Jewish violence in, 75 Lemberg, 10; anti-Jewish violence in, 110, 216n138; and economic subcultures, 17; Polish cultural orientation of Jews in, 19 Leo XII (pope), 23 Leo XIII (pope). See Pope, rumored permission to attack Jews Levin, Vladimir, 98 Lewicki, Włodzimierz, 38, 39, 40, 86 liberal democrats: on ignorance of rural masses, 182; views on causes of riots, 149–50 Licht, Lazar, 100 Liebeskind, Pepo, 209n14 Limanowa, 10; antisemitism in, 11; economic subculture of, 17; Jewish population in, 70; and Peasant Party Union, 35; prevention of impending anti-Jewish attack in, 71; religious affiliation of Jews in, 20; state of emergency declaration in, 107, 109 Limanowa area, anti-Jewish violence in,



63, 64, 70–71, 77, 95–96; government failure to prevent, 104; leaders of, 75; perpetrators, characteristics of, 133–34; rumors preceding, 89; trial of participants, 128–29, 134, 143 Lipinki, anti-Jewish violence in, 60 Lisowa, Kunegunda, 43 Lois, Jankiel, 216n138 Löw, Izrael, 59, 76, 136, 140 Löw, Naftali, 62, 136, 137, 170 Löwy, Emanuel, 91 Lueger, Karl, 22, 23, 75, 152, 163, 169, 181 Lustgarten, Samuel, 121 Lustig, Aron, 70, 129, 143 Lutcza, anti-Jewish violence in, 93, 101; leaders of, 76–77; perpetrators, characteristics of, 134; trail of perpetrators, 128, 130, 131–32, 143, 144, 159 Luther, Martin, 26 Madejczyk, Jan, 85 Mahler, Moses, 91 Mahler, Raphael, 2, 94–95, 174 Maków, distribution of flyers inciting violence in, 75 Marcińkowski, Karol, 206n81 Margoshes, Joseph, 21, 48 markets: attacks on Jewish stalls in, 46; Jewish participation in, 17; Jewish visibility in, 14 Meçina, anti-Jewish violence in, 71, 128–29, 143 Merunowicz, Teofil, 51 Michael, Robert, 28, 197n61 Michlic, Joanna, 197n59 Mickiewicz, Adam, 100th birthday celebration for (1898), 55–56, 80, 151, 154, 165, 205n58 Miczkowski, Michał, 75, 127 Mieszczanin (periodical), 42 Mikrut, Andrzej, 39 Milan, Grzegorz, 86 Miłkowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 97

Index 237

Miras, Jan, 76, 85–86, 132, 137, 140–41, 144, 170, 209n10 Modarka, anti-Jewish violence in, 71, 128–29, 143 Monowice, Jews’ post-riot departure from, 173 Morawski, Marian, 27–28 Morelowski, Julian, 52 Mróczków, Marciń, 133 Mroczkowski, Florian, 59 Mucha, Wojciech, 63 Naprzód (periodical), 37, 39, 104 National Democracy, alliance with Christian People’s Party, 180 Neue Freie Presse (periodical), 125 Nirenberg, David, 3 nobility, Polish (szlachta): agitation against, as source of riots, 148; and alcohol trade, 14, 155–56; and blame for riots, 147, 157–58, 163; loss of political dominance, 28–31; peasant massacre of (1846), feared recurrence of, 88, 211nn51–52; peasant parties’ linking of Jews to, 42; as percentage of population, 194n17; as potential target of peasant attacks, 63; reformers, (Stańczycy), 28–29; socialist criticisms of, 156, 157–58 Nossig, Alfred, 194n18 Nowak, Marjanna, 121 Nowak, Piotr, 66–67 Nowak, Wiktorja, 89 Nowa Reforma (periodical), 59, 83, 119, 122, 145, 173 Nowy Sącz, 10, 66; antisemitism in, 11, 42; declaration of state of emergency in, 107; economic subculture of, 17; Grand Synagogue in, 20; Jews as percentage of population in, 13, 19; Jews in, as primarily Hasidic, 13, 19–20; and Peasant Party Union, 35; post-riot ChristianJewish relations, 173–74

238 Index

Nowy Sącz, anti-Jewish violence in, 2, 63, 64, 65–66, 67; beating of Jews in, 95; government failure to prevent, 104; Governor Piniński’s tour of damage from, 104; Jews fighting back in, 102; number of participants in, 69; rumors of government approval of, 82; spread of, 66–67; trials of Jews for role in, 135; trials of participants, 128, 131, 142–43 Nowy Sącz circular court, trials of antiJewish rioters in, 118 Nowy Sącz–Limanowa–Brzesko triangle, anti-Jewish violence in, 63–71, 72, 219n50; attacks on Jewish homes and businesses, 64, 65–67, 69–70, 71, 207–8n106, 207n94; beating of Jews in, 96; government response to, 64, 65, 66, 70–71, 107; Jews injured in, 64, 65; leaders of, 75, 77; martial law declared in, 106, 107–8, 181; rumors of government permission for, 82–83; spread of, 65, 66–67, 70 Nürnberg, Meilach, 94 Olchawa, Thomas, 75–76, 127 Opyd, Jędrzej, 96 Orawka, tavern in, 16 Österreichische Monarchie im Wort und Bild (Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image), 18, 19 Österreichische Wochenschrift (periodical), 54, 60, 85, 99, 124, 163 Oświęcim, 10; rumors of impending attacks in, 57 Pan Tadeusz (Mickiewicz), 55–56 Papuga, Jan, 136 parliament, Galician. See Sejm, Galician parliament in Vienna. See Chamber of Deputies; election(s); Reichsrat; Vienna Parliament participants in anti-Jewish violence, 74–77; claims of forced participation,

89–90; government officials as, 76–77, 91, 131, 134, 135; leaders, characteristics of, 74–77; as local residents known to victims, 44, 90, 133; looters as, 74; supportive onlookers as, 74, 89, 91, 112, 213n83; types of, 69, 74, 214n91. See also leaders of anti-Jewish violence; trials of anti-Jewish rioters, defendants in peasant massacre of nobility (1846), feared recurrence of, 88, 211nn51–52 Peasant Party Union (Związek Stronnictwa Chłopskiego): antisemitism and, 35; asemitism and, 35, 159; on causes of riots, 153; and Chamber of Deputies debate on riots, 159; efforts to close Jewish businesses, 172, 172; and election of 1897, 37 peasant political parties: and antisemitism, 5, 28, 31, 34, 36–38, 39, 40–41, 42, 47, 74, 81–82, 86, 111–12, 177, 178, 179, 185; and blame for riots, 148, 171; challenge to conservatives’ right to rule, 184; and Chamber of Deputies debate on riots, 154–55, 159–60, 162; criticisms of government response to riots, 147, 166–70; objection to trials of rioters, 144; and peasant self-discipline, advocacy of, 177, 179; and political posturing over riots, 166, 172, 175, 177; push for greater political influence, 184; rise of, amid political conflict of late nineteenth century, 4, 28, 31–41; and state of emergency, objections to, 184; views on causes of riots, 150–53, 159–60. See also Christian People’s Party; Peasant Party Union; People’s Party peasants: and economic stresses of late nineteenth century, 17–19; government’s reluctance to credit rumors circulating among, 102; as ignorant, drunken, and superstitious, 184; Jews’ memories of cordial relations with, 21; poverty of, post-riot efforts to alleviate, 171



peasants, exploitation of: as charge against Jews, 21, 35, 38, 47, 151, 152, 153, 158, 159, 171, 206n81; post-riot focus on measures to reduce, 171–72, 175, 176, 224n67 peasants as true victims of riots: Christian press on, 145, 179; defense lawyers’ claim of, 140–41; peasant political parties on, 151, 155–56, 160; Polish public opinion on, 147 People’s Party: antisemitic views of, 71, 86, 180, 211n47; complaints about state of emergency, 149; criticism of gendarmes’ excessive force, 168; and election of 1895, 36; and election of 1897, 33, 37, 154; and election of 1898, 38–41, 42; objections to investigation of riots, 121; objection to trials of rioters, 144; as peasant party, 36; post-riot call for breaking Jewish control of countryside, 150–51; strength in western Galicia, 180; views on causes of riots, 150–51, 159–60 Pielgrzymka, anti-Jewish violence in, 62–63 Pieróg, Johann, 75 Pietrusza Wola, anti-Jewish violence in, 62–63, 75 Piłsudki, Józef, 180 Piniński, Leon Count (governor of Galicia): and citizen guards, order to create, 63, 104; delay in declaring state of emergency, 103; forceful response to riots, 63, 64, 180–81; and gendarmes, calls for increase in, 63, 103, 171; and Jewish economic domination, efforts to reduce, 171–72, 182; on Jewish provocations before riots, 103, 171, 176; meeting with state executioner, 107; on need for more gendarmes, 103; ordering of gendarmes and soldiers into areas of unrest, 103, 215n114; post-riot measures to address causes of violence, 170–72, 176; and rumors of permission

Index 239

to attack Jews, 104; state of emergency declared by, 2, 5, 104, 181; on successful restoration of order, 145; tours of rioting damage, 63, 103, 104 Pisarzowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 71, 95, 128–29, 143 Pisz, Roman, 214n97 Platner, Abe, 77 Podole, anti-Jewish violence in, 64, 82 pogrom, definition of, 7–8. See also Russian pogroms Polacy wobec Żydów w Galicji doby autonomicznej w latach 1868–1914 (Soboń), 190n7 Poland, and legacy of antisemitism, 185 Poles in Galicia: areas of concentration, 12; majority of as Roman Catholics, 12; tensions with other ethnic groups, 12–13 police: and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, antiJewish violence, 56; lack of resources and, 103; limited presence in smaller towns, 48; and Nowy Sącz, anti-Jewish violence in, 65; participation in antiJewish violence, 76–77, 93, 134, 135, 143; and soldiers’ looting, 108; and Stary Sącz, anti-Jewish violence in, 70. See also gendarmes Polish Christian People’s Parliamentary Club, 151 Polish Club: accusations of Jewish influence over, 151; Byk and, 156; conservatives’ control over, 29–30; peasant parties and socialist members of parliament and, 154, 175; peasant parties’ antisemitism and, 42; Peasant Party Union and, 159 Polish lands: high levels of illiteracy and poverty, 2, 26, 47, 198n55; larger number of Jews in, 2–3 Polish nationalist movement: calls for antiJewish attacks, 185; focus on control over state institutions, 184; and Jewish

240 Index

embrace of Jewish peoplehood, 13; People’s Party and, 36; Stojałowski and, 31, 180; those rejecting totalizing claims of, 185; views on causes of riots, 153 Polish revolutionary tradition, and Austrian rule, 28–29 political conflict of late nineteenth century, 28–42; antisemitism as rallying cry in, 5, 28, 31, 34, 36–38, 39, 40–41, 42, 47; arrival of mass politics and, 4–5; conservative elites’ loss of political hegemony and, 28–31; dramatic changes in society as context for, 42; and dualtrack framework of Habsburg state, 40–41; and harsh political rhetoric, 4–5, 12, 52; rise of peasant political parties and, 4, 28, 31–41 Pope, rumored permission to attack Jews, 78, 82, 83, 84, 96, 178 Porter, Brian, 183 Posadowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 64–65, 82 Potoczek, Jan, 35, 145–46, 159 Potoczek, Stanisław, 35 Prawda (periodical): antisemitic articles in, 22, 23, 26, 52, 86; antisemitic incitement by, 174; on Catholic anti-tavern movement, 15; and censorship in state of emergency, 104; on gendarmes’ defending of Jews, 56; on Jewish responsibility for violence, 119–20; support for Jeż’s Jewish Secrets, 50 Prawo Ludu (periodical), 34, 34, 104 press: censorship of, in investigations of gendarmes, 167–68; censorship of, in state of emergency, 104, 117; coverage of Wieliczka violence, 49; on investigation of riots, 119–22; on Tłuste riots, 57 press, Christian: on anti-Jewish violence in Przemyśl, 54–55; antisemitic articles in, 22, 23, 26, 28, 86, 112; blaming of Jews for anti-Jewish violence, 58, 119–20, 124; calls for rejection of violence by,

97–98; debate on antisemitism and Polish Catholic future, 183; denunciation of Jews fighting back, 101–2; distortions in reports on investigation of gendarmes’ use of force, 167–68, 169; echoing and amplification of rumor in, 78; incitement of anti-Jewish violence by, 74, 75, 81, 134, 179; increased antisemitism of late nineteenth century, 52; reports of rumors of government permission to attack Jews, 83–85, 87–88, 90, 112; support for Jeż’s Jewish Secrets, 50; on trials of rioters, 183 press, Jewish: on causes of riots, 163–64, 166; Christian calls for boycotts of, 23; claimed slandering of Poles in, 140, 153; on trials of Jews for instigating violence, 124 press reports on trials of Jews in Vienna, construal of Jews as criminals in, 115–16, 217n1 press reports on trials of rioters, 115; antisemitic accounts in, 123, 132, 137–38; charges of Jewish exploitation of disorder, 126; descriptions of defendants, 132–33; details provided in, 115; on Jewish defendants, 123, 124; on Jewish witnesses, 136, 137–38; on Jews’ responsibility for violence, 145, 179 Przegląd Polski (periodical), 148 Przemyśl, 10; large military fort in, 53 Przemyśl, anti-Jewish violence in, 49, 52–55, 111; cause of, 52–53, 204n43; Christian press on, 54–55; differences from other incidents, 53–54; government responses to, 53; Greek Catholic involvement in, 54; and rumors of government tolerance of anti-Jewish violence, 54; trials of perpetrators, 54, 204n47 Przyjaciel Ludu (periodical), 36, 86, 150–51 Przysietnica, anti-Jewish violence in, 77 Pszczółka (periodical), 31, 38–39, 75, 153, 189n2, 210n26



Ptaszkowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 96 Pzewłocki, Stanisław, 139 Radziszów, anti-Jewish violence in, 56–57, 81, 96 regional fairs and markets, Jewish participation in, 14, 17 Reichsrat: debate in, 145–46, 147, 154, 180; elections, 35, 45; electoral system, 30–31. See also Chamber of Deputies; Vienna Parliament Rewakowicz, Henryk, 36 riot, as term, 8 Ritter, Mojżesz and Gittla, 41, 77 ritual murder accusations against Jews: Catholic repetition of, 25, 41, 112, 177; credibility of, in climate of antisemitism, 116; increase in, in late nineteenth century, 50; peasant’s ignorance and, 184; press repetition of, 86, 210n22; rumors of, 78–79, 102, 209n13; victims of, 77 robot system, end of, 17 Rohling, August, 25, 86 Roman Catholic Church: and antisemitism, 4, 111–12, 183–84; and asemitism, 177; incitement of anti-Jewish violence, 86, 112; majority of Galician Poles as adherents of, 12. See also antisemitism in Galicia; asemitism movement; press, Christian Rosenblatt, Józef Michał, 123 Rosenthal, Jakób, 91 Rössler, Abraham, 61 Rosenzweig, Siegmund, 49–50 Rozruchy antyżydowskie (Fibich), 147, 149–50 Rückel, Abraham, 64 Rückel, Chaja, 65 Rückel, Emilia, 64 Rückel, Mojszez, 64 Rücklowej, Marguli, 65 Rudolph (crown prince), 19, 81, 148

Index 241

Rumin, Piotr, 63–64 rumors, 77–90; important role in ethnic conflicts, 78; of Jewish control of government response to riots, 75, 88–89, 108, 120, 145–46, 151, 167; press amplification of, 78 rumors of government permission to beat and rob Jews, 54, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 79–85, 96, 136–37; belief in truth of, as issue, 83–86, 134, 178–79; Christians asserting falseness of, 97; claimed evidence of, 75–76, 76–77, 80, 85–86, 87–88, 93, 143; as common in anti-Jewish incidents, 88; credibility of, in general climate of antisemitism, 112, 132, 134, 178; in eastern Galicia, 110, 216n138; governor’s efforts to refute, 104; importance as cause of antiJewish violence, 77–78, 89; origins of, 210n27; participation of government officials in violence and, 76–77; peasant party’s incitements and, 81–82, 210n26; peasants’ misreading of public notices and, 80, 83; persistence of, 119, 212n57; press’s echoing of, 83–85, 87–88, 90, 112; prohibition of outright killing in, 76, 80, 88; spread of, 67, 74, 82–83, 93, 94, 132, 143, 171, 210n27; theories on origins of, 148; weak government response as implied confirmation of, 54, 83, 87, 96 rumors of impending violence: and Jewish preparations, 57, 136; and Jewish requests for help, 61, 62, 102, 112, 118, 119; spread of, 57, 61, 74, 79–80, 89, 93 rumors of Jewish plots or crimes: authorities’ reluctance to respond to, 102; efforts to dispel, 99–101; to murder local clergyman, 45, 46–47, 78, 124; to poison food or water, 50, 58, 81, 119, 184; as supposed cause of order allowing attacks on Jews, 80; as widespread, 79

242 Index

Rumpler, Vadie, 91 rural areas, Jews in, 14; connections with larger world, 19; limited acculturation of, 19 Rusek, Jan, 139 Russia, anti-Jewish violence in: and pogrom, as term, 7, 8; scholarship on, 6; social conflict as catalyst for, 2–3 Russian pogroms: of 1881, 88, 202n5; of early twentieth century, types of participants in, 74; flight of Jews into Galicia from, 202n5; and Jewish emigration, 174; Jewish responses to, 98; Kishinev pogroms (1903), 184; rumor and, 78, 88 Russian Revolution of 1905, and antiJewish violence, 3 Rychlik, Franz, 209n14 Ryczów, anti-Jewish violence in, 48–49 Rzeszów, 10; Jewish flight to, 101 Rzym, Michal, 39 Sanok, 10; citizen guards in, 102, 214n107 Schodnica, 10; antisemitic violence in (1897), 43–44, 54 Schoenfeld, Joachim, 22, 197n43 Schomer Israel, 99 Schönerer, Georg von, 162 Schöngut, Moses, 91, 173 schools, Jewish, Hirsch trade schools, 57, 150, 165 Schorske, Carl, 4 Schulheim, Hyacinth von, 107 Sefer Sandz (Mahler), 2 Sejm, Galician, conservatives’ control of, before late 1890s, 29 Selinger, Karl, 107 serfdom in Galicia: end of in midnineteenth century, 14; legacy of, 147; peasants’ memories of, and resentment of Jewish dominance, 131–32 Shanes, Joshua, 13 Shelton, Anita, 11

shops, Jewish-run: average value of merchandise in, 94–95; as target, 1. See also anti-Jewish violence in Galicia (1898), attacks on Jewish businesses Shtetl Memoirs (Schoenfeld), 22 Siekierczyna, attacks on soldiers in, 108 Sieliński, Franciszek, 121 Siła i Brüderlichkeit, 54 Sinta, Stanisław, 93 Skawica, anti-Jewish violence in, 108 Skawina, anti-Jewish violence in, 56, 96 Słomka, Jan, 21 Słowo Polskie (periodical), 83–84, 85, 96–97, 100, 119, 149–50, 153–54, 163 Smoleń, Jan, 95, 128–29, 133–34 Soboń, Marcin, 190n7 Social Democratic Party: alliance with Christian People’s Party, 33–34, 157; and anti-Jewish violence in Przemyśl, 53–54; and election of 1897, 33–34, 36, 37, 154; and election of 1898, 42; newspaper of, 34, 34; objection to trials of rioters, 144; opposition to anti-Jewish riots, 182; political conflict of 1890s and, 31 social democrats/socialists: and blame for riots, 148; on causes of riots, 152, 156–58; challenge to conservatives’ right to rule, 184; and Chamber of Deputies debate on riots, 154–55, 156–58; complaints about government response to riots, 147; fomenting of peasant violence by, 103; Jewish participation in, 154; on nobility’s alliance with Jews, 157; opposition to antisemitism, 180; and political posturing over riots, 166, 172, 175; push for greater political influence, 184; and state of emergency, objections to, 156, 180, 184; state of emergency crackdown on, 109–10, 147, 153, 158, 181, 216n137 soldiers: and anti-Jewish violence after 1898, 185; investigation of riots, 121 soldiers in anti-riot efforts, 54, 59, 60, 63,



70–71, 95, 101, 110; attacks on Jews by, 108, 216n128; and deaths of rioters, 108; governor’s order of increase in, 103, 113, 216n138; martial law in Nowy Sącz–Limanowa–Brzesko triangle, 106, 107–8, 181; peasant parties’ criticism of, 168; rioters’ attacks on, 108, 133; rumors of Jewish control of, 88–89 Sowiński, Józef, 183 Sperling, Chaja, 126 Spira, Abraham, 66 Sporysz, anti-Jewish violence in, 91 Spytkowice, Jewish tavern in, 15 Stańki, Antoni, 99–100 Stapiński, Jan, 40; antisemitism of, 71; and blame for riots, 148; and Chamber of Deputies debate on riots, 159–60, 162; Christian People’s Party attacks on, 37, 82; and election of 1897, 37; and election of 1898, 38–41, 42, 86, 150, 154, 180; objection to trials of rioters, 144; and People’s Party, 36 Stary Sącz, 68, 69; economic subculture of, 17; Jewish population of, 13 Stary Sącz, anti-Jewish violence in, 1–2, 43, 64, 67–70; Christians helping Jews in, 97; government failure to prevent, 104; government response to, 70, 104; Jewish responses to, 99; Jews’ losses, value of, 70, 94; as largest of antiJewish riots, 128; origins of, 67–69; perpetrators, characteristics of, 134–35; rumors of government permission for, 82–83; rumors prior to, 89; spread of, 70; trials of perpetrators, 127, 128, 136, 137, 144 state of emergency: areas affected by, 104, 215n118; conservative support for, 148; continuation of some measures, 171; crackdown on socialists in, 109–10, 147, 153, 158, 181, 216n137; declaration of, 2, 5, 71, 104, 113, 181; delay in declaring, 103; duration of, 156; effectiveness

Index 243

of, 108; feared return of violence after lifting of, 109; incidents of violence despite, 109–10; liberal complaints about, 147; and martial law in Nowy Sącz–Limanowa–Brzesko triangle, 106, 107–8, 181; peasant parties’ objections to, 160, 184; public anger at, 145–46, 147; rights suspended in, 104–7, 117, 120, 181; satirical cartoon on, 105; socialist objections to, 156, 180, 184; success in restoring order, 145; Thun’s defense of, 158 Stein, Pinkas Dawid, 137 Steinmetz family, 92–93 Stojałowski, Stanisław, 32; alliance with Social Democratic Party, 33–34; antisemitic incitement by, 36–37, 47, 58, 60, 71, 75, 81–82, 94, 111, 162, 171, 177, 178, 183, 203n13; and blame for riots, 147, 148, 150, 161, 163–64; and Chamber of Deputies debate on riots, 161; and Christian People’s Party, 31–34; controversy surrounding, 31; and election of 1897, 36–37; and election of 1898, 154; excommunication of, 51; influence of, 84; Jewish criticisms of, 49; journals edited by, 31, 33, 46; and Peasant Party Union, 35; and People’s Party, 36; and Polish nationalism, 180; political activism of, 31–33; political rallies in support of, 37–38; popularity of, 180; reconciliation with Church, 34; and rumors of government permission to rob Jews, 61 Stop, Józef, 96 Struve, Kai, 217n142 Strzyżów, 10; anti-Jewish violence in, 101; economic subculture of, 17; flight of threatened Jews to, 93; Jewish flight from, 101; post-riot Christian-Jewish relations in, 174; spread of rumors about attacks in, 93 Suhr, Gerald, 8 Sułkowice, anti-Jewish violence in, 56, 91

244 Index

Sułkowski, Józef, 73, 92, 102, 108–9 Surh, Gerald, 74 Survey of the Situation of the Jewish Population of Galicia, 164–65 Świerchowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 60 Szajer, Thomas, 170 Szajer, Tomasz, 82 Szczepanowski, Stanisław, 17 Szczurowa, flyer from, calling for antiJewish violence, xiv, 1 Szczygły, Michał, 77, 143 Szeliga, Stanisław, 81–82 Sziffler, Józef, 37 Szpila, Anton, 88 Szponder, Andrzej: criticism of gendarmes’ excessive force, 167, 168, 169; and Defense of People faction, 203n13; incitement of Wieliczka residents against Jews, 44–46, 47, 78; Jewish criticisms of, 49–50; rumors of Jewish plot to murder, 45, 46–47, 78, 124 Szurlej, Jędrzej, 93, 143, 210n27 Taaffe, Eduard, 30 Targanica: anti-Jewish attacks in, 91; Jews’ post-riot departure from, 173 Tarnów, 10 Tarnów district: anti-Jewish violence in, 133; inadequate gendarmes force in, 103 Tarnowski, Stanisław, 23, 28, 148–49, 160 Tauger, Alka, 136 taverns and taprooms, Jewish-run: attacks on, 1, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62–63, 64, 65, 66–67, 67, 70, 71, 72, 85, 90, 92–93, 94, 97, 110, 119, 137, 139, 143, 170, 207– 8n106, 207n94, 216n138; and blame for Christian alcohol abuse, 149, 157, 159, 160; Catholic denunciations of, 15, 20, 23, 25, 26, 31, 35, 38; Christians’ post-riot efforts to reduce number of, 172; claimed false accusations against rioters by, 159; income from, 95; Jewish dominance of industry, 14, 15, 16; lead-

ers of attacks on, 76, 77; misbehavior of Christians in, 21; origin of many incidents in, 73; popularity of, 14; proliferation of, 14, 195n19; as social centers, 20–21; typical types of attacks on, 92–93 Teichler, Jakób, 137 Teichler, Schaindla, 137 Thaler, Daniel, 48–49 Thun und Hohenstein, Count Franz von: and Chamber of Deputies debate on riots, 156; and criticisms of gendarmes’ use of excessive force, 168; defense of government response to riots, 158, 166; on Jews, as equal citizens, 158; on origin of riots, 202n11; socialist criticisms of, 156, 158 Tłuste, 10; anti-Jewish violence in, 57, 96, 111, 135; citizen guards in, 102, 214n107 Tokarczyk, Grzegorz, 77, 142–43 Tokarski, Sławomir, 217n141 trials of anti-Jewish rioters, 2, 5–6, 115–46, 189n3; and accusations of Jewish plot to defame Poles, 125, 140; and blaming of Jews for attacks, 116–17, 122–26, 131–32, 140, 179, 182; court venues for, 117, 127; damage to Christian-Jewish relations, 145–46, 182–83; defense arguments in, 139–41; evidence, types of, 135; first to occur, 115; indictments in, 129–31, 130, 132, 135, 142, 219n49; laws governing court system, 117–18; lead prosecutors in, 117; light sentences in, 123; as morality play depicting Jews as enemies, 116, 132, 146, 179; notable cases, 127–29; number convicted, 142, 145; number tried, 2, 141, 189n3; participants in, 115; press reports on, 115, 132; prosecution appeals of innocent verdicts or light sentences, 131, 146; prosecution arguments in, 131–32; range of sizes of, 127; records of, 127, 142; restoring of law and order as



government goal in, 115, 122, 129, 144, 146, 171, 181; sentencing in, 2, 142–45, 182; as strain on judicial system, 118; suspension of right to jury trial in, 118, 181, 218n7; time required for, 115; verdicts in, 141–45. See also investigations of anti-Jewish violence; press reports on trials of rioters trials, defendants in: characteristics of, 133–35; defense characterization as simple, innocent peasants, 139–41, 146; defense characterization as victims, 140–41; denial of wrongdoing by, 138; media characterization as simple, innocent peasants, 132–33, 179; press reports on, 132–33; small number of, compared to number of rioters, 141, 189n3 trials, witnesses in, 135–39; antisemitic press descriptions of, 137–38; Christians as, 138–39, 182; court abuses of, 138; and discounting of Jewish testimony, 138–39; Jews as majority of, 135–36 trials of Jews for instigating violence, 122–26, 128, 135; and government desire to avoid image as protector of Jews, 122, 172–73, 181; harsh sentences in, 123–24, 126; major cases, 125; press reports on, 123, 124; and “proving” of Jewish provocations, 123–24 trials of Jews in Habsburg lands, and portrayal of Jews as criminals, 115–16, 217n1 Turaszówka, anti-Jewish violence in, 95 Tymowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 88 Ukrainains/Ruthenians in Galicia: and anti-Jewish violence, 110–12; areas of concentration, 12; majority of as Greek Catholics, 12; nationalist movement among, 13, 112; tensions with other ethnic groups, 12–13 Ulaszowice, anti-Jewish violence in, 59, 77, 98

Index 245

United States, Galician Jews’ migration to, 19, 22, 174 Urban, Mateusz, 76, 93, 143 Vienna, Parliament, 29-31. See also Chamber of Deputies; election(s); Reichsrat Vienna Commercial Association, 99 violence, communal, history of, in Habsburg Empire, 43–44 Vyleta, Daniel, 115–16 Wadowice, 10 Wadowice area, anti-Jewish violence in, 108–9, 146 Wasserlauf, Leib, 95 Wędkiewicz, Władysław, 50 Weeks, Theodore, 2–3 Weinberger, David, 97 Die Welt (periodical), 45, 49–50, 57, 63, 95, 99, 164 Wieliczka, 10; Jewish population in, 44; Jews’ complaints to authorities about clergy’s incitements, 45 Wieliczka, anti-Jewish violence in, 44–49, 108; anti-Jewish literature and, 47; attacks on Jewish businesses, 46, 47; attacks on synagogue, 45, 47, 96; economic frustration as driver of, 47–48; as first of 1898 attacks, 44, 48; gendarmes’ response to, 45, 46, 48–49; government reports on, 202n11; government response to, 102; investigation of, 50; Jewish fears of further attacks following, 49–50; Jewish injuries in, 46; Jewish responses to, 98; Jewish self-defense in, 101–2, 124–25; lack of consequences for rioters, 87; local clergy’s incitement of, 44–46, 47; local press’s repetition of antisemitic claims, 46–47; military units deployed in response to, 50; number of arrests in, 141; number of participants, 141; official investigation of, 46; origins

246 Index

of, 71; participants, characteristics of, 133; pause in attacks following, 49; press attention to, 49; rumors of Jewish plot to murder local clergyman and, 45, 46–47, 78; social factors contributing to tensions, 44; strong government response to, 50; symbols of Jewish power as targets of, 47; trials of participants, 124, 140, 202–3n11 Wielogłowy, anti-Jewish violence in, 95 Wielopole Skrzyńskie, threats of violence in, 79–80 Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung (periodical), 60 Wiener Bilder (periodical), 155 Wieniec (periodical): antisemitic incitement in, 26, 46, 50–51, 90–91, 151; on censorship during state of emergency, 168; and election of 1898, 39; on Jewish responsibility for riots, 151; Stojałowski as editor of, 31 Wilk, Jan, 167 Windak, Józef, 46 Winiarski, Johann, 61–62, 76, 103, 169–70 Winkowski, Franciszek, 37, 160 Witas, Michael and Josef, 92 Witos, Wincenty, 21 Wola Duchacka, anti-Jewish violence in: perpetrators, characteristics of, 132–33; trials of perpetrators, 128, 138, 139 Wolf, Karl Hermann, 155 Wolff, Larry, 84 workers’ associations, 23 Woroniecki, Philipp, 129 Wróbel, Jędrzej, 95 Wróbel, Katarzyna, 95 Wróbel, Maria, 80 Wróblowa town council, and anti-Jewish violence, 85

Wysłouch, Bolesław, 36 Wysłouch, Maria, 36 Wysocki, Stanisław, 38, 82 Wysoka Stryżowska, anti-Jewish violence in, 75 Wyżykowski, Władysław, 123 Zabłocie, anti-Jewish violence in, 91 Zagórza, anti-Jewish violence in, 62–63, 87–88 Zagórze: anti-Jewish violence in, 87; and election of 1898, 40 arnowa, anti-Jewish violence in, 92–93 Zator, anti-Jewish violence in, 56 Zayarnyuk, Andriy, 112, 193n9, 217n142 Zbyszyce, anti-Jewish violence in, 64, 128, 136 Żelaszkiewicz, Kornel, 37 Zionist movement in Galicia, 175–76; limited influence of, 13; response to riots, 166, 175–76 Zipser, Józef, 86 Zmiąca: Jews’ post-riot departure from, 173; weak national identities in, 12 Zornów, Dawid and Dorka, 143 Związek Chłopski (periodical): antisemitic incitement in, 35, 134, 178, 213n90; asemitism and, 97–98; condemnation of riots by, 97, 147; and Jewish taverns, crusade to close, 172, 172; as Peasant Party Union paper, 35; on peasants as true victims of riots, 120–21; on state of emergency, 147; on Stojałowski, 213n90 Zwoleń, Jakób, 88 Żywiec, 10, 212n63; anti-Jewish violence in, 90–92, 141; antisemitism in, 90–91; Jews’ post-riot departure from, 173