Galicia (Habsburg Austria)

In the early twentieth century, three provinces of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire enacted national compromises in their legislation that had elements of non-territorial autonomy provisions. Czech and German politicians in Moravia reached an agreement in 1905. In the heavily mixed Bukovina, Romanian, Ukrainian, German, Jewish and Polish representatives agreed on a new provincial constitution in 1909. Last but not least, Polish and Ukrainian nationalists compromised in spring 1914, just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War vitiated the new provisions. Even though the provisions of these agreements varied substantially, new electoral laws introducing national registers were at their heart. These were designed to ensure a fairer representation of national groups in the provincial assemblies and to keep national agitation out of electoral campaigns. The earliest compromise in Moravia went furthest in consociational power sharing. However, the national bodies within the provincial assembly had no right to tax their respective national communities, and the provisions of the provincial constitutions kept the non-nationally defined nobility as an important counterbalance. The compromises in Bukovina and Galicia, even if they categorised all inhabitants nationally, contented themselves with even less autonomous agency for the national bodies in the provincial assemblies and rather emphasised the symbolic elements of national autonomy. The non-territorial approach in all three crownlands, however, was an instrument to reorganise multi-ethnic provinces that increasingly became the model for national compromises in other Austrian provinces.

Center and periphery are popular concepts to describe geographical, political, or economic power relations. Both are mostly perceived as strict and mutually exclusive categories. This article examines a Galician border town whose history illustrates the complexities of conceptualizing center and periphery relations. At first glance, nineteenth-century Brody (in today's Ukraine) would seem to qualify as a peripheral town located on the Galician border between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. An analysis of this city under Habsburg rule (1772–1918), however, shows us that during that period it constituted both an important center and a declining periphery, not only consecutively, but also simultaneously. Its situation on the country's physical and political periphery did not harm Brody's central role in Europe's East-West trade until the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. Only in later decades did the city lose its place within a modernizing commercial system, and eventually it declined in importance. If we leave aside the economic aspect and take a closer look at Brody's mostly Jewish inhabitants, we see that for centuries this city functioned as an important center for Eastern and Central European Jewry. Even though the town's centrality for Jewish history also changed over time, Brody nevertheless kept its place on Jewish mental maps, whether as a center of religious learning, as a pioneering site of political emancipation, or as a safe haven for Jewish refugees.

This article provides an overview of the political representation and integration of Galician Jews on the municipal, provincial, and central state level under Austrian rule. It demonstrates that political representation on the latter two levels started only after the revolution of 1848 and was rather modest considering the numeric and economic weight Jews enjoyed in Galicia. Even though representation in municipal councils started earlier, the position of Jews depended very much on local circumstances. After the turn of the century, the widening of the electorate to the lower classes led to a broader Jewish representation and participation not only in terms of numbers but also within the political spectrum. This is particularly true for the paper's second part. In this section, the text explores the reform of the electoral system for Galicia's provincial parliament and the attitude of Jewish politicians towards the compromise eventually found in 1914. The article argues that among Jews the positive or negative assessment of the new voting system depended largely on their position in the larger antagonism between Jewish nationalists and assimilationists. The former complained that the entire reform was on the backs of the Jews ignoring their numeric strength and their national rights. Assimilationists, on the other hand, were satisfied that, against all counter-claims of Zionists and Anti-Semites, the compromise legally established that Jews were Poles.

An urban biography, Brody: A Galician Border City in the Long Nineteenth Century reconciles 150 years of the town's socioeconomic history with its cultural memory. The first comprehensive study of this city under Habsburg-Austrian rule, Börries Kuzmany advises against reading urban history solely through the national lens. Besides exploring Brody's extraordinary ethno-confessional structure—Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians—Kuzmany examines the interrelation between the city's geographical location at the imperial border, its standing as a key commercial hub in East-Central Europe, and its position as a major springboard for the dissemination of the Haskalah in Galicia and the Russian Empire. After delving into the contradictory perceptions of Brody in travelogues, fiction and memory books, Kuzmany uses contemporary and historical photographs to provide an illustrated walking tour of this now Ukrainian town.

This article presents and analyses legal acts that influenced the situation of Jews in
Galicia and shaped the local co-existence of Jewish communities and municipalities. It
concentrates on subsidies provided to Jewish charities and welfare institutions by municipal
funds. The subsidizing policy of Krakow is compared with that of Lwów.

The article discusses the process of the introduction in Galicia of a new law regulating the relations between Jewish communities and the authorities of the territorial administration. Unlike in the Galician provinces, where the Josephine patent of 1789 continued to be applied, certain Jewish communities in the cities here had developed new statutes previously, leading to partial changes in the elections for community councils. The first was the Krakow community (1870), whose Orthodox rabbi Szymon Schreiber (Sofer) attempted to withdraw the implemented changes, designing his own version of the new statutes (1882). The struggle over the form of the new law ultimately culminated with the Viennese government’s issue of relevant regulations in 1890.

The article deals with an issue not studied so far, in the subject literature mentioned only from a general or fragmentary point of view. On the example of the Kolbuszowa estate the article presents the forms of easement rights which originated from the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and were based on commonly accepted norms or unilateral acts. After 1772 the Austrians decided to keep the norms, which was most often accented in the socalled urbarial descriptions from 1789. Prior to economic reforms in Galicia easement rights were a source of numerous social antagonisms, as shown on the example of the conflict between Jerzy Tyszkiewicz and the Kolbuszowa townsmen, described in the article. The material content of the article mentions the issue of conflicts upon easement rights after the 1848 reforms. Lack of an immediate legal regulation of the easement rights for a long time as well as the process of their regulation and purchase led to mass disputes, particularly between the village and the manor. Complicated relations between the villagers and the Ruckis and Tyszkiewiczs as well as the disputes among the municipalities, presented in the article, are a by-the-book example of the real problem concerning the whole Galicia, which in some cases took decades to solve.

Kozińska-Witt, Hanna: Kraków Municipality and Jewish Denomination Church : Provisional Municipal Statute for the Royal Capital Kraków (1866) and its Effect The authoress describes and analyzes the implementation of the legal equality in the Municipal statute of the Galician statutory city of Kraków. The study focuses in detail on the sixth section of the Provisional Municipal Statute for the City of Kraków (1866), which regulated the approach of the municipality to the Jewish community, whereas above all those circumstances are of interest, which could possibly affect the content of the section. The Section VI of the Municipal statute of Kraków is compared with the coessential section of the Statute of Lviv (1870). Especially two aspects are pointed out: the fixation of the subsidization of the Jewish institutions and the establishment of the municipal council, which should minister the affairs of the Jewish inhabitants of the city and maintain contact of the municipality to the Jewish community. The authoress takes the view, that by virtue of the paragraphs of the section VI both the legal equality was introduced and the social status quo was preserved.

Galicia was called by its 19th-century contemporaries 'an India of Europe' as it was the poorest province of the Habsburg Empire. This paper presents a global history of ideas and people that connects India's colonial experience with Eastern Europe. Although different in size, both countries were ruled by the imperial centres that considered them as 'backward' and in a need of the 'civilizing mission'. Vienna German-speaking centre stigmatized Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Galicia periphery as 'barbaric East'. My aim is to show how some ideas of 'development', 'civilization' and 'barbarity' produced by the British to India were transferred and appropriated into Galicia. I will critically examine those ideas through the postcolonial prism. In this regard, I will demonstrate a Galician-Indian parallel in the biography and work of Stanisław Szczepanowski who held an ambivalent position that linked British colonial experience in India with attempts to 'civilize' Galicia.

The article discusses the tendencies of the few works addressing the subject of the activity of Jews in the municipal self-government bodies in the Galicia period. The author explains unpopularity of this subject-matter pointing to the secondary role of self-government as well as the popularity of the culturalistic approach. Quoting the example of the work by Andrzej Zbikowski on the Cracow Jewish community the author indicates potential points of interface between both self-government bodies: the municipal and the confessional one - and suggests the necessity of re-examining certain issues, e.g. the activities of the orthodox self-government officials, the modernization preferences of the self-government, or  the impact the politization of Catholicism had on the communal politics in the late 19th century.

The theme of the paper is the tension in the inter-relations between national culture and life as led in the municipalities. This issue is examined, taking the presentation of the city Cracow at the General Provincial Exhibition of 1894 as an example, analysing both national rhetoric and local government in practice. Particular attention is paid to the efforts of the Cracow municipal administration to present a city dedicated to preserving tradition as a modern living space. The analysis of municipal presentation will be supplemented by an examination of the ceremonies which accompanied the Exhibition (visit of the Crown Prince) and events (meeting of the Municipal Conference). In the final section the author endeavours to assess the significance of the Exhibition for the process of modernisation in Galicia. The paper closes with a brief comparison with the “Exhibition of Municipalities”, during the 1929 General Provincial Exhibition held in Posen, in which the essential differences between the Lemberg and the Posen presentations with regard to the sense of national belonging and the level of civilisation are brought to light.

Dieser Beitrag kann vom Nutzer zu eigenen nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken heruntergeladen und/oder ausgedruckt werden. Darüber hinaus gehende Nutzungen sind ohne weitere Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber nur im Rahmen der gesetzlichen Schrankenbestimmungen (§ § 44a-63a UrhG) zulässig.

Ukrainian translation of "Ukrainian Popular Science in Habsburg Galicia, 1900-14" by Diana Pavlys'ko

Уцій  статті викладено  хронологічну  послідовність ключових моментів  розвитку  ідеї«популярної  науки»в  українському  академічному дискурсізгідно зіснуючимипідходамидо «національної науки» (як «власне науки»).Зокрема,  зроблено особливий  акцент  на  введенні  регулярних наукових  лекцій  для громадськості  Габсбурзької  Галичини  на  початку  ХХстоліття.  Наукове  товариствоімені  Шевченка(НТШ)було  на  той  час основноюасоціацією науковцівв Україні. НТШ, в якому працювало більшість чоловіків, і яке все більше займалось вивченням українознавства, приділяло мало уваги популяризації наукових досліджень.У відповідь на  створення НТШбуло сформовано також і Товариство українських наукових викладів ім.Петра  Могили(ТУНВ  ім.  П.Могили). Його  метою  було  поглибленняобізнаностігромадськості  про  наукову  роботу,  і  тому  його  члени  почали організовувати регулярні публічні лекції по всій Галичині між 1909 і 1914 роками. У цій статті проаналізовано популяризацію науки, що пропагувалася ТУНВ ім. П.Могили, і досліджено коло слухачівлекцій з урахуванням їхнього місцяпроживання, гендерної приналежності та відповідних інтересів.