Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

Galicia and Bukovina were strategically important border provinces of the Hapsburg Empire, constituting its extreme eastern frontier abutting the realm of the Russian czar as well as Prussia (subsequently the Deutsche Reich), and later as an internal border dividing the Cisleithanian (Austrian) and Transleithanian (Hungarian) halves of the empire. Galicia became part of the Habsburg-Monarchy in 1772 as a result of the partition of Poland, and in 1775 Vienna could add the former Turkish-ruled region of Bukovina to the new province — the "Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria" as it was officially called. Until 1786, the region of Bukovina was under military rule; from 1786 to 1849, it was a county of Galicia; in 1850, its status changed to a that of a separate 'crown-land.' Although the two provinces were located in the extreme east of the Monarchy and a 'colonial setting' was characteristic for both of them, the Jewries in Galicia and Bukovina developed in two different directions. The differences will be indicated by language (language of everyday use), mentality and culture in the second half of the 19th century and the 20th century up to the interwar period. After 1918, Lemberg and East Galicia became part of Poland. Czernowitz and Bukovina were governed by Romania and finally partitioned between Romania and the Soviet Union. Following the breakdown of the USSR, Northern Bukovina including Czernowitz became part of the Ukraine. Galicia came under Soviet rule in 1939 and was taken by the Germans in 1941 (Generalgouvernement, District of Galicia). After liberation from Nazi rule in 1944, East Galicia and Lemberg were absorbed by the Soviet Union. This region is now part of the Ukrainian state.

Can the concept of colonialism be applied to Galicia and Bukovina? Certainly not in the classic sense, although, in 18th century Vienna, Austrian interests in Galicia were dominated by 'colonization.' The concept of 'internal colonialism,' however, can be applied quite properly to Galicia and Bukovina. This term was originally coined to describe the dependency of underdeveloped regions of the Third World following their formal political independence. Such a territory in an underdeveloped region is certainly not a colony in a political-administrative sense, though it functions as one in its economic relationship to a center within a national framework. In the following discussion, this concept will be applied to developed or developing industrial nations: namely, to dependent development and growing economic inequality of peripheral regions in contrast to a dominant economic center.. Thereafter, the concept of 'internal colonialism' will also be applied to cultural relations, an aspect which can be illustrated with particular effectiveness in the context of this paper.

"If Lemberg has enjoyed times of prosperity and well-being," ran the description in a widely-read travel guide published at the turn of the century, "then these were also times of affluence and good fortune for the Empire. But when troubled times came for the Empire, then Lemberg was the first gate at which the foe came knocking. If the Empire was a foremost bulwark of western culture and values, then Lemberg was its most advanced bastion which had to absorb and withstand the initial impact of the wild, hostile hordes. And a mighty defense it was against the raging turbulence of the east, though at the same time a bridge linking Europe and the Orient...." The affiliation with 'western culture' can be viewed as a paradigmatic principle of a segment of the Jewish population of Galicia, and Lemberg in particular, a claim which at least partially characterized the behavior of this group over a period of decades. In Galicia as well as in Lemberg over the entire period under consideration here, a considerable portion of the Jewish population remained true to Orthodoxy and under the sway of Chassidism. Aside from this, however, we can distinguish three chief phases in the history of Jewish acculturation within the geographical area of Galicia :

The Austrian occupation and settlement began with 'colonization' in the truest sense of the word. The first point on the Austrian agenda was to precisely survey and map its newest possession; more than a thousand surveyors, cartographers and their assistants were involved in this effort in Galicia during this period. Even as early as the 18th century, several measures were put in place directed toward the emancipation of and the provision of equal rights for Galicia's Jewish population and it was the 'policies of tolerance' followed by Kaiser Joseph II during the 1780s which encouraged a pro-Austrian attitude on the part of the majority of the Jews. In 1788, regulations allowing for the enlistment of Jews into military service were put in force in Galicia. This form of integration was then accepted by both sides — the military and the Jews. Thus, an officer stationed in Galicia wrote in his report dated 1788: "We have just been assigned 18 Hebrews who were recently drafted as surveyors’ assistants. These are nice-looking young men, conducting themselves well and, since they speak German, are coming along better than the Poles. They have shaved off their beards. They have been granted permission...to celebrate Shabbes....After the rabbis had explained everything clearly to them and impressed them with the fact that a lot of other boys were in the same position they are, they were soon able to regain their good spirits and are now shaping up quite nicely, as if they had already been soldiers for years." The Polish writer Stanislaw Wasylewski, who reported on the Austrian occupation with deep resentment, commented in a derogatory way on the subject of collaboration during the first decades: "The Jews were won with privileges...the nobility with titles."

A trend was totally clear in this phase of development: those Jews for whom 'out of the ghetto' was the solution, whose goal was the modernization of the Jewish sphere of life in Galicia and who included above all the middle classes, threw in their lot with the Austrian colonializing elites of the Hapsburg State and strove to assume a German-Austrian identity at this time. There were two reasons explaining the strong influence exerted by German Kultur. First, forces advancing the cause of the modern reform of Judaism emerged almost exclusively from those circles of educated Jews for whom German was the primary language of culture. Second, the vast majority of all Galician Jews spoke Yiddish, which was at that time considered a German dialect to which German would presumably provide a natural correspondence as a literary language. In the 1820s and 1830s, Jewish children in Galicia increasingly attended German elementary schools and German high schools, and many began studying at the university level. Over the course of the 1830s, Jewish university graduates, for the most part physicians and lawyers, began to appear in Lemberg and other Galician towns. It was precisely in this group of educated Jews that a process of cultural convergence could be especially clearly recognized. "One secretly read Schiller and Lessing, hidden behind Talmud folios," wrote the Jewish-Galician historian Majer Balaban." The reform synagogue erected in Lemberg in 1846 bore the name "Deutsch-Israelitisches Bethaus" (German-Israelite House of Prayer). Following the suppression of the Revolution of 1848, which also displayed Polish nationalist traits in Galicia, the Jewish communities there were the first to pay homage to the young Hapsburg, Franz Joseph — by no means a matter to be completely taken for granted, since Jewish intellectuals had been among the leading forces of revolution in Vienna. Until the 1860s, thousands of Jewish children attended Jewish-German elementary schools.

For example, in his description of the Jewish population as the author of the volume on Galicia in the deluxe commemorative series "The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures" issued on the occasion of the 50-year jubilee of the reign of Kaiser Franz Joseph, Leo Herzberg-Fränkl summarized the period from the 1840s to the 1860s as follows: "Nowhere are there so many autodidacts to be found as among this particular group of Polish Jews...Naturally, it is by no means a systematic, scholarly body of knowledge that these....people acquire; hardly able to read, they take up Schiller and are delighted by his melodious pathos, or study the philosophical writings of Mendelsohn or even Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason.' But the sons of these men are already permitted to attend school and enjoy proper instruction. The first book for which an autodidact reaches is, without exception, a German one because his Jewish-German idiom certainly makes this language more accessible to him; furthermore, for him, German embodies everything European — culture, art and progress."

This trend towards Germanization came to an end in the late 1860s, as new reforms came into force establishing Galicia's new autonomous status within the Hapsburg Monarchy. From this point on, it was above all Poles who assumed the key positions in the provincial government ó the educational and judicial systems were oriented toward Polish traditions and culture, and the Polish nobility could strengthen its position of power. This process also had effects upon linguistic hegemony. In 1871, the Polonization of the University of Lemberg was completed; in 1872, the German-language theater Deutsche Schaubühne was forced to close its doors. This trend toward Polonization was likewise evident within the Jewish population. The German-Jewish poet Alfred Nossig provides a literary illustration in this connection: In his 1892 novel 'Prophet Johannes,' published in Lemberg and set there in the year 1880, the rather biographically-drawn protagonist depicts a group strolling along the Lemberg Promenade: the adults walk at the head of the group, among them the narrator who "hears only chitchat in German all around him." The young people follow slightly behind, "conversing among themselves in splendid Polish."

Leo Herzberg-Fränkl maintains that, in the 1880s and 1890s, it was "the younger generation, particularly in the larger cities, which first began to assimilate Polish culture, though without completely distancing themselves from German language and education." This generalization is consistent with figures from the University of Lemberg. At the School of Law, the percentage of Jewish students dropped by about two-thirds from 1863/64 (instruction in German) to 1873/74 (Polish), at which point it slowly began to climb again, though it was only in 1893/94 that the percentage again equaled that of the 1860s. In the Department of Philosophy as well, it was not until the 1890s that a higher proportion of Jewish students was reached. In 1880 in Lemberg — the survey asked only for the respondent's language of everyday use — 8.3 % of the local population spoke German; by 1910, the figure had sunk to 2.8 %. Even taking into account the persistent underreporting of minority groups in national censuses, the proportion of Galician Jews who specified German as their language of everyday use in 1910 was a mere 2.9%. In contrast, 92.7 % of Galician Jews specified Polish as their language of everyday use. The "Deutsch-Israelitisches Bethaus" received a new Polish name after the turn of the century. The percentage of Jews who gave German as their language of everyday use dropped particularly in the decade 1900 - 1910; according to a survey taken at the turn of the century in which respondents could name only one language, this group had still made up 15.3% of the total. In spite of the fact that enormous pressure was frequently placed upon Jews to report Polish to the census takers, we can nevertheless work under the assumption that there was a massive tendency towards Polonization among Galician Jews.

The socialist movement opened a specific way to Polonization in the second half of the 1880s. The Polish socialists advocated equal rights for Jews and called for their linguistic and cultural assimilation. Like most European socialists, they also regarded the Jewish religion as a collection of superstitions and a symptom of backwardness. Their tolerance was accorded to Jews as individuals but not to Judaism. Jewish socialists in Galicia were in some cases themselves radical proponents of Polonization — Hermann Diamand, one of the movement's leaders in Lemberg, was a prominent example. Zionistic points of view had also become widespread beginning in the 1880s within a small circle of Jewish socialist intellectuals and 'progressive' thinkers. The first Zionist newspaper in Lemberg was published in Polish. Majer Balaban and the young Martin Buber are examples of Zionists who tended to assimilate Polish culture during this phase. Buber was born in Vienna and then raised by his grandfather in Lemberg where he attended the Polish high school; it was during this time that he attempted to translate Friedrich Nietzsche into Polish.

In considering data available regarding the social and economic situation of the Jewish population and comparing it with that of the non-Jewish population, it becomes clear that these statistics at least do not contradict the hypothesis which has been advanced thus far. The 1910 census offers the opportunity for a comparison of this kind. Here, it is evident that, on the level of aggregate data, there were doubtlessly differences in social stratification between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Self-employment was much higher than average among Jews. It is interesting to note, however, that laborers were not underrepresented, a fact that becomes clear upon comparison with, for instance, data from Vienna. Calculating an Index of Disparity (analogous to the Index of Dissimilarity) on the basis of social-statistical difference, the value for Galicia comes to 26.7 ( = Difference / 2 ); this means that 26.7% of the Jewish or non-Jewish population would have had to change professions in order to display the same distribution percentages as the other group. The corresponding Disparity Index calculated for Vienna in 1910 is clearly higher: 35.0. The value for Galicia lies closer to that of Budapest (23.4), a city well-known for its social climate favoring integration in the years before the outbreak of World War I.

The differences become even clearer in the case of the distribution of Jews and non-Jews according to employment by economic sector, whereby the Index of Disparity calculated for 1910 came to 70.7. This can be traced back to the enormous overrepresentation of the non-Jewish workforce in agriculture where Jews were strongly underrepresented, whereas Jews were over-represented in commerce and transportation. Nevertheless, in Galicia we find a broad class of low-income Jews comprised of approximately 80,000 laborers (day laborers and apprentices) and 80,000 unskilled hands. This demonstrates the existence of a large underclass (about 50%) of the population. The Jewish population thus by no means constituted a small economic elite. For this reason, the chances of integration by means of Polonization do not appear completely unrealistic at this point in time. In any case, a degree of social inequality dividing Jews and non-Jews, such as that which then existed in Vienna or Czernowitz (Bukovina), did not seem to be present.

Table 1: Occupational Breakdown of the Jewish and non-Jewish Workforce, Galicia , 1910

Source: Österreichische Statistik, Neue Folge, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Vienna, 1916), p. 225.

Table 2: Jewish and non-Jewish Population by Economic Sector, Galicia , 1910

Source: Österreichische Statistik, Neue Folge, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Vienna, 1916), p. 225.

In view of the Polish hegemony, those who viewed the strong Polonization with skepticism had not many opportunities to form alternative cultures or countercultures. After all, massive anti-Semitism was highly prevalent among non-Jewish elites. Some pogroms took place in West Galician cities in 1898 and 1903 and there arose a powerful ´League for the Polonization of Our Cities,´ which tried to organize a boycott of Jewish businessmen and to keep Jews out of certain professions.

One alternative to Polonization was migration. Many emigrated to North America, motivated above all by economic factors: of 281,150 Jewish emigrants during the period 1881-1910, 85% came from Galicia. Decade after decade beginning in the 1870s, 20,000-30,000 migrated to Vienna and Lower Austria as well. The proportion of Galicians among the Jews of Vienna rose continuously. From approximately 11% in 1880, this figure rose to about 20% by the outbreak of World War I. In 1910, 42,695 individuals residing in Vienna had been born in Galicia; of whom not all were Jews. As to their motives, it may be assumed that the cultural element played a role alongside many other motives and there is, in fact, good reason to suspect that other migrational movements, such as the one to the USA and to New York in particular, were more strongly determined by purely economic motives. Following the wave of refugees during the years 1914-1919, the number of Galician Jews in Vienna climbed even further. Those intellectuals and writers who migrated to Vienna such as Joseph Roth or Manes Sperber subsequently turned completely to the German language. For this group, the question of hegemonies had been decided once and for all by means of migration.

The tendency toward Polonization beginning in the late 1860s and continuing up until the outbreak of World War I is uncontested. In concrete terms, however, this process played itself out in a much more complex and contradictory fashion than the 'smooth' trend would suggest. Thus, in the 1860s, Moritz/Maurycy Rappoport, an influential representative of the Jewish Community, composed a poem which can be regarded as a Polish Nationalist ode. Indeed, the original version had been written in German, the language Rappoport preferred to use since his mastery of Polish was far from perfect.

"From Orient, the Fantasy,

In the breast, a Slavic fire,

How my young soul was inflamed,

Songs flowed from the golden lyre,

How melancholy filled my heart

From Sarmatians' bitter wails,

How my soul rose heavenward

At my father's wondrous tales,

How lustrous in the twilight's gleam

Ancient ruins in pallid glow;

To be a Pole as well as Jew,

Is the double crown of woe...."

Moritz/Maurycy Rappoport is by no means an isolated instance. The idea of the ethnically and linguistically homogenous national state, the idea of the 19th century, contradicted the fundamental principle of the Hapsburg Dynasty and the imperial-dynastic conception. In Austria, a state comprised of numerous nationalities, this led to deep-seated conflicts which ultimately contributed decisively to the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire. Neither the spirit of the age nor individual sensibilities admitted multiple loyalties; instead, they steered a course in the direction of either/or. Contradictions emerged in great numbers and often in one and the same person. Jewish intellectuals often ran the danger of getting caught in the crossfire between nationalist fronts. Particularly in regions such as Bohemia, Moravia and Galicia, anti-Semitic elements among the 'smaller' national groups (Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians) employed as their leading anti-Jewish argument the fact that the Jews regarded themselves as Germans and, since they were on the side of the German-speakers, were a threat to the nationalist movements in their own countries, or that they were indeed not "Germans" but rather loyal Hapsburg subjects devoid of nationalist loyalties. Those confronted by this were placed under massive pressure to conform, not only in the 1860s and 1870s but in later decades as well.

A second example, which can serve to document the contradictory nature of developments as well as the emergence of countertendencies, is the process leading to the erection of a new school in Brody, a city 70 km from Lemberg in East Galicia close to the Russian border. In 1880, Brody had 20,000 inhabitants of whom 76.3% were Jews, and thus displayed the highest proportion of Jewish population of all Galician cities. Of the three public elementary schools in Brody at that time, one offered instruction in German and two in Polish. The School Board of the Province of Galicia then approved the construction of two additional elementary schools but rejected the demand of the Brody municipal authorities that the language of instruction in both of them be German rather than Polish. As a consequence, the city filed a complaint in 1880 with the k.k. Reichsgericht (Royal Supreme Court) in Vienna. Brody argued its case as follows: "Four fifths of the population profess the Mosaic Confession; at the same time, because they employ the German language as their mother tongue, they consider themselves to be members of the German nationality." They regarded the decision of the provincial school board as a violation of their national rights. The court found in favor of the City of Brody, allowing that German schools might be built in Galicia even in the year 1880. Brody also had a German high school, which would later become a national bone of contention reaching as far as the Imperial Parliament. Along with anti-Semitism, this affair once again had to do with the massive pressure of Polonization exerted upon the Jewish students at this school.

When the Hapsburg Empire collapsed in November 1918, fighting between Polish and Ukrainian troops began immediately. The Jewish population claimed to be neutral during this period of conflict. After the end of the fighting and as a result of the Polish victory, some of the Polish soldiers and the civilian population started a pogrom against the Jewish inhabitants. Polish soldiers maintained that the Jews had sympathized with the Ukrainian position during the conflicts. Plundering and insults were the results, and many Jewish houses were set on fire. According to Polish statistics which perhaps underestimate the extent of the progrom, 72 persons were killed during these days (November 22 - 23), 433 Jews were injured, 38 houses were burned down. During the whole period of this military operation (November 1 - 24, 1918) there were said to have been 262 Jewish victims killed in connection with the conflicts following the breakdown of the Astro- Hungarian Monarchy. Jewish authors said that these figures clearly underestimate the true extent of the Lemberg pogrom. These events gained international recognition, newspapers in the United States, Great Britain and France reported them, diplomatic interventions followed.

After the clarification of the political situation in Lemberg, Polish was solidly established as the language of political power and culture. Lemberg, now known as Lwów, became the capital of Malopolska (Little Poland), and the name Galicia was no longer used. On the linguistic level, Polish influence was amplified even further. The now mandatory use of the Polish language in government, the educational system and the military furthered this development. Throughout Poland in 1925-26, the network of minority schools which had existed until then was replaced by institutions of learning marked by a Polish nationalist character. From this time forth, a strict policy of Polonization was pursued. A number of Jewish intellectuals resettled in other parts of Poland: the historian Majer Balaban as well as writers Jozef Wittlin, Filip Friedmann and Raphael Mahler moved to Warsaw or to Lodz. A segment of the assimilated Jews underwent conversion, thus completing the final step to full assimilation and Polonization.

If we now compare Lemberg with Czernowitz during this phase, we notice the surprising fact that, with respect to culture and identity, out-of-the-way Czernowitz presented a much more 'western' image than Lemberg which actually lies 300 km further to the northwest. In Czernowitz, the economic and cultural elites, including many Jewish citizens among them, continued even into the 1920s to cast their eyes toward Vienna and could thus write a new chapter of their quasi-colonial history; in Lemberg, on the other hand, the new Polish state and the traditional Polish elites permitted only the path to linguistic Polonization to remain open. The 1931 census results showed that the proportion of German speakers among Lemberg's 99,600 Jews (35.1% of the population ) was under 1%. A quite significant German-language literary output and cultural scene casts some doubt upon this figure. It is also interesting to note that there was an increasing concentration and urbanization of the Jewish population in the highly tense atmosphere of the interwar period. The pace at which urbanization took place was far higher among the Jewish population than among non-Jews. This can be concretely illustrated using the example of Lemberg: in 1910, 6.6% of all Jews in the Crown Land of Galicia lived in Lemberg, whereas in 1931, 12.6% of the Jews living in the administrative districts corresponding to the former Galicia lived in Lemberg/Lwów.

As to the question of the identity of the Jews of Lemberg and Galicia, Jewish national consciousness and self-confidence, had gained increasing influence. This had its roots in the highly problematic relations between Jews and Poles, whose strongest manifestation was the Lemberg pogrom. And this had not been the end of efforts undertaken against Jewish citizens. In the face of this massive anti-Semitism with which the Galician Jews in the Polish state were confronted, ranging from the introduction of restrictive university admissions policies aimed particularly at Jews all the way to the staging of pogroms, a majority of Jews oriented themselves toward those outlooks in which their own national identity played an increasingly prominent role. To a certain extent, however, religious orthodoxy and Chassidism along with the rejection of Zionism continued to dominate rural Jewish communities. This can also be seen in the results of the 1921 Polish census, which polled not only religious confession but also affiliation with a 'Jewish nationality.' In Lemberg/Lwów 76,783 individuals professed a Jewish religious affiliation, of whom an overwhelming majority (60,417 persons, representing 78.7% of the total) acknowledged a Jewish nationality as well. The contrast to the Jewish communities in the small towns and outlying villages in the District of Lemberg/ Lwów is striking indeed: out of 11,568 Jews professing no religious affiliation, a mere 5,440 (47%) acknowledged a Jewish nationality.

In summary, with respect to the so-called 'post-colonial setting' in the sense of the usage of the concept 'colonial' as previously defined to refer to 'internal colonialism,' the following points can be maintained, whereby it should be kept in mind that the first phase of this setting can be dated to the last two or three decades of the Hapsburg Monarchy whereas the definitive implementation of these principles occurred during the time of the Polish Second Republic: 1) the Jewish minority as a former segment of the German-speaking minority reacted to the new situation by gradually adopting the new hegemonial language and the new hegemonial culture; 2) emigration by those who rejected the new hegemonial language and culture; 3) intensified concentration of the minority in urban centers (centralization); 4) as a specific reaction of the Jewish minority, the increasing redefinition of the group in the sense of its own individual national self-conception. On one hand, in Lemberg, as a consequence of growing anti-Semitism and massive Polonization the broad acceptance accorded this form of self-definition was particularly rapid and long-lasting; on the other hand, Zionist groups gained more and more political influence in the Jewish communities.

When the Austrians assumed dominion over Bukovina, it was a territory that had been depopulated by war and its future capital Czernowitz was an insignificant backwater. The new rulers were by no means favorably disposed to Jews, keeping them in line rather by means of expulsions. It was only in the wake of the annexation to Galicia in 1785 with the implementation of Joseph II's policies of tolerance that the Jews experienced some relief. In the following section, we will concentrate on the historical phase after 1849 during which Bukovina was a separate crown land.

Bukovina comprised a mere 10,500 km2. Prior to World War I, it bordered on Romania and Russia, as well as on the Hungarian half of the Hapsburg Empire. Since it was a land in which the coexistence of various ethnic groups unfolded in a seemingly peaceful manner, and since it is a land that no longer exists today but has rather become a synonym for wasted chances for the peaceful coexistence of different peoples in one land, various mythologies have been retrospectively woven around this part of Eastern Europe. For example, it has been labeled as "Europa Minor" and has been characterized as a "microcosm" of the Monarchy, the Hapsburg Empire in miniature — a juxtaposition of various ethnic and religious groups. During the final decades of the Hapsburg Monarchy, the Jews of Bukovina were an important pillar supporting the "German" character of Bukovina.

Karl Emil Franzos was born in the Eastern Galician town of Czortków in 1848. His grandfather and father were followers of the Enlightenment and utterly rejected Orthodoxy and Chassidism. Religion retained little significance in his family, whereas the feeling of attachment to German Kultur was paramount: "The German national feeling that comes over me, which I have also actively pursued my entire life, has been instilled in me since my early childhood. When I was just a lad, my father said to me: 'Your nationality is not Polish, not Ruthenian, nor Jewish — you are a German.' But just as often, he said to me: 'As to your religion, you are a Jew.'"

Raised as a "German by choice" and a "Jew by obligation," Franzos and his family moved to Czernowitz following the death of his father in 1859 and he attended high school there as had been specified in his father's will. The city and the school offered an environment for upbringing and education in which he felt at home: "Here, I was no longer an outsider, but rather a German among Germans."

The results of the Austrian censuses begun in 1880 provide an idea of the relative dimensions of the various ethnic groups based upon statistics gathered regarding language of everyday use: to the north along the border to Galicia, the demographically largest linguistic group, the Ruthenians, dominated; the Romanians were strongest in the south. The German- speakers were the third most populous group. Then, far behind, came the smaller linguistic groups, the Poles and "Magyars."

Table 3: Language of Everyday Use in Bukovina 1880-1910, Resident Population Possessing Austrian Citizenship

Source: Emil Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation (Vienna-Cologne-Graz, 1982), p. 449; Enciclopedia Romaniei, Vol. 1 (Bucharest, 1938), p. 152.

Whereas only one or two languages were dominant in most of the other crown lands, Bukovina as an administrative district with three relevant linguistic groups personified a multicultural ethnic mixture. Upon closer examination of the situation in Czernowitz, it becomes evident that the linguistic mix there included four relevant groups: German speakers dominated with nearly half of the total, followed by the most widespread regional languages, Ruthenian and Romanian, and thereafter the Polish language group, which displayed an unusually high share in comparison to the rest of the province — more than a third of all Polish-speakers in Bukovina lived in Czernowitz.

Table 4: Population Possessing Austrian Citizenship According to Language of Everyday Use, 1910,

Source: Die Ergebnisse der Volks- und Viehzählung vom 31. Dezember 1910 im Herzogtume Bukowina nach den Angaben der k.k. statistischen Zentral-Kommission in Wien, Mitteilungen des statistischen Landesamtes des Herzogtums Bukowina, Vol. 17 (Czernowitz, 1913), pp. 54 f., 80 f.

These statistics of language of everyday use were of enormous importance in the multiethnic Hapsburg state since they served as a measure of the "nationalist standard of living" and were incorporated as a standard in a wide variety of legislation. Following the Ausgleich (settlement) with Hungary in 1867, the Hapsburg Monarchy functioned according to the principle of nationality. No longer was German the unifying official language of the state; rather, the languages which were customarily used in individual provinces assumed preeminence in political and administrative dealings. Whereas in Galicia, this development gave the green light to the process of Polonization, German could retain its hegemonial predominance in Bukovina.

We have consciously chosen to use the term "German-speaking" since this linguistic group was divided into two segments: Jews who designated German as their language of everyday use and the so-called speakers of Buchenlanddeutsch who, under Austrian rule, were settled into the easternmost provinces of the Hapsburg Empire. Buchenland was the German name for Bukovina. The principle of nationality which was accepted in the Austrian half of the Empire recognized the Jews only as a religion and not as a nationality. The consequence of this view was that the Yiddish language was not taken into account in censuses since this would have disrupted demographic polling according to the principle of nationality. It was not until the late 19th century and particularly following the turn of the century that the Jewish nationalist and Zionist movements drew attention to this shortcoming and demanded the right to designate Yiddish. The Austrian bureaucracy reacted with repression, punishing those who insisted upon their right to enter Yiddish on official state census forms.

The Jews of Bukovina were a substantial force in support of German since, even in the last census in 1910, 95.6% cited German as their language of everyday use, and 54.4% of all German-speakers were members of the Jewish religious community. How large the proportion of Yiddish-speakers had actually been remains a matter of speculation. The census conducted under the Romanian government in 1930 can provide at best a reference value: according to these results, 75% of the Jews in Bukovina spoke Yiddish. In attempting to apply this figure to prior circumstances under Hapsburg rule, it must be taken into account that intervening events may well have accounted for a large increase after 1918. In the wake of Austria-Hungary's collapse, thousands of Jews had left Bukovina; a disproportionately high number of them were those who felt a close attachment to the sphere of German culture and set off to find a new homeland in Vienna or in Germany. In contrast to Austrian polling, the Romanian statistics were based on mother tongue. Furthermore, a wave of immigration of Yiddish-speaking Jews from the east, above all from Bessarabia, has taken place in the meantime.

The Jewish population of Bukovina was thus by no means as homogenous as the census statistics based upon language of everyday use would suggest. They were also sharply divided in their attitudes toward the Jewish religion and Enlightenment ideas — into "blacks" and "whites" as the reformed Jews put it. These designations, often used by secular Jews, refer to the dark clothing worn by Chassidim, while those with a worldlier orientation indulged in the elegance of fashion. In Sadagura, where the dynasty of Rabbi Israel Friedman resided amid splendor after having fled from Russia in 1842, in Bojan and in the Carpathian Mountains in Wischnitz, where Rabbi Mendel Hager of Kossov settled in 1850, Bukovina was the headquarter of significant Chassidic communities, whose circle of followers extended far beyond the province's borders. The accuracy of the claim that a quarter of all Jews in Bukovina were Chassidim is a matter that has yet to be subjected to more painstaking investigation.

Thus, a significant amendment must be made to the impression left by statistics suggesting that three or four languages dominated among the populations of, respectively, Bukovina and Czernowitz — both figures must be increased by one to include Yiddish. For Czernowitz, this means that German would have to give up a portion of its leading share in favor of Yiddish. The statistics, used to force implementation of proportional national standards, fail to take into account the reality of multilingual life which characterized Bukovina to a very high extent. And this was particularly true for Jews, since both relationships in everyday life as well as matters of business demanded of both sides a knowledge of one another's language.

Nevertheless, the census responses of the Jews of Bukovina were so overwhelming for the German language that the figures are comparable only to those from the dominant German-speaking regions in the western half of the Monarchy. In the following section, we will go into the causal factors to which this development can be traced.

In Bukovina in the final days of the Hapsburg Monarchy, the proportion of Jews in the total population reached 12.9%, the highest figure for any Austrian crown land, followed by Galicia with 10.9%; the proportion for the entire Austrian half of the Empire amounted to a mere 4.6% in 1910. The Jews of Bukovina were thus second only to the Greek Orthodox religious community and were numerically stronger than the Catholics. In Czernowitz, the center of political and cultural affairs, the Jews, considered as a religious group, comprised a third of the population and were thus the largest religious group.

Table 5: Religions in Bukovina and Czernowitz in 1910 and in Bukovina in 1930

* The remaining 0.5% consists of 0.1% Adventists, 0.1% Baptists and other small groups with shares below 0.1%.

Source: Die Ergebnisse der Volks- und Viehzählung vom 31. Dezember 1910 im Herzogtume Bukowina nach den Angaben der k.k. statistischen Zentral-Kommission in Wien, Mitteilungen des statistischen Landesamtes des Herzogtums Bukowina, Vol. 17 (Czernowitz, 1913), pp. 54 f., 80 f.; Enciclopedia Romaniei, Vol. 1 (Bucharest, 1938), p. 154.

But this was not the only factor which characterized this special status. Measured by the prerequisites of a modern industrializing society, a considerable segment of the Jewish population of Bukovina belonged to the social elite. This can be documented through a number of indicators. Bukovina (along with Galicia and Dalmatia) was among the most backward regions of the Austrian half of the Empire; that is to say, they were only in the initial stage of the modernization process. We would like to illustrate this phenomenon as well as the elite status of the Jews using the example of two indicators:

1)Education: In the 1871 school year, only 10.9% of all school-aged children in Bukovina attended a public elementary school. By the outbreak of World War I, however, this deficiency had been remedied. In the 1913/14 school year, a mere 3% of all school-aged children were not receiving instruction, and these were mostly the children of Huzuls (Hootsool) in the remote villages of the Carpathians, the mountain range in the southern and western portions of Bukovina. As a result of this structural weakness in the area of education, illiteracy was still widespread among Romanians (60.39%) and Ruthenians (61.03%) in the Austrian half of the Empire as late as 1910.

With the founding of the University of Czernowitz in 1875, German efforts to achieve social hegemony had created a key bastion in the extreme eastern reaches of the Monarchy, which assumed even greater significance following the Polonization of the University of Lemberg. And the Jews of Bukovina took advantage of the German-language educational opportunities offered there to a far greater extent than any other group. At no other Austrian university did the percentage of Jewish students comprise a higher proportion of the total than in Czernowitz.

Table 6: Enrolled Students by Religion, Colleges/Departments of Austrian Universities (%)

Source: Ernst Pliwa, Österreichs Universitäten 1863/4 - 1902/3. Statistisch-Graphische Studie (Vienna, 1908), p. 28. Statistik der Unterrichtsanstalten in Österreich für das Jahr 1913/ 1914, Österreichische Statistik, NF, Vol 17, No. 3 (Vienna, 1919), pp. 4 f.

Jews were particularly interested in receiving education in German since this seemed to offer the greatest promise for advancement within the Monarchy. This intensive interest in German-language educational opportunities is shown, for example, by the trend in the number of Jewish students attending the German high school in Czernowitz, where Jews ultimately accounted for three quarters of the student body.

Table 7: Jewish Students at the German State High School in Czernowitz

[1909 - Total Number = 1,451 Jews = 40.3%]

Source: Martin Broszat, "Von der Kulturnation zur Volksgruppe. Die nationale Stellung der Juden in der Bukowina im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert", in: Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 200 (Munich, 1965), p. 579.

One indicator for this readiness to participate in the process of modernization, which seemed to be almost an exclusive trait of Jews in Bukovina, is the extraordinarily high proportion of Jewish girls in the middle (high school) level of the educational system in Bukovina in comparison to other crown lands.

Table 8: Attendance at Girls High Schools, 1913/14 School Year

Source: Österreichische Statistik, NF, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Vienna, 1919), p. 52.

Despite the fact that, to a great extent of course, the Jews of Bukovina continued to speak Yiddish, the German language exerted a strong attraction upon the younger generation as a sort of status symbol. Prive Friedjung, a butcher's daughter born in Zadowa in 1902, still recalls this fact: "The children of the Jewish inhabitants attended the German-language school. The mother tongue, Yiddish, was taught and learned through private instruction in the cheder. In school we probably also spoke Yiddish among ourselves, but German as well. Of course we wanted to speak German; after all, it was 'finer.' The German-speakers were the 'better people'." Here as well, we can see the hegemonial forces at work, implemented by means of the educational system.

2) Social Stratification: The "elite thesis" can also be observed from a second indicator — occupational structure of the population of Bukovina. Among members of Bukovina's two largest linguistic groups, the Ruthenians and the Romanians, the agricultural sector was dominant, accounting for nearly 90% of each group!

Table 9: Employed Persons in Bukovina by Economic Sector, 1910

* Calculated according to census data specifying language of everyday use, according to which 95.6% of all Jews specified German. The corresponding portion of "German-speaking Jews" was in each case analogously subtracted from those listed under "German."

Source: Österreichische Statistik, NF, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Vienna, 1916), pp. 226 f.

However, after 1860, when it was legally permitted for Jews to own land, they also played an important role in agriculture and forestry. In the law regulating elections for the provincial legislature in Bukovina, which took effect following the so-called Ausgleich in 1911 and were set up according to complicated national and social criteria, Jewish candidates were automatically awarded two legislative seats representing the electoral class of large landowners.

Although considerable numbers of Jews in Bukovina as well as in Galicia were involved in agriculture, we would like to focus our attention on those sectors which were essential to the process of modernization of the economy. In trade and transportation, Jews made up almost two thirds of all employed persons, and the proportion in trade would be even higher if the figure had been separated from that for transportation. In industry and crafts, Jews comprised almost a third of the workforce and were, along with the Germans, the most numerous and most important group.

The Disparity Index of 70.6 between Jews and non-Jews with regard to economic classes was nearly the same as that in Galicia and thus extraordinarily high. This was above all attributable to the dominance of the agricultural sector by the non-Jewish workforce. Applied to occupational groups, the Disparity Index, with a value of 39.1, was higher than in Galicia and the Austrian half of the Empire as a whole.

Table 10: Employed Persons in Bukovina According to Occupational Class, 1910

Source: Österreichische Statistik, NF, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Vienna, 1916), pp. 226 f.

The society of Bukovina continued to be based upon the division of labor by ethnic classes; that is to say, the separation of social functions according to ethnicity. Since social mobility had not yet begun to take effect within the large groups of Romanians and Ruthenians, the process of modernization had not yet created the potential for a climate of tension among the various ethnic groups.

This elite position can be further illustrated by a few examples, such as one taken from the previously mentioned educational sector: of the 44 faculty chairmen elected at the University of Czernowitz between 1875 and 1919, there were 22 Germans, 11 Romanians, nine Jews and two Ukrainians. This elite position is also evident in the sphere of politics. Since the Jewish city council members controlled approximately 20 of the 50 seats in that body, they twice succeeded in advancing a member of their ranks to the position of mayor of the capital city: Dr. Edmund Reiss (1905-1908) and Dr. Salo Weisselberger (1913-1914) who, as a result of his conduct during the period of Russian occupation during World War I, was subsequently raised to the nobility. Moreover, according to figures cited by Benno Straucher, Jews paid more than 75% of all taxes in the City of Czernowitz and almost half of all direct taxes in Bukovina.

It would, of course, be a highly incomplete picture of Jewish society in Bukovina to portray their position as limited to the elite. Their social composition was quite heterogeneous — reminiscences recall all too often only the laborers, innkeepers, artisans and those living on the verge of poverty. What we have attempted to show here is that the Jews in Bukovina constituted a segment of the social elite and played a significant role especially in the — admittedly not very highly developed — modern sectors of the economy. Since, in contrast to the Polish large land owners in Galicia, there was no traditionally established, non-German elite to speak of in Bukovina and the hegemonial powers of German-Austrian domination in the areas of education and administration still played a leading role, the Jews of Bukovina oriented themselves in this direction. The positions of power of the two large national groups, the Romanians and the Ruthenians, were still too weak to cause a shift in this orientation on the part of the Jews. In their situation as a people living in a Diaspora, the Jews were forced to rely on the protection of the hegemonial powers and this seemed, as before, to emanate from Vienna.

"Into the fourth decade of the 19th century, the Chassidim had the upper hand. It was only after 1848, as freedom spread across the land, that their influence began to recede and Jewish lifestyle outwardly adapted itself to the spirit of the age, such as moving out of the Jewish Quarter, European clothing, German as the language of everyday use and a diminishment in the observance of all the traditional commandments ..." Much later than in Central Europe, namely in the aftermath of 1848, the ideas of the Enlightenment found great resonance among the Jews of Bukovina, and they saw their future political course in the Liberalism of the Germans, whom they seemingly had to thank for their newly-acquired rights. The attractiveness of the Germans did not stop short of religious life: in 1855, the German-Israelite School was opened and, from 1872 on, sermons in the main Czernowitz synagogue were preached in German.

This also marked the beginning of the phase in which the German hegemonial culture set up institutions in order to solidly establish its influence. These were primarily institutions of Kultur and education such as the university and the new municipal theater. German influence was enormous, particularly in the school system, since Yiddish, the actual language of most of the Jews of Bukovina, was disavowed and ignored while the other languages of the province exerted only a modest attraction upon Jewish students.

The previously cited quote from Karl Emil Franzos could speak for an entire generation of enlightened and/or already secularized Jews who wished to give up their old ways and fully assimilate into German-Austrian society. The Jewish religion seemed to be a matter of little importance; above all, one was conscious of being a citizen and, after 1867, a citizen with equal rights. As was also true in the west of the Monarchy in the 1860s, Germans and Jews worked closely together in Bukovina. For example, in 1861 in the elections for the first session of the provincial legislature in Bukovina, the Jewish vice-mayor of Czernowitz, the German-Liberal Dr. Josef Fechner, was elected together with the Germans. The historian Martin Broszat, however, came to the conclusion that this was not a matter of adaptation toward the culture of the Germans of Bukovina, since, with respect to social or civilizational level, this group was by no means superior to the Jews. This process of acculturation was much more strongly oriented towards "Kulturdeutschtum" as this was hegemonially transmitted by the Austrian state through its government officials, army officers and teachers.

Although the process of separation of this German-Jewish symbiosis did not proceed as brutally as it did in regions of the Monarchy which were poisoned by anti-Semitism, segregation according to so-called nationalities did not stop short of Bukovina. Here, at the very latest, the meager extent to which the provisions of law were anchored in the attitudes of citizens became amply evident, such that the Jews were regarded merely as a religious community. The rest of the population including the Germans of Bukovina continued to view Jews as a nationality, as "others."

Prior to the final end of the Hapsburg Monarchy, the most important political representative of the Jews of Bukovina was the attorney Dr. Benno Straucher, born in 1854 in Rohozna near Sadagura. From 1897, he was a delegate to the Austrian Imperial Parliament, where he was a spokesman for an unusual mixture of German Liberalism and Jewish Nationalism — a sort of half-hearted Zionism. His chief innovation was to break with German Liberalism and, in the 1890s, to refuse further cooperation with the Germans. He then pursued his own independent course, a declared policy advancing Jewish interests. He joined none of the parliamentary fractions, though he was later chairman of the short-lived "Jewish Club." As a parliamentary representative and, from 1903, as president of the Jewish Community of Czernowitz, he dominated Jewish political life in Bukovina for several decades until after World War I. In Parliament, Straucher was immediately confronted with massive and verbally aggressive anti-Semitism, which reached its high point with the stand he took on the Hilsner Affair — the supposed ritual murder of Polna. Similar to the efforts of Rabbi Josef Samuel Bloch who had previously represented legislative districts in Galicia, Benno Straucher also attempted to employ argumentation in the fight against anti-Semitism.

Those who have written about Bukovina are quite fond of depicting it as a region in which there was peaceful coexistence; nevertheless, Bukovina can not be separated and viewed in isolation from the context of the Empire as a whole. Naturally, those secular Jews — whose acculturation had been a modern one, for whom religion and tradition retained little significance and for whom German Kultur had assumed almost mythological stature as a substitute for the traditional culture they had given up — were shocked by the rise of German Nationalist anti-Semitism in the western provinces of the Monarchy, since it endangered their perspective of their own identity. The extent to which the sense of security in this German identity was undermined among Jews beginning in the 1890s can be vividly illustrated with a quote taken from a heated exchange of words in which Benno Straucher was involved in Parliament — an example taken from a budget debate:

The disassociation from the Germans on the political level thus had no similar effect on the cultural level — and Straucher had put forth the opinion of the majority of politically active Jews in Bukovina. This striving to hold fast to values of German Kultur, which seems so defensive and helpless here, elevated the sense of connectedness to German culture to a mythologized and deeply emotional level. The extreme infrequency of conflicts among nationalities within Bukovina would later contribute to the effort to mythologize and transfigure the time of the Hapsburg Monarchy, but this cannot obscure the fact that the entire state had become a dangerous powder keg.

The gradual dissolution of the German-Jewish symbiosis was advanced in Bukovina by segregationist developments on both sides. As in Vienna, the first symptom appeared among German students who founded German Nationalist and/or exclusively Christian fraternities in Czernowitz as early as the 1880s. As a countermove, Jewish students at the University of Czernowitz — among them, Mayer Ebner, the future leader of the Bukovina Zionists — reacted with the founding of the Jewish Nationalist fraternity Hasmonäa in 1891; more were to follow. The influence of nationalism among the German populace also made its presence felt on the general political level with the emergence, after some delay, of a nationalist political wing. For instance, both German parliamentary representatives, Arthur Skedl and Michael Kipper, joined the "Society of Christian Germans in Bukovina" which was founded in 1897. This society and the German Nationalist fraternities were behind the establishment of the "Deutsches Haus" in the Herrengasse, a prominent address in Czernowitz.

Along with the supporters of Straucher, the development of Zionism brought forth a second wing of Jewish Nationalism which would take on historical weight as a result of its subsequent significance. Mayer Ebner, born in 1872 in Czernowitz, was the leading Zionist activist in Czernowitz and embodied the new mood of skepticism toward the potential for integration. This attitude characterized his speech at the First Zionist Congress: "The Jews have felt themselves to be German and have remained loyal to the Germans ... After the German Liberal Party collapsed, the Society of Christian Germans in Bukovina came into being. That was the thanks we got! That was the reward for the decades of chauvinistic emphasis on all things German on the part of the Jews." For reasons of Realpolitik, Zionists aligned with Mayer Ebner initially supported Benno Straucher in the parliamentary elections of 1901 and founded with him the Jewish-nationalistic "Jüdischer Volksverein" in Czernowitz. Zionism in Bukovina, however, suffered as a result of the highly emotionally charged quarrels between those who advocated a course of Realpolitik and the Herzl-Zionists who completely rejected a Jewish national policy in the Diaspora.

Although the separation of Jewish and German interests was a fait accompli following the turn of the century, hegemonial energies displayed resurgent power in the so-called Bukovina Ausgleich (settlement) of 1910/11 which had to do with electoral reform of the Bukovina Provincial Legislature. As in the case of the electoral reform in Moravia and in accordance with the wishes of Ruthenian, Romanian and Jewish political leaders in Bukovina, legislative districting were to be revamped to take national criteria into account. In view of the heterogeneous population of various groups living commingled with one another, this was an extraordinarily complicated undertaking. At the suggestion of provincial politicians, electoral constituencies specifically allocated for national groups were created. For the very first time, Jewish voting blocs were demanded. However, the government formally rejected the creation of Jewish constituencies since this would have meant the recognition of the Jews as a nationality. On one hand, they thereby acted in accordance with the wishes of the powerful, non-nationalist Jewish groupings such as the Austrian-Israelite Union. On the other hand, they did not want to give in to the efforts of the anti-Semites who called for the segregation of the Jews in all spheres of society. The central argument, however, was that the Jews, in the future as in the past, should not be recognized as a separate people and would thereby not be accorded the special rights due to such nationalities. In a compromise plan, though, a few separate Jewish electoral districts were created; formally, Jews continued to be grouped together with the Germans for electoral purposes. Despite protest assemblies and widespread disappointment, this solution had to be accepted. This was the final hegemonial demarcation point of the Hapsburg Monarchy which linked together the Jews of Bukovina and the Germans.

The first elections for the provincial legislature conducted according to nationality criteria took place in 1911. However, both the Germans (in German Liberals and German Nationalists) as well as the Jews were deeply split. On the Jewish side, the powerful group of the Nationalist Party headed by Benno Straucher ran against the less successful Zionists of the People's Council Party of Leon Kellner and Mayer Ebner. Instead of the nine Jewish representatives as foreseen in secret government projections, they succeeded in winning 10, an indicator for the unreliability of nationality-based electoral constituencies.

The acceptance and adoption of German Kultur by the Jews of Bukovina had to do with the hegemonial concepts of the multiethnic Hapsburg state. The internalization of this culture was deeply rooted in the attitudes of human beings and this could be traced back primarily to the fact that many of the Jews of Bukovina were quite sympathetically disposed toward this hegemonial power. The quotes attesting to the Bukovina Jews' patriotism and loyalty to the Kaiser are endless: "The Jews' allegiance to the state is nothing less than proverbial," stated Benno Straucher during one of his speeches in Parliament. Lydia Harnik, born in 1909 in Sereth and still living in Czernowitz to this day, still feels deep ties to the spirit of old Austria. She wrote in her reminiscences: "My father was a bank executive, my mother an elementary school teacher. Although a Jew, I was raised in the German spirit, in the spirit of German and Austrian classical poetry, [I] grew up in an atmosphere of fervent Austrian patriotism, passionate love of my homeland, and ardent admiration and reverence for our beloved emperor who had become a living legend and a figure of mythic proportions — Kaiser Franz Josef ..." It was to the Kaiser's great credit that, during his last visit to Czernowitz in 1880, he paid a visit to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement.

The history of the Jews can certainly not be treated by focusing solely on the deeply rooted German hegemonial culture. It is imperative to not lose sight of the cleft which divided the Jewish population into "blacks" and "whites" — that is, the religious traditionalists and the various groups of Chassidim, and those whose acculturation was based on modernism and secularism. From the investigative perspective we have chosen, the orthodox and Chassidic Jews are hardly apparent since they hardly participated in political life. In other perceptual perspectives of the day, it was precisely this group which was the prime object of attention — depending upon the motivation of the observer, to offer a literary taste of their exotic nature or in order to portray all Jews as "the others." For example, a Festschrift published in 1899 in Czernowitz celebrating the jubilee of the reign of the Kaiser exclusively depicted orthodox Jews: "On Shabbes or on the High Holidays, they wear long sabbath robes (Igitze), sabbath caps trimmed with fur (Stramel), short breeches, white knee socks and slippers." Anthropology, then still in its infancy, also turned its attention to the Jews of Bukovina, advancing, for example, the following bold theory: "Most noticeable in their faces, aside from the large nose and mouth, is the relatively limited height of the lower structures."

Of course, the secularly acculturated Jews of Czernowitz saw themselves as being completely different and wanted to avoid any connection with these exotic portrayals and stigmatizations. They were fond of referring to "their" city as "Little Vienna" in proud reference to its cultural life, its Kaffeehauskultur, its architecture and layout, and its newspapers. The German cultural orientation was likewise meant to sever it from its Eastern European, backward, "semi-Asiatic" framework. The effort to distance themselves from the "backward" East — incriminated as it was by negative images — had a very real background motivation for the Jews of the Hapsburg Monarchy: even as late as the census of 1846, they were categorized, along with the Magyars, Gypsies and Armenians, among the "Asiatic tribes." In the late 19th century, it was solely the orientation upon German hegemonial culture which seemed to offer the possibility of integration into the "western" (Western European) and thus the modern world, and the experience with emancipation seemed to offer empirical confirmation of this.

In the 19th century, a new form of stigmatization became attached to the German language — the concept of the "Ostjude" (Eastern European Jew), which took on various connotations according to the context in which it was used. To an impartial observer, this term was linked to images of orthodox, poor, religious, Yiddish-speaking Jews; for secularized, nationalistic Jews, it evoked romanticized conceptions of a still-genuine Jewish life; for the anti-Semites, however, it brought to mind images which were chiefly aimed at continuing to portray the Jews as "strangers," as migrants, as elements which did not fit in, to stigmatize them as "Asiatics" or as "Orientals." If Bukovina Jews whose acculturation had been a process of immersion in German Kultur would have been asked if they felt themselves to be "Ostjuden," the questioner could well have expected to receive indignant reactions.

As the destabilizing effects of the German host culture on their own identity became obvious in the wake of the mutually agreed-upon segregation, secularly acculturated Jews of Bukovina sought a new mainstay on which to base their Jewish nationality. Aside from Zionism, they discovered "Yiddishkeit" as a core element. The language itself did not force them into a retreat to traditional religion, but rather seemed to them an argument in support of their demands for Jewish national autonomy in the Austrian multiethnic state.

In the history of the Yiddish language, the first Yiddish Linguistic Conference which took place in Czernowitz from August 31-September 3, 1908 marked a key turning point. For the first time, the effort was made to acknowledge Yiddish as a language of culture and not to disparagingly discredit it as a "jargon," as a "language of lesser value," as a "corrupt form of German" or as the language of the ghetto. In the Zionist movement, the conflict took on a new twist, pitting the Yiddishists against the Hebraists. It is highly characteristic that the co-organizers of the Yiddish Linguistic Conference, Nathan Birnbaum, an early Zionist from Vienna, and Max Diamant, an attorney active in the struggle to achieve recognition for the Jews as a nationality, regarded their efforts as an "ideological" involvement in the Jewish Nationalist cause, since neither had grown up in the Yiddish linguistic culture. With regard to the political balance of power which then prevailed in Bukovina, it was highly significant that Benno Straucher, the unchallenged dominant force within the Jewish communities of Czernowitz, was forbidden to hold this conference in the "Jüdisches Haus"; the participants met instead in the concert hall of the Music Society and in the Ukrainian National House. Despite the highly diverse stimulus provided from outside, Yiddish cultural life reached its full bloom only after the end of the Hapsburg Monarchy as Bukovina became the homeland of significant Yiddish writers. An examination of the newspapers and books published by and for the Jews of Bukovina during the final decades of the Hapsburg Monarchy clearly illustrates this trend; in contrast to developments in Galicia, the press in Bukovina turned away from its original Yiddish and toward the German language.

The strength of German-language Kultur and the depth of its roots among the Jews of Bukovina can be seen in the period of the collapse of the Monarchy and the annexation of Bukovina by Romania. A new hegemonial, Romanian alignment was imparted to all key institutions of education, culture and official language. The school system was Romanized as was, in 1920, the University of Czernowitz; the German Municipal Theater became a Romanian one.

The allegiance to the Hapsburg Monarchy displayed by the Jews of Bukovina was associated with their recognition of the fact that they enjoyed a much better social position in comparison to the adjacent areas of Russia and Romania. Life on the border of countries whose governments were notoriously hostile to Jews engendered, as its mental consequence, an attitude of rejection of their cultures. On numerous occasions in speeches before the Austrian Parliament, Benno Straucher addressed the persecution of Jews in these countries, as well as intervening on behalf of the persecuted Jews and Armenians in Turkey.

No wonder that the new rulers were greeted with cool distance on the part of the Jews. The poet Alfred Gong, born in Czernowitz in 1920, described this in a poem about his father.

(From the poem Mein Vater by Alfred Gong)

Despite the policy of Romanization, the Germanness of the Bukovina Jews was not so quickly expunged. "The language which could still be heard downtown was German, so to speak, 'Viennese,'" Lily Glanz, who was born in Czernowitz in 1913, wrote in her reminiscences. Pearl Fichman, born in 1920 in Czernowitz, confirms this: "In our house and all around me people spoke German, read German books and the daily local German newspapers." As long as the performances continued to be presented at the famous theaters of Czernowitz, the illusion remained intact: "... I remember it as an Austrian way of life."

German linguistic culture experienced one final and long-lasting creative impulse in Czernowitz. One of the most creative lyricists of the German language was the Czernowitz native Paul Celan; he enrolled in the city's Romanian State High School in 1930, later transferring to the Ukrainian counterpart. He coined one of the most frequently-cited expressions referring to Bukovina: "... it was a place in which the human beings and the books were alive." German Kultur, above all literature and language, continued to be — one could almost say, venerated — by a segment of the Jews in Czernowitz and Bukovina. The link to the geographical region in which German is spoken was finally severed by borders: "Amidst all the losses, only this remained accessible, near and not lost: the language."

Many Eastern European Jews cultivated a mythic concept of "that which was German," wishing to regard German Kultur as the supreme embodiment of a highly developed form of culture. This and the identification with "the West" proved to be long-lived phenomena and were expressions of the powerful attraction exerted by 'culturally imperialistic,' quasi-colonial paradigms. The political borders had long since been redrawn; in the minds of the people, though, something remained of the former alignment. This myth, approaching almost a religious dimension, found its end only in the confrontation with events that were barely comprehensible: the reality of the genocide which emerged from Germany. "After all, how could a people as ‘civilized’ as the Germans follow such a madman [Hitler]?", Pearl Fichman asks herself in her reminiscences.

During the interwar period, the myth of "deutsche Kultur" undoubtedly remained present for segments of the Jewish population. For example, Salomea Genin, in her autobiography subtitled "From Lemberg to Berlin," looks back on the 1920s and describes the decision to emigrate from the former capital of Galicia to Germany: "First we go to Berlin. A good life is possible there too....The Germans are industrious, thorough and highly disciplined. In a newspaper, I read that high-quality German workmanship is prized throughout the world....What they don't have are anti-Semitic laws. In Germany, the Jews have long been citizens with equal rights....Naturally, we don't have to stay there long. But, in the meantime, maybe the children will learn a thing or two about cleanliness and order, which is something we don't have here. After all, it's a civilized land of poets and thinkers; here, we're stuck in a state of barbarism."

This myth had life-threatening consequences in the years 1939-1941 and the fact of the Holocaust makes the myth appear bizarre in retrospect. There is no doubt that the Jewish populations of Galicia and Lemberg were terribly shocked by Hitler's invasion of Poland. This was also linked to fears. The Soviet occupation which had been carried out in the meantime in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact had all the qualities of a brutal dictatorship. This in turn nourished hopes of less barbaric treatment at the hands of the German forces. Simon Wiesenthal, born in 1908 in Buczaz, recalls: "German was spoken and read in my parents' home. Mostly German classics stood on our bookshelves. If my mother wanted to explain something especially precisely to me, she often did it with quotations which she had looked up in the works of Goethe, Schiller, Heine or Lessing. We held the Kaiser in the highest esteem and regarded him as out protector. We were fervent Hapsburg-Austrian patriots....On September 17, 1939, Soviet soldiers occupied Lemberg. They were followed by the Soviet secret police, whose actions decided the fate of the population — particularly the Poles and the Jews. In a wave of arrests, all persons who were suspicious or were members of the 'capitalist class' were imprisoned. The same with the intelligentsia....Circumstances such as these make it understandable that, following two years of Soviet rule, there were people in Lemberg who greeted the German troops with open arms."

Lemberg native Benedikt Friedmann recalls how his father, like so many other Jewish citizens, "was devoted to German culture and Austrian patriotism. Even on the very eve of the German invasion (1941), they said 'The Germans are pursuing an anti-Semitic course now. They are harassing the Jews there and they'll do the same here. But I was an Austrian soldier....I met Germans on the Eastern Front. They were good comrades-in-arms....They won't do anything bad to us.'" Josef Burg, a writer from Czernowitz, has similar memories: "In this critical hour, my uncle lived about 50 km west of Czernowitz. He said: "'The Germans with their magnificent culture — I'm not afraid of them. They won't do anything to me. I'm more afraid of the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Romanians.'"

Old anti-Russian resentments and the form taken by the Soviet dictatorship, in which it was impossible to carry on a business or occupation of one's own choosing, led in May 1940 to a virtually incredible series of events. As a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, a German resettlement commission came to Lemberg in May. Thousands of Jewish residents of Lemberg and even refugees who had fled from the areas of Poland then occupied by the Nazis actually applied to this commission for resettlement to the Generalgouvernement portion of Poland. These registration lists were employed by the Soviet authorities to solve this problem in their own fashion in June 1940. In an operation lasting several days, they deported all persons whose names appeared on this list to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Through one of the small ironies of history, it was only in this way that they were able to escape the Holocaust.