Galician Jews

Galician Jews

Jewish population in Galicia
1772 150,000–200,000, or 5–6.5% of the total population
1857 449,000, or 9.6% of the total population of the region.[1]

Galician Jews or Galitzianers are a subdivision of the Ashkenazim geographically originating from Galicia, from western Ukraine (current Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions) and from the south-eastern corner of Poland (Podkarpackie and Lesser Poland voivodeships). Galicia proper, which was inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles and Jews, was a royal province within the Austro-Hungarian empire. Galician Jews primarily spoke Yiddish.

Demographics

The Jews in Europe (1881). Galicia is located immediately northeast of the Hungarian district

In the modern period, Jews were the third most numerous ethnic group in Galicia, after Poles and Ukrainians. At the time that Galicia was annexed by Austria (i.e. the Habsburg Monarchy), in 1772, there were approximately 150,000 to 200,000 Jews residing there, comprising 5–6.5% of the total population; by 1857 the Jewish population had risen to 449,000, or 9.6% of the total population.[1] In 1910, the 872,000 Jews living in Galicia comprised 10.9% of the total population,[1] compared to approximately 45.4% Poles, 42.9% Ukrainians, and 0.8% Germans.[2]

Society

Most of Galician Jewry lived poorly, largely working in small workshops and enterprises, and as craftsmen—including tailors, carpenters, hat makers, jewelers and opticians. Almost 80 percent of all tailors in Galicia were Jewish. The main occupation of Jews in towns and villages was trade: wholesale, stationery and retail. However, the Jewish inclination towards education was overcoming barriers. The number of Jewish intellectual workers proportionally was much higher than that of Ukrainian or Polish ones in Galicia. Of 1,700 physicians in Galicia, 1,150 were Jewish; 41 percent of workers in culture, theaters and cinema, over 65 percent of barbers, 43 percent of dentists, 45 percent of senior nurses in Galicia were Jewish, and 2,200 Jews were lawyers. For comparison, there were only 450 Ukrainian lawyers. Galician Jewry produced four Nobel prize winners: Isidor Isaac Rabi (physics), Roald Hoffman (chemistry), Georges Charpak (physics) and S.Y. Agnon (literature).

History

Galicia in relation to Volhynia (east and west) between the two world wars

Under Habsburg rule, Galicia's Jewish population increased sixfold, from 144,000 in 1776 to 872,000 in 1910, due to a high birth rate and a steady stream of refugees fleeing pogroms in the neighboring Russian Empire.[3] The Jews constituted one third of the population of many cities and came to dominate parts of the local economy such as retail sales and trade.[3] They were also successful in the government; by 1897, Jews constituted 58 percent of Galicia's civil servants and judges.[4] During the 19th century Galicia and its main city, Lviv (Lemberg in Yiddish), became a center of Yiddish literature. Lviv was the home of the world's first Yiddish-language daily newspaper, the Lemberger Togblat.[4]

Towards the end of World War I, Galicia became a battleground of the Polish-Ukrainian War which erupted in November 1918.[5] During the conflict, 1,200 Jews joined the Ukrainian Galician Army and formed an all-Jewish Ukrainian battalion called Zhydivs’kyy Kurin (UHA). In exchange, they were allotted 10% of the seats in the parliament of the West Ukrainian People's Republic which emerged in the same month and has disbanded nine months later.[6] The West Ukrainian government respected Jewish neutrality during the Polish-Ukrainian conflict by an order of Yevhen Petrushevych forbidding to mobilize Jews against their will, or to otherwise force them to contribute to the Ukrainian military effort.[7] Both Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian Jewish armed units suffered significant losses as they retreated from Galicia before the army of General Edward Rydz-Śmigły.[8] Although the Polish losses were estimated at more than 10,000 dead and wounded; the Western Ukrainian army lost in excess of 15,000 men.[9] "Despite the official neutrality, some Jewish men had been noticed aiding the combat Ukrainian units, and this fact alone caused a great enthusiasm in the Ukrainian press."[10] Reportedly, the Council of Ministers of the West Ukrainian People's Republic provided assistance to Jewish victims of the Polish pogrom in Lviv, wrote Alexander Prusin.[11] Nevertheless, as noted by Robert Blobaum from West Virginia University, many more pogroms and assaults against Galician Jews were perpetrated by the Ukrainian side in rural areas and other towns.[12] Between 22 and 26 March 1919, during massacres in Zhytomyr (Jitomir), 500–700 Jews lost their lives at the hands of the armed men from the Ukrainian republican army led by Simon Petliura.[5] The chief organizer of the pogrom became minister of war soon thereafter.[13] Simultaneous Ukrainian pogroms took place in Berdichev, Uma, and Cherniakhov among other places.[5][14]

Peace of Riga

The Polish–Soviet War ended with the Peace of Riga signed in March 1921. The borders between Poland and the Soviet Russia remained in force until the invasion of Poland in September 1939, although serious abuses against the Jews, including pogroms, continued in the Soviet Ukraine.[15] The rights of minorities in the newly reborn Second Polish Republic have been protected by a series of explicit clauses in the Versailles Treaty signed by President Paderewski.[16] In 1921, Poland's March Constitution gave the Jews the same legal rights as other citizens and guaranteed them religious tolerance and freedom of religious holidays.[17] The number of Jews immigrating to Poland from Ukraine and the Soviet Russia grew rapidly.[18] According to the Polish national census of 1921, there were 2,845,364 Jews living in the country; but, by late 1938 that number had grown by over 16% to approximately 3,310,000. Between the end of the Polish–Soviet War and late 1938, the Jewish population of the Republic had grown by over 464,000.[19]

Galician Jewish cemetery in Buchach, western Ukraine, 2005

In September 1939, most of Galicia passed to Soviet Ukraine. The majority of Galician Jews perished during the Holocaust. Most survivors immigrated to Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom or Australia. A small number have remained in Ukraine or Poland.

Culture

In the popular perception, Galitzianers were considered to be more emotional and prayerful than their rivals, the Litvaks, who thought of them as irrational and uneducated. They, in turn, held the Litvaks in disdain, derogatively referring to them as tseylem-kop ("cross heads"),[20] or Jews assimilated to the point of being Christian.[21] This coincides with the fact that Hasidism was most influential in Ukraine and southern Poland but was fiercely resisted in Lithuania (and even the form of Hasidism that took root there, namely Chabad, was more intellectually inclined than the other Hasidic groups).

The two groups diverged in their Yiddish accents and even in their cuisine, separated by the "Gefilte Fish Line." Galitzianers like things sweet, even to the extent of putting sugar in their fish.[22]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Manekin, Rachel (2 November 2010). "Galicia." Translated from the Hebrew by Deborah Weissman. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Retrieved 2016-02-13.
  2. ↑ Magocsi, Paul R. (1996). History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802078209. p. 423-424. Magocsi explains that the census data for Austria-Hungary did not include figures on ethnicity per se but only on language and religion; therefore, the Jewish population is based on the religion statistics, while his estimates of the other ethnic groups are based on both the language and the religion statistics, in order to correct for the fact that Jews are counted in those language groups. He notes that in 1910 "the vast majority of Jews (808,000) gave Polish as their language" (p. 423). (Yiddish did not appear as a language option on the census forms of Austria-Hungary.)
  3. 1 2 Magocsi, Paul Robert (2005). "Galicia: A European Land." In: Christopher Hann & Magocsi (Eds.), Galicia: A Multicultured Land. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802037817. p. 3-21; here: p. 11.
  4. 1 2 Magocsi (2005), p. 12.
  5. 1 2 3 Nicolas Werth (April 2008). "Crimes and Mass Violence of the Russian Civil Wars (1918-1921)". Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. ISSN 1961-9898.
  6. ↑ Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: a history, pp. 367-368, University of Toronto Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8020-8390-0
  7. ↑ Myroslav Shkandrij. (2009). Jews in Ukrainian Literature: representation and identity. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 94-95
  8. ↑ Norman Davies. "Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth Century Poland." In: Herbert Arthur Strauss. Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870-1933/39. Walter de Gruyter, 1993.
  9. ↑ Vasyl Kuchabsky, Gus Fagan, Wirth-Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies (2009). Western Ukraine in conflict with Poland and Bolshevism, 1918-1923. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. p. 185. ISBN 189486512X – via Google Books.
  10. ↑ Melamed, Vladimir. "Jewish Lviv". Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Archived from the original on January 12, 2012 – via Internet Archive. General Ukrainian Council, Dilo (L’viv), November 5, 1918, 3.
  11. ↑ Alexander Victor Prusin.(2005).Nationalizing a Borderland: war, ethnicity, and anti-Jewish violence in east Galicia, 1914-1920. University of Alabama Press. p. 99.
  12. ↑ Blobaum, Robert (April 2006). "Europe: Early Modern and Modern". Oxford Journals (The American Historical Review).
  13. ↑ Howard M. Sachar (2007). Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 11. ISBN 0307425673 – via Google Books.
  14. ↑ Jewish Virtual Library (2008). "Modern Jewish History: Pogroms". Encyclopaedia Judaica.
  15. ↑ Andrzej Kapiszewski, Controversial Reports on the Situation of Jews in Poland in the Aftermath of World War I: The Conflict between the US Ambassador in Warsaw Hugh Gibson and American Jewish Leaders. Studia Judaica 7: 2004 nr 2(14) s. 257–304 (pdf)
  16. ↑ Sejm RP. Internetowy System Aktow Prawnych. "Traktat między Głównemi Mocarstwami sprzymierzonemi i stowarzyszonemi a Polską, podpisany w Wersalu dnia 28 czerwca 1919 r." PDF scan of the Treaty, (original document, 1,369 KB).
  17. ↑ Sejm RP. Internetowy System Aktow Prawnych. "Ustawa z dnia 17 marca 1921 r. – Konstytucja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej." PDF scan of the March Constitution, (original document, 1,522 KB), including "Rozporządzenie Prezydenta Rzeczypospolitej z dnia 9 marca 1927 r. w sprawie utworzenia gmin wyznaniowych żydowskich na obszarze powiatów: białostockiego, bielskiego i sokólskiego województwa białostockiego." Amendments, (original document, 67 KB).
  18. ↑ Gershon David Hundert. The YIVO encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Vol. 2. Yivo Institute for Jewish Research Yale University Press. 2008. p. 1393. OCLC 837032828
  19. ↑ Yehuda Bauer, A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1929–1939. End note 20: 44–29, memo 1/30/39 [30th January 1939], The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1974
  20. ↑ Barnett Zumoff, "If Not Even Wiser" by Hirshe-Dovid Katz. Translation.
  21. ↑ Joshua Brandt (19 May 2000). "Berkeley bookseller's side shtick is a treasure trove of Yiddishisms". jweekly.com. Archived from the original on 2007-07-14. Retrieved 22 December 2014.
  22. ↑ Bill Gladstone (10 September 1999). "This is no fish tale: Gefilte tastes tell story of ancestry". jweekly.com. Archived from the original on 2004-03-08. Retrieved 22 December 2014.

External links

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