The pogrom of jews during and after world War I: The destruction of the jewish idea of galicia

Abstract

The idea of Galicia was a transnational political concept which represented a multinational coexistence in a situation of irrevocable national divisions and growing nationalist tendencies in the Austrian province called the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The Jewish variant of this idea was connected with the emergence of a specific Jewish-Galician identity which enabled the Galician Jews to identify with the province, in all its national and religious diversity, and with the Habsburg empire as a whole. The destruction of the Jewish idea of Galicia was connected with the outpouring of anti-Semitism expressed in the form of violence and pogroms after 1914. That tragic phenomenon was described, among others, by Ansky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport), Abraham Insler, Icchak Grünbaum, and Emil Tenenbaum. The most catastrophic event for the Galician Jews was the pogrom in Lviv in November 1918, which followed the outbreak of the Polish-Ukrainian War, and which was long falsified by Poles, the winners in the said war. The pogrom began an immense growth of anti-Semitism in the Second Polish Republic which signalled the end of the Jewish idea of Galicia.