Inevitable Historicity

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

Today, I updated the list of Citations of Holocaust Controversies in the Literature, adding two sources: a book on the Kurdish and Armenian genocides published back in 2007 by Desmond Fernandes, who was a senior lecturer in geography at De Montfort University in the U.K.; and a book on anti-imperialism from 2018 by Rohini Hensman. There was a third citation of our work that I found, but I won’t be adding it to our list. Here’s why.

The book that I won’t be including that cites our blog is Grover Furr’s Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every Revelation of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of February 25, 1956, Is Provably False. (As Max Amann famously said before deleting the subtitle Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit from Mein Kampf, “Everyone needs an editor.”) If you’re not aware who Grover Furr is, my blogmate and comrade Sergey Romanov has written fairly extensively about his work at this very blog. Several words come to mind to describe Furr, but “kook” is perhaps the one that comes most readily.

Look, I get it. I too have a Ph.D. in English and ended up doing most of my writing in the field of history. It happens. It happened to me. I just ended up on the “other side” of Furr. And lest it be said that we both see the Soviets as the “good guys” in World War II, the similarity pretty much ends there. (OK, I also wrote a doctoral dissertation that addressed the topic of medieval European literature, and we share an interest in Arthurian literature, but it really does end after that. Honest.)

The funny thing about Furr’s citation of us is what he cites from us and why. Specifically, on page 520 (footnote 26) of Khrushchev Lied: He Really, REALLY Did!, Furr cites this blog post by Sergey, as a way of marshalling evidence against Tim Snyder, the historian of modern European history at Yale and author of Bloodlands, among other studies, for having “lied” about a source on the antisemitism of Joseph Stalin. Notably, Sergey, while providing the correct translation and source of the quotation, does not exculpate Stalin of antisemitism — he merely notes that Stalin was likely more tactful. Indeed, Sergey writes, “This is not to say that he [Stalin] wasn’t an antisemite.” And indeed, the context for the dispute is the Doctors’ Plot — one of Stalin’s final repressions, which specially targeted Soviet Jews.

Furr writes, “Snyder is either deliberately lying or never bothered to check the source of this quotation. Whatever is the case, it does him no credit as a historian.” While it’s not my intention to venture into this particular thicket of weeds, I do want to point out that this discovery is not exactly the “gotcha” Furr seems to think it is. Not only was Stalin demonstrably antisemitic, particularly in the last chapter of his life (although other examples exist), but also Stalin in the correct quotation is clearly not referring to Zionists when referring to “Jewish nationalists.” When he said, “Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA (there you can become rich, bourgeois, etc.),” the “nation” Stalin was referring to was not Israel — it was the Jewish nation, i.e., the Jewish people.

Funnier is that Furr cites our blog as a way to attack Snyder without (apparently) checking to see whether we’d ever commented on his own work here. It’s a bit ironic that Furr didn’t fully check his source in this case (HC blog) while accusing Snyder of doing the same. As a famous Jew once said, “Physician, heal thyself!”

The final candidate to enter the race was Jakob Brod, whose candidacy Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung announced on March 8: “In Czernowitz-East, the Social Democratic party will run as a candidate against Dr. Straucher the secretary of the Lower Austrian Social Democratic state executive, Dawid [sic] Brod.”^[1] Beyond mistaking the candidate’s first name for another characteristically Jewish name, the item says nothing else, which speaks volumes about how familiar the Czernowitz electorate was with him. Even today, information about Brod is scarce. However, his name appears in the earliest editions of Arbeiter Zeitung. For instance, in December 1889, he is listed as a speaker planning to give a lecture in Vienna on the topic of the division of labor.^[2] It must have gone well because the next time his name appears in the newspaper, it is to deliver the same lecture, this time at a different location for a different group.^[3] At the end of 1892, Arbeiter Zeitung reported that Brod had been elected to the leadership committee of the political club “Equality” (Gleichheit).^[4] He later ran for city council in Vienna from the seventh district but received only 86 votes out of more than 3,000 cast when the SDAP performed poorly in the district.^[5]

Much of the reporting about Brod in the 1890s concerns his run-ins with the law. He was the subject of an article in the antisemitic Deutsches Volksblatt with the title “A Jewish Social Democrat”; surprisingly, despite the title, the article does not engage Brod’s Jewishness, instead reporting on his arrest for delivering a public lecture attacking capitalism. Found guilty of threatening public order, a judge sentenced him to two months’ imprisonment.^[6] In February 1893, he appeared before a district judge to answer charges that he had referred to the Parliament building as a Bude (shack). His defense lawyer argued that the word came from the same root as that for “building” and that the term Bude was commonly used among workers, but Brod was fined 15 gulden.^[7] He was charged again in December 1894 with leading a crowd in three cheers for “international revolutionary Social Democracy” and sentenced to 14 days’ imprisonment.^[8] At the end of 1895, Brod was to be the defendant in a libel trial brought by members of an upholsterers’ cooperative, but he withdrew his comments at the last minute and apologized; the same article describes Brod as the “publisher of a workers’ newspaper.”^[9] He would be accused of libel several more times while in Vienna.

In 1897, Brod rose to prominence within the SDAP by directly challenging the party leadership over the issue of antisemitism. The party’s founder and leader, Victor Adler, who was of Jewish descent although a convert to Christianity, had in 1882 cooperated with Schönerer, Lueger, and two other ethnic German intellectuals in drafting the Linz Program, a landmark political statement supporting German nationalism within the Habsburg Empire. With Schönerer’s increasing antisemitism, however, Adler became disillusioned with nationalism, moving to social democracy and founding the SPAD in 1888. However, he was frequently criticized for never taking a direct stand on the antisemitic attacks launched against the SPAD by Lueger and the CSP. In addition, with the exception of himself and Wilhelm Ellenbogen, leader of the teachers’ section within the party, Adler refused to run Jews for office as Social Democrats in German-speaking parts of Austria. From Lipnik, Moravia, Brod wrote to Karl Kautsky, the German orthodox Marxist theoretician, complaining that even in Galicia, with a very large number of Jewish socialists, Adler had put only nominally Christian candidates on the electoral slate. He resolved to raise the matter at the next party congress.^[10]

Brod did just that. When the CSP won a resounding victory in 1897, he stood up at the annual party congress to challenge Adler and the party. Accusing the party leadership of inaction for fear of alienating non-Jewish voters, Brod said, “I tell you, when we are 100 years old, we will not have convinced Philistines. What have the comrades from the party leadership done to convince the unenlightened elements that there is also a Jewish proletariat alongside the Jewish bourgeoisie? In Vienna, ‘Jew’ and ‘capitalist’ are synonymous.”^[11] Although Arbeiter Zeitung covered the race in Bukovina very little in 1907, what seems clear is that the SDAP chose Brod to run against Straucher because he was Jewish.

^[1] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, March 8, 1907, 3, emphasis in original.

^[2] Arbeiter Zeitung, December 13, 1889, 8.

^[3] Arbeiter Zeitung, January 24, 1890, 12.

^[4] Arbeiter Zeitung, December 23, 1892, 9.

^[5] Arbeiter Zeitung, February 28, 1896, 4.

^[6] Deutsches Volksblatt, August 5, 1890, 15.

^[7] Arbeiter Zeitung, February 3, 1893, 5.

^[8] Arbeiter Zeitung, December 4, 1894, 4.

^[9] Deutsches Volksblatt, November 8, 1895, 6.

^[10] Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 260-261.

^[11] Sozialdemokraten Parteitages, 87.

Of all the candidates, Wojtko was the most unusual. Like virtually every other candidate for the mandates from Czernowitz, Wojtko had served on the city council; however, he was the sole candidate representing the city’s working class. While Grigorovici represented the working class party, the SDAP, he was a political journalist and had trained as a medical doctor. Although it is unclear whether the SDAP’s candidate in Czernowitz-East was working class, it is certain that he was not a native of the city or even the province (see below). The first mention of someone named Georg Wojtko (or several alternate spellings of both his names) in the newspapers from Czernowitz has him elected from the farmers’ curia as a member of the city council for Czernowitz in 1864, representing the western suburb of Klokuczka.^[1]

Over the coming years, Wojtko’s name appears frequently in the journalistic record, primarily in reports on city council meetings and activities. Only a few times does his name appear in association with other events. In 1900, for instance, in a story about items donated to the Bukovina State Museum, it is reported that Wojtko provided a stone ball (Steinkugel) “found in May 1897 in Klokuczka.”^[2] A few months later, Wojtko was reported to be participating as a member in a commission meeting in the third electoral district, held at a school in Klokuczka.^[3] Three years after that, Wojtko was one of three men appointed as clerks by the Goods Directorate in Czernowitz,^[4] and after another two years, he was listed among several people elected to positions on a preliminary commission to determine the city’s budget for the coming year.^[5]

Some stories mentioning Wojtko paint the picture of a prominent local personality. For instance, in June 1902, Bukowinaer Rundschau reported on a fire breaking out in Klokuczka and the suburb’s magistrate ordering a family relocated from their destroyed home. Upon hearing this, Wojtko took issue with the magistrate’s decision, and a turf war broke out. The two men brought charges against one another, with the magistrate alleging unauthorized interference, defamation, and fraud; Wojtko countersued for slander, and the court found in Wojtko’s favor. The family, meanwhile, remained homeless. Interestingly, while Wojtko is described in the Rundschau story as a “university institute employee,” it is obvious that he wielded significant political clout in having interfered in a matter of public safety and receiving a ruling in his favor; the headline to the story (“What Can Happen in Doing One’s Job”) says as much.^[6] Another news story about Wojtko appeared in April 1906, when, while working as a security guard, he was responsible for apprehending two suspects (identified as the Bessaraba brothers) in the mugging of a day laborer named Cyprian Kolomejzuk while leaving a bar and delivering them to the police.^[7] Presumably by coincidence, only two months later, a sister of the Bessarabas was rescued by Wojtko when the roof of her house collapsed.^[8]

A month later, a story broke in Czernowitzer Tagblatt reporting that Wojtko was drunk at a local pub and was prohibting other patrons from purchasing the Tagblatt.^[9] The following day, Bukowinaer Rundschau published a letter from Wojtko denying the story,^[10] and the day after, a deputation appeared at the mayor’s office supporting Wojtko.^[11] The pressure was sufficient for the Tagblatt to retract its story.^[12] Reading the newspaper accounts over the course of 1906 about the work of Wojtko on the community council, a picture emerges of a civil servant consistently advocating on behalf of his constituents, whether about assuring the representation of illiterate residents of Czernowitz’s suburbs in a planned educational census or guaranteeing the necessary city funding to repave the suburbs’ streets. These stories belie the idea of Wojtko as an Analphabet (illiterate) and a “political zero,” as an article on the election in the SDAP daily newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung called him.^[13]

However, the most curious aspect of Wojtko’s candidacy is his aforementioned status as an employee of FJU. Oddly, Wojtko’s position at the university was an Institutsdiener, that is, a factotum, for the Mineralogical Institute, which Rudolf Scharizer ran. In short, Wojtko became a candidate against his direct employer. It is unclear what underlay this decision of Wojtko’s to run. The likeliest explanation is that Scharizer induced Wojtko to run against him to peel off Romanian votes for Grigorovici. The ethnic makeup of Czernowitz West was approximately 22% German, 28% Jewish, 17% Romanian, and 19% Ukrainian. In a four-way race among two Jewish candidates, a Christian German, and a Social Democrat, it was highly unlikely that any candidate would win an absolute majority, in which case there would be a run-off between the two candidates polling highest. Injecting a Romanian candidate into the race would increase the likelihood that Grigorovici would not be among the top two candidates, in which case a run-off between Scharizer and one of the Jewish candidates was more likely. In such a run-off, a non-Jewish candidate stood a decent chance of winning.

^[1] Bukowina, August 26, 1863, 3.

^[2] Bukowinaer Rundschau, June 24, 1900, 4.

^[3] Bukowinaer Rundschau, October 18, 1900, 2.

^[4] Bukowinaer Post, March 25, 1903, 3; Bukowinaer Rundschau, March 25, 1903, 2.

^[5] Bukowinaer Rundschau, June 28, 1905, 2; Czernowitzer Tagblatt, June 28, 1905, 4.

^[6] Bukowinaer Rundschau, June 7, 1902, 4.

^[7] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, April 11, 1906, 4; Czernowitzer Tagblatt, April 11, 1906, 3-4.

^[8] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, June 16, 1906, 3.

^[9] Czernowitzer Tagblatt, May 13, 1906, 5-6.

^[10] Bukowinaer Rundschau, May 15, 1906, 2.

^[11] Bukowinaer Rundschau, May 16, 1906, 2; Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, May 17, 1906, 3.

^[12] Czernowitzer Tagblatt, May 16, 1906, 4.

^[13] Arbeiter Zeitung, April 18, 1907, 4.

A New Electoral System

On January 26, 1907, Emperor Franz Joseph signed a law establishing universal male suffrage for Austrian voters. In a state that had been democratizing over the course of several decades, most recently including the addition of a voting curia for men at least 25 years old, the 1907 law was a concession to the demands of several political parties and a realization that the revolution in Russia nearly two years earlier had made universal suffrage inevitable. Legislators drew new districts across the empire, aiming to roughly provide equal representation for Austria’s nine recognized ethnolinguistic groups: Germans, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Italians, Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenes. Notably, while Jews were acknowledged as a religious group, they were not recognized as a nation, nor was Yiddish included among the national languages. As a result, Jews were counted according to the recognized language that they spoke. With the exception of Galicia, where many Jews spoke Polish, this language was German in most places.

Under the system before January 1907, Austria had five curiae for voting: a curia for estate owners, one for farmers, one for chambers of commerce, one for male city dwellers paying a minimum of five gulden in taxes (roughly $55 in 2020 U.S. currency), and the final one for men older than 24. According to this system, Bukovina had eleven seats in the Reichsrat. Formally, Czernowitz was represented by one seat from the chamber of commerce and one seat from the urbanites’ curia. Beginning in 1897, this seat was held by Straucher. Under the new electoral law, Bukovina would receive fourteen mandates, determined by a combination of rural or urban status and ethnolinguistic group. Ten rural mandates were evenly split into Romanian and Ukrainian districts. The remaining four urban districts, including the two from Czernowitz, were German. In recognition that Jews made up a majority of the German speakers in Czernowitz and Bukovina overall, one of the Czernowitz districts had the nearby town of Sadagora, home to a Hasidic dynasty, added to it to assure a majority of Jewish voters.

The assumption going into the electoral campaign was that Straucher would retain the “Jewish” seat in the district of Czernowitz-East. A native of Bukovina, Straucher was born in 1854 in Rohozna and was educated in Czernowitz, earning a law degree in 1880. He began practicing law in Czernowitz immediately but very soon drifted into local politics, beginning in the Jewish community and branching out from there. In 1882, he ran for a seat in the Kultusgemeinde (religious community), the Austrian equivalent of the kehilla in Russia, which functioned as an organ of limited self-government for Jewish citizens. For several years, the Kultusgemeinde had been controlled by a small number of wealthy Jewish families who controlled the flow of excise taxes from the Jewish community to the city administration.^[1] According to the Yiddish writer Shloyme Bikl, who knew Straucher for many years, Straucher’s election to the Kultusgemeinde “was Bastille Day in Czernowitz Jewish society. Then, the aristocratic family regime fell, and the administration of the plebian people’s leader began.”^[2]

Once on the Kultusgemeinde, Straucher also turned to secular politics. He was elected to the Gemeinderat, the city council, in 1884 and the school board in 1890. In these positions, he began to network with other population groups in the city, establishing longstanding ties with representatives of the German, Romanian, and Ukrainian communities. Despite a run of bad luck electorally in the early 1890s, with a failed run for the Reichsrat in 1891 and for the Landtag, the provincial parliament, in 1892, Straucher was elected to the Reichsrat in 1897, as noted, defeating the Mayor of Czernowitz, Anton Freiherr Kochanowski von Stawczan.^[3] Straucher’s ten years as a Reichsrat deputy had been significant. Elected as an independent, he formed an alliance upon arrival in Vienna with Ferdinand Kronawetter, a liberal deputy from the capital city, described as a “kind of democratic two-man party.”^[4] He established himself as a voice advocating for Jews and against antisemitism, for instance, denouncing on the floor of the Reichsrat the imprisonment of a Jew from Bohemia, Leopold Hilsner, on a charge of blood libel. Re-elected in 1900, Straucher’s second term in the Reichsrat saw him lament the fate of Russian Jews killed in the Kishinev pogrom in 1903.^[5]

Straucher Is Challenged

On the same day that new elections were announced, Straucher was nominated for the seat from Czernowitz-East by an assembly of workers’ representatives.^[6] Within a couple of days, plans were under way among Czernowitz’s Zionists to run a candidate in the district of Czernowitz-West. On January 28, as reported by Bukowinaer Rundschau – a daily aimed at liberal German readers – a Jewish people’s assembly was held at the call of the journalist Friedrich Billig and Wallstein, two prominent Jewish members of the Czernowitz city council. The assembly issued a unanimously supported resolution challenging the decision of Straucher to form coalitions with other ethnic groups in the city for “the purpose of suppressing the will of the majority of Jews”; at the same time, the statement expressed solidarity with the Romanian population, which it recognized for its friendship and good will. Finally, in response to corruption alleged against Straucher and other council members, the resolution called for reform of the election rules for city council in keeping with universal male suffrage as implemented at the federal level. The lawyer and activist Max Fokschaner, who presided over the meeting, announced that a new “Jewish Political Association” (JPA) had been formed and would hold weekly meetings. The next one would feature an address by the local Zionist activist Mayer Ebner, himself a former Rundschau employee, on the coming elections.^[7]

Before January was through, debate had arisen regarding whether another of the four mandates assigned to German speakers in Bukovina would be apportioned to Jews. On January 30, Czernowitzer Tagblatt – a liberal daily sympathetic to Straucher – reported that, while Straucher would run in Czernowitz-East, it was not yet clear whether a second Jewish mandate would be sought in Czernowitz-West or in the so-called Three Cities of Radautz, Sereth, and Suczawa. A Reichsrat seat representing the Three Cities was already held by Arthur Skedl, an ally of Straucher who had also been elected to the Reichsrat in 1900 from the urban curia. Since Skedl was a German, he would either run again in the Three Cities or would run in Czernowitz-West; the potential Jewish candidate mentioned was Neumann Wender.^[8] Not coincidentally, when Straucher attended a voter assembly in Sadagora on February 3 at the invitation of the Jewish organization “Zion,” Wender also attended and spoke.^[9] As promised, the JPA held its first people’s assembly on February 4. There, the party, also referred to in the local press as the Independent Jewish Party (IJP), issued a second resolution, this time demanding a second Jewish mandate, to be located either in the Three Cities or in Czernowitz-West. Presuming cooperation with the Germans in this endeavor, JPA/IJP members stated they would help the Germans win the seat not allotted to a Jewish candidate, regardless of where. Finally, they demanded the end of the nomination of candidates in “secret conventicles before so-called workers’ representative” and the introduction of assemblies that are “general, free, and accessible to everyone.”^[10]

The choice of Wallstein as one of the public voices opposing Straucher was a provocation in itself. A longstanding veteran of the Czernowitz journalistic community, Wallstein had served as editor of the tri-weekly Bukowinaer Nachrichten and daily Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung.^[11] The latter newspaper was founded in 1903 by Philipp Menczel, who had earlier founded the first Zionist newspaper (Jüdisches Echo) in the city and hired Ebner as its first editor.^[12] Beginning in 1899, Ebner had collaborated with Straucher, working together to draft a demand to the government in Vienna that Jews be recognized as a nation; however, this attempt was blocked the following year by Menczel. Subsequently, Menczel and Ebner were summoned to Vienna by World Zionist Organization leader Theodor Herzl to support Straucher’s ultimately successful re-election to the Reichsrat in 1900.^[13] In the same year, the three men also cooperated in creating the Jüdisches Volksverein (Jewish People’s Association).^[14] By 1904, however, the alliance had run its course between Straucher and the Zionists, who had added to their number the prominent university professor and activist Leon Kellner. Here began what Ebner would later call the “thirty-year war” between Straucher and his allies on one side and Ebner, Kellner, Menczel, and the other Zionists on the other.^[15] According to Ebner’s biographer, at issue was Straucher’s dedicated to the Zionist cause; in his opinion, Straucher was a mere fellow traveler, “sailing under the Zionist flag just for a political career.”^[16]

Jews and Germans

The next JPA/IJP meeting was held on February 10, with an agenda item on the “Christian Social danger.”^[17] The previous week, two important Viennese politicians visitors had visited Bukovina. Both men, Julius Axmann and Albert Gessmann, were elected Reichsrat representatives from the Christian Social Party (CSP). They visited Radautz and Gurahumora, where they were reportedly well received and where hostile politicians, including the local German nationalist Josef Wiedmann, were prevented from speaking.^[18]

This episode demonstrates just one of the cleavages underlying German politics in Bukovina — one that had already taken hold elsewhere in the empire in previous decades. The period between the Compromise of 1867, by which separate governments were established for the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire, and 1897, when the government fell despite attempts to meet growing Czech demands for autonomy, liberalism was the guiding political philosophy of Austria. However, a number of factors, not the least of which was the empire’s multinational nature, undermined the ability of liberals to govern. Every aspect of liberalism in the government evoked a hostile response: laissez-faire capitalism inspired socialist activity among workers, cosmopolitanism angered German nationalists among the petit bourgeoisie, and anticlericalism inspired a revitalized political Catholicism among the peasantry and artisanal classes.^[19] The latter two political strains emerged, respectively, in the German National Association led by Georg von Schönerer and the CSP led by Karl Lueger.

Although both Schönerer’s and Lueger’s movements were characterized by their antisemitism and the desire to preserve German primacy in the empire, the similarities ended there. Whereas Schönerer was anticlerical because the Catholic-Protestant rift prevented the unification of all German-speaking people, Lueger drew a large number of priests into his party and sought special status for Catholicism in Austria. Lueger was a Habsburg loyalist, while Schönerer envisioned eventual annexation of German-speaking Austrian territories to the German Reich. Finally, while Schönerer’s antisemitism was racial and, thus, absolute and irreconcilable, Lueger’s was political. He saw antisemitism as a practical means to attack capitalism, with which Jews were readily associated, and liberalism, of which the Jews had arguably been the greatest benefactors in Austria. As Carl Schorske wrote, Lueger “tolerated the most vicious anti-Semitism among his lieutenants, but, more manipulator and machine-builder than ideologue, he himself employed it rather than enjoyed it.”^[20]

Despite some early cooperation, Schönerer and Lueger disliked each other, and while Schönerer’s tendency toward violent criminality and hostility to Rome undercut his ability to build a viable political mass movement, Lueger was wildly popular and the CSP among the largest parties in Austria. Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna in 1897, the same year in which the first CSP minister-president (equivalent to prime minister) was appointed, Baron Paul Gautsch von Frankenthurn. Among German-speaking voters, Schönerer’s party won only 7.34% of the vote in the 1900 Reichsrat election compared to the CSP’s 27.45%. German nationalism in the mold of Schönerer, while never as successful as Lueger’s CSP, would remain a significant strain of German politics in Austria until the end of World War II. At the same time, the CSP, with the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei; SDAP), was one of the two major political parties in the first Austrian republic, albeit having dropped the explicit antisemitism of its original platform.

As a province of the empire in which non-Jewish German speakers constituted less than 10% of the population, Bukovina was not generally a place receptive to antisemitic appeals to German voters. Under the five-curia system that preceded the 1907 electoral reform, Bukovina received eleven seats: three for estate owners, three for farmers, two for city dwellers paying a minimum in taxes, one for the chamber of commerce, and two for any adult men older than 24. The estate owners’ curia was dominated by Romanians and Poles, while the general curia for adult men was dominated by the 80% of the population that was either Romanian or Ukrainian. Although Germans were represented in the farmers’ curia, Jews were mostly absent, and as a result, in the 1900 election, these three seats were won by two Romanians and one Ukrainian, with Germans entirely excluded. The remaining curiae of urbanites and businessmen both had Jewish pluralities — if non-Jewish Germans wanted representation, they could most easily find it by forming alliances with Jewish candidates. In 1900, the chamber of commerce chose Leon Rosenzweig, a Jewish banker, as its representative. The two seats from the urban curia went to Straucher and Skedl, respectively, a Jew and a German.

The previous election’s results notwithstanding, political antisemitism of both Schönerer’s and Lueger’s varieties among Bukovina’s Germans emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, albeit without electoral success. The primary site for this development was the Franz-Joseph University (FJU), founded in Czernowitz in 1875 as a German-language university for the eastern marches of the empire in reaction to a decision in 1871 to change the language of instruction at the University of Lemberg to Polish. German-speaking professors were brought in from across the empire; among them were scholars with decidedly antisemitic points of view. For instance, Julius Platter, a newly minted Ph.D. from Innsbruck, was hired among the initial faculty as a professor of statistics. During his tenure at FJU, he published Der Wucher in der Bukowina (Usury in Bukovina), detailing Jewish depredation upon gentile borrowers.^[21] The formation of fraternities exclusively for non-Jewish German students – a favorite cause of Schönerer’s — began in the 1880s (countered by Jewish student groups founded by Ebner, among other student activists). The antisemitic movement at FJU culminated in 1897 with the founding of the Association of Christian Germans in Bukovina; among the Germans who joined was Skedl.^[22]

While the Association was an obvious provocation to Bukovina’s Jews, it was initially fairly ineffectual. As noted by Mariana Hausleitner, since the founding of the Association resulted in the formation of German-only loan cooperatives, it had the paradoxical effect of decreasing antisemitism by diminishing the role of Jews in moneylending.^[23] In addition, the Association initially stood apart from both Schönerer’s nationalists and the CSP. Regarding the former, as Schönerer’s platform grew more radical, it added a plank to its platform renouncing Austrian control over Bukovina as a non-German-majority province that could never been successfully Germanized. Regarding the latter, with the advent of universal male suffrage and the realization that Schönerer’s group would never establish a foothold in Bukovina, the CSP saw the opportunity in the context of the 1907 election to broaden its base further. In June 1906, Lueger visited Czernowitz briefly, and while he was not greeted at the station by members of the Association, there were Catholic and Romanian student groups there – the latter apparently attracted not only to Lueger’s antisemitism but also his anti-Magyarism, which they appreciated since they saw their ethnic relations in Hungarian Transylvania as suffering under the Magyar yoke. When, in February 1907, Gessmann and Axmann visited Gurahumora, they played down the antisemitism of the CSP’s platform in favor of attacking Germans still clinging to Schönerer, which is why they treated prevented Wiedmann from speaking.^[24]

Transethnic Political Cooperation in Bukovina

Although a certain Rubicon was crossed in 1897, it would not have electoral consequences in Bukovina for ten years. While at first, Straucher had ceased cooperation with Germans in Czernowitz, including Skedl, over the founding of the Association, in 1904 – the same year in which he broke with Ebner – Straucher collaborated with Skedl in founding the Freisinnige Verband (Freethinkers’ Alliance). Skedl appears to have developed second thoughts about joining the Association relatively quickly. By 1900, he was already predicting a potentially disastrous outcome of the German-speakers’ vote being split Germans and Jews.^[25] The following year, Friedrich Freiherr Bourguignon von Baumberg, then governor of Bukovina, remarked in a report to Vienna that Skedl had attempted to merge some Association members with elements of the German Progressive Party.^[26] Following the establishment of the Freethinkers’ Alliance, Skedl found himself on the receiving end of abuse from Schönerer’s party for relying on Jewish voters.^[27] Although Skedl would eventually return to the Christian Germans fold after the 1907 election, during this electoral campaign, the two men were allies.

Straucher and Skedl, along with the Ukrainian Nikolaus von Wassilko of the Young Ruthenians and the Romanian Aurel Onciul of the Democratic Peasants’ Party – both of whom were also Reichsrat deputies from Bukovina – formed the Freethinkers’ Alliance to press for electoral reform and oppose the more conservative (and antisemitic) factions within the different ethnic communities.^[28] Straucher had already established an alliance the previous year with Wassilko and Onciul, who met in Vienna with Straucher and Moriz Stekel, the publisher of thrice-weekly Bukowinaer Post, to reform the electoral laws. The following year, Skedl joined them, with and the Young Ruthenian Stepan Smal-Stocki, the five men formed a progressive peasants’ bloc in the Landtag.^[29] Of Ukrainian ancestry, Wassilko had been raised in a German-speaking noble family and had first gravitated toward the Romanian political community; however, disconcerted by the overt antisemitism express among some Romanians and recognizing a greater role to be played by the nobility among Ukrainians, he settled on an estate in a Ukrainian-speaking area, learned the Ukrainian language, and entered professional politics as a spokesman for the younger generation of Ukrainians, who were seeking independence from the older, Russophile generation.^[30] A similar generational divide concerned the Romanians, with Onciul representing younger interests against the estate owners and conservative peasants, but his collaboration in the Alliance was short lived, and he parted ways with Straucher, Wassilko, and Stekel in 1905.^[31]

^[1] Lichtblau & John, “Jewries,” 51; Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 511.

^[2] Bikl, “Der Kinig,” 109; all translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

^[3] Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 511-512

^[4] Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 184-185.

^[5] Lichtblau & John, “Jewries,” 52.

^[6] Czernowitzer Tagblatt, January 29, 1907, 4.

^[7] Bukowinaer Rundschau, January 29, 1907, 2; Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, January 29, 1907, 4.

^[8] Czernowitzer Tagblatt, January 30, 1907, 4.

^[9] Czernowitzer Tagblatt, February 5, 1907, 5.

^[10] Bukowinaer Rundschau, February 5, 1907, 1.

^[11] Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon, s.v. “Wallstein, Adolf (1849–1926), Journalist,” accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.biographien.ac.at/oebl/oebl_W/Wallstein_Adolf_1849_1926.xml

^[12] Corbea-Hoisie, “Mayer Ebner”; Chelaru, “Die Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung,” 171.

^[13] Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 185.

^[14] Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 187.

^[15] Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 512, note 132; Lichtblau & John, “Jewries,” 53.

^[16] Reifer, Dr. Mayer Ebner, 53.

^[17] Bukowinaer Post, February 12, 1907, 2-3; Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, February 12, 1907, 4.

^[18] Bukowinaer Rundschau, February 5, 1907, 1.

^[19] Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 117-118.

^[20] Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 146.

^[21] Hausleitner, “Bukowina,” 61.

^[22] Lichtblau & John, “Jewries,” 53.

^[23] Hausleitner, “Transformations,” 200.

^[24] van Drunen, “A Sanguine Bunch,” 198-199.

^[25] van Drunen, “A Sanguine Bunch,” 228.

^[26] Quoted by van Drunen, “A Sanguine Bunch,” 217, note 698.

^[27] van Drunen, “A Sanguine Bunch,” 197-198.

^[28] Lichtblau & John, “Jewries,” 51; Ciucura, “Provincial Politics,” 270; Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 187, 513.

^[29] Gafița, “Aurel Onciul,” 161, 167-168; Stambrook, “Golden Age,” 11.

^[30] Dobrzhanskyi, “Nikolaj von Wassilko,” 188-189.

^[31] Corbea-Hoisie, “’Wie die Juden Gewalt schrein,’” 15.

One of my Twitter mutuals, Denying History (whom you should follow!), told me the other day that he found online an old essay I wrote about genocide denial in Rwanda and the similarities in the rhetoric used by proponents of both movements:

Genocide denial and the case of Rwanda

As I told my mutual, I thought I had issued a retraction to some (but not all) of the material in that article. I’m fairly certain that most of the stuff I’d written back then has gone down the memory hole, but since the piece linked to above is still live, I thought I’d reiterate some of the points I made back then.

The chief point of my retraction regarded Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, a Rwandan Hutu political activist who challenged Paul Kamage for the presidency in 2010 before she was thrown in jail for breaking Rwanda’s law against propagating “genocide ideology.” What I didn’t understand at the time that I wrote this article — but I do now — is the extent to which the smear campaign against Umuhoza was just that: a smear campaign. I further did not recognize the full extent of the depravity of the RPF under Kagame and how it has governed Rwanda. The article is not laudatory of Kagame or the RPF, but it doesn’t hold either to account to nearly the extent that I should have. More importantly, Umuhoza was poorly and unfairly characterized by me. While it strikes me as unlikely that what I wrote could have affected her case (she was in prison until 2018), that someone is still hosting the content online is troublesome. I intend to ask that it be removed.

That said, I still stand by everything I said about Ann Garrison and Peter Erlinder and the aim of them and the people in their circle to de-emphasize the victimhood of the Tutsi people during the 1994 genocide and instead pin the crime of genocide on Kagame’s RPF and its massacres of Hutu people over multiple military campaigns beginning in 1990. And to be clear, the RPF did commit massacres, but to label them genocide is false since the actions probably fall short of the legal definition of the term. That Garrison and Erlinder deny the genocide against the Tutsi as a way of undermining the legitimacy of Kagame’s rule — which is in and of itself a noble endeavor — does not change the fact that they are wrong or that the rhetoric they use routinely echoes that used by deniers of the Holocaust.

Thanks again to Denying History for pointing out the article to me.

Trouble Next Door

            In mid-February, a peasant revolt began in Romania, specifically in northern Moldavia, the region of the country directly bordering Bukovina. That the uprising began on estates employing Jewish leaseholders resulted in a high level of anti-Jewish violence, at least initially. As the revolt spread across the country, however, it became marked more by indiscriminate violence against property and its owners and managers, regardless of ethnic group. As the capital of a region directly bordering on the area in turmoil, Czernowitz was a major hub for news about the uprising. In addition, villages along the border between Bukovina and Romania received numerous refugees, including both Romanian peasants and Jews fleeing antisemitic violence.^[1]

            Irina Marin points out in her recent study of the uprising that there was never any real danger of the violence crossing the border into Bukovina, despite the presence of a large Romanian population on both sides. However, news of the revolt had significant repercussions for the electoral campaign and the rhetoric surrounding it. An unsigned comment in Bukowinaer Post connected the violence in Romania to the current battle between Jewish candidates in the election: “You Jews who sow the seeds of division among your own people, who wage a battle against your own co-religionists, against your own national brethren – you should consider that only the harmonious union of all forces can ward off evil and peril … The events in Romania, close to the border of Bukovina, are a gruesome Mene tekel for our Jews. You should understand this right.”^[2] Evoking the handwriting on the wall from the biblical Book of Daniel, which foretold the destruction of the Israelite Kingdom of Judah, the author reminded readers, “The Jews are always in danger!” – a catch phrase often uttered by Straucher in the past. Although the article was unsigned, the editors at Bukowinaer Volks Zeitung clearly believed Straucher had written it. They responded with their own front-page item attacking Straucher’s call for unity, referring to “his lack of embarrassment in erasing the misfortune of the Jews in Romania and cooking his thin soup by the fire of the peasant uprising there.”^[3]

            More disturbing was the response from some corners of the Romanian community, however. The lead-off item in the March 23 edition of Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, a weekly German-language newspaper targeted at Romanian educators and students, was entitled “Addressed to Our Jews.” It laid on the antisemitic stereotypes heavily. “It is not acceptable to see the cultureless peasants merely as objects of enrichment,” it read, “as unfortunately a large part of Jewry, not only in Russia and Romania but also in Austria and especially Bukovina, believes.” More ominously, it continued, “We involuntarily think of our own Jews at the many alarming reports that reach us from the border towns, and so many people who know our Jews find the popular anger, which is currently unfolding in such a fearful mass in the neighboring kingdom, all too understandable.” Bukovina’s Jews were condemned for peddling of alcohol, usury, worker exploitation, and control of the press. While assuring Jewish readers that it only had the best interests of the Jewish people in mind, the article accused the “Schnapps barons” of leading an attack on Aurel Onciul, and it closed with a dismissal of Straucher’s call for Jewish unity and a warning to Bukovina’s Jews to treat everyone justly and equitably.^[4] The newspaper was not yet finished. The next week, its front-page item, simply entitled “The Jews,” heaped insult upon injury. Having recognized that the nature of violence in Romania was predominantly economic and not antisemitic, the article accused Jews and specifically Straucher – now sneeringly called “the infallible” – of wrongly accusing others of hating them. Even as it warned readers that “Revolting farmers do not distinguish between circumcised and uncircumcised capital,” it engaged in grotesque antisemitic caricature: “It has never occurred to any of us to believe in ritual murder or to dwell on the fact that the Jews circumcise their boys instead of baptizing them, wear caftans and sidelocks, pray to the moon and believe in magical rabbis.”^[5]

            The threatening tone of these articles aside, it does bear mentioning that the hostility expressed toward Straucher is in keeping with the apparent division between Straucher’s JNP and the JPA/IJP and their respective alliances or aspiring alliances with the Ukrainians and Romanians of Bukovina. For the JPA/IJP, this gambit did not pay off. When it came time for the city’s newspapers to endorse candidates for the election, Neue Frei Lehrer Zeitung endorsed a choice: either the SD candidates, Brod and Grigorovici, or the Christian Germans, Roschmann and Scharizer. The Romanian support for the SD candidates, particularly for Brod, is somewhat confounding, but it seems to have been more a matter of denying votes in Czernowitz to Straucher and Wender than of supporting Brod or Grigorovici. With the Christian Germans, there was at least the unifying principle of antisemitism. In an overview of the electoral situation at the end of March, Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung noted, “The German candidate, Dr. Scharizer, is running on a national program with a strong – but unacknowledged – “Christian” element … The candidacy of Dr. Scharizer is intended to be implicitly antisemitic.”^[6] Roschmann would soon make his own antisemitism much clearer.

An Appeal to Christian Voters

            Sometime in early April, Roschmann tried to a new campaign strategy. He had posters put up across the city appealing to Christian voters – not German, but Christian – presumably a tactic to peel off antisemitic voters among the Romanians and Ukrainians of Czernowitz. For its own part, the liberal press in Czernowitz closed rank. Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung ran a signed front-page editorial by Johannes Kromayer, a German philologist and fellow professor at FJU, appealing to the better instincts of German readers and a sense of fairness in allowing the two Czernowitz mandates to be held by Jewish politicians.^[7] More incisive was an unsigned lead-off item in Czernowitz Tagblatt, which called Roschmann “a sinister agitator and wrongdoer who is all the more sharply condemned when he happens to work in the highest place of enlightenment and knowledge.” The piece diagnosed a split in the German political camp, urged German voters in the Three Cities to support Skedl – “a German of real scrap and grit” – and reminded readers that Czernowitz was already represented by two Jewish deputies – Straucher and chamber of commerce representative Rosenzweig.^[8] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung declared Skedl the “Jewish candidate” in the Three Cities despite his past.^[9] Bukowinaer Post reminded readers than neither Roschmann or Scharizer were natives of Bukovina, and as “imported Germans,” neither deserved the votes of the inhabitants of Czernowitz.^[10] Czernowitz Tagblatt picked up this thread and called the Christian German candidates “foreigners.”^[11]

            Even the twice-monthly Czernowitzer Presse, another of the late Herman Czopp’s newspaper, got into the act, releasing its second issue of the year after having appeared only sporadically since the publisher’s death. The first issue of 1907, released on April 9, ran a front-page editorial by an “independent socialist” who signed himself “Spektator.” The author, who piece ran five pages, accused Grigorovici of antisemitism – a strange claim considering the SD candidate in Czernowitz-West having openly courted Jewish voters (playfully referring to himself as a goy at an SD event in March), sought cooperation with the Jewish Bund in Russia, and most importantly, having a rather prominent Jewish wife, the Marxist theoretician Tatjana Pisterman; attacked Wallstein with the bathhouse allegation; and promised Billig that, if he did not withdraw from the campaign to “clean up his own affairs,” he would regret it.^[12]

            With the April 15 issue (which turned out to be the final issue), Czernowitz Presse opened with an attack on Billig and Wallstein but then turned to discussing the German candidates. In another pseudonymous piece – this one signed Justus – the Christian Germans were attacked as foreigners, “ignorant of the country, completely unfamiliar with the conditions of the population.” Roschmann’s declaration of himself as the “Christian candidate” was denounced as a “trick.” Finally, it warned that, if the Germans did not stop stoking antisemitic fires, Straucher’s JNP might consider canceling any deals with German candidates – an indication that it was up to Skedl’s liberal Germans to keep the Christian Germans at bay.^[13] This call seems to have been answered, with a new organization, the Bund der Deutschen (Association of Germans) emerging to call on German voters in Czernowitz to vote for Straucher and Wender.^[14] At the same time, cracks were beginning to show in some of Straucher’s other alliances. Two newspapers reported that the Straucher ally Smal-Stocki was encountering resistance getting Ukrainians to vote for the JNP.^[15] There was also talk of a Romanian entering the race in Czernowitz-East, presumably to force a run-off election in a district that still heavily favored Straucher.

^[1] Marin, Peasant Violence, 6, 209-210.

^[2] Bukowinaer Post, March 21, 1907, 2, translation is taken from Marin, Peasant Violence, 243.

^[3] Bukowinaer Volks Zeitung, March 23, 1907, 1.

^[4] Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, March 23, 1907, 1-2.

^[5] Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, March 30, 1907, 1-2.

^[6] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, March 31, 1907, 2.

^[7] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, April 12, 1907, 1.

^[8] Czernowitzer Tagblatt, April 13, 1907, 1-2.

^[9] Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, April 14, 1907, 1.

^[10] Bukowinaer Post, April 14, 1907, 2.

^[11] Czernowitz Tagblatt, April 14, 1907, 4.

^[12] Czernowitzer Presse, April 9, 1907, 1-5.

^[13] Czernowitzer Presse, April 15, 1907, 3-4.

^[14] Bukowinaer Post, April 21, 1907, 3-4.

^[15] Neue Freie Lehrer Zeitung, April 20, 1907, 2; Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, April 23, 1907, 4.

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

Over at the cesspit, our old friend Hannover tends to repeat himself a fair bit. One of his “greatest hits” is the claim that the idea that Jewish law generally forbids the exhumation of mass graves is a ruse designed to hide the “fact” that there are, in reality, no mass graves. Most recently, the Sage of CODOH wrote, “That [the idea that that Jewish law forbides exhumation] is a lie and has always been a way to dodge the fact that there are NO excavations which show the alleged millions upon millions of Jew human remains claimed to be located in know [sic] locations.”

Putting aside for the moment that mass graves have been demonstrated time and again, it’s worth considering what Jewish law actually has to say about these things. It’s been nearly a decade since we’ve discussed the matter, and maybe it’s time to get a little more specific.

There are two Talmudic texts of the topic. These quotations are taken from the William Davidson Talmud, which is provided online at sefaria.org.

Bava Batra 154a
Rabbi Yoḥanan raised an objection to Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish from a baraita: There was an incident in Bnei Brak involving one who sold some of his father’s property that he had inherited, and he died, and the members of his family came and contested the sale, saying: He was a minor at the time of his death, and therefore the sale was not valid. And they came and asked Rabbi Akiva: What is the halakha? Is it permitted to exhume the corpse in order to examine it and ascertain whether or not the heir was a minor at the time of his death? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is not permitted for you to disgrace him for the sake of a monetary claim. And furthermore, signs indicating puberty are likely to change after death, and therefore nothing can be proved by exhuming the body.

Yevamot 63b
Apropos the Ḥabbarim, the Gemara cites the following statement of the Sages: The Ḥabbarim were able to issue decrees against the Jewish people with regard to three matters, due to three transgressions on the part of the Jewish people. They decreed against meat, i.e., they banned ritual slaughter, due to the failure of the Jewish people to give the priests the gifts of the foreleg, the jaw, and the maw. They decreed against Jews bathing in bathhouses, due to their neglect of ritual immersion. Third, they exhumed the dead from their graves because the Jews rejoice on the holidays of the gentiles, as it is stated: “Then shall the hand of the Lord be against you and against your fathers” (I Samuel 12:15). Rabba bar Shmuel said: This verse is referring to exhuming the dead, which upsets both the living and the dead, as the Master said: Due to the iniquity of the living, the dead are exhumed.

More authoritative is the Shulchan Aruch (also available at sefaria.org), the 17th century compendium of Jewish law considered authoritative for eastern European Jewry.

Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah, 363
One should not remove a corpse and bones[1] from a dignified grave to [another] dignified grave, nor from an undignified grave to [another] undignified grave, nor from an undignified one to a dignified one, and needless to say [that it is forbidden] from a dignified one to an undignified one. 

[1] Two reasons are advanced for this prohibition: a) The disturbance of removal is hard on the dead — TaZ, ShaK. Cf. I Sam. XXVIII, 15; Job III, 13; b) Removal is considered a disrespectful treatment of the dead — RIDBaZ to Yad, Ebel XIV, 15. One who was buried in a non-Jewish cemetery may be removed to a Jewish one — P.Tesh., G.Mah. 

Two possibilities emerge here. The first is that international Jewry, cognizant of the grand hoax to be perpetrated some 1,500 years in the future, conspired to draft pages of Talmud to which Rabbi Yosef Karo could refer some 1,100 years later when compiling an index of Jewish law for the masses of Ashkenazim.

The second possibility is that Jewish law actually does have something to say about the topic.

Let’s be clear: We are under no illusions here that the folks over at CODOH will stop lying just because this blog post has appeared. However, with any luck, people curious to know whether their claims have any merit will find this post. That, after all, is sort of the point of what we’re doing here.

The 1907 election for the lower house of the Austrian legislature (the Reichsrat) was the first held after the central government in Vienna granted universal male suffrage. In the empire’s easternmost province of Bukovina — today divided between Ukraine and Romania — fourteen electoral districts were established, including two in the capital city of Czernowitz. The population of Czernowitz was quite heterogeneous, consisting of a Jewish plurality and roughly equal numbers of Germans, Poles, Romanians, and Ukrainians. The Reichsrat seats were contested in a highly volatile environment, with much of the battle fought in the pages of the local press. When the vote was held on May 14, the city’s eastern district elected Benno Straucher of the Jewish National Party (JNP) as its representative. At first blush, these events might seem well suited to the application of theories of political nationalism and the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas: a nationalist candidate was elected along ethnic lines after a campaign waged mainly in the public sphere. However, the unique environment of Czernowitz, including the complexity of its Jewish population and its politics and press, demonstrates some of the difficulties in applying these theories.

Nationalism: Diaspora Nationalism and Zionism

The study of nationalism has yielded an enormous literature, particularly since the 1970s. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have dominated the field. On one side, authors such as Benedict Anderson have propagated what has been called the “modernist” theory. These authors believe that nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon arising no earlier than the late 18th century, contemporaneous with processes of modernization including urbanization and industrialization. Moreover, they believe that nationalism as an ideology or movement predates the nation as a concept. As the title of his key work on the topic (Imagined Communities) implies, Anderson sees the nation as the “imagined political community […] imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”^[1] Nationalism, in Anderson’s view, is less an ideology than an anthropological condition “belong[ing] with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’.”^[2] What ushers in this condition and consequently gives rise to the nation is the emergence of what Anderson calls “print capitalism,” which emerges in Europe as dynastic rule and religious hegemony recede, literacy expands, and vernaculars favored by capitalism gain precedence over others.

While the idea of nationalist politics emerging as a result of print capitalism is an attractive one to apply to Czernowitz and the 1907 election, there are difficulties that we encounter in doing so. First, the experience of the Czernowitz Jewish community differs substantially from what Anderson proposes. The community was divided between, on the one hand, a longstanding traditional, Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox community that had resided in Bukovina since before Austrian annexation, largely in towns and villages, and on the other hand, a German-speaking bourgeois class of Jewish immigrants who moved to Czernowitz after the territory of Bukovina was separated from neighboring Galicia in 1863. This latter group did not undergo the processes of a liturgical prestige language giving way to a vernacular favored by capitalist forces; instead, it arrived in Czernowitz by and large already fluent in German and subsequently established German-language print publications. Although the pre-existing Yiddish-speaking Jewish population in Bukovina might have undergone a transition similar to that which Anderson describes, it was a process of becoming acculturated to the newer German-speaking Jewish arrivals than a more independent, “natural” evolution.

A perhaps more utile framework is offered by the primordialists, the other major group of nationalist theorists, who believe that the nation precedes nationalism and who see the modern nation as more continuous with pre-modern population groups. A key proponent of this view is Anthony Smith, who defines the nation as “a named human population occupying a historic territory or homeland and sharing common myths and memories; a mass, public culture; a single economy; and common rights and duties for all members.”^[3] Smith sees importance in tying the ethnic links and cultural sentiments of population groups to their modern status as nations; he calls ethnosymbolism the approach of the primordialists, which emphasizes the important roles of “myths, memories, values, and traditions.”^[4]

The tension between the modernist and primordialist understandings of nationalism intersect in the case of the 1907 election in Czernowitz with the more complex consideration of whether Jews constitute a nation and the extent to which Jewish nationalism and Zionism are overlapping ideologies. For the modernists, whether Jews are a nation is scarcely mentioned. In Imagined Communities, for instance, Anderson mentions Jews only in passing, specifically as an example of a group excluded by other nationalist movements.^[5] Of the major modernists, only Ernest Gellner examined Jews as a nation to any significant extent, specifically within the context of the phenomenon of diaspora nationalism. He mentions Jews among Armenians, Greeks, and Parsees as “economically brilliant groups” with “long tradition[s] of dispersal, urbanization, and minority status”^[6] and that enjoyed particularly strong in-group cohesion. Gellner sees a unique position of Zionism among other diaspora nationalisms, noting that it is “counter to the global trend: an urban, highly literate and sophisticated, cosmopolitan population was at least partly returned to the land and made more insular.”^[7]

In analyzing diaspora nationalism, Gellner is the modernist most closely resembling the primordialists, who also engage extensively with this subtopic and provide some of the more relevant theoretical analyses of Jewish nationalism in the diaspora, including its focus on emigration to Palestine. Smith, for instance, in defining ethnosymbolism, uses the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem — the holiest site in the Jewish faith — as an example.^[8] In more extended writing on the topics of diaspora Jewish nationalism and Zionism, Smith denounces not only the modernists for their failure to conceive of a sense of Jewish nationhood that predated modernity but also the “perennialists,” whom he sees as failing to acknowledge forms of Jewish nationalism beyond Zionism.^[9] This argument is particularly relevant in the case of Czernowitz’s 1907 election, in which Zionist activists campaigned against the JNP candidate for office — an example of factions of Jewish nationalists facing off against each other, rather than uniting against other population groups.

Like Gellner, Smith also notes the similarities of Jews with Armenians and Greeks while noting the key difference, according to which, while Armenians and Greeks mythologized a “golden age” of their pasts, the central myth of the Jews is the Exodus from Egypt and revelation on Mount Sinai.^[10] While all three diaspora groups experienced suffering and trauma, they also undertook, according to Smith, “the provision of channels and vehicles of collective action.”^[11] As forms of Jewish nationalism emerged, including both the diaspora subtypes of territorial autonomy and personal autonomy and Zionism, Smith argues that only Zionism could transform “a psychic deficit into a spiritual victory” by capitalizing on the mythic core of Jewish group identity.

In making this argument, Smith draws to a significant extent on the work of John Armstrong. A primordialist like Smith who examined diaspora nationalism, Armstrong argues in Nations Before Nationalism, “An extended temporal perspective is especially important as a means of perceiving modern nationalism as part of a cycle of ethnic consciousness,”^[12] comparing this process to the longue durée of the Annales school. Armstrong groups Jews with similar groups as “mobilized diasporas,” defined as a people that “does not have a general status advantage, yet which enjoys many material and cultural advantages compared to other groups in the multiethnic polity.”^[13] According to Armstrong, the conditions experienced by mobilized diasporas lend themselves to the development of specialization by the diaspora group in communications and role specialization. The former facilitated linguistic communication across borders, while the latter facilitated commercial enterprise under premodern conditions.

This matter of diaspora nations engaging in communication is an important one since it links the diaspora Jewish experience to high Jewish representation in diaspora journalistic institutions, as was the case in Czernowitz. Returning to the figure of Benno Straucher, despite repeated characterizations of him in the historiography as “Zionist,” he was decidedly more of a diaspora nationalist, even if, in forming the JNP, he collaborated with numerous committed Zionists outside of Bukovina, including the three JNP representatives also elected in 1907 from Galicia. Perhaps counterintuitively, it was the confirmed Zionists in Czernowitz who devised and supported the candidacy in Straucher’s district of Adolf Wallstein, representing the hastily named “Independent [Unabhängige] Jewish Party.”

Czernowitz Politics and the Public Sphere

Wallstein was a longstanding veteran of the Czernowitz journalistic community, having served as editor of the tri-weekly Bukowinaer Nachrichten and daily Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung.^[14] The latter newspaper was founded in 1903 by Philipp Menczel, who had earlier founded the first Zionist newspaper (Jüdisches Echo) in the city and hired the young activist Mayer Ebner as its first editor.^[15] Beginning in 1899, Ebner had collaborated with Straucher, who was elected for the first time to the Reichsrat in 1897. They worked together drafting a demand to the government in Vienna that Jews be recognized as a nation (they were then only recognized as a religious group, and Yiddish was not recognized as an official state language), but this attempt was blocked the following year by Menczel. Subsequently, Menczel and Ebner were summoned to Vienna by World Zionist Organization leader Theodor Herzl to support Straucher’s ultimately successful re-election to the Reichsrat in 1901.^[16] In the same year, the three men also cooperated in creating the Jüdisches Volksverein (Jewish People’s Association).^[17] By 1904, however, the alliance had run its course between Straucher and the Zionists, who had added to their number the prominent university professor and activist Leon Kellner. Here began what Ebner would later call the “thirty year war” between Straucher and his allies on one side and Ebner, Kellner, Menczel, and the other Zionists on the other.^[18]

Much of this conflict was fought in the newspapers, and the 1907 election campaign became a proxy war for it. This fact is unsurprising if we consider the extent to which Jewish politics (and those of the other national groups in Czernowitz) were already intermingled with Czernowitz’s public sphere. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas had articulated a theory of the introduction of the public sphere as a space that emerged as the earlier European period of absolutism, with its “publicness (or publicity) of representation,”^[19] receded. In this public sphere, the needs of private citizens, both familial and commercial, were mediated with the state and its power through public participation in such institutions as voluntary societies, coffee houses, and the press. Habermas writes, “The heirs of the humanistic-aristocratic society, in their encounter with the bourgeois intellectuals (through sociable discussions that quickly developed into public criticism), built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere.”^[20]

Importantly, Habermas identifies this public sphere as bourgeois, indicating the inherent barriers to entry imposed upon it by class and — by extension — literacy, education, and (depending on time and place) nation. The German-speaking Jewish community of Czernowitz offers a relatively pristine example of Habermas’s idea in practice in so far as this community arrived in the city in bourgeois form. However, the public sphere in Czernowitz did not emerge in the manner described by Habermas; rather, whereas the slow process of a public sphere emerging as absolutism gave way to liberalism could be seen unfolding in Vienna over several decades, the sphere was transplanted nearly fully formed into Czernowitz after liberalism had already taken root empire-wide. This fact constitutes the first difficulty encountered with applying Habermas’s public sphere paradigm to the 1907 election. Moreover, as other ethnic groups in Czernowitz began to establish their own press presences, the monopoly of the bourgeoisie over the public sphere was called into question. In addition, some representatives of these groups inserted nationalistic — and sometimes jingoistic and antisemitic — rhetoric into the public sphere, diluting the stated Habermasian intent of rational discourse. These developments point toward the identification of certain shortcomings in the public sphere paradigm overall.

Other theorists have noted the inability of Habermas’s public sphere to accommodate non-bourgeois actors and non-rational discourses. For instance, historian Geoff Eley has written extensively on ways in which the public sphere might be reinterpreted to consider historical developments beyond Habermas’s initial limits of laissez-faire capitalism under a liberal government transforming into a more managed economy. Eley writes, “It’s only by extending Habermas’s idea in this direction — toward the wider public domain, where authority is not only constituted as rational and legitimate, but where its terms may also be contested and modified (and occasionally overthrown) by society’s subaltern groups — that we can accommodate the complexity.”^[21] Eley sees this extension occurring on multiple levels, including a plebeian or proletarian challenge to the public sphere’s bourgeois status and the application of Karl Deutsch’s theories of the role of social communication in nation formation, which overlap with Anderson’s concept of print capitalism’s role in the rise of nationalism.

Similarly, sociologist Craig Calhoun has examined at length how Habermas’s public sphere might be reconfigured to better consider the rise of nationalism. Calhoun identifies what he considers a fundamental paradox lying at the center of Habermas’s public sphere theory, which is that it “works on the hope of transcending difference rather than the provision of occasions for recognition, expression, and interrelationship.”^[22] To resolve this paradox, according to Calhoun, requires both questioning the very notion of a single, authoritative public sphere and expanding the public sphere’s role to include identity formation as one of its key processes.^[23] Such an expanded understanding of the public sphere is more conducive to application in the case of Czernowitz in 1907 on two levels. First, it applies to the Zionist opponents of Straucher, who explicitly exploited the public sphere to both win voters and build support for Zionism. Second, regarding the entrance into Czernowitz’s public sphere of its Romanian and Ukrainian populations subsequent to Czernowitz’s Jews doing the same, Calhoun’s expansion of Habermas’s original theory allows for the expression of political concerns by these groups, including those based less on rational concerns and more on nationalist emotions and even outright prejudice.

Conclusion

            Ultimately, Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and the modernist school of nationalism studies — at least in their original forms — have limited application to the 1907 Reichsrat election in Czernowitz despite the prominent nationalist themes of the campaign and the highly evolved public square in which it was contested. Part of the problem is that Habermas’s initial enunciation of the public sphere does not extend far enough into the history of liberalism to respond to nationalism’s emergence. Therefore, it requires the revisions of Eley and Calhoun to truly fit the circumstances of the fight over Benno Straucher’s election. Similarly, Anderson’s theory of print capitalism’s role in the rise of nationalism is a poor fit to the peculiar circumstances in which Czernowitz’s public sphere arose or the Jewish population that found its voice there. Ultimately, primordialism might offer a better theoretical framework for this environment and its actors. With these specifically adjusted theoretic lenses, we can better understand the events in Czernowitz and how, despite their surface similarity to electoral results elsewhere, they constitute an important counterexample to common assumptions about nationalist and Jewish politics in the late Habsburg era.

^[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (New York: Verso, 2016), 5-6, emphasis in original.

^[2] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5.

^[3] Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates About Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 20, emphasis in original.

^[4] Smith, Nation in History, 121.

^[5] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 105, 153.

^[6] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2009), 105.

^[7]             Gellner, Nations, 107.

^[8] Anthony D. Smith, “The Origins of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 12, no. 3 (1989): 362.

^[9] Anthony D. Smith, “Zionism and Diaspora Nationalism,” Israel Affairs, 2, no. 2 (1995): 1.

^[10] Smith, “Zionism,” 12.

^[11] Smith, “Zionism,” 13.

^[12] John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 4.

^[13] John A. Armstrong, “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” American Political Science Review, 70, no. 2 (1976): 393.

^[14] Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon, s.v. “Wallstein, Adolf (1849–1926), Journalist,” accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.biographien.ac.at/oebl/oebl_W/Wallstein_Adolf_1849_1926.xml

^[15]            Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, “Mayer Ebner,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, accessed December 15, 2020, https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Ebner_Mayer; Nora Chelaru, “Die Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, die langlebigste Tageszeitung der Bukowina (1903-1940),” in Narrative des Peripheren in posthabsburgischen Literaturen des zentral(ost)europäischen Raums, edited by Ana-Maria Palimariu and Wolfgang Müller-Funk (Konstanz, Germany: Hartung-Gorre, 2019), 171.

^[16]            Adolf Gaisbauer, Davidstern und Doppeladler: Zionismus und jüdischer Nationalismus in Österreich, 1882-1918 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1988), 185.

^[17] Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 187.

^[18] Gaisbauer, Davidstern, 512, note 132; Albert Lichtblau and Michael John, “Jewries in Galicia and Bukovina, in Lemberg and Czernowitz: Two Divergent Examples of Jewish Communities in the Far East of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,” in Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Milton Shain (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 53.

^[19] Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 7.

^[20] Habermas, Structural Transformation, 30.

^[21]Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” CSST Working Paper #42, Comparative Study of Social Transformations, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, April 1990, 19-20, emphasis in original.

^[22] Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism and the Public Sphere,” in Public and Private in Thought and Action: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 83-84.

^[23] Calhoun, “Nationalism and the Public Sphere,” 84.