Papers for the Folk: Jewish Nationalism and the Birth of the Yiddish Press in Galicia

Summary

JEWISH nationalism in Galicia, like its Viennese counterpart, was initially a movement largely of the secular intelligentsia, especially students. Raised in a Polish cultural (and educational) milieu, Jewish students tended at first to identify strongly with Polish nationalist aspirations, but the increasing rejection they experienced from Polish nationalists, among whom antisemitism was sharply rising, made them choice targets for Zionist propaganda. Galician Zionists attacked their ‘assimilationist’ rivals ferociously, and tried to inspire Galician Jews to support the rebirth of a Jewish national culture instead. At first they relied on the German-language Viennese organ Selbst-Emanzipation, but by 1892 they had begun to publish their own Polish-language literature, including a party organ, Przyszłość (‘The Future’).

By the mid-1890s the Jewish nationalist movement, with dozens of associations and roughly 4,000 members throughout the province, had achieved a strong foothold among the secular intelligentsia in Galicia. It could hardly claim to represent the hundreds of thousands of traditional Jews in the province, however. Zionists occasionally debated reaching out to these Jews, but the focus of Zionist efforts continued to be the Jewish intelligentsia. Lecture topics were oriented towards those with little to no background in Jewish history, for example, and Zionist publications continued to reflect a secular readership. Most Jews, after all, could read neither Polish nor German, and anyway would have been alienated by the Zionist publications’ largely secular orientation.

Partially as a result of this political vacuum, a new kind of literature emerged in Galicia in the early 1890s: a populist nationalist press published in the Yiddish language. These papers, published and edited by Zionists (and often supported by Zionist associations), represented an early, major effort of outreach beyond the secular intelligentsia, and constituted a revolutionary advance for the Jewish nationalist movement. Anticipating the eventual dominance of the Yiddish-language press in Galicia, although pre-dating it by over a decade, they helped to lay the foundation for popular acceptance of Yiddish as a modern language worthy of its own press. More importantly, they made a critical contribution to the transformation of Jewish self-consciousness from an essentially religious to a national orientation, through the appropriation of religious norms which their readers shared.