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12 A Strange Case of Antisemitism IVAN FR ANKO AND THE JEWISH ISSUE Yaroslav Hrytsak In the Ukrainian intellectual tradition, there is no other author who has written as extensively on the Jewish issue as Ivan Franko (1856–1916). He turned to this issue in various ways: in his poetry and prose, as a political leader and a journalist, and through his research in the Biblical tradition. The volume and richness of Franko’s production stands in stark contrast to the rather modest amount of research devoted to it by scholars.1 This paucity may be partly explained by the Soviet tradition of eliminating Jewish topics from public and academic discourse . In Soviet Ukraine, this tendency seemed to take a more extreme form than in any other Soviet republic.2 In the case of Franko, it led to the passing over in silence of his writings on the Jewish issue, some of which were considered covert propaganda for Zionism.3 There is yet another difficulty in studying Franko’s attitudes toward Jews, and that is the ambivalent and sometimes controversial character of his statements. Indeed, Franko’s writings may be read sometimes as philosemitic, sometimes as antisemitic. There has been a telling discrepancy between Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian authors: while the former explored Franko’s positive statements on Jews,4 the latter often speak of him as another Ukrainian antisemite.5 The following paper seeks to analyze these two controversial facets of his lore as an expression of an essential controversy within his ideology. In a broader comparative context, the paper addresses the issue of antisemitism and its various historical expressions , using case of Franko as an interesting case study for late nineteenth century Central and Eastern Europe. Setting the Context: A Borderland on the Threshold of Modernity Franko’s lifetime was distinctive as the period during which there emerged modern movements and ideologies that shaped the whole of twentieth-century European history. At the A Strange Case of Antisemitism 229 time he started his career (1870s), there emerged all the possible new words—nihilism, materialism , socialism, assimilation, antisemitism, decadence, and others—that by the time of his death (1916) already dominated the political and intellectual scene of his native Habsburg Galicia.6 Franko himself was very instrumental in spreading these modern concepts and ideas—to the extent that he was regarded as “an epitome of modernity” by his numerous followers and as a “great demoralizer” by his no less numerous foes.7 Like most East European intellectuals, he faced, however, a great challenge: how to implement these modern concepts that emerged from outside of his region and had little relevance to the local social and cultural circumstances? For one thing, modern ideologies required from their adherents clear-cut loyalties and identities. Galicia was, however, a typical borderland marked by wholesale confusion of identities. Until the very final days of Habsburg rule, two major local ethnic groups, the Ruthenians and the Jews, were engaged in debates about to which nation they belonged: Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, or a separate Ruthenian nation in the first case,8 or German, Polish , or Jewish in the latter case.9 The third major group, the Roman Catholic Poles, was saved from these debates due to the existence of a heavily populated stratum of intellectuals and politicians with a strong feeling of their Polish identity. Polish elites strove to establish their political dominance in the province. Polish nationalism faced, however, a problem similar to the one that confronted both Ukrainian and Jewish nationalisms: how to integrate into the single body of a modern nation a largely illiterate and traditional population who were either apathetic or sometimes even hostile to nation-building projects. The Galician situation was hardly unique. It was rather typical for the whole of Eastern Europe, where large expanses of space without internal geographical divisions and with a diverse population led to contests over the definition of territorial and ethnic boundaries.10 Galicia was distinctive, however, in one sense: the ways in which the local crisis of identities might be resolved had a major impact on neighboring Russian provinces that were populated by the same set of ethnic and religious groups. The importance of Galicia was further aggravated by the fact that when the Polish and Ukrainian movements were repressed in the Russian empire in the 1860s, they shifted the center of their activity to the Austro-Hungarian empire, with its more liberal political regime. Each of them saw the region as their “Piedmont...

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