The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia by Daniel Unowsky (review)

During the first six months of 1898, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Polish western and central Galicia, located within the Habsburg Empire. Carried out primarily by Polish peasants against Jews and their property within small market towns and villages, between April and June the riots quickly spread to more than 400 communities. Daniel Unowsky's well-written and thoroughly researched study provides a sophisticated account of why the riots occurred, what actually happened, public and official reaction, and the events' long-term impact. Unowsky eschews the term "pogrom": these events were far less violent than what transpired in Russia before and after this date. Despite widespread property damage and multiple injuries, no Jews died. In fact, the only deaths occurred when military authorities fired on rioting Poles. Even so, the violence further hardened identities and helped to generate a crucial cleavage.

Unowsky contextualizes the disturbances within Western Galicia's peripheral, agricultural economy, in which Poles mostly worked the land and Jews mostly occupied positions in commerce and trades. Especially sensitive was the Jews' role in alcohol production, tavern-keeping, and smallscale loans. Scholars tend to focus on this, but the author points us in an underexplored direction: the advent of the public sphere, especially mass politics. Universal manhood suffrage and a series of elections in 1897 and 1898 brought parties and politicians onto the scene, appealing to small town citizens and the Polish peasantry. Catholic priests spearheaded their own approach; one named Mateusz Jeż issued a pamphlet titled Jewish Secrets supposedly "proving" the Jewish use of Christian blood for ritual purposes. The work decried the Jewish tavern, Jewish usury, and Jewish "domination" over the politics and economy of Galicia. Jews corrupted Christian society, according to the author, whose solution was asemitism: Jews should not be hated or beaten, but avoided. Separation required abstention from alcohol and the creation Polish businesses and cooperatives to supplant the Jews. The pamphlet sold out several printings, and its ideas were propagated in the press and from the pulpit.

Political parties took up a more militant antisemitic propaganda, the crucial link translating antipathy into violence. At rowdy meetings new politicians sought to upend the Polish conservative elites who had long dominated Galician politics under a highly restricted franchise. Expansion of suffrage for Parliament in Vienna permitted the emergence of populist peasant parties whose rivalries bolstered the prospects of the radical priest and former Jesuit Stanisław Stojałowski and his Christian People's Party. In a process of "ethnic outbidding," the latter, their populist rivals, and occasionally even the nominally universalist Social Democrats competed over which one best defended Poles against the pernicious influence of the Jews. Campaign gatherings often involved "clubs and rocks." Electoral success followed.

The most violent phase of the riots coincided with voting day, June 23, 1898. Jews were charged with vote buying, while populist politicians disputed who had received fewer "Jewish" votes. This was not the first time antisemitism had been deployed as a political weapon, but the arrival of mass politics changed everything. Now even the poorest peasant could vote. Ideas moved quickly between towns, a genuinely national public sphere had been created, and politicians sought by any means to transform demographic weight into political power.

Throughout Eastern Europe anti-Jewish violence had long attended the run-up to Holy Week—and alcohol. The addition of electoral politics and rising food prices tipped the scales. Peasant rioters, Unowsky shows, were less interested in high-minded party platforms than in material gain, intimidation, and the pleasure of destroying Jewish property. The government responded by banning Jewish Secrets, but could not halt political gatherings or the publication of antisemitic literature by other outlets.

In Kalwaria Zebrzydowska attacks occurred on May 25 and 26. Youths who had arrived for the centenary of national poet Adam Mickiewicz began to throw rocks through the windows of Jewish homes and ransack Jewish-owned businesses. Ten gendarmes and policemen...