*Online Course

In 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust, East European Jewry constituted the most important and influential Jewish community in the world. As a result of half a century of mass migration to the West, up to 90% of world Jewry either lived in Eastern Europe or were children of east European immigrants. Although scholarship and popular memory typically equate Eastern Europe with the Russian Empire, in fact Jews in the eastern Austrian empire – in Galicia and Bukowina – numbered one million souls by the Holocaust, plus hundreds of thousands of emigres throughout the world. Moreover, despite the popular image of the cunning, coarse, fanatical “Galitsyaners,” Galicia actually served as a center of haskalah(Jewish Enlightenment), rabbinic scholarship and a vital and innovative Hasidic movement, and later produced countless Zionist and socialist leaders as well as a cadre of literary and academic stars including most prewar Polish-Jewish historians and, most famously, the noble prize laureate S.Y. Agnon.

This course surveys the establishment, flourishing and destruction of this once vital community by examining its social, economic, political, religious and cultural history from the eighteenth century – the time of the province's creation – to the Holocaust and its aftermath. While we focus on Galicia, we will regularly place Galicia in its broader East European context, particularly in the final three lectures covering the period after the demise of Galicia as a legal province at the end of the First World War.

2024-2025 Course Syllabus