After the Edict of Tolerance: Galician Jews 1790-1848

The present project has been planned as a continuation of the current FWF project M1087-G08 From Qahal to the Jewish Community: Galician Jews 1772-1790. At the beginning of the transition there had been 64 Galician Qahalim associated with each other and having far-reaching political and financial authorities. At the end of the process we have 141 scattered Jewish communities that were solely responsible for religious affairs. On the basis of the records of the Lviv and Vienna authorities as well as of the Galician Jewish Communities ("Israelitische Kultusgemeinden", IKG), the resulting project is to look at a number of aspects: 1) The economic and social implications of the Edict of Tolerance for the overall community but also for the individual. 2) The influence of the state on the power structure within the IKG in connection with the differences between Hasidism and Haskalah. 3) The Galician educational projects of the Haskalah as another result of Enlightened absolutism. Ad 1) Numerous Galician Qahalim were already plunged in dept during the transition period 1772-1790; partly, those were debts stemming from the time before the re-vindication of Galicia. Additionally, the increased fiscal burden of the Jewish population at the times of Maria Theresia and Joseph II had led to new tax debts. At the beginning of the Austrian rule, a number of specifically Jewish duties had been introduced in Galicia (tolerance fee, additional charge for kosher meat etc.). This resulted in an enormous financial and social burden for the Jewish population, three quarters of who belonged to the lowest tax group anyway. The inventory Publico-politica - Judensachen of the Landesgubernium contains the complete annual information on the financial affairs of the Jewish population of Galicia 1790-1848. Ad 2) Lviv`s inventory Judensachen is very promising, too, as regards the outcome of the abolition of communal cooperation on a federal level. In addition we have to question the implications of the de-centralization - or even atomization - of the Galician Jewish community system onto the spreading of the Haskalah and Hasidism. While the Maskilim were in the fore of such "urban" communities as Lviv, Brody and partly Tarnopol, most of the smaller Jewish communities of the country were dominated by Hassidim. They formed veritable oligarchies whose networks and social interactions will be analyzed. Ad 3) The German-Jewish school system headed by Herz Homberg is closely connected with the spreading of the Haskalah and Enlightened absolutism. The first of an overall 107 schools and school classes was founded in Galicia in 1787, the zenith of this school system was, however, reached only after 1790. Numerous conflicts left their marks within the archives of the Lviv religious community and the central provincial government (Landesgubernium). Within this paper, the focus will lie on schools but also on pupils as they belong to a generation of differently educated Jews. These youngsters came to be important Jewish protagonists during the events of the year 1848 within the Crown Land. The Jewish picture of Galicia during this year of revolution, which opened an époque of transition from tolerance to civil equality, shall close this project.

For this project, Galician Jewish communities were looked at as regards the consequences of their transition from autonomous organisations formed within the Polish Aristocracy to the Josephian Judensystem. In spite of the fact that parts of the enlightened-absolutistic reforms had partially been withdrawn after 1790, Jewish community life had been largely impacted by these regulations for over half a century. These regulations had initially been aiming at a civil assimilation. To do so, the Galician Kahalim had been denied their old fiscal and political powers in 1785. Separate jurisdiction was annulled and the Jewish population fell under the general jurisdiction. As a result of this assimilation, Jewish patresfamilias had to at the beginning of the year 1788 assume a German gens for themselves and their descendants; further, Jewish communities had to exclusively use the German language in their books and official correspondence. The removal (Abstellung) of a Jewish tradition of clothing ordered in March 1788 was little successful. And the enlightened project of German-Israelite schools experienced its heydays only after the death of the reformed emperor and was abandoned altogether in 1806 in favour of the traditional Chadarim. Further, the project on the so-called productivisation of Jews found little success. The order from 1788 on the participation of Jews as entrepreneurs and blue-collar workers at still to be built Galician manufactories was never realized. Even the Jewish agrarian colonisation showed only very limited success due to a lack of useable farmland and financial resources. The attempts to remove the Jews from the Propination, the Szlachtas alcohol trade, failed due to the gentrys decisive resistance. The French Revolution then brought about an important change of course. From 1789 onwards, enlightened reforms were increasingly considered as a serious threat of the existing power structure by the ruling élites rather than a development opportunity. Accordingly, the focus lay progressively on politically conform religious traditions and on existing power structures.The discriminating special taxation introduced under the rule of Joseph II Koscherfleischgefälle and Lichtergefälle was preserved. Their abolition became one of the utmost Galician-Jewish concerns in 1848. The Josephian regulations on the organisation of Jewish communities though turned out to be of lasting effect. The so-called Präliminarpatent from May 17th, 1785 turned the associated and interconnected but autonomous Kahalim into individual religious communities. On the one hand this resulted in an exemption from a burden of debts for many Jewish communities. On the other hand, the abolition of the separate judicial system based on the Halakha removed the only impactful counterbalance to the oligarch tendencies within Jewish communities. The altogether 150 fragmented communities were then at the mercy of families of potentates. Based on pertinent archival papers it has been asserted that the Metternich System in Galicia had been exclusively interested in Jewish communities finances and the political loyalty of the Jewish community council without having any concern for the legitimacy of their elections. The fact that more than three quarters of the Jewish Galician tax payers were poor and thus not eligible to vote in their communities strengthened the dependency and power networks considerably as well as weakening the middle class. The positioning of a community as Chassidim or enlightened depended on the council rather than on the majority of community members. Successful foundations of enlightened schools in Ternopol (1813) and Brody (1815) had therefore only been possible because local heads of the council had seen themselves as supporters of progress. This aspect as well as other research results will be discussed at length within a project monograph.