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No. 40. | Vienna, 5 October 1900. | Fourth Year

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The Present and Future of the Galician Jews.

By Alexander Hausmann.

In Galicia, as in the rest of Poland, there had for a long time been no autochthonous burgher class. The development of town life had begun late and was abruptly interrupted by the Mongol and Tartar invasions. There was wanting the middle class which, socially and economically, would have formed the connecting link between Schlachta and peasant, would have carried on the traffic in goods and money, and would have occupied itself with the production of manufactured wares. The Polish kings and princes sought to remedy the evil that thus arose by calling German colonists into the country, granting them land and soil for nothing, and conferring upon them the privilege of living under a law of their own. Attracted by these favours, many Germans immigrated into Poland, rebuilt the towns destroyed and burnt to ashes by the Mongols and Tartars, and thereby laid the germ of a later burgher class. This German colonisation was far too weak to be able to take over wholly and undividedly the task that awaited it. A gap remained, and into it the Jews entered. The Jew did not need to be attracted. He came of himself, and offered money besides, glad to have found a place of refuge from the persecutions of the age of the Crusades and their after-effects. The Polish kings favoured the toleration of the Jews, for the poll-tax which these had to pay for it formed a considerable source of revenue. To the Schlachta, which gained ever more privileges and influence, so that it soon developed into the only fully enfranchised estate, the native burgher was a thorn in the eye. It sought to suppress him, as it sought to suppress everything that could narrow its power, to take his rights from him or at least to curtail them considerably. But for its own purposes it gladly made use of the Jew, for he was without rights and wholly in its hands.

With him one could do what one liked. The Jew was the intermediary between Schlachta and peasant. As leaseholder and propinator in the open country, he conducted the yield over into the pockets of the magnates and of the Schlachta. They squeezed as much money out of him as was possible, and he on his part was compelled to indemnify himself upon the peasant. This earned him the hatred of the peasants. In the Cossack and peasant risings he had to atone for it with blood and goods, and this hatred was handed down to the present day, when, awakened by an unscrupulous agitation, it found its terrifying expression in the excesses of recent years. Further, the money traffic, almost the whole of trade, and in part the handicrafts as well, lay in the hands of the Jews. The Poles maintain that we are bound to them in a particular gratitude, because at a time when we were everywhere persecuted and hunted they granted us reception and protection. This is true only with the qualification that in Poland we were hated and despised quite as much as anywhere else, and that we were tolerated only because we were needed, because we replaced the missing middle class and filled the gap in economic life. Only from moments of a political and social nature is that fact to be explained — a fact strange in view of the Jews' fate elsewhere — that in Poland the Jews were through a long period not merely tolerated, but found themselves in a relatively rather favourable position.

This condition lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. In the course of our own century there begins a slow and thoroughgoing change, whose final development is taking place in our days. In the last century of independent Poland the Turkish and Tartar danger, which was the most disturbing hindrance to the development of town life in Galicia, had ceased. At the partition of Poland, Galicia fell to Austria. Austria had no interest in preserving the prerogatives of the Schlachta. On the contrary, it sought to play off peasant and burgher against the nobility, which was a hearth of revolutionary spirit. The burgher class was thereby first freed from the oppressive prepotency of the Schlachta, and then, when constitutionalism made its entry in Austria, attained equality of rights and a share in the legislation both of the State and of the province. Favoured by these circumstances, there had slowly formed itself, steadily increasing in size and importance, a native burgher class which is not only able, but positively driven, to take over for itself the tasks that the Jew has hitherto fulfilled. The Jew has all at once no one left to replace. His social and economic function falls away, He is not only superfluous, but even harmful, for he holds those callings which should have formed the sources of livelihood of the new bourgeoisie. He loses his right of existence in the country, and for the possibility of his existence he must take up a struggle of life and death with the autochthonous middle class. In this struggle there stands on the side of the latter whatever possesses power and importance in the country, while we have in our favour at most those personal qualities, acquired through centuries of practice and discipline, which fit us particularly for the economic struggle. — All this does not proceed by way of conscious party formation. There is as yet in Galicia no great anti-Semitic party which would consciously proclaim the economic annihilation of the Jews as its programme; but the war of annihilation actually exists, and the beginnings of a