The present book is a translation of Antisemitismus in Galizien. Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (2012). It builds on two studies of the anti-Jewish riots in rural West Galicia in 1898, originally written in English: Keely Stauter-Halsted's “Jews as Middleman Minorities in Rural Poland: Understanding the Galician Pogroms of 1898,” (in Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (2005), 39–59) and Daniel Unowsky, The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia (2018). The present book takes note of these studies in its bibliography but analyzes the riots without engaging with them directly.

During the riots, most of which took place between March and June 1898, peasants and, in some cases, day laborers attacked Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes and looted Jewish property in over four hundred communities. While no Jews were killed, many were injured, and some rioters were killed by local gendarmes. The riots stopped only after Austria approved the declaration of a state of emergency and martial law in various districts, which was implemented with the help of the military and local militias. Despite the imprisonment of over 2000 rioters, many local judges expressed understanding for their motives and actions. During the parliamentary debates following the reaction of the Austrian government, Galician members of populist parties used the opportunity to attack Jews and blame their business conduct for what happened. Notwithstanding the efforts of agitators to sever economic contact between Christians and Jews, such contacts resumed after the riots, although tension remained in the air.

In attempting to explain this unprecedented eruption of violence in the Habsburg Monarchy, the author charts what he calls a “process of antisemitism” (27), an evolution that started with the propagation of antisemitic ideas in the second half of the nineteenth century by two Galician individuals: Teofil Merunowicz, a public figure and politician, and Jan Matejko, the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Both spread antisemitic conspiracy theories similar to those promoted by Jakob Brafman and August Rohling. The first chapter, “Agitation,” explains how the imperial changes in the franchise, especially the introduction of a fifth curia composed of all males over the age of twenty-four, gave rise to populist and clerical parties, which spread hostility toward Jews among the peasants. This was accomplished with the help of newspapers and pamphlets intended for the rural population. Antisemitism became a central theme not only on the printed page but also in political campaigns conducted in villages and small towns, which blamed Jews’ economic practices for the poverty and alcoholism of peasants.

The second chapter, “Violence,” explains the link between agitation and violence. It sees in collective violence “a reflection of social reality” (112), which in this case was marked by changes in several spheres: civic, economic, the media, and self-identification. Convinced by agitators that Jews made their living by exploiting Christians, peasants felt entitled to rob “their Jews,” but in many cases, familiarity inhibited them from direct physical attacks. Violent attacks were motivated also from below, specifically by various rumors that gave legitimacy to violence. Many of these rumors claimed that the emperor had granted permission to beat the Jews. These rumors appeared not only as gossip but also in printed material in the form of permit cards and leaflets. Providing a rich theoretical basis for the function of rumors, the author claims that “rumors cannot be regarded as an expression of ‘primitive culture,’ limited to retelling stories about the nobility, the emperor, and Jews. In this chapter, Galician peasants will be treated as thinking actors. They not only received rumors and reproduced them in the process of retelling, but also shaped them” (116). The question remains why rumors about the emperor's permission to attack Jews did not lead Christians in a neighboring city like Kraków to do the same.

The last chapter in the book, “Politics,” describes in detail interpellations presented in the Austrian parliament by members of Galician populist parties. The interpellations cited peasants’ testimonies and gossip, thus linking the village with the imperial capital. Using antisemitic terms, they portrayed Jews as not only exploiting the peasants but also as colluding with government officials. Jews, on the other hand, saw that they could trust the government whose actions stopped the attack on them.

Despite the author's assertion that “Jewish actors [in the book] appear as autonomous subjects and not merely as victims” (22), they appear mostly as victims. There is no data on their percentage of the population in the various villages and towns mentioned in the book, or on their religious and cultural life and political affiliations. Such data could have demonstrated more points of similarities, differences, or contacts (e.g., in schools) between Jews and Christians beyond the economic sphere. Had the author utilized the reports on the riots in the contemporary Hebrew-language press, he could have enriched the book by providing Galician Jewish perspectives on the events and not just the views of Viennese Jews. This leaves room for further research.

This criticism aside, the book is based on an impressive collection of archival documents and contemporary press reports. Its description of the 1898 riots and the newly political backdrop against which the violence took shape is rich in texture and details. It is also timely, as its analytical framework illuminates the link between the rise of political populism, rumors, and violence, beyond the subject and geographical region discussed in the book.