Global Politics and the Shaping of Jewish Religious Identity: The Case of Hungary and Galicia (original) (raw)

2019, JEWISH POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW

When scholars discuss major turning points and novel worldviews in the Jewish religion, they generally address ideological changes and social trends that took place either within the Jewish realm or in its adjacent non-Jewish environment. In this article, however, I demonstrate how Jewish society in general, and its religious concepts in particular, were also influenced by political decisions taken by the leaders of the countries in which they lived. To this end the article examines two of the most religiously diverse Jewish societies, that of Galicia and that of Hungary. In referring to these two locations, this article does not relate to territories contained within recognized political borders but rather to the Jews who lived in two distinct, yet adjacent, geographic regions. The one, located north of the Carpathian Mountains and known as Halych or Galicia since the 12th century, was recognized as a semi-independent region after its annexation to the Habsburg Empire in 1772. The second is the vast area surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains to the east and the Pannonian Basin to the west known as Hungary since the 10th century, nowadays referred to as “Greater Hungary.”1 From a Jewish perspective, Galician and Hungarian Jews were always considered to be two distinct types, regardless of their formal nationality, be it Polish or Austrian in the case of Galicia, or Romanian or Czechoslovakian in the case of Hungary. Compared to the groupings of Jews in the regions that surrounded these two territories, be these the German-speaking territories in the west, Poland to the north, the Russian Empire to the east, or Romania and the Ottoman Empire to the south, the Jewish populations of both Galicia and Hungary displayed a wider assortment of religious orientations. Both contained a large number of Hasidic communities – the most conservative and traditional of Jewish groupings – which offered the strongest opposition to modernity and to other international social trends. Next came the non-Hasidic mainstream Orthodox Jews, who were more receptive to external influences such as general education, proficiency in the local languages, openness to European culture, and the partial adoption of the prevailing dress code and appearance. Then there were the nonobservant yet traditional Jews, who adhered to some of the customs and public rituals as well as to their Jewish identity. Many of them moved freely between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, while some exchanged their observance of religious lifestyle for Jewish nationalism and became active, yet predominantly secular, Zionists. At the furthermost end of the spectrum were those who were born and raised as Jews but who chose to sever all connections to their forefathers’ spiritual heritage. This, of course, is only a partial list of the Jewish subcultures that existed in these two lands. On closer inspection, one may differentiate, for example, between mainstream non-Hasidic Jews who believed that acquiring general knowledge and even an academic education was permitted by Jewish law, and the neo-Orthodox, who regarded such an education as an integral and obligatory part of Jewish education, in a manner they titled “Torah and science.”2 One may also distinguish between one sector of more radical and zealous Hasidic courts and a second grouping of courts, which were more tolerant toward other Jewish concepts and lifestyles. Among the nonobservant, there were those who maintained a somewhat nostalgic attachment to the traditional, namely Orthodox institutions and customs. Others, on the other hand, were more inclined toward the Reform movement, which defiantly abandoned the “old” Judaism while extravagantly conducting “novel” public rituals in its newly fashioned institutions. When it came to the secular Jews, some eagerly adopted every new European cultural and social trend and eschewed any connection to Jewish tradition, while others, seeking to put their Jewish past firmly behind them, simply converted to Christianity.