Jewish politics in Southeastern Europe: new insights from the field

This workshop explores the history of Jewish politics in Southeastern Europe in the modern period. It will bring together new voices in this field to create a space for meeting, discussing, and future networking. It will therefore be small and discussion oriented.

The workshop seeks to address and reflect on several lacunas. Jewish nationalism in the neighbouring Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires and their successor states, as well as Western European Jewish internationalism, have dominated the historiography of Jewish politics. Moreover, historians working on Romanian and Yugoslav lands are rarely in dialogue with each other. However, these two regions and their Jewish communities have evolved in parallel in the modern period. Among others, the gradual withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans, the Great Powers’ involvement in the region, the rise of antisemitism as an organised political movement, the protection of minority rights as a growing international concern, the establishment of fascist regimes, and the post-war rebuilding of the community under communism posed a similar set of questions to local Jewish political actors. This workshop will offer the opportunity to discuss these and other issues across national lines. It also aims to give greater visibility to a history that has fallen into the cracks of different historiographical fields – Jewish politics, national history writing in Southeastern Europe, and the history of Jews in this region.

Programme

10:30 Greetings

10:45 Introductory remarks: Noëmie Duhaut (Graz / Mainz)

11:00 Nineteenth century

Discussant: Constantin Iordachi (Vienna)

• Andreas Pfützner (Vienna): Against the tide: The exclusion of Jews from Romanian citizenship and the emergence of political antisemitism at the margins of Europe (1864-1866)

• Noëmie Duhaut (Graz/Mainz): The international crucible of early Jewish nationalism

12:00 Lunch break

13:30 Interwar period

Discussant: Michael Miller (Vienna)

• Željka Oparnica (London): ‘Ermanos Sefardi!’: The Sephardi movement in the Balkans in the 1920s

• Philippe Henri Blasen (Iași)

Wilhelm Filderman: fighting antisemitism in its first phase (1938-1940)

14:30 Coffee Break

15:00 Wartime and post-war

Discussant: Ari Joskowicz (Vienna / Nashville)

• Marija Vulesica (Berlin): Towards a history of the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia through a Jewish-Croatian collective biography

• Emil Kerenji (Washington, D.C.): Between Justice and Rebuilding: Albert Vajs and Post-Holocaust Jewish Politics in Yugoslavia

16:00 Concluding remarks