ROBERT S. WISTRICH
363
Burschenschaft
in Europe, known as "Kadimah." Subsequently, duelling
fraternities would be established across the Empire, from Prague to Czer–
nowitz, along with Jewish sporting and gymnastic clubs (on the German
model)-all of them spreading a message of Jewish pride and militant
self-defense. One of the founders of "Kadimah," Nathan Birnbaum, was
in
I
890 the first publicist to coin the word"
Zionismus"
in its current
meaning. Ten years before Theodor Herzl's conversion to Zionism in
Paris, the journal
Selbstemanzipation,
edited by Birnbaum, had already
proclaimed the idea that only a return to the soil in Palestine and the cre–
ation there of a Jewish national home, could solve the "Jewish Ques–
tion." Birnbaum especially looked to the sizeable Jewish communities in
Galicia and Bukovina as a fertile recruiting ground for Austrian Zionism.
In
1900, there were 811,371 Jews living in the densely populated
Kronland
of Galicia-one-tenth of the total population in the province
and two-thirds of Austrian Jewry itself. Sandwiched between a power–
ful Polish national movement (since 1869 the Polish ruling elite had
enjoyed virtually a free hand in Galicia in return for supporting succes–
sive Austrian governments) and an awakening Ruthene (Ukrainian)
minority nationalism, the Jews were exposed to intense pressure from
both sides. Jewish nationalism offered one way out of this impasse-a
solution viewed with some sympathy by the embattled Ukrainian lead–
ership. However, Zionists were regarded with open hostility by Poles–
especially by the dominant
Schlachta
(nobility) and its Jewish
establishment allies-by the masses of Hassidic Jewry, the Bundists, as
well as the Polish Socialist Party and the "assimilationist" Jewish stra–
tum in its leadership. Yet ironically enough, despite this opposition, the
Jewish national renaissance in Galicia owed not a little to the heroic,
vitalist myths of Polish romantic literature and the messianic national–
ism that shaped Polish consciousness in the nineteenth century. Further–
more, in Galicia (as elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire)-precisely
because they were caught in a nationalist crossfire as well as the poverty
trap of social backwardness and rising anti-Semitism-Jews developed
a sharper ethnic consciousness that was also nourished by a strong and
intimate familiarity with traditional Jewish sources.
A similarly favorable soil for Jewish nationalism existed in neighbor–
ing multi-ethnic Bukovina-a microcosm of the Habsburg
National–
itdtenstaat
as a whole-where Jews formed
12
percent of the population
and over a fifth of all the German speakers.
In
Czernowitz, the provin–
cial capital, where they represented a third of all the inhabitants, this
percentage was especially high. Significantly, Jews were elected as may–
ors of Czernowitz between 1905 and 1908, as well as in 1913. Bukov-
