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ina Jews also acquired the role of political arbiters between the two
largest ethnic groups-the Romanian and Ruthenian electorates-and
were strikingly preponderant in the dissemination of German
Kultur
in
this far eastern hinterland of the Monarchy. A populist Jewish politician
like Benno Straucher who demanded full linguistic rights and political
representation for the Jews as a distinct ethnic entity while defending
the hegemony of German
Ku/tur,
was also repeatedly elected in the
Bukovina. His
Judische Volkspartei
was autonomist rather than Zion–
ist, convinced that the Jews had a future inside the Empire as an offi–
cially recognized (German-speaking) Jewish national minority.
There were other Jewish autonomists like the organizers of the Czer–
nowitz conference in
1908
who raised the banner of Yiddish language
and
Kultur
in their crusade for a
Galut (Galus)
nationalism as the best
creative national vehicle for the despised
Ostjuden.
Nathan Birnbaum in
his post-Zionist phase after
1900
defended this synthesis of autonomism,
Yiddishism, and the "organic" culture of East European Jewry (who at
that time accounted for almost three-quarters of the world Jewish popu–
lation) against both assimilationists and Zionists. The
Ostjuden
in the
Monarchy, living in compact masses with their own Yiddish language lit–
erature, theatre, and folk consciousness, were for Birnbaum a separate,
living nation that should be accommodated within the Habsburg imper–
ial framework. His theories of national autonomy paralleled those of the
great Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow and Chaim Zhitlovsky
(the populist Russian revolutionary) as well as resembling those put for–
ward by Karl Renner and Otto Bauer-Austro-Marxist thinkers, though
the latter refused to recognize the validity of a distinct Jewish nationality.
Renner and Bauer did not change their negative views on Jewish nation–
alism. But Zionist and Jewish nationalists applied some of the more gen–
eral Austro-Marxist ideas on "nationality questions" to justify their own
arguments in favor of cultural-national autonomy with telling effect.
During World War I and in its immediate aftermath, nationalism and
ethnic self-determination became increasingly irresistible forces,
although until
1918
a majority of Jews in the Habsburg lands still
hoped that the Empire would emerge renewed from the war as a more
democratic, tolerant, and pluralistic state. As a result of the war, both
Zionism and left-wing radicalism became serious ideological alterna–
tives to the assimilationist Jewish establishment, particularly for a
younger generation of Jews; although in Vienna itself, Jewish liberalism
still remained a cultural force to be reckoned with well into the
1930S.
Nevertheless, the war years with their accompanying patriotic hysteria,
chaos, uncertainty, and revolutionary upheaval, led to a significant shift
