BETWEEN ASSIMILATION AND SOCIAL RECOGNITION: «ANTI-SEMITISM» IN THEOPHIL MERUNOVYCH`S POLITICAL ACTIVITY AND PUBLICISTIC HERITAGE

Abstract

In the last quarter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish community was an important part of the political and social life of Galicia. It was the third largest community in the region, after the Ukrainian and Polish ones. The political activity of the Galician Jews was significantly influenced by the legislative reforms in the 1960s in the Austrian monarchy, due to which they obtained equal civil rights. However, the emancipation achievements of Galician Jews did not become a guarantee of their social recognition. Therefore, the solution of the Jewish question was delayed due to a number of unregulated legal principles. These legal principles attracted the attention of the well-known politician and public figure Theophil Merunovych. The main idea to this study was the attempt to determine the place and the role of the politician as well as to trace his objectivity in solving the Jewish question in the context of the spread of emancipation, assimilation and anti-Semitic ideas on the European territory.

An assessment of political activity and publicistic heritage of T. Merunovych in foreign and national historiography deserves special attention. Mostly, they are extremely negative, and the politician is presented with anti-Semitic views. In view of this, a thorough analysis of T. Merunovych's parliamentary speeches and works shows some controversy about the unambiguousness of such statements.

T. Merunovych presented his proposals for solving the Jewish question in his speeches and publications which caused a negative reaction from the Jewish population. The idea of his proposals was to abolish the norms and regulations that the Jewish population had as a national minority. Concerning the latter, then, according to T. Merunovych, having received equal civil rights, they did not want to lose them.

As of 1883, T. Merunovych had identified a number of major privileges, in his opinion, that the Jews had after the constitutional reforms of 1867, in particular, the lack of separation of secular and religious powers in the Jewish community; the presence of the rules for honoring customs in the organizational regulations, according to which the Jewish population could freely adhere to their customs; the evasion of Jewish men from military service due to marriage; absence of control over the activity of Kagals in agricultural business;  Jews' arbitrary treatment of laws which led to their limitations as official norms for the entire community, etc. Raising these issues, T. Merunovych emphasized that he did not seek to restrict the rights of the Jewish population but only sought the equalization of their rights with Christians, which they had been actively striving for before the events of 1861 and 1867.

T. Merunovych tried to analyze the Jewish question from different angles. His attention was drawn to the economic, political, educational, and cultural activities of the Jewish community. With this in mind, he tried to raise the key issues related to Austro-Hungarian Jews to the legislative level. In addition, as an ambassador of the Galician Regional Seim and the State Council, he repeatedly emphasized the need to equalize the rights of Jews and Christians at the meetings and in numerous petitions. His active position on this issue contributed, to some degree, to the resolution of the Jewish question. At the same time, the consistent advocacy of his position has secured him a reputation of anti-Semite despite the arguments put forward by him against such accusations.