Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture: "One Community or Many? Was there a Habsburg Jewish Experience?"

Co-sponsored by the Centers for Austrian Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Images on event poster: 

Top left to right: second graduating class of Beys-Yankev School in Lodz Poland (image: Jewish Women's Archive); Franz Ferdinand visiting and meeting with Jewish community members in Tarnopol in 1910 (image: YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe); Hungarian Opera (image: Wikimedia)

Bottom left to right: Helene Deutsch (image: Jewish Women's Archive); Fanny von Arnstein (image: Jewish Women's Archive); Sigmund Freud (image provided by Kann Lecturer); Budapest Parliament Building (image: Wikimedia); Dohany Street Synagogue (image provided by Kann Lecturer); Chernivtsi Univeristy (image: Wikimedia); Rabbi Adolf Jellinek (image provided by Kann Lecturer); Franz Kafka (image provided by Kann Lecturer)

Abstract: 

In the years before the First World War, over 2 million Jews—about 4.5% of the total population—lived in the territories that made up the Habsburg empire. In terms of language, geographic concentration, religious behavior, and cultural patterns, Jews in the Habsburg lands were a highly diverse group. This variety of patterns and behaviors appears only to have increased with the creation of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. Can one, then, speak of a distinct “Habsburg” Jewish experience? Despite a plurality of Jewish experiences, common imperial structures still mattered; family and communal relations continued to cross political and territorial boundaries; and some kind of Habsburg Jewish identity—based to a significant extent on collective experience—did emerge. Just what the nature of this experience was will be the subject of Kieval’s lecture.

About the Speaker: 

Hillel J. Kieval is the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor Emeritus of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. Over the course of his career, has held visiting appointments at Charles University in Prague, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Universidad Hebraica in Mexico City, Vilnius University in Lithuania, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Hillel Kieval’s research interests focus on Jewish culture and society in Central and East-Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They range from pathways of Jewish acculturation and integration to the impact of nationalism and ethnic conflict on modern Jewish identities, and from cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstandings to the discursive practices of modern antisemitism. His books include Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder at Europe’s Fin de Siècle (2022); Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands (Co-editor, 2022); Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (2000); and The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918 (1988). In May 2022 Prof. Kieval was awarded the Silver Medal of the Faculty of Arts, from Charles University of Prague. In May 2024 he was received the Moses Mendelssohn Award from the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

About the Kann Lecture:

Born in Vienna, Robert A. Kann practiced law before he and his wife, Marie, fled to the United States following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Kann later earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and was a professor of history at Rutgers University until his retirement in 1976. In 1982, the University of Minnesota acquired Kann's personal library. Consisting of roughly 5,000 monographs, the Kann Collection is noted for its breadth, depth, and integrity as the product of a single collector. The Kann Collection forms an integral part of the Special Collections and Rare Books Division at the University of Minnesota's Elmer L. Anderson Library, serving as a valuable resource for scholars of Austrian history.

Established in 1984 with the dedication of the Kann Collection, the Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture is delivered each year by a internationally-renowned scholar of Central European history, and is open to the University community and the general public. An expanded version of each Kann Lecture appears in the Austrian History Yearbook.