Enemies for a Day Staliunas, Darius
2015, 20150430, 2015-04-10
eBook
This book explores anti-Jewish violence in Russian-ruled Lithuania. It begins by illustrating how widespread anti-Jewish feelings were among the Christian population in 19 th century, focusing on ...blood libel accusations as well as describing the role of modern antisemitism. Secondly, it tries to identify the structural preconditions as well as specific triggers that turned anti-Jewish feelings into collective violence and analyzes the nature of this violence. Lastly, pogroms in Lithuania are compared to anti-Jewish violence in other regions of the Russian Empire and East Galicia.
This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery, this challenge was most prevalent in twelve ...provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, and to the Kingdom of Poland. At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist. The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, and the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.
This article asks why the Russian Empire's closure of hundreds of Catholic monasteries, convents, and churches in the early and mid-nineteenth century proceeded without major incidents, while in the ...1880s and 1890s it met with grassroots resistance. The article specifically deals with tsarist authorities' closure of the Benedictine convent and church in Kražiai in 1893, which provoked the fierce resistance of parishioners. The Kražiai case grew into a significant symbol that strengthened anti-tsarist feelings among Roman Catholics in Poland and Lithuania, and at the same time it disclosed the presence of larger issues related to the management of the western borderlands. The author argues that, while a number of contingent factors played a specific role in the escalation, on a more structural level it was very difficult for the tsarist state to manage the empire's western borderlands whenever it deflected from a well-coordinated, even if harsh policy of discriminating against the non-Orthodox population. The article also shows how different confessional policy priorities - or at least different approaches to the same policy - emerged among various government institutions and came into conflict.
This article argues that apart from a couple of cases, there were no situations where the Russian imperial government would have supported Lithuanian national culture as a counterbalance against ...Poles, and more generally, that the policy of “divide and rule” was in principle not applied on the empire's western periphery regarding other non-dominant ethnic groups. A more general reason for not implementing such a policy was related to many officials’ belief that the government should seek integration, acculturation, or even assimilation of non-Russian ethnicities. At the same time, on the Russian mental map, the Northwest Region was understood not just as part of the empire, but as part of Russian national territory. In such a territory, most of the government subscribed to a discourse of nationalism that permitted no means of support for the strengthening of non-Russian nationalisms. Finally, social radicalism of the Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian national movements was another obstacle for tsarist officials to support these “peasant” nationalities.
A large crowd had gathered at Vilnius Airport (Lithuania) on March 31, 2017 and appeared to be waiting for something. Among the gathered was the government chancellor, three ministers, and many other ...well-known public figures. The scene at the airport was being shown on the national broadcaster, and later on news reports on all the channels. Readers would be amiss thinking that this crowd was waiting for a sports team (more likely a Lithuanian basketball team than a Lithuanian football team, alas), which had just won top position at a championship. They were in fact waiting for a little-known scientist at the time, Liudas Mažylis, who, as was announced, had found the declaration of Lithuanian independence from 1918 in a German archive. Until then, the Lithuanian state did not have its own original “birth certificate.” No one cared about the opinion of professional historians that the discovered document should be called differently and more precisely. Mažylis became a national hero and a TV star, while the document's exposition turned it into a mass pilgrimage object.
This article deals with the identification of the so-called krajowcy – a relatively small group of Polish-speaking activists in Lithuania and Belarus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth ...century who promoted an idea of the re-establishement of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This article claims that the krajowcy democrats (Michał Römer, Tadeusz Wróblewski, Konstancja Skirmuntt and others) were not nationally indifferent. On the contrary, they promoted a clearly formulated national identity ideology, different to the dominant (ethno-linguistic) one. First of all, the krajowcy were nationalists in a civic sense: they were Lithuanians, citizens of Lithuania within its historical boundaries. In addition, some of them, for example Wróblewski, suggested strengthening ethno-linguistic nationalism as well, otherwise his national personal autonomy concept would simply not have worked. Others, such as Konstancja Skirmuntt, Juozapas Albinas Herbačiauskas and Michał Römer, expressed a hybrid identification with several national cultures, and sometimes their self-identification was even reminiscent of identity ideologies that had dominated in earlier historical periods.
This book deals with the spatial concepts of Lithuania and other geo-images that either "competed" in the nineteenth century with the term Lithuania or were of a different taxonomic level (Samogitia, ...Prussia's Lithuania, Lithuania Minor, Poland, the Western Region, the Northwest Region, Lita/Lite, Belarus, East Prussia etc.).
The History of Jews in Lithuania Sirutavicius, Vladas; Staliunas, Darius; Šiauciunaite-Verbickiene, Jurgita
09/2019, Letnik:
44
eBook
This book aims to create an integral picture of the social, economic and cultural history of the Jews in Lithuania during the course of more than six hundred years – from the Middle Ages to the ...1990s. It is a translation of the study “Lietuvos žydai. Istorinė studija” (Engl. “Lithuanian Jews. Historical study”), published in Lithuanian in 2012. The Book was written by an interna-tional group of scholars from Lithuania, Israel, the United States of America and Germany.
The world of Lithuanian Jewry is reconstructed through different aspects of the development of community and society: demography, social and economic activity, self-government institutions of the community, cultural and religious movements, literature and the press, education, discriminative policy of the authorities and relations with the dominant church, segregation, assimilation and changes of identity, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.
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