Suspended between States: Bukovinan Jews and the Transition from Imperial to National Citizenship

• In Event: In and Out: Twentieth-Century Jewish Mobility in Eastern Europe

Abstract

In World War I, the eastern front cut through the heart of Bukovina, the Austro-Hungarian empire’s easternmost crownland. By the end of 1918, the empire fell apart, and its successor states inherited responsibilities towards the former imperial citizens. Bukovinan Jews found themselves suspended between two nation–states. In Romania, many lost their jobs and their Romanian citizenship during the 1920s. Those who opted for Austrian citizenship could often not fulfill the new ethnic and racial criteria for citizenship in the Austrian Republic. This paper traces how Bukovinan Jews–both those families who remained outside of Bukovina and those who returned home–navigated the difficult transition to the postwar citizenship regime. Their story, as I will show, is a small but important episode in the history of statelessness (Heimatlosigkeit). Adding a local and personal dimension, this paper will show how Jewish Heimatlose from Bukovina got caught in the legal revolution which followed Austria-Hungary’s collapse and the birth of the post-World War I order.

Author

• Cristina Florea, Cornell U