״Legal Drama: Galician Jews, Imperial Law, and the First Modern Yiddish Play״

• In Event: States of Legality: Law in Modern Jewish Life

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project that centers on the encounter of Polish Jews with imperial law, and, on a more general level, with the logic of the imperial state, in the first decades following the partition of Poland. It investigates how Galician maskilim sought to popularize civic morality and share information concerning the mobilization of state law. I pay specific attention to how narrative became a vehicle to naturalize concepts of legality and to legitimize state intervention.

First, I reflect on how imperial law came to occupy an increasingly central position in Jewish life in early nineteenth-century Galicia. I locate this phenomenon in the intersection of the Austrian movement of codification, which sought to homogenize the legal system across territorial units and various populations, the ongoing colonization of Galicia, and the piecemeal emancipation of Jews in the wake of the 1789 Edict of Tolerance.

The next part explores how Galician maskilim strove to popularize knowledge about Austrian law as well as strategies to mobilize Austrian authorities. I focus on the 1816 Lemberg Herem (excommunication), a failed attempt to excommunicate two maskilim, in order to show how, given the absence of public space, narrative became a site for both the popularization of information about excommunication laws and the structuring of a plot in which intervention of the authorities was imagined as successful and morally unproblematic. The first Yiddish play, the anonymous “The Deceived World [Di Genarte Velt],” introduced strategic information concerning the illegality of certain excommunication practices, training its readership to recognize legal transgression and to seek police intervention. Finally, I examine how the category of the modern writer was conceptualized in the context of mediation of legal knowledge, as a continuation of early modern shtadlanut (intercession) practices.

author

• Ofer Dynes, Harvard University