Bio: Jan Rybak is Alfred Landecker Lecturer at CEU’s Jewish Studies Program. He received his PhD from the European University Institute and has worked in York, London. His first book ‘Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe’ was published by Oxford UP in 2021.
Abstract: In the upheavals, wars, and revolutions that shaped Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century, Jews found themselves both as victims of violence and as active participants, fighting for their rights and emancipation, and for the remaking of the societies they lived in. They not only appeared as subjects, citizens, patriots, and revolutionaries but also acted on their decidedly own terms. The lecture analyses the recurring phenomenon of Jewish armed self-organisation and self-defence, of Jews participating in the violent transformation of the region in their own units, guns in hand, fighting simultaneously for their protection, their emancipation, and for wider society. It argues that these ‘moments’ of Jewish armed self-organisation represent a trajectory of Jewish agency and emancipation that profoundly shaped the modern Jewish experience and were mirrored in Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and in the creation of the State of Israel. At the same time, they should make us reconsider some of the larger narratives about European modernity and state formation, centring on the perspective of a marginalised, but armed, minority.