The Budapest Jewish Studies Colloquium in cooperation with the CEU Democracy Institute, the CEU Jewish Studies Program and the Tom Lantos Institute cordially invites you to a public lecture.
Registration is required for in-person and online participants by June 24 here.
Zoom link will be sent to registered guests.
Reception to follow.
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 to reshape the societies in which they lived. They not only appeared as subjects, citizens, patriots, and revolutionaries, but as actors in their own rights – challenging narratives of alleged ‘passivity’.
In this lecture Jan Rybak analyses the recurring phenomenon of Jewish armed self-organisation and self-defence, of Jews participating in the violent transformation of the region, weapons in hand, fighting simultaneously for their own protection, their emancipation, and for wider society. He argues that these ‘moments’ of Jewish armed self-organisation represent a trajectory of Jewish emancipation and should at the same time bring us to reconsider some of the larger narratives about European modernity and state formation, by centring on the perspective of a marginalised, but armed, minority.
Speaker:
Dr. Jan Rybak is a Lecturer in the Nationalism Studies Program and the Jewish Studies Program at Central European University. Dr. Rybak holds a PhD in history from the European University Institute in Florence. He previously worked at the University of York, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in London and has held fellowships in Poland, Germany, the United States, and Israel. His work focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century Central- and East European Jewish history, nationalism, emancipation, violence, antisemitism, and Jewish responses to it. Dr. Rybak’s book ‘Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914–1920’ (Oxford University Press, 2021) won the 2023 book prize of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies. His current project ‘Jewish Armed Self-Defence and Self-Assertion from the Second Partition of Poland to the Holocaust’ is funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation and analyses the long history of Jewish armed self-organisation, responses and resistance to violence through Europe’s long nineteenth century and beyond.
Image on the cover photo: Colonel Berek Joselewicz wearing of Duchy of Warsaw mounted riflemens (pol. Strzelcy konni) uniforms by Juliusz Kossak, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
