THE POLITICS OF Galicia in the second half of the nineteenth century exhibited many specific features which were not to be found in the remaining Polish lands. In the first place, this was the only area of Poland which was governed by Poles. Far-reaching autonomy was conceded to the province in the 1860s, creating a situation in which the area became a haven for Poles unable to express freely their national and political ideas elsewhere in the Polish lands. The failure of the revolution of 1848 was followed by a decade of absolutism and centralized rule from Vienna, but the Austrian defeats of 1859 and 1866 at the hands of Piedmont and Prussia led to the establishment of a constitutional system. As a result, the province of Galicia was now governed by the Polish landowning stratum and its more enlightened representatives, the Stańczycy, or Krakow conservatives.

The Austro-Hungarian empire was the home of the second largest Jewish population in the world. In 1910 around 2,246,000 Jews lived there, and they were generally happy with their position as subjects of the emperor Franz Joseph. A popular saying in the last part of the nineteenth century was that ‘Austria is governed by Poles, defended by Hungarians, and financed by Jews’. The liberal constitution of December 1867 established full legal equality for all citizens of the Habsburg empire regardless of religious belief or nationality. It did not, however, specifically abolish all the restrictions on Jewish activity in Galicia. In the sessions of the Galician Diet between 1866 and 1868, which saw the consolidation of the autonomous status of the province, Jewish leaders allied themselves with the Polish democrats and the Stańczycy in order to achieve their objectives. During these parliamentary debates it became clear to the Polish conservative opponents of the abrogation of the remaining anti-Jewish legal restrictions that, if they blocked the granting of equal rights to the Jews, these would be made a condition of the granting of Galician autonomy by the central government and by the German centralist liberals who dominated the Reichsrat. Under these circumstances, the Galician Diet in 1868 abolished the restrictions on the number of Jews who could sit on the city council of Lviv and other Galician towns, the last barrier to full legal equality for the Jews.