Theodore R. Weeks
Professor of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where teaches courses in modern world, European, and Russian history. He also teaches at the College of Europe, Natolin (Warsaw). Among his works are Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (1996), From Assimilation to Antisemitism: the “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850-1914 (2006), and Vilnius between Nations 1795-2000 (2015). His research interests include nationalism, ethnic relations, antisemitism, and, more recently, the history of technology. He is presently working on a history of radio in interwar Poland (1920-1939).
This short course looks at Jewish history in the context of two multinational empires: the Russian and the Habsburg. Both of these states must be understood as fundamentally pre-modern, non-national (even anti-national) political structures, a fact that is crucial for understanding Jewish history here. In the mid-19th century, the great majority of world Jewry made its home in this region and even at the end of the First World War, after the great wave of emigration to the Americas, western Europe, Erets Israel / Palestine, and South Africa, the Jewish presence here was considerable. In 1918 even antisemites could hardly imagine a Warsaw, Wilno, Lwów, Odesa (etc.) without Jews.