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The article presents the issue of the reform of Jewish liturgical music in Galicia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its main question concerns the essence of the reform, the novelty of which relied rather on the introduction of a modern way of performance of traditional music than replacing it with a new repertoire. The text discusses the role of new music performers such as cantors, choirs and organists in Galician Temples. It draws attention to the aesthetic changes of synagogue music and its ideological foundations. It also presents the attitude of progressive Galician Jews toward the repertoire of West European synagogues as well as to the music composed by local orthodox cantors, such as Baruch Schorr, Baruch Kinstler or Eliezer Goldberg. As the analysis of the historical material shows, their musical tastes and strong attachment to tradition tied them more closely to the Galician orthodoxy than to the German reform.

One of the markers of the emerging Reform movement in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the publication of synagogue regulations that introduced new norms of decorum and, occasionally, slight changes in the prayer service. Scholarly discussions of the first synagogue regulations have been limited to the available published regulations, namely, the Westphalian (1810) and Amsterdam's Adat Jesurun regulations (1809). The recently discovered regulations composed by Joseph Perl for his synagogue in Tarnopol (1815) enable us for the first time to consider an east European perspective for understanding the different varieties of the new trend of synagogue innovations in the early nineteenth century. In addition to an analysis of Perl's regulations, the following article explains the circumstances in which Perl's synagogue project took shape, and highlights the historiographical significance of his synagogue regulations. I argue that Perl may be credited as the first to suggest a religious path that was both traditionalist and modern, a path that later characterized the synagogue innovations in several Habsburg cities. An English translation of the regulations is provided in an appendix.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kraków was a flourishing city, both economically and artistically. During the period of Galician autonomy, Kraków was granted significantly greater political freedom than other Polish cities located in the Prussian or Russian partitions. For this reason it became an important center for cultivating national tradition. Lviv, as the capital of the Crownland of Galicia and Lodomeria, was one of the most important centers of scholarship, education, and culture in this region. The city was a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multilingual conglomerate of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and Ruthenians. Lviv's significance as an operatic center grew from the time when the German theater was closed in 1872 and a permanent Polish stage was created. This was a decisive moment for the development of the national opera, and Lviv became the main rival to Warsaw. The aim of this article is to present a general overview of the functioning of musical theater in Kraków and in Lviv, the two musical centers of Galicia. These cities were closely linked by institutional, artistic, cultural, and social bonds. In the artistic life a crucial part was played by the directors of the two city theaters, Tadeusz Pawlikowski and Ludwik Heller. Both made important contributions to the development of the opera.

This article examines the shared primitivism of the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg. In her art and poetry, Lasker-Schüler imagined a bohemian utopia ruled by the Bund der wilden Juden, or Society of Savage Jews; Greenberg adopted this figure and turned it into an expression of his radical Zionism. This transformation of aesthetic to political sovereignty reveals one trajectory of Jewish primitivism, with the blurred boundary between Jewish and primitive identities mirroring the blurred boundary between divergent political agendas.

After resigning from his diplomatic position as Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations in the early 1950s, Muhammad Asad devoted himself to writing his autobiography. Published to much acclaim in 1954, The Road to Mecca told the story of a Galician Jew named Leopold Weiss who had rejected his European Jewish heritage by converting to Islam and immersing himself in the Orient. Despite the author's emphatic disavowal of his Jewish roots, this article argues that the author framed his conversion to Islam as a resolution to the dilemmas of emancipation and assimilation faced by Central European Jews of his generation. Thus, whereas Asad's conversion to Islam and his shifting allegiance to the Muslim world seem to place him outside the boundaries of modern Jewish identity politics, I argue that the orientalist ideal he constructs in the autobiography draws on the same postliberal, antiassimilatory rhetoric used by Zionists in the early twentieth century. Asad's acerbic critique of Zionism and his renunciation of European Jewry notwithstanding, his autobiography is steeped in the symbolic language of Jewish orientalist self-affirmation that characterized his generation's search for new modes of Jewish self-definition.

This essay looks at both Buczacz, the Galician hometown of Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes, and Jerusalem, the adopted city/town of the writer who became S. Y. Agnon, modern Israel's most prominent Hebrew writer and only Nobel Prize winner. Like Jerusalem, the generic shtetl proved over time to be primordial, protean, and portable as a point of reference in Jewish culture and memory. Juxtaposing the “shtetl” as monolithic space with the “city” as heterogeneous space in sociological as well as artistic representations, I argue for a reading of several of S. Y. Agnon's major fictions that render Buczacz and Jerusalem as mirror images of each other. Finally, I gesture towards the ethical and political implications of this move for Agnon's readers and the citizens of Jerusalem.