A Galician Jew

A Galician Jew on His Way to the Temple. Arnold Lüschwitz-Koreffski (1869–1924), Tarnopol.

The card was published in the series “Folk Images from the Territories of Friend and Foe based on originals by A. Lüschwitz-Koreffski” by the Berlin chapter of the Patriotic Women’s Association and circulated by the Norddeutsche Export-Verlag, Berlin. Proceeds from the sale of the postcard went to the Kriegsfürsorge, the central welfare fund for wounded soldiers and the dependants of the dead and wounded.

Galicia was the southwestern part of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that came under Austrian control in the course of the Polish Partitions. Unlike many portrayals of Eastern European Jews created by artists attached to the German and Austro-Hungarian troops during the First World War, Lüschwitz-Koreffski’s image is neither denunciatory nor romanticizing but seems to reflect an earnest inquisitiveness. Conversely, the Jew in the image looks out inquisitively at the observer. Perhaps we can understand the image as reflecting the fact that—contrary to widespread assumptions—first encounters with strangers need by no means be characterized by rejection and are just as likely, if not more so, to engender inquisitiveness and fascination. While the shtraymel (here with a lower fur rim than the better-known cylindrical shtraymeln) is neither an original Jewish nor an original Hasidic invention, by the time of the First World it had increasingly emerged as a marker of Hasidic distinctiveness, notably in Galicia. In the nineteenth century, Tarnopol was an important centre of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment). The city is now located in Western Ukraine (roughly 120 kilometres southeast of Lviv and 140 kilometres north of Czernowitz) and called Ternopil.