To view the church-state problem from Vienna in 1900 is to view it from the capital of an ancient Catholic state in a multiethnic cultural arena, a world in which Catholicism strove, at least officially, to be supranational, and in which, although there was no Catholic nation, there was a preeminent and distinguished Catholic dynasty. This was a world in which large numbers of Austrians—many of them in rural areas—continued to affirm popular religious affections and loyalties throughout the century—values and practices that if not always consonant with official Catholic doctrine, at least afforded the hierarchical church and sympathetic aristocratic and bourgeois elites the ready opportunity to claim Catholicism as not only a historic and true but also a public and mass religion. At the same time, the long-term heritage of Josephinist state control of the church had powerful negative effects on active religiosity and religious identity, especially among the emergent Bürgertum and urban inhabitants of the monarchy. The Concordat of 1855—coming after the failed revolution of 1848–49 and on the heels of the imposition of neoabsolutist rule—was an imprudent decision precisely because it alienated both the Josephinist state and incipient bürgerlich society.

The conflicts between episcopal and Habsburg provincial authorities in late sixteenth-century Upper and Lower Austria can be seen in some ways as a continuation of the investiture controversies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The long roots of these later conflicts have been pointed out by local historians of Upper Austria like Karl Eder and Rudolf Zinnhobler. The early modern connections help to explain the particular course of religious reform in the Habsburg Hereditary Lands.

The first peasant movement in Eastern Europe to declare its formal independence from other parties grew up in Austrian Galicia. Founded in 1895, the Polish Peasant party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) was characterized by an approach to the problem of Polish nationalism unique to the peasantry. Like many other agrarian groups, the Polish peasants privileged peasant culture and values above upper-class and urban traditions as the true source of national strength. Yet the dynamics of this budding peasant nationalism, its sources and leadership bases, have yet to be fully explored.

Gaucia occupied an important place in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. Galician Jews made up a majority of Habsburg subjects of Mosaic faith and formed a cultural bridge between Westjuden and Ostjuden. Numerous outstanding Jewish political figures and scholars, such as Isaac Deutscher, Karl Radek, and Martin Buber, were born or raised in Galicia, where Zionist and Jewish socialist movements flourished at that time. The unique atmosphere of a Galician shtetl was recorded in Hassidic tales, in the books of Emil Franzos, Manes Sperber, Bruno Schulz, Andrzej Kuśniewicz, and others. Scholarly works on Jewish Galicia are, however, mostly outdated and relatively short. Consequently, scholars who use information on Galicia only as supplementary data often make numerous errors, and even for an educated American or West European Galicia remains a land of mystery. Marsha Rozenblit is absolutely right when she concludes a review essay, “The Jews of the Dual Monarchy,” with the following observation: “Indeed, it would be nice to know more about the traditional Jewish population of Moravia, Galicia and Hungary.” The present article is a contribution to filling that gap with regard to Galicia.