The triumph of Zionism has clouded recollection of competing forms of Jewish nationalism vying for power a century ago. This study explores alternative ways to construct the modern Jewish nation. Jewish nationalism emerges from this book as a Diaspora phenomenon much broader than the Zionist movement. Like its non-Jewish counterparts, Jewish nationalism was first and foremost a movement to nationalize Jews, to construct a modern Jewish nation while simultaneously masking its very modernity. This book traces this process in what was the second largest Jewish community in Europe, Galicia. The history of this vital but very much understudied community of Jews fills a critical lacuna in existing scholarship while revisiting the broader question of how Jewish nationalism - or indeed any modern nationalism - was born. Based on a wide variety of sources, many newly uncovered, this study challenges the still-dominant Zionist narrative by demonstrating that Jewish nationalism was a part of the rising nationalist movements in Europe.

Empire and Identity is a novel approach to the critical last decades of the Habsburg Empire. The book is organized as three dual political biographies, each focusing a certain problem in the development of the Imperial Austrian state in the early twentieth century. The biographical approach also throws new light on the six examined individuals, whose scholarly, artistic, and bureaucratic careers are placed in a political context.

Anna Coreth's work appeared originally in 1959. Her interpretation focuses on the relationship of Catholic religious practices and symbols to the House of Habsburg from the Counter or Catholic Reformation until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Coreth demonstrates how elements of religiosity and spirituality, particularly those surrounding the Catholic Eucharistic and Marian celebrations, became part of the Habsburg ruling style. She discusses the imperial house's dedication to these rituals and what the religious practices came to mean to individual members of the Habsburg monarchy, such as Rudolf I, Ferdinand I, II, and III, Maria Theresa, and Joseph II. Coreth demonstrates the Habsburg monarchy's devotion to specific Catholic rituals and how these rituals in turn acquired political significance. Moreover, Coreth also examines the links between this Habsburg religious style, on the one hand, and the institutional Catholic Church, popular piety, religious orders, and mainstream political developments. The book is an extremely rich source for early modern and modern Austrian history.