Preliminary Programme

Recent Jewish History defines Trieste as a “Jewish Port City”, thanks to the politics of civil inclusion of an increasing number of Jewish immigrants, carried out by the Habsburg Empire during the 18th and 19th Centuries. This paper will focus on the 19th Century and will analyze in the first part the transformation from tradition to modernity that took place in the various levels of the Triestine Jewish Community: First, the transformation of the Community into an institution, that strongly influenced its relationships with the non-Jewish society and with the other Jewish Communities of the Habsburg Empire and of the Italian area. Second, the transformation of the Jewish family, with women’s emancipation and the change of the education system, according to the Berlin Haskalah, founded by Moses Mendelssohn. And third, the transformation of Jews as individuals, free to act without any kind of Community’ traditional mediation in their relationships with the State and with the local authorities. In the second part, the paper will examine how this “new” Triestine Jewish Community faced questions like: political anti-Semitism and political participation in the struggle for Nationalities. (Show less)

South Slavs were only a small fraction of migrants in Vienna, and they were, before WWI, almost entirely elite and career migrants. Though, in the first half of the 19th century, they had played a considerable economic and political role in Vienna. This was also one of the places, where South-Slav identity projects were located, even launched. However, at the end of the century, they were virtually invisible in the city’s discourses and media. This is all the more surprising as at the same time, one segment of migrants had immensely increased: the students. This presentation will attempt several explanations of this phenomenon. The context of political and economic change and of competing identity projects and their interaction will be the major focus of this talk. (Show less)

In the 18th century Triest transformed from a small municipal town into a maritime emporium of international dimensions and a modern urban agglomerate. This transformation was encouraged by the mercantile policy of the Austrian state by granting the north adriatic city the status of free port and supporting its growth with targeted policies. Between the 1730s and the end of the century Trieste increased in population from about 5.000 to 25.000 inhabitants. The driving force of such an expansion and the formation of a completely new social fabric was the immigration from the surrounding regions and the broader european and East Mediterranean space. In these decades the city also gained a cosmopolitan character with several ethnic groups and religious communities living together and profoundly redefining the city’s social and cultural life. The paper will present the features of the immigration processes to Triest from the point of view of their geographical origin, socio-demographic and economic structures. The stress will also be on the role and position of the diverse ethnic and religious immigrant communities, on the relationships between them and on how immigration influenced the city’s identity. (Show less)

In the last decades before World War I, the region of the Austrian Littoral was part of the Habsburg Empire, and the city of Trieste/Trst was fourth in size only to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, and the monarchy's most important port. Good economic prospects led to a rapid increase in population, turning the city into a confluence of languages, customs, religions, and cultures. In my paper I use the Czech milieu of Trieste as a looking glass for reflecting on several conceptual tropes. Given that the Czechs did not stand at the center of the major national conflict in the city - waged between Italians and Slovenes - they allow for different interpretative angles when it comes to observing nation-state affiliations, supranational identities and imperial loyalties, entangled with nationalisms, national hybridities, national assimilations, a-nationality and transnationality. (Show less)