Among the nationalities: Jewish refugees, Jewish nationality, and Czechoslovak statebuilding.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the Interwar period, the Jewish population of east central Europe experienced its first and last opportunity to engage in modern political life as a nationality among the nationalities. This study of nationality politics is organized around "Jewish nationality," a new category of political nationhood introduced after the First World War, in order to investigate questions of establishing, administering, and securing viable successor states to the multi-national Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires created according to the national principle. Focusing on the territory of Slovakia, I examine what Jewish nationality meant and how it was used within the context of Czechoslovak state building, both from the perspective of the state and of the Jewish population.
While Czechoslovakia offered the most favorable environment for the Jews of its neighbors, renounced anti-Semitism, supported Zionism and Jewish national rights, significant challenges to the Jewish relationship with the state remained. This was particularly true in Slovakia, where Jews were suspect as potential accomplices to the irredentist ambitions of the Interwar Hungarian regime due to their history of alignment with the Hungarian nation. The process of integrating the territory of Slovakia had the most significant impact on how the Czechoslovak state and the surrounding Slovak population viewed expressions of Jewish nationality among the Jews there.
This study shows that the intensifying overlap of language, nationality, and territory eroded Jewish nationality as a means of negotiating the Jewish position among the nationalities "here," and led to the growth of Palestine-centered Jewish nationalism. I base my arguments on archival research conducted in Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and German focusing on issues of (1) the wartime Jewish refugee crisis as a politicizing force within the Hungarian Jewish community, (2) the bureaucracy of nationalism through the lens of the Czechoslovak census, and (3) transnational investigations of Slovak Jewish loyalty to the Czechoslovak state. My dissertation shows how loyalty can be used as a new comparative framework of analysis to locate the active function of nationality and its implications for minority citizenship.