From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (14 page)

Read From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism Online

Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Europe, #Austria & Hungary, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #test

 

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peror ordered his prime minister, Count Edward von Taaffe, to stop them immediately. Consequently, when the emperor finally died in 1916 at the age of nearly eighty-six, Jewish newspapers were lavish in their praise of his reign. He had opened the gates of ghettos for Jews, commented one prominent Jewish newspaper. Another writer said that the name of Franz Joseph would always be written in golden letters in Jewish history.

36

Jewish Demography, 18481914
The constitutional rights Jews obtained between 1848 and 1867, especially the right to reside wherever they pleased, to own property, and to enter professions of their own choosing, enormously facilitated the growth of the Jewish population in Austrian cities and above all in Vienna. Although Austria as a whole had a Jewish population second only to Russia following the annexation of Galicia and Bukovina in 1772, Vienna's Jewish population still numbered only about 1,600 in 1830. The number grew to approximately 4,000 in 1846, and to 6,217 in 1857. Thereafter, however, attracted above all by the beauty of the city, its exciting cultural opportunities, and its educational institutions, and facilitated by Austria's new railway system, Jews migrated to the Austrian capital in unprecedented numbers.
37
By 1880, 72,588 Jews lived in Vienna, 118,495 resided there in 1890, 146,926 in 1900, and 175,318 in 1910. The percentage of Jews living in the
Residenzstadt
skyrocketed from 2. 16 in 1857 to 10.06 in 1880; thereafter, it declined slowly but steadily to 8.63 in 1910in part, however, because of the incorporation of the largely non-Jewish suburbs in 1890.
38
For the whole crownland of Lower Austria the growth rate for Jews was five times greater than for non-Jews between 1869 and 1880, and twice as fast in the 1880s.
39
On the other hand, between 1900 and 1910 the overall population of Vienna grew by 21.2 percent compared with only 19.3 percent for the Jews.
40
Nevertheless the growth of Vienna's Jewish population was unmatched anywhere else in Europe except Budapest. In most of the continent's other cities with large Jewish communities, such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Lemberg (Lvov), and Cracow, the percentage of Jews actually dropped, sometimes by nearly half, between the mid-nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War.
41
If the increase of Vienna's Jewish population was dramatic after 1857, the same cannot be said for that of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy as a whole. There the Jewish population grew only about 2 percent faster than the non-Jewish population between 1869 and 1900. In Bohemia and Moravia the

 

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Jewish population actually fell sharply in the second half of the nineteenth century, in part because of their migration to Vienna.

42
By 1910 there was a total of 1,313,698 Jews in the Austrian half of the monarchy, or 4.68 percent of the total population. If Jews had still been considered a separate nationality, as they had been before 1860, they would have been the fifth largest in the country, albeit far behind the Germanspeaking Austrians, the Czechs, the Poles, and the Ruthenes (Ukrainians).
43
These figures should be kept clearly in mind when we later evaluate anti-Semitic charges concerning the size of the Jewish population in Vienna and Austria as a whole.

In the roughly seven decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War, the nature of Jewish immigration to the Austrian capital changed considerably. Until the 1870s Jews came mostly from the Bohemian crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Having already adopted the German language, even before 1848, and being well educated, they had little difficulty adjusting to life in the Austrian metropolis. The same, for the most part, could be said of the second wave of immigrants, which came from Hungary.
44
After 1867 the geographic origins of Jewish immigrants to Vienna began to change drastically. Immigrants from Galicia, usually non-German-speaking and often Orthodox, now started to outnumber Jewish immigrants from the Bohemian crownlands and Hungary. As early as 1880, 18 percent of Vienna's Jews were from this Polish and Ukrainian province; that figure grew to 23 percent in 1910. The growth in the absolute number of Galician-born Jews was even more impressive: 13,180 in 1880 and 30,325 thirty years later.
45
Whereas the emigration of Galician Jews until 1880 was motivated primarily by the dire economic backwardness of their homeland, emigration after 1881 from what had once been Poland was additionally propelled by pogroms organized by the Russian minister of the interior, Nicholas Ignatiev. The Russian Empire thus became the first country in Europe to have officially sponsored pogroms. The tsar's regime was also skillful at playing off Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Cossacks against the Jews. The pogroms of Ignatiev spread to over one hundred locations and lasted nearly a year (188182); they were followed by a mass of anti-Jewish legislation designed, according to the government, to restrict the antisocial activities of the Jews and to calm popular indignation against them.
46
Austria was scarcely the only country to be affected by these new Jewish immigrants, nor the only country to react negatively. A massive wave of terrified Jews fled from Russia to urban centers in Western Europe. In England, the Jewish population of 65,000 in 1881 quadrupled during the next thirty years fueling demands by Conservative politicians and trade union leaders alike

 

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for immigration controls. Another 20,000 Russian Jews fled to Paris between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War. The refugees also increased anti-Jewish feelings in Germany just two years after the Hamburg anarchist pamphleteer, Wilhelm Marr, had introduced the term
antiSemitism
and had founded an Anti-Semitic League. A year after the onset of increased Russian Jewish immigration to Germany, that is in 1882, the first international anti-Jewish congress met in Dresden.

47

Thanks in part to these newcomers from Galicia and Russia, Vienna, with 146,926 Jews, had the largest Jewish population in the Dual Monarchy in 1900. However, by 1910, Budapest, with over 203,000 Jews had forged ahead of Vienna, which had grown to only 175,000 Jewish inhabitants. Other Austrian cities with large Jewish populations were Lemberg, the largest city in eastern Galicia, with 44,258; Cracow, the capital of Galicia, with 25,670; Czernowitz (Cernauti), the capital of the easternmost Austrian crownland of Bukovina, with 21,587 Jews; and Brünn (Brno) in southern Moravia, with 8,238. In the ''Inner Austrian" crownlands, those areas that would make up the Austrian republic after 1919, the Jewish population remained tiny. Graz, which had the second largest Jewish population after Vienna, was home to only 1,971 Jews or just 1.3 percent of the Styrian capital's total population in 1910. By contrast, about 100,000 Jews lived in rural parts of Germany after 1900.
48
Despite the rapid increase in Vienna's Jewish population, it was far from having the highest percentage of Jews in the Dual Monarchy or even in the Austrian half of the monarchy. The 8.77 percent of Vienna's population that was Jewish in 1900 was far below that of Czernowitz, with nearly 32 percent, Cracow, which had 28 percent, and Lemberg, where just under 28 percent of the population was Jewish.
49
The percentage of Jews living in Vienna was even more modest when compared with the 23.1 who lived in Budapest in 1910.
50
The Outlook in 1880
Although there was never a time in nineteenth-century Austria when antiSemitism was entirely dead, it certainly seemed to be receding during the 1860s and for most of the 1870s, at least as far as the Germanspeaking population of the country was concerned. Jew-hatredpolitical, social, and especially religiousappeared to most German-Austrians, particularly educated German-Austrians, to be a mere vestige of the Middle Ages.
51
Until at least 1880, Jews who spoke fluent German were considered to be German-Austrians

 

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by the Jews themselves, as well as by non-Jewish German-Austrians and the national minorities of Austria. In fact, Germanspeaking Jews, out of gratitude for their recent emancipation, identified so closely with German culture and the Austrian state idea that to members of national minority groups who felt oppressed, especially the Czechs, Jews seemed to be accomplices in that oppression, a feeling that could also be found in Hungary.

52
The prominence of Germanspeaking Jews in the development of Austrian capitalism gave the national minorities, who were far more likely to be peasants, an additional reason for disliking Jews.

However, in Austria, the views of the Czechs and other national minorities hardly counted in the 1860s and 1870s. What mattered was that Jews were accepted, or at least appeared to be accepted, by German-Austrians. True, not all was well even in these two golden decades. Catholics resented the role played by Jews in the Liberal Party in 1870 when the Austrian concordat made with the papacy in 1855 was canceled. Jews were also blamed for the disastrous stock market crash of 1873. That the House of Rothschild, which had not engaged in the speculation preceding the crash, had emerged from the disaster unhurt, only seemed to prove the Jews' craftiness. The crash, however, produced no immediate political repercussions.
53
In 1867 Austrian Jews had obtained, de jure if not always de facto, complete political and civil equality. Few Jews, or for that matter, probably even non-Jews, would have predicted as late as 1880 that twenty years later antiSemitism would once again be rampant among both the Austrian elite and the masses. Nor would they have believed that Vienna would have the first municipal government in the world controlled by a political party that officially espoused antiSemitism.

 

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3
AntiSemitism in Fin-De-Siècle Austria

In retrospect antiSemitism may have been in one of its periodic dormant phases in the Austria of the 1860s and most of the 1870s. Because many of the very people who would later form the hard-core support for anti-Semitismsmall businessmen and artisansdid not yet have the franchise, there was no need for politicians to cater to their prejudices. The situation was changing, however. When antiSemitism resurfaced in Austria, it was no longer simply an emotion or a religious prejudice as in earlier centuries but was now a political program and a justification for political action.

1

Austria-Hungary, being almost in the geographic center of Europe, was of course influenced by intellectual trends outside its borders, and antiSemitism was no exception. The popularity of Darwinism, in both its biological and social manifestations, stressing the "struggle for survival" and the "survival of the fittest," did not leave the Dual Monarchy unaffected. Moreover, at a time when fewer and fewer Christians and Jews alike, especially in the big cities, were still practicing their religion, and at a time when science was reaching its peak of prestige, those people who instinctively disliked Jews, envied their wealth, or rejected their political views felt compelled to justify their feelings on some grounds other than religion or else run the risk of being declared religious bigots. Charges of ritual murder and well poisoning were no longer convincing in a modern, secularized society.
Such views are clearly apparent in Hitler's
Mein Kampf
. If we can believe his own account, the young Hitler, in his Linz years and for a time after his move to Vienna at the age of eighteen, rejected antiSemitism as being "intolerant" and "unscientific." "There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in fact, I even took them for Germans. The absurdity of this idea did not dawn on me because I saw no distinguishing feature but the

 

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strange religion. The fact that they had, as I believed, been persecuted on this account sometimes almost turned my distaste at unfavorable remarks about them into horror."

2

Even Hitler's first exposure to anti-Semitic literature in Vienna did not convert him because of its "unscientific" nature. "For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain degree. Besides, the tone for the most part was such that doubts again arose in me, due in part to the dull and amazingly unscientific arguments favoring the thesis."
3
The Origins of Racism and Political AntiSemitism in Germany
The theories about "scientific racism" so cherished by Hitler did not have their origins in Austria or even Germany. Rather it was the Frenchman, Count Arthur Joseph de Gobineau whose three-volume work,
An Essay on the Inequality of the Races
(185355), argued that race is the decisive element in history rather than the characteristics or beliefs of individuals. The white races were creative and destined to rule and the other races were bound to follow. The Semites, including the Jews, were merely parasitic. These ideas were to have fateful consequences for the Jews even though de Gobineau himself had no political agenda regarding them.
4
Although de Gobineau's theories did not attract a particularly large following in his native country, they were popular in Germany and Austria among those urban, educated people who felt alienated from the Christian church and its traditional, religious anti-Judaism. For hard-core racists the racial myth became an all-pervading philosophy of life, which regulated their political and even personal behavior. They could (and did) argue that even baptized Jews should not be accepted as equal citizens in Germany and Austria and should be excluded from the civil service and other influential positions. They interpreted Jewish predominance in trade and moneylending not as historically conditioned but as racially determined. In fact, all negative judgments about Jews were seen by racists as being rooted in nature.
5
It was for the most part Germans rather than Austrians who elaborated de Gobineau's ideas and applied them to Jews. The man who was probably the most responsible for popularizing the new "scientific" racism in Central Europe was Wilhelm Marr, who is also "credited" with coining the preten-

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