From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (15 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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tious term antiSemitism in 1879, which soon gained wide acceptance in part because of its lack of clarity. In his book entitled
Der Sieg des Judentums über das Germanentum
(
The Victory of Judaism over Germandom
), which went through twelve editions in six years, Marr contrasted Jews not with Christians but with Germans along lines that were immutable and eternal. Marr deliberately rejected many of the Christian accusations against Jews as unworthy of an enlightened thinker, but replaced them with the idea of a cunning, rootless, and conspiratorial race. The Germans had lost the battle to the Jews, according to Marr, through their own stupidity without ever realizing that a war was taking place. The only solution to the "Jewish problem" was the strict segregation of the races, an idea perhaps inspired by his unhappy marriages to three Jewish women. Although Marr would eventually become a critic of the anti-Semitic movement, he is still remembered as the "patriarch of antiSemitism" and the person who changed the image of the Jews from being a small, weak group to that of a world power; now Jews could be depicted as being much stronger than the Germans.

6

One reason why the term antiSemitism gained such rapid momentum, especially in German universities, was its incidental use by the immensely popular German historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, in an essay he wrote in November 1879 in which he identified the Jews with every negative aspect of German life. The Jewish question was not one problem among many, but the very essence of evil. Nevertheless, Treitschke differed sharply from most German racists in not opposing Jewish conversions to Christianity and in actually favoring their assimilation into German society.
7
Neither Marr nor Treitschke were political activists. The first German to create an anti-Semitic ideology based on biology, philosophy, and history was a professor of philosophy and national economy at the University of Berlin, Eugen Dühring. Dühring carried antiSemitism to new extremes in his book,
Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten-und Culturfrage (The Jewish Question as a Race, Morals and Cultural Question)
published in1881. Dühring contradicted Treitschke in denying that Jews could ever become Germans; he also rejected Treitschke's advocacy of Jewish conversion, which he believed would only make it easier for Jews to infiltrate and corrupt German society. Jews were irredeemably depraved because of their racial characteristics, which had even shaped their religion. The Jewish problem could only be solved by the revocation of their emancipation. They had to be governed by special laws and their influence removed from all public affairs including education and the press as well as from business and finance.
8
Although Dühring, through his students, influenced the Austrian panGerman and racial antiSemite Georg

 

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von Schönerer (to be discussed later), his influence was limited even within racism's lunatic fringe, not to mention the larger German society, in part because of his outspoken atheism and his desire to go beyond a mere "cleansing" of Christianity of its Jewish elements.

9

Much less extreme than Dühring but more influential was Adolf Stöcker. The imperial court chaplain in Berlin, Stöcker thought that the emancipation of the Jews had been a serious mistake but was irreversible. However, he favored the German government's de facto policy of excluding unconverted Jews from civil service positions and especially from teaching Christian children. He deplored anti-Semitic violence and like Treitschke demanded the complete assimilation of Jews. Although Stöcker failed in his attempt to win over the German working class to antiSemitism, his Christian Social Party was the first organized political expression of antiSemitism during its brief existence between 1878 and 1885. His effort to merge "German socialism" with antiSemitism made it one of the early forerunner's of Hitler's National Socialism.
10
Thanks to Stöcker, Dühring, Marr, Treitschke, and other antiSemites, Germany became the first country in the world to develop a modern political anti-Semitic movement. This is not to say that antiSemitism did not exist in other countries. But antiSemitism as a well-organized political movement aimed against liberalism, socialism, and clericalism flourished first and most vehemently in Germany and very soon thereafter in the Germanspeaking parts of Austria. Even after its spread to France, England, Eastern Europe, and the United States, Germanspeaking Europe remained the center of the movement.
11
Academic AntiSemitism in Austria before the First World War
Although the racial component in Austrian antiSemitism was largely imported from Germany, nonreligious and "racial" antiSemitism first appeared in Austria even before the publication of Marr's book. Universities and other so-called
Hochschulen
or schools of higher learning were already espousing the new creed in the late 1870s at about the same time that Jewish enrollments were exploding. Unfortunately, the rapid increase in Jewish enrollments coincided with a downturn in the economy, which was not completely reversed until 1896. Nowhere was this first "Great Depression" more obvious than in the academically trained professions, especially between 1880 and 1900. Non-

 

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Jewish students in both Austria and Germany saw their careers threatened by the shortage of jobs and blamed their new Jewish classmates.

12

Jewish enrollments in Austrian institutions of higher learning had been modest until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the years 1851 to 1855 there had been an average of only 484 Jews or 7.9 percent at all the Austrian universities and technical Hochschulen. Between 1876 and 1880 these figures rose sharply to 1,685 or 14.2 percent and reached a relative peak between 1886 and 1890 with 3,301 or 21.5 percent before the percentage of Jewish students began to decline, at least for the monarchy as a whole.
13
At the University of Vienna the number of Jews increased especially rapidly during the early 1880s from 1,298 in the winter semester of 1881 to 2,095 four years later. During the same period the Christian enrollment rose only slightly from 3,525 to 3,831. Thereafter, however, it continued to rise to 5,422 in 19034 while the number of Jewish students declined to only 1,693.
14
AntiSemites, however, either ignored this decline by citing only those years in which Jewish enrollment had been high,
15
or else simply invented inflated statistics.
16
They were also oblivious to the fact that many of the Jewish students were foreigners (well over a third in 191819)
17
who were likely to return to their homelands at the completion of their studies and not compete for positions in Austria.
Although academic antiSemitism in Austria was by no means confined to Viennait was also strong at the University of Innsbruck, for example, even though the Jewish student population never exceeded 1.5 percent before the First World War
18
it was most intense in the Austrian capital probably because more than half of all the Jewish students in the Austrian half of the monarchy were located in the
Kaiserstadt
.
19
Likewise, the
percentage
of Jewish students was substantially higher in Vienna, both at the university and at the Technical College, than elsewhere in the monarchy with the exception of the much smaller German University of Prague and the tiny University of Czernowitz in far away Bukovina.
20
Moreover, ethnic German students and professors in Prague were inclined to see Germanspeaking Jews as allies against the Czechs; in Graz and Innsbruck the primary enemies were the large minority of South Slav and Italian-speaking students rather than Jews.
21
The origins of racial antiSemitism among students at the University of Vienna can be traced to Dr. Theodor Billroth, a worldfamous German-born surgeon and professor at the Medical College of the University of Vienna. Jewish enrollment at the Medical College had been high since before the Revolution of 1848 and about half the teaching staff was also Jewish after 1890.

 

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Billroth objected to the large number of new Jewish medical students coming from Eastern Europe; their poverty and poor command of German, he assumed, would lower the academic standards of his college. In his book,
Über das Lehren und Lernen der medizinischen Wissenschaften (About the Teaching and Learning of Medical Science)
, published in 1875, he warned against the dangers of Jewish predominance in medicine. He argued that the Jewish students did not simply belong to a different religion but also to a different race. Although Billroth later reversed this view and actually became a member of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (League to Combat AntiSemitism), substantial damage was already done.

22

Another member of the faculty at the University of Vienna who contributed to the idea of Jewish racial characteristics was Adolf Wahrmund. In his book
Das Gesetz des Nomadenthums und die heutige Judenherrschaft (Law of Nomads and Contemporary Jewish Domination)
, which he published in 1887, Wahrmund argued that the central Jewish racial characteristic was their need to wander, which had been created by their origins as nomads in the Sinai desert. This fact explained their shiftlessness in commerce and their rootless, cosmopolitan way of thinking, and their inability to build a state of their own in contrast to Aryans whose racial characteristics had been formed by their peasant ancestors. Wahrmund thus used secular and pseudoscientific environmental arguments to describe Jewishness instead of the traditional religious explanations.
23
Of the two Viennese academicians, Billroth appears to have had the greater influence on Austrian students. His assertion that Jews belonged to a separate race was enthusiastically received by gentile students at the University of Vienna even though the university had been a bastion of liberalism during the 1850s and 1860s. Most university students rejected religious anti-Judaism as reactionary and unenlightened. Racial antiSemitism, on the other hand, seemed modern and scientific. Moreover, the treatment of Jews as a separate race and not merely as a different religion would eliminate the opportunities for social and economic advancement Jews enjoyed in Central Europe when they converted to Christianity.
24
In the same year that Billroth published his book, a nationalistic student organization in Vienna called the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten (Reading Club of German Students) supported his racial thesis. Two years later a student fraternity (or
Burschenschaft
) in Vienna called Teutonia was the first to make itself
judenrein
, followed the next year by another fraternity called Libertas. In both instances the exclusion was based on "race," not religion.

 

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Not even a pseudoscientific test was used, however, to determine race. Most Burschenschaften were satisfied with a simple declaration by the candidate that he knew of no Jewish ancestors.

25

Once established in the Burschenschaften, antiSemitism developed a dynamics of its own. Actually, Jews had been underrepresented in the fraternities in relation to their proportion of the student population, and those who did belong tended to be wellassimilated German nationalists. These facts did not prevent them from being excluded from one fraternity after another during the 1880s; even the fraternities' Jewish alumni (
alte Herren
) were expelled. By 1890 all of the Burschenschaften of Vienna had become anti-Semitic. Even in the United States Greek letter societies began excluding Jews, beginning at the City College of New York in 1878.
26
The antiSemites of the Austrian Burschenschaften were well ahead of their fraternity brothers in Germany who, though nationalistic, were not specifically anti-Semitic in the 1870s, accepting new members without regard to their ancestry, political affiliation, or faith. Germany even had a national organization of students that was categorically opposed to antiSemitism, the Deutscher Allgemeiner Burschenbund (German General League of Fraternities). However, German university students were the largest single supporters of a nationwide petition in 1881 calling for the end of Jewish immigration. By 1890 German Burschenschaften no longer accepted practicing Jews; in contrast to Austria, however, they did admit baptized Jews. Even in the heyday of student antiSemitism in the 1880s and 1890s, therefore, German academic antiSemitism was somewhat less extreme than in Austria, much to the frustration of Austrian university students.
27
These differences became readily apparent in the matter of dueling between Jews and "Aryans." As early as 1881 Libertas had forbidden its members to duel with Jews. Then in 1896 the "Waidhofner Principle" was adopted by the Waidhofner Verband, an umbrella organization of panGerman dueling fraternities that had been established in 1890. This doctrine, named for a town in eastern Austria, stated that there were deep moral and psychic differences between Jews and Aryans; Jews had no honor or character in the sense that Germans (including German-Austrians) defined these terms. Therefore, students accepting this principle swore to refuse to give Jews the "satisfaction" of fighting duels with them. The practical effect of this policy was to enable anti-Semitic and nationalistic students to insult and assault Jews without the unpleasant prospect of having to fight a duel with them as a consequence. (The prohibition may have been induced in part by the rapid improvement

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