From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (36 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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of his philosophy vis-à-vis Jews. If his career began with aggressive hostility toward Jews, it ended with indifference. He did not want to rid the world of Jews, but the spirit behind Judaism which he equated with capitalism. Merely disestablishing the religion would not eliminate the religious beliefs or the social ills that gave rise to those beliefs. The Jews and their capitalistic spirit would only disappear in a future classless society, he argued. Marx could not have been an antiSemite because for him antiSemites were only people who opposed the struggle against capitalism. He had only one enemy: the capitalists, not the Jews. Nevertheless, the terminology Marx used to describe Jews resembled that used by antiSemites and made Jews appear to non-Marxists as pure money-makers who were parasitic, clannish, and antisocial.

5

It was Marx's linkage of capitalism and Judaism that provided much of the material used by both later-day socialists and the bourgeoisie against Jews. Some of Marx's followers thought that if the proletariat would hate Jewish capitalists, they would eventually hate even those capitalists who were not Jews. An early Austrian Socialist bank employee of Jewish origins, Isidor Ehrenfreund, was one of those who believed that antiSemitism could be used to increase the hatred of capitalists by the proletariat. It was, he wrote to Friedrich Engels in 1890, a necessary road to socialism in a country like Austria where so many prominent capitalists were Jews. According to Ehrenfreund, many Viennese thought that socialism was a movement that wanted to deprive property owners of all of their possessions in order to give them to the proletariat. Engels was already well informed about Austrian antiSemitism and its oppositionist and democratic associations through the early Austrian Socialist leader Karl Kautsky. Kautsky had written Engels a few years before that it was difficult to prevent socialist workers from fraternizing with antiSemites.
6
Engels was not impressed by Ehrenfreund's arguments and told him in a letter that was published in May 1890 in the Austrian party's official organ, the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
, that antiSemitism was a product of backward societies and therefore was strong in Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In the more modern countries of England and the United States it was considered ridiculous. AntiSemitism existed, Engels wrote, in places where the lower bourgeoisie and artisans could not compete with big capitalists. Only after the destruction of the lower middle class in Austria would Austria become a modern country. Engels concluded his letter by denouncing antiSemitism as being only the reaction of dying medieval social classes against modern society and able to serve only reactionary purposes.
7
Although Ehrenfreund had no desire either to defy Engels or to appear to be a follower of Georg von Schönerer, the attitude of other Socialists toward

 

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Jews and antiSemitism both before and after the First World War in Austria, as well as in other countries, wavered ambiguously between Marx's equating of Jews and capitalism, Ehrenfreund's desire to exploit antiSemitism, and Engels's outright rejection of antiSemitism. Their most consistent belief was that antiSemitism, the Jewish question, and Jews themselves would vanish with the establishment of socialism and the disappearance of capitalism. "History" alone would eliminate antiSemitism. At that time the Jews would simply be assimilated into the general population. In other words, cultural, economic, and social progress would eventually overcome national exclusivity, including that of the Jews. In the meantime, Social Democratic leaders expected Jewish workers to get rid of any distinctive traits that might repel their gentile comrades. This was not an attitude likely to win them fast friends among Jews who were conscious of their heritage, especially Zionists. Zionism was regarded by international socialism and Austrian Socialists in particular, both before and after the First World War, as a reactionary, bourgeois, nationalistic movement. Not surprisingly, the Zionists responded by accusing the Socialists of being anti-Zionist or even anti-Semitic. The
Arbeiter-Zeitung
counterattacked by saying that Zionism served the cause of English imperialism.

8

All of these attitudes were readily apparent almost as soon as the Socialist Party of Austria was founded in 1889. Viktor Adler, one of the founding fathers and himself an apostate Jew, spoke against a condemnation of antiSemitism at an international party congress in Brussels in 1891 because he said that it would work to the advantage of the party by driving persecuted Jews into the party's ranks. He though that antiSemitism was only a form of anticapitalism. However, he did not believe that Jews had invented capitalism; at most they had accelerated its development and worsened its manifestations. Taunted by hecklers about his Jewish background he tried to avoid any appearance of defending Jews. Therefore he did not appoint Jews to leadership positions and admitted that his own Jewish background was a handicap. He was forced to change his policy toward utilizing talented Jews as the party grew into a mass movement. However, the new Jewish intellectuals in the party hierarchy tended to view their Jewish background with the same disdain as Adler.
9
During the 1890s the Social Democratic Party of Austria maintained a kind of benevolent neutrality toward antiSemitism. Adler stressed that the Austrian workers should not allow themselves to be exploited by either Jews or Christians. He did believe, as did later Austrian Socialists, that antiSemitism obscured social questions. However, the party only sporadically attacked antiSemitism and occasionally indulged in it itself. For example, in 1892 the

 

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A Jewish nationalist election poster of 1923 reprinted in
Racial Victory in
Vienna
by Robert Körber depicting the use of anti-Semitic stereotypes by the
Social Democrats. The cartoons, which originally appeared in Social Democratic
publications, show Jewish capitalists and rabbis cavorting with Roman Catholic
and Christian Social officials in an attempt to win over Christian Social
voters to the Social Democratic Party.

 

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Arbeiter-Zeitung
said that many Galician Jewish immigrants were crooks and swindlers.

10

The Appeal of Socialism for Austrian Jews
Until the catastrophic electoral defeats of the Liberal Party in 1895, the Social Democrats were militantly antiLiberal because of sharp ideological disagreements regarding capitalism, free trade, and the Liberals' opposition to extending the vote to industrial workers. (The working class was not fully enfranchised at the local level in Vienna until after the First World War when they also gained control of the municipal government for the first time.) After 1896, however, Socialist hostility began to shift toward Lueger's Christian Social Party. In that year Socialist representatives in Vienna's city council, reacting to anti-Semitic charges of the Christian Socials, sardonically began using the term "Jewish banks" and referred to the Christian Socials as
Judenschutztruppen
because their party contained a number of (mostly converted) Jews. In language that resembled the antiSemitism of panGerman nationalists, the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
claimed that Jews controlled the liberal press of Vienna, big industry, the universities, and the arts and sciences, in addition to the major banks. The newspaper's editor, Friedrich Austerlitz, of Jewish origins himself, even wrote that the antiSemitism of the Lueger period had been "a justified reaction against the indubitable preponderance of the Jews . . . in all spheres of influence of Viennese public life." However, after 1900 Socialists began to take a less neutral attitude toward antiSemitism and started to see its attacks on free thought, education, and progress as attacks on civilization itself. But this change of heart never induced Socialists to give up their own occasional indulgence in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
11
With the virtual collapse of the Liberal Party after 1895 a growing number of its Jewish members switched their allegiance to the Socialists. By 1918, when the Liberal Party had become minuscule, the drift had become a flood. Although the Liberals and Socialists had been rivals, the changeover was by no means irrational for Jews. Both parties were heirs of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. They had secular philosophies and favored reducing the privileges of the Roman Catholic church and the importance of religion in general. Both believed in progress and saw education as the most important instrument of that progress. And both believed in the full range of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and freedom of the press.
For Jews, who in general supported all of these ideas, the Socialist Party

 

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had a number of additional advantages. It favored a social welfare program very much in keeping with the three-thousand-year-old Jewish tradition of social justice, which was particularly important for recent Jewish immigrants. Party members were relatively free of anti-Semitic prejudices themselves, and middleclass Jews could identify with their exclusion from society. Finally, Socialism, with its cradle-to-grave-involvement in all aspects of life, became a substitute religion that would bring about a heaven on earth for those Jews who no longer practiced the religion of their ancestors. It was a secular form of messianism.

12

Only Jews who had completely renounced their religion and who did not regard themselves as big businessmen or capitalists could accept Socialism without any reservations. Many Jewish businessmen, especially small businessmen, voted for the SDAP despite their repugnance for the Marxist critique of capitalism. And practicing Jews could not be pleased with the party's attack on religion. But for most Austrian Jews, there were simply no realistic alternatives aside from political abstention. All the other parties of Austria were overtly anti-Semitic and in some cases even flatly refused to accept Jews as members. Consequently, about 75 percent of the Jews of Austria voted for the Socialists. Unfortunately, this combination of factors also meant that the SDAP did not have to make any special effort to win the Jewish vote. By the same token, its mild antiSemitism seemed relatively harmless in comparison to the much more vicious anti-Jewish hostility of the other political parties.
13
A few Jews voted for the Greater German People's Party in 1930 and 1932 perhaps because they favored an Austrian Anschluss with Germany or because the leader of the Greater Germans, Johannes Schober, had been helpful toward Jews during his tenure as police president at the time of the Zionist Congress in 1925. Wealthy Jews were sometimes able to ignore the antiSemitism and clericalism of the Christian Socials and vote for the party's candidates because of its procapitalist philosophy. And a few thousand other Jews voted for tiny Jewish parties, which, however, never had any representation in the Austrian Parliament after 1920.
14
Not only did the Socialist Party accept Jews as members, but it also allowed them to play leading roles. By the beginning of the First Republic an estimated 80 percent of the Socialist intellectuals were of Jewish origins. Karl Renner was the only one of the top Socialist leaders who did not have a Jewish background. Sixteen of the twenty-three Socialist literary writers who contributed to
Jung Wien
were Jewish, as were the great majority of the editors of Socialist newspapers. Socialist lawyers, physicians, and secondary-school students and teachers were also predominantly Jewish, as were the overwhelming per-

 

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centage of the members of the Socialist organization for university students. Socialists, however, did not like to mention statistics such as these for fear of giving ammunition to their enemies.

15

The leader of the left wing of the Socialist Party and without doubt the party's best-known theoretician, Otto Bauer, was Jewish. Unlike other prominent Socialists who bent over backward to dissociate themselves from their coreligionists, Bauer never left the Jewish community of Vienna even though he was not a practicing Jew. Bauer considered the Jewish people to be a nation, but thought that their extraterritoriality, along with the development of capitalism, condemned them to assimilation. Although he opposed forced assimilation, he urged Jewish workers to resemble native workers culturally. He once assured an English Zionist that he was not antagonistic toward Zionism. Bauer himself was also the object of a good deal of anti-Semitic abuse. On one occasion a stone was hurled at him by a Heimwehr deputy in a meeting of the Parliament's Finance and Budget Committee. Nevertheless, like other Austrian Socialists, Bauer was not willing to renounce the attempt to take the anti-Semitic wind out of bourgeois sails by claiming that the SDAP was the better opponent of Jewish big capitalism and high finance. Ironically, Bauer, like Marx and other Socialist leaders, espoused an ideology resembling the nineteenth-century Catholic philosophy of Karl Vogelsang by equating the "Jewish spirit" with capitalism. They were also careful to point out Christian Social leaders who had Jewish backgrounds in order to demonstrate the hypocrisy of that party's antiSemitism.
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Marxist Attacks on "Jewish Capitalism"
Although as Marxists the Austrian Social Democrats were theoretically opposed to all capitalists without distinction, in practice they frequently gave the impression of being opposed only to Jewish capitalists. They called on the "real antiSemites" to join them to fight Jewish capitalism. In order to avoid offending their own Jewish constituency, however, Socialists confined their attacks only to big Jewish businessmen and ignored the small Jewish shopowners.
17
Examples of such attacks on the big Jewish bourgeoisie in the Socialist press are legion. On 5 October 1919 the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
said that big Jewish capitalists were in agreement with the antiSemites about Social Democracy. The Jewish factory owners, together with the antiSemites in the Greater German People's Party and the Christian Social Party, were all opposed to the

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