From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (49 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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percentile rose to over 12 in 192627, or well above their 10.8 percent of the total population during that period.

16

Although the Jewish population of Austria steadily declined between the wars, it was still highly visible because it was concentrated in the capital city. Whereas Jews made up only 3.8 percent of Berlin's population, their percentage in Vienna was nearly three times as high. By contrast, Jews made up only 0.64 percent of the population of the other federal states in 1923; with the exception of the Burgenland, most of these provincial Jews lived in the state capitals or larger towns. By 1938 the provincial population of Austria had declined by about 20 percent, from around 19,000 to little more than 15,000. Only 8,ooo Jews lived in Lower Austria, 3,200 in Burgenland, just over 2,000 in Styria, fewer than 1,000 in Upper Austria, and only a few hundred in each of the other states, except for Vorarlberg, where a mere 18 Jews lived at the beginning of 1938.
17
In Vienna itself Jews were also unevenly distributed. Nearly 60,000 of them lived in the former ghetto and still impoverished district of Leopoldstadt, or 38.5 percent of that district's total population in 1923. The equally poor twentieth district, called Brigittenau, had another 17,600 Jews in 1923, or 18 percent of that neighborhood's population. At the opposite end of the social scale, the wealthy first district had 10,460 Jews, or 24.3 percent of the total. Nearly 24,000 residents, just over a quarter, of the middleclass ninth district of Alsergrund were Jewish, and the middleclass sixth district of Mariahilf contained nearly 9,000 Jews, or 16.4 percent of the entire population. On the other hand, the percentage of Jews in the other districts of Vienna was well below the average for the city.
18
The concentration of 60 percent of Vienna's Jewish population in just four of the city's twenty-one districts and 75 percent of the Jews in eight districts made it easy for Jews to socialize with each other, but it also made a complete assimilation into the general population much less likely, a phenomenon also found in cities like Warsaw and even Paris.
19
Sigmund Freud's son Martin wrote that even though his family was completely alienated from the Jewish religion and Jewish rites and was thoroughly assimilated into German-Austrian culture, it moved in exclusively Jewish circles. Their friends, physicians, lawyers, and business partners all tended to be Jewish. Even when they went on vacations, it was to places where Jews were in the majority.
20
The experience of the Freud family was typical of all but the most culturally assimilated Viennese Jewish families. The pattern of housing and social segregation, according to Marsha Rozenblit, created the impression among

 

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both Jews and non-Jews that they were a distinct group and prevented intimate relations between them.

21
Die Wahrheit
was disturbed by this situation and editorialized in 1931 that "contact between Jews and non-Jews [was] declining at a frightening rate." Equality, the paper continued, could "never be based on laws alone, but instead on the sympathy or at least respect of the non-Jewish population."
22
This lack of personal contact and friendship between Jews and non-Jews, which was partly voluntary on the Jewish side but also to a large extent the result of antiSemitism, was to have dire consequences for Vienna's Jews after the Nazi takeover in 1938 when Jews often found themselves with tragically few gentile friends to protect them.

Jewish Wealth, Poverty, and Employment
It is easier to enumerate the size and location of Austria's Jewish population than it is to describe its wealth or poverty. Such is not the case for German Jews because we know that their average income was more than three times that of the general population during the Weimar Republic. In Austria, no statistics were ever kept about the wealth of different religious groups so that one is forced to speculate by way of very indirect evidence and the personal observations of contemporaries. There were certainly some wealthy Jews living in the First Austrian Republic, but it does not follow that all Viennese Jews were rich. The only completely safe generalization that can be made about the economic status of Jews is that it varied enormously from one individual to another. The idea that Jews made up just one economic group was one of the more absurd myths perpetrated by antiSemites.
23
What evidence is available suggests that more Jews were poor than rich. In the four districts of Vienna where 60 percent of the Jewish population lived nearly 19 percent more people were housed in large apartment buildings than in the other seventeen districts of the city. The percentage of employed Jews (54) was almost identical to that of non-Jews (53) according to the census of 1923. Many Jews were businessmen who had generally prospered in the last decade and a half before the First World War. However, businessmen were especially hard hit by the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy and the subsequent loss of markets. Then, little more than a decade later, the Great Depression and the drying up of international trade proved to be a second blow to Austrian commerce. The declining Jewish population was almost certainly a symptom of these disastrous economic circumstances. The depression was the main reason why the number of Jews who could afford to pay taxes to the

 

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Israelitische Kultusgemeinde declined from 60,000 in 1927 to little more than 48,000 six years later. In 1934 no fewer than 55,000 Viennese Jews were receiving assistance from the Kultusgemeinde, and fully 65 percent of all Jewish burials were made at the expense of the communal organization.

24

Two areas in which the anti-Semitic stereotype of the rich Jew bore some relation to the truth were credit institutions and big industries. Jewish bankers had been powerful in Vienna as early as the eighteenth century and had actually begun to dominate Vienna's financial structure as early as the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Ever since the time of Joseph II Jews had administered Austria's tobacco monopoly, probably because of their trade relations with the Near East, from where the raw tobacco was imported.
25
Fully 60 percent of the people engaged in finance and industry were Jewish, or about six times as many per capita as gentiles, at least in 1900.
26
Although most of these people were undoubtedly wealthy, they were also among those who suffered the most catastrophic losses during the depression, when ten of the twelve Austrian banks that failed were Jewish-owned.
Another area in which Austrian Jews were definitely overrepresented was in the so-called free professions such as law, medicine, and higher education. AntiSemites charged that this was because of a specifically Jewish characteristic of seeking lucrative jobs and avoiding manual labor. These same antiSemites never explained which people preferred low-paying jobs to highpaying ones. Nor did they attempt to prove that Christians preferred manual labor to white-collar work.
There were, however, some concrete reasons why Jews were particularly anxious to enter the professions. In many cases Jews hoped to avoid problems created by centuries of legal and social discrimination. Before 1848 it had been impossible for them to own land and become farmers; and even after 1867 it was virtually impossible for them to become civil servants without first becoming Christians. Jews were seldom hired by Christian employers, and observant Jews could not work on Saturdays. All of these problems could be avoided in the free professions. The traditional Jewish emphasis on scholarship, and the observance of daily rituals prescribed by 614 Jewish laws, also made a move into the professions a natural one. The law profession had the additional advantage of not requiring too much money to get started.
27
AntiSemites were especially exercised about the number of Jews in the free professions. The
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Presse
claimed that only 300 of 1,940 Viennese lawyers were Aryans and 75 to 85 percent of physicians in the Austrian capital were Jews. Georg Glockemeier, a somewhat more restrained anti-Semitic author frequently cited by other antiSemites, alleged in 1936

 

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that 85.5 percent of all lawyers and 1,541 of 3,268 physicians in Vienna were Jewish. The pamphleteer Walter Pötsch thought that 90 percent of all Viennese lawyers and 45 percent of all university instructors were Jewish. Only rarely did antiSemites admit that these Jewish professionals could not have continued their practices without the heavy patronage of Christians.

28

Although these figures may have been somewhat exaggerated, there is no doubt that in interwar Vienna the free professions were dominated by Jews. According to one Jewish calculation made in 1936, 62 percent of all Viennese lawyers were Jewish, as were 47 percent of all physicians, and almost 29 percent of the city's university instructors. Vienna, in fact, had a higher percentage of Jewish lawyers and physicians than any other city in Europe.
29
Before the First World War the Jewish domination of certain professions was not a terribly pressing issue because Christians preferred the security of civil service or military jobs, over which they had a near monopoly.
30
After the war, however, in the shrunken territory of the First Republic, the civil service, which had been overstaffed even before the war, now had a huge surplus. The AustroHungarian army, whose officers had come primarily from the Germanspeaking population, was now only a memory, and the new army of the First Republic was far smaller than the 30,000-man limit allowed it in the Treaty of St. Germain. Not unnaturally, Christians now turned to the traditionally "Jewish" professions, only to find that they too had no room for novices. Only a reduction of the number of Jews in the professions to their percentage of the overall populationa numerus claususor an even more drastic deportation of Jews seemed to offer hope to antiSemites of creating new jobs for themselves.
Jewish professional people (as well as other Jews), facing an uphill struggle against discrimination, were convinced that they had to work 120 percent as hard as Christians to get even 90 percent as much recognition. They had to do everything better and more thoroughly than others and could not allow themselves the luxury of making any mistakes. This perfectionist attitude resulted in many magnificent Jewish contributions to Austrian culture and society, but it did not necessarily make the Jews more popular with their Christian competitors.
31
Below the socioeconomic level of the Jewish financiers, big industrialists, and professionals came the businessmen. The Nazis estimated just after their takeover of power in 1938 that 36,000 of the 146,000 business enterprises in Vienna, or 25 percent, were owned by Jews, or about three times their percentage of the city's population. The great majority of these businesses, however, were small, old-fashioned family affairs. This large number of Jewish

 

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businesses helps explain why some 45 percent of all Viennese Jews were self-employed compared with just over 28 percent for non-Jews. The Jewish desire for self-employment was not a great deal different from that of Viennese Christians, however, and was part of a common reluctance to modernize, which only the Nazis would be able partially to overcome after 1938.

32

The percentage of Jews engaged in various businesses differed substantially, but in nearly all of them they were overrepresented. Over 76 percent of the book salesmen in Vienna were Jewish in the 1930s, 74 percent of the retailers of wine, 73 percent of the textile handlers, 63 percent of the owners of motion picture theaters, 53 percent of the shoe merchants, 40 percent of the jewelers, 34 percent of the photographers, and 26 percent of the druggists, to cite only a few examples.
33
The high proportion of these Jewish merchants created a great deal of antiSemitism among Christian small-time merchants and shopkeepers. It was not numbers alone, however, that aroused their resentment. Christian merchants were used to long, leisurely lunch hours, coffee breaks in a nearby cafe, and early closings. Jewish merchants, by contrast (not unlike recent immigrants to the United States from southeast Asia), anxious to become established in what for them was often a new city, frequently disregarded these Viennese traditions, forcing their Christian competitors either to keep pace or lose customers. Many Jewish merchants, especially owners of department stores, were able to offer their customers lower prices, which also did not endear them to their Christian competitors. One particularly innovative and successful Jewish grocery store owner in Vienna's ninth district by the name of Jakob Lehrer attracted a loyal clientele by being the first to offer "specials." His store, the largest of its kind in Vienna with no fewer than twenty-one employees, was also the first to have a machine that roasted imported coffee beans, the aroma of which filled the store. Even his cash register, imported from the United States, was a novelty that amazed his customers.
34
Jewish writers in interwar Austria were able to point out that Jews benefited the Austrian economy by being responsible for 60 percent of the country's exports; they employed 212,000 Christians, which meant that including dependents, 600,000 to 800,000 Viennese derived their livelihood from Jewish employers. By contrast, Christian firms rarely employed Jews. Jews also paid a disproportionately high percentage of the taxes in Austria, which helped pay the salaries of civil servants, virtually all of whom were Christians. None of these facts impressed antiSemites, however, who complained that almost half of the workers and employees of Vienna worked for "Jewish gold." They also complained bitterly when the depression forced some Jewish businesses to re-

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