From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (50 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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duce the wages of their employees; even more anger was created when a Jewish business had to close altogether, thus throwing gentiles out of work.

35

Further down the social and income scale were Jewish tailors, money changers, and peddlers, most of whom were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. The latter would usually sell easily transportable items like soap, suspenders, buttons, pencils, and the like. With some luck a son would establish a more substantial business and a grandson would become a professional person. A grandson might even convert to Christianity and become an anti-Semitic Christian Social politician.
36
At the very bottom of the social ladder one could find some Jewish shoe shiners, newspaper salesmen, and even beggars. However, just 2.9 percent of Vienna's industrial workers were Jewish on the eve of the First World War.
37
Almost too small to be counted were the Jewish peasants of Austria, all 760 of them, who in 1934 made up just o.7 percent of Jewish employment. AntiSemites regarded the virtual absence of a Jewish peasantry as particularly damning, thus completely ignoring the laws that prevented Jews from owning property in Central Europe before 1848. After that date Jews could, in theory, become farmers; but by that time Europe was moving inexorably toward urbanization and industrialization. Few Christians moved from the city to the countryside after the mid-nineteenth century, not even when encouraged to do so by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. In any event, Jews would have found it next to impossible to accommodate themselves to the peasant customs of Alpine Austria, which revolved in large part around the Catholic church.
38
A common characteristic of all the occupations where Jews were highly representedbe they finance, commerce, or the liberal professionswas that they were all "unproductive" in the eyes of Christian traditionalists. Unlike premodern artisans and peasants, the "Jewish professions" literally produced no tangible products. Instead, Jewish bankers made money by charging interest on loans; Jewish businessmen lived from the profits charged on goods produced by Christians, and Jewish lawyers and physicians profited from the hardships of their Christian clients: hence the myth of the "unproductive'' and "exploiting" Jew.
39
When antiSemites cataloged the economic fields in which Jews were overrepresented, they carefully avoided mention of the civil service. If a numerus clausus had meant guaranteed proportional representation for Jews instead of capping Jewish representation it would have been an enormous boon to Austrian Jews. There had been a tradition of excluding Jews from public service in Austria, and most of the rest of Europe, since the Middle Ages when imperial charters forbade their employment. This tradition was supposedly ended by

 

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the Austrian constitution of 1867; in practice, however, it remained extremely difficult for a Jew to obtain a government positioneither local, state, or federalunless he was baptized. This policy continued into the First Republic. In 1935 the Austrian government employed 160,692 civil servants, but only a pathetic 682, or 0.28 percent, were Jews. In Vienna there were only 152 Jews, most of them physicians, who were employed by the municipality, out of 42,113 positions. Since the establishment of the republic, no Jew was ever made a judge anywhere in Austria, whereas before the war there had been thirteen Jewish judges in Vienna alone. The Zionist Robert Stricker was the only politician representing Jewish interests exclusively in the Austrian Parliament during the entire First Republic, and he served only from 1919 to 1920; in the early 1930s there were no Jews from the bourgeois parties in the National Assembly. Almost certainly the large number of Jewish lawyers and professors in Vienna would have been greatly reduced if some of them could have found government employment.

40

The "Jewish Press"
Two professional activities in which Jews were heavily involved in interwar Austria and before, which have been intentionally omitted until now, were writing and publishing. Probably nothing else the Austrian Jews did so incensed antiSemites, particularly the editors of anti-Semitic newspapers.
All manner of evils were ascribed by antiSemites to this "Jewish press," which was above all responsible for the "decay" of German intellectual and spiritual life. It was supposedly leading Christian Germans like a ''herd of sheep." Whenever the Germans were about to defend themselves, the Jewish press managed to incite them against each other. The sale of pornographic books was allegedly solely in the hands of Jews and was causing Christians to lose their morality. Jews were also said to control the most important literary magazines and through them "created" great men who "of course" were always either Jews or friends of Jews. They also controlled literary criticism and had good things to say only about Jewish authors and playwrights. Hitler echoed this idea when he wrote in
Mein Kampf
that the "glorification of the theater critics [of the Jewish press] was always reserved for Jewish authors, and their rejection never affected anyone but German [-Austrians]." However, on rare occasions even a Nazi newspaper would admit that Jewish families did a great deal to encourage the development of their children's talents whereas "Aryan" families often discouraged their children.
41

 

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Some Jewish writers or writers of Jewish origins did play into anti-Semitic hands. Most were nonpracticing Jews and often felt alienated from society. Therefore Jewish publications were sometimes critical of Austrian culture. An extreme example was the baptized Jew, Karl Kraus, and his journal
Die Fackel (The Torch)
, which he edited from 1899 until his death in 1936.
Die Fackel
set new standards for aggressive satire, much of it aimed against Jews such as Herzl and Freud. AntiSemites condemned Kraus for defending homosexuals and prostitutes. Kraus was a half century ahead of his time in arguing that a person's sexual activities were his business alone as long as they did no one any harm. Prostitutes, he said, were more heroic than soldiers. Like the latter, they served the existing social order by facing injury, disease, and death, but unlike soldiers, prostitutes were subject to social and legal penalties.

42

Jewish newspaper editors in interwar Austria also sometimes provided antiSemites with ammunition. Even Jewish historians have admitted that not all were respectable.
Pressefreiheit
(freedom of the press) could sometimes lead to
Pressefrechheit
(insolence). A tasteless, sensationalistic boulevard press, edited largely by Jews, grew up between the wars. And there was also some corruption in the press of the First Republic. None of these phenomena was unique to Austria, however. They were also common in New York and in London where there were very few Jewish editors. More important, in comparison to anti-Semitic newspapers like
Der eiserne Besen, Der Stürmer
, the
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung, Kikeriki, Wiener Stimmen
, and
Der Kampfruf
, Jewish-owned papers like
Der Tag, Der Abend
, and
Die Stunde
were absolute models of decorum and restraint.
43
It is a fact that the creation of the liberal Viennese press, like much of the metropolitan press in Germany, was to a large extent a Jewish achievement. Jews wrote the leading articles, advertisements, essays, and business news; they were also highly influential in the publication of books and magazines. One British writer claimed shortly before the First World War that 75 percent of the editors of Vienna's daily newspapers were Jewish.
44
However, when antiSemites referred to the "Jewish press," they rarely meant those newspapers which were written by and exclusively for a Jewish audience, such as the assimilationist weekly,
Die Wahrheit
, the daily Zionist paper,
Die Wiener Morgenzeitung
, and its successor, the weekly
Die Stimme
. Because these newspapers exercised no influence over the non-Jewish population, antiSemites mentioned them only when they might contain a statement that they, the antiSemites, found damaging to Jewish interests.
Rather it was the secular and liberal press, owned and edited predominantly by Jews, that drew the wrath of antiSemites. Though they never said so di-

 

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rectly, it was actually the liberalism of the Jewish press to which nationalistic antiSemites objected; Catholic newspapers like the
Reichspost
and
Wiener Stimmen
detested both their liberalism and secularism and not just their association with Jews. This is why antiSemites referred to Austrians who expressed liberal ideas as being infected by the "Jewish spirit." Pan-German nationalists used "the Jews" and "Jewish influence" to explain why some Austrians did not think as they did. As in so many other aspects of Austrian culture and society, it was easier for antiSemites to condemn something because of its association with Jews than it was to criticize an idea or practice on its own merits. Although liberal newspapers like the
Neue Freie Presse
certainly depended on well-educated upper-middle-class Jews for much of their readership, they also could not have survived without a large gentile audience, another fact that infuriated hard-core anti-Semitic editors and politicians.

45

Far from supporting specifically Jewish causes, the liberal Jewish-owned and edited newspapers of Vienna actually bent over backward to avoid even mentioning Jewish issues such as Zionism or Palestine. Even in the liberal causes that Jewish-owned newspapers did support, it may be doubted just how much influence they really had. Liberalism itself was a dying ideology after the mid-1890s and never more so than during the entire First Republic. Liberal, Jewish-owned newspapers fought the Christian Social Party, as did the Socialist press, which was also edited primarily by people of Jewish origins; yet they did not prevent the Christian Social Party from controlling the government continuously after the breakup of the early postwar coalition government in 1920. Such papers were occasionally critical of antiSemitism, but certainly did not eliminate it. They were staunchly pro-Austrian and anti-Nazi yet failed to prevent the Nazi takeover in 1938.
46
About the only safe generalization that one can make about the Jews in Austrian society during the First Republic is that it is impossible to make grand generalizations that would apply to all of them. All of the anti-Semitic clichés about the Jews did have some basis in fact, but only some. There were wealthy Jews, but there were also a large number of impoverished ones. And if anything, Jews were hurt by the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Great Depression even more than gentiles. Some Jews did live in palatial quarters in the inner city of Vienna and elsewhere, but far more were crowded into the slums of the Leopoldstadt and Brigittenau. They were overrepresented in certain fields such as banking, law, and medicine, but grossly underrepresented in the civil service. There were a large number of Jewish-owned and -edited newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, but they did not de-

 

 

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fend specifically Jewish causes and had only a limited ability to influence public opinion; and they were often critical of Jews themselves.
These fine distinctions were almost always lost on the antiSemites. They talked only about "die Juden" or "das Judentum." Crimes or perversions of individual Jews became "typical" of all Jews. Achievements of individual Jews, if mentioned at all, were called exceptions or manufactured creations of other Jewish writers. For the true believing antiSemite, antiSemitism was an article of faith. Facts that contradicted that faith either had to be ignored or explained away as exceptions. Jews and the friends of Jews discovered to their dismay that rational arguments made almost no impact on these people.

 

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15
A House Divided:
Internal Jewish Politics

Austrian Jews were by no means passive during the First Republic when they were being regularly assaulted, first verbally and then increasingly physically. However, their reaction was far from united. In fact, their responses were just as varied as the many types of antiSemitism they encountered. Not only did they differ according to particular incidents but also according to the religious, political, social, and economic background of the Jews themselves. We have seen how the non-Jewish Austrians were bitterly divided into panGerman nationalists, conservative Roman Catholics, and relatively radical Social Democrats. The Jews of Austria were also split into at least as many acrimonious political factions as the gentiles, who outnumbered them by a thirty-to-one ratio. One Viennese Jewish magazine went so far as to describe Jews as "the most divided people in the world."

1
In no respect was the mythical Nazi view of Jews more absurd than in its depiction of them as monolithic world conspirators. Indeed, Jews could not even agree on the most fundamental questions of survival.

The Zionist Challenge
The most important reason for the acrimony within the Jewish community after 1918 not only in Austria but throughout the rest of Europe and America as well was the rise of Zionism. Before the war the Zionists had been little more than a vocal minority. As late as 1913 there had been only fifteen hundred dues-paying Zionists, over a third of whom were university students who encountered antiSemitism and even physical assaults almost on a daily basis. However, their use of Herzl's inflammatory language along with their aggressive tactics and philosophy, which would so outrage wealthy and wellassimilated Jews, were already well established before the First World War.

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