From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (11 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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

BOOK: From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
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Page 6
Photographs from
Racial Victory in Vienna
by Robert Körber contrasting
a Near Eastern caftan Jew and a blonde German peasant woman in traditional dress.
The caption reads, "The racial mixing between Nordic-defined Germans and
Near Eastern-oriental-negroid Jews, which has been preached and blessed
by liberal circles, is the greatest cultural disgrace of the world."

The lack of a peasantry and the Jews' concentration in big citiesboth again the result of their historical discriminationtended to produce another characteristic that nearly all antiSemites detested: their social, political, and intellectual modernity. Although antiSemites generally ignored Orthodox Jews, they occasionally expressed admiration for them because the latter were among the most conservative and traditional people in Europe. However, Orthodox Jews were a small minority in Austria. The vast majority of Jews in Austria, as elsewhere in Central and Western Europe, were acculturated and relatively secular in their outlook. Although by no means all Jews were modernists, and not all modernists were Jews, the freedom from the intellectual dogmas and traditions of the more secularized Jews made them more prone than gentiles to be iconoclasticeven toward Judaismand exposed them to the charge of attempting to undermine traditional Christian and German-Austrian values. Far from single-handedly initiating intellectual changes, however, they more frequently simply accelerated changes that were already taking place.

28

 

Page 7
Photographs from
Racial Victory in Vienna
by Robert Körber contrasting
a German girl with long, flowing, blonde hair and a Jewish student with dark,
curly hair. The caption, a quotation from a Nazi official (State Secretary
Reinhardt), reads, "Just as it is impossible to make a Jew out of a German-
born person, it is impossible to make a German out of a Jew."

Religious, non-Jewish conservatives in Austria, however, saw the gradual secularization of society since the Middle Ages, along with the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, as movements that were increasingly dominated by Jews and were directed against Christianity in general and the Roman Catholic church in particular.

29
Political conservatives held modernistic Jews responsible for all the recent trends that theyboth panGermans and conservative Catholicshated, namely capitalism, liberalism, democracy, and socialism.
30

The Myth of Jewish World Domination
Probably the most prevalent, notorious, and insidious of all anti-Semitic allegations, as well as one of the most universal, was the idea that the Jews were

 

Page 8

conspiring to dominate the world. Dating back to the French Revolution, it resembled the belief in Jewish "spiritual," racial characteristics, of which it was a part, insofar as antiSemites of every type in Austria (and elsewhere) accepted this idea as an article of faith. It lay in the essence of Jewry to strive for power; their drive for world domination was ancient. Hitler was only somewhat more extreme than most racial antiSemites in frankly telling his friends (but not saying so publicly) that Christianity itself was part of this Jewish plot. St. Paul's extolling of pacifism and egalitarianism had deprived the Roman Empire of its hierarchical and military outlook and had ensured its doom. Hitler maintained that the Jews had continued to propagate their pacifism and egalitarianism in the modern world and thereby brought about the French Revolution, liberalism, democracy, and Bolshevism. Many antiSemites believed this domination by Jews was already so complete that only the cooperation of völkisch people all over the world could possible break it. This mythical threat, then, became the "warrant for genocide."

31

The establishment in 1860 of the "Alliance Israelite Universalle," a cultural and educational association for French-speaking Jews, and the first organization to represent world Jewry on a political basis, seemed to lend some credence to the idea of a world Jewish conspiracy.
32
However, much more important for the growing popularity of the myth for countless people was the publication in Russia of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in 1903. Forged in France by agents of the chief of the Russian secret police, General Rachkowski, between about 1894 and 1899, to convince Tsar Nicholas II of the Jewish threat,
Protocols
was based on a pamphlet written by a Frenchman, Maurice Joly, in 1864, which claimed that Napoleon III wanted to dominate the world. The new Russian version merely substituted the Jews for the French emperor. The
Protocols
contained an elaborate plan for the conquest of the world through Jewish dominated Masonic lodges culminating in the absolute hereditary monarchy of the House of David. The first principle of the "conspiracy" was that the ends justified the means and that most non-Jews were weak, cowardly, and stupid. World domination would be established through the use of merciless violence, cruelty, lies, and demagoguery. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote that the
Protocols
"constitute an apology of autocracy and of the extremest despotism.''
33
According to the
Protocols
everything had to be done in every state to foster discontent and unrest. This could be accomplished by the Elders through liberalism, which produced confusion through a multiplicity of political parties. The Elders would aggravate the situation by secretly supporting all of the parties. They would pretend to sympathize with the grievances of the workers

 

Page 9

while secretly maneuvering to increase the cost of living. State authority had to be discredited and all industry had to be concentrated into a few giant monopolies, which would destroy gentile fortunes whenever it pleased the Elders. International relations were also slated to be muddled by emphasizing national differences until international understanding became impossible. Meanwhile, gentile morality would be undermined through the encouragement of atheism and materialism. Drunkenness and prostitution were also to be vigorously encouraged. After years of such intrigue it would be easy for the Elders to organize a war against any nation that resisted them.

34

From the beginning, the identity of the "Elders" was in doubt. The first Russian translator warned that the Elders of Zion should not be confused with representatives of the Zionist movement and that it was not even known who had copied the minutes of the meetings at which the conspiracy had been hatched.
35
When the book was first published in Central Europe shortly after the world war, this warning did nothing to stop antiSemites from confidently asserting that the Elders were actually Zionist leaders who met at the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897.
36
The publication of the
Protocols
attracted little notice until 1917 when Bolshevik aims and methodsterror, dictatorship, conspiracy, world revolution, and world dominationseemed to validate the forgery and confirm what many people had already believed about the Jews' desire for world domination. The Jewish origins of many of Lenin's close associatesfor example, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenevlent further credence to the
Protocols
. The
Protocols
helped establish a link between anti-Bolshevism and antiSemitism. For antiSemites, every Jew was now suspected of being a Bolshevik.
37
In reality, only 7 percent of the Bolsheviks' membership was Jewish in 1924 even though the urban population of the Soviet Union, which contained most of the party's membership, was 11 percent Jewish. Even at party congresses, only 15 to 20 percent of the delegates were Jewish. Moreover, most of the Bolshevik Jews no longer practiced Judaism or had a Jewish consciousness. For religious Jews the Bolshevik Revolution was a catastrophe; by the end of the 1920s all specifically Jewish activity had been ended or emasculated by Stalin; Jewish religious leaders were either imprisoned or exiled. Nevertheless, antiSemites preferred to believe that since people of Jewish origins were among the instigators of the revolution, they must have also been its main beneficiaries.
38
The publication of the
Protocols
in Germany in 1919, in the United States in 1920, and in Great Britain in 192021, came just as the hysteria surrounding the "Red Scare" was reaching its height. Even though an investigation by the
London Times
(which for a time had given the
Protocols
the benefit of

 

Page 10

the doubt) soon revealed them to be a forgerya conclusion reached again through a libel trial in Switzerland in 1934they were widely accepted, even to some degree among the general public, as the literal truth and frequently quoted in Austria, especially, but not exclusively, by racist newspapers.

39
By the time Hitler rose to power in 1933 the book had gone through no fewer than thirty-three editions in Germany; one popular edition alone sold nearly 100,000 copies. Even more important, the legal discrediting of the
Protocols
did not completely discredit the myth of a worldwide conspiracy.
40

None of the anti-Semitic ideas described in this chapter was unique to Austria either before or after the First World War. Still less were any of them inventions of either Austrian or German Nazis. However, the rapidity with which the country entered the modern, secular, industrialized age made the clash between traditionalism, with which anti-Semitismespecially the Catholic varietywas closely associated, and modern secularism, with which the Jews were identified, far more striking than in countries like Britain and France where the process of modernization was much more gradual. Moreover, the Roman Catholic church in Austria was still a powerful and authoritative institution as late as the 1930s and bitterly resented and resisted the trend toward liberalism, democracy, Marxism, capitalism, and especially secularism, all of which it associated with the Jews.
It was not just Roman Catholics, however, who were alarmed about the role of Jews in the development of modernist trends. University students resented the rapidly increasing enrollment of Jewish students, panGerman nationalists detested the cosmopolitan outlook of some Jews, and small shopkeepers hated the large Viennese department stores, which were owned mostly by Jews. Industrial workers often hated the Jewish owners of their factories. Most of these people regarded religious antiSemitism as antiquated in a world that had become increasingly secular. For them the racial and economic antiSemitism found in the new bourgeois parties and political movements and in the Marxist Social Democratic Party seemed much more relevant and up to date. For them the ancient Judeophobia and the traditional allegations remained, but the vocabularly had changed. Moreover, unlike premodern times, when Judeophobia was merely a prejudice, albeit a deeply rooted one, there were now well-organized political parties that made antiSemitism an important part of their programs and propaganda.

 

 

Page 11
PART I
ANTISEMITISM IN THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE
AntiSemites were right about one thing: antiSemitism was scarcely a new phenomenon in the twentieth century, in Austria or elsewhere in Europe. Its roots in Austria can be traced back nearly to the founding of Jewish communities in the tenth century. This is not to suggest, however, that Christian-Jewish relations were always hostile. Nevertheless, three themes predominate for the whole of Austrian history up to the collapse of the monarchy in 1918 and even into the First Republic: (1) Jewish-gentile relations were tolerable during periodapidly deteriorated during social and economic crises brought on by bad harvests, plagues, wars, or revolutions; (2) Christian theology taught by the Catholic clergy, especially the lower clergy, was a constant cause of popular antipathy toward the Jews; and (3) Jewish survival depended on the protection of the Austrian rulerswhenever it was removed, expulsion or at least harsh social and legal discrimination was the likely result.
In comparison with that of most other ruling dynasties in Europe, the treatment of Austrian Jews by the Habsburgs was usually fairly enlightened, especially after the accession to the throne of Emperor Joseph II in 1780. Habsburg benevolence did not prevent upsurges in popular antiSemitism, especially in the late nineteenth century, but it did provide Austrian Jews a secure enough setting to leave their ghettos and to enter the modern, secular world and make magnificent cultural contributions to Western civilization.

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