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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (19 page)

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Page 50

years before, in 1871, a priest named August Rohling, who considered the Jews a nation of deicides, published a book entitled
Der Talmud Jude
(
The Talmud Jew
), a plagiarism of a book written by Johann Eisenmenger in 1700 called
Entdecktes judentum
(
Essence of Jewishness
) which was a compilation of anti-Semitic allegations that previously only marginally respectable individuals had made. Within six years
The Talmud Jew
went through six editions; by the time the seventeenth and final edition was printed, the book had been sold (or perhaps in some cases given) to hundreds of thousands of readers. Following this ''achievement" Rohling was appointed professor of Bible Studies and the Old Testament at the German University of Prague in 1876. After securing this prestigious position, Rohling offered to serve as an expert in trials involving accusations of ritual murder and to substantiate other charges against Jews. The Jewish community tried to ignore Rohling's book until 1882 when he published a series of articles in a Viennese newspaper in which he accused Rabbi Jellinek and his assistant, Moritz Gudemann, of "arrant knavery" for having denied that the Talmud teaches Jews to hate the Christians. The articles were reprinted in book form and 200,000 copies of it were circulated.

25

A partly self-educated, Galician-born rabbi named Josef Samuel Bloch suddenly appeared on the scene to defend the Talmud, the collection of Jewish legal codes and interpretations of Biblical laws. Within a twenty-four-hour period, Bloch wrote a detailed refutation of Rohling's accusations. Bloch's newspaper article was literally an overnight sensation; published as a supplement, three editions of 100,000 were sold in a single day, and subsequently it was translated into several foreign languages. When Rohling tried to make a rebuttal, Bloch offered to pay him three thousand gulden if he could correctly translate a single page from the Talmud, a challenge Rohling declined to accept.
26
Some months later Rohling published the allegation that "the Jew was required by his religion to exploit non-Jews in every possible way, and to destroy them physically and morally, to corrupt their lives, honor, and property openly and with force, secretly and treacherously . . . in order to bring about the world domination of his people."
27
Later, at a ritual murder trial, Rohling maintained that the shedding of the blood of a non-Jewish virgin was an "extraordinarily holy affair."
28
Bloch counterattacked by publicly calling Rohling an "ignorant plagiarist," a charge that Rohling could not ignore without admitting guilt. Rohling filed a lawsuit against Bloch; preparations for the trial took a year, but at the last moment Rohling withdrew his charge. His action was considered an admission of guilt and he was dismissed from his profes-

 

Page 51

sorship. But if this incident terminated Rohling's career, it did not mark the end of the popularity of
The Talmud Jew
, or the end of charges of Jewish ritual murder within Austrian and German Catholicism. However, the allegation was at least made less frequently than before Bloch's time.

29

On the other hand, the RohlingBloch confrontation marked only the beginning of Bloch's career as a highly respected and influential Jewish leader, a career that was to last until his death in 1923. In 1883 Bloch was elected to the Reichsrat and for a time was the only one of twelve Jewish deputies to defend specifically Jewish issues.
30
In January 1884 he founded
Dr. Bloch's Oesterreichische Wochenschrift
. The newspaper's subtitle,
Zentralorgan für die gesamten Interessen des Judentums
(
Central Organ for the Collective Interests of Jewry
) revealed Bloch's aversion to dissension within the Jewish community and his desire to serve as a mediator of conflict and as a creator of consensus. For thirty-seven years, until just two years before his death, Bloch remained the paper's editor. It became an indispensable source for the history of Viennese Jewry during its golden age. Far from evading the "Jewish question" as the liberal press usually did, the
Wochenschrift
was a world forum for its discussion and an organ for the refutation of hostile criticism of Jewry.
31
Josef Bloch favored a stronger expression of Jewish identity and tried to educate his readers about the history and ethics of Judaism. On the other hand, he was not a Jewish nationalist or Zionist. His
Wochenschrift
encouraged Jews to develop their own spiritual and political sphere in Austria and was opposed to complete assimilation. He wanted the Jews to have their own political party and not simply help other nationalistic parties. Rare among Germanspeaking Austrians of his day, he actually called himself as well as his newspaper "Austrian" (rather than German) and sought to make the Jews the pillars of the state. He therefore could not support Zionism, regarding it as divisive. Moderate as Bloch's Jewish selfconsciousness was, it still aroused resentment among Vienna's numerous politically liberal and pro-German Jews. The Jewish upper classes in Vienna regarded Judaism almost exclusively as a religion.
32
Bloch was not simply an inspiring writer, but also a practical man of action. He was the first Austrian Jew to advance a coherent defensive strategy based on a Jewish political organization. Disgusted with the passivity of the Viennese Kultusgemeinde in the face of the virulent antiSemitism of the 1880s, Bloch founded the Österreichisch-Israelitische Union (Austrian-Israelite Union) in 1886. Its first task was to raise Jewish pride and selfconsciousness. Second, it was committed to expose anti-Semitic errors and prejudices and to fight the passage of any discriminatory religious or racial laws. As the first Jewish self-

 

Page 52

defense organization in Central Europe, it preceded by seven years the similar Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) in Germany.

33

Although Bloch himself was not an assimilationist, the Austrian-Israelite Union appealed mainly to young middleclass Jews who were so inclined; members therefore included mostly liberal professors, businessmen, politicians, and lawyers, all people who were particularly concerned about the de facto deterioration of Jewish rights and the rapid growth of antiSemitism. By sponsoring lectures on Jewish history and scholarship and keeping the Jewish community informed about the activities of the Austrian Parliament that might affect them, the union followed a middle road between assimilation and Jewish nationalism.
34
In March 1895 the union decided to establish a Rechtsschutz Comité (Legal Defense Committee) to cope with the increasing number of appeals for assistance. In December 1897 the committee was transformed into the Rechtsschutz und Abwehr-Büro (Legal Aid and Defense Bureau), which was staffed by a small but efficient office force. Unfortunately, the bureau proved to be less than a spectacular success. Although it was effective on minor issues, like having anti-Semitic government clerks reprimanded, in more serious cases, such as economic boycotts, satisfactory results were obtained only about 15 percent of the time.
35
Within a few years after founding the union, its leaders had also become the leaders of the Kultusgemeinde. By 1900 the union, including Bloch himself, had lost some of its original militancy, but by then the Jewish establishment was much less timid about expressing Jewish pride than it had been earlier.
36
The union was not the only Austrian organization to fight in the defense of Jewish rights. In 1891 a predominantly Christian Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Society to Combat AntiSemitism) was founded by Baron Arthur Gundacher von Suttner, his wife Berta, and Count Hoyos. Other famous Viennese Christians such as the composer Johann Strauss and the surgeon Theodor Billroth (who by now had completely reversed his earlier view of Jews) were also founding members. Modeled after a German society of the same name established four months before in Berlin, it sought to fight antiSemitism by stressing the common ideals of Christianity and Judaism and by exposing the falsehoods of anti-Semitic publications, rather than taking direct political action. Despite its promising beginnings, however, the organization met with little successits membership rose to only 4, 520 in 1895in large part because the Suttners were far more involved in the pacifist movement (for which Berta was to win a Nobel Prize for Peace) than fighting antiSemitism.

 

Page 53

Although liberal professors as well as members of the nobility were well represented, prominent clergymen were conspicuous only by their absence. Equally damaging was the reluctance of many well-known Jews to join because of their continuing desire not to give antiSemitism any publicity by confronting it.

37

Another prominent Christian defender of Jews from the 1890s until his death in 1934 was the writer, Hermann Bahr. His early book,
Der Antisemitismus: Ein internationales Interview
(
AntiSemitism: An International Interview
), published in 1894, contained the answers of thirtyeight of Europe's leading intellectuals to Bahr's questionnaire asking them to explain their views about antiSemitism. Bahr drew the doubtful conclusion from their responses that antiSemitism was an end in itself. But he was on much firmer ground in also pointing out that rational arguments made little impact on people whose views rested on illogical feelings. AntiSemitism, Bahr maintained, was the "morphine of little people"; critics of Jews were usually people who had the same faults as the Jews they condemned. Bahr never became an uncritical philo-Semite despite his marriage to a Jew, Rosalie Jokl. He did not hesitate to criticize individual Jews himself and insisted only that Jews not be judged as a group.
38
Bahr's attitude toward Jews was not always so enlightened. He had been something of an antiSemite himself in his early years as a student at the University of Vienna. In 1881 he had joined an anti-Semitic fraternity called Albia and at the same time was a member of Georg von Schönerer's German National Party. But in 1882 his view started to change when his fraternity expelled several of his Jewish friends including Theodor Herzl, the future leader of political Zionism. Another friend, Viktor Adler, was ejected from Schönerer's party at about the same time. Bahr also noticed that his Jewish uncle in no way fit Schönerer's stereotype of Jews. In 1884 Bahr broke with Schönerer. Then, a sojourn in Berlin between 1889 and 1891 convinced him that the best of Berlin's traditional culture was being preserved almost exclusively by Jews.
39
The Rise of Jewish Nationalism and Zionism in Austria
Probably the best known reaction to late nineteenth-century antiSemitism was the birth of modern secular Zionism. Often mistakenly attributed to the Viennese journalist and friend of Hermann Bahr, Theodor Herzl, the movement actually began among Galician Jews already in the 1870s as a result of the impoverishment of Jewish small-time traders and merchants. It was not simply a reaction to antiSemitism but was also an integral part of the rise of

 

Page 54

nationalism in general that was occurring all over Europe, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. Herzl was not even the first Jew in modern times from the Germanspeaking part of Austria to conceive of the idea of a Jewish state in the Holy Land.

40

That distinction belongs instead to a little-known Galician-born journalist and long-time resident of Vienna, Nathan Birnbaum. In 1882 he was one of the founders of the first Jewish nationalist fraternity in the world called the Akademischer Verein Kadimah at the University of Vienna. Although Jewish nationalism at this early date was confined almost exclusively to Eastern European Jews, it was mostly assimilated Westjuden who joined Kadimah. Even though it attacked assimilationism, Kadimah soon adopted many of the customs of the German-nationalist Burschenschaften including ritualized beer drinking and, in 1890, dueling. Previously Jews had considered dueling "un-Jewish," but newer members refused to tolerate taunts that they were inherent cowards. By 1910, 35 percent of the Jewish students at the University of Vienna including half of the Jewish medical students considered themselves Jewish nationalists and by 1914 there were close to twenty-five Jewish nationalist or Zionist organizations at the University of Vienna. By this time some of the early Kadimah members had already become leaders in the world Zionist movement and Kadimah-inspired Jewish fraternities had been founded in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and America.
41
In 1885 Birnbaum established a journal called
Selbst-Emancipation
(
Self-Emancipation
) in which he introduced the word
Zio
nism. In 1892 he first used the term Zionism publicly at a discussion meeting in Vienna. The following year he expounded his Zionist views in a pamphlet with the explicit title,
Die nationale Wiedergeburt des jüdischen Volkes in seinem Lande als Mittel zur Lösung der Judenfrage (The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in Their Land as a Means to the Solution to the Jewish Question)
. In the same year Birnbaum formed an organization in Vienna called Zion: Verband der österreichischen Vereine für die Kolonisation Palastinas und Syriens (Zion: Union of Austrian Societies for the Colonization of Palestine and Syria). Birnbaum, however, did not see a mass Jewish migration to Palestine as the sole answer to the "Jewish question." Rather it would be complemented with cultural autonomy for Jews in countries where they already resided. Birnbaum and his ideas found little favor among Viennese Jews, so in 1907 he moved to Galicia where his ideas had always enjoyed a more receptive audience.
42
Although Nathan Birnbaum can be considered the "father of Austrian Zionism," his impulsiveness, inconsistency, and self-criticism prevented him from enjoying major success. Consequently, it was Theodor Herzl who made Zion-
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