From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (22 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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Page 65
The Flight of the Galician Jews

Anti-Semitic charges against Jewish soldiers were mild and infrequent compared with those made against Jewish refugees from Galicia and Bukovina. These refugees represented a second wave of Ostjuden who had migrated to the Austrian capital. As noted in Chapter 2, between 1867 and 1910 some 30,000 Galician Jews had moved to Vienna. This first "wave" of Jewish immigrants had aroused a great deal of anti-Semitic resentment even though their numbers were insignificant compared with the 467,000 immigrants who came from Bohemia and Moravia. And whereas the generally Yiddish-speaking Galician immigrants quickly learned the closely related German language, Slavic immigrants from the Bohemian crownlands often preferred to establish their own private Czech-language schools.

20

Even in the most prosperous prewar years, Galician immigrants to Vienna had been overwhelmingly poor. Although Galician Jews were legally equal to the Jews of western Austria, economically they were far more like the Jews of Russia. In Galicia, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Jews handled the money economy between landowners and peasants; the latter were usually gentiles and saw the Jews as economic exploiters. This entire traditional social order, however, began to change with the coming of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. The emergence of Polish and Ukrainian nationalism also helped lead to economic competition between Jews and gentiles. All of these factors caused the decline of Galician villages and the rise of unemployment among Galician Jews, sometimes to levels above 50 percent. Therefore, young people, both gentiles and Jews, had to seek employment in the cities. Galician Jews were attracted to Vienna not only by economic opportunities but also by the prospects of greater social equality and frequently by the presence of friends and relatives who had emigrated earlier.
21
Although second generation Ostjuden often transformed themselves into Westjuden by entering the professions, the older generation and the new immigrants remained for a long time a culturally and religiously distinct entity. While they resided in Galicia, Jews had lived in well-established communities, geographically and culturally isolated from the West and so culturally and economically superior to the surrounding Polish and Ukrainian population that they had no temptation to assimilate, at least in rural areas. When they moved to Vienna, they often retained the Orthodox faith and occasionally the dress, manners, and lifestyle that were typical of Ostjuden all over Eastern Europe. Many of these Eastern Jews considered themselves to be a distinct nationality with their own rich and unique literature and
Volksgeist
and were

 

Page 66
Galician Orthodox Jews on the Karmeliterplatz in the Leopoldstadt
about 1915. Franz Hubmann,
The Habsburg Empire
. In
Mein Kampf Hitler said of this section of Vienna, "Particularly the Inner City and
the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which
even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans."

therefore often attracted to Zionism. They were frequently startled, when first arriving in Vienna, to discover that it was practically impossible to tell the difference between most of the Jews and gentiles whom they encountered on the street.

22

There were then, on the eve of the First World War, two Jewish communities in Vienna. The majority consisted of westernized, very pro-Austrian, politically liberal Jews who adhered to "reform" Judaism or who were frequently even nonobservant; most had been born in Vienna itself or else in Bohemia or Moravia. The minority, about 25 percent, consisted of recent immigrants from Galicia, many of whom retained their Orthodox faith. The westernized Jews usually regarded their eastern coreligionists with suspicion if not outright contempt and rarely intermarried with them. They saw the Ostjuden as loud, coarse, dirty, immoral, and culturally backward. As in Germany they were seen as apparitions from an earlier period of Jewish history the assimilated Jews wanted to forget. Well-established Viennese Jews even held

 

Page 67

them responsible for arousing antiSemitism. The hostile reception Galician Jews encountered in Vienna was not unlike that which Russian Jews received in the eastern cities of the United States after 1905 or that which Japanese immigrants experienced in California at about the same time.

23

The world war vastly accelerated the migration of Jews from Galicia and Bukovina to Vienna, increasing in a matter of months the city's Jewish population by as much as 125,000,
24
or almost 75 percent. This veritable population explosion, consisting mainly of penniless peddlers, artisans, or cattle dealers, was produced mostly by the Russian invasion of northeastern Austria at the outset of the war; a few thousand Galician Jews were also expelled from France and Belgium as enemy aliens and made their way to Vienna.
25
Facilitated by the deployment of much of the AustroHungarian army on the Serbian front when the war broke out, the Russian conquest momentarily reached to within twelve miles of Cracow, in extreme western Galicia, by 29 November 1914. By January nearly all of Bukovina was also under tsarist control. The Central Powers managed to drive the Russians out of most of the occupied territories between May and September of 1915, only to see the majority of the same area fall again to the Russians during the "Brusilov" offensive of June 1916. Not until 1917 were Galicia and Bukovina liberated once and for all.
26
When the Russians approached, AustroHungarian military authorities ordered the evacuation of civilians from the battle zones; Jewish inhabitants, well aware of the anti-Semitic policies of the Russian government in recent decades, needed little prodding to leave. By the fall of 1915 the army reported that 340,000 refugees had fled to the West, including some who had been expelled by the Russian army command for having allegedly caused the Russian defeat. Although the AustroHungarian military authorities attempted to direct the refugees to several different unoccupied territories, the Jews were free to go where they wished; some went to Bohemia and to Linz in Upper Austria, but the majority chose Vienna with its large and well-organized Jewish community.
27
The first refugees who reached Vienna before the end of August 1914 were met with considerable sympathy, especially by their coreligionists, or with nothing worse than indifference. Even so rabid an anti-Semitic newspaper as the
Ostdeutsche Rundschau
at first ignored the refugees. It contradicted the initial enthusiasm for the war to mention refugees at a time when there were supposed to be victories in the East. Even police reports did not indicate the presence of strong anti-Semitic feelings during the first months of the war. In any case, the refugees were not expected to remain in the capital for long, and until at least 1915, food shortages were not too serious in the Austrian capital.
28

 

Page 68

The reaction of the "native" Jewish population of Vienna to the arrival of the Jewish refugees from the East was complicated. The upper class was shocked by the poverty and backwardness of these Ostjuden. The Austrian-Israelite Union's
Monatschrift
for NovemberDecember 1914 described the unfortunate living conditions in the barracks where most of the refugees were housed. They were at least equipped with electricity, kitchens, and washrooms, all of which would have been suitable for soldiers, but which were very inadequate for whole families. The
Monatschrift
appealed to its readers to supply the refugees with jobs, clothes, and shoes, which were desperately needed with winter approaching.

29
Jewish officials praised the work done by the government to establish children's homes, schools, kitchens, and libraries for the refugees.
Dr. Bloch's Oesterreichische Wochenschrift
stated in March 1915 that the friendliness of the Christian Social mayor and administration of Vienna toward Jews would not be forgotten by them.
30

As time went on and tens of thousands of the refugees remained in Vienna far longer than anyone, including the refugees themselves, had anticipated, resentment against them began to grow for consuming the already short supplies of housing, food, and fuel. Upper-class Jews now began to see them as a threat to their goal of complete social acceptance by the Christian Viennese. Meanwhile, poorer Viennese Jews, fearing economic competition from the refugees, saw them as a danger to their existence.
31
In fairness to the Jews and gentiles of Vienna, it should be pointed out that their hostility to Jewish refugees was not unique. Many Berlin Jews reacted in the same way to the 70,000 Ostjuden who immigrated to the German capital between 1917 and 1920.
32
Hungarians and Czechs were even less friendly toward the refugees. As late as April 1918 there were still 41,365 Jewish refugees in Bohemia out of a total of slightly fewer than 65,000, and in neighboring Moravia there were 18,487 Jewish refugees among the 35,413 people who had fled their war-ravished homelands.
33
When Galicia was temporarily cleared of Russian troops in the summer of 1915, the Viennese municipal government considered interning Jewish refugees who refused to return to their homes, an idea that was repeatedly discussed after the war. In 1915, however, the minister of interior, Baron Haynold, was sympathetic to the refugees, calling them "victims of war," so no such drastic action was taken. But the city council still put pressure on remaining refugees to leave by removing their public assistance and offering free transportation back to Galicia. The number of Jewish refugees consequently declined from 125,000 to 77,000 by October 1915. For many of the remainder, however, a return to their native villages (
shtetl
) was a virtual impossibility because they

 

Page 69

had been rendered uninhabitable by the fighting. A new Russian offensive in 1916 sent another 200,000 refugees (both Jews and gentiles) fleeing to the West, 40,000 to 50,000 of whom reached Vienna and other parts of Lower Austria. The loss of most of Galicia, one of the prime breadbaskets of the Austrian half of the monarchy, also meant that grain and meat shortages became ever more acute in the Austrian metropolis. An offensive launched by the Central Powers in 1917 finally enabled most of the refugees to return to their homes. By April 1918 only 38,772 refugees without means remained in Vienna, of whom 34,233 were Jews. By the following March there were no more than 20,000 to 25,000 Jewish refugees left in Vienna.

34

Jewish Refugees, Wartime Shortages, and Profiteering, Real and Imagined
Although the number of Jewish refugees in Vienna was never as large as antiSemites believed, especially by 1918, the refugees and other Jews were blamed for every conceivable problem afflicting Austria at the end of the war and in the early postwar period. In reality, the refugees (both Jews and gentiles) at no time occupied more than 7,700 Viennese apartments. Although it is impossible to describe the living conditions within these apartments with any precision, we can get some idea from the districts of Leopoldstadt and neighboring Brigittenau, where nearly half of all of Vienna's Jews lived, and far more than half of the Galician Jews lived. An average of four to six people inhabited single rooms as late as 1919.
35
The real problem, however, was that even before the war there had been a severe housing shortage in the Austrian capital. In 1910, 1.24 Viennese lived in every room in the city, including kitchens, bathrooms, and front halls. During the war, the housing question was aggravated not only by the influx of refugees but also by the absence of residential construction. All this made the temptation to blame the Ostjuden for the hardships more and more irresistible. AntiSemites charged that the refugees were living in comfortable quarters or even in palaces while 19,000 honest Aryans had no place at all to live. The whole issue could be resolved overnight if only the unwanted guests were compelled to return to their homelands.
36
Worse than the charges of creating shortages of housing and food were the allegations that the Jewish refugees were war profiteers. Indeed, so numerous were the accusations that by the end of the war the words, "Ostjude," "Galician," ''profiteer," "hoarder," "speculator," and "usurer" had become practi-

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