From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (48 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 205
PART IV
AUSTRIA'S JEWS AND THE ANTI-SEMITIC THREAT
Oddly enough, scholars have devoted far more attention to antiSemitism than they have to the victims of that prejudice. This is particularly true of the Jews of Austria and most especially for the interwar years. Judging from their propaganda, even Austrian antiSemites knew little about the people they were so quick to condemn.
A single, monolithic Jewish community of Austria existed only in the fervid imagination of antiSemites. In reality, there was not one Jewish community but several. There were, to begin with, wellassimilated or at least wellacculturated Jews whose ancestors, as we have seen, generally came from the Bohemian crownlands or from Hungary. They almost always adhered to the "Reform" type of Judaism if they were still observant at all. They tended to be upper-middle-class businessmen or professional people and were deeply devoted Austrian patriots. In contrast to these "Westjuden" were the more recent immigrants to Vienna and the smaller Jewish communities of Austria who had usually come from Galicia or Bukovina. Consisting largely of peddlers, very small businessmen, or industrial workers, they too soon spoke fluent German. Vienna, in fact, had no Yiddish or Hebrew newspapers in the interwar period. Nevertheless, these "Ostjuden" were much less well assimilated than the Westjuden, at least for a generation or two. Younger immigrants from the East tended to be either Zionists or Socialists whereas the older generation often still clung to the Orthodox faith and, even more than the Zionists, shunned assimilation.
Only when these basic divisions are understood can the reader appreciate how bitterly divided was the Jewish community of Austria and why it was utterly incapable of presenting antiSemites with a united front. Their religious, political, and economic differences colored how they interpreted events

 

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not only in Austria but in neighboring Germany as well. Only after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933 could Austrian Jews finally agree on something: the need to support the federal government of chancellors Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg.

 

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14
The Jews in Austrian Society

A study of Austrian antiSemitism would hardly be complete without a discussion of the objects of so much passionate hatred and propaganda by so many people and organizations. Anti-Semitic propaganda was often effective precisely because it seemed to correspond with known facts. As two American specialists on the subject have put it: "No propagandist worth his mettle will prefer an untruth to a truth, if the truth will do the job."

1
It is highly unlikely that antiSemites would have won any converts if their claims had borne no relationship to reality. No intelligent person in interwar Austria could deny that there were some very wealthy Jews and many Jewish bankers in the country, that Jews were overrepresented in certain professions, and that they played an important role in Vienna's newspaper press and various fields of entertainment. What was important about anti-Semitic propaganda, however, was not only what it said, but what it did
not
say.

Anti-Semitic Estimates of "Ethnic" Jews in Austria
Anti-Semitic propaganda was perhaps weakest on the fundamental issue of determining how many "ethnic" Jews there were in Vienna and the whole of Austria between the world wars. As Mark Twain once said, there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." AntiSemites were fond of citing statistics, some of them real, some of them out of date, and almost all of them highly tendentious. We have already noted this penchant with regard to estimates made of Eastern European Jewish refugees and the number of people expected to attend the Zionist Congress in 1925.
Although the census of 1923 revealed that there were just over 201,000 registered Jews in Vienna and about another 19,000 in the federal states, no one knew how many people there were of Jewish origins in Austria (or for that

 

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matter in Germany). As noted earlier, the Nazis themselves discovered after the Anschluss that there were only 34,500 Viennese who met the Nuremberg definition of a full-blooded Jew who had not already been counted as such in the most recent Austrian census.

2
(The Nuremberg Laws, it will be recalled, defined a full-blooded Jew as someone with at least three Jewish grandparents or someone who practiced Judaism and had two Jewish grandparents.) Members of the Greater German People's Partywho, incidentally, could not be party members if there was the slightest doubt about their racial background or if they were married to Jewsmade the most extravagant estimates. Probably using a much broader definition than that used later by the Nazis, they claimed in 1921 that there were 730,000 "racial" Jews in the whole country and 583,000 in Vienna alone, or nearly one-third of the city's entire population!
3
The Nazis'
Deutsche ArbeiterPresse
was actually considerably more modest in its estimate of 300,000 which it made in 1925.
4
The
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung
, by 1932 an unofficial organ of the Austrian Nazi Party, spoke of an "incredible increase of Jews in Vienna." By counting the "Jewish-sounding names" in the phone book, it estimated that there were 375,000 "racial" Jews in the Austrian capital.
5

Walter Pötsch, in an anti-Semitic tract published in 1932, estimated that there were at least 750,000 Jews in Vienna, counting converts to Christianity, Jews without any religion, and "part Jews." At the rate Jews were multiplying they would make up half the city's population by 1935! He estimated that there must have been at least 165,000 racial Jews who had not been counted in the census of 1923.
6
When not frightening Austrian gentiles about the supposed rapid increase of Jews in their country, antiSemites were making dire predictions about Jewish population growth in other countries. In the early 1930s several Nazi newspapers and public speakers were fond of quoting from a book by E. van Winghene and A. Tjorn entitled
Arische Rasse, christliche Kultur und das Judenproblem
(
Aryan Race, Christian Culture and the Jewish Problem
) published in Erfurt in 1931 by the notoriously racist U. Bodung Verlag. These authors quoted a so-called
Illustrierter jüdischer Kalendar
(
Illustrated Jewish Calendar
) for the year 1924, which claimed that there were 18 million Jews in the world, a figure that the publication said would increase to 30 million by 1950, making the Jews the most rapidly growing people in the world. This "terrifying" increase was caused, Winghene and Tjorn claimed, by a life expectancy for Jews that was 40 percent higher than for Aryans, the result of greater Jewish wealth and therefore better health care. According to the same obscure
Jewish Calendar
there were really 280,000 religious Jews in Vienna

 

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instead of the official figure of 201,000. Winghene and Tjorn, however, said they had ''secret" information that there were actually 420,000 religious Jews in Vienna and 450,000 "racial" Jews. Extrapolating from these discrepancies with official census figures, they estimated that there must really be 27 million observant Jews in the world and 38 million racial Jews altogether.

7
By contrast, the Nazis in an internal memorandum written in January 1933 admitted that at least as far as the Jews of Germany was concerned their future was doubtful without constant immigration from the East because their birthrate was far lower than for Catholics or Protestants.
8

The Declining Jewish Population in Austria
Far from increasing at a "frightening" pace, the Jewish population of Vienna and the rest of Austria steadily and rapidly declined during the entire First Republic. The population of Vienna, where over 90 percent of Austria's Jewish population lived after the fall of the monarchy, probably reached its peak in 1915 or 1917 when during the First World War the city was filled with Jewish refugees. The highest number ever recorded in an official census, however, occurred in 1923 when 201,513 Jews were counted, or 10.8 percent of Vienna's shrunken population of 1,868,000. Another 18,695 Jews lived in the other eight federal states, thus giving Jews 3.37 percent of the country's total population, compared with a Nazi claim of 4.6 percent.
9
After that the Jewish population in the Austrian capital declined to 176,034 in 1934 and to just under 170,000 on the eve of the German annexation. Except for Lower Austria, where there was a slight increase in the Jewish population, the number of Jews declined in the Austrian provinces even more rapidly than in the capital. By 1938 there was a total of only 185,000 practicing Jews in the entire country, a remarkable decline of 17 percent in just fifteen years.
10
Several reasons account for this diminution. Even during the period 1870 to 1910, when Vienna's Jewish population was increasing at its most rapid rate, the growth came almost exclusively from immigration, not births. After 1918 Vienna and the rest of Austria was cut off from its previous reservoir of potential immigrants in the Bohemian crownlands and especially Galicia, where the vast majority of the Jewish population of the Austrian empire had lived.
Vienna's Jewish birthrate was always low. In 1896 there had been 999 more births than deaths; after that the ratio steadily changed until after 1908 there were always more deaths than births. By 1918 2,424 more Viennese Jews died than were born, although this was a situation caused in part by deaths result-

 

Page 210

ing from the world influenza epidemic of 191819. After the war the situation momentarily improved; in 1921 there were only 406 more deaths than births. However, between 1920 and 1930 the number of births declined by well over 50 percent, from 2,744 to 1,214. By 1937 only 720 Jews were born compared with 2,824 who died, a shortfall of 2,102. According to the census of 1934 only 1.1 percent of all babies born in Austria were Jewish even though Jews made up 2.8 percent of the country's total population.

11

The birthrate for Jews in Vienna was probably the lowest for Jews anywhere in the world. Already in 1925 there were only 8.5 live Jewish births in Vienna per one thousand people, about half of what was needed to maintain a stable population. By comparison, the Jewish birthrate in Berlin was 11.9; in New York it was 18.0; in Warsaw, 14.4. The Jewish birthrate in Rumania was 19.3 and 23.4 in Czechoslovakia.
12
Nowhere were there the 32 births per 1,000 Jews mentioned by Winghene and Tjorn, and least of all in Vienna where over half of all Jewish families had only one child and less than a quarter had two or more. The only favorable statistics for Viennese Jews were the decline in the number of people leaving their ancestral faith from 1,236 in 1923 to just 472 in 1935 and the rise in the number of people converting to Judaism or returning to it from 290 in 1932 to 369 just three years later. Altogether, about 17,000 Jews left the fold between 1919 and 1937 whereas 7,000 people (three-fourths of them women) converted to Judaism. Meanwhile, although the gentile population was not exactly booming in the First Republic, a surplus of births over deaths was recorded nearly every year.
13
Considering the declining Jewish birthrate in Vienna it is not surprising that the number of marriages also nosedived from 2,95 5 in 1920 to 1,244 in 1930.
14
Jews tended to marry much later than gentilesusually between the ages of 30 and 40 compared with ages between 20 and 30 for Christianswhich obviously also contributed to the low Jewish birthrate; moreover, far more Jews than gentiles remained single. Even more alarming for Jews was the fact that by 1929, 28 percent of all Jewish marriages were with Christians. As before the war, the Jewish partner converted to Christianity in the great majority of these marriages. The number of mixed marriages increased by perhaps as much as 100 percent between 1914 and 1930.
15
Finally, a minor factor in the declining Jewish population of Vienna was the relatively high suicide rate after the First World War, probably reflecting deteriorating economic and psychological circumstances. Whereas only 9.06 percent of all suicides in Vienna during the years 190713 were committed by Jews, or just slightly over their percentage of the population, this

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