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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (12 page)

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Page 13
2
The Historical Roots
Austrian Jews from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century

Jews in the late Middle Ages were attracted to Austria by the opportunities to earn a living denied them in many European countries. In other parts of Germany they were subjected to arbitrary rules of lesser clergymen and city councils, as well as those of the Holy Roman emperor. But in Austria the dukes, like some rulers in other parts of Europe at that time, realized the economic value of Jews and jealously guarded their authority over them much to the displeasure of their gentile subjects. Jews, however, in thirteenth-century Austria were only allowed to engage in money and credit transactions. In 1397 the duke of Austria invited Jews to immigrate to his land from other parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Jews were also lured to Austria by the promise of self-government.

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Consequently, Jews settled in several Austrian localities from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, soon after or in some cases actually before the founding of the cities of which they became a part. Viennese Jews were first mentioned in a document in 966. Jews began settling in Carinthia in the tenth or eleventh century, well before the founding of Klagenfurt, the capital city, sometime between 1161 and 1181. In neighboring Styria, Jews could be found in Judenburg by 1103 at the latest, in Völkermarkt sometime between 1105 and 1126, and in Judendorf bei Graz in 1147. The history of the Jews of the Styrian capital, Graz, began in 1166, only thirty years after the city itself was founded.
Except for Vienna, Jewish communities in Lower Austria were not founded until the thirteenth century. For example, in Wiener Neustadt, which lies only a few miles south of the Austrian capital, Jews first settled in the early thirteenth century, a few years after the founding of the city in 1194. Meanwhile, the Jewish community in Vienna had grown to be the largest in Germanspeaking Europe; it substantially contributed to the city's improving economy

 

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by engaging in business on a grand scale with the nobility and clergy and on a much smaller scale with ordinary townspeople and peasants.

2
On the other hand, the usurious moneylending of some Viennese Jews, even though it was one of the few occupations legally open to Jews, and even though it was indispensable to maintaining the luxurious lifestyle of Austrian dukes, aroused both the envy and distaste of Christians.

The tolerance of the Roman Catholic church toward the collection of interest on loans by Jews served a dual purpose: the church did not have to abandon its condemnation of usury while it could permit its existence in practice; second, usury gave the Jews a new reason for being damned. Christians were already ill-disposed toward Jews because the Catholic church had diabolized them not only for their rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, but also because the church held them collectively and hereditarily responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus or, in other words, the murder of God. The Jews were thus doubly accursed for being exploiters and deicides. The religious and economic arguments reinforced each other and the picture of the Jew as a usurer became permanently fixed in the popular mind.
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As early as the First Crusade, at the end of the eleventh century, Jews had also been widely viewed as the children of the Devil and agents employed by Satan to combat Christianity. By the twelfth century they were being accused by the lower clergy of murdering Christian children, desecrating the consecrated wafer (so that they could murder the body of Jesus over and over), and poisoning wells.
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Although such allegations were commonplace in the late Middle Ages, they usually resulted in overt persecution of Jews only during times of severe economic or social crisis. Such was the case in 1338 when poor harvests in Lower Austria drove many Austrian peasants to Jewish moneylenders who were then accused of poisoning wells and sacrilege against consecrated wafers. Far worse was in store for the Jews as a result of the black plague, which ravaged Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. Jews were accused of starting the epidemic by poisoning wells in order to stamp out Christianity. Thousands of them were murdered throughout Europe even though Pope Clement VI declared their innocence. In Mühldorf, in the archbishopric of Salzburg, fourteen hundred Jews of all ages and both sexes were burned to death in 1348. The Jews of Upper Austria were far more fortunate. Duke Albrecht, one of those princes who realized the economic value of the Jews, managed to protect the majority of them in his duchy the following year.
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Not all Austrian rulers were so enlightened, or at least so rational, as Duke Albrecht, however. In the early fifteenth century, the Habsburg dynasty, no

 

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longer believing that it needed Jews, took away their means of earning a living. In 1420, new charges of desecration and aiding the Bohemian heretic, Jan Hus, and supplying his followers with arms were used as pretexts by Archduke Albrecht V to destroy the Jewish community of Vienna, which numbered between 1,400 and 1,600. In reality, indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders resulting from the Hussite wars, along with increased religious fanaticism, were the chief motivations behind the archduke's actions. Poorer Jews were set adrift in the Danube. Many Jews who were imprisoned in the synagogue committed suicide. The remaining 214 men and women who refused baptism were burned alive outside the city's walls on 12 March 1421. Jewish property was expropriated and Jewish children were forcibly baptized. The events of 142021 earned Vienna the title of "the City of Blood" in the memory of Jews.

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The Jews were officially banned from Vienna "forever" in 1431. The Renaissance emperor Maximilian, accusing them of sacrilege, ritual murder, and forgery, expelled them from Wiener Neustadt and Neukirchen in 1496. In 1498 the archbishop of Salzburg, responding to popular demand, also drove them out of the city, again "forever." Such expulsions, of course, were scarcely unique to Austria. Jews had been forced out of England in 1291, out of France beginning in 1394, and out of Spain in 1492.
Nevertheless, Jews were never entirely absent from Austria for long. Jewish physicians and merchants could almost always be found in Vienna, at least on a transient basis. During the sixteenth century, individual Jews were once again allowed to settle in Vienna by rulers who needed their services. By the end of the century a new Jewish community had been established. The Jews of this "second ghetto," which was officially founded in 1625, were mostly merchants, in contrast to the moneylenders of the first ghetto. The new Jewish merchants were usually not wealthy; however, they were important because they managed to establish new centers of trade after the old ones had been destroyed by the discovery of America, the Turkish conquest of Hungary in 1526, and the Thirty Years' War. They were also exclusively responsible for providing the Habsburgs and their armies with many of the necessities of warfare. By the mid-seventeenth century about five hundred families were living next to one of the branches of the Danube River in a district called Leopoldstadt, named after the reigning Austrian emperor Leopold I.
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The second Viennese ghetto turned out to be far more short-lived than the first one. Prosperity was elusive in seventeenth-century Vienna, a city that was never out of the shadow of the Turkish armies only a few miles to the east. The end of the wars against the Protestants in 1648 left the Austrian emperor with no more apparent need for Jewish money. The logic of the Catholic Counter-

 

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Reformation also made it likely that it would be turned against all nonbelievers including Jews. Moreover, the Counter-Reformation and the wars of religion left Austria comparatively untouched by destruction, but as a result the disgust for religious bigotry and violence that appeared in some parts of Europe was never created here.

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Such bigotry became readily apparent in 1670 when Emperor Leopold I expelled all of the three to four thousand Jews of Vienna who refused baptism. The municipal government of Vienna accused the Jews of being "blasphemers, murderers of God's son, hateful to all Christians, and cursed by God."
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The chief instigator of the expulsion, however, was Bishop Kollonitsch of Wiener Neustadt. But Leopold's court preacher, Abraham a Sancta Clara, was no less hostile toward Jews calling them "scum of the godless and the faithless" and blaming them for a recent plague. Leopold's Spanish wife, who was well known for her anti-Jewish feelings, interpreted a recent miscarriage and a fire in the imperial palace as omens that she should expel the Jews to avoid further misfortunes. Finally, the Christian merchants of Vienna had long been eager to rid themselves of their Jewish competitors.
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Although some of the Jews who had been expelled from Vienna moved as far away as Brandenburg, where they were welcomed by the tolerant and farsighted Frederick William, the Great Elector, others moved only as far as the Bohemian crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. By 1693, Emperor Leopold, who was already feeling the financial loss of the absent Jews, allowed a small number of them to return, although they were required to make large initial payments for the privilege of settling in Vienna. The reestablishment of even a small number of Jewish families was enough to provoke Christian burghers once more into petitioning Emperor Karl VI to expel the "accursed and depraved Jews."
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A hundred years later, in the middle of the eighteenth century, a small Jewish community once more existed in Vienna. Many of the newcomers were Sephardic Jews, who could trace their ancestry back to Spain and Portugal prior to the expulsion of 1492 and who came to Austria by way of Constantinople, Amsterdam, and various cities in Italy. Although often wealthy, they lacked the political status of the second ghetto; they stood outside the law and were completely dependent on the favor of the monarch. Empress Maria Theresa, who reigned from 1740 to 1780, virtually forced commerce on them by limiting their employment to money changing, general financial operations, and jewel trading; a new law of 1764 also allowed them to trade in domestic (but not foreign) manufactured goods.
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Maria Theresa was by no means pleased by even this very limited tolera-

 

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tion of Jews. Although enlightened and reforming in many respects, as seen, for example, in her abolition of torture and the founding of schools of higher learning, she was a religious bigot when it came to people of the Mosaic faith. She insisted that Jews keep out of sight when a Catholic procession was passing by as well as on Sunday mornings and holidays. She refused to speak directly with them herself and said that "she knew of no worse plague for the State," a phrase Nazis were fond of quoting two hundred years later.

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Her outspoken aim was to rid Vienna of them once again; the most she was able to accomplish, however, was the expulsion of the Jews of Prague, on the suspicion they had aided Frederick the Great in his conquest of Silesia. The expulsion lasted for only a year, but it was enough to earn the empress the distinction of being the last European ruler (before Hitler) to expel Jews.
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As late as 1776 the Jews of Vienna remained a tiny community although they were considerably more numerous in other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. They numbered a scant 317 in Lower Austria, which at that time (and until shortly after the First World War) included Vienna. A mere 37 lived in the Tyrol; in other Alpine crownlands of the monarchy they were not officially allowed to reside at all until 1848. On the other hand, Bohemia and Moravia, from which large numbers of Jews would come to Vienna in the mid-nineteenth century, had a total of about 55,000. The recently annexed crownland of Galicia, which constituted the southern part of Poland before the first partition in 1772, had by far the largest Jewish population in the empire in 1776, amounting to nearly 150,000. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it became an important source of Jewish immigrants to Vienna.
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Reform and Reaction: Austrian Jews from Joseph II to 1848
The accession to the throne of Emperor Joseph II in 1780 marked the beginning of a new era for Austrian Jews. Joseph attributed their real and alleged shortcomings to harsh oppression and economic necessity. As coregent with Maria Theresa after 1765, he had tried unsuccessfully to get his mother to grant religious toleration to Jews in the so-called hereditary lands near Vienna. But it was not until after her death that he was able to issue a decree (in May 1781) that improved the education of Jews in Bohemia in order to make them more useful to the state. In the same year he abolished the wearing of the yellow badge of identification. Then on 2 January 1782 he enacted his famous Patent of Toleration, which applied to the Jews of the whole empire, freeing them from their ghettos. Jewish children were now required to attend German-
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