History of the Jews in Austria

In the middle of the 15th century, following the establishment of the anti-Catholic movement of Jan Hus in Bohemia, the condition of Jews worsened as a result of unfounded accusations that the movement was associated with the Jewish community.

In 1420, the status of the Jewish community hit a low point when a Jewish man from Upper Austria was falsely accused and charged with the crime of desecration of the sacramental bread. This led Albert V to order the imprisonment of all of the Jews in Austria. 210 Jewish men, women, and children were forcibly taken from their homes and burnt alive in the public town square, while the remaining families were rounded up and deported from Austria, forced to leave all their belongings behind. In 1469, the deportation order was cancelled by Frederick III, who became known for his fairness and strong relationship by allowing Jews to live relatively free from scapegoating and hate crimes — he was even referred to at times as the "King of the Jews". He allowed Jews to return and settle in all the cities of Styria and Carinthia. Under his regime, Jews gained a short period of peace (between 1440 and 1493).

In 1496, Maximilian I ordered a decree which expelled all Jews from Styria.[6] In 1509, he passed the "Imperial Confiscation Mandate" which foresaw the destruction of all Jewish books, apart from one exception, the Bible.[7]

Maria Theresa of Austria

After the period of religious fanaticism towards the Jewish population of the region, a period of relative tolerance began which was less noticeable during the reign of Maria Theresa of Austria. It reached its peak during the reign of Franz Joseph I of Austria, who was very popular among the Jewish population.

Upon the partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, or simply "Galicia", became the largest, most populous, and northernmost province of the Habsburg Empire. As a result of annexation, many Jews were added to the Austrian Empire and the empress, Maria Theresa, quickly legislated different laws aimed at regulating their rights and canceled Jewish autonomy to take authority over the Jews.

Although the empress was known for her hatred of Jews, several Jews did work for her at her court. The empress made it mandatory that Jews would go to the general elementary schools, and in addition, permitted them to join universities. Jewish schools did not exist yet during that time.

After Maria Theresa's death in 1780, her son Joseph II succeeded her and started working on the integration of Jews into Austrian society. The emperor determined that they would be obligated to enlist in the army, and established governmental schools for Jews. The 1782 Edict of Tolerance canceled different limitations that had been placed upon Jews previously, such as the restriction to live only in predetermined locations and the limitation to certain professions. They were now allowed to establish factories, hire Christian servants and study at higher education institutions, but all this only on the condition that Jews would be obligated to attend school, that they would use German only in the official documents instead of Hebrew or Yiddish, that dorsal tax would be forbidden, that the trials held within the community would be condensed, and that those who would not get an education would not be able to marry before the age of 25. The emperor also declared that Jews would establish Jewish schools for their children, but they opposed that because he forbade them organizing within the community and establishing public institutions. In the aftermath of different resistances, also from the Jewish party, which opposed the many conditions held upon them, and also from the Christian party, which opposed many of the rights given to Jews, the decree was not fully implemented.

Upon his death in 1790, Joseph II was succeeded by his brother, Leopold II. After only two years of his reign, he died and was succeeded by his son Francis II, who continued working on the integration of Jews into the wider Austrian society, but he was more moderate than his uncle. In 1812, a Jewish Sunday school was opened in Vienna. During the same period of time, a number of limitations were placed on Jews, such as the obligation to study in Christian schools and to pray in German.

Franz Joseph I of Austria

Between 1848 and 1938, Jews in Austria enjoyed a period of prosperity beginning with the start of the reign of Franz Joseph I as the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and dissolved gradually after the death of the emperor to the annexation of Austria to Germany by the Nazis, a process that led to the start of the Holocaust in Austria.

Franz Joseph I granted Jews equal rights, saying "the civil rights and the country's policy is not contingent in the people's religion". The emperor was well liked by Jews, who, as a token of appreciation, wrote prayers and songs about him that were printed in Jewish prayer books. In 1849 the emperor canceled the prohibition against Jews organizing within the community, and in 1852 new regulations for the Jewish community were set. In 1867, Jews formally received full equal rights.

In 1869 the emperor visited Jerusalem and was greeted with great admiration by Jews there. The emperor established a fund aimed at financing the establishment of Jewish institutions and in addition, established the Talmudic school for rabbis in Budapest. During the 1890s several Jews were elected to the Austrian Reichsrat.

During the reign of Franz Joseph and after, Austria's Jewish population contributed greatly to Austrian culture despite their small percentage in the population. Contributions came from Jewish lawyers, journalists (among them Theodor Herzl), authors, playwrights, poets, doctors, bankers, businessmen, and artists. Vienna became a cultural Jewish center and became a center of education, culture and Zionism. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, studied at the University of Vienna and was the editor of the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse, a very influential newspaper at that time. Another Jew, Felix Salten, succeeded Herzl as the editor of the feuilleton.

Inside the 1887 opened Türkischer Tempel in Leopoldstadt (painting)

Other notable influential Jews contributing greatly to Austrian culture included composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and the authors Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum and the doctors Sigmund Freud, Viktor Frankl, Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler, the philosophers Martin Buber, Karl Popper, and many others.

The prosperity period also affected the sports field: the Jewish sports club Hakoah Vienna was established in 1909 and excelled in football, swimming, and athletics.

With Jewish prosperity and equality, several Jewish scholars converted to Christianity in a desire to assimilate into Austrian society. Among them were Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger.

During this period, Vienna elected an antisemitic mayor, Karl Lueger. The emperor, Franz Joseph, was opposed to the appointment, but after Lueger was elected three consecutive times, the emperor was compelled to accept his election according to the regulations. During the period of his authority, Lueger removed Jews from positions in the city administration and forbade them from working in the factories located in Vienna until his death in 1910.

The intertwining of Jews and the attitude of the emperor towards them could also be seen in the general state of the empire. From the middle of the 19th century there started to be many pressures from the different nationalities living in the multinational House of Habsburg empire: the national minorities (such as the Hungarians, Czechs and Croatians) began demanding more and more collective rights; among German speakers, many started feeling more connected to Germany, which was strengthening. Under these circumstances, the Jewish population was especially notable for their loyalty to the empire and their admiration of the emperor.

In about 1918, there were about 300,000 Jews in Austria scattered in 33 different settlements. Most of them (about 200,000) lived in Vienna.

Leopoldstädter Tempel, one of the many synagogues in the neighborhood of Leopoldstadt, Vienna

Austria during the First Republic (1919–34) was strongly influenced by Jews. Many of the leading heads of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and especially the leaders of the Austromarxism were assimilated Jews, for example Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Gustav Eckstein, Julius Deutsch and also the reformer of the school system in Vienna, Hugo Breitner. Due to the Social Democratic Party being the only party in Austria that accepted Jews as members and also in leading positions, several Jewish parties that were founded after 1918 in Vienna, where about 10% of the population was Jewish, had no chance of gaining bigger parts of the Jewish population. Districts with high Jewish population rates, such as Leopoldstadt, the only districts where Jews formed about half of the population, and the neighbouring districts Alsergrund and Brigittenau, where up to a third of the population was Jewish, had usually higher percentage rates of voters for the Social Democratic Party than classical "worker"-districts.[12]

Rosh Hashanah greeting card by Wiener Werkstätte, 1910

The First Republic of Austria denied citizenship to former Habsburg monarchy Jews during the interwar period.[13] Brain drain from Austria already began with the increase of antisemitism after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.[14] In University of Vienna, violent attacks by German National and National Socialist students against Jewish and socialist classmates increased since the 1920s, particularly at the Institute of Anatomy under Julius Tandler, or on the occasion of the abolishment of the anti-Semitic Gleispach student regulation 1930.[15] In 1921, there was a significant antisemitic mob parade in Vienna.[16] Antisemites began blaming Jews for the downfall of Austria-Hungary and the Central Powers during World War I, similarly to the German "stab-in-the-back" myth.[17]

In May 1923, Vienna hosted the First World Congress of Jewish Women in the presence of President Michael Hainisch, calling in particular for support for the relocation of Jewish refugees in Palestine.[18] Also the cultural contribution of Jews reached its peak. Many famous writers, film and theatre directors (e.g., Max Reinhardt, Fritz Lang, Richard Oswald, Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger) actors (e.g., Peter Lorre, Paul Muni) and producers (e.g., Jacob Fleck, Oscar Pilzer, Arnold Pressburger), architects and set designers (e.g., Artur Berger, Harry Horner, Oskar Strnad, Ernst Deutsch-Dryden), comedians (Kabarett artists (e.g., Heinrich Eisenbach, Fritz Grünbaum, Karl Farkas, Georg Kreisler, Hermann Leopoldi, Armin Berg), musicians and composers (e.g., Fritz Kreisler, Hans J. Salter, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Kurt Adler) were Jewish Austrians. In 1933, many Austrian Jews, who had worked and lived in Germany for years, returned to Austria, including many who fled Nazi restrictions on Jews working in the film industry.

In 1934, the Austrian Civil War broke out. The new Federal State of Austria was fascist, and leaders of the Social Democratic Party were arrested or had to flee. But, except for Jews strongly engaged in the Social Democratic Party, the new Fatherland Front regime, which thought itself as pro-Austrian and anti-national socialism, brought no worsening for the Jewish population.

The census of 1934[19] counted 191,481 Jews in Austria, with 176,034 living in Vienna and most of the rest in Lower Austria (7,716) and Burgenland (3,632), where notable Jewish communities also existed. Of the other Bundesländer, only Styria (2,195) also counted more than 1,000 Jews. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates 250,000 Jews in Austria in 1933.[20]

In 1936, the previously strong Austrian film industry, which had developed its own "emigrant-film"-movement, had to accept the German restrictions forbidding Jews from working in the film industry. Emigration among film artists then rose sharply with Los Angeles becoming the major destination. The main emigration wave started in March 1938, with Anschluss, to November 1938, when nearly all synagogues in Austria were destroyed (more than 100, about 30 to 40 of which were built as dedicated synagogues, 25 of them in Vienna).

"Razzia" (raid) after the annexation of Austria at the headquarters of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna, March 1938

The prosperity ended abruptly on 13 March 1938 with the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany (the "Anschluss"). The Jewish population in Austria at the time was 181,882, with 167,249 in Vienna. Thousands of Jews had already emigrated before Anschluss. The German racial Nuremberg Laws were immediately applied to Austria so that people with one Jewish grandparent were deemed to be Jewish, even if they or their parents had converted to another faith so that 201,000 to 214,000 people were caught by these anti-Jewish laws.[19]

The Nazis entered Austria without any major resistance and were accepted approvingly by many Austrians.[21] Immediately after Anschluss, the Nazis started instituting anti-Jewish measures throughout the country. Jews were expelled from all cultural, economic, and social life in Austria. Jewish businesses were 'aryanised' and either sold for a fraction of their value or seized outright. Jewish citizens were humiliated as they were commanded to perform different menial tasks, without any consideration of age, social position, or sex.

On November 9, "the Night of Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht) was carried out in Germany and Austria. Synagogues all over Austria were looted and burned by the Hitler Youth and the SA. Jewish shops were vandalised and looted and some Jewish homes were destroyed. During that night, 27 Jews were murdered, and many others beaten.

After the Anschluss, all Jews were effectively forced to emigrate from Austria, but the process was made extremely difficult. The emigration center was in Vienna, and the people leaving were required to have numerous documents approving their departure from different departments. The Central Office for Jewish Emigration under Adolf Eichmann was responsible for handling emigration.[17] They were not allowed to take cash or stocks or valuable items like jewelry or gold, and most antiques or artworks were declared 'important to the state' and could not be exported, and were often simply seized; essentially only clothes and household items could be taken, so nearly everything of value was left behind. To leave the country, a departure 'tax' had to be paid, which was a large percentage of their entire property. Emigrants hurried to collect only their most important personal belongings, pay the departure fees, and had to leave behind them everything else. Departure was only possible with a visa to enter another country, which was hard to obtain, especially for the poor and elderly, so even the wealthy sometimes had to leave behind their parents or grandparents. By the summer of 1939 110,000 Jews had departed the country.[17] The last Jews left legally in 1941. Almost all Jews who remained after this time were murdered in the Holocaust.

Immediately after the Anschluss the Nazis forced Austrian Jews to clean pro-independent Austria slogans off the pavements.

Some foreign officials assisted by issuing far more visas than they were officially allowed to. The Chinese consul to Austria, Ho Feng-Shan, risking his own life and his career rapidly approved the visa applications of thousands of Jews seeking to escape the Nazis. Among them were possibly the Austrian filmmakers Jacob and Luise Fleck, who got one of the last visas for China in 1940 and who then produced films with Chinese filmmakers in Shanghai. Ho's actions were recognized posthumously when he was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by the Israeli organization Yad Vashem in 2001.

In December 1938 the Dutch representative of a committee for aid to Jews, Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, went to Vienna after being requested to do so by the British (and Jewish) professor Norman Bentwich, who on behalf of the British government sought help to fulfill the quota of 10,000 temporary Jewish refugee children from Nazi-Germany and Nazi-Austria. Wijsmuller went to Vienna but was arrested for criticizing the Nazi Winterhilfe-collection, but managed to talk her way out and the next day headed straight to the then office of Adolf Eichmann, the then relatively unknown head of the Central for Jewish Emigration Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung. At first, he refused to see her, but then let her in for five minutes and disapprovingly told her she could take 600 Jewish children if she managed to get them out within one week. She managed. She then kept on organising the transport of children from Germany and Austria. This lasted until the outbreak of WW-II on Sept. 1st, 1939, when European borders were closed. The exact number of Austrian children that could flee through Wijsmuller's organisation is not exactly known but according to her biographer runs up to 10,000. The last transport - now known under the name Kindertransport was on the 14th of May, 1940, three days after The Netherlands was invaded by the Nazis, on the last ship leaving Dutch waters, the SS Bodegraven, on which she managed to place 74 German and Austrian Jewish children. She decided to remain in Holland herself, although she had had the chance of joining the group of children. All of the children she rescued, survived the war circumstances. Wijsmuller was awarded the title 'Righteous Among the Peoples' by Yad Vashem. Early in 2020, a statue was made in her honor in her birth town of Alkmaar but the erection and unveiling was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In 1939 the Nazis initiated the annihilation of the Jewish population. The most notable persons of the community, about 6,000, were sent to the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. The main concentration camp in Austria was the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, which was located next to the city of Linz. Many other Jews were sent to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt and the Łódź ghetto in Poland and from there they were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the summer of 1939 hundreds of factories and Jewish stores were shut down by the government. In October 1941 Jews were forbidden to exit the boundaries of Austria. The total number of Jews who managed to exit Austria is about 28,000. Some of the Vienna Jews were sent to the transit camp at Nisko in Nazi-occupied Poland. At the end of the winter of 1941, an additional 4,500 Jews were sent from Vienna to different concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland (mainly Izbica Kujawska and to ghettos in the Lublin area). In June 1942, a transport went directly from Vienna to Sobibor extermination camp, which had around one thousand Jews. In the fall of 1942, the Nazis sent more Jews to the ghettos in the cities they occupied in the Soviet Union: Riga, Kaunas, Vilnius and Minsk. Those Jews were murdered by the Lithuanian, Latvian and Bielorussian collaborators under the supervision of German soldiers, mainly by being shot in forests and buried in mass graves.

Liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp by the American forces.

By October 1942 Austria had only about 2,000 to 5,000 Jews left.[22] About 1,900 of these were sent out of the country during the next two years, and the rest remained in hiding. The total number of the Austrian Jewish population murdered during the Holocaust is about 65,500 people, 62,000 of them known by name.[22] The rest of the Jewish population of Austria, excluding up to 5,000 who managed to survive in Austria, emigrated — about 135,000 people of Jewish religion or Jewish ancestry, compared to the number in 1938. But thousands of Austrian Jews emigrated before 1938.

After the Holocaust, the Jews throughout Europe who managed to survive were concentrated in Allied DP camps in Austria. Holocaust survivors who had nowhere to return to after the war remained in the DP camps, and were helped by groups of volunteers who came from Palestine. Until 1955, about 250,000 to 300,000 displaced persons lived in Austria. About 3,000 of them stayed in Austria and formed the new Jewish community. Many of the Jews in the DP camps throughout Europe eventually immigrated to Israel. Many others returned to Germany and Austria. In October 2000 the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial was built in Vienna in memory of the Austrian Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

One of the notable prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp was Simon Wiesenthal, who after his release worked together with the United States army to locate Nazi war criminals.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 about 200,000 Hungarians fled through Austria to the west, among them 17,000 Jews. Seventy-thousand Hungarians stayed in Austria, a number of Jews among them. One of the best-known of them is the political scientist and publicist Paul Lendvai.

Details of the property seized under the Nazis in Vienna from Austrian Jews such as Samuel Schallinger who co-owned the Imperial and the Bristol hotels,[23] and the names of those who took them and never gave them back, are detailed in the book Unser Wien (Our Vienna) by Stephan Templ and Tina Walzer.[24]

• Eveline Brugger, Birgit Wiedl. Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter. Band 1: Von den Anfängen bis 1338. Institut für Geschichte der Juden in Österreich. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck. 2005. ISBN 3-7065-4018-5).
• Michaela Feurstein, Gerhard Milchram. Jüdisches Wien. Boehlau Verlag, Vienna. 2001. ISBN 3-205-99094-3
• Sabine Hödl, Peter Rauscher, Barbara Staudinger (ed.) Hofjuden und Landjuden. Jüdisches Leben in der Frühen Neuzeit. Philo Verlag, Vienna. 2004. ISBN 3-8257-0352-5
• Martha Keil, Elke Forisch, Ernst Scheiber. (ed.) Denkmale. Jüdische Friedhöfe in Wien, Niederösterreich und Burgenland Club Niederösterreich, St. Pölten. 2006. ISBN 3-9502149-0-9.
• Christoph Lind. "Der letzte Jude hat den Tempel verlassen": Juden in Niederösterreich 1938–1945. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna. 2004. ISBN 3-85476-141-4
• Barbara Staudinger. "Gantze Dörffer voll Juden": Juden in Niederösterreich 1496-1670. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna. 2005. ISBN 3-85476-165-1
• Thomas E. Schärf. Jüdisches Leben in Baden: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna. 2005. ISBN 3-85476-164-3
• Werner Sulzgruber. Die jüdische Gemeinde Wiener Neustadt: Von ihren Anfängen bis zu ihrer Zerstörung. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna. 2005. ISBN 3-85476-163-5
• Nicht in einem Bett - Juden und Christen in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit. Reihe: Juden in Mitteleuropa, Ausgabe 2005.