Jewish Women In Fin De Si Cle Vienna

Despite much study of Viennese culture and Judaism between 1890 and 1914, little research has been done to examine the role of Jewish women in this milieu. Rescuing a lost legacy, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna explores the myriad ways in which Jewish women contributed to the development of Viennese culture and participated widely in politics and cultural spheres. Areas of exploration include the education and family lives of Viennese Jewish girls and varying degrees of involvement of Jewish women in philanthropy and prayer, university life, Zionism, psychoanalysis and medicine, literature, and culture. Incorporating general studies of Austrian women during this period, Alison Rose also presents significant findings regarding stereotypes of Jewish gender and sexuality and the politics of anti-Semitism, as well as the impact of German culture, feminist dialogues, and bourgeois self-images. As members of two minority groups, Viennese Jewish women nonetheless used their involvement in various movements to come to terms with their dual identity during this period of profound social turmoil. Breaking new ground in the study of perceptions and realities within a pivotal segment of the Viennese population, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna applies the lens of gender in important new ways.

Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925) was one of the most important Jewish artists of modern times. As a successful illustrator, photographer, painter and printer, he became the first major Zionist artist. Surprisingly there has been little in-depth scholarly research and analysis of Lilien's work available in English, making this book an important contribution to historical and art-historical scholarship. Concentrating mainly on his illustrations for journals and books, Lynne Swarts acknowledges the importance of Lilien's groundbreaking male iconography in Zionist art, but is the first to examine Lilien's complex and nuanced depiction of women, which comprised a major dimension of his work. Lilien's female images offer a compelling glimpse of an alternate, independent and often sexually liberated modern Jewish woman, a portrayal that often eluded the Zionist imagination. Using an interdisciplinary approach to integrate intellectual and cultural history with issues of gender, Jewish history and visual culture, Swarts also explores the important fin de siècle tensions between European and Oriental expressions of Jewish femininity. The work demonstrates that Lilien was not a minor figure in the European art scene, but a major figure whose work needs re-reading in light of his cosmopolitan and national artistic genius.

A recent surge of interest in Jewish patronage during the golden years of Vienna has led to the question, Would modernism in Vienna have developed in the same fashion had Jewish patrons not been involved? This book uniquely treats Jewish identification within Viennese modernism as a matter of Jews active fashioning of a new language to convey their aims of emancipation along with their claims of cultural authority. In this provocative reexamination of the roots of Viennese modernism, Elana Shapira analyzes the central role of Jewish businessmen, professionals, and writers in the evolution of the city's architecture and design from the 1860s to the 1910s. According to Shapira, these patrons negotiated their relationship with their non-Jewish surroundings and clarified their position within Viennese society by inscribing Jewish elements into the buildings, interiors, furniture, and design objects that they financed, produced, and co-designed. In the first book to investigate the cultural contributions of the banker Eduard Todesco, the steel tycoon Karl Wittgenstein, the textile industrialist Fritz Waerndorfer, the author Peter Altenberg, the tailor Leopold Goldman, and many others, Shapira reconsiders theories identifying the crisis of Jewish assimilation as a primary creative stimulus for the Jewish contribution to Viennese modernism. Instead, she argues that creative tensions between Jews and non-Jews - patrons and designers who cooperated and arranged well-choreographed social encounters with one another - offer more convincing explanations for the formation of a new semantics of modern Viennese architecture and design than do theories based on assimilation. This thoroughly researched and richly illustrated book will interest scholars and students of Jewish studies, Vienna and Viennese culture, and modernism.

A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born. "Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsmen. It is also a moving vindication of historical study itself, in the face of modernism's defiant suggestion that history is obsolete." -- David A. Hollinger, History Book Club Review "Each of [the seven separate studies] can be read separately....Yet they are so artfully designed and integrated that one who reads them in order is impressed by the book's wholeness and the momentum of its argument." -- Gordon A. Craig, The New Republic "A profound work...on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history" -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review "Invaluable to the social and political historian...as well as to those more concerned with the arts" -- John Willett, The New York Review of Books "A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing." -- Newsweek

A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular narrative of “The Jew’s Daughter,” which has been overlooked in conventional studies of European anti-Semitism, this innovative study looks at canonical and neglected texts which have constructed racialized and sexualized images that persist today in the media and popular culture. The book goes back before Shylock and Jessica in TheMerchant of Venice and Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe to seek the answers to why the Jewish father is always wicked and ugly, while his daughter is invariably desirable and open to conversion. The story unfolds in fascinating transformations, reflecting changing ideological and social discourses about gender, sexuality, religion, and nation that expose shifting perceptions of inclusion and exclusion of the Other. Unlike previous studies of the theme of the Jewess in separate literatures, Sicher provides a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society. The book draws on examples from the arts, history, literature, folklore, and theology to draw a complex picture of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in England, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe from 1100 to 2017. In addition, the responses of Jewish authors illustrate a dialogue that has not always led to mutual understanding. This ground-breaking work will provoke questions about the history and present state of prejudiced attitudes in our society.

This book provides a historical analysis of one of Sigmund Freud’s least-studied cases, published in 1920 as The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. Scholars of sexuality often focus on Freud’s writings on male homosexuality, disregarding his views on homosexual women. This book serves as a corrective, renewing and reinvigorating interest in Freud, and demonstrating that his views on sexuality are as relevant today as ever. Part I introduces the case and explores Freud’s attitudes towards lesbianism, radical among his medical colleagues in the early twentieth century. It also puts Margarethe Csonka, the patient, at its centre. Michal Shapira considers Freud’s only treatment of a "female homosexual" and assesses Csonka’s background life before and after the encounter. Part II expands the case beyond the scientific-medical purview of the times and looks at the new opportunities afforded to women and assimilated Jews through growing equality and the modernization of urban life in 1920s Vienna. This book places Csonka’s case within the broader context of medical and psychological texts, Freud’s own writings, Jewish and queer history, and modern Vienna’s urban and art history. Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to readers interested in the history of gender and sexuality, feminism, modern European and urban history, the history of psychoanalysis, science and medicine, and the history of ideas.

A biography of the Christian Social mayor of Vienna (1897-1910). Ch. 5 (p. 171-207), "Running with the Hares, Hunting with the Hounds", discusses Lueger's antisemitism, which many historians have tended to discount. While leaving open the question of Lueger's personal convictions, argues that his antisemitic remarks and those of his party associates exerted an extremely harmful influence which continued through the First Republic and is still felt today, and that only the limitations imposed on him by the Emperor prevented drastic measures against the Jews. Reviews the position of Lueger and the Christian Socialists in the debate over Jews at the university (especially the medical school), the antisemitic productions of Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn's Kaiserjubiläums-Stadttheater (the "Aryan Theater"), and demands for segregation in the public schools.

This book examines the antisemitism that flourished outside of Vienna, in Austrian provinces such as Styria, Carinthia, Vorarlberg, Upper Austria, and Tyrol, focusing in particular on gender bias and its relationship to antisemitism. The 1904 arrest and bigamy trial of Frau von Hervay, the Jewish wife of District Captain Franz von Hervay of a Styrian provincial town (Mürzzuschlag), is closely examined to shed light on the relationship between Jews and non-Jews and attitudes towards women and sexuality in the small cities and towns of the Austrian provinces. The case demonstrates that antisemitism influenced popular perceptions of Jews and women at the local level and that it targeted women as well as men. This bookprovides an in-depth study of an episode of Austrian history that had a significant impact on the development of Austrian law; the role of religious institutions; perceptions of Jews, women, and sexuality; conceptions of Austrian bureaucracy and the need for reform; and the relationship between the provinces and the Viennese center. It also provides insight into the public interest generated by sensations such as arrests, suicides, crimes, and trials and the way the press of that time reported on them.