The Jews Of Vienna And The First World War

The first account of the experience of Viennese Jewry during the First World War, exploring the wartime crises of Jewish ideology and identity.

This book explores the impact of war and political crisis on the national identity of Jews, both in the multinational Habsburg monarchy and in the new nation-states that replaced it at the end of World War I. Jews enthusiastically supported the Austrian war effort because it allowed them to assert their Austrian loyalties and Jewish solidarity at the same time. They faced a grave crisis of identity when the multinational state collapsed and they lived in nation-states mostly uncomfortable with ethnic minorities. This book raises important questions about Jewish identity and about the general nature of ethnic and national identity.

World War I utterly transformed the lives of Jews around the world: it allowed them to display their patriotism, to dispel antisemitic myths about Jewish cowardice, and to fight for Jewish rights. Yet Jews also suffered as refugees and deportees, at times catastrophically. And in the aftermath of the war, the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian and Ottoman Empires with a system of nation-states confronted Jews with a new set of challenges. This book provides a fascinating survey of the ways in which Jewish communities participated in and were changed by the Great War, focusing on the dramatic circumstances they faced in Europe, North America, and the Middle East during and after the conflict.

This book explores the variety of social and political phenomena that combined to the make the First World War a key turning point in the Jewish experience of the twentieth century. Just decades after the experience of intense persecution and struggle for recognition that marked the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish men and women across the globe found themselves drawn into a conflict of unprecedented violence and destruction. The frenzied military, social, and cultural mobilisation of European societies between 1914 and 1918, along with the outbreak of revolution in Russia and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East had a profound impact on Jewish communities worldwide. The First World War thus constitutes a seminal but surprisingly under-researched moment in the evolution of modern Jewish history. The essays gathered together in this ground-breaking volume explore the ways in which Jewish communities across Europe and the wider world experienced, interpreted and remembered the ‘war to end all wars’.

During the First World War, the Jewish population of Central Europe was politically, socially, and experientially diverse, to an extent that resists containment within a simple historical narrative. While antisemitism and Jewish disillusionment have dominated many previous studies of the topic, this collection aims to recapture the multifariousness of Central European Jewish life in the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike during the First World War. Here, scholars from multiple disciplines explore rare sources and employ innovative methods to illuminate four interconnected themes: minorities and the meaning of military service, Jewish-Gentile relations, cultural legacies of the war, and memory politics.

Examines Jewish life in Vienna, outlining internal dissensions and conflicts between assimilationist and traditional Jews and focusing on the rise and evolution of modern Austrian antisemitism. Jews were attacked as both capitalists and Marxists, as racially inferior and as a corrupting element, from the time of Christian Socialist Karl Lueger to Hitler and the Nazi period. Describes the Holocaust period, the persecution and deportation of Austria's Jews, and the unwillingness of Austrians to deal with their Nazi and anti-Jewish past after the war, as shown by their reluctance to bring war criminals to trial and by Kurt Waldheim's election as president.

Ablaze with excitement, effervescent with creativity—late nineteenth-century Vienna was the ideal site for this analysis of the ways in which a sizable and significant group of Jews was assimilated into European society. After leaving homes in the Austrian and Hungarian provinces and migrating to the Austrian capital, the Jews underwent a variety of profound changes. The Jews of Vienna shows how they successfully transformed old, identifiably Jewish patterns of behavior into modern urban variations, without abandoning their ethnic identity in the process. Marsha L. Rozenblit describes the Jews' migration to Vienna, the occupational changes they experienced in the city, where and how they lived, the various means they used to achieve social integration, and the vibrant network of Jewish organizations they established. As they evolved new patterns of urban Jewish life, the Viennese immigrants also created ideologies which defined the place of the Jew in European society. Rozenblit shows how this urbanization led to social change while simultaneously providing the necessary demographic foundation for continued Jewish identity in modern Europe.

This book examines Jewish life in Vienna just after the Nazi-takeover in 1938. Who were Vienna’s Jews, how did they react and respond to Nazism, and why? Drawing upon the voices of the individuals and families who lived during this time, together with new archival documentation, Ilana Offenberger reconstructs the daily lives of Vienna’s Jews from Anschluss in March 1938 through the entire Nazi occupation and the eventual dissolution of the Jewish community of Vienna. Offenberger explains how and why over two-thirds of the Jewish community emigrated from the country, while one-third remained trapped. A vivid picture emerges of the co-dependent relationship this community developed with their German masters, and the false hope they maintained until the bitter end. The Germans murdered close to one third of Vienna’s Jewish population in the “final solution” and their family members who escaped the Reich before 1941 chose never to return; they remained dispersed across the world. This is not a triumphant history. Although the overwhelming majority survived the Holocaust, the Jewish community that once existed was destroyed.