Vienna

Jews have long had a vexed relationship with Vienna. They count among the city’s most ardent fans as well as its loudest detractors. Facing much antisemitism both in the Middle Ages and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Vienna’s Jews nevertheless helped shape a great deal of what is considered to be the best of Austrian culture. Ranging from assimilated Jews to enthusiastic converts to ardent Zionists, they drove and supported some of the most well-known ideas and movements of the modern era, including psychoanalysis and Zionism. That they did so in a city that hosted Adolf Hitler as he developed his destructive antisemitic ideologies underscores the paradox of Jewish life in Vienna. Many people remain fascinated by Jews’ participation in high culture and modernism around the fin de siècle: the works of Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, and Stefan Zweig, to name only a few, continue to mark the landscape of international popular culture. However, the history of Jews in Vienna reaches far beyond the clichéd world of Vienna’s coffeehouses. The city’s reputation as a cosmopolitan capital of an empire, as well as its location between Eastern and Western Europe, meant that Jews from varying cultures mixed together in ways they often did not in other cities. By 1945, of the roughly 200,000 Jews living in Austria before the war, 65,000 had been murdered; most of the rest had been able to flee Nazi persecution between 1938 and 1941 and found refuge mainly in the United States, Great Britain, and British Mandatory Palestine (now Israel). Few of those who survived returned. In recent decades, however, Austrians have begun to come to terms with their active involvement in the destruction of its Jewish population. The reconstruction of Vienna’s postwar Jewish population of between 8,000 and 11,000, which now numbers around 15,000, continues amid growing possibilities for public debate and discussion.