Smart Jews in Fin-de-siecle Vienna: "Hybrids and the Anxiety about Jewish Superior Intelligence - Hofmannsthal and Wittgenstein

One of the most potent images of and among acculturated Jews at the turn of the nineteenth century is the image of the “smart Jew.” Jewish savants of the time come to be ambivalent in regard to their own position as intellectuals as they internalize the image of their questionable “superior intelligence.” Jews, according to the common wisdom of the time among many non-Jews, are crafty rather than clever. Thus in the standard American phrenological text at midcentury, Samuel R. Wells’s New Physiognomy, or, Signs of Character: As Manifested Through Temperament, the Jew’s physical appearance is the guide to his mercenary character. ¹ Wells speaks of the fact that “the more cultivated and advanced the race, the finer the nose” (NP, 189). Yet the Jew’s nose has not changed after millennia. It shows a “worldly shrewdness, insight into character, and ability to turn insight into profitable account” (NP, 196). It is a sign of “commercialism” (NP, 196). “The Jew has a larger head than the Arab, and at present undoubtedly stands at the head of the Semitic sub-races” because of his intelligence (NP, 445). His intellectual qualities are clear: “He is religious; he is fond of trade; he is thrifty; he is unconquerably true to his racial proclivities; he is persistent in everything he undertakes” (NP, 445). He is also “prejudiced, bigoted, stern, stubborn, irascible, exacting, secretive, and unrelenting” (NP, 445). This is the general understanding of Jewish superior intelligence in the late nineteenth century, with intelligence simply masking bad character. Bad character, in turn, is manifested in the Jew’s innate inability to be original in the creative arts, where he makes the claim for his own originality. The Jew, in short, is shrewd rather than creative.

Once internalized, such images lead to intense self-doubt about one’s own intelligence and creativity. One example of this position as a negative formulation is the self-doubt that Victor Adler, cofounder of the Austrian Socialist Party, evidenced in a letter he wrote to his political ally Karl Kautsky on 21 August 1886: “I do not have the calling for a quiet, scholarly occupation. I believe myself quite useful as a copier of the ideas of others. We Jews seem predestined to copy others’ ideas.” ² This version of the notion of a Jewish intellect that is condemned to be a “parasite” on the real intellectuals of the “host” culture is a commonplace in the anti-Semitic literature of the day. ³ Adler acts this out in his rejection of any Jewish specificity within his complicated understanding of national identity and national language. The Jews are clever, according to Adler, but not smart. And only true intelligence can be understood as a sign of civic virtue. This typical rereading frames the question of Jewish intelligence in Vienna during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Viennese context seems to be especially rich in these cases of self-doubt concerning Jewish intelligence as creative rather than parasitic. As the city believed to be the most anti-Semitic in Central Europe and the one in which the Jewish visibility as intellectuals was very high, one would expect the reading of Jewish intelligence to have an intense and evident form. Robert Wistrich noted that “the main components of Austrian anti-Semitism, its multinational character, agitational techniques, and mass impact, were distinctly novel.” ⁴ There was a general assumption in Vienna that there was a “Jewish mind” that transcended conversion or adaptation and that this mind was inherently unoriginal. ⁵ In the writings of a number of Viennese Jewish (however this is defined) intellectuals of the turn of the century, one can see a wide range of the positions involving the internalization of the question of Jewish intelligence; these positions are linked in striking and rather unusual ways. This is not a specifically “Viennese” problem; rather, for creative individuals in a city in which the Bildungsbürgertum, the intellectual middle class, was defined by ideas of originality and creativity, this quality of mind came to...