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  • Jüdische-Christliche-Muslimische: Lebenswelten der Donaumonarchie, 1848–1918 by Rupert Klieber
  • Laura A. Detre
Rupert Klieber, Jüdische-Christliche-Muslimische: Lebenswelten der Donaumonarchie, 1848–1918. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2010. 294 pp.

As anyone with even a passing interest in Austria-Hungary knows, the Empire was defined by its multiculturalism. Spanning Western and Eastern Europe, Austria-Hungary was composed of people from many ethnicities, and this meant that all of the major religions of Europe, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were represented. This is the starting point for Rupert Klieber’s text, Jüdische-Christliche-Muslimische: Lebenswelten der Donaumonarchie, 1848–1918. This book provides readers with an overview of the religious history of the Danube Monarchy and, for the most part, successfully portrays for the reader a society in which these religions coexisted.

The book is divided into five sections—one for each of the major religions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, and Eastern Christianity)—and each of the sections consists of four to seven articles. Klieber wants to present a world in which all religions are equal, but this is a modern conceit and does not reflect the reality of Austria-Hungary. Catholics clearly dominated the Empire, both in numbers as well as in terms of importance within the imperial institutions. It may be true that Jews represented a majority in the city of Czernowitz, but this statistic does not reflect the overall importance of Jews to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In particular, the period that Klieber examines, from the ascension of Kaiser Franz Joseph in 1848 to the end of the Empire in 1918, is the high point of Jewish cultural and social influence in the territories under discussion. After the emancipation of Austria-Hungary’s Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish subjects rapidly began to join the ranks of the Empire’s empowered Bürgertum. They sought out economic and social opportunities previously unavailable to them and were, perhaps, statistically overrepresented in certain professions and cultural institutions in reaction to generations of exclusion. By contrast, Protestants were more empowered, especially in Eastern Hungary, where they sometimes constituted a majority of the population. This is not to say that Protestants experienced no discrimination in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; as the heart of the former Holy Roman Empire, Austria-Hungary remained closely aligned with the Catholic Church and was one of its staunchest defenders in Europe. Protestants were certainly viewed with suspicion and were at a disadvantage when competing with Catholics, particularly in Cisleithania. The problem with the way Protestants are represented [End Page 124] in this project is one of proportion; they were not an empowered majority, nor were they an oppressed minority in the process of transformation. While they are certainly statistically significant, at just under 10 percent of the population they had comparatively little impact on the overall history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

On a related note, Klieber falls into a common trap for those studying Jewish life in Central Europe. At times, rather than telling the reader about Jewish practice or the lives and accomplishments of Jewish people, he finds himself relating the history of anti-Semitism, which is, in and of itself, an interesting topic, but not synonymous with Jewish history. He also seems to struggle with some of the internal definitions of Jewish life. For example, on page 43 he includes a picture with the caption “Traditionelle ‘Ostjuden’ am Mathildenplatz (heute Gaußplatz) in Wien (Foto 1915).” The two men and the boy depicted in this picture are observant Orthodox Jews, wearing dark hats and coats, the men with long beards and the boy with payot. Klieber correctly observes that the Jewish population boomed after the extension of the railroad to eastern cities such as Cracow, Lemberg, and Czernowitz, but I take issue with his use of the term Ostjuden. It was a commonly used term in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Klieber uses quotation marks to set the word apart, but Ostjuden was sometimes used as a pejorative term. Additionally, we cannot with certitude know from the picture if the men in question were recent transplants from the...

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