City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600-1740

6 The Expulsion of the Jews

The jews of Vienna had never been accepted as neighbors by the majority Chtistian population. Tension between the two communities had been a fact of social and political life at least since the fourteenth century. Protected only by a thin shell of privilege granted them by the Habsburg monarchs, the jews lived in constant fear of informal violence. Once packed into a small corner of the old town near the High Market, the community had been relocated in 1626 to the Lower Word, a built-up suburb just across the Danube channel flowing past the city. Physically separated by the river and connected with the city only by a single, guarded bridge, the jews could live in relative safety. Their new location, however, also made it somewhat easier for the city officials to control their coming and going, to keep track of their business connections with the Christian population. Since they were excluded from the professions and craft guilds, all of whose members had to be Christian, the jews concentrated at first on moneylending and the related pawnshop and secondhand trade. As outsiders who could never be an organic part of the Christian commonwealth, they depended absolutely on the fact that society and, above all, the monarchy needed their financial services and would provide limited toleration in 123 Chapter 6 return for them. Through the late Middle Ages, a pattern of alternating persecution and protection developed in which periods of relatively peaceful coexistence in the city under the duke's watchful guard alternated with moments of violent pogroms and tacitly sanctioned pillaging, particu~arly at the end of the fourteenth century in the years following the reign of Rudolf IV. 1 The extent to which the ruler could or wanted to protect the jews from the wrath of the Christian townspeople became an index of royal authority over the city. Yet even that degree of protection was ambivalent. Much ofViennese society, especially the ruler and the high nobility, were deeply in debt, and the interest the jews could charge was enormous, legally as much as 130 percent per annum for short-term indebtedness. The court itself had to resort to moratoria, threats of expulsion, and confiscations to control the rapid mushrooming of its own debts. The jews paid dearly for any concessions they obtained from the crown. During the Thirty Years' War, the crown had greater need than ever not only for jewish loans and for their international financial connections but also for their' services as military suppliers and horse dealers. At the same time, the general economic crisis of the first decades of the century, accompanied by rural and urban uprisings in. many parts of Austria, created an atmosphere of social unrest that frequently manifested itself in violent outbursts against the jews. In 1619 Ferdinand II published a decree threatening severe punishment for anyone guilty of insulting or injuring Viennese jews.2 This Christian violence lay behind Ferdinand's decision in 1626 to move the jews to the Lower W6rd.3 The long war tended to favor the jews. Their financial operations crossed international and confessional boundaries, offering access to capital which no Viennese merchant or banker could hope to match, especially after the collapse of the city's commercial prosperity in the fifteenth century. The Hofjud, or "Court jew"- a feature of the Austrian court by the mid-seventeenth century-had become a familiar, if often despised, figure who provided essential financial services and large-scale purchasing that were beyond the capacity of cumbersome state financial procedures and the modest capital of Christian merchant bankers. 124 The Expulsion of the Jews In Vienna two families-the Oppenheimers and Wertheimers -filled this function in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gaining privileges for themselves not shared by the Jewish community at large. Such privileges included the right to live inside the city walls and to enjoy effective protection for themselves and the many members of their households who took the family name and came under the clan's protection. These wealthiest Jews were also the ones who could most effectively represent the community's interests. They were natural allies of the crown in its tentative but generally consistent movement toward more effective absolutist government. Cultural aliens in an intolerant, insecure society, they could hardly be expected to display civic chauvi~ism. It was not easy, however, to keep out of the city's clutches. In 1638 the Lower...