Jewish Nationalist Politics in Interwar Vienna: The Failure of Landespolitik

44 SHOFAR JEWISH NATIONALIST POLITICS IN INTERWAR VIENNA: THE FAILURE OF LANDESPOLITIK Harriet Pass Freidenreich Harriet Pass Freidenreich is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. She is the author of The Jews of Yugoslavia (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979) and other writings on Viennese and Yugoslav Jewry. The most salient feature of Austrian Zionism in the early twentieth century lay in the strong commitment shared by most of its top leadership, if not always its membership, to active involvement in diaspora politics.1 As early as 1900, Zionists began competing in Viennese Kultusgemeinde elections and in 1932 they succeeded in "conquering the Jewish community." The 1906 Austrian Zionist conference in Cracow officially endorsed the idea of Landespolitik, i.e., participation in national, as well as municipal, politics for the purpose of representing Jewish interests and gaining recognition and rights for Jews as a national minority. Thereafter Viennese Zionists began to run candidates in elections for city council and the Austrian parliament and they continued to do so until 1930. Although the Zionists eventually achieved electoral victories in the communal sphere, their forays into general politics for the most part resulted in dismal failures, while minority status for Jews in Austria remained an elusive goal. The major dichotomy within Viennese Jewish political life, which cut across the entire spectrum from left to right, lay between the Jewish Nationalists and the opponents of Jewish nationalism. The non-nationalists, whether Liberals, Social Democrats or even many of the Orthodox Agudists, were generally Hungarian or Czech Jews who had arrived in Vienna before the 1880s and had adopted German culture and nationality. They vehemently opposed the idea of recognizing Jews as a national minority in Austria. 1This article is based on research for a larger study, Jewish Politics in Vienna, 1918-1938 (Indiana University Press, 1991). The author wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and Temple University. VoLume 9, No.2 "'lnter 1991 45 Despite their disparate religious and ideological orientations, these nonnationalists could all agree that Jews constituted primarily a religious community whose rights could best be protected by civic equality and freedom of religion for all individuals within the state. The non-nationalist camp tended to support existing political parties in municipal and national elections whenever possible. Jewish Nationalism mainly attracted Jews of Eastern origin, usually from multi-ethnic, predominantly Slavic-speaking areas. Thus Jews who had come to Vienna in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, especially from Galicia but also from Moravia, were more likely to join the Jewish Nationalist camp. Although most of these Jewish Nationalists spoke fluent German and were by no means immune to Viennese culture, they felt less at home in Vienna and their primary identity remained jewish, rather than Austrian. The Jewish Nationalists, virtually all of whom were also Zionists in interwar Vienna, split into numerous factions. Middle-of-the-road General Zionists provided the strongest support for involvement in diaspora politics. They created a separate Jewish party to run in municipal and parliamentary races. Labor Zionists, whether adherents of the Marxist Poale Zion or nonMarxist Hitachdut, vacillated in their support for diaspora Jewish politics, while Orthodox Mizrachists restricted their political activities in Vienna to the communal sphere. Despite their differing agendas, all Jewish Nationalists agreed on one basic premise, namely-that Jews constituted a separate nation and deserved recognition as such, whether as a majority in their own state or as a minority in the diaspora. Jewish· Nationalist politics had become a Zionist preserve in Austria even before World War I. Zionists had taken over control of the small dias- , pora nationalist Jewish People's Party and renamed it the Jewish Nationalist Party. While some prominent diaspora nationalist figures remained outside the Zionist framework, by and large the terms Jewish Nationalist and Zionist became virtually synonymous in Vienna.2 Immediately after the war, the Jewish National Council for Germcm-Austria, established under Zionist auspices , demanded recognition of Jews as a nation and assurance of their national minority rights in Austria, as well as complete political and civil equality for all citizens of the state. They wanted proportional representation in...