Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna

Conclusion

219 Conclusion Since the publication of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, historians have discussed and debated his thesis and have focused on his analysis of liberalism, the relationship of politics and culture, and his understanding of modern culture, for which the culture of fin de siècle Vienna is seen as paradigmatic.1 Schorske proposes that accompanying the decline of liberalism, a new politics emerged in which the leaders “grasped a social-psychological reality which the liberal could not see. Each expressed in politics a rebellion against reason and law which soon became more widespread.”2 As this rebellion spread throughout Viennese politics, culture, and society, more segments of the population came under its influence. Part of this rebellion manifested itself in intense anti-Semitic politics. Many works have been inspired by Schorske’s masterpiece, mine among them. Focusing on Jewish women’s contributions to Viennese culture and the perceptions of them in the context of the decline of liberalism and the development of modern culture and politics in Vienna , this book aims to show that Jewish women played a key role in fin de siècle Vienna, both in terms of their participation in the various spheres of activity, which they pursued with enthusiasm and which served them in their sometimes challenging position as Jewish women in a less than welcoming climate, and in terms of the imagined Jewish woman found in a wide array of works by Jewish (and nonJewish ) men. Beyond demonstrating that Jewish women have not received enough attention in studies of fin de siècle Vienna, I have shown that examining their lives together with images of them contributes to the understanding of the overall cultural, social, and political climate of Vienna. Austrian high culture, according to Péter Hanák, was “dominated by the problems of existence and nonexistence, the finality of death, existential solitude, the place of the individual, and the secrets of love, in other worlds by Eros and Psyche, and the related embrace of Eros and Thanatos.”3 These problems wove their way into the cultural works by and about Jewish women as well, but by focusing specifically on Jewish women another dimension is added to the current understanding of fin de siècle Viennese culture and identity. The intersections of Jewish 220 » Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna identity and female identity, the linkages of the woman and the Jew in the popular imagination, and the psychological implications of isolation , images of otherness, and discrimination on Jews, women, and Jewish women come to the fore. These factors played themselves out in Viennese Jewish women’s identity, leading them to pursue all kinds of religious, cultural, intellectual, and political pursuits, including prayer, philanthropy, Zionism, psychoanalysis, socialism, university study, and writing through which they negotiated multiple loyalties. Finally, while this book has focused primarily on two aspects of Jewish women’s identity—Jewishness and gender—their identities also included other components which repeatedly played a role behind the scenes. As mentioned in the introduction, Marsha Rozenblit has suggested that Habsburg Jewry can be seen as having a tripartite identity. Their political loyalty to the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, their German (or other depending on where they lived) cultural identity, and their Jewish ethnic identity allowed them a certain latitude in making choices to be as Jewish as they chose. This tripartite identity distinguished Habsburg Jewry from the Jews of ethnically monolithic countries such as Germany and France.4 Accordingly, German culture and Austrian political loyalty played an important role in the identity of Viennese Jews, male and female, and influenced their political, cultural, and other activities and contributions in addition to the images of Jewish women created by Jewish men. The identity of Viennese Jewish women, the images of them, and their cultural contributions were shaped by the various cultural, ethnic , political, and gender loyalties and pulls, and therefore when gender is taken into account, one can speak of a quadripartite identity for Austrian Jewish women. While the thread of my argument has been the convergence of the Jewish and the female in the popular imagination and in fin de siècle Viennese culture and its impact on the identity and image of the Jewish woman, loyalty to Habsburg Austria and attraction to German culture played an important role for Jewish women as well as men. Viennese Jewish women incorporated notions of genderappropriate roles from bourgeois German culture, immersed themselves in German literature and culture...