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171 Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Jewish people were expelled from the city of Vienna several times. Catholic prejudice, superstition, and religious intolerance combined with economic upheaval and competition to ensure severe persecution in which Jews were, for example, restricted to a few kinds of work and placed under great personal constraints. There had been repeated calls to ban Jews completely from the city. As late as the 1750s, the Enlightenment empress Maria Theresa refused to speak to Jews. As a result, many Jews lived outside of Vienna, in regions of the empire such as Bohemia and Moravia. This changed in the 1780s, when Maria Theresa’s heir, Emperor Joseph II, enacted several new reforms. These included the Patent of Toleration , which, for example, allowed Jews to attend public schools. People were no longer required to wear yellow badges marking them as Jews; they might live in areas throughout the city (not just in ghettos); and they might enter any academic field of work. There were still restrictions (they did not have equal rights and had to pay to reside in the city), but the changes were great. Historian Bruce Pauley writes that “Joseph made Austria the first county in the world to grant Jews naturalized citizenship and to consider them permanent residents; it was also the first to allow complete toleration in religious affairs.”1 A foundation for religious tolerance had been laid. But Joseph died in 1790, and strong reactions to the French Revolution, the conquests of Napoleon, and the revolutions of 1848 eventually combined with the traditions of Austrian Catholicism to increase prejudice and intolerance. Nonetheless, the influence of Viennese Jews on their society slowly began to grow. Tolerance grew too, especially under the influence of the young emperor Franz-Joseph, who ascended to the throne in 1848. The new constitution of 1867 removed most laws discriminating against Jews, and Vienna’s Jewish population grew enormously. As 8 Working Jewish in Vienna 172 PART II REFORM EUGENICS a result, at the turn of the twentieth century many assimilated Jews saw the Habsburg reign of the 1860s and 1870s as their golden age. Historian Marsha Rozenblit argues that the presence of so many ethic, national, and linguistic identities in a single multinational state enabled Viennese Jews to become culturally German, politically Austrian in a non-nationalist sense, and to retain their sense of Jewishness as one of the many ethnicities present in the city and in the empire. Before the 1880s, the multinational and multiethnic diversity of the Habsburg Empire in effect made it easier to be Jewish in Austria-Hungary. But the triumphs were short lived, as deeply embedded stereotypes persisted and eventually even strengthened. By 1900, a surge in European nationalism joined with the rise of race science and the ideal of Nordic racial superiority to produce a reversal that facilitated the welcoming of Hitler in 1938. The monarchy itself had retained what Steven Beller calls “structural antisemitism,” an administrative infrastructure that, far from granting universal rights, restricted Jews from the “symbolic heart” of the state: the Habsburg bureaucratic club. The result reinforced a persistent sense of Jewish difference.2 Indeed, a new logic and a new political demographic gave modern antisemitism newfound virulence. Wilhelm Marr coined the term “anti-Semitism” in 1879. His argument was racial; it juxtaposed Jews to Christians on racial, not religious grounds. Jews were, he assumed, biologically distinct from “pure” Germans , and no amount of assimilation or conversion could change that. Even baptized Jews with little religious feeling were marked by racial boundaries. Alongside their successes in banking, finance, and other professions, uppermiddle -class Jews who were proud of their “Germanness” were nonetheless assigned racial attributes that were presumed to be immutable. These usually included being cunning, imitative, materialistic, dishonest, egotistical, oversexed , disease prone, and given to conspiracy or revolutionary intrigue. Marr’s book, The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, “changed the image of Jews from being a small, weak group to that of a world power.”3 A scientific classification of human “types” based in a hereditary determinism that preceded the new genetics was well under way. Prior to this time, Jews had been bothersome and untrustworthy outcasts, religious underlings ever wandering Eurasia with no sense of place and marked with the stigma of having killed Christ. With the addition of a biologically based racial antisemitism, permanent and pathological bodily difference was taken as scientific “fact.” As was the case for other “races,” anthropological measurements of skulls supposedly reflected...

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