!!!Antisemitismus

Anti-Semitism, hostility towards Jews. In Austria, anti-Semitism has a 
long tradition. Reports of acts of violence against Jews go as far 
back as the end of the 13th century, and under Duke Albrecht V Jews 
living in Vienna were subject to wholesale expulsion or burnt at the 
stake in 1420/21. Under Ferdinand I Jews were required in 1551 to wear 
a yellow ring on their clothing. In 1670 Leopold I. expelled all 
Jews from Lower Austria, the ghetto in Vienna was abolished and the 
Jewish population sent to what is now Leopoldstadt; nevertheless 
members of rich Jewish families soon returned to Vienna. 
Joseph II's ( Edict of Tolerance) freed Austrian Jews from many 
discriminatory restrictions. At the same time, many Jews started to 
move to Vienna from Bohemia, Moravia and Galicia. The age of 
liberalism enabled the Jewish population to live in a less oppressive 
environment. After 1867 they were allowed to enter the liberal 
professions as physicians, lawyers, journalists, writers and artists 
and to engage in such activities as trade and banking, and many of 
them taught at universities. As a reaction, economic anti-Semitism 
developed in large parts of the population, a trend which various 
political movements tended to exploit. Whereas the Christian 
Socialists under K.  Lueger (from approx. 1885 onwards) stressed, 
above all, the economic problems allegedly caused by this development, 
G. Ritter von  Schoenerer at the same time propounded a form of 
anti-Semitism based on racist arguments which aimed at totally 
excluding the Jews from any form of participation in society. While 
both forms of anti-Semitism found many followers, anti-Semitism was 
seen to decline somewhat between 1897 and 1914. Many Jews held leading 
positions in the Social-Democratic movement and in some of the liberal 
groups. During World War I a large number of Jews from Galicia 
came to Vienna, which caused anti-Semitism in Vienna to gain momentum, 
particularly at the universities and amongst university graduates. By 
1938 anti-Semitic attitudes had gained ground in most political 
movements, and especially in the Christian-Social Party, where they 
assumed more and more racist characteristics. In spite of the fact 
that many party leaders were Jews, anti-Semitism was also found in 
Social Democratic circles; it persisted in many different forms in 
German nationalist groups and was a stock-in-trade in National 
Socialist propaganda.

\\
From the National Socialist take-over in 1938 onwards, Jews were 
systematically persecuted, which initially resulted in massive 
emigration to the USA and Palestine and ultimately in the systematic 
extermination of the  Jews. While in 1938 there were 185,250 Jews in 
Austria, by September 1939 their number had been reduced to 66,000, 
and in 1947 there were only 8,552 Jews resident in Austria. Although a 
polity of opposing anti-Semitism has prevailed in Austria since 1945 
it still persists in the population-at-large. The exact degree of 
anti-Semitism in Austria can only be determined by opinion surveys, 
and there have been numerous instances of anti-Semitic acts of 
violence (defiling of Jewish cemeteries etc.) in the Second Republic.

!Literature
B. F. Pauley, Eine Geschichte des oesterreichischen 
Antisemitismus, 1993 (English 1992); A. Rotter, Der Antisemitismus der 
Christllich-Sozialen in Oesterreich, master's thesis, Vienna 1994.


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