Page - 298 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Harriet Pass Freidenreich Jewish women made up a disproportionately large percentage of the female student population at the University of Vienna after it opened its doors to women in 1897. On the eve of World War I, 43 % of all women students enrolled listed “Jewish”, “Isra- elite” or “Mosaic” as their religion ; immediately after the war, such women accounted for a remarkable 59 % of university women. During the interwar years, the relative proportion of Jews declined considerably, but in 1933, they still amounted to 20 % of the women students. Roughly 750 Jewish women studied at the University of Vienna before 1914 and several thousand more followed in their footsteps thereafter. A ma- jority of these women were born in Vienna, but, especially before 1919, many came from Galicia and some from other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well. According to university records, these women overwhelmingly claimed German as their mother tongue, although some indicated Polish or Yiddish and a few even specified Hebrew. While most listed “German” as their nationality, the number of women who entered “Jewish” in this category on registration forms increased slowly but steadily by the 1930s. Judging by official records, one might conclude that, like Papanek-Akselrad, Jewish university women in Vienna classified themselves as Jews by religion but as Germans (or Austrians) by culture and nationality. Such an impres- sion would be superficially correct, but not fully accurate. Defining the identity of modern Jewish women is by no means a simple task. For men, one can utilize public indicators of Jewish involvement, like membership in the Gemeinde, participation in synagogue and Jewish communal or organizational activities, as well as religious behavior and life-cycle events, such as circumcision and Bar Mitzvah. For women, who were largely excluded from the public domain of synagogue and community and whose documented Jewish life-cycle events were most likely to be marriage and burial, Jewish identity was mainly expressed in the private sphere of the home and was often hidden from general view. Although most university women of Jewish origin listed “Jewish” as their religion on official forms, since their families were at least nominally affiliated with the local Gemeinde and their fathers (or husbands) paid communal taxes, few of them believed in or practiced Judaism in their daily lives or attended synagogue on a regular basis, especially as adults. Despite the fact that Zionism initially developed in Vienna as a student movement, relatively few women students affiliated with Zionist groups or considered themselves Jews by nationality. Indeed, Austrian university women did not tend to join any Jewish These figures are derived from Waltraud Heindl and Marina Tichy, eds., „Durch Erkenntnis zu Freiheit und Glück …“ : Frauen an der Universität Wien ab 1897, Vienna 1990, and also from Zwischenbericht über das Projekt „Die Studentinnen an der Universität Wien“, unpublished statistics, courtesy of Wal- traud Heindl, Vienna. Ibid.