Page - 304 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

0 Harriet Pass Freidenreich and Jewish in an ethnic sense.” During the interwar years, however, many Jewish university women owed their political loyalty not to the German-Austrian Republic but to Socialism. Although their citizenship was Austrian and, for the most part, they considered themselves to be Germans linguistically and culturally, Jewish women studying at the University of Vienna in the early twentieth century rarely described themselves as either Germans or Austrians. They felt very at home in “Red Vienna” and were definitely part of Viennese high culture, but they were neither Austrian patriots nor German nationalists. If they supported the idea of Anschluss immediately after World War I, they did so politically as Socialists, not as Germans. By 1938, an- tisemitism had muted their sense of belonging to the Austrian or German people to such an extent that they barely mention it in their later writings. Except for the fairly small group of “Jewish Jews” who maintained a strong, posi- tive Jewish identity, sometimes in the form of Jewish nationalism or Zionism, the most openly articulated sense of identification of Austrian Jewish university women tended to be as left-wing intellectuals, whether Socialists or Communists. Although they might claim on paper to be Jews by religion, for the most part they were areli- gious. Even though they socialized primarily with other Jews, they did not tend to see themselves as ethnically Jewish, but neither did they really consider themselves ethni- cally German or Austrian. Indeed, they were supranational individualists who really did not belong to any ethnic group. As Helga Embacher has concluded in her article “Aussenseiterinnen : bürgerlich, jüdisch, intellektuell — links”, they were outsiders. As Jews, they were not accepted as part of Austrian society, and as women, they were largely excluded from the organized Jewish community. As women with ad- vanced secular education, they often rejected the traditional Jewish woman’s role as wife and mother within the home, but as women with limited Jewish education, they were unable to carve out a new role for themselves as Jews in either the private or the public sphere. While men with university education, including in some cases their husbands, helped run the Jewish community and affiliated with a plethora of Jewish organizations, whether religious, philanthropic, cultural or Zionist, Jewish university women were excluded from these men’s organizations and seem to have left Jew- ish women’s auxiliaries to their less educated sisters. They rarely saw themselves as feminists and as a rule did not join women’s associations of any kind. Insofar as they actively affiliated at all, whether as students or as adults, these university women, like many of their male counterparts, joined Socialist or Communist groups. Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity : The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I, New York 1991, p. 4. Embacher, “Außenseiterinnen“, in : L’Homme, pp. 57–76.