Page - 313 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

From White Terror to Red Vienna 1 cations for Austrian Jewry. The Legal Protection Office (Rechtsschutzbüro) of this newspaper submitted a complaint to the Prime Minister (Bundesminister) and Minis- ter of Education (Unterrichtsministerium), arguing that it represented : “[…] an insult and affront, not only to the foreign Jewish applicants, but also to the Jewish citizens of Austria, because, for the first time since the existence of the constitution, govern- ment officials have introduced a differentiation between Jews and non-Jews, to the detriment of the former.” For Austrian Jewry, the distinction between xenophobia and antisemitism may have had great significance, but for the thousands of foreign Jewish students in Vi- enna at the time, the distinction was rather moot. Indeed, both forms of institutional- ized prejudice threatened to exclude them from Vienna’s universities. Vienna had initially served as a place of refuge for Hungarian Jewish students, but now they confronted the very specter they were trying to escape : another numerus clausus. To make matters worse, the Pro-Rector of the Technische Hochschule even specified that the ten-percent Jewish quota applied “first and foremost” to Jews from Hungary and Poland. The Bécsi Magyar Ujság, which was highly sympathetic to the plight of the Hungarian Jewish students in Vienna, viewed this latest numerus clausus as “the Calvary of the Hungarian students” (A Magyar diákok kalaváriaja), since it made their already difficult plight even more “unbearable” (még elviselhetetlenebbé vált). 9 In the words of the article : “Several thousand Hungarian-speaking students study at the Viennese Technische Hochschule. In the expensive Austrian capital, these poor students study while struggling with unbelievable poverty, [and now] antisemi- tism once again presses the wandering staff in their hands.” For the author of the article, the exclusion of foreign students could not be explained in terms of “patriotic protection of the race” (hazafias fajvédelmi szempontokkal), since, in his view, “these foreign Jewish students prefer to return to their homeland after completing their studies and not to settle down [in Austria].” Apparently, the author of this article had internalized the rhetoric of the Hungarian right, which justified the numerus clausus as a patriotic means for preventing Jews from dominating fields such as medicine and law, at the ostensible expense of “true Hungarians.” 0 „Der numerus clausus an der Technik“, Die Wahrheit, April 13, 1923, p. 9. Ibid. „… eine Kränkung und Zurücksetzung nicht nur für die fremdländischen jüdischen Aufnahms- bewerber, sondern auch für die jüdischen Staatsbürger Österreichs, weil hier zum ersten Male seit dem Bestande der Verfassung von einer staatlichen Behörde eine Differenzierung zwischen Juden und Nicht- juden zu Ungunsten der ersteren durchgeführt wird.“ “A bécsi egyetemek a külföldi zsidók ellen,“ Bécsi Magyar Ujság (1923), no. 55. 0 See Mária M. Kovács, Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics : Hungary from the Habsburgs to the Holo- caust, Washington, D.C. 1994.