Page - 217 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

217 cHApter 6 Imperial Space and Its Identities If we [Catholics] would have equal rights, then around 80 percent of the Jews who nowadays frequent the university would have to leave it. . . . Are those equal rights, when just in the recent past among the eight appointed professors we find seven Jews? . . . We want equal rights; we want the university, which once belonged to German Christian people, to belong again to German Christian people. —kArl lueger, 19071 The advance of professionalization and the professional closure of academia to nonacademic scholars during the nineteenth century did not mean that scholarly quality became the only factor influencing academic advancement. Whereas the previous chapters have discussed, among other things, how is- sues of nationality influenced university careers and dissolved the Habsburg academic space into linguistic subspaces, this chapter concentrates on is- sues that, until 1918, united Franz Joseph’s subjects under one worldview. Catholic identity—one of the founding ideologies of Habsburg statehood, its universities, and most of its peoples—influenced academia across the empire well beyond neoabsolutism. By merging with different nationalisms and conservative ideologies such as Germanness2 and Polishness,3 it coproduced pan-imperial cultural othering narratives (Türcken, or Turks; Ostjuden, or eastern Jews).4 Scholars did not remain immune to these, both using such stereotypes and coproducing them; for example, Theodor Billroth used the stereotype of low-income Galician Ostjuden overcrowding universities, and Adolf Wahrmund and August Rohling wrote openly anti-Semitic pamphlets.