Page - 222 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

222 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 time). These are not even particularly extremist journals; the positions are even more radicalized when one looks further from the center. Similarly, there was no common ground with respect to the national issue, and univer- sities were criticized by nationalists and loyalists from all sorts of positions. Legal Confessionalization While countless publications have scrutinized the question of nationalism at universities, the impact of a scholar’s religious confession remains an open question; it has mostly been analyzed on a case-by-case basis.22 Not only are the confessional relations at universities hard to determine, but confes- sion has remained an extremely fluid category and thus requires a flexible methodological approach. The category “Jew” can be taken as an example of the complexities surrounding one-dimensional descriptions. In the Habsburg Empire, Jews remained officially unacknowledged as a national group but were accepted as a religious community; there were, however, substantial internal conflicts between Orthodoxy, Reform Judaism, and Zionism.23 With a growing num- ber of conversions, however, this categorization lost some of its explanatory power. In the late nineteenth century, Jewish converts to Catholicism or Protestantism were still referred to as Jews, and many saw themselves as such, despite their change of confession. Likewise, anti-Semites saw ethni- city, which conversion could not change, as the dominant characteristic. And ethnicity could be understood very broadly: in the spring of 1889, anti-Semitic attacks forced Eduard Suess to resign his position as rector of the University of Vienna. Suess had never been Jewish, but ancestors of his mother were.24 The fluidity of the category of ethnicity in turn influenced political debates, including those concerning universities. Discussing the number of Jewish scholars in a debate on the confessional status of Cisleithanian universities in 1907, the spokesman of the liberals mentioned that the University of Innsbruck had two Jews among professoriat, but his conservative oppo- nents insisted that he should also add two Judenstämmlinge (descendants of Jews).25 In the same debate, similar controversies arose over the number of Jewish scholars teaching at other universities. Individual accounts present a similar delicate and complex canvas, in- cluding regional particularities. In his curriculum vitae in Vienna in 1913, Harry Torczyner (Naftali Herz Tur-Sinai; יניס-רוט ץרה ילתפנ) described