Page - 223 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 6 ♦  223 himself as a “German of Jewish nationality and Mosaic confession,”26 but this combination of terms makes sense only if German is not considered a national category. In other words, in the context of the late empire, this com- bination could hardly be used with Czech, Polish, or Ruthenian/Ukrainian instead of German. The designation Polish Jew or Czech Jew would thus mean something different from German Jew. The former were linked to the ominous terms assimilation and acculturation, incorporating cultural or national transformation,27 especially the rejection of Haskala (Jewish enlightenment, a cultural intellectual movement affiliated with German culture), whereas German Jew usually was not. Using the ethnic term Jewish as a category of analysis accepts an as- cription that does not consider cultural identity, leading in this case to less useful results, reminiscent of the categorization of confessions used by the anti-Semitic intellectuals who in 1907 spoke of Austrian universities as being overcrowded with (ethnic) Jews. Whereas anti-Semites spoke of Jews irre- spective of conversion or baptism, others distinguished between “Jews” and “people of Jewish origin.”28 Individuals’ perspectives on their own identities remain mostly hidden in the official documents, and they can be determined only for some scholars, providing confusing results rather than revealing the situation at the universities. Even a detailed book on Protestant teachers at the University of Vienna was limited to studying professors because of problems with archival sources.29 Moreover, a recently published detailed monograph on Jewish professors at Prussian universities was made possible not through officially accessible statistics but via the fortunate discovery of intraministerial queries, which hint at a similar privacy of confession in the German Empire.30 Religion remained one of the leading issues in the controversies over universities, with the public evidently taking more interest in this than in the scholars themselves. The accusation that universities were liberal, socialist, Jewish, and filled with Matrikelchristen (“registered Christians,” that is, those who were supposedly Christian in name only) not only caused an extremely serious crisis at the turn of the century, apart from the growing nationalist tensions, but also remained tightly intertwined with nationalisms. The more or less successful recalibration of national self-identification, and of the ac- companying cultural rivalries, ran along ethno-religious boundaries: Roman Catholic Poles versus Greek Catholic Ruthenians, Orthodox Russians, and Protestant Germans; Roman Catholic Austrians versus Protestant Prussians; Protestant Czechs versus Catholic “(Bohemian) Germans.”31 These religious