Page - 234 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

234 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 Although a religious declaration was not requested in documents on habilitation, an annotation of “Mosaic confession” or (more seldom) Jewish origin can still be found in some papers, such as those of Harry Torczyner, mentioned above.89 As with Catholic German Bohemians, for some scholars their confession was an important part of their identity, and they did not fear being disadvantaged by openly naming it. (In no cases, however, can one imagine affirmative action as the basis of this practice.) Nevertheless, as noted before, one would have to consider different definitions of Jewishness to draw conclusions about its influence on the appointment policy and thus about the political alignment of the faculty and ministry. In most cases, it is thus impossible to determine from the official records whether scholars were rejected because of their Jewish confession or origin. However, the historian Urszula Perkowska noted in her analysis of habilita- tions in Cracow that in many cases she could hardly understand the reasons for declining a habilitation and therefore suspected the presence of conser- vative Catholic cliques at the university.90 Indeed, in the case of Szymon Askenazy, members of the Cracow philosophical faculty discouraged him from habilitating because the university already had two Jewish scholars.91 However, since the young historian never submitted habilitation documents, and this discouragement was articulated in a private letter, it is impossible to tell how the faculty would have reacted if Askenazy had formally applied. One can find cases where habilitations were rejected without no concrete rea- son given, other than a vague mention of, for example, “personality.”92 Only in a few cases can one find direct statements: anticlericalism and his Jewish confession were the main reasons for the rejection of Ludwik Gumplowicz’s habilitation thesis.93 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the discursive construction of the Jewish scholar underwent important changes. In the Vormärz period and during the 1850s, it was confession that counted; the ministry saw and treated converted scholars as Catholics, and even promoted them as exam- ples of regained lost sons. Most noteworthy were two converted scholars who worked in the most ideologically important discipline in the empire: philos- ophy.94 This situation changed later in the nineteenth century. Cultural and ethnic affiliation, defined and ascribed in different ways across the Habsburg Empire, replaced confession as a marker of Jewishness, especially in the public and political eye. Conversion thus leveled the legal hurdles but not the social and cultural ones.