ROBERT S. WISTRICH
357
speaking and therefore counted as Poles. Yet this statistical picture was
profoundly misleading. Austrian Jews, by r900, had in fact developed a
stronger ethnic-religious identity and a sharper sense of Jewish people–
hood than existed elsewhere in Western or Central Europe. Increasingly,
Jewish students at Austrian universities were registering Yiddish as their
Umgangssprache
and claiming affiliation to a revived Jewish nation.
The mass of Galician Jews did indeed speak Yiddish, not Polish, despite
the official census. Furthermore, there were far more traditional, Yid–
dish-speaking Hassidic Jews and
Ostjuden
in the Monarchy-concen–
trated especially in the orthodox strongholds of Hungary and
Galicia-than anywhere outside the Russian Empire.
Moreover, the pace of modernization, secularization, and economic
development was significantly slower when compared
to
Germany and
Western Europe. Jewish assimilation-while it had grown rapidly after
the full emancipation of Austro-Hungarian Jews in r867-was, as a
result, far from being an irresistible process. True, in Vienna (as in
Budapest) Jews were flourishing and extremely prominent in banking,
commerce, industry, journalism, law, medicine, arts, and science-a tes–
tament not only to their far-reaching social assimilation but also to their
remarkable success in reshaping the contours of Central European cul–
ture. Equally, by 1914 the Habsburg Jewish middle class was among the
strongest cohesive forces in the Empire; it was essentially a cosmopoli–
tan, integrative,
staatserhaltend
element in the supranational Monarchy,
the "intellectual cement" which provided much of the "European"
color, tone, and vitality that characterized places like Vienna, Budapest,
Prague, Lwow, Cracow, Czernowitz, and Trieste before 1914. The
enlightened, modern, liberal-bourgeois intelligentsia of Jewish origin
was one of the pillars of Austro-Hungarian society and anything but
nationalist. In Cisleithania this middle-class stratum was "Austrian" in
the specific sense of loyalty to the dynasty. In cultural and linguistic
terms it was rarely
volkisch
in outlook, although unabashedly German,
unlike the provincial non-Jewish German-Austrian
Mittelstand.
Much of the "high culture" of Austria in 1900 undoubtedly had
important Jewish ingredients. Unfortunately this merely strengthened the
standard anti-Semitic rallying cry, that German culture was becoming
"judaized." It is a significant fact that anti-Semitism at the end of the
nineteenth century was politically more successful, dynamic, and populist
in Austria than in Germany or anywhere else in Western or Central
Europe. This was particularly true of the anti-capitalist Jew-baiting prac–
ticed by the immensely admired Christian-Social Party leader Karl Lueger,
who was so resoundingly elected as Mayor of Vienna in r897. His petit-
