ROBERT S. WISTRICH
365
in the balance of forces within Austr ia (and especially among Viennese
Jewry) towards a more nationalist direction. The election of a Zionist,
Zvi Peretz Chajes, as Chief Rabbi of Vienna in April
1918,
was one sign
of change; the increasing influence of the militant "revisionist" Zionist
Robert Stricker (elected to the Austrian parliament in
1919)
was
another; so, too, was the establishment of a Jewish self-defense force at
the end of the war, a remarkable departure from previous communal
practice. Austrian Jews began to respond to the unmistakable "nation–
alization" of ethnic and minority politics in East-Central Europe in
these early postwar years of political crisis, hunger, drastic economic
impoverishment, xenophobic anti-Semitism, and ideological conflict.
One unforeseen consequence of these postwar trends was that Vienna
lost its unique position in the Zionist movement as a mediator between
east and west-as the point where (as Nathan Birnbaum once put it)–
"German and Russo-Polish, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewry meet and
can best be united in common work." Until the end of
1918
Vienna had
still been the capital of a nationalistic State, a German city with a dis–
tinct, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic flavor, "as if born to be the center of
Jewish national agitation .. .. " During the lifetime of Theodor Herzl it
had even been the organizational center of World Zionism, despite the
fierce opposition to the Zionist program from the local Jewish financial
oligarchy, community leaders, and rabbis in Vienna.
The Viennese
Kultusgemeinde
establishment, like Herzl's assimilated
peers, could never really understand how a thoroughly acculturated Aus–
tro-German Jew like him (one who in his youth had even flirted with
pan-Germanism) could propose a Jewish exodus from Europe. How
could he turn his back on Franz Joseph's seemingly tolerant and benign
multi-national Monarchy? The Maccabean dream of creating a new
regenerated generation of Jews in Zion who would finally be acknowl–
edged by a hostile Gentile world as "fellow Europeans" struck them as
bizarre. Herzl's hi-tech vision of a Jewish state turning Middle Eastern
deserts into a garden of Eden seemed more like science fiction-not for
nothing did a fellow journalist of the
Neue Freie Presse
call him the Jew–
ish Jules Verne. Herzl's theory of anti-Semitism as something essentially
ineradicable in European Christian society was seen as a doctrine of
despair by most of his Jewish contemporaries until the triumphs of Hitler
in the
1930S
vindicated his pessimism concerning the "Jewish Question."
For the prescient visionary of the Jewish State, the nationality strug–
gles in the Austrian Empire between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia
and Moravia or between Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia were a micro–
cosm and warning signal of the coming crisis. He had little doubt that
