During a ceremony commemorating Jewish war service held in November 1866, just months after the end of the Austro-Prussian War, Adolf Jellinek, chief rabbi of the Viennese-Jewish community, praised the loyalty of the Austrian soldiers to the Habsburg dynasty and appealed for continued Jewish loyalty to the Crown in order to preserve the internal strength of the Empire.1 On the battlefields, he claimed, the Austrian soul had emerged and triumphed beyond national and religious boundaries.2 Even though Austria had lost the war, he saw a splendid future for the Austrian-Hungarian Empire under Franz Joseph I and under the slogan ‘united, peaceful and fraternal’.3 Almost fifty years later, Austro-Hungarian Jewry would again be confronted with the outbreak of a war and questions of loyalty, patriotism and participation. In 1914 Austro-Hungarian Jews once again enthusiastically endorsed the imperial declaration of war, this time against Serbia, and supported their ‘deified Monarch to protect and defend the honour of the fatherland’4 as the popular weekly paper the Oesterreichische Wochenschrift declared. Across the internal religious divide, and despite their diverse political convictions, Jews of the Danubian Monarchy demonstrated their devotedness to the throne and dynasty.5 In its annual report of April 1914, the Israelitische Allianz zu Wien (IAzW), an influential national Jewish aid organization founded in 1872–1873, had described the ongoing pogroms in the Russian Empire, the ritual murder trial against Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev and growing antisemitism and persecution in the ‘East’ at the beginning of the year. The paper thus welcomed the outbreak of the war as a great opportunity to finally end Jewish persecution and oppression in Eastern Europe.6 Despite its international organizational structure and transnational collaborations and contributors, the Vienna Allianz adhered to the idea of Jewish loyalty to throne and Empire and openly declared its dedication to the Austrian fatherland. This chapter examines the role of the Allianz (or IAzW) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the war years and explores the organization’s ambivalent position between internationalism and nationalism.
War Alliances and the New ‘Enemies’
With the outbreak of the Great War in the summer of 1914 many Jewish organizations were confronted with the challenge of rising nationalism. The majority of Jews across Europe tended to support the national causes of their home countries and many ostensibly international Jewish organizations were forced to adjust to these new circumstances. Jewish aid organizations which had worked on a transnational level for decades found these changes particularly challenging. The Vienna Allianz, which was founded along the lines of the ideas of the French Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) and had established well-organized links with other international Jewish institutions, provides a good example of an organization torn between national and international interests.
In the decades before 1914, influential members of the Jewish community of Vienna, including Adolf Jellinek and the former president of the Jewish community, Joseph Ritter von Wertheimer, had become strong supporters of certain progressive ideas that had originally been formulated in Paris. In 1860, the newly established French AIU had openly declared that it would fight for Jewish emancipation and integration across the globe based on the universal ideas of equality and freedom. Its formulated mission civilisatrice aimed to spread French republican ideals fused with ideas of Jewish modernization beyond the French borders. The French language, modern education and a combination of religious and secular teaching were the essence of the AIU’s programme, which promoted its understanding of a modern Judaism and a modern Jewish identity.7 Aron Rodrigue has emphasized that three major issues dominated the AIU’s self-proclaimed mission, ‘educational reform to socialize the Jews, vocational instruction to turn them to ‘useful’ trades, and the transforming of rabbinical training to produce new spiritual leaders of the community’.8
Jellinek, who was chief rabbi of the Viennese-Jewish community between 1865 and 1893, clearly adopted and promoted some of the contemporary ideas of equality, modern education and emancipation, which had influenced the establishment of the AIU. He even saw in the foundation of a universal Jewish association a clear symbol of modernity which reflected his strong belief in progress and a better future.9 He called for a ‘century of love, humanity and freedom’ and stressed the importance of a brotherly alliance with other leading Jewish communities in Western Europe. Consequently, he was convinced that the Jewish communities of Western Europe had a religious and social obligation to defend Jewish rights and push for Jewish modernization as part of the more general processes of modernization.10 Moreover, he declared that the propagation of religious truth and modern education were the main missions of Israel and should be made available not only to Jews but to all mankind. He thus proclaimed education and knowledge as essential pillars of modern Judaism, and, in turn, of a modern Jewish identity.11 Wertheimer, who had demanded political equality and cultural-religious modernization, was also deeply influenced by French ideas and openly absorbed and adopted them. In common with Jellinek, Wertheimer perceived the idea of an international alliance fighting for universal rights as a perfect symbol of modernity.12 He also supported the reorganization of Jewish education and learning and publicly declared that the neutralization of the so-called ‘poison of prejudices’ (antisemitism) could be achieved and the ‘period of darkness’ could be overcome.13
Influenced by the AIU’s ideas and its self-declared mission civilisatrice, education emerged as a key element in the strategy of the Viennese-Jewish elite to counterbalance anti-Jewish sentiment, strengthen Jewish emancipation and integration and modernize Jewish communities, especially in the so-called ‘East’, which comprised the Eastern territories of the Danube Monarchy and neighbouring countries such as the Russian Empire or Romania. The strong support for the new progressive ideas by Viennese Jews was labelled not only as a fight for Jewish rights, but also as a struggle for more generally proclaimed human rights. Jellinek and Wertheimer, therefore, called for a strong alliance of Western European Jewries in support of the ideals of emancipation, integration and modern education, which also influenced other leading Viennese Jewish figures. These ‘modern’ political and humanitarian ideas especially united the Viennese religious elite, but also influenced the economic and cultural elites in the Habsburg metropolis and reshaped the traditional Jewish identity. The highly acculturated elite, which was comprised of bankers, journalists, communal workers and religious authorities, was convinced that the Habsburg Empire had a duty to guide their so-called ‘half-wild’ neighbours into modernity and become the advocate of culture and justice in the ‘East’. They argued that Vienna, located at the edge of ‘enlightened’ and ‘civilized’ Western Europe had a natural duty to spread modernity into the ‘East’. The Viennese Jews were, therefore, eager to establish a national organization following the model of the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA), which had been founded in London in 1871. Even though leading figures such as Wertheimer propagated a brotherly union between Paris, London and Vienna, the Viennese community leaders—in common with their British counterparts—were committed to the notion that a national organization was better placed to serve universalist ideas.14 In 1872, leading Jewish aid organizations organized a conference in Brussels which prompted the Viennese Jewish delegation to form an independent association.15 The Viennese-Jewish elite subsequently founded the IAzW in 1872/73 and began promoting their own understanding of modernity. The Viennese Allianz placed a strong emphasis on the improvement and reform of Jewish education in the Danubian Monarchy, and especially in the Eastern crownlands of Galicia and Bucovina, and supported the fight against any kind of oppression and persecution of Jews.16 Despite the foundation of a national organization, the board of the Vienna Allianz strongly supported the continuation of close links between the Western-European Jewish centres. Indeed, Moritz Friedländer, secretary of the Vienna Allianz and later of the Baron Hirsch Stiftung (BHS), declared the inner unity of the alliances as essential elements in the fight for modernity and progress, especially in Galicia.17 Wertheimer referred to the cooperation between Vienna and Paris as ‘notre entente cordiale’,18 which would secure the ‘regeneration’ of Galicia, the ‘East’ and other regions of the world. Wertheimer and Jellinek even presented Paris, London and Vienna as centres in which the process of modernization had already begun to take place and progress based on an enlightened and modern education were immanent. The three Jewish centres grouped under the slogan of the ‘West’ became an important signifier for the unity of a modern and progressive European Jewry and formed a central point of reference for Viennese-Jewish identity. I...