At Home in an Antisemitic City: The Jews of Vienna before the Holocaust

Vienna was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe in the early twentieth century. These Jews, mostly immigrants from other parts of Austria-Hungary, especially Bohemia and Moravia (today’s Czech Republic), Hungary, and Galicia (today partly in Poland and partly in Ukraine), or their Viennese-born children happily acculturated into Viennese German culture and society. Some of them even became leading figures in Viennese culture. But all of them lived in a very antisemitic city, where the Christian Social Party, led by Karl Lueger, came to dominate politics in the late nineteenth century and in the interwar period. While the party never overtly discriminated against the Jews, it did create an environment that made the Jews nervous about their place in society.