The Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

A Bewildering Variety of Ethno-Nations

More than 1.5 million Jews, who enjoyed full civil rights from the 1860s, lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1880. Like its Russian neighbor, this great empire at the center of Europe incorporated a bewildering variety of ethno-nations, and Jewish modernity there took shape as regional elites and nationalist movements jostled both with the imperial regime and with each other for sway. 

Already in 1867, the Hungarian aristocracy had won formal political equality and autonomy, recasting the Habsburg Empire as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although Polish aristocratic elites did not win quite the same formal parity, Austrian Galicia—populated largely by Ukrainians and Jews in a cultural sense—came under Polish-language cultural dominance. At the same time, local Germanic, Hungarian, and Polish elites all confronted the strengthening of local national movements (Czech, Ukrainian, South Slavic) in the territories under their control. 

Caught between Polish, Hungarian, and German Cultures

The large Jewish minority, with its variety of socially and culturally distinct groups, was not officially recognized as a nation as such—though as one headed further east, one found a Yiddish-speaking ethnoreligious community quite distinct from its Slovak, Polish, and Ukrainian neighbors. 

Politically, eastern Austro-Hungarian Jews were pulled between different cultures and competing political strategies. Growing numbers identified strongly with the dominant local ethnicities and cultures, with both political and cultural implications: Lwów and Kraków became centers of Jewish Polonism in this period, and many of the 638,000 Jews in the Hungarian part of the empire, which included Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, identified fully with Hungarian nationalism even as others cultivated one of the most extreme sorts of Orthodoxy and antimodernism to appear in the Jewish world of that era. 

In the German parts of Austria, as well as in Bohemia and Moravia, which had been exposed earlier to processes of economic modernization, the process of acculturation that had begun in the early nineteenth century was now well underway. And it was in the empire’s west, particularly the glittering capital Vienna and for different reasons Prague, that German remained the undisputed language of high culture. There, swelling populations of Jews of all sorts of backgrounds could take part in a transnational German-language high culture, as did for instance Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, and Franz Kafka.

Other factors complicated matters still further. Even as imperial society continued to see the Jews of the empire’s east as “barbaric” Ostjuden, by contrast with the Westjuden identified from mid-century with the German cultural universe, Jews themselves were on the move. In 1880, a total of 72,588 Jews lived in Vienna, but that number doubled to 146,926 within two decades. The Jewish populations of other cities in the empire swelled in similar proportions, adding to the populations of more Germanized, Magyarized, or Polonized Jews.

Subjects of the Empire, Loyal to the Emperor

Yet throughout all this variegation, many and probably most Jews, with the exception of the Hungarian and some Polonized elements, continued to identify less with one or another national group in the empire and more with the Austro-Hungarian emperor and the imperial state themselves—perhaps even more so as nationalist tensions and new forms of antisemitic sentiment bubbled up around them. 

Prague’s German-language culture was largely a Jewish creation, but the city’s Jewish elite identified with neither the ethnic German nationalists nor the Czech nationalists who struggled to control the city. Not least because the imperial state offered Jews fair treatment—the number of Jews in the Austrian officer corps was higher than anywhere else in the world with the exception of France—Jews won a reputation as especially Kaisertreu, loyal to the emperor.