Vienna 1897, New York 2025?
A city that was a center of culture, finance, and political power. with a large and thriving Jewish community elected an antisemitic mayor. The impact on two residents of that city would change the Jewish world forever. What are the lessons we can learn from that today?
The city was Vienna. In the early 19th century, it was the hub of European power politics. The 1815 Congress of Vienna established a new order for Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. Culture, especially music, thrived in the hometown of Mozart and Beethoven. Austria, like most of Europe confined Jews to ghettoes and limited the number of professions in which Jews could engage. Jews were impoverished and on the margins of society.
In 1848, revolutions broke out throughout Europe. Many Jews participated, believing that a new liberal order would lead to the emancipation of the Jews and the integration of Jews into the wider society. In Austria, Emperor Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his nephew Franz Josef. A new Constitution for what would become the Austro – Hungarian Empire stated that in the future civic and political rights would not be dependent on religion. In 1849, Franz Josef permitted the establishment of an autonomous Jewish Community. In 1860 Jews were permitted to own land and engage in all professions. By 1867, all barriers to Jewish participation in Austro – Hungarian life had been removed. In 1882, Franz Josef told his ministers, “I will tolerate no Jew baiting in my empire.”
A golden age for Viennese Jewry ensued. Jews became doctors, lawyers, professors, civil servants, bankers, and financiers. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and others helped transform Vienna into a center of literature, art, and culture. In 1895, the first Jewish Museum in Europe opened in Vienna. Yet anti-Semitism still lurked. Many in the working class of Vienna resented Jewish success and blamed Jews for taking their jobs.
Stepping into a situation where Jews were ingrained in the fabric of Viennese life, but anti-Semitism was rampant was Karl Lueger. He incited the working-class masses and gained the support of those in the middle and upper class who stood to gain by Jews being put in their place. Lueger accused Jewa as having a disproportionate addiction to monetary profits,” and “expropriation of the Indigenous population.” In 1895, Lueger’s Christian Social Party won two thirds of the seats in the Vienna Municipal Council and Lueger was elected Mayor. Franz Josef vetoed his election. For two years, the council continued to elect Lueger while Franz Josef vetoed the elections. Finally, in 1897, Franz Josef relented and Lueger became Mayor.
Many people remember Lueger as one of Vienna’s greatest Mayors. He built hospitals, schools, roads, gas, electricity, and water lines, and the first modern public transportation system. Yet anti-Semitism was at the heart of his political persona. Quotas were instituted for Jews in civil service, high schools, and universities. To head the Vienna Opera, Gustav Mahler, the Jewish composer converted to Catholicism. Yet anti-Semitism continued to hound him, and he eventually moved to New York, where he would transform the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic into world class cultural institutions.
According to many historians, Lueger did not believe his own anti-Semitic rhetoric. He had Jewish friends and visited synagogues. There were jews who supported him politically. Jewish life in Vienna continued to flourish as Jews relied on Franz Josef to protect them from the hatred of the masses.
Lueger’s most lasting impact on the Jewish world is his influence on two people who lived in the Vienna of his time.
Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907and was twice rejected for admission to the Vienna School of Fine Arts. In Mein Kampf, Hitler described Vienna as “the school of my life.’ It was while aimlessly wandering the streets that Hitler first encountered Torah observant Jews saying, “the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.” Hitler began to take an avid interest in politics and became a follower of Leuger. He admired Lueger’s ability to incite crowds and to use anti-Semitism as the basis of a political platform and would later tell Josef Goebbels, the infamous Nazi propaganda chief, that Leuger was his political mentor. Summing up his year in Vienna, Hitler wrote, “for me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti-Semite.” Hitler left Vienna in 1913. He would return twenty-four years later as a conquering hero who incorporated Austria into his Third Reich.
Theodore Herzl’s family moved to Vienna in 1878 when he was 18. They were members of a Reform temple and great admirers of German culture. In a hint of things to come, Herzl left a dueling fraternity to protest an anti-Semitic speech given at a memorial for the composer Richard Wagner. After graduating from law school and practicing for a year, Herzl decided that his true talent was in writing, and he became a successful playwright. His plays such as His Majesty, The Poachers, and What Will People Say? were produced in the most prestigious theaters in Vienna.
In 1891, Herzl turned his talents to journalism becoming the Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse – New Free Press, the most distinguished newspaper in Austria. While in Paris, Herzl composed his most important play, The New Ghetto, in just 17 days. It is set in Vienna. Jacob Samuel, the plays leading figure, is a Jew whose attempts to build a successful legal career and assimilate in cosmopolitan Vienna were thwarted at every turn by anti-Semitism and discrimination. Jews were no longer confined to the ghetto but were despised by both the elites and the working class of society. Herzl’s diary describes The New Ghetto as being inspired by the realization that, “the curse still clings. We can not get out of the ghetto.” A month after completing The New Ghetto, Herzl wrote in his diary: “I had thought that through this eruption in playwriting I had written myself free of the (Jewish) matter. On the contrary, I got more and more deeply involved with it. The thought grew stronger in me that I must do something for the Jews.” It was at that point, that Herzl began writing his most important work, The Jewish State. It was written in 1895, the same year that Karl Leuger was first elected Mayor. Hitler would organize the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the year when Leuger took office. While historians and Herzl himself describe the Dreyfus Affair in France as having an enormous impact on Herzl’s thought, his diaries from the time, clearly show that Karl Lueger’s Vienna was the incubator of Herzl’s Zionism.
The introduction to The Jewish State makes the case clearly:
The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.
We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes, in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens, in vain do we stir to strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers.
Herzl got many things wrong. The state described in his utopian novel Altneuland bears little resemblance to the Israel of today. He thought that there would be harmonious relations with the local Arabs. His political program was based on winning the acceptance of the Ottoman Empire and the great powers of Europe and purchasing land legally. At a time when those powers dominated the world, Herzl apparently thought that the local population would acquiesce in the land being turned over to the Jews by the great powers. The Jewish National Fund, an arm of the Zionist movement purchased land from absentee Arab landowners. While the Jews owned the land legally, the Arab tenant farmers who lived and worked on the land saw things differently, leading to conflict.
It was thought that with the birth of a Jewish state, the Jews would become a “normal” people and that anti-Semitism would disappear. In reality Israel has become lightning rod for anti-Zionism a virulent form of anti-Semitism that masquerades in the language of human rights and social justice.
The need for a refuge for the Jewish people was felt most acutely in Eastern Europe, where Jews were still confined to the Pale of Settlement, barred from most professions, and subject to the mob violence of pogroms. Between 1880 and 1910 approximately 1 million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. At the same time groups as Hovevei Tzion were being formed to encourage Jewish migration to the Land of Israel. During the First Aliyah, which proceeded Herzl, 35,000, mostly Torah observant, Jews from Eastern Europe, migrated to the Land od of Israel and founded settlements like Petach Tikvah, Zichron Yaakov, and Rishon LeTziyon.
Many Rabbonim were opposed to emigration to both the treife medina – the United States and Eretz Yisroel, encouraging their followers to remain in the great communities and Torah institutions of Eastern Europe. Those communities and institutions were destroyed in the Holocaust. It was Israel and the United States that provided a refuge for the sherit ha-pelatah, saving remnant and where Torah institutions would once again flourish.
In the emancipated and enlightened Western Europe, many Jews including Herzl himself, believed that by fulling integrating into the societies in which they lived, Jews would win acceptance. Herzl’s experiences in Karl Lueger’s Vienna, and in France during the Dreyfus Affair convince him that no matter how hard we tried we would never win acceptance.
For Western European Jews, for whom emancipation was the holy grail, the dream did not die easily. Many of them denounced Zionism as jeopardizing the efforts of Jews to win acceptance in the countries where they lived. Reform Jews removed references to Israel from their prayer books. Many denied the entire concept of Jews as a people. They doubled down on their efforts to prove themselves as patriotic Germans and Austrians. We know how well that worked out.
For all his faults, Herzl got the big question right. He understood that anti-Semitism would exist wherever Jews went. His accomplishment was to unite impoverished Jews in Eastern Europe and Western European Jews disillusioned by the failure of assimilation to end anti-Semitism behind the vision of a Jewish State.
So, we come to the provocative question of today. Is New York of 2025 Vienna of 1897? No two historical situations are the same. Zohran Mamdani is not Carl Leuger. Leuger, by most accounts did not believe his own anti-Semitic rhetoric. He used antisemitism to incite the masses and attain political power. Mamdani’s anti-Semitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism, is part of the core of who he is. He found it necessary to proclaim that “anti-Semitism has no place in New York,” to win political acceptance.
New York, much more so than Vienna, is a city that Jews helped build and where Jewish culture pervades the city. Yiddish words like chutzpah are familiar to all New Yorkers. Jewish foods like bagels are mainstream. It is our city.
Yet the warning signs are there. In a city where Jews are 11% of the population, we are victims of two thirds of the rising number of hate crimes. Anti-Semitism has become mainstream in education and the media. Anti-Semitic politicians like Mamdani have won growing acceptance.
Last Friday was July 4, the 249th anniversary of the birth of the United States. Last Thursday was July 3, the 121st anniversary of the passing of Theodore Herzl. There is a lesson in the juxtaposition of the two.
July 4 reminds us of the good fortune that we have to live in the greatest country in the history of the world, where Jews have thrived and been accepted as nowhere before. George Washington wrote, “may the children of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” For the most part, that promise has been kept.
Theodore Herzl’s work reminds us that while Jews in America have had a great run it won’t last forever.
While Herzl deserves credit for creating a practical political program, the vision is much older.
Hashem, your G-d will bring back your returnees and will be merciful towards you; and He will return and gather you from all the peoples that Hashem, your G-d has dispersed you there. If your exiled one will be at the edge of the heavens, from there will Hashem your G-d gather you and from there he will take you. And Hashem your G-d will bring you to the land that your forebears inherited and you will inherit it. Devarim 30:3-5
For 2,000 years this vision was something our ancestors could only hope and dream and pray for. Now, it is within our grasp.
It is not time for American Jews to close the book, but it is time to turn the page. We don’t have to wait till we are forced to flee. We can walk with our heads held high, bringing our families and our material possessions with us. It is time to return to the land where we became a nation, where our Kings ruled, and our Prophets preached to write the next great page in the story of the Jewish people. To build our own future in the land where in the words of Menachem Begin, “Jews kneel only to G-d.”
