Helga Embacher, Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Hanns Haas, Charlotte Natmessnig (Hrsg.): Sonderband 5. Vom Zerfall der Grossreiche zur Europäischen Union – Integrationsmodelle im 20. Jahrhundert (2000)

Von der alten zur neuen Ordnung - Marsha Rozenblit: The Crisis of National Identity: Jews and the Collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy

Marsha L. Rozenblit

Habsburg Austria. Not only had they achieved legal equality - emancipation - under the influence of liberalism in 1867, but the multinational empire proved to be their best protector from the antisemitism that had raged among many of the monarchy’s nationalities. Jews trusted the central government and its bureaucrats to protect their rights, and that government fulfilled their expectations. Moreover, the supranational Habsburg Monarchy, or rather its Austrian half, had allowed the Jews a great deal of latitude to assert Jewish ethnicity even as they adopted German, or Czech, or Polish culture. Because Habsburg Austria was not a nation state, because it was an old-fashioned dynastic, territorial state which never developed its own national identity, modernizing Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century had created a comfortable tri-partite identity that allowed them to assert staunch Austrian political loyalty, German, Czech, or Polish culture, and Jewish ethnic affiliation. Jews who adopted German culture, for example, did not have to consider themselves members of the German Volk. They were Austrians, members of the German Kulturnation, and Jews all at the same time. A supranational multinational state therefore benefited a religio-ethnic minority like the Jews. It afforded them the freedom to develop their identities as they liked.5

With the demise of this supranational state Jews confronted the new nation-states generally unwilling to allow them to divide their identities so neatly. These nationstates demanded that they adhere to the dominant national community even though antisemitic national leaders simultaneously declared the Jews unfit for membership. Moreover, the well-known Jewish allegiance to old Austria rendered the Jews suspect in the new states.

The Jews of the former Habsburg Monarchy thus faced a grave crisis right after World War 1. They now had to craft new national identities to fit the new states in which they lived: German-Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In Hungary, which was now a true Magyar nation-state, Jews had no trouble because they had already adopted Magyar identity. But Jews elsewhere found constructing new identities very difficult. The easiest part was political. Jews understood that it would do them no good to go into permanent mourning for Habsburg Austria, and they realistically declared their loyalties to the new states in which they lived. What was difficult was adopting the national identities of the new states. Jews who had embraced German, Czech, or Polish culture still could not think of themselves as members of those national communities, those Völker. They continued to think of themselves as adherents of German, or Czech, or Polish culture, but not as Germans, Czechs, or Poles. Indeed, although the old supranational state no longer existed, Jews hoped still to separate national and political identity. They saw themselves as loyal citizens of the states in which they lived and

5 For a fuller discussion see Rozenblit, Marsha L.: Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. New York, forthcoming.

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