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

not cause this increased ethnicity, but it certainly enhanced it, making many Jews realize that they could not join the Czech or German nation even if they wanted to.

The German-speaking Jews of former Habsburg Austria persisted in the identity they had developed during the monarchy because they felt comfortable with it even if it was not appropriate in the new political situation. They responded to the collapse of the monarchy with the hope that somehow the new states would allow them to adhere to their old identities. Czechoslovakia did give the Jews the opportunity to recreate a new tri-partite identity, even allowing them to register as members of the Jewish nation if they so chose. Austria proved less hospitable, but the interwar period was so chaotic and crisis-ridden that Jews simply adhered to their old identity even if it did not fit the situation in the new state. They too asserted political loyalty to Austria, German cultural affinity, and Jewish ethnic identity. Such identity may have been more suited to a multinational society than to the nation-state of the First Austrian Republic, but Austrian Jews clung to it because it best conformed to their deeply held convictions. Indeed, the multinational, supranational state proved more hospitable to the needs of an ethnic minority than the real or imagined homogeneous nation-states of the interwar period.

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