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 trilingual Silesia especially it was “ein Gebot der Selbsterhaltung” for the Silesian Jewish communities to support a Jewish national identity.44 The Jewish nationalists in Czechoslovakia may have felt that their version of Jewish identity solved the dilemma of Jews in the new state, and they may have convinced themselves that they had become the dominant voice in Jewish affairs. Yet it is not at all clear how most Jews resolved the crisis of identity that they faced. There is no question that growing numbers of Jews, especially in Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia, began to assert a Jewish national identity. But Jews who identified with the Jewish nation did not necessarily abandon their German cultural identity. A Jewish national identity enabled them to convert their old Austrian tripartite identity into a new Czechoslovakian one, espousing loyalty to the multinational state and its benevolent old ruler, adherence to German, Czech, or Magyar language and culture, and at the same time to Jewish ethnic identity. Just as in the old Austria the Jews were jokingly referred to as the only Austrians in Austria, now Jews would be the only Czechoslovakians in Czechoslovakia. But not all Jews wanted to profess membership in the Jewish nation. The Czech Jews, those who had long identified with the Czech national movement, hoped for a growth in Czech identity among the Jews. Yet, although Jews increasingly learned Czech, the number of Jews who identified as members of the Czech nation did not grow significantly in the interwar period.45 German-speaking Jews who found it impossible to assume a Jewish national identity, even in the new political context, faced the most severe dilemma, especially in Bohemia. They thought of themselves as members of the German cultural community, and as Jews, but not in the Zionist sense. Undoubtedly most Jews in Bohemia persisted in their German cultural identity, and like the Zionists hoped that Czechoslovakia would indeed function like the old Austria, allowing them the luxury of a Czechoslovakian political identity, a German cultural identity, and a Jewish ethnic one. Reconstructing Identity in German-Austria In the rump state of German-Austria the situation was radically different and far more problematic. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Deutschösterreich was a nation-state in which the overwhelming majority of inhabitants considered themselves members of the German nation. In such a nation state it would be difficult for Jews to insist that they did not belong to the dominant nation, especially since they spoke its 44 OW: (13 December 1918), pp. 785-86. 45 According to census figures, in 1921,49.5 per cent of the Jews in Bohemia and 15.7 per cent of the Jews in Moravia identified as members of the Czech nation; in 1930, the figures were 46.4 per cent and 17.6 per cent respectively. See Mendelsohn, Ezra: The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington 1983, pp. 146, 159; Kieval : Making of Czech Jewry, pp. 195-96. 52
