Improving the Volk: Leon Kellner and the Jewish Toynbee Hall Movement (1900–39)

Abstract

The Jewish Toynbee Hall movement—part moral crusade, part adult education—has almost entirely escaped the attention of historians, as has its prime mover, Leon Kellner. Modeled on London's Toynbee Hall, the first Jewish Toynbee Hall opened in Vienna in December 1900; within a few years, others opened across Habsburg Austria and in Germany and Romania. A Zionist project, the Toynbee Halls were taken over by Bnai Brith in Germany and Austria but remained in nationalist hands further east, part of a Jewish public sphere—reading rooms, newspapers, libraries, lecture halls—that produced, consumed, and disseminated Jewish knowledge and culture. Kellner, one of Theodor Herzl's first and closest confidants, was a Galician who became a renowned Shakespeare scholar, public intellectual, and politician. The article aims to begin to write the Jewish Toynbee Halls and Kellner back into history.