The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918 by Steven Beller

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918 by Steven Beller Ian Reifowitz Steven Beller. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 326, 5 maps, 25 b/w illus. Paper $29.99. ISBN 9781107464742. You might be wondering why a book on this topic, one whose title does not contain the word Jew or Jewish, is being reviewed in this journal. A fair question. It is not enough to answer by saying that Jews were pivotal players in this period of Austrian history, although they certainly were. The primary reason is that the author, Steven Beller, is a highly regarded scholar both of Austrian history overall as well as its Jews. This volume not [End Page 213] only pays more attention to Habsburg Jews than most surveys of Austria, but its author also reflects on interpretive aspects of their history, and fits them into his larger argument about the Monarchy. Beller’s first book was Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Beforehand, analyses of the explosion of modernist culture in Vienna and Habsburg Austria—a culture that helped shape the twentieth-century West—de-emphasized the disproportionate role played by Jews and those of Jewish descent. Beller countered that argument in 1989, and he distills his findings in this book, here placing them directly in the context of political and social developments in the Habsburg Monarchy. The most important elements of that culture, the author argued, “were developed against the national and establishment grain.” Jewish participation in this cultural milieu grew out of the “existential crisis” they faced after the victory of antisemitism and nationalism over liberalism in the Austrian political arena. (216) In his first book, and again here, Beller describes how Viennese Jews by 1900 came to be overrepresented in entrepreneurial fields and finance, having been excluded from owning land in the old system, and thus became the primary patrons of the arts. Their children became the majority in the highest levels of the educational system. In addition to their socioeconomic status, the Jews of the capital were placed in an “endangered and adversarial position” by political developments. The Habsburg Jewish elite were thus “cultural insiders and social and political outsiders,” and this gave the culture they produced “its ironic, and critical, edge.” (219) Beller connected this phenomenon to his broader argument about Habsburg history, in which he pushes back at the once revisionist, now largely dominant, argument that views the Monarchy more positively, as a home where, before 1914, its peoples co-existed reasonably peacefully. The Jewish experience highlights the reality that “nationalism and modernization [in Austria] . . . had losers too, including non-nationalized minorities such as acculturated Habsburg Jewry.” (219) Beyond this argument, which brings together what Beller has to say about both Habsburg Austria and its Jews, he recounts the major events in their entwined history. He also examines Hungary’s Jews, who, after the 1867 Compromise that essentially gave Hungary autonomy within the Monarchy, benefited from an arrangement in which those Jews who had previously adopted German culture instead acculturated as Magyars and identified as members of the Magyar nation. However, the author notes that post-1918 Hungary, shorn of two-thirds of its territory and all its linguistic minorities, no longer needed the support of its Jews. That Hungary enacted the first law in Central Europe capping the percentage of Jews in institutions of higher learning. Further examining the effects of the Monarchy’s demise on its Jews, Beller notes that in Austria, the postwar courts determined that Galician Jews living in Vienna at the end of the war were, despite their Habsburg citizenship, [End Page 214] not eligible for citizenship in the Republic of Austria because they were not German. Drawing parallels to policies that emerged before 1914, the author explained: “The racial definition of Jews in the interwar period was thus a development of Habsburg jurisprudence.” (281) Ultimately, argues Beller, the Habsburg Monarchy failed—and fell—because it could not embrace the so-called “Austrian Idea” . . . a sense of Austria having a special character, and indeed mission, of containing great diversity within unity.” (18) Many of those who urged it to embrace...