The Nobility, Jewish Assimilation, and the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Service in the Late Imperial Era

Abstract

On the surface, there would appear to be little cause to explore the connections between Jews and the bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian foreign office in the last decade before the outbreak of World War I. During the tenures of foreign ministers Count Alois Aehrenthal (1906–12) and Count Leopold Berchtold (1912–15), no Jew belonged to the diplomatic corps, and only one functionary from the central office in Vienna is known to have entered the service professing Judaism. The situation within the Ballhausplatz certainly did not reflect that found in the other mainstay of the unified Dual Monarchy, the Habsburg armed forces, which contained an extraordinarily high percentage of Jewish officers, particularly in the reserves. Our knowledge of the experience of Jews in Central Europe's other major foreign office, the Wilhelmstraβe in Berlin, merely reinforces the view that few formal ties existed between Jews and diplomacy.