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By Root 1679 0

‘the nation’, because there was none. In the Austrian half of the Emperor Franz Josef’s dominions, unlike in the Hungarian half, there was no single ‘country’ with a single ‘people’ theoretically identified with it. Under such circumstances for Jews to be ‘German’ was not a political or national but a cultural project. It meant leaving behind the backwardness and isolation of shtetls and shuls to join the modern world. The city fathers of the town of Brody in Galicia, 80 per cent of whose population was Jewish, had petitioned the emperor long ago to make German the language of school education, not because the emancipated citizens of Brody wanted to be like beer-drinking Teutons, but because they did not want to be like the Hasidim with their miracle-working hereditary wunderrabbis or the yeshiva-bokhers explicating the Talmud in Yiddish. And that is why middle-class Viennese Jews, whose parents or grandparents had migrated from the Polish, Czech and Hungarian hinterlands, demarcated themselves so decisively from the Eastern Jews.

It is no accident that modern Zionism was invented by a Viennese journalist. All Viennese Jews knew, at least since the 1890s, that they lived in a world of anti-Semites and even of potentially dangerous street anti-Semitism. ‘Gottlob kein Jud’ (Thank God it wasn’t a Jew) is the immediate reaction of a (Jewish) passer-by to the cries of newspaper vendors on the Vienna Ring, announcing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the opening scene of Karl Kraus’s wonderful The Last Days of Humanity. There was even less reason for optimism in the 1920s. There was no doubt in most people’s minds that the governing Christian-Social Party remained as anti-Semitic as its founder, Vienna’s celebrated mayor Karl Lueger. And I still recall the moment of shock when my elders – I was barely thirteen – received the news of the 1930 German Reichstag election, which made Hitler’s National Socialists the second-largest party. They knew what it meant. In short, there was simply no way of forgetting that one was Jewish, even though I cannot recall any personal anti-Semitism, because my Englishness gave me, in school at least, an identity which drew attention away from my Jewishness. Britishness probably also immunized me, fortunately, against the temptations of a Jewish nationalism, even though Zionism among the central European young generally went together with moderate or revolutionary socialist views, except for the disciples of Jabotinsky, who were inspired by Mussolini and now govern Israel as the Likud party. Of course Zionism had a greater presence in Herzl’s city than among indigenous Jews in, say, Germany where, until Hitler, it attracted only an untypical fringe. There was no way of overlooking the existence either of anti-Semites or of the blue-white football club Hakoah, which faced my father and Uncle Sidney with a problem of conflicting loyalties when it played the visiting British team Bolton Wanderers. However, the vast majority of emancipated or middle-class Viennese Jews before Hitler were not, and never became, Zionist.

We had no idea what dangers threatened the Jews. Nobody had, or could have. Even in the benighted pogrom-ridden corners of Carpathian Europe and the Polish–Ukrainian plains from which the firstgeneration immigrants came to Vienna, systematic genocide was inconceivable. In case of serious trouble, the old and experienced argued in favour of keeping a low profile, taking evasive action and staying on the right side of such authorities as were in a position to protect them, and might have an interest in doing so, or at least an interest in re-establishing law and order, however inequitable, on their domains. The young and revolutionary called for resistance and active self-defence. The old knew that, sooner or later, things would settle down again; the young might dream of total victory (e.g. world revolution) but how could they imagine total destruction? Neither actually expected a modern country permanently to get rid of all its Jews, something that had not happened since