“EVERY VIENNESE HAS A BOHEMIAN GRANDMOTHER“: BOHEMIAN & MORAVIAN JEWS IN THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE

The gravestones of Josef Weiss, medical doctor, and Agnes Weiss, his wife, my great-great grandparents, Eywanowitz (Ivanovice na Hane)

„Every Viennese has a Bohemian grandmother”, this popular Viennese saying is partly true for me as well, but she was a Moravian and not a Bohemian grandmother because Lola was born in Eywanowitz (today Ivanovice na Hane) in Moravia in 1902 as the second daughter of Leopoldine, née Weiss, and Ignaz Sobotka, a beer brewer. Soon after her birth the family moved to Vienna because Ignaz started to work for the brewery in Kaiser Ebersdorf. She did not speak any Czech, but told me some lines of Czech nursery rhymes she still remembered and she spent her childhood holidays at the house of relatives in Znaim (Znojmo). In 2015 I visited for the first time the little village of Eywanowitz and saw the church, the castle and the brewery. In 2017 I discovered, to my great surprise, a Jewish cemetery that was preserved between a petrol station and a sewage treatment facility on the outskirts of the village and accessible to the public. To my even greater astonishment I spotted among the graves the well-preserved gravestones of my great great-grandparents Josef Weiss, general practitioner, who died in 1901, and Agnes Weiss, his wife, who died in 1902.

Jewish cemetery in Eywanowitz

In the 16th century larger Jewish communities existed already in Moravia, contrary to the Habsburg lands, for instance in Nikolsburg (Mikulov) Trebitsch (Trebic) and Proßnitz (Prostejov). The Jews had been expelled from the imperial cities at the end of the 15th century and mostly lived on the estates of the landed nobility in smaller villages. The Bohemian capital city of Prague hosted the biggest Jewish community, next to Frankfurt, of Ashkenazi Jews. Those were Jews who had originally settled along the Rhine River in Western Germany and Northern France and continually moved eastward out of the Holy Roman Empire in the late Middle Ages in the wake of pogroms. But the majority of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia lived in small villages dispersed across the countryside. After the pogrom of Vienna of 1670 many Viennese Jews fled to Bohemia and Moravia, but also to Hungary where they could settle on the estates of the Hungarian nobility, like the Counts Palffy. The majority of Hungarian Jews lived in the part of Hungary that was still under Osman rule which can be explained by the more tolerant religious policy of the Osman Empire which guaranteed relatively better legal security for Jews than in the Habsburg lands.

JEWS IN THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN MONARCHY

Synagogue Pecs, Hungary

The first mentioning of Jews on the territory of Austria proper goes back to the “Raffelstettner Customs Regulation” which was formulated between 903 and 906. The first Jews came as travelling merchants who traded between the Carolingian Empire, where they were already mentioned in the 8th century, and the Slav territories in the East. At that time several Jewish merchants had already settled on the territory of the duchy of Bavaria, of which Austria was a part. The Jews were expelled from the duchy of Austria several times. After the battle of Mohacs 1526 and the expansion of the Habsburg Empire into the Danube basin including now Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary many Jews who lived in the kingdom of Bohemia moved to Vienna and the surrounding lands, but they fled again to Bohemia after another pogrom of Viennese Jews between 1669 and 1671 because bigger Jewish communities had already existed there in the 16th century. In Moravia the Jews were expelled from the cities already in the 15th century and mostly lived on noble estates on the countryside. Also in Hungary bigger Jewish communities were established on the estates of the Hungarian nobility after they had been driven out of the cities. But most of the Jews in the Eastern Danube basin in the 17th century lived on the territory that was still part of the Osman Empire because the more tolerant attitude of the Osmans towards Jews guaranteed them relatively more legal security.…

THE DANUBE REGION UNTIL 1918: MOSAIC OR MELTING POT OF CENTRAL EUROPE

Budapest, market hall

The Canadian historian William Hubbard showed how tightly social, economic and demographic developments in the second half of the 19th century in Cisleithania, the western Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were linked to the migrational processes and the minorities issue. In the seven biggest cities in this area, namely Vienna, Graz, Trieste, Prague, Brno, Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv and Krakow, the share of the population born in these cities was rather small. As in other European and American cities urbanisation was fed by migration from the countryside, not by higher birth rates in the cities. In Vienna you had in 1880 a share of immigrants of 65 %. Especially in Vienna immigration was a hot issue of social and political debate. The dynamisms of migrational processes and the political, economic and social status of minorities in the 19th and 20th century were undoubtedly due to urbanisation and industrialisation processes. Immigration followed the allocation of capital, but also traditional migrational processes continued that added to the numbers of already existing minority groups dispersed across the Danube region. One should not forget that migration was already a central phenomenon of the pre-industrial society here.…

FINANCE AND INDUSTRIAL INVESTMENT IN THE HABSBURG EMPIRE

Sparkasse Karlsbad, Bohemia

 

Industrialisation and the industrial boom in Cisleithania, the western part of the “Dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy”, boosted the confidence of Austrian liberalism, while the crash of 1873 weakened it again considerably. The Gründerzeit (literally: founding time) resulted from a combination of several factors, a mushrooming financial sector willing to invest in the economy, an expanding rail network making demands on the iron industry and technical innovation in various coal-consuming industries, all of this interacting to produce an economic leap forward. As in the 1850s the railway expansion spurred financial innovation, the Gründerzeit was characterised by a blossoming of banking institutions. After the financial crisis of 1857/58 most private bankers experienced a serious downturn, but finance grew again from 1867, the founding of the dual monarchy, via the multiplication of joint stock banks through the established Creditanstalt, associated with Anselm Rothschild, and the Niederösterreichische Escomptegesellschaft. Utilising high profits, the banks helped sponsor the growth of joint stock companies, 1005 of which received charters in the years 1867-73. Vitkovice, controlled by Rothschild, led the way in the adoption of the Bessemer process by the monarchy’s major iron works by 1870, along with puddling, the rolling mill and increasingly the use of coke instead of charcoal. Chief among them was the Bohemian Iron Company, centred at the coal-mining town of Kladno near Prague, which had emerged from the amalgamation of three predecessors in 1857. The coal production received a powerful impetus from technical innovations in a series of industries in the 1860s, like flour milling, sugar refining, paper making and of course the textile industry.…