March 5th, 2025, 7:00 pm - 8:15 pm
Assimilation and Identity in Jewish Vienna before World War II
The recording of this class is at https://youtu.be/oJcaALnvavs.
Large numbers of Jews migrated to Vienna in the decades before World War I. They migrated from other places in the Habsburg Monarchy: from Bohemia and Moravia (today’s Czech Republic), from Hungary, and from Galicia (today half in Poland and half in Ukraine), creating one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe (about 200,000 by 1920). In the capital they assimilated into Austro-German culture, but they retained a large measure of Jewish identity making them noticeable in the urban population. They occupied a unique niche in the economy of the city. They lived largely in Jewish neighborhoods, which meant that they attended school together, befriended and married each other, and created a large complex of Jewish organizations with articulated old or new forms of Jewish identity.
This class will explore the social dynamics of the Jewish community of Vienna as well as the various ways that they articulated their Jewish identity, whether through religious institutions, Zionism and Jewish nationalism, or simply ethnic solidarity. It will also evaluate Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt, to see to what extent the play may have been great theater but not good history.
Marsha Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. A social historian of the Jews of Central Europe, she is the author of two scholarly books: The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (1983) and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (2001). She has co-edited two books: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (2005) and World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (2017) and written over 35 scholarly articles on such topics as Jewish religious reform in nineteenth century Vienna, Jewish courtship and marriage practices in 1920s Vienna, and Jews and German culture in Moravia. She is currently working on a book on how Jews who left Nazi Austria and Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1941 created (or did not create) new homes in the places to which they fled, primarily Great Britain, British Mandate Palestine, and the US. She has served as the director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland (1998-2003) and president of the Association for Jewish Studies (2009-2011).
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