From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
the Jewish community in Vienna had grown to be the largest in Germanspeaking Europe; it substantially contributed to the city's improving economy
     

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by engaging in business on a grand scale with the nobility and clergy and on a much smaller scale with ordinary townspeople and peasants.
    2 On the other hand, the usurious moneylending of some Viennese Jews, even though it was one of the few occupations legally open to Jews, and even though it was indispensable to maintaining the luxurious lifestyle of Austrian dukes, aroused both the envy and distaste of Christians.
The tolerance of the Roman Catholic church toward the collection of interest on loans by Jews served a dual purpose: the church did not have to abandon its condemnation of usury while it could permit its existence in practice; second, usury gave the Jews a new reason for being damned. Christians were already ill-disposed toward Jews because the Catholic church had diabolized them not only for their rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, but also because the church held them collectively and hereditarily responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus or, in other words, the murder of God. The Jews were thus doubly accursed for being exploiters and deicides. The religious and economic arguments reinforced each other and the picture of the Jew as a usurer became permanently fixed in the popular mind. 3
As early as the First Crusade, at the end of the eleventh century, Jews had also been widely viewed as the children of the Devil and agents employed by Satan to combat Christianity. By the twelfth century they were being accused by the lower clergy of murdering Christian children, desecrating the consecrated wafer (so that they could murder the body of Jesus over and over), and poisoning wells. 4
Although such allegations were commonplace in the late Middle Ages, they usually resulted in overt persecution of Jews only during times of severe economic or social crisis. Such was the case in 1338 when poor harvests in Lower Austria drove many Austrian peasants to Jewish moneylenders who were then accused of poisoning wells and sacrilege against consecrated wafers. Far worse was in store for the Jews as a result of the black plague, which ravaged Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. Jews were accused of starting the epidemic by poisoning wells in order to stamp out Christianity. Thousands of them were murdered throughout Europe even though Pope Clement VI declared their innocence. In Mühldorf, in the archbishopric of Salzburg, fourteen hundred Jews of all ages and both sexes were burned to death in 1348. The Jews of Upper Austria were far more fortunate. Duke Albrecht, one of those princes who realized the economic value of the Jews, managed to protect the majority of them in his duchy the following year. 5
Not all Austrian rulers were so enlightened, or at least so rational, as Duke Albrecht, however. In the early fifteenth century, the Habsburg dynasty, no
     

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longer believing that it needed Jews, took away their means of earning a living. In 1420, new charges of desecration and aiding the Bohemian heretic, Jan Hus, and supplying his followers with arms were used as pretexts by Archduke Albrecht V to destroy the Jewish community of Vienna, which numbered between 1,400 and 1,600. In reality, indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders resulting from the Hussite wars, along with increased religious fanaticism, were the chief motivations behind the archduke's actions. Poorer Jews were set adrift in the Danube. Many Jews who were imprisoned in the synagogue committed suicide. The remaining 214 men and women who refused baptism were burned alive outside the city's walls on 12 March 1421. Jewish property was expropriated and Jewish children were forcibly baptized. The events of 142021 earned Vienna the title of "the City of Blood" in the memory of Jews.
    6
The Jews were officially banned from Vienna "forever" in 1431. The Renaissance emperor Maximilian, accusing them of

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