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sacrilege, ritual murder, and forgery, expelled them from Wiener Neustadt and Neukirchen in 1496. In 1498 the archbishop of Salzburg, responding to popular demand, also drove them out of the city, again "forever." Such expulsions, of course, were scarcely unique to Austria. Jews had been forced out of England in 1291, out of France beginning in 1394, and out of Spain in 1492.
Nevertheless, Jews were never entirely absent from Austria for long. Jewish physicians and merchants could almost always be found in Vienna, at least on a transient basis. During the sixteenth century, individual Jews were once again allowed to settle in Vienna by rulers who needed their services. By the end of the century a new Jewish community had been established. The Jews of this "second ghetto," which was officially founded in 1625, were mostly merchants, in contrast to the moneylenders of the first ghetto. The new Jewish merchants were usually not wealthy; however, they were important because they managed to establish new centers of trade after the old ones had been destroyed by the discovery of America, the Turkish conquest of Hungary in 1526, and the Thirty Years' War. They were also exclusively responsible for providing the Habsburgs and their armies with many of the necessities of warfare. By the mid-seventeenth century about five hundred families were living next to one of the branches of the Danube River in a district called Leopoldstadt, named after the reigning Austrian emperor Leopold I. 7
The second Viennese ghetto turned out to be far more short-lived than the first one. Prosperity was elusive in seventeenth-century Vienna, a city that was never out of the shadow of the Turkish armies only a few miles to the east. The end of the wars against the Protestants in 1648 left the Austrian emperor with no more apparent need for Jewish money. The logic of the Catholic Counter-
     

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Reformation also made it likely that it would be turned against all nonbelievers including Jews. Moreover, the Counter-Reformation and the wars of religion left Austria comparatively untouched by destruction, but as a result the disgust for religious bigotry and violence that appeared in some parts of Europe was never created here.
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Such bigotry became readily apparent in 1670 when Emperor Leopold I expelled all of the three to four thousand Jews of Vienna who refused baptism. The municipal government of Vienna accused the Jews of being "blasphemers, murderers of God's son, hateful to all Christians, and cursed by God." 9 The chief instigator of the expulsion, however, was Bishop Kollonitsch of Wiener Neustadt. But Leopold's court preacher, Abraham a Sancta Clara, was no less hostile toward Jews calling them "scum of the godless and the faithless" and blaming them for a recent plague. Leopold's Spanish wife, who was well known for her anti-Jewish feelings, interpreted a recent miscarriage and a fire in the imperial palace as omens that she should expel the Jews to avoid further misfortunes. Finally, the Christian merchants of Vienna had long been eager to rid themselves of their Jewish competitors. 10
Although some of the Jews who had been expelled from Vienna moved as far away as Brandenburg, where they were welcomed by the tolerant and farsighted Frederick William, the Great Elector, others moved only as far as the Bohemian crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. By 1693, Emperor Leopold, who was already feeling the financial loss of the absent Jews, allowed a small number of them to return, although they were required to make large initial payments for the privilege of settling in Vienna. The reestablishment of even a small number of Jewish families was enough to provoke Christian burghers once more into petitioning Emperor Karl VI to expel the "accursed and depraved Jews." 11
A hundred years later, in the middle of the eighteenth century, a small Jewish community once more existed in Vienna. Many of the newcomers were Sephardic Jews, who could trace