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to say that there were three major ingredients of Austrian Nazism: political anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism, and the clash between the rising national aspirations of the long-submerged Czechs of Moravia, especially Bohemia, and the desire of the German-speaking inhabitants of those crown-lands to preserve their superior economic and political position. A similar, though somewhat less intense, conflict occurred in Styria and Carinthia between the German- and Slovene-speaking inhabitants of those crownlands.

     
    Austrian Anti-Semitism
    Although religious anti-Judaism in Austria dates back to the Middle Ages, modem racial anti-Semitism has its Austrian origins in the emancipation of the Jews, completed in 1867, 1 and the Industrial Revolution, which followed. These phenomena were accompanied by a rapid migration of Jews from the monarchy’s eastern provinces and the Russian Empire to Vienna. Whereas the capital city counted only 6,217 Jews out of a total population of 476,220 in 1857, by 1910 the comparative figures were 175,294 and 2,031,420.® Thirteen years later, following a mass immigration of war refugees, the city’s Jewish population reached 201,510 or 10.8 percent of the total population of 1,865,780. The Austrian capital now had the third largest Jewish population of any city in Europe. 3 Outside Vienna, however, the Jewish population was minuscule, amounting to well under 20,000 after the war. Thus, Austria’s Jewish population in the 1920s was only 3 percent of the
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    country’s total. 4 But this did not prevent a virulent brand of anti-Semitism from existing in the provinces.
    Emancipation and migration to the big cities of the Empire were accompanied by a remarkably rapid increase in Jewish involvement in higher education. By 1914, 27.5 percent of the students at the University of Vienna were of Jewish extraction, more than th/ee times their proportion of the city’s population. Almost 35 percent of the students at the city’s elite secondary schools, the Gymnasia, were also Jewish in 1913. On the other hand, the fact that Jewish enrollment was low, only 2.95 percent, at Vienna’s School of Agriculture (Hochschule fur Bodenkultur) in 1910, was seen by anti-Semites as proof that Jews were averse to dirt and manual labor. 5
    Austrian Jews used their newly acquired advanced education to enter the so-called free professions in large numbers. Whereas there were only 33 Jewish lawyers in Vienna in 1869, there were 394 of them in 1893 out of a total of 683. In the latter year, 48 percent of the medical students in Vienna were Jewish. 6 A large minority of the city’s university instructors were also Jewish. An English author estimated in 1913 that no fewer than 75 percent of the Viennese journalists were Jewish. 7 The editors of Socialist newspapers were nearly all Jewish. Hence, there was some truth in the Nazis’ description of the Viennese press as being “Jewish.” Yet the charge overlooked the fact that Jewish journalists, like other Jews, were hardly monolithic in their political views. Some even wrote for newspapers that were notoriously anti-Semitic. 8 Austrian anti-Semites also ignored the fact that Jews made up hardly more than one-fourth of 1 percent of postwar Austria’s civil service.
    The coming of the Industrial Revolution to Austria was to a large extent a Jewish enterprise. Most of the country’s bankers and many of its industrialists (especially in textiles, paper milling, and coal mining) were Jewish. 9 To a skilled artisan, the big industrialist with mass production seemed like a threat to his very existence. The same feeling prevailed among lower-middle-class merchants toward wealthy department-store owners. Even the poor Jewish peddler, though scarcely a product of the Industrial Revolution, was viewed by gentile businessmen as an unfair competitor. Certain trades, like furniture retailing and advertising, were 85 to 90 percent in Jewish hands by the eve of the