Free From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism by Bruce F. Pauley

first country in the world to develop a modern political anti-Semitic movement. This is not to say that antiSemitism did not exist in other countries. But antiSemitism as a well-organized political movement aimed against liberalism, socialism, and clericalism flourished first and most vehemently in Germany and very soon thereafter in the Germanspeaking parts of Austria. Even after its spread to France, England, Eastern Europe, and the United States, Germanspeaking Europe remained the center of the movement. 11
Academic AntiSemitism in Austria before the First World War
Although the racial component in Austrian antiSemitism was largely imported from Germany, nonreligious and "racial" antiSemitism first appeared in Austria even before the publication of Marr's book. Universities and other so-called Hochschulen or schools of higher learning were already espousing the new creed in the late 1870s at about the same time that Jewish enrollments were exploding. Unfortunately, the rapid increase in Jewish enrollments coincided with a downturn in the economy, which was not completely reversed until 1896. Nowhere was this first "Great Depression" more obvious than in the academically trained professions, especially between 1880 and 1900. Non-
     

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Jewish students in both Austria and Germany saw their careers threatened by the shortage of jobs and blamed their new Jewish classmates.
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Jewish enrollments in Austrian institutions of higher learning had been modest until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the years 1851 to 1855 there had been an average of only 484 Jews or 7.9 percent at all the Austrian universities and technical Hochschulen. Between 1876 and 1880 these figures rose sharply to 1,685 or 14.2 percent and reached a relative peak between 1886 and 1890 with 3,301 or 21.5 percent before the percentage of Jewish students began to decline, at least for the monarchy as a whole. 13 At the University of Vienna the number of Jews increased especially rapidly during the early 1880s from 1,298 in the winter semester of 1881 to 2,095 four years later. During the same period the Christian enrollment rose only slightly from 3,525 to 3,831. Thereafter, however, it continued to rise to 5,422 in 19034 while the number of Jewish students declined to only 1,693. 14
AntiSemites, however, either ignored this decline by citing only those years in which Jewish enrollment had been high, 15 or else simply invented inflated statistics. 16 They were also oblivious to the fact that many of the Jewish students were foreigners (well over a third in 191819) 17 who were likely to return to their homelands at the completion of their studies and not compete for positions in Austria.
Although academic antiSemitism in Austria was by no means confined to Viennait was also strong at the University of Innsbruck, for example, even though the Jewish student population never exceeded 1.5 percent before the First World War 18 it was most intense in the Austrian capital probably because more than half of all the Jewish students in the Austrian half of the monarchy were located in the Kaiserstadt . 19 Likewise, the percentage of Jewish students was substantially higher in Vienna, both at the university and at the Technical College, than elsewhere in the monarchy with the exception of the much smaller German University of Prague and the tiny University of Czernowitz in far away Bukovina. 20 Moreover, ethnic German students and professors in Prague were inclined to see Germanspeaking Jews as allies against the Czechs; in Graz and Innsbruck the primary enemies were the large minority of South Slav and Italian-speaking students rather than Jews. 21
The origins of racial antiSemitism among students at the University of Vienna can be traced to Dr. Theodor Billroth, a worldfamous German-born surgeon and professor at the Medical College of the University of Vienna. Jewish enrollment at the Medical College had been high since before the Revolution of 1848 and