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

about half the teaching staff was also Jewish after 1890.
     

Page 32
Billroth objected to the large number of new Jewish medical students coming from Eastern Europe; their poverty and poor command of German, he assumed, would lower the academic standards of his college. In his book, Über das Lehren und Lernen der medizinischen Wissenschaften (About the Teaching and Learning of Medical Science) , published in 1875, he warned against the dangers of Jewish predominance in medicine. He argued that the Jewish students did not simply belong to a different religion but also to a different race. Although Billroth later reversed this view and actually became a member of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (League to Combat AntiSemitism), substantial damage was already done.
    22
Another member of the faculty at the University of Vienna who contributed to the idea of Jewish racial characteristics was Adolf Wahrmund. In his book Das Gesetz des Nomadenthums und die heutige Judenherrschaft (Law of Nomads and Contemporary Jewish Domination) , which he published in 1887, Wahrmund argued that the central Jewish racial characteristic was their need to wander, which had been created by their origins as nomads in the Sinai desert. This fact explained their shiftlessness in commerce and their rootless, cosmopolitan way of thinking, and their inability to build a state of their own in contrast to Aryans whose racial characteristics had been formed by their peasant ancestors. Wahrmund thus used secular and pseudoscientific environmental arguments to describe Jewishness instead of the traditional religious explanations. 23
Of the two Viennese academicians, Billroth appears to have had the greater influence on Austrian students. His assertion that Jews belonged to a separate race was enthusiastically received by gentile students at the University of Vienna even though the university had been a bastion of liberalism during the 1850s and 1860s. Most university students rejected religious anti-Judaism as reactionary and unenlightened. Racial antiSemitism, on the other hand, seemed modern and scientific. Moreover, the treatment of Jews as a separate race and not merely as a different religion would eliminate the opportunities for social and economic advancement Jews enjoyed in Central Europe when they converted to Christianity. 24
In the same year that Billroth published his book, a nationalistic student organization in Vienna called the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten (Reading Club of German Students) supported his racial thesis. Two years later a student fraternity (or Burschenschaft ) in Vienna called Teutonia was the first to make itself judenrein , followed the next year by another fraternity called Libertas. In both instances the exclusion was based on "race," not religion.
     

Page 33
Not even a pseudoscientific test was used, however, to determine race. Most Burschenschaften were satisfied with a simple declaration by the candidate that he knew of no Jewish ancestors.
    25
Once established in the Burschenschaften, antiSemitism developed a dynamics of its own. Actually, Jews had been underrepresented in the fraternities in relation to their proportion of the student population, and those who did belong tended to be wellassimilated German nationalists. These facts did not prevent them from being excluded from one fraternity after another during the 1880s; even the fraternities' Jewish alumni ( alte Herren ) were expelled. By 1890 all of the Burschenschaften of Vienna had become anti-Semitic. Even in the United States Greek letter societies began excluding Jews, beginning at the City College of New York in 1878. 26
The antiSemites of the Austrian Burschenschaften were well ahead of their fraternity brothers in Germany who, though nationalistic, were not specifically anti-Semitic in the 1870s, accepting new members without regard to their ancestry, political affiliation, or faith. Germany even had a national organization of students that