Early Jewish history in Austria is fragmentary, but dates back to the Roman Empire, when Jews arrived in the region with the Roman legions. The first written reference to a Jewish presence in Austria goes back to the twelfth century, when, after the first Crusades, Jews fled persecution or were expelled from the cities of the Rhine valley. During that time Emperor Frederick II issued his famous Charter of Privileges, which granted wide autonomy to Vienna’s Jewish community. In the late thirteenth century and throughout the fourteenth centuries, this community evolved into the most prominent one in all the Germanic states, as much for demographic reasons as for its heightened influence.
Beginning in the late fourteenth century, persecution of Jews multiplied throughout Austria. In 1406, following a synagogue fire, citizens attacked Jewish houses. Several years later, in the wake of a pogrom, many Jews were massacred, while others were expelled from Vienna and their children were forced to convert. After such persecution, only a small number of Jews continued to live in Vienna, totally illegally. By 1512, only twelve Jewish families remained in Vienna, a situation that persisted throughout the sixteenth century.
During the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-48, the Jews suffered greatly during Vienna’s occupation by soldiers of the imperial army. In 1624, Emperor Ferdinand II ordered the Jewish community to live in a ghetto located in the Unter Werd. In the mid-seventeenth century, a wave of anti-Semitic hatred engulfed Vienna once more. The poorest Jews were expelled from the city, while others, dispossessed of their belongings, were ultimately forced out and the Grand Synagogue was transformed into a Catholic church.
In 1693, Vienna, now in financial disarray, decided to readmit the Jews within its walls. Only the wealthiest were permitted to return, however, and then only under the status of “tolerated subjects” burdened by heavy taxes. Practice of their religion was authorised only in private homes. As the nineteenth century progressed, Austria’s Jewish community enjoyed the increasing freedom, which culminated in 1849 with the granting, in theory, of equal rights to different faiths. In the latter half of that century, Vienna’s Jewish population grew rapidly with the massive arrival of Jews from the empire’s other regions, including Hungary, Galicia, and Bukovina.
In 1826, a magnificent synagogue had opened. By the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna had some fifty-nine synagogues of various denominations, as well as a wide network of Jewish schools. By 1923, Vienna’s Jewish community had grown to become the third largest in Europe, with many Jews starting to gain access to the liberal professions. With the “Ausgleich” between Austria and Hungary in 1867, Jews finally gained full citizen rights. Between 1848 and 1938, the Jewish Austrian population enjoyed a period of prosperity beginning with the start of regime of Franz Joseph I of Austria who bestowed on the Jewish population equality of rights saying, “the civil rights and the country’s policy is not contingent in the people’s religion”.
During the First World War, 36,000 Jews from Galicia moved to Vienna. In 1918, there were 300,000 Jews in thirty-three communities within Austria, with 200,000 living in Vienna. The Treaty of St. Germain, in 1919. following World War I guaranteed the Jews minority rights. A total of 200,000 Jews lived in the new, tiny Austria. Eastern-European Jews were generally much more conservative than the assimilated, wealthy Jews of Vienna, and tensions increased.
In 1938, Austria had a Jewish population of about 192,000. After a prolonged period of economic stagnation, political dictatorship, and intense Nazi propaganda inside Austria, German troops entered the country on March 12, 1938. They received the enthusiastic support of most of the population. Austria was incorporated into Germany the next day. Following the Anschluss, the Germans quickly extended anti-Jewish legislation to Austria. The German racial Nuremberg Laws were immediately applied to Austria, so that people with one Jewish grandparent were deemed to be Jewish, even if they or their parents had converted to another faith, so that 201,000 to 214,000 people were caught by these anti-Jewish laws.
Jews were expelled from all cultural, economic and social life in Austria. Jewish businesses were aryanised and either sold for a fraction of their value or seized outright. Jewish citizens were humiliated as they were commanded to perform different menial tasks, without any consideration of age, social position or sex. On November 9, “the Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) was carried out in Germany and Austria. Synagogues all over Austria were looted and burned by the Hitler Youth and the SA. Jewish shops were vandalised and looted and some Jewish homes were destroyed. During that night, 27 Jews were murdered, and many others beaten. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Nazis blamed the Jews and fined them 1 billion marks. As repayment, the government seized Jewish property and kept insurance money owed to Jewish people.
The Mauthausen concentration camp was established in the summer of 1938 and became the main Nazi camp in Austria. Mauthausen concentration camp was a special penal camp with a harsh regimen. Inmates in the punishment detail, were forced to carry heavy stone blocks up 186 steps from the camp quarry. The steps became known as the “Stairway of Death.” During the war, forced labour using concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important to German armaments production. In 1944, subcamps were established near armaments factories throughout northern Austria and staff at Mauthausen administered more than 60 subcamps, where thousands of prisoners were worked to death.
After the Anschluss, all Jews were effectively forced to emigrate from Austria. Over 100,000 Jews fled Germany for other countries after Kristallnacht. People leaving were required to have numerous documents approving their departure from different departments. They were only allowed to take clothes and household items, so nearly everything of value was left behind. They had to pay a departure ‘tax’, which was a large percentage of their entire property. Departure was only possible with a visa to enter another country, which was hard to obtain.
Some foreign officials assisted by issuing far more visas than they were officially allowed to. The Chinese consul to Austria Feng-Shan Ho, risking his own life and his career, with the aid of his Catholic Viennese staff, rapidly approved the visa applications of thousands of Jews seeking to escape the Nazis. The last Jews left legally in 1941. Those who remained endured the full horrors of the Nazi terror, and more than 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Anton Schmid was an Austrian recruit in the Wehrmacht who saved Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania. Put in charge of an office to return stranded German soldiers to their units in late August 1941, he began to help Jews after being approached by two pleading for his intercession. Schmid hid Jews in his apartment, obtained work permits to save Jews from the Ponary massacre, transferred Jews in Wehrmacht trucks to safer locations, and aided the Vilna Ghetto underground. It is estimated that he saved as many as 300 Jews before his arrest in January 1942. He was executed on 13 April.
Soviet and American forces occupied Austria in April and May 1945. In 1945, Austria was a reluctant host to approximately 1,432,000 refugees, including both DPs and Volksdeutsche expellees. That number quickly diminished through rapid repatriation in the first year after the war’s end. By 1947, only 520,591 refugees remained on Austrian soil. Four years after the Nazi defeat, the expellee population in postwar Austria numbered 310,000. After the war, many emigrated to Israel after its formation in 1948.
A small community did establish itself in Vienna and, in 1968, there was a small Jewish day school, a Jewish hospital, and an elderly home. Vienna became a stopping point in the 1970s for Soviet Jews emigrating from Russia, who were expected to continue they journey toward Israel or the United States. A number of them wound up staying.
In July 1991, the Austrian government composed a statement acknowledging Austria’s participation in the crimes of the Third Reich. In March 1993, the synagogue in Innsbruck, Tyrol, which had been destroyed in 1938, was reopened. In November 1993, the Jewish Museum of the city of Vienna was opened in Vienna. In 1994, the library of the Vienna Jewish community was re-opened. The Museum Judenplatz in Vienna opened in October of 2000 and is the national memorial to the Austrian Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In May 1995, the Reform Jewish congregation Ohr Chadash celebrated its fifth anniversary.
In 2018, approximately 9,000 Jews lived in Austria. The majority are in Vienna, with smaller communities in Baden, Bad Gastein, Graz, Innsbruck, Linz, and Salzburg. The present-day Austrian Jewish community is primarily made up of Holocaust survivors and their families, returning Austrian expatriates, refugees from the former Soviet Union and other parts of eastern Europe, and Iranian Jews. The only synagogue in Vienna to survive the Holocaust is the Stadttempel, built in 1826. There are four Jewish kindergartens and four day schools in Austria offering Jewish primary and high school education. The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation operates nursery, elementary, and secondary schools.