Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites engages with and challenges some key narratives of one of the darkest periods in the history of Vienna; the rise and sustained presence of organised, politically directed antisemitism in the city between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Sketching out first the longer-term background, it then focuses on central players in the antisemitic Christian Social movement, which flourished through an ideology of exclusion and prejudice. The work is built on considerable original research into both bourgeois social organisations and activists from the lower clergy, but it also exposes the role played in the development of antisemitism by the senior clergy in Vienna. In addition to a close examination of the antisemitic aspects of the Christian Socials, it analyses how other major social debates in this period impacted on their development as a group: national struggles, especially the desire for German unification; responses to the waves of poverty and social unrest that swept over Europe; and conservative and clerical reactions to modernity, such as liberalism and democracy – debates with a resonance far beyond Vienna. Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites tells its story across this long period, and for the first time in such detail, to give room to the gestation in ‘respectable’ society of antisemitism, an ideology that seemed to be dying in the 1860s, but which was revived and given new strength from the 1880s onwards, even surviving challenges from the more widely known Red Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s.