This fascinating volume represents an attempt to understand the nature of Viennese anti-Semitism—both its social base and its precise content—in the two decades before World War I. Daniel Vyleta seeks to ascertain the degree to which the Viennese, especially those who were not sympathetic to Viennese Christian Social mayor Karl Luegar, internalized stereotypes about Jews and passed them to the next generation, helping to prepare the way for the events of the 1930s and 1940s (5–6). The author focuses on a trio of interconnected and quintessentially modern elements—anti-Semitism, criminology, and the media—to answer some of the questions he poses. Indeed, criminological discourse of Jewish criminality was framed especially as a modern and rational criminality. Vyleta argues that popular thinking about criminals was not yet overshadowed by biological models but reflected the most popular genre of criminal narratives—the trial reports prevalent in the Vienna newspapers—that followed a logic in which criminal rationality, rather than biological determinism, defined the perpetrator. Nor was the popular knowledge of crime these newspaper accounts disseminated so much at odds with scientific views on crime as might have been supposed from reading much of the historiography on criminology (220). Moreover, Vyleta claims, scholarly engagement with criminality was more diverse than often realized.

Although there might have been good reason to anticipate a criminological construction of Jewish criminals as biological-racial Others, Vyleta argues this was not the case. Rather, it was the Roma who were physiologically Others, even criminality incarnate (53). Only slowly, claims Vyleta, did race turn into a key, if contested, unit of criminological analysis and begin to take on the more strictly biological meaning it would hold a generation later. There was, however, strong cultural identification of Jews with one crime: Mädchenhandel, or white slaving, which would generate its own scholarly discourse. Some contemporary observers described this “cowardly,” nonphysical crime as Jewish, a modern crime that was an extension of commercial activity. This interpretation highlighted the international dimension of Jewish criminality as well as the specter of a Jewish solidarity in crime that transcended the nation (57–61).

In his analysis of crimes, Vyleta relies heavily on Viennese newspapers, especially the racist, anti-Semitic Deutsches Volksblatt; the Christian Social Party's Roman Catholic, conservative, anti-Semitic Reichspost; and the populist Illustrierte Kronenzeitung, the most successful national newspaper in the late monarchy. Vyleta explains how crimes were reported, criminals were pictured, especially in the early days of illustrations (a number of which are reproduced here), and read. In the creation of the courtroom as “a social sphere of interaction,” the attendance of the public was crucial. Anti-Semites sought to construct Jewish crime as the product of deliberate and rational criminals and to construct Jewish criminality by reference to the entire social sphere of the trial (128). Reporters thus paid attention to the behavior of the audience: what they wore, their reactions, their sympathies. Female criminals, according to Vyleta, were particularly the subject of the “truth-seeking” (male) reporter's gaze.

Vyleta examines business crimes like con artistry, embezzlement, and fraud; murder, including ritual and sexual murder (Jewish involvement in violent crime was extremely rare); and sexual crimes, for example, prostitution and homosexuality. He explains the differing role anti-Semitism played in each trial because not all of the defendants were Jewish. Indeed, because almost any trial was open to the accusation of miscarriage of justice, Jewish forces could be identified as the primary instigators of judicial miscarriages, especially when Jews were involved in the wider network of the trial, including owning and publishing the newspapers in which accounts of the cases appeared.

The chapter Vyleta devotes to the two trials of Leopold Hilsner on charges of ritual murder is the most problematic portion of the book. Ritual murder—a medieval crime, as the author notes—was not, surprisingly, an entirely uncommon accusation at the European fin de siècle. Indeed, there were eighteen accusations between 1890 and 1899 in the Bohemian Lands alone. While accepting Hillel Kievel's definitive account of the trial in Polná as reflecting economic-social-political struggle in the Bohemian Lands, Vyleta focuses on the trial in the context of the construction of criminality in the contemporary press, noting that in contrast to the other criminal cases considered in the book, an anti-Semitic narrative was embedded in the accusation of ritual murder (185). This case, important as “news” throughout Europe, is the only one discussed in detail with no direct connection to Vienna. The chapter would have been enriched had the author also employed contemporary reports from Czech- and German-language newspapers in the Bohemian Lands, including anti-Semitic publications, complementing, contradicting, or expanding the discussion in the Viennese newspapers on which he relies.

The text contains occasional errors and repetition: Austrian Minister-President Kazimierz Badeni issued the language decrees for Bohemia and Moravia that caused such national strife in the Bohemian Lands—and elsewhere in Cisleithania—in April, not November 1897, which was when he resigned; and Czechoslovakia's first president, Tomáš Masaryk, and Prague's future Czechoslovak National Socialist mayor, Karel Baxa, are introduced repeatedly. Moreover, the term, Bohemian Lands, rather than the anachronistic Czech lands, is more apt for the period under consideration.

In sum, Vyleta both demonstrates the complexity of the phenomenon of Austrian anti-Semitism and challenges the interpretation of Vienna as a more casually anti-Semitic society than the one his book presents. He argues that Jewish criminality in late imperial Cisleithania was not narrated in terms of racial criminality in the biological sense of the term. Rather, it was narrated as a competent, rational, and volitional criminality, much as it has been narrated throughout the nineteenth century. Even the anti-Semitic press upheld the narrative of modern criminality. As Vyleta notes: “Neither physical nor psychological criminal stigmata were mapped onto Jewish bodies and minds” (221). Although there was no evidence in this period of the merging of racial narratives of Jews with criminal biological narratives, crime reporting was, however, “a central locus in which sustained anti-Semitic narratives were disseminated” (221). Among the people who enjoyed their daily dose of crime in the newspapers, only those who identified themselves as anti-Semites by their choice of reading matter would come across a narrative of “Jewish” crime.