On 27 April 1808, the Lower Austrian Estate of knights adopted a new statute that excluded persons of recent Jewish ancestry from admission. It remained in force for nearly two decades, until 28 April 1827. Jews themselves had never acquired the right, which Joseph II had explicitly accorded noble Protestants in his patent of toleration (1781), to be received into political corporations as they existed in the society of orders. The knights' statute disallowed not only those of Jewish background in the male but also in the female line: ‘He who wants to be admitted to the Lower Austrian Estate of knights must profess the Christian religion and descend from parents who were born in that religion.’Footnote 1 Though the statute contains no direct reference to Jews, the minutes of the knights' sessions in April 1808 show that not only former Jews but also those of Jewish heritage in the ‘third degree’ in the maternal and paternal lines were to be ineligible for membership.Footnote 2 The assumption existed among these petty nobles that persons whose mother and father had been baptized at birth would have had non-Jewish grandparents as well. In contrast, the statute of 1808 did not require potential members to have parents of noble birth. Applicants had only to prove their own noble status, either by birth or patent. This conformed to curial practice since the seventeenth century.
Until the full emancipations that began with the French Revolution and were not completed in most of Europe until the second half of the nineteenth century, laws discriminating against Jews or those believed to be professing Jews had been common. But measures aimed at those of Jewish heritage, regardless of confession, had been rare. The chief exception in the early modern period had been the infamous statutes of limpieza de sangre enacted by countless towns and religious foundations in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. The town council of Toledo had led the way in the year 1449. In the following decades, many other corporate bodies followed suit. By the middle of the sixteenth century, royal and papal sanction for this policy had been forthcoming.Footnote 3 In the late modern era, the National Socialists introduced the most notorious such ordinances.Footnote 4 Like the knights' statute in Lower Austria, the Iberian and Nazi measures penalized – in radically different ways – persons of Jewish background in both the male and female lines.
The enactments in Spain and Germany had far-reaching repercussions on society, which was not the case with the statute of the Lower Austrian knights. The latter potentially affected a few dozen ennobled families of Jewish background. For several reasons, the circumstances surrounding its approbation nonetheless deserve a closer look. First, it was implemented in the heart of the Austrian Empire. Politically and economically, the archduchy of Lower Austria with its capital at Vienna was the most important of the dynastic territories outside of Bohemia and Hungary. Not only was Vienna the seat of the imperial Court, central administration, and the Lower Austrian government and Estates, but also the home of what had become the Empire's richest, most influential, and most self-confident Jewish community. Joseph II's patent of toleration for Lower Austria had been issued in 1782.Footnote 5 It was the only one promulgated in the Austrian duchies, Jews not having been permitted to settle in Upper and Inner Austria. The measure abolished the more humiliating aspects of discrimination, gave the Jews new opportunities in education and employment, and clearly raised expectations about the future. Joseph's goal was to make Jews, along with the rest of his subjects, useful to the state. Though the death of the emperor ended reform, the ongoing crisis of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars opened up new chances of social advancement and prestige, especially for the grander Jewish bankers and wholesalers in Vienna. They made large sums available to the cash-strapped state and thereby acquired reputations as ‘patriots’ in the eyes of the authorities.Footnote 6 This was occurring just at the time in which the knights sanctioned discrimination against persons of Jewish descent.
The Lower Austrian knights' statute is noteworthy in a second respect. The radical provision against Jewish ancestry in both maternal and paternal lines was unique in its time. No other such regulation in western or central Europe has yet been documented for the epoch around 1800. Some two hundred years separated it from the high-water mark of Spanish anti-Judaism. More than another century elapsed before the Nuremberg laws.Footnote 7 The period witnessed, to be sure, the exclusion of Jews and former Jews from patriotic and social clubs, such as the ‘Christian-German Dining Club’ (Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft) in Berlin and the noble casino in Budapest.Footnote 8 But the Christian descendants of Jews seem not to have been the target of such measures, which in any event lacked an important ramification of the Lower Austrian regulation: the exclusion of people of Jewish heritage from noble consortia effectively barred them from the political nation of the Estates assembled in the diet. The insignificance of civic trade and manufacture in early modern Austria had condemned the towns to political impotence. Though possessed of formal representation, the economically weak burghers, including converts who might have gained the freedom of the city of Vienna, were all but excluded from the provincial assemblies.Footnote 9 In Lower Austria, reform changed this situation only marginally. The industrial revolution first brought the issue of the representation of new financial and industrial elites to the fore in the 1830s and 1840s.
Recent research has shown that no ideological continuum – such as a common understanding of race – underlay the early modern Iberian and the late modern German measures against people of Jewish extraction.Footnote 10 There is likewise no evidence that the Lower Austrian statute was known to or inspired the Nazi authorities. Of interest, nonetheless, is how the statute of 1808 fits into the history of ‘blood-purity’ legislation. In particular, how did the understanding of ‘nation’, which in the revolutionary era underwent profound change, condition the debate about the statute among the knights? As David Bell has noted, nations in medieval and early modern Europe had been ‘facts of nature’ that signified differences in the human species, not unlike hair colour.Footnote 11 The concept of ‘nation’ also had a political meaning, referring to those who exercised political rights in the society of orders.Footnote 12 New forms of ‘national sentiment’ arose in France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian hereditary lands, and Belgium as a consequence of reform and state-building in the eighteenth century.Footnote 13 There is no evidence that these forms of early modern ‘national sentiment’ necessarily led to modern nationalism, even though this has been commonly assumed.Footnote 14 The decades after 1789 saw the genesis not only of French and German, but also of an ultimately abortive Austrian nationalism much neglected in the recent literature.Footnote 15 As the American sociologist Rogers Brubaker has argued, the modern ‘nation’ signifies not a ‘thing in the world’ but a ‘perspective on the world’.Footnote 16 The ‘nation’ became a product of political will rather than of historical inevitability.Footnote 17 Benedict Anderson has demonstrated how the ‘nation’ supplanted earlier ‘cultural systems’ – ways of perceiving reality – such as the ‘religious community’ and the ‘dynastic realm’.Footnote 18 An intrinsic link has been postulated between early (German) nationalism, which George Mosse identifies as a ‘system of belief’, and hatred of Jews.Footnote 19 Writers have otherwise tended, as recently noted, to treat these two phenomena separately.Footnote 20 As we shall see, new ideas of the ‘nation’ informed the debate within the Estate of knights about the statute of admission. What attitude did the Austrian monarchical state adopt to the knights' exclusion of persons of Jewish heritage? To what extent can its adoption be ascribed to what is usually regarded as the reactionary government of the Emperor Francis (1792–1835)?
The knights' enactment also raises the question of the assimilation of Jews and people of Jewish descent into surrounding society, particularly into its higher reaches. Several developments in the last quarter of the eighteenth century reduced the vast gulf between the more opulent ones and the nobility. These included the first ennoblement of a Jew (1789), the granting of the first baronial title to a Jew (1798), and the marriages of high-ranking Roman Catholic noblemen to the daughters of Jewish houses (beginning in the 1780s). For the first time in Austria, a process of acculturation set in that was facilitated by the wealth, urbanity, and dynastic patriotism of leading Jews and new Christians. The statute of 1808 aimed to reverse this trend. It was a political statement of protest at the existence of nobles perceived as Jews, whom the knights feared might be forced upon them as members. It remarkably, if implicitly, made monarchical patents of nobility for former Jews invalid as a qualification for curial admission, thus undermining the traditional concept of nobility as well. The progeny of Christian noble families who descended on the maternal side from Jews were likewise to be penalized. This created an additional socio-political barrier to integration. To what extent did the knights succeed in their policy? Were their views typical of the traditional nobility generally and of the corporate nobility in particular? Did the knights' view reflect sentiment among other segments of the popluation?
How did such a statute even come about? The knights sanctioned it at a regular curial session in their chamber adjacent to the magnificent frescoed meeting hall of the Lower Austrian diet at Vienna. A look at its circumstances casts a telling light on the Austrian system of dominion. Together with the prelates, lords, and towns, the knights constituted one of the four Estates of the provincial diet, a conventional early modern representative assembly rare in Napoleonic Europe. The traditional society of orders, with its attendant political and social structures, had by then disappeared in France, the Low Countries, most of the Italian and German states, and Spain. In the core lands of the Austrian Empire, the reformed Estates' ‘constitutions’ existed down to 1848 both de jure and de facto. One problem with the notion of caesura as it has been applied to Austrian history around 1800 has been that the still extant intermediate corporations, said to have been stripped of power and influence by Maria Theresa and Joseph II, have been blended out of the history of government. With the exception of Christine Mueller's pioneering and little-known work, we know almost nothing about the interplay of central, provincial, and local authority in Austria in the century after 1748.Footnote 21 Here, Austrian historiography has not kept pace with that of the later years of the French ancien régime, for example.Footnote 22 As the knights' statute of 1808 suggests, important shifts in mentalités had occurred. But these took place within the context of relative political and social stability. Austria had become a reformed corporate state in a post-revolutionary ideological world.
Historical continuities in Austria that transcended the eras of Theresan–Josephian reform and European revolution remain little studied. One such made the statute of 1808 possible: the provincial Estates in the Austrian duchies had successfully preserved their legal autonomy of admissions.Footnote 23 Even before the defeat of the Protestant cause at the beginning of the early seventeenth century, they had not used their prerogative as a political weapon against the sovereign, but rather to maintain social insularity. Successive monarchs, including Maria Theresa, had supported this policy. The recent scholarship on France and other states indeed explains the success of ‘absolutism’ by its guarantee of the social position of selected elites at the provincial and local levels.Footnote 24 Despite the increase in dynastic state power in the later eighteenth century, noble prestige in Austria still derived not from a ruler's patent, but from acceptance by corporately constituted peers. The knights' bar on people of Jewish ancestry, which was not a product of the monarchical state nor received its sanction, is evidence of the still splintered nature of public authority. It would be wrong to regard the Estates as the principal source of government, but they influenced policy through the consultative form of rule that Francis and his predecessors observed. As we shall see, the Estates helped determine the boundaries of Jewish ownership of property in Lower Austria, a question closely tied up with belonging to the political nation. A final caveat: the conflicts about the status of Jews exposed fault-lines within the Estates and the nobility, neither of which may be regarded as monolithic. This too was a consequence of absolutism as now understood.
I
Throughout early modern western and central Europe, the Estates, and especially the nobility, had made up the political nation.Footnote 25 In the Austrian duchies, the First and Fourth Estates represented in the diets were traditionally regarded as having been subject to the princely demesne and thus inferior politically to the nobility. Though this view had lost much of its relevance by the eighteenth century, at least with regard to the great prelates, the two Estates of the nobility in Lower Austria – lords (Herrenstand) and knights (Ritterstand) – continued to be known as the only ‘two political Estates’ down into the nineteenth century.Footnote 26 In social terms, the difference between these two curiae roughly corresponded by around 1800 to that between the titled, landed, and pedigreed aristocracy and ennobled newcomers from officialdom and the upper middle class. Membership in a noble curia had been the early modern form of citizenship par excellence in Austria, as it conferred political rights, the most important having been consultation by the ruler and the exercise of influence on public administration.Footnote 27 The ownership of certain forms of property (as listed in the provincial land-registers known as the Landtafel) had been an important qualifier. While inclusion in noble consortia by the 1700s in the Austrian duchies no longer depended on being landed, the relationship between domains and dominion never lost its symbolic importance. Physiocracy and the re-conceptualization in the reform-era of the Estates as the representation of landed interests reinforced the connection not only in theory.Footnote 28 Leopold II (1790–2) made attendance at the Bohemian diet conditional upon title to a seigneury (1791); his son Francis did the same in Carniola (1818).Footnote 29 The impact of the change in thinking was evident in the rhetoric of the Lower Austrian Estates. But induction into the corporate nobility there – and thus participation in the assembly – continued to depend exclusively on formal acceptance by one of its two curiae, which met separately at changing intervals in their own chambers, maintained their own staffs, and from at least the later seventeenth century kept records of their sessions. Only following such admission did the new member's formal ‘introduction’ into the diet take place.
Processes of state-building determined changes in the notion of Estates' representation in the late Enlightenment, but also broadened the meaning of concepts such as ‘subject’, ‘citizen’, and ‘patriot’. This raised the question of the status of Jews in the Austrian lands. A tradition of princely ‘naturalization’ had existed in many European countries. It had not been a form of citizenship in the classical sense, as it entailed none of the rights of political participation acquired by membership in civic, noble, and some ecclesiastical corporations. It has been examined in greatest depth for France, where its origins went back to the later middle ages.Footnote 30 By the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), the assimilation of foreigners was well established bureaucratically. Against the particularist claims of corporate bodies, the crown imposed its sovereign right to determine who was a French subject.Footnote 31 In other words, a town's bestowal of civic rights no longer brought concomitant French status. We unfortunately know little about monarchical naturalization, of Jews or otherwise, in eighteenth-century Austria. What does seem clear is that an augmentation of princely authority similar to that in France did not occur. As late as the 1830s, no consensus existed among jurists about whether admission to the Estates conferred Austrian citizenship.Footnote 32
But even in Austria, the ideas of ‘subject’ and ‘citizen’ underwent profound transformation that undermined older understandings of the ‘noble nation’ as assembled in the Estates. In 1787, Joseph II proclaimed the inhabitants of his hereditary lands to be ‘natives and subjects’ (Innländer und Unterthanen), thus creating a levelling distinction different from the hierarchical ‘vassals and subjects’ referred to in early Theresan legislation.Footnote 33 He made it possible for Jews to take the ‘oath as a subject’.Footnote 34 Again, however, these directives did not create classical ‘citizens’ and the emperor notoriously tried to ignore political rights as they did exist in his states.Footnote 35 The general legal code (Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) of 1811 introduced the status of ‘citizen’ (Staatsbürger) explicitly using that concept. This has been regarded as the beginning of a new social and political order. In fact, it merely refined the older tradition of princely naturalization. Like Joseph's ‘natives and subjects’, new ‘citizens’ enjoyed no political rights, which could still only be obtained by membership in Estates' curiae and civic corporations. Importantly, the code did not affect existing Estates' prerogatives and liberties.Footnote 36 The transformation of citizenship from a privilege in the society of orders to a general right, such as happened in France during the Revolution, did not occur in Austria until after 1848.Footnote 37 Thus the seemingly anomalous situation arose that the monarchical state did not determine the political nation – as defined by those who could participate in the diet – on its own territory.Footnote 38
The Lower Austrian knights' measure was not retroactive in depriving persons of Jewish extraction of rights already acquired, as did the Nuremberg laws later. But it meant to shut potential aspirants to membership out of the ‘nation’ as traditionally understood. The statute of 1808 was the first major overhaul of conditions of admission to that Estate and also the first such to be undertaken autonomously by a noble consortium in the core Austrian lands since the seventeenth century.Footnote 39 In general, the knights aimed at stemming the consequences of what they regarded as an inflation of honours and the rise of a plutocratic class. A number of factors emboldened them to such a caste-conscious move, from the ‘restoration’ of the Estates' constitution after Joseph II's death to the major financial and organizational contribution of the Estates in the war against Napoleon to the traditionalism of the curial president and Landuntermarschall (vice-president of the Estates), Baron Karl Moser (1744–1823).Footnote 40
In some respects, the politics of the knights betrayed all the signs of old-fashioned noble die-hardism. The language of economic anxiety in the curial debates is practically interchangeable with that used by the Estates during a controversy about membership in 1572, with the exception that ennobled Jews were not a concern in the earlier period.Footnote 41 The principal supporters of the measure in 1808 belonged not to the great territorial aristocracy, whose representatives sat in the Estate of lords, but to the petty nobility affected most by the economic hardships of war. Soon after his appointment (1802), Baron Moser introduced reactionary changes to restore the perceived tarnished prestige of the knights, such as reviving the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ families within the consortium that had earlier been forbidden by Maria Theresa.Footnote 42 Indeed, the discrimination of the noble descendants of Jews was first proposed in a session of the ‘old’ knights. Moser himself represents one line of continuity in Estates' history between the pre- and post-reform epochs. His father, Carl Leopold von Moser (1688–1770), held the same offices from 1729 until Maria Theresa sacked him in 1764 for his opposition to her innovations in the Estates' administration that cost his family – indeed his young son – the expectancy to the lucrative general receiver's office (ständisches Obereinnehmeramt). Between them, the senior and junior Moser held the top positions in the curia of knights for more than half a century (1729–64 and 1802–23).
Monarchical approbation of statutes of admission of noble consortia had not been customary. The Lower Austrian knights therefore did not communicate the newly approved rules of 1808 to the authorities. The complaint of a rejected candidate with an imperial recommendation brought them to the attention of the United Aulic Chancellery (Vereinigte Hofkanzlei), which requested their submission for confirmation. Aware of the violation of traditional observance entailed by this directive, the knights complied, though with reservations.Footnote 43 After a lapse of more than two years, they learned that the emperor had determined that no changes were to be made at that time to Estates' constitutions and that ‘this matter [was to] be dropped for now’.Footnote 44 As the knights did not recognize a monarchical right of confirmation in this case, they reaffirmed their new statute, in contravention of power-political realities.Footnote 45 But other such realities kept the Court from intervening again.Footnote 46 A revocation of the knights' autonomy would have entailed the same for all provincial noble consortia. The social basis of the regime – the territorial aristocracy rooted in the Estate of lords – inhibited an attack on a prime juridical guarantee of noble exclusiveness. In keeping with the Josephian tradition of state-building, Francis's government nevertheless opposed the penalization of persons simply because they descended from Jews. With the knights' statute under consideration in the Aulic Chancellery, he issued a decree assuring ‘baptized Jews’, as they were incongrously called, all rights enjoyed by other Christian subjects.Footnote 47 Its recipient, however, was the Lower Austrian provincial government, which had no formal jurisdiction over the Estates.Footnote 48 Authority remained fractured, even among offices all operating within a few streets of each other in the imperial capital. The Estates changed the prerequisites for participation in the diet without reference to the ruler, who issued decrees that did not come to the attention of the Estates' consortia. The reform-era had interestingly not given the monarchical state access to the minutes of curial meetings.
II
The first known dispute about the entry of a person perceived as a Jew to an Austrian noble consortium occurred near the end of Maria Theresa's reign. It concerned the application to the Lower Austrian lords of the formerly Jewish army supplier and financier, Abraham Wetzlar (1725–99), who had converted to Catholicism (1776) and been ennobled (1777) as Baron Carl Abraham Wetzlar von Plankenstern. The only previous such admission had involved the immediate descendants of the imperial physician and convert, Paul Ritz (Rizius, Riccius, Ricci) (c. 1480–1542), who had likewise become noble. They became members of the Estates of Lower Austria (1550), Upper Austria (1566), and Moravia (1566).Footnote 49 Only a few decades later and under the new, more elegant name ‘Sprinzenstein’, they belonged to the prestigious ‘old families’ of the Lower Austrian curia of lords.Footnote 50 Count Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein (1625–79), Ritz's great-great-grandson, a long-time confidant of Leopold I, and the owner of large domains north of the Danube, ended his career as president of the archduchy's Estates (Landmarschall). Though noble social climbers often embroidered the history of their lineages so that even their descendants no longer knew their actual ancestry, Ferdinand Maximilian was aware of his Ritz connection. On the other hand, his surviving papers suggest that Ritz's Jewish past had been forgotten.Footnote 51 Within the family, there was discussion as early as the middle of the seventeenth century of its extraction from the Florentine patriciate.Footnote 52 The fact that Paul Ritz had come from Italy abetted such embellishment.
The first half of the eighteenth century saw the ennoblement of few former Jews. The practice became more common in Maria Theresa's later years. The first such of a Jew did not take place until near the end of Joseph II's reign. His patents of toleration for Jews, issued before that event, contained no provision for the membership of ennobled Jews in the Estates, as had been stipulated for noble Protestants.Footnote 53 Given curial autonomy, monarchical patents in any event did not guarantee admission. In ennobling a Jew, Joseph thus created a category of nobles paradoxical for the early modern world in being excluded a priori from the provincial political nation. Not only did he not allow their admission to the Estates, but he did not permit them the other form of early modern political participation, the acquisition of freedom of the towns (Stadtbürgerrecht). Only for the Jews of Galicia and Trieste – whose histories diverged markedly from those of Jews in the other hereditary crownlands – did he make exceptions regarding landownership that were nonetheless carefully circumscribed.Footnote 54 Jews thus remained largely excluded from the early modern body politic in the Austrian territories. This conformed to Joseph's general contempt for political rights.Footnote 55 Up until the knights' statute of 1808, nothing barred ennobled former Jews and their descendants from the Estates. As there were also no legal impediments to their acquistion of property, an application to one of the curiae was almost preordained. It came in the late winter of 1778 from the newly minted Baron Wetzlar von Plankenstern.
Two years after his baptism and within months of his ennoblement, Wetzlar petitioned the Lower Austrian lords for membership.Footnote 56 The support he thereby received from Maria Theresa must be seen in the context of her general encouragement of conversion. She had already facilitated the entry of former Protestants into the corporate nobility.Footnote 57 Wetzlar's demarche, however, triggered dissension in the curia that lasted into the 1790s. No united noble front opposed him. In fact, a slight majority of the members (ten of nineteen) at the session in which his case was discussed, led by the scion of a prominent aristocratic house, accepted him.Footnote 58 A mixture of factors, including pressure from the monarch, corruption, and Enlightened convictions, must have accounted for this vote. Except in the case of Count Philipp Sinzendorff, whose standpoint reflected the Court's views, the sources do not record the motivations of those who approved. Wetzlar's entry was nevertheless blocked by the Estates' president (Landmarschall), Count Johann Anton Pergen (1725–1814), who ex officio presided over the lords and who intervened, contrary to the rules of procedure, to produce a tie. Among the paradoxes here, many lords regarded Pergen himself as an upstart and had opposed his appointment to office. He owed his position to the same ruler then sponsoring Wetzlar.
It took Maria Theresa's direct intercession to get Wetzlar into the Lower Austrian Estates. What she did not achieve was his accession to the lords. In a strongly hierarchical society, the less prestigious consortium of knights was more susceptible to monarchical pressure than the aristocracy.Footnote 59 The abrupt dismissal from office thirteen years earlier of their president, the above-mentioned Carl Leopold von Moser, had taught the knights what the consequences of ill-advised dissent could be. If opposition to Wetzlar existed, which was surely the case, the knights did not express it officially.Footnote 60 His admission was explicitly restricted to him and his Roman Catholic descendants. A few months later, his ceremony of ‘introduction’ into the diet took place.Footnote 61 Well represented on that day were the prelates of Lower Austria's great ecclesiastical foundations – among others Melk, Klosterneuburg, Göttweig, Heiligenkreuz, and Zwettl – as well as the provost of St Stephan's cathedral chapter in Vienna, where Wetzlar had been baptized. Whether they turned out in such strength to gawk or to lend credibility to the new Christian, whose conversion several lords had questioned, is not recorded. Whatever hostility Wetzlar encountered among his fellow nobles did not keep him from turning up at Estates' assemblies down into the early years of Joseph II. He took part in debates and later participated in the inauguration (Erbhuldigung) of Leopold II as Austrian archduke.Footnote 62
Wetzlar later tried to get the lords to reverse their position. He twice requested a transfer to their curia, but his timing – the years immediately following the Estates' ‘restoration’ after Joseph II's death – was bad. In September 1790, the two lords' commissioners (Herrenstandskommissare), Count Joseph Khevenhüller-Metsch (1733–92) and the prominent Josephian reformer Count Carl Zinzendorf (1739–1813), who by vetting applications upheld the consortium's social insularity, arranged for his renewed rejection. Khevenhüller's demise not long afterward and the selection of a successor favourable to his case, the imperial Vice-Chancellor Prince Franz Gundaccar Colloredo-Mannsfeld (1731–1807), encouraged Wetzlar to try again. Contrary to custom, the two commissioners could not agree on a joint recommendation.Footnote 63 The proponents of admission contested the rebuff of the late 1770s as having been a violation of curial rules. Wetzlar's opponents, including Zinzendorf, continued to take exception to his wife's remaining true to the faith of her ancestors.Footnote 64 Largely thanks to Zinzendorf's authority, the debate nevertheless went against Wetzlar, who was turned away with a larger proportion of nays than in 1778.Footnote 65 The Wetzlars remained in the curia of knights, also sometimes attending the diet, until the disappearance of the Estates in 1848.
Neither his own experience as a reluctant convert from Lutheranism nor his embrace of the Enlightenment, of which he was a chief Viennese exponent, made Zinzendorf favourable to Wetzlar. The Enlightenment in Austria in any event lacked the radical and secular thrust of its French counterpart. His acceptance of the prestigious post of lords' commissioner furthermore evidenced the commitment of this key adviser of Joseph II to the established social order.Footnote 66 His arbitrary revival of the antiquated and nearly forgotten rule that a family in the knights' curia had to remain there for a least a hundred years before transferring to the lords swung opinion against Wetzlar. Sixteen years later, the chief proponent of the exclusion of persons of Jewish descent from the knights, Baron Joseph Mayenberg (1776–1860), believed that ‘in generations the religion and customs of [converted] Jews do not disappear’.Footnote 67 Across a social divide, the aristocratic courtier Zinzendorf and the petty noble Mayenberg would seem to have shared a common understanding of confession, citizenship, and nation. To what extent was this true?
The original draft of the knights' statute of 1808 with its anti-Jewish passage originated not with Mayenberg, but rather with Baron Emanuel Doblhoff (†1830), a knightly councillor on the Estates' executive committee.Footnote 68 A consensus among the leading members of the consortium – the Landuntermarschall, the knights' two councillors on the Estates' executive committee (Ausschuss), and the knights' two representatives on the Estates' college of deputies (Verordnetenkollegium) – emerged early that persons of Jewish extraction were to be barred. We have the written endorsement of this measure by Ignaz von Keeß (†1817), who together with Mayenberg represented the knights on the Estates' college of deputies.Footnote 69 Ironically, Keeß's well-known father had helped implement Joseph II's policy of toleration. Only Joseph von Aichen (1745–1818), a councillor on the executive committee and vice-president of the provincial judicial tribunal (Niederösterreichisches Landrecht), declined to endorse it. He objected that it was ‘not compatible with today's tolerance’.Footnote 70 His counter-suggestion that only the candidate himself should be Christian conformed to Joseph II's legislation, which had not opened up the Estates to Jews.
Because of his rabid insistence on and his personal responsibility for enforcing the knights' statute, Mayenberg's biography deserves a closer look. He did not descend from a pedigreed lineage, but rather from a family originally named ‘Schmid’ that had risen into the nobility through monarchical service. His great-grandfather, Christoph Friedrich Schmid von Mayenberg (1668–1742), emigrated from south-western Germany to Vienna, where he ended a distinguished career as chancellor of the Lower Austrian government (Regierungskanzler). As was typical in such cases, the local Estates co-opted him (1726), while the seigneury he acquired (1730) bound his descendants in an altogether more concrete way to the archduchy. Both his grandson and his great-grandson occupied high Estates' offices. However, the noble landed existence of the family lasted only a few decades. At the end of the eighteenth century, during the turnover of landed properties in Lower Austria that was in part a result of Joseph II's secularization of ecclesiastical foundations, the manor was sold, leaving Mayenberg only peasant-quality acres (Rustikalwirtschaft). This loss necessarily slackened the family's connection to the Estates, who preferred their officeholders to be owners of dominical land, and thus endangered its material existence in another way. Paradoxically, Mayenberg married the daughter of Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta-Lerchenau (b. 1736), who in his capacity as a member of the Estates' college of deputies had ‘introduced’ Wetzlar into the diet. The couple had no children, leaving Joseph as the last male of his line.
Mayenberg's writings betray a deep fear of the degradation and plutocratization of countryside and nobility. He believed that it was the aim of former Jews ‘to take over our possessions, to ally themselves [by marriage] with Christian families, and to disseminate their all too well-known perniciousness in such a way as to tolerate our descendants as we have tolerated them and thus Christians will require toleration in our Fatherland’.Footnote 71 He directed similar resentment at ennobled new money generally.Footnote 72 He nevertheless identified wealthy Jews as the main threat to his social, material, and religious existence. Several general phenomena conditioned the experiences of decline of Mayenberg and his fellow knights. First, the dynasty's close alliance with the territorial aristocracy as represented in the lords had marginalized the lesser nobility.Footnote 73 This reflected absolutism's enhancement of the position of some groups of nobles at the expense of others.Footnote 74 Second, the ennoblement of Jews and former Jews early aroused official Estates' opposition.Footnote 75 Third, the policies of Maria Theresa and Joseph II had brought about a tentative opening of the Estates to commercial wealth. Its extent should not be exaggerated, but was greatest in Lower Austria because of Vienna's economic importance. A few Protestant bankers had become members of the noble consortia there following the patent of toleration for non-Catholic Christians of 1782. The knights had dragged their feet at admitting them as well.Footnote 76 Rich Jews and former Jews had not only been ennobled; some were also accepted by representatives of the Viennese haut monde. By the early 1790s, the later celebrated Fanny Arnstein (1758–1818) moved on easy terms with territorial aristocrats.Footnote 77 The wives of petty nobles such as Mayenberg and his curial fellows did not enjoy a comparable privilege.
A final development that aroused the loudest noble opposition, as its perceived threat was both material and political, was the acquisition of real estate by outsiders or those perceived as such. In the weeks immediately preceding the passage of the knights' statute of 1808, acrimonious debate had taken place in the diet about the increasingly stiff competition of ‘immigrant foreigners’ in the market for domains.Footnote 78 Only a small minority of Lower Austrian knights in the 1800s even owned noble property. This made the connection of the petty nobility to the Estates, redefined in late eighteenth-century political theory as the representation of landed interests, tenuous. Since the expulsion of 1670, the possession by Jews of land of any kind, in the countryside (dominical or rustical) or in the towns, had been illegal.Footnote 79 Except in Galicia and Trieste, Joseph II had not permitted them the material basis for early modern political participation.Footnote 80 He twice issued decrees confirming his mother's prohibition on their holding houses in Vienna or rural property.Footnote 81 Leopold II and Francis II (later Francis I) pursued roughly the same line. The former effectively revoked the privilege granted by Joseph to Galician Jews regarding citizenship in the towns.Footnote 82 The latter generally upheld the same traditionalism, with respect both to the toleration that Joseph II had extended to the Jews and to the many restrictions that had survived reform. Was Jewish emancipation even possible as long as the society of orders continued to exist? The abolition of all restrictions on Jews in France and the Netherlands only followed that for other sections of the population – noble, burgher, and peasant – which in turn was a consequence of revolution. Where the old regime had been overturned, as in northern Italy and Illyria, Francis also confirmed the civic rights of Jews.Footnote 83
In only one edict did Joseph II mitigate the general prohibition on Jewish ownership of real estate in a western crownland. The motivation was again economic advantage for the state. Because the measure applied to dominical lands, it incurred Estates' opposition and led to another dispute that set long-term parameters for official policy on Jewish possession of property. Here again, the power-political realities of a still extant society of orders, in which the state had not yet become the sole source of authority, limited the room for manoeuvre of Joseph's successors on the throne in a way that has generally been ignored, particularly in the negative assessments of Emperor Francis's approach to the Jews and government in general.Footnote 84 In a rescript from 24 September 1789, Joseph permitted ‘well-to-do Jews’ to bid at public auction on state-owned domains in Lower Austria, including those from dissolved ecclesiastical foundations.Footnote 85 This concession was made at the request of Israel Hönig (1724–1808), whose family had made a fortune in the Bohemian tobacco monopoly and who become Austria's first ennobled Jew (on 2 October 1789 as Edler von Hönigsberg).Footnote 86 Though he was interested in purchasing the estate of Velm in the archduchy's wine-growing district (Viertel unter dem Mannhartsberg), his petition emphasized not his personal wishes but rather the general welfare of the state and the practice in Galicia.Footnote 87 Hönigsberg's acquisition of Velm, which had come on the market after the dissolution of the Carthusian monastery of Mauerbach near Vienna, resolved the incongruity of an early modern nobleman excluded by law from rule in the countryside. Though he obtained the usual feudal rights associated with a seigneury, Velm lacked the ecclesiastical benefices to which he, as lord, would in theory have had the right of presentation.Footnote 88 This eliminated one source of conflict that had arisen in a comparable case in France, where since the early eighteenth century occasional Jews, particularly in Bordeaux's wealthy Sephardic community, had bought noble lands and the titles that went with them.Footnote 89 Joseph's rescript, which allowed Jews to acquire property listed in the provincial land register (Landtafel), opened up the perspective of ennobled ones becoming members of the early modern political nation. He did not permit them to join the Estates, but a (Jewish) nobleman who exercised dominion at the manorial level would have been difficult for him or the curiae to turn away. Protestants provided a certain precedent here.
Through their control of the provincial administration of the land tax, the Lower Austrian Estates for years blocked Hönigsberg's official possession of Velm.Footnote 90 Both Leopold II and Francis II upheld his claims.Footnote 91 The case became not simply a point of contention between Estates and Aulic Chancellery, but also opened up divisions within the nobility. The acting president of the Estates, a leading Freemason, opposed the transfer on the grounds that Hönigsberg's ownership of a manor would make him their ‘quasi-member’.Footnote 92 His speech manifested the influence of the then-current notion of the Estates as representatives of landed wealth. Paradoxically, the chief defender of Hönigsberg's property rights in the Lower Austrian diet was none other than Count Carl Zinzendorf, who in these same years was instrumental in keeping Wetzlar out of the curia of lords. Zinzendorf ventured the view that the peasantry would not care to whom dues and fees had to be paid and rejected the notion that Jews were natural usurers. In conformity with Josephian practice, he called for their being allowed an ‘honest way’ in which to invest their capital, which would be advantageous to the state.Footnote 93 Though several grandees, including Prince Carl Liechtenstein (1765–95), a habitué of Fanny Arnstein's salon, seconded Zinzendorf, the prelates and knights almost unanimously opposed a concession.Footnote 94 Such a constellation of forces reflected the dividing lines within the Estates, with important representatives of the territorial aristocracy continuing to constitute the party of reform.
Though the Estates ultimately did not prevent Hönigsberg from taking Velm, they did delay it, as well as secure important concessions. The opportunity that Joseph's decree of 1789 had offered Jews for the acquisition of real estate was effectively revoked. Francis withdrew it officially in 1820.Footnote 95 He enforced, as had his uncle and grandmother, the traditional laws that forbade Jews to own land. This applied also to the increasing numbers of Jewish nobles. In 1807, the Lower Austrian government fined Carl Abraham Wetzlar's widow, Eleonora (1732–1813), for being the actual owner of a seigneury registered under his name. She had remained loyal to her religion after her husband's conversion and the marriage of her children to Catholic aristocrats. In her appeal to Court against the punishment, she cited the decree of 1789.Footnote 96 All that ultimately remained of Joseph's initiative and Hönigsberg's purchase was an individual privilege typical of the society of orders. The compromise disallowed Hönigsberg's own descendants who did not convert to Christianity. The Estates' college of deputies determined the official line here, which was confirmed by the Lower Austrian government and the United Aulic Chancellery. This policy was carried out even though the provincial judicial tribunal (Niederösterreichisches Landrecht) rejected the notion that confession could infringe property rights.Footnote 97 Theresan–Josephian reform led to closer oversight of Estates' offices by the monarchical state. The literature has indeed only taken notice of the college of deputies as a branch of public tax administration.Footnote 98 Generally ignored has been the fact that the college remained subordinate to and represented the views of the diet as well. The persistence of intermediate corporations and the accompanying absence of thoroughgoing state-formation accounted not only for the knights' paragraph against those of Jewish extraction, but also determined limits on Jewish landownership.
The boundaries of traditional society and the dynasty's political alliance with the nobility left Francis the time-honoured option of extending individual privilege. He ignored Estates' protests and continued his uncle Joseph's policy of ennobling Jews. In 1798, Nathan Arnstein (1748–1838) became what the prince de Ligne wittily characterized as ‘le premier baron du vieux testament’.Footnote 99 Individual Jews received permission to own property, though no longer dominical land. In Lower Austria, members of the Arnstein clan were the chief beneficiaries.Footnote 100 Even before the end of the conflict with the Estates over Hönigsberg, Francis approved Nathan Arnstein's acquisition of a villa and garden in Mariahilf, which lay outside the walls of Vienna and partly under the feudal jurisdiction of St Stephan's cathedral chapter.Footnote 101 Soon thereafter, Arnstein obtained another one-time concession to expand his holdings there.Footnote 102 His patriotism recommended him to the authorities for this award, which is of particular interest given Baron Mayenberg's effort less than a decade later to exclude Jews from the traditional noble nation by denying their membership in the Austrian nation. Shortly after the turn of the century, Francis conceded Arnstein a general privilege to hold property classified as ‘rustical’ or ‘civic’.Footnote 103 In the society of orders, land was classified according to quality and this remained the case in Austria in the first half of the nineteenth century. Arnstein's patrician Dutch son-in-law, Heinrich Pereira (1810 Baron Pereira-Arnstein) (1773–1835), and his brother-in-law, Bernhard (1797 Edler von) Eskeles (1753–1839), were accorded comparable rights.Footnote 104 That for Pereira provoked a protest from the Estates' college of deputies, to which Mayenberg in the meantime belonged, only a few weeks after the knights began barring those of Jewish heritage.Footnote 105
Francis restricted Eskeles's grant to civic property and shortly thereafter rejected an exemption for another Arnstein kinsman, the wholesaler Salomon (1797 Elder von) Herz (1743–1825).Footnote 106 Such privileges became rarer around this time, possibly because of the Court's financial and administrative reliance on the Estates during the Napoleonic invasions. Arnstein himself had detected public resentment against financiers after the turn of the century.Footnote 107 Only a few months after the knights' enactment of 1808, the monarch denied Arnstein's wealthy son-in-law the civic freedom of Vienna.Footnote 108 He thereby reaffirmed the policy of his predecessors that even the grandest Jews were not to enjoy political rights in the dynasty's core territories. Just as Hönigsberg had not become a member of the Estates by his purchase of Velm, so Arnstein, Pereira, and Eskeles did not become citizens because they possessed Viennese houses. This was especially incongruous in the case of Pereira, whose Sephardic family not only had enjoyed civic freedoms in Holland, but had also been landed.Footnote 109 He would have been a citizen in the modern sense in Napoleon's Batavian republic.Footnote 110 Only as a Christian convert did Pereira finally became the owner of estates in the countryside.
III
The intrinsic connection between hatred of Jews and early German nationalism after the devastating defeats by Napoleon (1806) has been demonstrated for Prussia by Klaus L. Berghahn.Footnote 111 The knights' paragraph against those perceived as Jews – defined as those of such extraction in both lines – evidences a radicalization in Austria after Austerlitz (1805). The restriction on the extension of privilege and the crackdown on secret Jewish ownership of civic property both occurred during the later war years as well.Footnote 112 No wholesale reversal of Josephian legislation regarding Jews occurred, however, and Francis did not endorse discrimination against Christians of Jewish ancestry. As in Prussia, where Chancellor Hardenberg pushed through emancipation (1812), the new anti-Judaism in Austria was primarily a social phenomenon rather than one of state policy.Footnote 113 Sentiment among the knights exemplified that among less-well-off nobles, middling officials, and ennobled members of the professional middle class. The consortium drew its members primarily from the first two of these groups, with the last represented by the occasional induction of a prominent doctor or lawyer. Economic hardship and the possibility of domains passing into different hands had traditionally aroused noble xenophobia and did so here as well. But new ideas of ‘nation’ conditioned the adoption of the knights' statute as well. The politically and nationally charged atmosphere leading up to the renewed war against the French in early 1809 indeed provided its immediate context.
The semantic use of the concept ‘Austrian nation’ first became common after the outbreak of the French Revolution, especially toward the end of the 1790s under the threat of Napoleonic invasion. It referred to the state defined as the entire Austrian Monarchy, rather than the archduchy of Lower Austria, but also sometimes just to the dynasty's territories outside of Hungary. At other times, it took on a cultural flavouring, with traits such as ‘magnanimity’, ‘uprightness’, and ‘honour’ attributed to the ‘nation’ in the sense of its constituent inhabitants.Footnote 114 Such language had a new quality and became increasingly common, though the ideological perspective of its users often remains unclear. If nationalism is ‘the idea of actively constructing a nation through political action’, then the publicist and historian Baron Joseph Hormayr (1781–1848) qualifies as the leading Austrian nationalist of the period.Footnote 115 Following the relaxation of censorship under the new Foreign Minister Stadion (in office 1806–9), he and others turned out influential and widely read publications on behalf of the Austrian cause.Footnote 116 According to his intellectual biographer, Hormayr's aim was to give life to an Austrian ‘nation’ not thought yet to exist.Footnote 117 Such work was paralleled by efforts to whip up German national feeling to create a united front with the lesser central European states for the renewed struggle against France.Footnote 118 The effects of this campaign were felt in Vienna, where upper-class society socialized with and attended lectures by such contemporary ‘German’ luminaries as the Schlegel brothers. By the spring of 1808, a remarkable mixture of heightened Austrian dynastic loyalty, Lower Austrian provincial patriotism as well as incipient Austrian and German nationalism characterized the excited intellectual milieu of the imperial capital. At its height, the Lower Austrian knights introduced their statute.
The records show that modern concepts of ‘nation’ entered the discussion among the knights about admissions' standards principally through Baron Mayenberg, the chief proponent of excluding people of Jewish extraction. That such language was present at all was a symptom of the times, the consortium having been a Lower Austrian institution with no authority beyond the borders of the archduchy. In his written opinion on the draft of the statute, Mayenberg proposed two significant and, for him, closely related changes.Footnote 119 First, he conflated older and new ideas of ‘nation’ by recommending that Austrian birth (‘in [den] Erbstaaten gebohren’) be required for membership in the Lower Austrian Estate of knights. This was a marked departure from the traditional understanding of the ‘noble nation’. Second, he suggested that the passage excluding persons whose parents had been Jewish at birth be extended to shut out those with such grandparents.Footnote 120 His semantics indicate that he understood ‘state’ and ‘nation’ as Austrian in the broader sense:
Finally, the opinion has been voiced that the possession [of property] by foreigners brings our Fatherland, to the advantage of domestic trade, much foreign money. But it is not certain that a lot of bad money in equivocal hands is more beneficial to the state than devoted citizens with less money. Indeed, history shows that national spirit and national virtues (national Geist und national Tugenden) are especially undermined when citizens of a state become dependent on foreigners, whether found within or outside the same.Footnote 121
If we did not know that Mayenberg was calling for Austrian birth for admission to the curia, the ‘state’ referred to here might be interpreted as Lower Austria. We cannot be certain what he meant by the phrase ‘hereditary states’. It will have connoted at least the Austrian duchies and the Bohemian lands, and perhaps Hungary as well. Whatever their geographical origins, he obviously did not regard people of Jewish extraction as belonging to the nation. Here he departed from the understanding of population inherent in the tradition of eighteenth-century state-building. Joseph II had regarded all of the inhabitants of his territories, presumably also Jews, as ‘natives and subjects’.
Earlier statutes had sometimes barred certain ‘nations’ from admission to provincial Estates, as had happened to ‘Hungarians’ and ‘Italians’ in 1591 in Carinthia.Footnote 122 The Carniolan Estates had excluded all ‘foreign nations’ not under the jurisdiction of the house of Austria.Footnote 123 The aim in these cases had been to safeguard privilege associated with a particular ‘noble nation’ rather than to protect or build a ‘nation’ in the modern sense.Footnote 124 In 1753, Maria Theresa made entry into noble curiae conditional on having a patent of nobility issued by one of the Aulic Chancelleries of her hereditary lands. Again, considerations of dynastic state-building had prompted this move, which the corporate nobility often enough ignored.Footnote 125 Neither she nor her successors required those who attended the diets to be ‘Austrian’ or any other nationality defined according to geography. In demanding that aspirants to the Estate of knights be of Austrian birth, Mayenberg went beyond what early modern statutes of admission or Theresan policy had required. Not just nobles lacking ties to the ruling house, but also non-Austrians had become undesirable. In the question of whom to admit, Mayenberg thus came close to according equal importance to noble quality and ancestral origin, thus paradoxically weakening the concept of nobility typical of corporate society. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century central Europe, such thinking became a leitmotiv of noble history as the understanding of ‘nation’ continued to mutate. Most crassly, the German Association of Nobility (Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft) introduced ‘Aryan’ ancestry as its chief requirement for membership (1920).Footnote 126
In the end, Mayenberg failed to persuade his fellow knights to adopt either his proscription of an even wider circle of persons with Jewish ancestry or his proposal to make Austrian birth a condition of admission. The consortium adhered to tradition: political rights remained attached to nobility, regardless of origin. The extraordinary prohibition on those whose mother and father were not ‘born’ Christian, however, won approval with little opposition.Footnote 127 In a stimulating comparison of the Spanish ordinances of limpieza de sangre with the twentieth-century Nazi racial laws, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi successfully refuted the oft-repeated assertion that the conversion of a Jew to Christianity in the middle ages or the early modern period blotted out the confessional past and brought immediate assimilation.Footnote 128
But Yerushalmi's argument that analogous notions of race inspired both the Spanish and the German ‘blood-purity’ statutes has not held up to closer scrutiny. On the basis of an analysis of the concept of ‘race’ in early modern Spain, Max Sebastián Hering Torres has shown the Iberian measures to have been a ‘theological construct’ influenced secondarily by Aristotelian science, whereas the Nazi laws were inspired by the pseudo-scientific use of modern biology.Footnote 129 He has therefore proposed the term ‘racial anti-Judaism’ to distinguish early modern limpieza de sangre from modern anti-Semitism (a term coined in the late nineteenth century).Footnote 130 Though Mayenberg contrasted ‘Christians’ with those he perceived as Jews, neither his commentary on the statute nor the debate in the consortium of knights suggests that considerations of confession played the central role in his thinking in Napoleonic-era Vienna that they had in early modern Spain. How the incipient Catholic spiritual revival might have influenced the knights' views is a yet unanswered question. The Iberian and Lower Austrian statutes did share one crucial similarity: they were products of corporate society.
The conceptual transformation of the ideas of ‘nation’ and ‘race’ by the years after 1800 reconditioned older prejudices of origin and religion. On the basis of the available records, we cannot say to what extent Mayenberg and his fellow knights were influenced by the hierarchical and value-laden ‘“anthropological” systems and typologies’ already in circulation.Footnote 131 The names of the botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78) and the ‘cultural anthropologist’ Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) are ones among many such well known at the time.Footnote 132 Mayenberg's language too was biologically tinged. If the statute's corporate origins suggest placing it in the tradition of what Hering Torres has labelled ‘racial anti-Judaism’, the terms ‘race’ and ‘nation’ had nonetheless acquired new meanings by the early nineteenth century. No simple ideological continuum connected the Lower Austrian ‘blood-purity’ paragraph with either the Spanish or the Nazi legislation. What can be said with certainty is that it was the first of its kind to take shape in a political atmosphere charged with recognizably late modern concepts of ‘nation’.
No evidence indicates that such concepts informed Count Zinzendorf's obstruction in the early 1790s of Carl Abraham Wetzlar's accession to the consortium of lords. Zinzendorf had also not spoken of blocking Wetzlar because of his Jewish descent nor did he propose making curial membership dependent on being Austrian. In fact, the record shows that the aristocratic Zinzendorf did not want to exclude Jews or people of Jewish heritage from the prerequisites of citizenship, whether that concept is understood in the classical political or in the broader, late eighteenth-century sense. As we have seen, Zinzendorf argued in the diet for allowing Jews to own seigneuries, which was the qualification par excellence for participation in early modern representative assemblies. He thereby also conceded them equality in certain respects with other subjects of the reformed state. Here his stance was thoroughly Josephian. In contrast, Mayenberg vigorously opposed the countryside's passing into what he considered Jewish hands. What we know of Zinzendorf's views, also with respect to his work as lords' commissioner responsible for upholding curial insularity, suggests that he opposed Wetzlar on social grounds and because Wetzlar's wife remained Jewish.
Within the curia of knights, Mayenberg personally enforced the paragraph against those of Jewish heritage.Footnote 133 He also served on the Estates' college of deputies (in office 1805–47) when it intervened repeatedly with the Aulic Chancellery to oppose the inheritance of the domain of Velm by the Jewish Hönigsberg heirs. The knights were able to sustain their statute as long as the Court or a high aristocrat showed no interest in placing a protégé of Jewish background in the lesser corporate nobility.Footnote 134 Such patronage had otherwise been a common occurrence. A symbolic barrier fell when the Styrian Estates accepted two formerly Jewish brothers and wholesalers named Lakenbacher who had none of the social cachet of the Arnsteins and Eskeles. Their admission took place at the explicit recommendation of the grand aulic chancellor, Count Franz Saurau (1760–1832), the scion of a leading Styrian family.Footnote 135 The Estates of Inner Austria had never introduced prohibitions on membership of people of Jewish extraction, these territories having had no appreciable Jewish population.
Only a few months after the events in Graz, the Lower Austrian knights received a similar application. It came from an ennobled former Jew named Carl von Joelson (1763–1827), whose family enjoyed Metternich's patronage.Footnote 136 Here again, outside pressure typical of earlier periods seems to have forced the knights' hand. The curial minutes show that no appreciable change in sentiment toward those of Jewish heritage had occurred. Only one knight, Franz de Paula von Aichen (†1843), argued in principle against the provision that his uncle had opposed at the time of its approbation in 1808.Footnote 137 What had disappeared was the nationally and politically electrified climate of the Napoleonic era. On 28 April 1827, the nearly twenty-year-old statute was dropped. The knights nevertheless reaffirmed their admissions' autonomy by rejecting Joelson himself, who had been Austria's first Jewish doctor of jurisprudence, as a ‘speculator’.
Joelson died soon thereafter and the knights did not accept their first former Jew, Jacob Joseph von Löwenthal (1771–1864), a director of the Austrian National Bank, until 1830. They had initially turned him down too, though his son-in-law was a member of the curia of lords. A handful of other such admissions occurred down to 1848 in the archduchy. Neither Protestant nor Greek Orthodox candidates felt compelled, as several former Jews did, to prove their confessional reliability. To that end, Löwenthal provided testimonials of the Catholic clergy on his domains.Footnote 138 Others deposited certificates of baptism with Mayenberg.Footnote 139 The first such admission in Bohemia, where membership in the corporate nobility was in the gift of the crown after consultation with the Estates, is documented for 1812. Its beneficiaries were the brothers Henikstein, whose parents had accepted baptism under Joseph II and who had been certified as ‘true patriots’ by the authorities in Vienna.Footnote 140 As the inheritance of seigneuries in Bohemia depended upon Estates' membership, the ruler and nobility thus facilitated the permanent acquisition by the Heniksteins of the ones that they had purchased a few years earlier.Footnote 141 Francis made Jacob Joseph von Löwenthal a member of the Bohemian Estates, which eliminated the last major hindrance to his establishment of an entail in that kingdom. Monarchical sanction of Löwenthal's plan for securing the socio-economic status of his descendants may well have been the first such for a former Jew.Footnote 142 In the same years, new Christians also achieved admission to the Hungarian Estates. In the 1840s, the first person of recent Jewish heritage achieved Estates' office when the young Moritz von Franck (1816–95) was elected to the executive committee (Ausschuss) in Styria. Franck would have fallen under the prohibition of Jewish ancestry in the fourth degree that Mayenberg had wanted to institute in Lower Austria, his paternal grandmother having been a Henikstein.Footnote 143
IV
The Lower Austrian Estate of lords did not second the knights in their opposition to those of Jewish extraction and no general noble reaction occurred. At the time that the knights re-worked their rules of admission, the lords explicitly rejected revising theirs.Footnote 144 The aged Zinzendorf's opposition to the dilution of aristocratic insularity – representative of an older generation – is the most likely explanation for the initial lack of ennobled former Jews among the lords in the first decade of the nineteenth century. After Zinzendorf's death, Baron Pereira-Arnstein gained uncontested entry (1815).Footnote 145 This occurred at the time that the knights' paragraph was still in effect a chamber away. The lords did not exhibit the same fear of bankers, trade, and new money evident among the petty nobility, admitting candidates explicitly because of their financial expertise.Footnote 146 For a time during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, capable representatives of the so-called ‘second nobility’ held the highest offices in the consortium.Footnote 147 Most notably, Baron Franz Prandau (1751–1811) presided in 1807/8 over the diet in his capacity as ranking lords' member of the Estates' executive committee (Ausschuss). The aristocracy also absorbed émigrés from France, the southern Netherlands, and the Rhineland who turned up in Vienna and whose anti-Napoleonic sentiments trumped doubts about their birth.Footnote 148
The new latitude was also evident at Court. As grand chamberlain, the liberal-minded Moravian grandee Count Rudolph Wrbna (in office 1806–23) used his power to open it to a broader spectrum of nobles. Under his conservative predecessor, the weakening of traditional conceptions of status had already become apparent. In the late 1790s, speculation arose in high circles that one of Carl Abraham Wetzlar's married daughters was to appear there.Footnote 149 While this evidently did not occur, Wrbna probably supported the admission of Countess Wilhelmine Bubna (1790–1840) to the vice-regal Court at Milan presided over by the emperor's brother. She was the daughter of an ennobled and converted wholesale merchant named Arenfeld and became the first person of recent Jewish ancestry permitted such access to an Austrian Court, an honour in theory reserved to those of pedigreed birth.Footnote 150 Her husband's position as commander of Austrian forces in Lombardy was the motive for this exception.
The knights' statute had barred not just the patrilinear descendants of Jews, but also the products of intermarriage. A nobleman from a traditionally Christian family with Jewish maternal heritage would thus have been ineligible for membership. Given the many conversions, the late eighteenth century saw the beginnings of the marital assimilation of the offspring of Jewish houses into the nobility. This phenomenon was more common in Vienna than in Berlin, where only six such unions have been recorded for the years between 1780 and 1806.Footnote 151 Reaction among knights to the marriage near the end of Joseph II's reign of Nathan Arnstein's brother to an Albrechtsburg, who belonged to what had been a premier family in the consortium, has unfortunately not been handed down.Footnote 152 Between them, the converted children and grandchildren of Baron Carl Abraham Wetzlar and Salomon von Herz alone allied themselves down to 1848 with at least ten representatives of the lesser and non-pedigreed nobility.
Further up the social scale, such matches took place with increasing frequency and are better documented. Between 1780 and 1848, twenty aristocrats in the Austrian Monarchy of the rank of at least count or countess married persons of recent Jewish heritage (see appendix). Common to nearly all these cases was a close connection to Viennese society, which was the immediate context of the knights' statute. The first such nuptials occurred there in 1786, when a Hungarian magnate married a Wetzlar. Before the end of the century, two other Wetzlar daughters had wed counts. For the decades after 1800, the Arnstein–Eskeles cousinage (Löwenthal, Eskeles, Herz, Pereira-Arnstein, and Liebenberg) dominates the statistics. The passing attenuation of caste during the war years explains the espousal of two Austro-Bohemian grandees, Count Franz Desfours-Walderode (1771–1838) and Count Michael Kaunitz (1781–1846), with women of lower-class Jewish extraction. In defending his choice, the idealistic Desfours exhorted his family in the language of the day to ‘listen to the voice of humanity and not that of the nobility’.Footnote 153 Both marriages eventually collapsed.Footnote 154 Near the end of his life, Count Moritz Fries (1777–1826), himself the heir to a banking fortune, contracted what for the time also constituted a mésalliance. His second wife was Fanny Lombard, a dancer of Jewish background famed at the time of the Congress of Vienna.Footnote 155 Desfours-Walderode, Kaunitz, and Fries all lived in Vienna.
Excepting the case of the imperial officer Desfours, who stumbled across his wife during a military campaign in western Germany, there is unfortunately little evidence as to how these marriages came about. A constellation of factors not unlike that postulated by Deborah Hertz for the Prussian capital must have been at work here.Footnote 156 Male aristocrats and women of Jewish background had met in the salons of the Jewish upper crust since the late Josephian period. The glamour, luxury, and music at Fanny Arnstein's house had been a chief attraction. Though her entertaining was briefly eclipsed in the same period that saw the approbation of the knights' statute – Hilde Spiel noted an embourgeoisement of the guests in those yearsFootnote 157 – aristocratic-Jewish salon culture survived in Vienna, whereas it ended in Berlin following Jena and Auerstedt. Indeed, Arnstein's salon and those of other Jewish hosts flourished in the years 1812 to 1815 as never before. The inclusion of Fanny Arnstein in a socially exclusive and financially powerful charity, the ‘Society of Noblewomen for the Promotion of the Good and the Useful’ (1811), helped consolidate an already remarkable position by drawing previously aloof female representatives of Vienna's highest circles, otherwise the guarantors of pedigreed insularity, into her salon. She became the only one of the twelve initial committee members of the charity who did not bear a traditionally grand name.Footnote 158 The unflattering contemporary accusation of snobbery, that ‘everything [at the Arnsteins] trembled when a countess was sitting on the sofa and a princess on the chair’, cannot be verified.Footnote 159 What was true was that within days of the constituent meeting of the charity, Fanny began receiving aristocratic wives who had not previously called on her.Footnote 160 Her success at the Congress of Vienna is too well known to need further discussion here, but can be attributed in part to her increasing acceptability among female aristocrats. Other Jewish salons, such as Eskeles and Herz, did almost as well in 1814/15.Footnote 161 That Metternich dined with the duke of Wellington and Lords Castlereagh and Stewart at the house of his banker, Leopold von Herz (1767–1828), foreshadowed his later, much closer relationship to Salomon Rothschild (1774–1855).Footnote 162 The end of the Congress and the death in 1818 of Fanny Arnstein reduced the scale of such entertaining, but did not end it as happened in Berlin. The Rothschilds' original reputation as ‘parvenus’ did not keep the Austrian aristocracy out of their drawing room for long.Footnote 163 In view of Salomon's enormous wealth, the scepticism wore off fairly quickly, at least at the upper end of the spectrum. Like the older generations of the Arnsteins and Eskeles, the Rothschilds rejected conversion.
Deborah Hertz has further described how mixing in salons in Berlin enhanced social status. That Baroness Wilhelmine Arenfeld moved in the Arnsteins' orbit in Vienna perhaps balanced out the physical unattractiveness attested by contemporaries. She may well have met her future husband in their house.Footnote 164 Though a scion of a pedigreed and landed Moravian family, he did not belong to the nobility's economic elite nor did most of the other aristocrats who married the daughters of well-to-do Jewish houses. Counts Johann Barth-Barthenheim, Franz Wimpffen, and Cajetan Alcaini had all been blown into Austria by revolution. Barth-Barthenheim and Wimpffen wed the only daughters of rich bankers. Barth-Barthenheim's wife brought him a domain in Lower Austria's wine-growing district, though his scholarship on the legal status of Jews may have led to their meeting.Footnote 165 Transfers of valuable Viennese real estate from Carl Abraham Wetzlar to two of his married daughters, Countesses Clary-Aldringen and Triangi, are on record.Footnote 166 The latter's husband gambled and the spouse of a third Wetzlar daughter, a Count Festetics, earned a reputation as a notorious cheat and debtor. August Pereira-Arnstein (1811–47) loaned tens of thousands of guilders to the family of his wife, who descended from a blue-blooded, though not financially potent, Hungarian noble family.Footnote 167 The ‘exchange of status and wealth’ that happened in Prussia thus occurred in most of these cases. Joseph Desfours-Walderode and Michael Kaunitz, who both married women without fortune, were exceptions. Desfours-Walderode was himself the heir to extended entails in the Bohemian lands that eventually passed to his only surviving son by the former Minha Katz. As his correspondence shows, the rejection of traditional considerations of rank and notions of romantic love explain his attachment. After their separation, Desfours arranged for his wife to live according to the standing that she had acquired through him.
The small number of noblewomen who wed males of originally Jewish families – only 20 per cent of the documented cases – nevertheless indicates that socializing between the groups for marital purposes, which took place at balls for young people within the aristocracy, did not occur. Only in 1835 did the first such union, between Countess Seraphine Amadé (1814–48) and Baron August Pereira-Arnstein, come about. Unlike especially older male aristocrats, who were free to venture into the houses of the Jewish elite, young unmarried females remained closely supervised. But even for the men, a taboo on alliances outside traditional circles existed that was attributable not just to narrow-mindedness. Unlike in much of the rest of the defunct Holy Roman Empire, the pedigree of noble bloodlines still guaranteed concrete socio-political and economic benefits such as access to Court (twelve quarterings) and to the collegiate foundations for noblemen and -women (eight to sixteen quarterings) that provided valuable economic and social support to aristocratic agnates.Footnote 168 This was both reflected and reinforced in the later more socially conservative years of Francis's reign, when the traditional birth-qualifications for going to Court were again stringently observed.Footnote 169 Many early modern statutes of entail, which continued to regulate the inheritance of territorial wealth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, placed strict limits on the choice of marital partners.Footnote 170 Considerations of caste and the crisis of conscience they provoked were rumoured to have brought about the suicide of Count Clemens Ugarte (1798–1842), chamberlain to the Regent Archduke Ludwig (1784–1864) and nephew of a grand aulic chancellor. Ugarte had promised his hand to the daughter of a converted financier named Kaan.Footnote 171 Marriages between the aristocracy and the Jewish elite remained a matter of chance in the 1820s and 1830s, as no social mechanism existed by which they could have come about. Marriage-markets remained separate. This changed somewhat in the late Pre-March, when ‘notabilities from the world of trade’, including representatives of Jewish families, began to be invited to the balls of the pedigreed nobility.Footnote 172
In contrast to the situation in Prussia, ennoblement and even baronial status had been open to Jews in Austria since the late eighteenth century. However, the prestige of hereditary status and membership in the Austrian diets continued to derive not from monarchical enactments, but from acceptance by the corporately constituted nobility. Here we see a parallel to the situation in England, where Jews otherwise come closer to emancipation than in Austria. For much of the 1850s, Lionel Rothschild (1808–79) was barred from taking the seat in the House of Commons to which he had been elected. Much of the opposition came from the House of Lords.Footnote 173 Only in 1858 did he finally succeed and not until 1885 did the first Jew, Lionel's son Natty (1840–1915), enter the upper chamber.Footnote 174 The incomparable wealth of the family, but especially its importance to public finance, similarly overcame political obstacles in Austria. The baronial title that the five Rothschild brothers acquired there in 1822 was admittedly not equal socially even to a British baronetcy, an honour which Lionel later rejected with contempt. After years of pressure, the imperial authorities finally allowed Salomon, the head of the Viennese line, to acquire a Moravian noble domain with major iron works, evidently the first such concession since that made to Israel von Hönigsberg in Lower Austria a half-century earlier.Footnote 175 This occurred in the early 1840s. But renewed fears among the Estates that Rothschild might be aiming for accession to their number ultimately proved groundless.Footnote 176 The formal bestowal of membership in the Estates, which had earlier passed to the monarch in the Bohemian lands, still required consultation with the local nobility. Even in the Pre-March, the abolition of curial admissions' autonomy did not figure on the government's agenda. As in Britain, the most prestigious sector of the nobility remained closed to Jews until the second half of the nineteenth century. Neither Salomon Rothschild nor any other Jew became a corporate noble in the Austrian lands before 1848.
Appendix
Marriages between Austrian nobles of the rank of count or countess and persons of Jewish descent (late eighteenth century to 1848 in chronological order of marriage):
1 Count Franz Festetics (1763–1822) m. 1786 Baroness Catharina Wetzlar-Plankenstern (c. 1767–1807, baptized 1777)
2 Prince Heinrich XIV Reuss-Greiz (1749–99) m. 1797 Marie-Anne Meyer (d. 1812; after her marriage, she took the name ‘Frau von Eybenberg’)
3 Count Karl Franz Clary-Aldringen (1774–1840) m. (before 3 May 1797) Baroness Johanna Wetzlar-Plankenstern (1767–1807, baptized 1778)
4 Count Anton Franz Triangi (1753–1824) m. 1798 Baroness Caroline Wetzlar-Plankenstern (b. c. 1763, baptized 1777)
5 Count Franz Desfours-Walderode (1771–1838) m. 1799 Augusta Elisabeth Walde (1779–1807, baptized 1799; name before baptism was Minha Katz)
6 Count Michael Kaunitz (1781–1846) m. 1812 Rosa Maria Rämschik (b. c. 1788; name before baptism was Rosa Flekeles genannt Ramschak)
7 Count Ferdinand Bubna (1768–1825) m. 1813 Baroness Wilhelmine Arenfeld (1790–1840; father baptized as adult)
8 Count Johann Barth-Barthenheim (1784–1846) m. 1824 (Baroness) Wilhelmine Löwenthal (b. 1802, baptized 1803)
9 Count Moritz Fries (1777–1826) m. 1825 Fanny Lombard (1795–1869; name at birth was Vogel Müntzenberg)
10 Count Franz Wimpffen (1797–1870) m. 1825 Baroness Maria Eskeles (1801–62, baptized 1824)
11 Count (later Prince) Gustav Batthyány (1803–83) m. 1828 Baroness Wilhelmine Arenfeld (widowed Countess Ferdinand Bubna, see above no. 7)
12 Count Ladislaus Rey (1818–87) m. 183? Baroness Maria Brunicka (1820–76; first paternal great-grandfather baptized in 1808, while first paternal great-grandmother remained Jewish until her death 1820)
13 Count Cajetan Alcaini (1792–1854) m. 1831 Louise von Herz (1800–89, baptized 1819)
14 Countess Seraphine Amadé-Varkony (1814–48) m. 1835 Baron August Pereira-Arnstein (1811–47; parents baptized as adults)
15 Count Moritz Fries (1804–87) m. 1836 Baroness Flora Pereira-Arnstein (1814–82; parents baptized as adults)
16 Countess Maria Anna Wurmbrand-Stuppach (1816–38) m. 1836 Baron Johann Baptist Löwenthal (1801–91, baptized 1803)
17 Countess Marie Drohojowska (1814–93) m. c. 1840 Baron Leon Brunicki (1811–66; first paternal great-grandfather baptized in 1808, while first paternal great-grandmother remained Jewish until her death 1820)
18 Count Walafried Vetter-Lilienberg (1811–47) m. 1842 Angelica von Liebenberg de Zsittin (1819–81; parents baptized as adults in the year of her birth)
19 Countess Henriette Larisch (1817–61) m. 1844 Baron Louis Pereira-Arnstein (1803–58, baptized 1808)
20 Count Glizojo Mels-Colloredo (1819–94) m. 1848 Baroness Eleonore Philippsborn (1827–80; first paternal great-grandfather baptized under the original family name Philippssohn).
The principal published sources for the appendix include: Anna L. Staudacher, Jüdische Konvertiten in Wien 1782–1868, 2 parts (Frankfurt am Main, 2002); Tomasz Lenczewski, Genealogie rodów utytułowanych w Polsce, i (Warsaw, 1995–6), pp. 233–7 (article Brunicki); Leon Ruziczka, ‘Die Nachkommen des Salomon Edlen von Herz’, Monatsblatt der Heraldischen Gesellschaft ‘Adler’, 11 (1931), pp. 17–31; Christian Steeb, Die Grafen von Fries: Eine schweizer Familie und ihre wirtschaftspolitische und kulturhistorische Bedeutung für Österreich zwischen 1750 und 1830 (Bad Vöslau, 1999); Michel Huberty, Alain Giraud, and F. and B. Magdelaine, L'Allemagne dynastique, vol. 1: Hesse-Reuss-Saxe (Le Perreux, 1976); some unpublished data taken from Ruczicka Sammlung, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv. For the information on Eleonore Philippsborn, the author would like to thank Dr Volkhard Huth of the Institut für Personengeschichte, Bensheim.
