This book deals with the significance of the “Jewish question” in central Europe, particularly in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and links it to the “ethnic cauldron” of the multicultural Habsburg Empire. It argues that the origins of Hitler's racist nationalism and anti-Semitism can be found in Habsburg Austria, reflecting the “identity crisis of those German Austrians who felt increasingly on the defensive in the wake of Slav encroachment and Jewish emancipation” (p. 7). In that specific sense the Empire could indeed be named, in the words of Karl Kraus, a “laboratory for world destruction.”

In fourteen essays, most of them previously published, the well-known historian of anti-Semitism and of Jewish-Gentile relations in Austria explores his topic by drawing clear-cut portraits of individual politicians and intellectuals and their positions on the “Jewish question.” The series starts with Adolf Fischof, the liberal activist of the 1848 revolution and unwavering advocate of conciliation between the different nationalities of the Empire who fought a losing battle when, during the 1880s, the national struggle sharpened and racial anti-Semitism emerged. Two chapters follow on Socialists' attitudes to Jewish assimilation, Zionism, and anti-Semitism exemplified with the Austro-Marxists Victor Adler and Otto Bauer on the one hand and Rosa Luxemburg on the other; the line continues with portraits of the Jewish nationalists Nathan Birnbaum, Max Nordau, and Theodor Herzl. Friedrich Nietzsche's stance against German anti-Semitism and his rather positive views on the Jews as a people with a world historical mission is accentuated against the anti-Semitic interpretation of his work. Wistrich also includes three major Viennese intellectuals who in very different ways defined their Jewishness within an anti-Semitic environment: Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, and Karl Kraus. The series concludes with two anti-Semitic politicians: the charismatic mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger and, as a kind of logical conclusion of the sequence, Adolf Hitler whose development into an anti-Semite is dated very early and attributed to the disintegrating multicultural Habsburg Empire: “The seeds of Nazism were sown in the cosmopolitan melting-pot of early twentieth-century Vienna where Hitler's obsession with Jews as agents of decomposition and corruption first began to crystallize” (p. 377).

The essays of this book address a general readership and present little new to the expert. They are well documented and often elegantly written. Seen individually, the different portraits are rather convincingly drawn—with nuances of different shades and embedded into the background of their times. I am much more skeptical, though, toward Wistrich's overall interpretation that is presented in the introduction and appears throughout the book in predictions such as “[this or that] was herald of the catastrophe that would … later descend upon Central Europe” (p. 76). History is presented here in a deterministic fashion, leading almost inevitably to the “world destruction” of the Holocaust. Like the omniscient narrator of a novel, Wistrich presents forebodings and conclusions based on hindsight-knowledge, thereby reducing the complexity and openness of the historical process in a simplistic manner. Like others before him, Wistrich is particularly concerned with a possible connection between “the dazzling achievement [of Jewish intellectuals in central Europe] and the ferocity of the [anti-Semitic] backlash” (p. 1). In spite of the fact that the material presented in this book does not allow us to answer that question, Wistrich claims that the “intensity of Jewish acculturation seemed to exacerbate rather than diminish existing social, economic, and cultural tensions” (p. 22). As a general statement about the relations between Jews and non-Jews in German-speaking Europe, this thesis is rather speculative and hardly convincing. It is true that some anti-Semitic ideologues might have found it more difficult to construct the “foreignness” of the Jews when in fact they were similar, and that this dilemma might have contributed to the radical racialization of Jews in the anti-Semitic worldview. But is it true for society in general? Did everyday relations between Jews and non-Jews exacerbate when Jews were acculturated? Historical evidence does not support such a sweeping thesis. This illustrates one of the limits of Wistrich's approach: he deals with ideological constructions of the “Jewish Question” in a selection of public figures, not with the history of “Germans and Jews in Central Europe” as the subtitle of the book indicates.

Wistrich is, of course, well aware of the fact that the radicalization of anti-Semitism in central Europe was not a “result of Jewish behavior” (p. 21) and that the increase of anti-Jewish activities in central Europe was due to cataclysmic historical events such as World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. But this insight is not systematically applied in his book. History is rather presented as a moral lesson, as a warning against the pitfalls of assimilation, and against the underestimation of anti-Semitism. This commitment makes these essays an interesting read, but it also limits the scope of historical understanding.