There is much of interest in this work on the ever-fascinating topic of Vienna and its Jews, and at least some that will be new even to those who fancy themselves experts. Lisa Silverman approaches her topic from a particular perspective, that of boundaries, the “unspoken rules of behavior built upon notions of Jewish difference [that] constantly and irrevocably shaped the experience of Jews in Austrian culture” (4). As a result “the use of Jewish difference as a method of articulating other power relationships intensified along with the highly charged and politicized culture of the period” and “age-old codes were invigorated with new urgency” (8, 21). Overt and covert social boundaries exist in all societies, separating gender, class, religion—or its absence—and ethnic origin. In interwar Austria they were fairly explicit, though probably no more so than elsewhere in Central Europe. They separated Left from Right, Catholic from secular, metropolis from periphery, traditional culture from modernist, Jew from non-Jew. There were also boundaries within each category and those that overlapped. Although some of the boundaries corresponded to objectively recognizable categories, others were hidden or coded and reflected stereotypes rather than facts. Silverman is particularly good on the last of these. Thus, in the eyes of most of the provinces, Vienna was “Jewish,” as was the Social Democratic Party, dominant in Vienna between 1918 and 1934.

The prevalence of coded boundaries emerges particularly strongly in two set-piece chapters, those on spectacular court trials (chapter 2) and on the theater (chapter 4). In the 1928 trial of Philipp Halsmann for the alleged murder of his father while on a hike in the Tirol, the murder was increasingly portrayed, in the absence of any concrete evidence, as a blood-obsessed patricide, reflecting the image of the Jew as a dangerous alien in the Catholic provinces. Two better-known trials took place in Vienna, those of the murderers of the journalist Hugo Bettauer in 1924 and the philosopher Moritz Schlick in 1936. Bettauer was a publisher of erotica, fairly mild by present-day standards, and an advocate of sexual liberation, including the decriminalization of homosexuality and abortion. He therefore fitted the image of the subversive, immoral Jew. The case of Schlick was an even better instance of the “abstract nature of Jewish codings and their ability to be applied to particular people and situations for political expediency” (59). Though Schlick was an upper-class German Protestant, his association with the antimetaphysical positivism of the Vienna Circle, many of whose members were Jews and/or Socialists, made it easy to code him as a Jew, with the result that his murderer, with his far-right links, could portray himself as a freedom fighter.

An even more complicated case was that of the theater, in particular of the founders of the Salzburg Festival, Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Reinhardt was a Jew with an interest in both traditional Jewish theater, including Yiddish, and high-culture classical theater. Hofmannsthal was the grandson of a Jewish banker who had converted to Catholicism and who took his own conservative Catholicism seriously, which did not save him from being coded as a Jew by some anti-Semites. The choice of provincial Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart, bestowed on the festival a distinct Austrian-patriotic flavor, with all its Catholic overtones, the more so as the festival's centerpiece was Hofmannsthal's adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman, performed on the steps of the cathedral. Despite some sniping, this baroque spectacle was one of the more successful attempts at breaching boundaries, attracting a Jewish as well as a Catholic audience and catering to a shared nostalgia for a stable heritage.

The most puzzling aspect of the book is its title. No doubt the end of the Habsburg Empire demanded a search for new identities, but were the country's Jews more Austrian in 1938 than in 1918? Silverman refers to memoirs in which the writers emphasize a Viennese rather than an Austrian identification (118). It is significant that when Austrian-Jewish emigrants after the Anschluss tried to recreate their culture in their places of exile, this took form in coffeehouses, music societies, and cabarets, not dirndls or leather shorts. Paradoxically, Jewish Austrian-ness was probably strengthened after 1934, when, under Chancellors Dollfuß and Schuschnigg, the provinces had captured the politics of Vienna. But the reason for this would have been exogenous—namely, the threat of National Socialism from across the border.