Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

The Partitions of Poland meant the transfer of most of Europe’s Jewish population from Poland to the Prussian, Habsburg and Russian states. The great majority fell to Russia, which had no tradition of dealing with Jews and proceeded to make a disgusting nightmare of ‘the Pale’. Berlin and Vienna had long experience with Jewish populations and simply extended their own more or less disreputable ways of dealing with them. Prussian Jews were unlucky enough to have the ridiculously low-grade Friedrich Wilhelm III, a mystical and babyish Christian who once shut down an experimental new synagogue in Berlin (which allowed men and women to sit in the same space) on the grounds that if Judaism lost its aura of irrational obscurantism it might become attractive as a faith. This binary atmosphere – either pressure on Prussian Jews to become German-speaking Prussians or the Russian view that Jews were irretrievably alien – made the Habsburg experience relatively sane.