This volume is a pioneering effort to examine the social, demographic, and economic changes that befell the Jewish communities of Central Europe after the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. It consists of studies researched and written especially for this volume by historians, sociologists, and economists, all specialists in modern Central European Jewish affairs. The era of national rivalry, economic crises, and political confusion between the two World Wars has been preceded by a pre-World War I epoch of Jewish emancipation and assimilation. During that period, Jewish minorities had been harbored from violent anti-Semitism by the Empire, and they became torchbearers of industrialization and modernization. This common destiny encouraged certain common characteristics in the three major components of the Empire, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech territories, despite the very different origins of the well over one million Jews in those three lands. The disintegration of the Habsburg Empire created three small, economically marginal national states, inimical to each other and at liberty to create their own policies toward Jews in accord with the preferences of their respective ruling classes. Active and openly discriminatory anti-Semitic measures resulted in Austria and Hungary. The only liberal heir country of the Empire was Czechoslovakia, although simmering anti-Semitism and below surface discrimination were widespread in Slovakia. While one might have expected Jewish communities to return to their pre-World War I tendencies to go their independent ways after the introduction of these policies, social and economic patterns which had evolved in the Habsburg era persisted until the Anschluss in Austria, German occupation in Czechoslovakia, and World War II in Hungary. Studies in this volume attest to continuing similarities among the three Jewish communities, testifying to the depth of the Empire's long lasting impact on the behavior of Jews in Central Europe.
1: Part I: 1648–1806 From the end of the Thirty Years War to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire; Introduction to Part I Germany and the Thirty Years War; 1: The Holy Roman Empire; 2: Court life; 3: The German nobility; 4: Town life in Germany; 5: The educated classes; 6: Religious life and the clergy in Germany; 7: Army life; 8: The peasantry; 9: The fringes of society; Part II: 1806–1914; Introduction to Part II; Section I The authorities; 10: The courts and the nobility; 11: The churches and religious life in the nineteenth century; 12: The German army; Section 2 ‘Bildung und Besitz’: Education and property; 13: The bourgeoisie; 14: The bureaucrats; 15: Education and élites; 16: The industrial entrepreneurs; 17: The Jews; 18: Artisans and small traders; Section 3 Rural life and its problems; 19: The peasantry and rural labourers; Section 4 Lower orders: manual workers; 20: The industrial labour force; 21: Domestic servants; 22: The poor; Section 5 The other half; 23: Women in German society
