AUSTRIAN JEWS AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE: REFORMULATING MULTINATIONALISM AS A RESPONSE TO THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE HABSBURG EMPIRE, 1880-1939 by Katherine E. Sorrels M.A. in History, Central European University, 2000 B.A. in History, Binghamton University, 1998 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2009 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Katherine E. Sorrels It was defended on April 14, 2009 and approved by Jonathan Scott, University of Pittsburgh Seymour Drescher, University of Pittsburgh Alexander Orbach, University of Pittsburgh Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Carnegie Mellon University Adam Shear, University of Pittsburgh Dissertation Advisors: Jonathan Scott, University of Pittsburgh, Gregor Thum, Frieburg Institute for Advanced Studies ii Copyright c by Katherine E. Sorrels 2009 iii AUSTRIAN JEWS AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE: REFORMULATING MULTINATIONALISM AS A RESPONSE TO THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE HABSBURG EMPIRE, 1880-1939 Katherine E. Sorrels, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 The process of European political unification that began in the mid-twentieth century has taken for granted a certain idea. This is that Europe is composed of ethnonational units. My research shows that some of the central, though largely unexplored intellectual roots of the European Union challenged this idea. German-speaking Jews from the Habsburg Empire, in the period between the 1880s and the Second World War, formulated an idea of Europe that was intended to cut across enthnonational distinctions. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German nationalism had been the gate- way for Central European Jews to membership in a European civilization defined by liberal Enlightenment values. Yet the crisis of liberalism at the close of the nineteenth century saw liberal national movements turn into exclusive, ethnonational ones. The cosmopolitan, Enlightenment idea of Europe gave way to an idea of Europe whose membership was con- fined to sovereign ethnonational components. The multinational Austrian dynastic state and its Jews had little to gain from this development: Jews were not only unwelcome in the ethnically-defined nation state, but by extension, in all of Europe. I show that in response to the national disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, Austrian Jewish liberals, pacifists, Zionists, Diaspora nationalists, and Austro-Marxists formulated a strikingly similar clus- ter of European ideas. All conceived of Europe as a cultural and intellectual community constituted on the basis of a decentralized, multinational polity in which national affilia- tion(s) or lack thereof would be defined by individual choice. Though they offered divergent iv immediate solutions to antisemitism, their shared dilemma and common intellectual and cultural resources united them in imagining Europe as the long-term solution to the Jewish predicament. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ......................................... viii 1.0 INTRODUCTION .................................1 1.1 The Idea of Euorpe: A Very Brief Overview..................4 1.2 The Abendland Idea of Europe.........................6 1.3 The Nationalist Idea of Europe......................... 10 1.4 Austrian Jewish Cosmopolitanism....................... 15 1.5 Method and Sources............................... 17 2.0 THE AUSTRIAN JEWISH ORIGINS OF \PAN-EUROPE" ...... 22 2.1 Introduction................................... 22 2.2 Alfred Fried.................................... 24 2.3 Progressive Social Reform in Vienna...................... 27 2.4 Moral Pacifism in Germany........................... 34 2.5 Organicism as a basis for Pan-Europe..................... 37 2.6 Pacifism and Pan-Europe after World War One................ 52 2.7 Conclusion.................................... 56 3.0 ZIONIST COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE JEWISH RESUSCITA- TION OF EUROPE ................................ 59 3.1 Introduction................................... 59 3.2 Historiography.................................. 62 3.3 Jewish Political Nationalism and Europe.................... 67 3.3.1 Zion and the \Continental Union".................... 67 3.3.2 The Jewish State as a European Diaspora................ 75 vi 3.4 Jewish Cultural Nationalism and Europe.................... 97 3.4.1 Natan Birnbaum's Yiddish-Speaking Europe.............. 97 3.4.2 Multicultural Central Europe Abroad.................. 110 3.5 Conclusion.................................... 121 4.0 AUSTRIAN JEWISH SOCIALISTS AND THE \UNITED STATES OF EUROPE" ................................... 124 4.1 Introduction................................... 124 4.2 Otto Bauer's Idea of the Nation......................... 129 4.3 The United States of Austria: Proposals and Precedents........... 141 4.4 Cosmopolitanism and the Special Role of the Jews in Europe........ 151 4.5 Conclusion.................................... 157 5.0 THE HABSBURG EMPIRE AS A MODEL FOR POSTWAR EUROPE159 5.1 Introduction................................... 159 5.2 The Austrian Idea................................ 160 5.3 Hope in the 1920s................................ 167 5.3.1 Roth and The Shtetl as a Source of European Cosmopolitanism.... 167 5.3.2 Zweig and Europe as a Republic of Letters............... 173 5.4 Nostalgia in the 1930s.............................. 181 5.4.1 Joseph Roth on the National Defeat of Europe............. 182 5.4.2 Austria Abroad: Zweig's Response to Europe's Suicide......... 187 5.5 Conclusion.................................... 192 6.0 CONCLUSION ................................... 194 7.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................. 198 7.1 Unpublished Primary Sources.......................... 198 7.2 Published Primary Sources........................... 200 7.3 Secondary Sources................................ 204 vii PREFACE I would like to thank the people who made this dissertation possible. I am grateful for the help of archivists at the Hoover Institution Archives, the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute and the YIVO in New York, the Archiv der Verein f¨urGeschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Vienna, and the Central Zionist Archives, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. I am also grateful for generous financial support for my research and writing. I wish to thank the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Leo Baeck Institute for a Leo Baeck Doctoral Fellowship. Felloships from the Osterreichische¨ Austauschdienst and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research made research trips to Vienna and New York possible. Scholars at Pitt and beyond have provided support and encouragement. Alex Orbach and Adam Shear have been indispensable guides in my study of Jewish history and in the writing process. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and Seymour Drescher have also been kind and generous with their time. Evelyn Rawski and Bill Chase offered excellent graduate courses and guidance in my first years at Pitt. This text would never have been produced without the prodding, encouragement, and insightful comments of Jonathan Scott, to whom I am also infinitely grateful for taking on the supervision of a dissertation that required he become familiar with an entirely new field|a challenge he seemed not to notice. Gregor Thum took on much more than he had to as a DAAD visiting professor when he agreed to co-supervise this dissertation. At Pitt and from Germany he has been a supportive and challenging reader and has saved me from the embarrassment of numerous historical errors. Our discussions have been both greatly enjoyable and crucial in shaping my thinking about the dissertation topic. Zvi Biener has lived with me during the research and writing|no small achievement|for which I am deeply grateful. He has also read significant portions of this dissertation and pro- viii vided tech support with (almost) infinite patience. My mother Mira, and my grandmother, Nancy, have endured absentmindedness and neglect and been more forgiving and generous than anyone deserves. Finally, since Microsoft Word is a tool of the devil, this dissertation has been written in Scrivener|a writer's friend|with the help of MultiMarkdown, BibDesk and LATEX. ix 1.0 INTRODUCTION The process of European political unification that began in the mid-twentieth century has taken for granted a certain idea. This is that Europe is composed of ethnonational units. This dissertation shows that some of the central, though largely unexplored intellectual roots of the European Union challenged this. Jewish intellectuals from the Habsburg Empire, in the period between the 1880s and the Second World War, formulated an idea of Europe that was intended to cut across ethnonational distinctions. The Jewish intelligentsia of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Austria promoted this vision of Europe across the political spectrum and despite vast ideological differences. They did so long before support for European unification became mainstream in Europe. In fact, it took two world wars to build consensus in Europe that nationalism was dangerous and that national sovereignty needed to be reigned in. However, I show that such consensus existed decades earlier among Austrian Jews. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German nationalism had been the gate- way for Central European Jews to membership in a European civilization defined by liberal Enlightenment values. Yet the crisis of liberalism