Herzl, Freud, and the End of Jewish Vienna

By 1900 Vienna held one of the largest and most prominent Jewish communities in Europe, and also a mayor who had built a career on antisemitic politics. The city synagogue of 1826 stands behind an ordinary residential facade because a law of the time required non Catholic places of worship not to front the street, which is why it is the only one in the city that survived 1938: it could not be burned without burning the block.

Two Viennese responses to that situation shaped the century. Theodor Herzl, a journalist who covered the Dreyfus affair in Paris, concluded that assimilation had failed and published Der Judenstaat in 1896, arguing for a Jewish state as a political project; the first Zionist Congress met the following year. Sigmund Freud, working a few streets away, went in the opposite direction, treating religion as a collective illusion rooted in the helplessness of the child, and in his last book reconstructing Moses as an Egyptian killed by his own followers, a book he published as a refugee in London after fleeing in 1938.

What followed the annexation of that year was the destruction of the community. Synagogues and prayer houses were burned in November 1938, property was seized, emigration was forced and then closed off, and the great majority of those who remained were deported and murdered. A small community re-established itself after the war, and the Stadttempel is again in use.