Jewish Museum

Today after class we headed over to the Jewish Museum to try and see what we could learn about such an integral culture within Vienna. The museum's lower level had artifacts concerned with the various holidays throughout the Jewish year, including those relics used during temple services and associated with the Tabernacle. However, the second floor is where the history truly began.

The exhibit began with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, where they fled to North Africa and into the Ottoman Empire. In 711 Spain was conquered by the Moors, but later the Reconquista pushed the Muslim influence out of the region. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain signed an edict expelling all Jews, participating in a mass ethnic cleansing. Some Jews fled to Portugal and then later to Amsterdam due to persecutions, and some established economic communities in the Balkans (parts of which were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire). These Sephardic Jews ('sepharad' is Hebrew for Spain) became assimilated into the Turkish empire, and were welcomed freely. When the peace treaty was signed between the Habsburgs and the Sublime Porte (referring to the Ottomans), Turkish citizens began to reside in Habsburgs lands, and Austrians began to settle in Turkish lands. Thus, due to these new cultural and economic relations, Sephardic Jews began to settle in Vienna. The Sephardic Jews became mediators between the east and the west, between orient and occidental, and between Asia and Europe.

In 1735 a treaty established the Turkish Sephardic Community in Vienna, but in 1830 the new Israelite law ended the community's autonomy, and they were incorporated into the Israelite community (The Association of Turkish Israelites).

Jews also settled in Bosnia (Sarajevo) after their expulsion from Spain, but with the establishment of the Yugoslavic state in 1918 and the subsequent German invasion , 75% of the Jews were sent to the Jasenovac Concentration Camp. The survivors after the war immigrated to Israel in 1948; only 1000 Jews remain today in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

When the Habsburgs were able to recapture Hungary from the Ottomans, there was a large influx of Ashkenazic Jews in Budapest, making the Sephardic Jews who had fled to Budapest now a minority.

The Ottoman conquest of Belgrade by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1521 led to an influx of Sephardic Jews in the city. Fights between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans over Belgrade continued until 1867 when the Kingdom of Serbia obtained complete independence. The Jews who fled to both Bulgaria and Thessaloniki were deported to concentration camps when the Germans invaded during WWII.

In Italy, the exhibition mentioned that attitudes toward the Jews were ambivalent and oscillating between acceptance and discrimination; the Republic of Venice was the first nation to implement a Jewish ghetto.

The Jewish musicians in Vienna were executed and exiled, and after the war, many refused to return to a land which had denounced and ignored their contributions to culture and history. As the exhibit mentioned, in exile they became a testimony to Vienna's past - while valued abroad they were only distantly remembered at home.

The exhibit itself focused mainly on the regional diaspora of the Jews after their expulsion from Spain, and did not detail the Holocaust. However, the second floor had a temporary exhibit of Ernst Toch, a classical and film score musician, who went into exile during WWII to avoid Hitler's wrath. The exhibit included more history from WWII, but was extremely modern with everything displayed on glass holograms and a mock pool patio as the backdrop.

Apart from the top floor, the Jewish Museum was extremely enlightening and gave a much needed and yet concise context for the Jewish culture in Vienna.