Modern Judaism

Jewish politics of the interwar period in eastern and central Europe has been described as sometimes resembling a “children’s crusade,” and Viennese Jewish politics during the First World War certainly fit this description at least in part. ¹ The emergence in Vienna in late 1917 of a dynamic and popular Jewish nationalist youth movement was an important element in the upsurge of Jewish political activity of the second half of the war, a phenomenon particularly marked on the nationalist side of the political fence. The combination of the presence of tens of thousands of Galician and Bukovinian refugees in the city, a period of intense crisis and uncertainty keenly felt by young refugees, the influence of the German cult of youth, a strong and capable leader, and a political atmosphere in which nationalism increasingly held sway all provided the conditions for the intense and relatively brief flourishing of a Viennese Jewish youth movement. This youth subculture existed at one remove from the world of “adult” politics, represented in this context by the Zionist organization in Vienna. Their mutual antipathy was driven from the one side by the local Zionist leadership’s distaste for what it regarded as the impractical and overly “spiritual” nature of the youth movement, and from the other by a desire not to be sullied by too intimate an involvement with the “corrupt” world of bourgeois adulthood and politics.

The rapid rise and fall of the Viennese Jewish youth movement testifies to the volatility of east central European Jewish politics in these years. Much of the fighting on the eastern front in World War I took place in the most densely populated Jewish regions in Europe, devastating the infrastructures of Jewish life. Mass expulsions, widespread anti-Jewish violence, and economic ruin were the consequences of the war for Jews in these areas. At the same time, however, Jews emerged as an autonomous political factor in the international political arena—a development facilitated by the apparent triumph of the principles of self-determination and nationalism, and reflected in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 and by the presence of independent Jewish representation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. These were years, then, of “both untold loss and of unprecedented political achievement.” ² [End Page 25] Set against this background of prolonged crisis and rising expectations, the history of the wartime Viennese Jewish youth movement reflects the broader contours of east central European Jewish politics during these years—on the one hand, the divisiveness and fragmentation that characterized most Jewish political activity, and on the other, a shift in Jewish political culture whereby radical and nationalist norms were temporarily ascendant. ³