Tales of the Viennese Jews: 1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

Edgar Degas, General Millinet and Chief Rabbi Astruc (1871), oil on canvas, Community of Géradmer, France (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz written by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) just over a century and a half ago, in 1868.

Strauss, whose other works include The Blue Danube and the Kaiser-Walzer, was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church. But he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, which they regarded as typically German, they tried to conceal and even deny the Jewish identity of the Strauss family.

However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of those stories from Vienna are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.

Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two blog postings, I have decided over the next few days or weeks to re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.

One of the exhibitions in the Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse is a double portrait by the French painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and General Anne Francois Millinet (1768-1852) and Chief Rabbi Astruc. Although neither of these subjects is from Vienna, this painting, in oil on canvas, dates from 1871 and is currently on loan to the museum in Vienna from the Community of Géradmer in France.

The artist Edgar Degas (born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas) is known for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. He is especially identified with the subject of dance, and more than half of his works depict dancers.

Degas is seen as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist. He was particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his paintings of dancers, racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are also known for their psychological complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation.

At the start of his career, Degas had many Jewish friends and patrons, including Charles Ephrussi, whose extended family is the subject of a major exhibition on one floor of the museum.

The double portrait by Degas of General Millinet and Chief Rabbi Astruc was painted during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. Later, during the ‘Dreyfus Affair’ (1894-1906), Degas became a fanatical anti-Semite and vocal opponent of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice and hysterical public anti-Semitism.

This vitriolic antisemitism provides some of the background for the forceful response to the portrait by Chief Rabbi Astruc’s son, the journalist and theatre director Gabriel Astruc. He saw the double portrait of his father and the general as an anti-Semitic travesty.

‘Degas, whose anti-Semitism has made him colour-blind, has destroyed his wonderful model by replacing his small thin mouth by thick sensuous lips and transforming his sensitive and warm regard into an expression of greed,’ Gabriel Astruc wrote. ‘This work is not art, it’s a pogrom.’

A photograph of Chief Rabbi Astruc in the exhibition serves to illustrate how his son’s response is justified.

Élie-Aristide Astruc (1831-1905) was a French rabbi and author. He was born in Bordeaux on 12 November 1831, and went to school in Bordeaux before studying at the French rabbinical college in Metz.

He was appointed assistant to the Chief Rabbi of Paris in 1857, and he became the chaplain of the Paris Lyceums of Louis le Grand, Vanves, and Chaptal.

Astruc was one of the six founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860, and in 1865 he was the delegate from Bayonne at the convention to nominate the Chief Rabbi of France.

When he was elected the Chief Rabbi of Belgium in 1866, a special decree from the Emperor Napoleon III allowed him to remain a French citizen while he held that office.

During the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871), Astruc distinguished himself both as a French patriot and as a Jewish minister. He was a member of the comité du pain, whose chairman, the Comte de Mérode, leader of the Belgian Catholic party, cared for the wounded. As secretary of the ‘Belgian committee for the liberation of the territory (Alsace and Lorraine),’ Astruc revisited Metz for the first time in 20 years.

Astruc resigned as Chief Rabbi of Belgium in 1879. Before leaving Belgium, the King of the Belgians made him a Knight of the Order of Leopold. Back in France, he was Chief Rabbi of Bayonne from 1887 to 1891, when he retired.

In the pulpit, Astruc expressed independent but moderate views, proclaiming his moral convictions and his attachment to the Jewish faith.

Astruc was a successful writer. His first work was a French metrical translation of the principal liturgical poems of the Sephardic ritual, Olelot Eliahu, Elia's Gleanings) (1865). His small book Histoire Abrégée des Juifs et de Leurs Croyances (1869) caused a sensation. As Astruc said, he wished ‘to separate the kernel from its shell,’ or to disengage the great ideas of Judaism from egendary traditions.

His more important sermons were published as Entretiens sur le Judaisme (1879). His Origines et Causes Historiques de l’Anti-Sémitisme (1884) was translated into German and Hungarian.

He contributed to many reviews, including the Revue de Belgique, Revue de Pédagogie, and the Nouvelle Revue, often seeking to correct non-Jews and their views of Jewish history and beliefs.

He died in Brussels on 23 February 1905 at the age of 73.

A photograph of Élie-Aristide Astruc at the end of the 19th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Other postings in this series:

1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean

3, portraits of two imperial court financiers

4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis

5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist

6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle

7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions

8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’

10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna

13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew

14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna

15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship

16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.

17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.

18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.

19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.

20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.

The lost synagogues of the Sephardic Jewish community in Vienna

A 19th century silk Torah mantle and a Megillat Esther or Esther Scroll from the lost Sephardic synagogue in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

One of the many synagogues lost during the horrors of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust following the Nazi annexation of Austria was the Sephardic synagogue in Vienna. With it, the story of the Sephardic community in Vienna and their unique traditions were destroyed.

However, some of this community story has been recovered and is retold in the exhibitions in the Jewish Museum in the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse in Vienna. This story illustrates the diversity of the Jewish community in the Habsburg empire and also shows how changing circumstances, both political and social, offer opportunities and challenges.

The Ottoman Empire twice laid siege to Vienna, in 1528 and again in 1683. The defeat of the Turks in 1683 was an enormous, strategic setback for the Ottoman Empire, and its most disastrous defeat since its foundation four centuries earlier in 1299.

The Turkish defeat at Vienna became a turning point in history, and the Ottoman Turks ceased to be a threat to western Europe. In the war that continued until 1699, the Ottomans lost almost all of Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburg Empire.

The Treaty of Passarowitz, signed at the end of Austro-Turkish war of 1716-1718 and the end of the Venetian-Turkish war of 1716-1718, marked the end of Ottoman westward expansion. The treaty gave Austria commercial privileges in the Ottoman Empire, and allowed some Ottoman subjects to settle and conduct business from then on in the lands of the Habsburg monarchs.

Although there was another war between Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey that came to an end with the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, the provisions of the Treaty of Passarowitz allowed a group of Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Turkish lands to settle in Vienna.

As subjects of the Sultan, these Sephardic Jews were allowed to establish a legally recognised community in Vienna in the mid-18th century and they were permitted to build their own synagogue.

Paradoxically, the same right was denied to the Ashkenazi Jews from Central and East Europe who were living in Vienna. It was the misfortune of these Ashkenazi Jews in Vienna to be subjects of the Habsburg Empire. Until Joseph II issued an edict of toleration in 1782, they were not allowed to build their own synagogues, and many of them must have found it attractive to seek ‘Turkish papers.’

The Sephardic community in Vienna was established in the early 18th century by a group of Ottoman families led by Diego d’Aguillar. Many were the descendants of Sephardic families expelled from Spain and Portugal under the Inquisition in the 15th century; others were descended from families that had once lived in Italy; and in many cases they had fled cities and islands in Greece that the Venetians were forced to cede to the Ottomans under the terms of the treaty in 1718, such as Crete and the Peleponnese.

Two Ottoman-style finials for Torah scrolls survive from that time. They came from Jerusalem, which was part of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. Although it is not known when the Torah scrolls came to Vienna, the inscriptions on the finials say, ‘Jerusalem 1741.’

A silk Torah mantle from the 19th century and a Megillat Esther or Esther Scroll made in Vienna in 1844 also survive from the Sephardic community and are on display in the Jewish Museum.

Inside the ‘Turkish Temple,’ after a watercolour by Franz Reinhold (1890)

The first reference to a prayer house of the Turkish-Jewish or Sephardic community in Vienna is in 1778, although its location is unknown. The Sephardic prayer house on Upper Danube Street was destroyed by fire in 1824, and the community moved to the Great Mohrengasse.

As membership increased sharply, the community bought a plot of land at Fuhrmanngasse (today Zirkusgasse) 22 and began building a new prayer house that opened in 1868. However, major building defects soon appeared, and the building was demolished.

An elegant new Sephardic synagogue was built in the Moorish Revival style, inspired by the Alhambra in Spain. It was known as the ‘Turkish Temple’ and was built by the architect Hugo von Wiedenfeld (1852-1925) at Zirkusgasse in the Leopoldstadt district, between 1885 and 1887.

The synagogue was built between several neighbouring houses so that the entrance could only be reached through an atrium or vestibule. The main, square prayer room had an octagonal dome that was 12 metres high. This was supported by 17-metre high walls and was illuminated by skylights and lanterns.

The Aron ha-Kodesh or Holy Ark for the Torah scrolls, like most of the interior, was covered with marble or stucco, decorated and in gold or other colours. At the opposite end was the organ loft.

The prayer room had 314 seats on the ground floor, and galleries on three sides could accommodated another 360 people, with 250 standing spaces and 110 seats. In addition, a winter room on the first floor had 105 seats.

With new laws regulating the Jewish community in 1890, the Turkish Jewish community lost its independence and was to be incorporated into the larger Jewish community. After long negotiations, however, the Sephardic community was granted a degree of autonomy.

Rabbi Michael Papo from Sarajevo served the synagogue as a rabbi until 1918. After him, this position remained virtually vacant, and his son Manfred Papo served as a rabbi in the ‘Turkish Temple’ only sporadically. On the other hand, after World War I, Cantor Isidor Lewit, who created his own singing style based on Turkish-Sephardic melodies, made a significant contribution to the synagogue and community life.

It is said there were 94 synagogues and prayer houses in Vienna before the Nazis moved into Austria in 1938. The Sephardic synagogue at Zirkusgasse, like all other synagogues in Vienna – with the sole exception of the Stadttempel on Seitenstettengasse, built in 1824-1826 – was destroyed during the Holocaust.

Fifty years after the ‘Turkish Temple’ was destroyed in November 1938, the City of Vienna erected a commemorative plaque in 1988 to remember the Sephardic synagogue.

Two Ottoman-style Torah finials Jerusalem … once in the Sephardic synagogue in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

This morning: The Stadttempel or City Synagogue at Seitenstettengasse 4, Vienna