Читать книгу Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment - Hilde Spiel - Страница 10

THE EMPEROR’S EYES TOO WERE BLUE. SO BLUE THAT THE COURT ladies named a color after them, in which they had their gowns made à la duchesse and à la toque. The same color was surprisingly becoming to the Emperor himself, as if to belie the gravity of that shrewd, parsimonious man. He preferred to dress simply, in the German or “Werther” style, as it was called in those days, consisting of a long greatcoat, leather trousers and top-boots, which betrayed his martial sternness and perhaps also his admiration for Austria’s main adversary. Frederick the Great was his model; yet he took up arms against him without a qualm when it became necessary. He had revered Voltaire as the King’s teacher; yet he travelled through Switzerland without seeking out the philosopher in Ferney. In his discipline, his moderation and his sense of duty this exceptional Habsburg took after his robust ancestors of the Palatinate and Brunswick. Roman King and Emperor in the German realm, at home only a tolerated co-regent of his mother, the Austrian ruler, he shivered in the evening sunshine of the Theresian sovereignty, waiting for the dawn of enlightenment. Among his easy-going subjects he felt like a lonely, misunderstood stranger. Twice widowed, “cold and passionless, looking at women as though they were statues,” he did not share their tendencies towards extravagance. A frugal eater, whose meal of no more than six dishes was prepared by a single royal cook, he was untouched, even revolted by their gluttony.

“The god of the Viennese is their belly. They know no more pleasant entertainment than to feed. In summer, there is no garden that one enters where people are not eating from high-piled dishes laid out on every table; and for the most part chicken — fried chicken, braised chicken, roast chicken.” So wrote an Engelländer (Englishman) in his Journey through Mannheim, Bavaria and Austria to Vienna, which was published “by his German friend L. A. F. v. B.” in the last year of Joseph II’s reign, and perhaps even written in that year. It is only one of the numerous reports on countries, peoples and customs which were being rushed into print at a time when people were possessed by a veritable travel fever. They traversed the length and breadth of Europe noting, in the most painstaking detail, the dimensions, topography and population of its great cities, their public buildings, means of transport, quality of lighting, the birth and death rates of their inhabitants, how they spent their time and their money, the laws and regulations, religious, social and sexual customs, the names of the most important statesmen, philosophers, artists, collectors and scholars, the virtues and vices of the men and women, their songs and prayers, their bills of fare and their epitaphs, their appearance, their character and their temperament.

There is hardly an epoch in European history which has been described so frequently and so amply, with such naïve delight in discovery, as if one were dealing with exotic or savage tribes, with such pleasure in the characteristic and generalizing detail. One learns almost too much, and the inconsistencies are many. Yet all these travelers’ accounts, whether by genuine or bogus Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans or Dutch, agree on one thing, that is the epicureanism and gluttony of the Viennese.

“Apart from eating, their greatest pleasure is their Kasperl [Punch and Judy] and their animal-baiting,” reports the Engelländer previously quoted. Another visitor, the Swabian Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin, is of the opinion that “both sexes love splendor, display and pleasure to the point of excess — faults that are not so much in their hearts as in their blood.” Admittedly he has seen “consummate beauty among the women” and “figures among the male sex which a Persian sultan might envy,” but “these gifts are obscured by the most insufferable self-love and vanity.” The Viennese ladies attract and repel him simultaneously. They are “neither as coarse and strapping as Englishwomen, nor as delicate as Frenchwomen. They possess the sentiment of a Neapolitan, the coquetry of a French and the heart of a German woman.” Their pleasing traits however are “balanced by an unforgivable tendency towards idleness and a comfortable life. To paint the emblem of a Viennese lady, one would have to follow the drawing by Carracus: a Venus with a tortoise at her feet.”

Moreover, however beautiful “the scions of this climate” appear to him, he calls in question the purity of their blood-line: “Vienna teems with French, Italians, Hungarians, Slavs, Jews and other nations. The original Austrians have disappeared. A magistrate told me yesterday that from the house of Starhemberg down to the town-crier who goes about the streets there is hardly a family left among us which can trace its Austrian ancestry in an undiluted lineage from its great-grandfather.”

The North Germans were the sharpest critics of the sensuality and selfishness of that nation in the south, in whose midst, as it happened, their overlord, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, resided. In 1784 a Berliner wrote to a friend concerning the Viennese aristocracy: “The young ones play, drive, ride, hunt, make love in warm countries, till they grow cold, beat their servants lame, ruin their tenants, squeeze money out of their stewards, often get their mistresses with child, but rarely their wives, know no other merit in them but that they have money, and wish for nothing more earnestly than that the virtue of women could be sold at auction, like old books and clothes.” Of the old, he said that they were “wrathful, headstrong, proud, litigious, and keep their own followers, because in their old age they have not forgotten the habit of teasing people which still clings to them from their youth; they quarrel with their wives, are given over to gorging and guzzling, and let their children grow up blockheads.”

The ordinary people seemed to please him better, for they were “trusty, hospitable, kindly, well-meaning,” but liked to live “in splendor and excess.” “My dear fellow, I should in no way exceed the limits of the truth, were I perhaps to describe Vienna to you as the one place where the most gormandizing takes place.” All this, however, this “gluttony and debauchery makes the people here too lustful and lascivious, as the servant girls know only too well, when their gentlemen need to refresh themselves after dinner.” Nowhere else is “female game so cheap as here, for you can eat yourself sick for twenty pence. You may easily, without trouble, find a letto fornito in any house, as there are in most inns in Italy.”

Finally, this Prussian subject emphatically rejected Vienna’s claim to be a beautiful city. “It has no spacious streets, no squares with buildings pleasant to the eye, no dominant similarity of the houses and no perspective views as have other German towns … Vienna is not a place which strikes one by its appearance; it needs an expert eye, and must be examined.”

If this anonymous correspondent was a thorn in the flesh of the country that had entertained him, in order afterwards to be exposed by him, his compatriot Friedrich Nicolai seemed a very dagger in its heart. When, at about the same time, the second volume of Nicolai’s Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the Year 1781 was published, in which his description of Vienna began, a storm of indignation arose in Austria and raged northwards to Berlin. The Viennese, hotheads and sensible people alike, were being forced to observe their own merciless portrait through the eyes of an upright, enlightened, tolerant but deadly serious Prussian.

“To abolish all the softness, love of comfort, thoughtlessness, idleness and constant dissipation that are so generally rife in Vienna, two future generations will certainly not suffice.” This was only one of the gloomy prophecies which Nicolai wove into his description of the court. Precise as in all things he said or did, he furnished proof of his assertion:

A well-to-do citizen in Vienna is eating almost at every moment of the day. On rising, in summer he slurps down a few glasses of cream and enjoys the requisite quantity of croissants or French rolls to go with them. In the winter he dips his roll into milky coffee and, before going to mass, stuffs himself with a good helping of “prayer sausages.” Before midday he is to be found in the cherry wine cellar in summer, or the mead cellar in winter, and has a cold snack while he is about it. For his midday meal he usually eats four dishes, and not a little of each. About four o’clock, he has a hearty afternoon tea; at five he goes to play skittles, when he takes some smoked belly of pork or chicken, as well as fried snails, scrambled eggs and roast loin of beef. Notwithstanding all this, he is able to consume a further three dishes at home towards eight o’clock, or he betakes himself to a tavern, dines on a hundred oysters and accompanies them with sweet wine. All who do not do so are called starvelings. My native land, Brandenburg, is frequently given the honor in Vienna of being called Hungerland.

The greed of the Viennese particularly enraged him because of its harmful effect on body and mind, its stultifying effect on the writers and thinkers of the city, regular spongers at the table of their patrons, of whom a satirist says:

Sie schlecken beym Lungenbraten und Hendl,

Fauscheln von Mauskatzen, Krapfen und Pfanzl,

Und suchen Verstand, Genie, Witz und Laun

Im Schnapfen und steyrischen Kapaun.

[They gobble their roast beef and chicken, / Gloating over pancakes and doughnuts, / And seek reason, genius, good and wit / In snipe or woodcock and Styrian capon.]

In his reproaches, whether they were directed against sensual excesses or lack of spirituality, Nicolai hoped to find support among all right-minded people. And certainly a visitor from Berlin arriving in the capital of the German Empire in those days was bound to share Nicolai’s opinion to a certain extent, even if he did not possess the writer’s strict and unflinching sense of virtue. Whether he had grown up in the Protestant creed of the New Testament or according to the reasonable laws of the Old, he could not but deplore the abuses of bigotry and hypocrisy into which Christianity had here degenerated. For, like Nicolai, he would have observed in the dark old churches, glistening with gold, an almost superstitious reverence for dubious relics, a “sliding around on one’s knees” before every tinsel-decked shrine, together with the scarcely concealed sidelong glances of the ladies who had come straight from their lovers to divine service, or even the coquettish fervor of women of easy virtue at the last Mass at half past eleven in the Kapuzinerkirche, which was well known as the “Whores’ Mass.” Like him, he would have met young clerics, “all languishing and thirsting for pleasure in their celibate state,” as well as the “excessively great number of young and beautiful chambermaids, who appeared decked from head to foot in silk and gold lace.”

As far as the dearth of men of intellect was concerned, many a visitor from Berlin would have been convinced like Nicolai that “Austria has not yet given us a writer deserving of the attention of the rest of Germany.” Without doubt there was in Berlin “a very faulty knowledge of the political, literary, commercial and social circumstances of that other part of Germany.” And there was certainly some truth in the dictum coined by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu seventy years earlier, now confirmed by Nicolai, that “getting a Lover is so far from loseing, that ‘tis properly geting reputation, Ladys being much more respected in regard to the rank of their Lovers than that of their Husbands.”

But if the Berliner were here not to see, to censure and to depart again, but to linger awhile in Vienna, then for better or worse, sooner or later, he would have to learn to reconcile the two lifestyles. Perhaps the most charming work to have been published at that time in defense of the capital might then have fallen into his hands. Johann Friedel’s Letters from Vienna on Various Subjects to a Friend in Berlin — published in the same year as Nicolai’s second volume — corrected the balance in a refreshing way. Friedel nominated kind-heartedness as “the most original trait of our populace,” but admitted that not all foreigners were aware of this characteristic: “We appear to them too stiff, too unfeeling. And why? Because we do not appear to melt away at every moment with sentimentality and soulfulness.”

Sensual enjoyment has rarely been advocated with more ingenuousness:

We sentimentalize less. A hundred times we visit smiling meadows or rose-decked avenues at sunrise, and hardly once do we notice the roses, the meadows or the sunrise. All that magic lies there before us, and seldom, very seldom do we say to ourselves more than: Upon my soul! now that’s a pretty sight, truly. And therewith we saunter off to breakfast, enjoy it, feel cheerful and never give another thought to why we should feel so cheerful. It is with the pleasures of man as it is with beauty. The Graces please us, as long as we see them entire. But as soon as they are dissected in the anatomical theater — gone is the susceptible feeling we would have at the sight of them. So it is with pleasure. As soon as the moral surgeon dissects the pleasure we have enjoyed — we yawn — it disgusts us at last. It is only affectation that prevents us from admitting this. We enjoy the pleasure; — you chatter about it. — We drink wine; you sing about it. We marry our pretty girls; you — Petrarchize over them. We kiss the bosom that pleases us; you write a poem about it. — We enjoy becoming fathers, you moralize about this pleasure. We pluck the roses and violets and hyacinths, — you paint them, and so on. Now which of us two is the more sensible?

A hedonistic view of the world opposed to an ethical-sentimental one — this is how the contrast between the two cities, imperial Vienna and royal Berlin, presents itself. Joseph II, by nature and upbringing attached to the moral rules of life, the “dissecting” way of thinking of his Prussian subjects, in a great and futile experiment set about converting his compatriots to this very attitude. In vain! As long as the good-hearted, narrow minded, motherly old Empress sat upon the throne, and hardly less after her death, though prevented from an excessively carefree satisfaction of their thirst for enjoyment by Joseph’s Spartan reforming spirit, the Viennese gave themselves up to their joie de vivre.

They worked only when they had to do so, and much prefered to revel in idleness. They bustled in and out of inns, restaurants, dance-halls and promenades; they strolled in the Augarten and the Prater; they crowded to the animal baitings where fierce dogs were set upon enfeebled donkeys, bears and lions to tear them in pieces for the general amusement, and they assembled in front of the pillories where a hundred strokes of the rod were being meted out to some thief. They rushed to the Kasperl show and laughed themselves silly over its coarse jests. They ate their fried and braised and roast chickens and drank the light, dry, rippling wine that grew on the slopes of the Vienna Woods. And when they had had their fill of laughter, food and drink, they took their evening stroll through the broadest of their crooked old city streets, signaled to a “nymph” of the Graben and disappeared with her into one of those houses which did not scruple to rent out an empty bed or a letto fornito for a few hours. It would take more than a Prussian pedant, a Friedrich Nicolai, more than an idealistic monarch, to rob them of such joys. From time to time, wars and famines damped their animal spirits. But as soon as these were fanned into flame again by the return of prosperity and plentiful nourishment, once more the Viennese would fall to their pleasures in the traditional, earthy, sensual way.

This then was the city which had become the new home of the bride from Berlin. Her residence was in the Graben, that street of purveyors of fashion and of coffee houses, of evening strollers and ladies of easy virtue, which was at the same time the domicile of the best society. It was surprising enough that the Arnsteiners had been permitted to settle here, and explained only by the special advantage enjoyed by Adam Isaac Arnsteiner through the imperial warrant which entitled him to establish his quarters “in any place that he should consider most safe to take up his abode.” We know how much yearly rent Adam Isaac paid his landlord, Johann Baptist Contrini, every Martinmas: it was 2,690 gulden. For this he became possessor of nineteen reception rooms, ten bedrooms, three kitchens, three attics, two cellars, lodging for carriages, stabling for six horses, and a hayloft, distributed over three stories and some outbuildings in the courtyard.

The house known as “No. 1175 in the city” was a splendid edifice, with a snarling lion leaping out from the ridge of the roof. A glazed alcove on the first floor provided a view of the Starhemberg fountain and, some distance away, the column of the Trinity whose disorganized mass Nicolai found so abominable. At ground-floor level there were the arched shop-fronts of the merchants Franz Hakel, Peter Oswald and Martin Vogl. On the third floor, besides accommodation for the Arnsteiners’ coachmen, personal servants and kitchenmaids, was a small apartment occupied by a succession of tenants. And finally, Contrini, the landlord, had reserved for himself the use of a bedroom and a cellar. Otherwise, the sole ruler of the building was the court agent, Arnsteiner, with his wife Sibilla, his eldest son and his retinue, together with an indeterminate and changeable band of followers including clerks, bookkeepers and cashiers, who shared his protected status and were as devoted to him as slaves. Outside, instead of the barges of the Spree boatmen which passed in front of the palace in the Burgstrasse, carriages glided past, sedan-chairmen ran along, and the melancholy cries of Croatian hawkers of herbs, Bohemian women selling snails, and straw-cutters from Lombardy, drifted upwards. It was a foreign world. Franziska found it difficult to feel at home, and in a sense she never did.

To the Arnsteiners this was a familiar world, as if they had lived there from time immemorial. Eighty years are a long time in the history of an unsettled people who were constantly driven from one place to the next. And it was in about 1700 that the court agent’s father had first set foot in this city — a slight young man from Arnstein near Würzburg, still unmarried and childless, who for his part became employed as a cashier by the great Samson Wertheimer, and thus came to share his privilege of protection. When he exchanged his sleepy Franconian village for the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, he had come to a place whose very soil seemed drenched with the ancient destiny of the Jews.

In the train of the Roman legions, the Jews had reached the Rhine, the Main and the Danube. Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem and drove them out of there, already regarded them as imperial servants, as objects, goods and chattels. This, too, was how they were seen by the Holy Roman Emperors, the heirs and successors of the Caesars, who as “overlords and immediate arbiters over Jewry at large” reserved for themselves the right “to keep Jews,” well up to the days of Charles V. Under the Carolingians the Jews were allowed to ply their trades in Austria, and the Vienna of the Dukes of Babenberg allowed them their own streets and squares. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, here and there some of their number achieved fame and wealth; in King Wratislaw’s Bohemia, on the Wissehrad hill, for example, they were said to be rolling in gold and silver, and in neighboring Hungary it was reported that they had become so mighty that many of the kingdom’s greatest subjects were on the point of converting to Judaism. In Vienna, however, the crusaders and local citizens made sure that they were kept firmly in their place and continually clipped their wings.

Frederick the Warlike conceded them some public offices for a time, but it was a privilege which was soon removed. Forbidden to practice any trade, to farm, to join the army, to take up administrative posts, to practice law or medicine in any form, and restricted to the narrow and not always high-minded world of money and commerce, the Jews developed their talents to their own benefit and that of their prince. Immediately subject to him, neither part of the nation nor owing a duty to it, they “stood at the side of any tyrant with untiring industry,” assisted him in his state of constant shortage of funds by dint of inventing new royal prerogatives, taxes and duties and thus drew upon themselves the wrath of the populace, “which was ready to run riot against them for the sake of every conflagration, every misfortune sent from heaven.” If ever their financial power should disappear through some stroke of fate, the ruler would have no further use for them. When, in 1406, the Jewish quarter of Vienna, behind the big square am Hof, went up in flames, the mob looted the houses that had been spared by the fire, while their occupants sat in the cellar, “so as not to complete the plundering with a blood-bath.” They had no way of making good the loss of some 100,000 gulden either for themselves or Duke Frederick, who immediately came to view their usefulness in a less favorable light. Their community had not yet recovered from the consequences of this misfortune when a man called Israel, in the city of Enns, was accused of desecration of the Eucharist, and despite his denials under severe torture was found guilty.

Jews were now being captured throughout the duchy of Austria and deported across the frontier, mainly to Poland, but some were retained as hostages. Israel’s wife “strangled herself with her own veil. A rich Jew of Tuln drove a knife into his own heart. Many Jewesses in Mödling, in Berchtoldsdorf, throttled themselves, many veiled the faces of their friends and loved ones and opened their veins for them.” On 12 March 1421, all those in prison, including Jews of both sexes, were burnt to death on the meadow near the Viennese suburb of Erdberg, and their ashes scattered in the Danube. They had not wavered in their faith and had disdained to be saved through conversion. “Now when the Jews were taken to be burnt,” says a report, “they began to dance and leap as if going to a wedding. With loud shouts and words of comfort to each other, they begged each others’ forgiveness and looked forward to bliss in the next world.” After this sacrificial procession, reminiscent of the martyrdoms of the early Christians, all their houses were made the property of the city, under the seal of the mayor and council.

In this way young Albert, Duke of Austria, who later acquired the title of King of Germany, first drove the Jews out of his duchy. For a long time they were banned from entering it. After many years of representations by their “commander” Josel von Rosheim, Emperor Charles V granted them a privilege in the German Kingdom which simultaneously protected them and freed them from their imperial bondage. But the effects of his clemency did not extend as far as Vienna. “Safe conduct in trading and traveling by land or water” was not granted to those who might have wished to return to this city. And as there were hardly any Jews to be found there when the decree was issued, its prohibition against expelling any who had been resident there at the time of the Emperor’s accession did not greatly help matters. Those few who still remained in Vienna in 1551 were forced by Ferdinand I to wear the yellow armband. Even twenty years later, there were no more than seven families who were constrained by Maximilian II to wear a “little yellow disc.”

Rudolf II — that eccentric Habsburg, who surrounded himself with alchemists and visionaries, astrologers and interpreters of dreams, painters and silversmiths, and drew the Jews of Prague to his court, not only for their money but for the sake of their cabbalistic mysticism — bestowed renewed favor upon them. He even created the concept of “court Jews,” chosen men who were not subject to the limitations of other members of their faith. Yet to the poor and simple among them, who had meanwhile settled in Vienna without any proper authorization, but only as a result of occasional official negligence, this was not yet a sign of special graciousness. It was in Ferdinand II that they first saw their true protector. This sensible monarch agreed in 1619 to a confirmation of their rights and liberties, allowed them to build a house of worship and soon afterwards assigned them a part of the city as their place of residence — the “Lower Werd,” a district on the left-hand shore of the present Danube canal.

Here they were found and described by the traveler J. J. Müller from Weimar, in the year 1660, when he had reached “the Jews’ town, oddly situated in front of the Red Tower over the drawbridge, and somewhat protected by its walls and gates.” In its streets sat “those of the male sort, their heads covered by broad black caps, some in long gowns of black velvet and others in silk, as among others their medicus, and also a chymicus, who is consulted by the most distinguished cavaliers and others in the city of Vienna, in the same habit. Those of the above-mentioned who wear white woolen shawls are reputed to be men of law.”

Ferdinand’s son had allowed them to live in peace in the Lower Werd and had even had them protected — at their own expense, it is true — by his musketeers at times of unrest and attacks by students. The youthful Leopold I too seemed well disposed towards them at first. When the advance of Turkish troops was imminent soon after his accession, the Jews were given permission to flee into the inner city in case of need. Leopold frequently gave orders to check the wrath of the populace against them, which broke out time and again through bitterness over the hardships of war. Despite many injustices and constant threat from Turks, Swedes and their own compatriots, those fifty years of peace in the Lower Werd were once seen by the Vienna Jews as their golden age. But their happiness was not to last. “Those of Vienna,” representatives of the city and guilds who stood to gain no direct benefit from the Jews’ wealth were always devising new ways to drive them out and to seize their possessions and premises.

A conflagration in the newly built wing of the Hofburg, set off by the carelessness of a carpenter’s mate, was laid at the door of Jewry. The bloody tumult that broke out after the arrest of a student who was mistreating a Jew was also blamed on them. They were reproached with collusion with the Turks, because they sometimes sent their children on exchange visits to their relatives in Turkish-occupied Hungary. Bishop Kollonitsch stirred up anger against them from the pulpit. And finally, in their eagerness to appropriate for themselves the Jews’ business dealings, the Viennese merchants together with the city council declared themselves willing to reimburse the Emperor for the 10,000 gulden of annual tolerance payments.

Leopold hesitated, mindful of his father’s example. In the end, however, he gave way to the constant pressure from “those of Vienna,” the reservations of his clergy and not least the pleas of his consort Margarethe Therese — a “weak and delicate female, brought up rather for the profession of a nun than of a princess” — whose religious fervor stemmed from her native Inquisitorial Spain. His mind once made up, he carried out his intention in great haste. The feast of Corpus Christi in 1669 seemed to him an “opportunity to take action contra inimicos Christi” which was not to be lost. At that time there were some 4,000 Jews living in 132 houses in the Lower Werd, a whole flourishing community with scholars, doctors, lawyers and men of culture and taste, who often entertained the bourgeoisie of Vienna and traveling scholars as guests. The first 1,400 were expelled as early as July. When they had departed, and wholesale expulsion was threatened, those who remained turned to the Emperor with “humble sighs and entreaties dripping with blood,” “in the most gracious consideration that to be a Jew is in itself no crime,” and because His Majesty “would hold their extirpation no satisfaction for his tender disposition,” to allow them to stay. This was refused with the declaration that “execution is the soul of all wholesome resolutions.” A year later the Jews’ town was empty. Leopold gave the district the name of his patron saint and had a church dedicated to him built on the site of the destroyed Jewish prayer house.

The second expulsion, however thoroughly it destroyed the life of the community, at least proceeded without a blood bath. Robbed of their immovable possessions, with only a few bundles heaped up on carts, they who had only recently walked in state “in black velvet and silk” were passing out of the city gates of Vienna. Fifty families, as we know, set out for Berlin. Most of the others headed for the hereditary dominions of Bohemia and Moravia, where they were left unmolested and often given the surname of Wiener. Like their predecessors who had met death by fire on the Gänswiese at Erdberg, they were not shaken in their faith by any promises, though this might have been presumed in a “people given to haggling and usury.” Full of indignation, the satirical versifier Matthias Abele reported the answer given by the weeping women in a distinguished Jewish household, where he had been invited for a farewell meal, to his suggestion that they should take refuge in the bosom of Christianity: “They would rather left themselves be burnt alive than waver the breadth of a needle’s point from their faith. I bethought myself that these accursed martyrs of the devil would persevere in their wickedness and obstinacy even up to their ears. I would sooner seek to wash a Moor white than to cleanse and purify such Jewish scum.”

The Swedish resident ambassador wrote in a similar vein to Queen Christina, who had interceded with the Holy See for the Vienna Jews: “Yet this is greatly to be wondered at, that of three to four thousand souls who have emigrated within half a year, and are about to settle in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, not one should be found who might prepare himself in this their great affliction to think of changing their faith.”

Now they were gone. And the Viennese, to whom the business minded Jews had been a thorn in the flesh, rejoiced. But the new landlords of the “Leopoldstadt” did not pay their share of the 4,000 gulden tolerance money, the treasury found that it no longer had the option of obtaining short-term credit, and apart from finance certain kinds of retail trade came to a standstill, “since the idleness of Christians and particularly of the Viennese,” as a treasury document remarked, “is so great that they are unwilling to transact such business.” The imperial treasury found further grounds to deplore the departure of the Jews. It estimated at around 25,000 gulden the loss of revenue to the townspeople from rents for premises standing empty, the diminished market for foodstuffs and the decrease in business for merchants and companies. The loss of annual receipts from taxes, duties, levies and tolls formerly paid by the Jews was estimated at 40,000 gulden. Meanwhile Vienna was afflicted by the plague and, worse than ever before, by the Turks. Public credit was exhausted. Whereas 100,000 gulden could once have been procured in a day, the Emperor had for weeks not been able to borrow a tenth of that sum.

It was thus his top financial officials who finally advised him urgently to take in the Jews again, and, on the subject of the cost of their expulsion, wrote that “doubtless, had your Imperial Majesty been advised earlier of this matter, your Majesty would not so lightly have agreed to such a general banishment.” The treasury also questioned the theological faculty of the University of Vienna as to what might stand in the way of a return of the Jews, and received the answer that their scruples were not insurmountable. Nevertheless, the Emperor was unable to share his treasury’s viewpoint that fiscal considerations should serve as the guiding principle of government, and wished to see the matter weighed above all “theologice, then politice and finally cameraliter.” Since the political consequences of renewed admission for the Jews seemed too great a threat, even if the church should raise no objection to it, Leopold refused the treasury’s suggestion.

As he was soon to realize, he did so to his own detriment. For at this late stage of absolutism the court Jews, whose privileges had been justified by almost superhuman achievements in the procurement of money and credit, had already become indispensable to the throne. Constant wars, the demands of ostentatious court life and the needs of the growing administrative machinery, were disrupting the domestic economy. Nobody was capable of preventing the “witches’ cauldron of state finance” from occasionally boiling over. But the court Jews, by means of long-term loans or supply of goods on credit, had continually blown cooling breezes over it so that the hellish brew should not flood the whole country. Whether one liked it or not, however, with the court Jews the matrix of a new community had been admitted. Had these men been without ties or responsibilities, thinking only of the advancement of themselves and their families, their services could have been bought more cheaply. But even in the highest positions they never lost solidarity with their own religious community. They remained its spiritual and sometimes even its religious leaders; they became its spokesmen in times of need. Not only that: they were the advance-guard of an army of the disinherited that was always on the move. Their victories were symbolic. Every honor bestowed upon them fell to the share of the most humble of their brethren.

Collectively the Jews had been driven out of Vienna. Singly they now returned — looked at askance by a people and clergy who had no use for them, and greeted with barely concealed relief by an Emperor and an exchequer to whom their use was only too evident. For ten years Leopold had hesitated to readmit them to the capital. But the wars against the Turks and French were bleeding the state coffers dry. His armies, led by Prince Eugene of Savoy, needed to be equipped. The coalition with Spain, Holland and England rested on Austria’s power and influence. Not long after the expulsion the Emperor had already imposed the task of supplying his army with clothing and ammunition upon the Jew Samuel Oppenheimer in Heidelberg.

This man, the most skilful business magnate since the decline of the Fugger family, now military commissary of the great European coalition, was the first Jew to re-acquire the right to settle in Vienna. A second, who was to raise himself to equal power with Oppenheimer, Samson Wertheimer, was summoned to the imperial court for the same reasons. Both hailed from that meeting-point of three states, Hesse, Baden and Franconia, that lies in the heart of Germany and in the midst of its most delightful countryside. Both came to be the true embodiment of the court Jew of the era of absolute monarchy, far more than Oppenheimer’s unfortunate relative Jew Süss had ever been, far more also than most of their contemporary kinsfolk.

They were men of unimaginable wealth and influence, who could conjure up out of thin air, perhaps not armies, but their pay and equipment. They carried out financial business which today would require a whole chain of banks, yet at the same time, in a Europe of countless petty states each with its own tax-collecting system, of inadequate means of communication, of unregulated markets and unstable currencies, they were able to supply every conceivable kind of commodity — from jewelery, wines and confectionery for the Emperor’s household, timber for the construction of his palaces and fodder for his stables, to all the materials of war for his armies and ships for his new Danube fleet. By special privilege, they owned houses in Vienna, in Worms and in Frankfurt, and vineyards on the slopes of the Vienna Woods. They lived like true kings of their tribe, exercised generous hospitality and, when they died, left their children costly proofs of princely favor such as could not be matched in splendor by any statesman or diplomat. Samson Wertheimer’s will, for example, includes a list of gifts which reveals, if nothing else, the range of his high connections:

A portrait of the King of Poland set with brilliants, ditto of the Elector of Mainz, ditto of the Elector Palatine set with diamonds, Elector of Bavaria a portrait with brilliants, Elector of Mainz ditto brilliants, a portrait with diamonds and rubies of his Grace the Duke of Wolfenbüttel, ten chains of honor, one from his Imperial Majesty now reigning, one from their Imperial Majesties Leopold and Joseph of most blessed memory. Item, from her Majesty the Empress Amelia, two from his Royal Majesty of Poland. One from the Elector of Mainz, ditto the Elector Palatine, ditto the Elector of Trier, and lastly one from the Duke of Saxe-Gotha with likeness attached, of which two are set with small diamonds.

Despite such lavishly bestowed favor, such intimacy with many thrones, these and all other men who were once again able to settle in Vienna were more strictly limited in their rights than their predecessors in the Lower Werd. They were forbidden to form a community, their acts of worship could be carried out only individually and in secret, and their residence was legal only as long as their privileges were renewed by the Emperor. They were there merely “on sufferance,” although the nation’s financial credit stood or fell by them. In this paradox an era is revealed which almost daily, as Prince Eugene wrote, provided an example of how “a charming woman, a black-robed priest or a bearded Jew decided the fate of nations.” But so closely knotted were the financial bonds between the treasury and the court agents that even the ingenious Oppenheimer was finally destroyed by the exchequer’s promissory notes, which were widely ramified, barely comprehensible and insufficiently guaranteed, so that his fortune of millions turned out at his death to be no more than a mass of irrecoverable debts.

His nephew, Wertheimer, who succeeded him in 1703 in the position of court banker, was not only a wiser but also a more careful man. Only five years later, at the height of his reputation, he gave up the conduct of the imperial business, which was taken over by his son Wolf, while he himself went into honorable retirement. In 1718 a young cousin from Lippe-Detmold described him as “the great, respected, famous Herr Samson Wertheim, who in the common parlance is known as the Jewish emperor.” Here in Vienna, “where the richest Jews of Europe” had their homes, Wertheimer had “full many palaces and gardens.” Ten of the Emperor’s soldiers stood guard outside his gates at all times, “by special favor of the Emperor among many other privileges allowed him.” He was said to be so wealthy that “he hath given to each of his children two hundred thousand Dutch gulden against their marriage, and of his children there are six.” Moreover, he performed many good acts, so it was said, among the poor of his Jewish brethren, throughout Europe, as far as Poland and “even unto the Holy Land, to Jerusalem, where he is called lord of the land.” He was honored not only as a dignitary, but as a scholar who had written many important sermons, designated his younger son to the study of religion and created innumerable schools.

It was the service of this man, the mightiest of his faith in the Holy Roman Empire, which was entered by the first of the Arnsteiners. He may or may not have been a relative of Samson, having traveled from his native Franconia to seek his fortune under Samson’s protection. He may or may not have appeared on the list of Samson’s “kith and kin” as early as 1699, as “S. Wertheimer’s bookkeeper,” who was resident at the house of the court Jew Schneider. Born in about 1682, he first set foot in the capital around the turn of the century, where he probably began his career as a humble cashier. In 1710, however, he was already traveling to Amsterdam as Samson’s bookkeeper with the “newly appointed chief manager Wolf Wertheimer” in order to redeem the “mortgaged” jewelery of the King of Spain and bring it to Vienna.

This was the first important commission undertaken by Wolf, after declaring himself ready to “follow in his father’s footsteps and most humbly and obediently perform useful duties for your Imperial Majesty.” That he chose Isaac Arnsteiner for his companion in this undertaking casts some light on the position that Arnsteiner had meanwhile achieved in Samson’s employ. Together with Wolf’s father-in-law, the court Jew of electoral Mainz at Frankfurt am Main, they were both granted passports to travel to Linz, entry to which “in those dangerous times” — the plague was rife — was denied to Jews. They traveled on, unhindered, to Amsterdam and forthwith delivered to Joseph I the Habsburg treasures that had been pawned by his brother. Isaac Arnsteiner carried out occasional commissions for Joseph’s brother, Charles VI, who ascended the imperial throne in the following year. But his proper office became that of court agent to the widowed Empress Amelia, a Brunswick by birth, whom he served faithfully until her death.

Arnsteiner’s career began and blossomed in the shadow of the great Wertheimer, and came to an end with his death. Like Wertheimer and the other members of the privileged circle, he lived in the heart of the city. Wertheimer’s palais, where, protected by the ten imperial soldiers, he practiced his renowned hospitality, was in the Kärntnerbastei. Arnsteiner’s residence was more modest, though in proximity to that of his patron. Like Wertheimer and all other Jews, despite all his usefulness to the court of the widowed Empress, he was still in constant danger of banishment. Through substantial contributions to the war-loan fund, which were collected at intervals from the Jewry of Vienna, he contrived to have his privileges renewed from time to time.

In about 1717, together with Wolf and Samson Wertheimer, he raised the sum of 500,000 gulden, whereupon he was granted residence with his wife and children until further notice, although they were not granted the status of a specifically tolerated family, as some others had been. Four years later, an imperial command, occasioned by a new regulation relating to the Jews, was addressed to the “Lord Chamberlain,” “that, insofar as praeliminariter the complaints made by Simon (Samson) Wertheimer are concerned, namely that his servant Isaac Arnsteiner has been assured of residence only for the period of three years, the matter should rest with the gracious resolution created on the 31st of May of this year.” And so it dragged on from one case to the next. The last extension was granted in 1736, when Charles VI again attempted to expel the Jews, but rested content with higher contributions to the state coffers. This time Arnsteiner actually succeeded in having his decree of protection extended to his elder son, who was aged fifteen at the time, bearing in mind the possibility of the latter’s deciding to marry.

Having begun as a clerk at the turn of the century, within a few decades Isaac Arnsteiner, with Samson’s help and through his own industry, became a rich man. His supplies to the court of the widowed Empress and for the requirements of Charles VI’s army must have brought in substantial profits. As the Vienna court chancery wrote in a report, the Jews, “because of their thrift and their retired way of life, were able to supply more cheaply than Christians.” In any case, by 1725 Arnsteiner was in a position to endow his daughter, on the occasion of her marriage to a son of the great Oppenheimer, with 22,000 gulden, jewels to the value of 5,000 gulden and further gifts towards the acquisition of the right of residence and for investment in favor of their children. He himself, after the death of his first wife, a woman from Prague, had a short time before married a stepdaughter of Samson Wertheimer. She was a granddaughter of that same Liebmannin who even at her advanced age had been able to ensnare the hunchbacked King Frederick of Prussia. So entangled were the fates of those few families, in Berlin and Vienna just as in the other cities of the Holy Roman Empire!

After his father’s death, Adam Isaac, Arnsteiner’s son from his first marriage, grew up in a matriarchal household. His stepmother Eleonore had eleven children of her own to care for as well as him. Even after some of these had already married or moved away, the members of her family, her employees and servants still numbered fifty persons altogether. Among her staff, according to a list drawn up in 1753, nine years after her husband’s death, were numerous cashiers, bookkeepers, scribes, auctioneers, accountants, tutors, amanuenses, nursemaids and kitchenmaids, valets, chambermaids and butlers. Although these domestics may not all have been in the widow Arnsteiner’s employ, but may have carried on their own businesses under the protection of her privileges, this retinue was commensurate with a great mansion in Maria Theresa’s Vienna. Three years later the matriarch followed her husband into the grave, deeply mourned for her goodness and beneficence, like him who was called in the inscription on his tombstone “a man of pure heart and clean hands,” who “helped the poor and the unjustly persecuted, and spared no means to dry the tears of the oppressed.” Whoever of her followers remained behind in her house, Adam and his family exerted themselves to leave it.

A beginning was made in 1762, when he received a magnanimous imperial document in which the office of court agent to Francis I was transferred to him. This amiable monarch, who despite his well-known high spirits was a skilful and conscientious steward of the finances of the houses of Habsburg and Lorraine, did not share his wife Maria Theresa’s inimical disposition towards her Jewish subjects. As a true follower of her ancestors she resolved soon after her accession to expel the Jews, and in Prague had already made this a reality. In Vienna she contented herself with further restricting their rights through a series of stringent decrees, and excluding them from any of the reforms which Van Swieten and Sonnenfels had succeeded in carrying through. So great was the hate for the Jews of this woman, who was otherwise so warm-hearted, but in this alone hard and narrow-minded, that they were not even allowed to appear in her sight, but had to convey their requests at imperial audiences to a screen behind which the Empress was concealed.

Francis of Lorraine, later Holy Roman Emperor, who became her husband in 1736, liked to live and let live; he had no hesitation in securing for himself the assistance of such an astute and experienced businessman as the second Arnsteiner had become. This high office was bestowed by virtue not only of his father’s good reputation, but quite expressly of his own “diligent zeal, particular skill and also his honest and worthy character.” Now he might “come and go with his servants in safety and without escort, free of tolls, duties and taxes of all and every kind,” and use arms, daggers and pistols, and was not obliged to wear “the customary yellow badge of the Jews.” Moreover, as we have seen, he was permitted to set up his household, “for a suitable payment,” and in any place, “wherever it should appear safest to him.” In order to translate this verbal permission into fact, all that was still lacking was a word from the Empress. Even this he was finally able to obtain. When it was granted, he exchanged the Jewish residence in the Dorotheergasse for an elegant and extensive house on the Graben, in the midst of those Viennese citizens from whom he could still be distinguished by his religious customs and his appearance, but whose way of life was no longer markedly different from his own.

It was, to be sure, his appearance which gave continued occasion for their mockery. In this clean-shaven century Adam Isaac wore the beard of the prophets and patriarchs. At this time of knee-breeches and well-formed, silk-stockinged calves, he went about in a black gown that reached to his ankles, just as “those of the male sort” had gone about in the Lower Werd, “some in long gowns of black velvet and others in silk,” and just as Samuel Oppenheimer had appeared before the Emperor who had expelled them. Thus, Samson Wertheimer, in his clothing “like to a Polack with long white beard,” had resided in his mansion on the Kärntnerbastei, and thus had Isaac Arnsteiner approached the widowed Empress Amelia. For Adam Isaac there was as little reason to lay aside this garment and this facial adornment as there was necessity for him to blow out his own candles on a Saturday. His wife Sibilla, a wise and pious woman of the house of Gompertz, would probably have taken amiss such a departure from the customs of their fathers. The sons of the next generation thought differently.

In May 1764 there were renewed deliberations in the Lower Austrian government as to how the arrogance of the Jews of Vienna could be controlled by a particular regulation. Two high officials, the privy councilors von Eger and von der Marck, referred indignantly in their reports to the fact that the adult bachelor sons of the privileged Jewish family heads not only frequented “the coffee houses and inns of the city, but also certain gardens and even dance-halls in the suburbs,” but did so dressed just like other gentlemen of quality, for which reason they recommended that “the married ones should grow their beards as before, but the unmarried ones should wear large bows of broad yellow ribbon in their hats.”

Such a return to practices which had long been recognized as unjust was not, to be sure, carried out in the new order for the Jews. Nevertheless, over the next years, up to the death of Maria Theresa, voices continued to be heard, complaining that “Jewish young fellows go about openly, against all normal custom, in clothing edged with braid and in other ways not to be distinguished from that of Christians, and moreover, which was never before the case, with hair bag or pigtail and some even with sidearms.” And finally the government announced that in order to prevent “persons dressed in such unseemly fashion from further attending regularly the inns, dance halls and playhouses among the Christians to be found there” it would not introduce any distinctive marks “which should make them despised in the eyes of the world,” but would “direct the Jewish folk back into the precise bounds in which they had been kept at all times previously, and from which they had emerged only through unsanctioned innovation, to the annoyance of Christians and even of reasonable Jews themselves.”

Young Nathan Adam Arnsteiner undoubtedly gave occasion for such annoyance. The middle one of five children, protectively enclosed by two older sisters and two younger brothers, he grew up no less cheerfully and hopefully than did his bride-to-be in Berlin. Of easy-going temperament, not without inherited shrewdness in matters of business and finance, but all his life a man of simple good nature, with a childlike sense of humor, he took pleasure in all the privileges which had been grudgingly granted him, and fretted after none that was still denied him. A certain leaning towards idleness and ostentation, sometimes found in the third generation of an aspiring family, was unmistakable in him. Yet he was a long way off from that refinement which more than a hundred years later was characteristic of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a descendant of the silk merchant Isaac Löw Hofmann, or the later heirs of Samson Wertheimer — the von Wertheimsteins — and of the house of Gompertz. Nathan was and remained a man of plain, practical pleasures, even when the intellectual nobility of Europe met in his drawing room. There is no question that as a “young fellow” he was already wearing the “clothing edged with braid,” with “hair bag or pigtail,” that he needlessly and unlawfully buckled to his side the dagger whose use was permitted to his father as a protection when travelling, and ventured to “attend regularly the inns, dance halls and playhouses among the Christians to be found there.”

At the same time he practiced, in his father’s counting house, the management of business appropriate for a court agent and high financier, as Adam Isaac had done in the employ of his own father. Like Isaac before him, Adam Arnsteiner supplied the Emperor with horses and equipment for his regiments. His annual tax amounted to 1,500 gulden. On the other hand his privileges had been increased, so that, for example, ordinances concerning the Jews were delivered specifically to him by the authorities. And yet he was dissatisfied. In 1768 he made a formal request to the Empress that he should at last be allowed to live apart from the Jews and not to have to take financial responsibility for any crime committed by them. He even dared to threaten Maria Theresa with the warning that if these favors were not granted to him he would depart to Holland, his wife’s native land. The Empress thereupon decreed: “The court agent is by no means to be included in the ordinance which has been issued in respect of the other Jews here resident.” In her own hand she added: “On condition that he shall no longer desire the remission of 1,500 gulden but shall continue to pay this, Hatzfeld [the minister for home affairs] to be reminded.”

If the services of the Arnsteiner family had not appeared indispensable to her, the Empress would certainly have punished such audacity instead of giving way to it. Nor did Adam Isaac, whose reputation and self-confidence were considerably enhanced thereafter, hesitate to use equally forcible language to the government of Saxony. In 1776 he complained about the high tolls which had to be paid when traveling through Dresden, and threatened not to set foot in the city again if such treatment were not discontinued. Thereupon he was issued with a passport, which he used that year on his journey to attend his son’s wedding in Berlin. It was thanks to this passport that Nathan Adam and his young bride were finally excused the personal toll which the guards at Dresden had demanded with such insolence.

So the Arnsteiners, ever more manifestly, took up a privileged position among the tolerated Jews of Vienna, a community which meanwhile had increased to twenty-five families. The Jewish prince of Berlin had given his daughter to no unworthy man. Nevertheless, when she exchanged the royal Prussian capital for the seat of the imperial residence, Franziska became aware for the first time of the deep, even heart-rending contempt with which her people were regarded from the monarch’s throne. Shortly before her death, Maria Theresa wrote with her own hand on a report from her court chancery recommending the granting of a three-year Toleranz for a Jew who had rendered a service by disclosing the fraud committed by one of his own people: “In future no Jews, whatever their name, are to be allowed to be here without my written permission. I know no worse plague to the state than this nation, for bringing people to a state of beggary through their deceit, usury and financial dealings, for practicing all the misdeeds which another, honest man would despise; consequently, as far as possible, they are to be kept away from here and their numbers are to be decreased.”

These cruel words were written in the autumn of 1777, when Franziska was not yet nineteen and had been married a year. They were such words as no Hohenzollern had spoken for centuries. Was it surprising that they offended her young and sensitive spirit so deeply that for ever after she nursed a resentment or mistrust of the ruling house of Austria, that to the end of her days she thought longingly of her youth in the more enlightened city of Berlin, that all her life she remained at heart a Prussian?