Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
gious Community), more than a century after the Sephardic Jews had founded their own.
Today this is the largest body that represents religious Jews in Austria.
In 1878 Jewry in Austria was shaken up again by the arrival from Budapest of Theodor
Herzl (1860-1904), who founded political Zionism, a concept that brought together the
ideas of the workers' movement with support for a Jewish state. His book
Der Judenstaat
(The Jewish State; 1896) would later be crucial to the creation of Israel.
Beginning with Adolf Fischhof (1816-93), whose political speech on press freedom in
1848 helped trigger revolution, and continuing with Herzl and with the founding father of
Austrian social democracy, Viktor Adler (1852-1918), Jews drove reforms in Austria and
played a key role during the 'Red Vienna' period of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Take a virtual tour through Jewish history in Austria from the Middle Ages to the present in the Jewish
Virtual Library at
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Austria.html
.
