Germania Judaica IV - Austria Judaica

Germania Judaica, a project aimed at a complete recording of Jewish settlement in the Holy Roman Empire from its beginnings up to most recent times, was initiated by the "Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Judentums" (Society for the Promotion of Scientific Research on Jewry) in 1903. Meanwhile three volumes, which cover the time up to 1519, have been published. In 1998 work on volume IV, which comprises the period between 1520 and 1650 (Germany) or 1670 (Austria/Bohemia-Moravia), started in Austria (Austria Judaica), the Czech Republic (Bohemia, Moravia et Silesia Judaica) as well as in Germany and Israel (Germania Judaica). Thus it can be considered an international project with the main emphasis on Central Europe. This application follows the previous application for the project initiated in December 1998 under the same title; its aim is to continue and conclude research on sources and literature and publish the collected results in an extensive presentation to make a new standard book on Jewish history in Austria from 1520 to 1670 available to the public at home and abroad. The emphasis of the current project`s research work is on the East of Austria, especially on Lower Austria and Vienna. This results from the historically given centre of Jewish settlement in Lower Austria in the 16th and 17th centuries on the one hand, and from the very extensive source material to be found in the various departments of the Austrian State Archives on the other. Especially Jewish history in Vienna and the topic of the court Jews formed the basis of the previous research work. Apart from that the identification of rural Jews and the presentation of their living standards is an important aspect of our current and future work. There is an intensive cooperation with historians and archivists in the Czech Republic (Bohemia, Moravia et Silesia Judaica). The work aim is to concretize the now and then appearing signs of a close and intensive contact and give them a vital basis by a mutual exchange of data. Apart from the organizational cooperation with the researchers of Germania Judaica IV in Germany and Israel and their cooperation in the field of clarifying general questions about Jewish history in early modern times the contacts to Germania Juddica IV are above all important for the study of Jewish history in Vorderösterreich.

The project "Germania Judaica IV - Austria Judaica" was located at the Institute for the History of the Jews in St. Poelten (Lower Austria) from 1998 until 2005. Since re-search done to date on the history of the Jews in early modern Austria during the 16th and 17th centuries was far from adequate, "Germania Judaica IV - Austria Ju- daica" has dedicated itself to close the gaps in cooperation with the German-Israeli project "Germania Judaica IV" the Universities of Duesseldorf an Tel Aviv (http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/ijs/germania_judaica/index.html). "Germania Judaica IV - Austria Judaica" begins with the expulsion of the Jews from Carinthia and Styria and the remigration of Jews to Lower Austria and examines the period up to 1670, the year of the Jews were expelled from Vienna and all of Lower Austria again. After a first phase of the project from 1998 until 2001 "Germania Judaica IV - Austria Judaica" continued 2002- 2005 collecting the extensive source materials as basis for various publications. Results of this work are, beside a number of articles, two an-thologies of conference papers and three monographical studies on the history of the Jewish rural community of Langenlois, a small town in Lower Austria, in the 17th cen-tury, the first handbook of the history of the Jews in Lower Austria during the period from 1496 up to 1671 and a sourcebook including the most important sources of Jew-ish history in Vienna and Lower Austria in the 16th and 17th century. As these publications demonstrate, the most interesting part of the project was the Jewish history of Lower Austria which turned out a central region of Jewish settle-ment in the Habsburg-Austrian lands and the Holy Roman Empire, containing more than 50 Jewish communities during the 17th century. In contrast to their number and importance the Jewish rural communities in Lower Austria aroused no attention nei-ther in the Jewish History nor in the historiography on the Austrian lands. Research shed new light on the structure and operation of organizations within Jewish commu-nities, on the role of Jewish women, relations between Christians and Jews, the his-tory of Jewish settlement, as well as on interaction and communication among the Jewish elite in Central Europe. "Germania Judaica IV - Austria Judaica" also worked on the relations between Jews and Jewish communities of the Holy Roman Empire and the Emperor. The results of "Germania Judaica IV - Austria Judaica" are therefore not only important for the Aus-trian history but also for the Jewish history in the Holy Roman Empire and the Bohe- mian lands.