´Heimatrecht´ and Citizenship of the Austrian Jews

The importance of the `Heimatrecht` (right of domicile) and citizenship for the emancipation of the Austrian Jews, i.e. their inclusion in the association of the State by acquiring full legal and political equality, has received relatively little attention to date. `Heimatrecht` and citizenship, two very different concepts of integration the modern concept of citizenship extending integration to the great space of the Austrian monarchy, the much older concept of `Heimatrecht` being confined to the narrower space of the local community continue long after the Austrian monarchy to determine not only the legal status of a person, but to a large degree also their identity. This applies in particular to the Austrian Jews who, after a transformation process which spanned many generations, constituted a multiplicity of different groups rather than a homogeneous entity in religious, political and cultural terms. Against the backdrop of disenfranchisement and deprivation of citizenship of the Austrian Jews during the Nazi period, this study attempts to describe in analytical, normative, and legal terms the process of gradual inclusion of the Jews into the `Heimatrecht` and citizenship in the Austrian monarchy since the Josephine reforms. The study looks at Jews not as strangers, `eternal wanderer`, `cosmopolitans` or `universalists`, as has frequently been the case in older literature, but as (State) citizens - as cives nostri. The study approaches the concept of citizenship from its margins, taking the `exceptional case` (namely that of the Jews) as an indicator for the development of citizenship in general (the inclusion of the Jews into full citizenship was since the middle of the 19th century considered an indicator of `good governance`). The stony path of integration of the Jews into general citizenship spans many centuries and is marked by numerous setbacks. It stretches from special royal protection of the Jews (`Judenregal`) via Tolerance or `Familienstelle` all the way to full citizenship. A description of this development allows to shed new light on the previously dimly lit act of expatriation of the Austrian Jews during the Nazi regime. This was a complex process running in several stages which, although similar to the rest of the German Reich, occurred at a somewhat later stage and already under the sign of flight and expulsion. However, the disenfranchisement and literally and legally - depersonalization of the Austrian Jews was - so the argument - not just an act of targeted Nazi persecution, but the systematic reversal in rapid motion of the Jews` emancipation which had started at the end of the 18th century. What at first glance appears to have been an abstruse and cluttered convolution of Nazi regulatory activity turns out, on closer analysis, to have been a meticulous reversal of the historical process of `Jewish emancipation`. Numerous case studies and three major biographical studies towards the end of the book show to what extent the `Heimatrecht` and citizenship or, by contrast, the fate of statelessness determined the lives and identities of people - far beyond the time of the Austrian monarchy.