Generally speaking, Jews were a minority among bankers; bankers were a minority among Jews; and Jewish bankers competed too fiercely against each other and associated too much with erratic and mutually hostile regimes to be able to have permanent and easily manageable political influence (Heine called Rothschild and Fuld “two rabbis of finance who were as much opposed to one another as Hillel and Shammai”). Still, it is obvious that European Jews as a group were very successful in the new economic order, that they were, on average, better off than non-Jews, and that some of them managed to translate their Mercurian expertise and Mercurian familism into considerable economic and political power. The pre–World War I Hungarian state owed its relative stability to the active support of the powerful business elite, which was small, cohesive, bound by marriage, and overwhelmingly Jewish. The new German Empire was built not only on “blood and iron,” as Otto von Bismarck claimed, but also on gold and financial expertise, largely provided by Bismarck’s—and Germany’s—banker, Gerson von Bleichröder. The Rothschilds made their wealth by lending to governments and speculating in government bonds, so that when members of the family had a strong opinion, governments would listen (but not always hear, of course). In one of the most amusing episodes in Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, “His Majesty” James Rothschild blackmails Emperor Nicholas I into releasing the money that the father of Russian socialism has received from his serf-owning German mother.15
Money was one means of advancement; education was the other. The two were closely connected, of course, but proportions could vary considerably. Throughout modern Europe, education was expected to lead to money; only among Jews, apparently, was money almost universally expected to lead to education. Jews were consistently overrepresented in educational institutions leading to professional careers, but the overrepresentation of the offspring of Jewish merchants seems particularly striking. In fin de siècle Vienna, Jews made up roughly 10 percent of the general population and about 30 percent of classical gymnasium students. Between 1870 and 1910, about 40 percent of all gymnasium graduates in central Vienna were Jewish; among those whose fathers engaged in commerce, Jews represented more than 80 percent. In Germany, 51 percent of Jewish scientists had fathers who were businessmen. The Jewish journey from the ghetto seemed to lead to the liberal professions by way of commercial success.16
The principal way station on that route was the university. In the 1880s, Jews accounted for only 3–4 percent of the Austrian population, but 17 percent of all university students and fully one-third of the student body at Vienna University. In Hungary, where Jews constituted about 5 percent of the population, they represented one-fourth of all university students and 43 percent at Budapest Technological University. In Prussia in 1910–11, Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population, about 5.4 percent of university students, and 17 percent of the students at the University of Berlin. In 1922, in newly independent Lithuania, Jewish students composed 31.5 percent of the student body at the University of Kaunas (not for long, though, because of the government’s nativization policies). In Czechoslovakia, the Jewish share of university students (14.5 percent) was 5.6 times their share in the general population. When Jews are compared to non-Jews in similar social and economic positions, the gap becomes narrower (though still impressive); what remains constant is that in much of Central and Eastern Europe, there were relatively few non-Jews in similar social and economic positions. In large parts of Eastern Europe, virtually the whole “middle class” was Jewish.17
Because civil service jobs were mostly closed to Jews (and possibly because of a general Jewish preference for self-employment), most Jewish students went into the professions that were “liberal,” congruent with Mercurian upbringing, and, as it happens, absolutely central to the functioning of modern society: medicine, law, journalism, science, higher education, entertainment, and the arts. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, 62 percent of the lawyers, half the doctors and dentists, 45 percent of the medical faculty, and one-fourth of the total faculty were Jews, as were between 51.5 and 63.2 percent of professional journalists. In 1920, 59.9 percent of Hungarian doctors, 50.6 percent of lawyers, 39.25 percent of all privately employed engineers and chemists, 34.3 percent of editors and journalists, and 28.6 percent of musicians identified themselves as Jews by religion. (If one were to add converts to Christianity, the numbers would presumably be much higher.) In Prussia, 16 percent of physicians, 15 percent of dentists, and one-fourth of all lawyers in 1925 were Jews; and in interwar Poland, Jews were about 56 percent of all doctors in private practice, 43.3 percent of all private teachers and educators, 33.5 percent of all lawyers and notaries, and 22 percent of all journalists, publishers, and librarians.18
Of all the licensed professionals who served as the priests and oracles of new secular truths, messengers were the most obviously Mercurian, the most visible, the most marginal, the most influential—and very often Jewish. In early twentieth-century Germany, Austria, and Hungary, most of the national newspapers that were not specifically Christian or anti-Semitic were owned, managed, edited, and staffed by Jews (in fact, in Vienna even the Christian and anti-Semitic ones were sometimes produced by Jews). As Steven Beller put it, “in an age when the press was the only mass medium, cultural or otherwise, the liberal press was largely a Jewish press.”19
The same was true, to a lesser degree, of publishing houses, as well as the many public places where messages, prophecies, and editorial comments were exchanged orally or nonverbally (through gesture, fashion, and ritual). “Jewish emancipation” was, among other things, a search by individual Jews for a neutral (or at least “semineutral,” in Jacob Katz’s terms) society where neutral actors could share a neutral secular culture. As the marquis d’Argens wrote to Frederick the Great on behalf of Moses Mendelssohn, “A philosophe who is a bad Catholic begs a philosophe who is a bad Protestant to grant the privilege [of residence in Berlin] to a philosophe who is a bad Jew.” To be bad in the eyes of God was a good thing because God either did not exist or could not always tell bad from good. For the Jews, the first such corners of neutrality and equality were Masonic lodges, whose members were to adhere “to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves.” When it appeared as if the only religion left was the one on which everyone agreed, some particular opinions became “public opinion,” and Jews became important—and very public—opinion makers and opinion traders. In the early nineteenth century, the most prominent salon hostesses in the German-speaking world were Jewish women, and Jews of both sexes became a visible, and sometimes the largest, part of the “public” in theaters, concert halls, art galleries, and literary societies. Most of the patrons in Viennese literary coffeehouses seem to have been Jewish—as were many of the artists whose inventions they judged. Central European modernism, in particular, owed a great deal to the creativity of “emancipated” Jews.20