The Industrial Revolution that began in the eighteenth century introduced a fluidity into society that increasingly challenged class relations and notions of personal identity. By the late nineteenth century one did not have to be in the nobility to belong to the upper class. Elitism was now based not so much on birthright as on wealth, and capitalism offered upwardly mobile possibilities (however remote) to almost anyone. But this changing social order was also threatening and disorienting. On the one hand, Europe’s traditional aristocracy tried through various means to retain its position atop the social pyramid.^[1] On the other, the newly emergent bourgeoisie sought to redefine and reclassify society for its own ends. As Peter Gay has written, “[T]he Victorian age was an age of redefinitions. Competition was secularized; race, dramatized; manliness, democratized. Sins became crimes; crimes, diseases; diseases, social problems.”^[2] The final decades before World War I have long garnered much attention and, despite many novel interpretations,^[3] historians still find it difficult not to interpret them in a teleological vein. Added to imperialism and secularism, scientific positivism and Social Darwinism produced a potent mixture, drafts of which allowed individual identity to be better realized and the Other better identified.^[4] The rise of the paternalistic state and municipal policing coincided with that of the machine and factory management.
Michel Foucault spent much of his career theorizing about the “knowledges” produced by power toward the establishment of disciplinary regimes that “normativized” an increasingly subjectified citizenry,^[5] though as early as 1939 Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer used Marxism to show that the state manufactures criminals for purposes of labor exploitation and social regulation.^[6] Stripped of its ideological imperatives, this view is at the core of most analytical scholarship on prison, crime, criminals, and criminology.^[7] Influenced by the “linguistic turn,” historians have recently focused on discursive constructions of the criminal. A recent annotated translation of Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente that charts the Italian criminologist’s protean and expanding definition of “criminal man” throughout its many editions is especially welcome.^[8] In addition to studies on criminology generally, the role played by the tsarist-era press in constructing the criminal has been the subject of books by Roshanna Sylvester and Joan Neuberger.^[9]
The construction of “the Jew” has a longer history than that of the criminal, though like that of the criminal it was heavily influenced by Social Darwinism and the other factors just mentioned.^[10] Daniel M. Vyleta’s Crime, Jews and News: Vienna, 1890–1914 acknowledges these various factors but adds to them “criminalistics – the science of detection – that emerged in Austria around the fin-de-siècle and articulated a sweeping critique of criminology’s most fundamental assumptions.” Criminalistics functioned as a counter-narrative to Lombrosian criminology – which purported to identify and even to predicate the so called “natural” criminal – because it “stressed the epistemological challenges of bringing offenders to justice and consequently inquired into the physical procedures and psychological dynamics of the investigative and judicial processes” (P. 8). Through an assiduous reading of Viennese newspapers Vyleta argues that “Jewish criminality” was not a biologically and racially constructed narrative, but instead one that identified Jews as rational actors who were better adjusted to modernity and took advantage of the less well adjusted. Stressing that newspapers shaped popular mentality (while also acknowledging the methodological difficulties here), Vyleta finds little evidence to support the view that anti-semitism was rife in Vienna prior to World War I and critiques historians who casually transfer Karl Lueger’s views onto a faceless LeBonesque mob.^[11] “The merging of racial narratives of Jews with criminal biological narratives predicted by various cultural historians was not in evidence in this period,” he writes. “At the same time, it is clear that crime reporting was a central locus in which sustained antisemitic narratives were disseminated” (P. 221). Vyleta neither denies the existence of contemporary anti-Semitism nor ignores the fact that Austrians were eventually disproportionately overrepresented in the Nazi Party and among the SS and other elite organs, but he does question “whether antisemitism had truly achieved widespread respectability up and down the social ladder…” (P. 223).
Aside from being nuanced, Vyleta’s overall argument is rather cryptic and could have been made more succinctly. It holds that newspapers such as the Arbeiter-Zeitung, by catering to the public’s voracious appetite for crime stories (“trial reports … represented the bread and butter of Vienna’s most popular papers, and formed a central feature in even the most sophisticated dailies, comparable perhaps to the status of sport in present-day news culture” [P. 219]), managed, through a conscious and “occasional use of an antisemitic idiom” (P. 223), to render anti-Semitism more socially acceptable. In short, words mattered. This is a provocative argument, and in the absence of evidence for an overt biologico-racist narrative, one that is potentially revisionist. However, despite being a logical extension of Vyleta’s research and one that links fin-de-siècle Viennese newspapers’ words and cartoons to what eventuated in Austria, there is not enough evidence presented of a supposed transmission from words to deeds for it to be entirely persuasive.
Vyleta’s discussion of the place of “the Jew” in contemporary criminological literature is more convincing. He finds little to support Sander Gilman’s argument that the criminal and the Jew were collapsed into a single figure. Indeed, neither Lombroso nor anyone else reportedly associated “the Jewish race” with a predisposition to crime. Nonetheless, there was constructed such a thing as “Jewish criminality” and the bête noire of “the cunning Jew” who manipulated the credulous or less intelligent. Fears of the Jew as enslaver of white middle-class women found expression via this trope. The White Slavery debate of the late nineteenth century also revealed fears about sex and modernity, and so it is notable that the constructed Jew highlighted these as well as the perennial belief in an international Jewish conspiracy.
Having debunked the notion that criminologists conflated Jews with hereditary criminals, Vyleta devotes the second half of his book to the reportage on crimes and jury trials in which Jews figured as victims, suspects, defendants, or litigants. He outlines a morphology expressed through texts and cartoons (many of which are reproduced) to argue that several major newspapers associated Jews with crime and had anti-Semitic motives for doing so. The evidence for this is incontestable. In reporting the trial of a Jewish prostitute one newspaper editorialized: “And Jews are almost always the entrepreneurs of vice. They call it and foster it, they poison and spoil our youth. Take notice, Vienna!” (P. 148). Even when non-Jews were involved, newspapers sought to “judify” them using the usual signifiers. One defendant, it was reported, “sports a beard … and hence looks remarkably like a Jew” (Pp. 104-105). Having exhausted this avenue, the same newspaper shifted attention to his supposedly Jewish lawyers, the supposedly Jewish portion of the audience, and even the “Jewish paper” in which the defendant placed incriminating advertisements. This and similar accounts produced an image of judicial courtrooms and procedures that were not what they pretended to be, but were instead loci of the (mal)functioning Jewish shadow-world. The vulgar Kikeriki, reporting the spectacular Leopold Hilsner trial, published a cartoon showing the “Jew-Press” and a “Jewish Money-Bag” machinating behind the back of Justice (represented by the classic Greek matron, blindfolded and holding a sword and scales), while the Cock who represented the newspaper’s editorial voice asks: “Am I wrong – or are there some that tower over justice?” (P. 197).
Vyleta’s is an impressively researched and thoroughly detailed study highlighting the interstice between anti-Semitism as privately voiced conceit and as socially accepted discourse. Newspapers taught readers how to talk about and look at Jews and, as a result, how to think about Jews. Vyleta writes that he has no desire to “whitewash” Vienna or to deny the other factors, such as Lueger, that produced what eventually became a rabidly anti-Semitic society. But he does challenge views about anti-Semitism’s development that appear commonsensical but for which there is, it turns out, little evidence. This book is sure to be controversial, but it is also very significant and deserving of careful study. Recommended for specialists and graduate students.