In this lively and well-written book, David Rechter seeks to demonstrate how Leon Kellner – scholar, public intellectual, and Zionist activist – reflected the Jewish experience in Habsburg Austria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rechter argues that Kellner was “one of the great and good of Habsburg Austria” (1, 126-127), a man living in a society willing to tolerate “a degree of difference” (163) even while it erected barriers to full Jewish success.
Rechter does an excellent job delineating Kellner's life. Leon Kellner was born into a traditionally religious, lower-middle-class Jewish family in Tarnów, Galicia, in 1859 and received a traditional Jewish education. His family, however, provided him with a German tutor, and after he mastered German – the language of upward social mobility in Habsburg Austria – they sent him to obtain a modern education at the secondary school division of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, Germany. Kellner had no interest in becoming a rabbi, and he lost interest in Jewish religious observance. After a few years in Breslau, he finished Gymnasium in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia. Kellner then studied at the University of Vienna, obtaining his Ph.D. in comparative linguistics and English philology in 1883. Because of antisemitic prejudice, he did not obtain a job as a Gymnasium or university professor, but he did teach Jewish religion and, later, English at a Viennese secondary school, gave lectures as a Privatdozent at the University of Vienna, began a long career writing articles for the press, mostly on English culture and society, and published scholarly books and articles on English language and literature. He became a Zionist in 1896, when Theodor Herzl asked him to check the English translation of his Zionist manifesto, Der Judenstaat. Remaining close to Herzl until the latter's death in 1904, Kellner became intimately involved in the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
In 1904, he moved to Czernowitz, Bukovina, where he had finally obtained a professorship in English philology. Although Czernowitz was an oasis of German culture in the Habsburg east, Kellner longed for Vienna (the Eden to which Rechter refers in the book's title), and his family returned there after a few years, while he commuted. In Bukovina, Kellner helped the Palestino-centric Zionists and the Jewish nationalists, who wanted the Jews recognized as one of the nations of Habsburg Austria, work together, and he won a seat in the Bukovinian Diet in 1911. Due to several Russian occupations of Bukovina, he spent most of World War I in Vienna, devoting himself to scholarship. Always an Austrian patriot, he was devastated by the collapse of Austria-Hungary in November 1918, which placed both Austria's and his own future in doubt. Czernowitz was now in Romania, which converted the university into a Romanian institution and fired the German-speaking faculty. Kellner spent the rest of his life in Vienna, paid a meager salary by the Austrian government as a former state employee. He continued to write for the press and engage in scholarship, and he also served as advisor to the president of the Austrian Republic on English and American affairs.
Rechter correctly sees Kellner as leading a Habsburg Jewish life, but he does not provide sufficient background about the Habsburg Jewish experience, and he makes many mistakes. For example, Rechter should have provided more background on the Jews in Galicia and their linguistic choices. He does not adequately explain why Kellner's religious family gave him a German-language education in the 1860s, at a time when Polish-language education was gaining ground. Rechter assumes far more widespread use of German and far less knowledge of Polish in Galicia than was in fact the case. Just because the Austrian government in the early nineteenth century mandated that Jewish communities keep their records in German does not mean that they did so. Moreover, Galician Jews had rejected the German-Jewish schools that the state had mandated at that time, and many Jews in Galicia always knew Polish, even if they could not read it. Rechter also does not understand the gendered nature of Polish-language education in Galicia. Habsburg Austria required all children to attend public school, which in Galicia after 1869 was in Polish. Traditional Jews in Galicia evaded Polish public schools for their sons, but, because they regarded girls as less important, they sent their daughters to Polish schools. Rechter also should have explained Jewish nationalism and Kellner's position on the subject more fully, and he should have shown how the other nationalist movements influenced both the Zionists and the Jewish nationalists. The book also would have benefitted from a discussion of Kellner's attitudes to the Austrian Republic.
There are other mistakes. In 1880, when Kellner first arrived in Vienna, Galician Jews did not yet form 20% of the Jewish community of the city, and most Galician Jews in Vienna in the 1880s were not poor and religious. Such was the case in the early twentieth century, but not in 1880. Rechter implies that the Breslau Seminary was modern Orthodox, but it was modern and traditional, not Orthodox at all. Rechter also says that Kellner's daughter attended Gymnasium in Vienna, but Viennese Gymnasiums were not open to girls before World War I.
Rechter deems Kellner an East European Jew who became a West European Jew. The distinction minimizes the uniqueness of Habsburg Jews. Yes, Kellner was born into an “Eastern” Jewish family, but he did not become West European, he became a modern Habsburg Jew, at home in German culture but also concerned with Jewish ethnic, indeed national, identity. Such was the case because of the nationalist activism which inundated politics in Habsburg Austria, an activism made possible by Habsburg policy. It was not so much that the state tolerated difference, but that it encouraged difference. Kellner, therefore, was a product of the Habsburg environment more than Rechter realizes. It is true that de facto antisemitic barriers stymied a perfect career, but Kellner actually did very well in Habsburg Austria. Was Kellner typical of Habsburg Jewry? Of course not. Most Jews, especially in Galicia, Bukovina, and Hungary, were ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. But Kellner was typical of modern Jews who believed that Jews formed part of a Jewish nation in the multinational Habsburg state. It was not Zionism itself that helped Kellner bridge the East/West divide, as Rechter argues, but rather the very nature of Habsburg Austria.
