Viennas respectable antisemites offers a radical challenge to conventional accounts of one of the darkest periods in the citys history: the rise of organised, politically directed antisemitism between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Drawing on original research into the Christian Social movement, the book analyses how issues such as nationalism, mass poverty and social unrest enabled the gestation in respectable society of antisemitism, an ideology that seemed to be dying in the 1860s, but which was given new strength from the 1880s. It delivers a riposte to portrayals of the lower clergy as a marginalised group that was driven to defend itself from liberal attacks by turning to anti-liberal, antisemitic action, as well as exposing the nurturing role played by senior clergy. As the book reveals, the Church in Vienna as a whole was determined to counter liberalism, to the point of welcoming any authoritarian regime that would do so.

Michael Carter-Sinclair is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of History at Kings College London

Introduction1 Before the rise of the antisemites2 Antisemites begin to organise, 1873893 To the brink of power, 1889954 A Christian, socially engaged movement? 189619145 A German movement? 189619146 War and the end of empire, 1914187 An unloved republic? 1919268 The right asserts itself, 1927339 Building a Christian and German Austria? 1934810 An end to Austria? 11 Principal conclusions and further questionsIndex