The Daily News Letter

Vienna.

The statement on the position of the Jews in Austria and the government’s policy with regard to the Jewish population which Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg gave the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on his recent courtesy visits to Paris and London, continues to attract the widest attention in Austrian Jewish circles.

Dr. Schuschnigg’s explanations of developments affecting the Jewish community in recent months has been discussed editorially by all the Jewish papers.

Interesting comment on the Chancellor’s pronouncement is contained in the current issue of the organ of the Union of Austrian Jews which has vigorously called upon the government to halt the Nazi campaign of defamation of the Jews.

“The unfortunate development of relations between the Christian and the Jewish Austrians is not, as the anti-Semites assert, the result of the consistent application of the ideas of tolerance, but, on the contrary, the fact of their sabotage, partly implicit and partly explicit,” the paper points out. “If Chancellor Dr. Schuschnigg sees the division of occupations into purely Christian and specifically Jewish in the pre-war period, he demonstrates in that way that already then the realization of the ideas of the Emperor Josef II was being interfered with. Even under the rule of Kaiser Josef, Jews were able to obtain certain positions by surrendering their inherited faith, and the denominational division of occupational groups which was in that way created also had its external causes.

“Dr. Schuschnigg idealizes them too much by seeking internal motives. It is very flattering to us Jews when he tells us that the Christians were concerned only with the State Treasury, while the Jews preferred to struggle for their livelihood in the liberal professions.

“Dr. Schuschnigg denies that the present movement of ejecting Jews from their positions in the banks is being carried out under State influence and on religious grounds. When the Christian Socialist Professor Guertler was to become Minister of Finance in the inflation period, he decided to do so only on condition that the Jewish president of the Anglo-Bank, Rosenberg, should be his adviser. Nor is it any secret that the Prelate Dr. Seipel achieved the successful stabilization of the schilling only by the aid of Jewish bankers. On the other hand, the dangerous destruction of Austrian national wealth, the devaluation of the pre-war securities and war loans was the work of the Christian Socialist Minister of Finance, Schumpeter, in the Renner government.

“The Chancellor says that the Christian population, which constitutes ninety-five per cent of the entire population, considers it an injustice that the Jews should be represented to the extent of seventy or eighty per cent in the professions in which the ‘Aryans’ are seeking their livelihood, which they had no reason to do so long as they were able to make their living in State positions and out of the State Treasury. Is it not a much greater injustice to drive people out of their positions for the sake of such people who are now trying to find positions in these professions, not because they have any real desire for these occupations, but because another branch of activity which they prefer happens now to be closed to them because of external conditions?

“The worst sufferers are the Jewish teachers. All the agitation against Jewish doctors could not prevent the ‘Aryan’ opera singer Kiepura, when he was ill recently in his native Poland, from bringing down a Jewish doctor from the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna to treat him.

“Dr. Schuschnigg speaks of the Jewish teachers in comparison with the pre-war period. At that time it was the demand of the Christian Socialist party that the head of the school should be of the same religion as the majority of the pupils at his school. On this basis Jewish directors were appointed in several Vienna schools even in the anti-Semitic period of Lord Mayor Lueger. Today, even in such schools where the Jewish pupils are in a majority and which are, like the commercial schools, maintained mainly by Jews, the best and most qualified Jewish teachers have to give way to ‘Aryans’ who are appointed in their places.”