This thesis presents the first integrated history of Vienna’s four Jewish cemeteries as
sites reflecting the construction, negotiation and at times contestation of Jewish
communal belonging within Viennese society, embedded in the Viennese cityscape.
Through a novel analysis of the sepulchral epigraphy of the thousands of matzevot or
grave-memorials contained therein, the development and expression of codes of
belonging constructed in the nexus between shifting notions of ‘Jewish’ and
‘Viennese’ culture are illuminated in a longue durée from the medieval into the
modern periods. The Shoah, while it does not represent the first instance of the
violent erasures of Jewish life and culture in the city, through its magnitude and
presence in living memory constitutes a profound rupture in the historic enmeshment
of the Jewish community in Viennese society. During the Shoah, the cemeteries
became a focal point for the attempted excision or revision of Jewish cultural heritage
and its place in Viennese culture, perpetrated by a complex network of agency, with
the cemeteries moreover becoming recalibrated as sites of intense Jewish-communal
introspection and activity. The cemeteries constituted after the Shoah some of the
only sites of Jewish heritage to survive in the physical and memorial landscape,
becoming moreover deeply contested sites of memory, within the context of the
fledgling re-establishment of Jewish life in the city and the conflicted political and
historical discourses in the Second Austrian Republic. This thesis presents the
cemeteries as sites of the most profound engagements with Vienna’s long and
convoluted Jewish history, comprising moments of great cultural prowess as well as
murderous destructivity, embodying the deeply interactive yet conflicted relationship
between the City of Vienna and its successive Jewish communities.