Austria Judaica – database

The Austria Judaica project (1998-2004), supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), examined the history of the Jews in the Austrian countries between 1520 and the displacement of all Jews from Vienna and Lower Austria in 1670/71. The aim of the project was to look into all aspects of Jewish existence in early modern Austria on a broad source basis, whereby both the inner-Jewish developments and the relationships between Jews and their Christian environment were examined.

Geographically, the project concentrated particularly on the Jewish community in Vienna and on the Lower Austrian rural Jews, who until then had been largely ignored by research. In addition to Austria Judaica, the cooperation project "Bohemia, Moravia et Silesia Judaica" (1998-2003) aimed at researching the networks of Austrian and Bohemian-Moravian Jews. In the partner project "Hungaria et Slovakia Judaica" Hungarian materials were also collected in the years 2000-2002.

Due to financial and human resources, the source screening and collection was discontinued in 2004, after which the former employees were still able to publish on the issues mentioned. Numerous collected sources were the basis of these publications, substantial pieces of content could be edited, but there is currently no way to make the entire collection of sources available to the scientific community and thus to provide the wealth of information for researchers in the field of Jewish history in the early modern period.

The extensive holdings of unprinted sources from numerous archives were partly incorporated into a database. This has now been transferred into a new system, the missing stocks are now continuously entered, the existing data records are checked and supplemented. The database will soon be accessible online - please note when using it that this is a "work in progress"!

Information: |mail: Sabine Hödl|

We would like to express our thanks to Land Niederösterreich, the City of Vienna and the IÖG/University of Vienna for supporting this project.