them as Germans. The wrongness of this conception was not clear to me, since the only distinguishing mark I saw in them was their unfamiliar religion. As I thought they were persecuted on that account, my aversion to remarks in their disfavour almost grew into abhorrence. Of the existence of deliberate Jewish hostility I had no conception.
Then I arrived in Vienna. Being confused by the mass of architectural impres¬ sions and crushed by the hardness of my own lot, I was at first unaware of the stratifications of the people within that immense city. Although Vienna then counted something like two hundred thousand Jews aomngst its population of two millions, I failed to see them. During the first weeks my eyes and mind were unable to take in the rush of values and ideas. Not till I gradually became calmer and the confused images began to get clearer did I obtain a deeper view of this new world and come up against the Jewish question.
I will not say that the way in which I was to make acquaintance with them was very pleasant to me. I still saw Jewry as a religion, and therefore, for reasons of human tolerance, I still disliked attacking them on religious grounds. Thus I considered that the tone, especially that adopted by the anti-semitic Press in Vienna, unworthy of the cultural traditions of a great nation. I was oppressed by the memory of certain events in the Middle Ages, which I would not care to see . repeated. £ Since the newspapers in question had not a high reputation in general—how this came about I never knew then exactly—I regarded them more as a product of jealous rage than the result of genuine, if wrong-headed, opinion.
My own opinions were fortified by what seemed to me the infinitely more dignified forms in which the really great Press replied to those attacks or silently ignored them altogether—which occurred to me as being even more worthy of respect.