Her name rarely appears amongst those said to have advanced the cause of Jewish women; indeed she would have said that was never her intention. But arguably her wealth, status and privilege enabled Fanny Arnstein to make an unrivalled contribution to the position of Jewish women in patriarchal, antisemitic, early 19th century Austria.
When Fanny Arnstein was born, the vast majority of European Jews still lived the same impoverished lives as had their ancestors: excluded from mainstream society, rejected as an outcast faith. One of the few occupations permitted to them was money lending, usually just small time pawnbroking that left them as poor as their customers. Some who were more business minded became merchants; one advantage of belonging to a dispersed people was to be part of a wide geographical network of contacts. And there were just a few, no more than a handful of Jewish families, who were a bit sharper, a bit more entrepreneurial, who built substantial businesses by combining the permitted occupations of trade and moneylending. By the end of the 17th century these few families, with names like Oppenheimer, Gumpertz and Liebmann were supplying the royal houses and courts of Europe with the funds and provisions they needed to remain in power. They became known as Court Jews.
Fanny Arnstein was born into one such family. Her father, Daniel Itzig, was Frederick II of Prussia’s banker, the first Jew to be granted Prussian citizenship without having to convert to Christianity. The son of a horse dealer, he had started his career by minting coins for the royal treasury. A man of power and wealth, he and his wife Marianne had 16 children. Fanny was the fourth of their eight girls.
Fanny grew up in Berlin’s cultured and intellectually enlightened Jewish community. It was the Berlin of Mendelssohn and Lessing, of literary salons, philosophy and education for women. It was also a city in which many Jews converted to Christianity, believing this would give them a better advantage in life. Years later, Fanny would become the great aunt of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, Moses Mendelssohn’s grandson, baptised at the age of 7. Fanny, who became an accomplished pianist, was given the best education her substantial parents could afford. She never converted, though she did introduce the first Christmas tree into Vienna.
At the age of 18, Fanny married Nathan Arnstein. It was possibly an arranged marriage, or at least one over which the couple’s parents exerted profound influence, because when she came to make her will, Fanny insisted that her sole daughter be married “only to the man she had chosen.”
That is not to say that Fanny and Nathan’s marriage was an unhappy one. Although it may have been, after she had been married for about 15 years, two of her admirers, Prince Carl von Lichtenstein and Baron Weichs, fought a duel over which of them was to accompany her to the theatre. The Prince was killed and the story was later put about that each year Fanny Arnstein would spend the anniversary of his death in silent mourning.
Fanny’s husband, Nathan Arnstein, came from a background as rarified and privileged as her own. He was a member of Vienna’s most prominent banking family, one of the twenty-five “tolerated” Jewish families in the city; families whom the Hapsburg emperor, Joseph II, was prepared to tolerate, for the sake of his own self-interest.
Austrian antisemitism has a long history. In 1670, Emperor Leopold II threw all the Jews out of Vienna and the next year he expelled them from the rest of the country. He regretted his mistake shortly afterwards when his war with France was going badly and he needed Samuel Oppenheimer to supply and equip his army. He granted Oppenheimer permission to live in Vienna, ushering in the principle of Austria’s “tolerated” Jews. When Fanny arrived in Vienna there were a few Jews there who didn’t have the same privileges as those who were “tolerated”. Nevertheless, to be a “tolerated” Jew in Vienna was a mark of distinction.
Life in Vienna was not as stiff and formal as it had been in Berlin. Viennese high society was shallow and elitist; its overwhelming priority was amusement, at musical gatherings, parties and the theatre. Religion was not much of a barrier, provided one was “tolerated.” As one of the wealthy elite of Vienna, Fanny found herself welcome almost everywhere. The only people who would not consort with her were the women of the higher aristocracy, the princesses and countesses for whom she was not good enough.
When her parents-in-law both died within two years, Fanny became the mistress of their palatial residence and the subject of fascination and gossip in high Viennese society. Visits to her salon became de rigueur. To be invited to a salon, particularly one in as prestigious a home as the Arnstein’s, meant that one had arrived in Viennese society. Those who visited Fanny’s salon described its rich brilliance, the gardens in which they strolled, the suppers they ate, the music and, of course, the eminent guests.
Fanny Arnstein was not the first Jewish woman to open a salon, Sara Coppio Sulam had a thriving, short-lived one in the Venice Ghetto, 200 years earlier. But Fanny’s was one of only two Jewish salons in Vienna. We only have to look at the list of people who are said to have attended to get an idea of its prestige. Mozart is said to have played there, or at least to have visited, as did the Emperor Joseph II. More reliably, her guests at one time or another included the Duke of Wellington, the French statesman Talleyrand, Vienna’s powerful Prince Metternich, Nelson and Lady Hamilton, members of the Schopenhauer and Mendelssohn families, along with many others whose names mattered at the time, even if they mean very little to us now.
If there was any surprise when the Emperor made Nathan a baron and Fanny a baroness in 1798, it was that it hadn’t happened sooner.
For most of her life Fanny Arnstein took little interest either in politics or religion. When, in 1812, she erected a Christmas tree in her salon, it wasn’t because of any interest in Christianity. It was because she wanted to introduce a custom she remembered from her childhood in Berlin. But if Fanny Arnstein had a Christmas tree then everybody had to have one. By the following year, Christmas trees were ubiquitous in Vienna.
A couple of years later, after the defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna brought politicians and statesmen from all over Europe to the city to discuss the future of the continent. Fanny’s salon became the go-to venue for informal, off the record, diplomatic conversation. She had spent years being a dignified and discreet hostess, she was now old enough and renowned enough to speak out and say what she thought. She took a prominent role in the campaigns pressing for Jews to be granted civil rights in Prussia and Austria. But she had no political instinct and the campaigns failed. Fanny suddenly felt very tired. She retreated to her country home where, three years later, she died.
It is quite apparent from letters that have survived, that the success of Fanny Arnstein’s salon was not just due to her family’s wealth or her position in Viennese high society. It was her own personality that made it special, her charm, grace and hospitable talent made it the one salon at which every grandee passing through the city had to be seen. But Fanny Arnstein has not gone down in history simply because she was fun to be around, nor because she was a scintillating character, a consummate hostess or even a talented pianist.
Most European women were invisible in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish women even more so. The only women in the public eye in those days were those born into the nobility: the countesses, princesses and queens. And until Fanny Arnstein came along, no Jewish woman could even dream, would probably not even want, to be part of that world. But in those days every Jewish woman, and indeed nearly every Jewish man, lived lives that were impossibly constrained by barriers. What Fanny Arnstein did, perhaps unwittingly, was to show that even the most intractable barriers can be broken down. She received no accolades for it, it’s only because her name crops up in the letters and memoirs of her salon’s notable guests that much is known about her. But if she hadn’t broken down her particular barrier, the eventual emancipation of Jewish women may have taken just a little longer.