Banished Jews carry their Torah Scrolls with them – A scene from 1924 silent film, “City Without Jews”
Based on famous novel and digitally restored, ‘City Without Jews’ includes stunningly prescient scenes depicting passage of anti-Jewish laws and deportations from Vienna
A Jewish man is beaten up on the street. Jewish husbands are separated from their non-Jewish wives and children, and deported on trains. A Jewish community, led by rabbis carrying a Torah scrolls, marches down a dark road as it is banished from town.
These snapshots appear to be Holocaust history — but they are not. These are scenes from a silent Austrian film made a decade prior to the enactment of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws, and some 15 years before the outbreak of World War II.
The 1924 film “City Without Jews” is based on a popular 1922 novel by Austrian writer and journalist Hugo Bettauer. It astutely predicted what was to come. But only partially.
The film was conceived as a satirical response to the anti-Semitism gaining popular and political strength in Austria during the early inter-war period. Its plot depicted the scapegoating of the Jews for the country’s problems and their subsequent expulsion.
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