(Jewish Group) 'The City Without Jews' shines unsettling spotlight on history of antisemitism

[Behind the Aegis]

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A copy of Austrian director H. K. Breslauer’s 1924 satirical film “The City Without Jews,” presumed lost for decades, was discovered in 2015 at a Paris flea market in astonishingly good condition. The film, based on Hugo Bettauer’s 1922 novel of the same name, became the subject of a crowdfunded restoration campaign led by the Austrian Film Archive. Since its re-release, “The City Without Jews” has been touring the festival circuit, which brought it to Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre earlier this month as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, screened with live musical accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis.

The film, which took great influence from the Austrian political climate of the time, opens as the Austrian metropolis of Utopia has been caught in a crippling financial crisis. Crowds of jobseekers angrily march through the city’s streets, blaming the city’s Jewish population and demanding their banishment. A majority of the city council is only too happy to indulge their own antisemitism, and an ordinance ordering the Jews to leave in a matter of days is passed. Soon after the Jews are exiled, however, the city’s situation worsens: The city’s banks fail, the economy collapses even further and a steep cultural decline follows. The citizens soon begin demonstrations demanding a repeal, while a city councilor’s daughter (Anny Milety) and her Jewish fiancé (Johannes Riemann), who has snuck back into the city in disguise, must conspire to swing the vote in their favor.

“The City Without Jews” is an early example of film that addresses the sudden departure of an entire demographic, but it is not the only example. In Sergio Arau’s 2004 mockumentary “A Day Without a Mexican,” California wakes up one morning to find an eerie, impenetrable pink fog surrounding the state’s borders, and all of its nearly 15 million residents of Mexican and other Latinx descent vanished without a trace, sans reporter Lila Rodriguez (portrayed by Arau’s wife, Yareli Arizmendi). As in “The City Without Jews,” the loss of the state’s Latinx population predictably throws Californian society into disarray. The film’s poster mockingly displays a frazzled upper-class white couple, rife with sweat and dirt, forced to do their own house cleaning and gardening. The joke is low-hanging, and the film sadly does not make the most of its intriguing premise, but like all good satire, it has a solid truth underlying it. Indeed, the loss of California’s Latinx population, despite some incendiary politicians’ rhetoric, would be just as catastrophic in real life as it is in Arau’s often ham-fisted feature. A CNN editorial discussing the film notes that even absent the economy’s dependence on immigrants, the loss of their often-questioned tax revenue alone would cripple the state.

“A Day Without a Mexican” failed to make much of a commercial or critical impact in its day, and the circumstances surrounding this film are vastly different from those surrounding the making of “A City Without Jews.” Yet the parallels are eerie: “The City Without Jews” was released in July 1924, 14 years before Austria’s 1938 Anschluss, or annexation, by Nazi Germany. “A Day Without a Mexican” was released in May 2004; 14 years and three presidents later, hate crimes targeted at Latinx individuals rose by 15 percent from 2015 — when Donald Trump announced his candidacy — to 2016, and images of migrant children tear gassed at the border have gone viral in recent days, sparking international outcry. Antisemitic hate crimes have also risen — last month’s mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh became the deadliest act of antisemitic terror in American history.

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