In the rich and multinational tapestry of life that was fin de siècle Vienna there were a considerable number of highly accomplished Jews. After Warsaw, Vienna had the largest Jewish community of any European city and this was a time when, as Freud (1900a) noted, “… every industrious Jewish schoolboy carried a Cabinet Minister's portfolio in his satchel” (p. 193). It was also a time when the progressive liberalism of the closing years of the Hapsburg empire had enabled Jewish intellectuals, and those with professional ambitions such as Freud, to constitute a substantial upper stratum in Viennese life. However, by the 1890s mass anti-Semitism, which had always had a more than spectral presence, had crystallised