Forced Interethnic Cohabitation: Jewish and Non-Jewish Prisoners in Austrian Prisons, 1848–1914

This article examines Habsburg prisons as supra-confessional spaces of forced interethnic cohabitation, arguing that these coerced spaces offer particularly insight into the encounters unfolding within them, and traces their legal foundations from eighteenth-century reforms to Jewish emancipation in 1867. Drawing on administrative records, court files, and Emil Kläger’s Sozialreportage, it shows how prisons revealed patterns of religious plurality, gender, and hierarchy otherwise obscured in everyday life. Case studies of the 1848 revolutionary Hermann Jellinek, the Czernowitz prison’s ‘Jewish’ Bethaus, and a trafficking network in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt demonstrate how confessional accommodation was administratively improvised, producing coerced yet consequential Jewish–non-Jewish encounters.