In 2008, a team of archeologists discovered a third-century CE amulet in the form of a gold scroll with the words of the Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael (Hear, O Israel!

One of the main reasons for the prosperity was the declaration by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II that the Jews were a separate ethnic and religious group, and were not bound to the laws that targeted the Christian population.

This bill of rights affected other kingdoms in Europe such as Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Silesia and Bohemia, which had high concentrations of Jews.

During this period, the Jewish population mainly dealt with commerce and the collection of taxes and also gained key positions in many other aspects of life in Austria.

The insularity and assumed prosperity of the Jewish community caused increased tensions and jealousy from the Christian population along with hostility from the Catholic Church.

In 1282, when the area became controlled by the Catholic House of Habsburg, Austria's prominence decreased as far as being a religious center for Jewish scholarly endeavors due to the highly anti-Semitic atmosphere.

Some Jewish business enterprises focused on civic finance, private interest-free loans, and government accounting work enforcing tax collection and handling moneylending for Christian landowners.

The earliest evidence of Jewish officials tasked with the unpleasant role of collecting unpaid taxes appears in a document from 1320.

210 Jewish men, women, and children were forcibly taken from their homes and burnt alive in the public town square, while the remaining families were rounded up and deported from Austria, forced to leave all their belongings behind.

Ferdinand I, whose regime began in 1556, opposed the persecution of the Jews, but levied excessive taxes and ordered them to wear a mark of disgrace.

The nadir of the Jewish community in Austria arrived during the reign of Leopold I, a period in which Jews were persecuted frequently and deported from many areas, including Vienna in 1670, though they gradually returned after several years.

A Sabbatean movement, which was established in the same period, also reached the Jewish community in Austria, largely due to the difficult condition of the Jews there.

After Maria Theresa's death in 1780, her son Joseph II succeeded her and started working on the integration of Jews into Austrian society.

After only two years of his reign, he died and was succeeded by his son Francis II, who continued working on the integration of Jews into the wider Austrian society, but he was more moderate than his uncle.

Contributions came from Jewish lawyers, journalists (among them Theodor Herzl), authors, playwrights, poets, doctors, bankers, businessmen, and artists.

Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, studied at the University of Vienna and was the editor of the "feuilleton" of the Neue Freie Presse, a very influential newspaper at that time.

Other notable influential Jews contributing greatly to Austrian culture included composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and the authors Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum and the doctors Sigmund Freud, Viktor Frankl, Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler, the philosophers Martin Buber, Karl Popper, and many others.

During the period of his authority, Lueger removed Jews from positions in the city administration and forbade them from working in the factories located in Vienna until his death in 1910.

Many of the leading heads of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and especially the leaders of the Austromarxism were assimilated Jews, for example Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Gustav Eckstein, Julius Deutsch and also the reformer of the school system in Vienna, Hugo Breitner.

[23] Antisemites began blaming Jews for the downfall of Austria-Hungary and the Central Powers during World War I, similarly to the German "stab-in-the-back" myth.

Many famous writers, film and theatre directors (e.g., Max Reinhardt, Fritz Lang, Richard Oswald, Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger) actors (e.g., Peter Lorre, Paul Muni) and producers (e.g., Jacob Fleck, Oscar Pilzer, Arnold Pressburger), architects and set designers (e.g., Artur Berger, Harry Horner, Oskar Strnad, Ernst Deutsch-Dryden), comedians (Kabarett artists (e.g., Heinrich Eisenbach, Fritz Grünbaum, Karl Farkas, Georg Kreisler, Hermann Leopoldi, Armin Berg), musicians and composers (e.g., Fritz Kreisler, Hans J. Salter, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Kurt Adler) were Jewish Austrians.

Departure was only possible with a visa to enter another country, which was hard to obtain, especially for the poor and elderly, so even the wealthy sometimes had to leave behind their parents or grandparents.

The Chinese consul to Austria, Ho Feng-Shan, risking his own life and his career rapidly approved the visa applications of thousands of Jews seeking to escape the Nazis.

Ho's actions were recognized posthumously when he was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by the Israeli organization Yad Vashem in 2001.

Early in 2020, a statue was made in her honor in her birth town of Alkmaar but the erection and unveiling was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

At the end of the winter of 1941, an additional 4,500 Jews were sent from Vienna to different concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland (mainly Izbica Kujawska and to ghettos in the Lublin area).

Those Jews were murdered by the Lithuanian, Latvian and Bielorussian collaborators under the supervision of German soldiers, mainly by being shot in forests and buried in mass graves.

One of the notable prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp was Simon Wiesenthal, who after his release worked together with the United States army to locate Nazi war criminals.

Some issues in the holiday resort Serfaus gained special attention in 2010, where people thought to be Jews were barred from making hotel bookings, based on a racial bias.

[34] In August 2020, an Arab immigrant from Syria was arrested in Graz for attacks on Jews, and defacing a synagogue with "Free Palestine" graffiti.