When he specialized, as a laryngologist, he became rich and comfortable. For a long while, assimilation to Christian society seemed a feasible destiny for the Jewish elite. In the first decade after Arthur’s birth, professional and social life in Vienna showed few signs of the aggressive anti-Semitism which was to be marked – and politically rewarding – long before the end of the century. Only in the 1890s was the odiously affable Karl Lueger elected mayor of Vienna on an overtly anti-Semitic ticket, although individual Jews were indeed some of his best friends.

Unlike many successful families (the Wittgensteins were a prime example), the Schnitzlers did not renounce Judaism. Their observation of High Days and Holy Days was, however, no more than pious politeness. Respect for religion was a gesture to please the older generation; young Schnitzler enjoyed fasting not least because it sharpened his appetite for the delicacies which greeted its end. Hypocrisy could scarcely be distinguished from good manners.

Medical science was, in a sense, an ecumenical religion. The common anatomy of mankind assimilated Jews to Gentiles. What reason was there to feel inferior? As Shylock had pointed out, Jews and Christians bleed under identical circumstances. In the dissecting room, as Schnitzler recalls, students confronted the common humanity of the cadaver:

… like my colleagues, I tended to exaggerate… my indifference to the human creature become thing… I never went as far in my cynicism as those who considered it something to be proud of when they munched roasted chestnuts… at the dissecting table. At the head of the bed on which the dead man lies, even if the man who has just breathed his last is unknown to you, stands Death, still a grandiose ghostly apparition… He stalks like a pedantic schoolmaster whom the student thinks he can mock. And only in infrequent moments, when the corpse apes the living man he once was in some grotesque motion… does the composed, even the frivolous man experience a feeling of embarrassment or fear.

In Dream Story, Fridolin has similar reactions after his visit to the morgue, where the deadness of a dead woman does not prevent her from seeming to reach out to embrace the living.

Despite early dismay at the realization of his own mortality, Schnitzler observed with clinical equanimity what was physiologically common to all men. Freud declared our psychological anatomy to be no less universal. Medicine and science, like the arts, convinced talented Jews that they could and should look to a more modern allegiance than Judaism; logically speaking, only atavistic prejudice stood between them and citizenship in the civilized world. At the same time, Freud and Schnitzler saw that what was reasonable was also unreliable. Who could depend on the fundamental decency of a society where, beneath the elegant surface, irrational motives made nonsense of constancy and a comedy of morals?

Schnitzler begins his fragment of autobiography – My Youth in Vienna – by telling us

I was born on the 15th of May 1862, in Vienna, on the Praterstrasse… on the third floor of a house adjacent to the Hôtel de l’Europe. A few hours later, as my father liked to tell so often, I lay a while on his writing desk… the incident gave rise to many a facetious prophecy concerning my career as a writer, a prediction my father was to see fulfilled only in its modest beginnings and not with undivided joy.

The Oedipal theme which was to become central to Sigmund Freud’s theory of human behaviour is noticeable at once. Schnitzler suggests both that his father told his story repeatedly and that he regarded his son’s fame without enthusiasm. Despite his youthful zeal for scandalous themes and rakish behaviour, Arthur never wholly rebelled against the paternal model, though he did not practise medicine regularly once his plays were fashionable. For a time, however, he did edit a medical journal which his father had founded. His 1912 play, Professor Bernhardi, shows thorough knowledge of the treacherous politics of the Viennese medical world. The success (and hence the menace) of Jewish doctors led to increasing, often devious, discrimination against them. Roman Catholic tradition had fostered an animosity which its hierarchy did nothing to discourage.

Freud’s determination to make a name for himself, outside conventional medicine, testifies to apprehension of the impediments which Jews could expect if their careers took routine paths. At the same time as advertising his retreat to a solitary wilderness, Freud craved recognition by the very establishment whose ill-will he feared: by recruiting the Gentile Carl Gustav Jung to the psychoanalytic camp, he sought to establish the scientific and un-Semitic character of his challenging theories. He was not the only Jew to be torn between the desire for independence from the scornful majority and an appetite for its applause. Otto Weininger, Gustav Mahler, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, no less than half or crypto-Jews such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Ludwig Wittgenstein, were but the most renowned of many who could not renounce a society which might, at any time, turn spitefully against them.

Schnitzler neither denied his Jewishness nor asserted it. Denial was demeaning; assertion led to self-deluding vanity. The doubleness of their identity sometimes created inescapable (and not infrequently suicidal) strains in Austrian Jews, but Schnitzler’s dexterity with dialogue – which served him so well in the theatre – and his light touch can be seen as a witty strategy which gave him the nervous freedom both to be and not to be as other men. All his writing life, he observed the Jewish condition with an involved aloofness which parallels the cold eye which Freud brought – or presumed that he brought – to his self-analysis. As Schnitzler observed,

You [a Jew] had the choice of being counted as insensitive, shy and suffering from feelings from persecution.