Tas (Torah shield)

The Torah shield from 1806 shows the double eagle and crown of the Austrian Empire. Two years earlier Franz I had proclaimed Austria to be a hereditary empire so as to thwart Napoleon, who had just been crowned Emperor of France. At the same time, as Franz II, he was still Holy Roman Emperor, renouncing the title in 1806 under pressure from Napoleon. The crown of the young empire on the Torah shield was a way of showing the loyalty to the empire of the Viennese Jews, even though they were faced by enormous bureaucratic hurdles at a time and had to renew the “tolerance” every year.