Laurence Sherwood asked:

>Does anyone know if Alma was Jewish? If so, was she observant?

Essentially, a single religious attribution of AM would be a meaningless
categorisation.

This is not authoritative, but from memory.

She was of Jewish extraction only in that her father was an eminent
society portraitist and would appear to have converted to Catholicism in
the 1880's, long before the crises around the turn of century (see also
the parallels in Zola's France, and the Dreyfuss affair).

Her major relationships were

1898 Klimt
1900 Zemlinsky
1902 married Mahler, converted to Catholicism 1897
1912 Kokoshka
1915 married Gropius
1929 Werfel - Jewish

Of all of these, the only one I am pretty certain was, and remained,
Jewish, was Werfel.

So she was certainly not observant; but I recall seeing somewhere a list
of the books she got from Max Burckhard and it included works on Buddhism,
Taoism, Hind, Judaism and early Coptic beliefs.  So perhaps it is safe to
say she was catholic in the real meaning of the word.  And calling her a
"zaftig shiksa" is far too crude and low class for her!

CR