Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands

By University of Pennsylvania Press

Prague's magnificent synagogues and Old Jewish Cemetery attract millions of visitors each year, and travelers who venture beyond the capital find physical evidence of once vibrant Jewish communities in towns and villages throughout today's Czech Republic. For those seeking to learn more about the people who once lived and died at those sites, however, there has until now been no comprehensive account in English of the region's Jews.

Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today's Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors.

Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812299595

Book preview

Prague and Beyond

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

PRAGUE AND BEYOND

Jews in the Bohemian Lands

Edited by

Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5311-5

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval

Chapter 1. The Jews of the Bohemian Lands in Early Modern Times

Verena Kasper-Marienberg and Joshua Teplitsky

Chapter 2. Absolutism and Control: Jews in the Bohemian Lands in the Eighteenth Century

Michael L. Miller

Chapter 3. Unequal Mobility: Jews, State, and Society in an Era of Contradictions, 1790–1860

Hillel J. Kieval

Chapter 4. Contested Equality: Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 1861–1917

Michal Frankl, Martina Niedhammer, and Ines Koeltzsch

Chapter 5. Becoming Czechoslovaks: Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 1917–38

Ines Koeltzsch, Michal Frankl, and Martina Niedhammer

Chapter 6. The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia

Benjamin Frommer

Chapter 7. Periphery and Center: Jews in the Bohemian Lands from 1945 to the Present

Kateřina Čapková

Appendix. The Demographic Development of Jewish Settlement in Selected Communities in the Bohemian Lands

Helena Klímová and Lenka Matušíková

Notes

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This volume is the product of at least six years of planning, discussion, research, and writing. The final push was provided by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, whose funding (20.15.0.075GE) to the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences enabled the convening of two workshops in Prague in the summers of 2016 and 2017 and covered translation costs of the English original into Czech. A key participant in the 2016 workshop was Rachel Greenblatt. We would like to express our deep gratitude for all the important input Greenblatt gave to the project in its initial stages. Our appreciation also goes out to the Central European University in Budapest and Michael L. Miller, who hosted the third and final workshop in December 2017 thanks to funding from the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe.

The writing and publication of Prague and Beyond were also made possible by several research grants provided to individual authors and editors. We would like to acknowledge the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR, grant no. 16-01775Y) for supporting Kateřina Čapková’s research and editorial work; Washington University in St. Louis for providing support for research and travel for Hillel Kieval; Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences for supporting the research of Ines Koeltzsch, Michal Frankl, and also Benjamin Frommer during his stay in Prague in autumn 2017; and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, where Frankl and Koeltzsch have been fellows in the past years. We are also grateful for the support provided by Strategy AV21, the Czech Academy of Sciences, Global Conflicts and Local Interactions, for funding most of the translation into Hebrew and some additional costs related to finalizing the manuscript.

We would also like to thank Zuzana Justman and Eva Derman for their private donations to this project given through the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews. We appreciate not only their personal support but also our partnership with this important New York–based organization.

The German version of our volume was funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (BKM) and shepherded by Martina Niedhammer from Collegium Carolinum in Munich. The German manuscript profited enormously from Martina’s expertise and labors. It is an honor to have our volume appear in the book series of Collegium Carolinum, an institution that not only is at the center of research on Czech and Slovak history in Germany but has notably contributed to research on history of Jews in this region through several conferences and key publications.

Special thanks go also to Derek Paton, who has painstakingly proofread the original English version of our manuscript and contributed to its linguistic homogeneity and clarification. His language-editing abilities were uniquely suited to this project: A gifted word stylist and relentless copy editor, Derek also has deep knowledge of Czech and German languages and Czech and Jewish history.

We would also like to express our gratitude to the editors from the University of Pennsylvania Press for their impressive work on the manuscript—especially to Noreen O’Connor-Abel and Mindy Brown, and also to David Luljak for his help with the index.

We were also very fortunate that we could entrust the translations into Hebrew and Czech to the top translators and specialists in the field. We are indebted to Yael Rosenman for her excellent translation into Hebrew and to Tamara Vosecká and Olga Sixtová for their special help with the Czech version. The demographic study, added to this volume and written by Helena Klímová and Lenka Matušíková in Czech, has been translated into German by Kristina Kallert and into English by Barbara Day. We are also thankful to Dana Léw, an IT specialist, for preparing the maps that open each chapter.

Finally, we would like to thank those institutions and individuals who have generously provided the rights for publication of images from their collections. We are grateful to the Jewish Museum in Prague (www.jewishmuseum.cz) for granting permission to use several precious pictures and photographs from the collections of the museum free of charge. We greatly appreciate this generosity and partnership. Special thanks also go to Harry Farkaš, Malvina Hoffmann Z" L and Daniel Adler, Alice Lutwak, the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the organization Respekt a tolerance, the USHMM, and the State District Archive in Chomutov for providing us with the permission to publish their photographs without any payment due.

NOTE ON PLACE NAMES

In works about Central Europe, local place names can present problems since they can exist in several forms—in case of the Bohemian Lands, in German and in Czech. Except for the names of towns with an established English version (like Prague, Pilsen, and Carlsbad) we are mentioning both versions with the first use in the chapter and only one form thereafter. Since we do not prefer one national narrative over another, and also in respect to the different preferences in place names during the centuries, in Chapters 1–4 the German place names are given preference, in Chapters 5–7 the Czech.

This is reflected also in the maps which precede each chapter. Only in the map at the front of Chapter 6 do we distinguish between places in Sudetenland which were annexed to the German Reich during World War II, and their names are therefore written in German. For the places in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia we have consciously chosen their Czech names. In the demographic supplement, where the history of selected Jewish communities is described in more detail, the authors have chosen to use the Czech names which one may also find on today’s map of the Czech Republic. In case of uncertainty, for equivalents of place names, consult the index.

Introduction

Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval

For the millions of foreigners who visit Prague each year, the city’s magnificent synagogues and Old Jewish Cemetery are prime draws and destinations. Beyond the capital, more intrepid travelers encounter physical evidence of once-vibrant Jewish communities in towns and villages throughout today’s Czech Republic. When those tourists and students, however, seek to learn more about the people who once prayed and mourned, haggled and struggled, lived and died at those sites, they find that, surprisingly, there exists no comprehensive history of the region’s Jews. Traditional surveys of the political, economic, and social development of the Bohemian Lands, moreover, treat its Jewish communities—and Jewish life—as an afterthought, tangential to the main historical narrative. This absence is all the more remarkable because, over the past two decades, scholars have published a number of ground-breaking monographs on specific aspects of the region’s Jewish history. The authors of a number of those innovative works have been working together to complete the historiographical circle, to write a comprehensive history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands that synthesizes and revises existing scholarship. They have produced a volume of connected and integrated chapters whose goal is to narrate and analyze the Jewish experience in the Bohemian Lands as an integral and inseparable part of the development of Central Europe and its peoples from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Prague and Beyond seeks to create a different kind of historical survey, one that is analytical and interpretive as well as descriptive, that searches out social and cultural patterns distinctive to the Bohemian Lands without losing sight of the ways in which Jewish experience cut across political and territorial boundaries. As the book’s title suggests, its authors take pains not to focus exclusively—or even primarily—on Prague, which, for reasons of its size and cultural prestige, has tended to command the attention of scholars to such an extent as to stand in for everything there is to know about Jewish life between Teplice (Teplitz) and Mikulov (Nikolsburg). Prague and Beyond pays close attention to patterns of Jewish life (often quite distinctive) in Moravia and Austrian Silesia as well as Bohemia. Its authors highlight the lives of individual Jews as a point of entry into wider social structures and group behavior. They address everyday life and the experiences of everyday Jews as well as high culture and elites; of women and girls as well as men and boys; of small towns and villages as well as urban centers; of exceptions to the rule as well as general patterns.

Another way Prague and Beyond differs from conventional historical surveys is in its use of primary sources to produce its narrative. These sources include travel accounts, memoirs, government documents, Jewish communal legislation (takkanot), personal archives, letters, rabbinic responsa, women’s prayer books, newspaper accounts, and polemical literature. Introducing primary source material into our narrative informs the reader of the numerous products of Jewish experience in the Bohemian Lands and invites the reader to engage with these cultural products. Finally, this approach allows each chapter to put forth its own original arguments and interpretation, which we shall endeavor to highlight in what follows. We strove to write Prague and Beyond in a narrative style that incorporates various analytical perspectives, ranging from migration and mobility to religious life and education, from social networks to spatial configurations, and from gender and family to memory and commemorative practices. The hope is not only to address neglected areas of study but to capture more fully the diversity and multivalence of life in these lands.

Why Bohemian Lands?

In this book we use the term Bohemian Lands to refer to that part of Central Europe which since 1993 has comprised the Czech Republic: a region made up of Bohemia (with Prague/Prag/Praha as the largest city), Moravia (with Brno/Brünn as the main urban center), and a part of Silesia (with Opava/Troppau). Bohemian Lands is also a historical term, which gained a new political connotation in the second half of the nineteenth century as a conceptual tool defining the legal and political aspirations of the Czech national movement. This term refers to the late medieval and early modern composite monarchy, with the kingdom of Bohemia as a core and a cluster of adjacent and greatly self-sufficient provinces attached to it. This fragmented political structure of lands of the Bohemian Crown (Corona regni Bohemiae in Latin; Länder der böhmischen Krone in German) was defined for the first time in 1348 by King Charles IV of Luxembourg, who drew on the legacy of the extinct Přemyslid dynasty and its expansionist efforts. In its extent, which survived the fifteenth-century Hussite wars, this composite monarchy included Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz/Horní Lužice), Lower Lusatia (Niederlausitz/Dolní Lužice), a handful of smaller autonomous territories, such as the region around Cheb (Egerland/Chebsko), and a patchwork of fiefs in the Holy Roman Empire.¹

The borders of Bohemia and Moravia have been remarkably stable over the centuries. The major change in the shape of the Bohemian Lands occurred during the two Silesian Wars (1740–1745), after which only a small part of historical Silesia—concurrently named Austrian Silesia, later redubbed Czech, or even Czechoslovak Silesia—remained attached to the Bohemian Crown. During the twentieth century, disputes repeatedly erupted in Silesia’s Těšín region (Teschener Schlesien/Těšínsko) between Poland and Czechoslovakia over where the border between Czechoslovakia and Poland should lie. For the vast majority of their history, the present-day Bohemian Lands have existed within larger political units—with the only exception of the short period between 1993, when Czechoslovakia split into two separate states, and 2004, when the Czech Republic (like Slovakia) entered the European Union.

In the late middle ages, Bohemia and Moravia formed parts of various dynastic agglomerations of the Luxembourgs, Jagiellonians, and Habsburgs, and were in varying degrees linked to the Holy Roman Empire. When Archduke Ferdinand I was elected king of Bohemia in 1526, the Bohemian composite monarchy entered the dynastical union with the Austrian and Hungarian lands which soon developed into a firmer political system.² The Bohemian Lands, as well as Hungary, remained part of the Habsburg monarchy up to the end of World War I.

Following almost three and a half centuries of asymmetrical development in the Habsburg Lands, the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867 split the monarchy into Austrian (Cisleithania/Předlitavsko) and Hungarian (Transleithania/Zalitavsko) parts. The constitutions of 1867 and 1868 also brought nearly full political emancipation to Jews in the monarchy. The remaining lands of the Bohemian Crown (Kingdom of Bohemia, Margraviate of Moravia, and Austrian Silesia) formed a major part of Cisleithania, together with the Austrian hereditary lands, Galicia (annexed at the end of the eighteenth century during the Partitions of Poland), and Venetian Dalmaţia. Of these territories, the Bohemian Lands may well have enjoyed the most developed industry and economy. The decades that stretched from 1867 to 1914 were buffeted by various social and political conflicts, among which linguistic and national struggles were particularly salient.³ In order to establish critical distance from the Czech/German national controversies of the period, we have made a conscious choice not to use the term the Czech Lands to refer to this part of Europe, though it does have some currency in recent historical scholarship. Part of the confusion is caused also by the fact that the Czech language does not distinguish between Czech and Bohemian (in contrast to German, English, or Latin) and has only one term for both: český.

When the borders of the newly established states were carved out of the territory of the former Habsburg monarchy at Versailles, the case of Czechoslovakia appeared to pit one principle against another. Officially the right of nations (which were defined mostly in linguistic terms) to have self-determination in the form of independent states dominated public debates and played an important role in the argumentation of Czech and Slovak politicians for an independent Czechoslovak state. The Allies also showed respect for historical political borders and took natural frontiers, logistics, and transportation into account as well.⁴ It is this combination of potentially irreconcilable principles that explains in part how the historical borders of the Bohemian Lands came to be acknowledged as the western borders of Czechoslovakia, including the predominantly German borderlands, resulting in a Czechoslovak state that included more than three million German-speaking inhabitants. In the case of Slovakia, the use of the river Danube for part of the border was understood as a natural choice, even though the number of Hungarian-speaking people in Czechoslovakia grew with this decision. The southern border of Carpathian Ruthenia, which became part of the interwar Czechoslovakia, was set by the presence of a railway line.

Throughout the interwar period, a tension existed between the nationalist definition of Czechoslovakia as a state of primarily Czechoslovaks—a newly constructed nation—on the one hand, and the ideal of a liberal democracy made up of people from different nationalities who might feel secure and well-integrated into the society, on the other.⁵ After 1933, when the Nazis seized power in neighboring Germany, the impact of an otherwise minor movement among Czechoslovak Germans who were in favor of the annexation to Germany of the predominantly German border regions began to grow. The Munich Agreement of September 29, 1938, signed by Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, Édouard Daladier, the French premier, Benito Mussolini, the Italian prime minister, and Hitler, ordered the Czechoslovak government to cede the Sudeten-German border regions to the German Reich. In October, Poland forced Czechoslovakia to give up a region around Teschen (Těšín), and in November large parts of southern and eastern Slovakia and all of Subcarpathian Ruthenia were annexed by Hungary.

The period between October 1938 and May 1945, therefore, was the only time in the history of the Bohemian Lands when the borders of state units cut across Bohemia and Moravia. Large Jewish communities in the border regions fell to the newly established Reichsgau Sudetenland and to neighboring regions in German-annexed Austria. The vast majority of the Jewish population in these regions, together with many non-Jewish Czech as well as German-speaking opponents of Nazism, tried to flee to the Czecho-Slovak interior.

With the end of World War II, another change came to the shape of Czechoslovakia. In 1945 the Soviet Union decided to annex Subcarpathian Ruthenia (since 1945 called Transcarpathian Ukraine) to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. This was precisely the territory that, in the interwar period, contained close to a third of the total Jewish population of the country, home to numerous Jewish communities in cities, shtetls, and villages. Several thousand local Jewish survivors decided to move to the Bohemian Lands after the war, thereby radically changing the linguistic, religious, and social structure of the Jewish population there.

In 1969 Czechoslovakia became a federal state of Czech and Slovak Republics. Negotiations related to the federation started during the Prague Spring and were accelerated after the occupation of the Warsaw Pact’s armies in August 1968, in the face of anticipated Soviet opposition. In 1970 additional legislation changed dramatically the balance of the previous federal law, in favor of centralization and the dominance of the Czech Republic.⁶ After the fall of communism in November 1989, the tensions over Czech and Slovak political representation grew. On January 1, 1993, the two republics became independent state units, and both joined the European Union in 2004.

Works That Preceded Ours: The State of the Field in Modern Times

The middle years of the nineteenth century, as Monika Báar notes in her analysis, marked a time when, in much of East Central Europe, the master narratives of local nations were written by historians to anchor the political demands of the nation’s elite. Jews, by and large, were not understood to be an integral part of these stories but were viewed as foreign to them.⁷ This observation holds true for the case of the Bohemian Lands as well, where František Palacký—the father of modern Czech historiography—outlined the history of the region as an eternal struggle between Czechs and Germans in which Jews were seldom mentioned. Jews, moreover, were clearly understood to be a group of people who did not belong to either of these national bodies.⁸ The few works that did appear during this period concerning the history of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands were written as a story apart, interesting precisely for being so different from the Christian experience.⁹

At the turn of the twentieth century Jewish scholars joined in the production of local Jewish histories. These surveys, written by such people as Markus Hirsch Friedländer, Adolf Stein, and Gottlieb Bondy (joined in his work by the non-Jewish historian Franz Dworský), shared a common approach.¹⁰ They relied on official state documents and Christian chronicles as the basic sources of information. Consequently, Jewish history in these works amounted to the history of state policies toward Jews, though the surveys written by Jewish scholars also managed to list the leading rabbis of the region and their achievements.¹¹

It was not until the interwar period that a critical, archival-based historiography of Jewish life in the Bohemian Lands fully emerged, research made possible in part through the establishment of specialized journals. In 1928 the Czechoslovak lodge of B’nai B’rith established the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews and proceeded to provide generous financial support to an academic journal of heretofore unmatched excellence: the Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der Čechoslovakischen Republik (published simultaneously in Czech as Ročenka Společnosti pro dějiny Židů v Československé republice), which appeared between 1929 and 1938. Samuel Steinherz (1857–1942), professor of history at the German University in Prague and a respected member of the B’nai B’rith, served as its editor-in-chief.¹²

The Vienna-born publisher and editor Hugo Gold (1895–1974) produced a second journal devoted to Jewish history from the Moravian capital of Brno (Brünn) entitled Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in der Tschechoslowakei beginning in 1930. Acutely aware of the dramatic changes that had taken place in Jewish life in the Bohemian Lands in his own times, Gold also observed with more than a touch of nostalgia the decline and disappearance of numerous Jewish communities in small towns and villages—the result of urbanization and Jewish migration. As he explained in the introduction to a separate project of his to collect photos and documentation, he acted out of the sense that our village communities would totally disappear in short time due to depopulation and dissolution and that we have to do everything we can in this last minute, in order to save at least in word and picture all the Jewish heritage and to preserve it for our descendants.¹³ The decline of rural Jewish communities proved to be remarkably quick. In many cases Gold could not even find a Jew in a locality where there had been an active Jewish community before 1848. Thus the book project ended up as a unique example of cooperation between Jewish and non-Jewish authors, between scholars and local devotees.¹⁴

Gold managed to escape to Palestine before the war and established the publishing house Olamenu in Tel Aviv; Steinherz died in the Theresienstadt ghetto. In 1938, the same year both Gold and Steinherz were forced to stop publishing their journals, Guido Kisch (1889–1985), a lawyer and specialist in medieval studies, started another journal, Historia Judaica, in both German and English—published first in Europe and since 1939 in the United States.¹⁵ Kisch understood himself to be one of the few people who could preserve and continue this Central European tradition of history-writing in American exile. He became a founding member of the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, established in New York in 1961, an organization that was conceived as a successor to the interwar society, with a minor, but significant, change in title.¹⁶ In contrast to Jews in Czechoslovakia (or, more precisely, the Czechoslovak Republic), the focus turned to Czechoslovak Jews, regardless of the territory in which they lived. B’nai B’rith, this time the Joseph Popper Lodge, which was established by Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia, again played a crucial role as the major donor and supporter of the society. The initiative for establishment of the society came from Kurt Wehle, who had been working as the secretary of the Council of the Jewish Communities in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia until the communist coup in February 1948.

Research on Jewish history continued, though under highly restricted conditions, in Czechoslovakia under communist rule. In 1965 Václav Benda, director of the State Jewish Museum in Prague, founded Judaica Bohemiae, an academic journal aimed at readership abroad. The vast majority of its articles that were devoted to history analyzed the situation of Jews in the medieval and early modern periods—certainly the result of a decision not to deal with controversial topics from modern Jewish history, such as the Zionist movement, a taboo subject under communism. One can also understand this development as a continuation of the dominant interest in the late medieval and early modern periods, which we could observe in the historical journals of the interwar period.

Several new surveys of Jewish history in the Bohemian Lands appeared during the years 1968 to 1990 in the United States, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Those works that were published in German and in English were written from the perspective that the history of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands was by now a closed chapter, a finished story with a definite ending; the purpose of the Czech-language studies, in contrast, seems to have been to bring Jewish history—and Jewish presence—back into the consciousness of the Czech public.

The major American contribution was the three-volume compendium The Jews of Czechoslovakia, which stands as a major achievement of the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews in New York, and it continues to serve as a key reference work for English-language readers.¹⁷ The contributors to these volumes were mostly Czechoslovak Jewish émigrés who had escaped either the Nazi or the communist regime. The authors did not have access to historical archives in contemporary Czechoslovakia; most of the individual contributions were based on printed sources from the early twentieth century, personal experience, and privately held collections. The work has been of enormous value to scholars, nevertheless, in part because of its personal approach, touched as it was by a certain nostalgia for the era prior to World War II. Moreover, because some of the authors themselves were important actors in the events described in their texts, The Jews of Czechoslovakia provides a remarkable trove of first-person testimonies by some of the major Jewish actors in interwar Czechoslovakia.

Two very different volumes offer readers of German an overview of the history of Jews in the Bohemian Lands from the second half of the eighteenth century down to the middle of the twentieth. Rudolf M. Wlaschek’s Juden in Böhmen relies heavily (except for the period of World War II) on the research of previous scholars; what he offers is a largely fact-based survey with an explicit focus on state policies toward Jews. At the time of the book’s appearance, its final chapter, devoted to Czech-Jewish culture in Israel, was unprecedented.¹⁸ Wilma Iggers’s unique volume of documents relating to the history of Jews in the Bohemian Lands presents readers with sources that go beyond political narrative and the relationship of Jews to the state. She introduces the reader to valuable ego-documents (memoirs, diaries, correspondence), some published for the first time, thereby offering insight into the complex social networks that existed both within and outside the Jewish community, into local religious customs and language usage in different social contexts. Iggers includes not only documents from Prague and the larger Jewish communities in the Bohemian Lands, but also ones relating to Jewish life in small towns and villages. She shows concern for the specific situations and experiences of Jewish women and is sensitive to the importance of myth and legend in collective identity.¹⁹

Readers of Czech mostly rely on the survey Historie Židů v Čechách a na Moravě (History of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia) by Tomáš Pěkný (1943–2013), who was a leading Czech journalist and dissident, one of the founders of the liberal journal Respekt, and editor-in-chief of Roš Chodeš, the journal of the Jewish communities in the Czech and Slovak Republics. Pěkný collected material for his book in the 1980s, and its first version was published as one of the last volumes of the dissident book series Alef in 1990.²⁰ It appeared in an expanded version in 1993 and again in 2001.²¹ This book played an important role in the early post-communist period by providing the Czech public with basic information about Jewish history and culture. Based on secondary literature, mostly from the pre-communist period, it offers an overview of the history of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, but the chronological narrative ends with the emancipation of 1867. The book then shifts focus to explore a number of discrete topics in the fields of religion, literature, and economic history.

In the last three decades, scholars from Europe, the United States, and Israel have taken part in what might be seen as a rejuvenation of the field of Jewish history in the Bohemian Lands, producing new and original research, and challenging, in the process, some of the dominant theses of earlier writing. This trend can be said to have begun with the publication in 1988 of Hillel J. Kieval’s The Making of Czech Jewry, which marked an important departure in the writing of modern Jewish history in this region.²² It was soon followed by a host of other new and original contributions. What distinguishes these new publications, in part, is their reliance on primary sources produced by Jews, sources that often correct or refute conventional wisdoms and prejudices based on documents of state administration only, and which show the remarkable diversity of Jewish communities, culture, and society. The authors are less interested than earlier historians in political history, focusing instead on social networks, daily life experiences, material culture, oral history and memory, and gender issues. These works, moreover, tend not to separate Jewish experience from that of the surrounding population. They focus on entanglement and connection—between Jews and non-Jews; between Jews of the region and those in other countries and continents; and on the entanglements of conflicts across religious and ethnic communities. In Prague and Beyond a number of these scholars have joined together to present new findings and perspectives in a comprehensive history. Isolated research projects are in this way bound together and reveal long-term tendencies as well as turning points and radical changes.²³

Major Themes and Arguments

In Chapter 1 (The Jews of the Bohemian Lands in Early Modern Times), written by Verena Kasper-Marienberg and Joshua Teplitsky, the authors make the point that any history of Jewish life in the Bohemian Lands must take place along three intersecting axes: within the unequal legal and demographic spaces of Bohernia, Moravia, and Prague; between the structures of Jewish life and its wider non-Jewish, often Christian, local ambiences; and across the features of Jewish life that were at once shared with Jews across Europe and at the same time regionally particular to the Jews of the Bohemian Lands. Their story is one of movement, pattern, mobility, and distinctiveness (social, regional, cultural, and religious). The authors show the ways in which patterns of settlement and communal organization in much of the Bohemian Lands resembled those of the western parts of the Holy Roman Empire, while in Moravia these patterns were closer to those of Poland-Lithuania. To a large extent, international boundaries separating Jewish communities were quite porous, with many Jewish men moving in and out of the Bohemian Lands for purposes of study and trade, and Jewish women moving usually in connection to domestic employment and marriage. Jewish refugees of both sexes fled from violence in Poland-Lithuania in the mid-seventeenth century, settling, for greater or lesser periods of time, in the Bohemian Lands and influencing the cultural complexion of their new homes there.

With the expulsion of Jews from most royally chartered cities and towns in Bohemia in the sixteenth century—with the exception of the imperial city of Prague—many Jews found refuge in small villages in the countryside under the protection of noble lords, while a very large concentration of Jews lived in Prague, which for a period of time also served as the imperial capital. In Moravia, in contrast, where most urban expulsions occurred in the fifteenth century, Jews tended to live in medium-sized market towns that were the private domains of noble families. In both regions, Jews forged close political alliances with the nobility; in Prague, a complex dynamic played out, pitting burgher elites against both imperial and noble interests.

Jewish cultural production in this period reflected the larger dichotomy between social and religious distinctiveness, on the one hand, and shared experience, the realities of migration, and economic interaction, on the other. Talmudic glosses produced in the thirteenth century introduced to the broad Jewish readership numerous Slavic expressions; Prague’s David Gans visited the astronomical laboratories of Christian scientists at the turn of the seventeenth century; and popular memory (both Jewish and Christian) has preserved stories of contacts between Rabbi Judah Loew (Maharal) and the court of Rudolf II. The very act of disseminating culture—through the medium of print—was similarly forged by collaborative energies between Jews and Christians. Exchanges across confessional lines ensued in markets and fairs, town squares, inns and taverns, and private homes, even as Jews administered distinct houses of prayer, courts, and legislatures. Jews in the Bohemian Lands in the early modern period evinced signs of a strongly held regional identity and attachment to place. This identity was distinct from that of other regional Jewish cultures, neither Ashkenaz (the German lands) nor Polin (the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth). The Jews of the lands between forged their own particular sense of self.

Chapter 2 (Absolutism and Control: Jews in the Bohemian Lands in the Eighteenth Century), written by Michael L. Miller, opens with the emergence of the Habsburg monarchy from the crisis of the Thirty Years’ War and the efforts of the Habsburg monarchs to exert control over the size and distribution of the growing Jewish population in the Bohemian Lands. A major, discriminatory landmark of this period took the form of the so-called Familiants Laws (Familiantengesetze)—which remained in force in the Bohemian Lands from 1726 to 1848. Their purpose, only partially achieved, was to cap the size of the Jewish population and allow no further growth. These were followed one year later by the Separation Laws of 1727, which ordered residential segregation in clearly demarcated Jewish residential quarters, or ghettos. The demarcation of a bounded space in which Jews were to live, whether in Moravian towns or in the Bohemian capital, reflected a widespread perception (though not held by all, particularly not by noble lords) that Jews constituted a threat that needed to be curbed or contained. Only in the reign of Maria Theresa, however, were Jews banished, at least for a short period of time, from part of the Bohemian Lands.

Maria Theresa’s son Joseph II took a very different approach, aiming instead to transform his Jewish subjects into useful and productive subjects, in part by breaking down the social and occupational barriers that separated Jews from the surrounding Christian population. His Edicts of Toleration (dating from 1781 to 1789) and other laws mandating educational, cultural, and economic reform have sometimes been viewed as harbingers of Jewish emancipation in Central Europe. This may be too optimistic a view, but they clearly signaled a major policy shift on the part of the state. Now—while never fully abandoning earlier fears and suspicions—the state deliberately intervened in the cultural, educational, and economic affairs of the semi-autonomous Jewish community, not only to control its size and growth but also to encourage various reforms that might lead to the production of subjects deemed to be useful to the state.

The eighteenth century thus witnessed the encroachment of the state upon the lives of its Jewish population in the Bohemian Lands from several different angles: efforts at demographic and spatial control; physical expulsion (from Prague between 1745 and 1748); but also (under Joseph II and Leopold II) significant measures designed to facilitate the integration of Jews into Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian society through acculturation. It was a century, then, marked both by counter-reformation policies of control and repression and by enlightened absolutist interventions into Jewish social, cultural, and educational patterns. Jewish society in the Bohemian Lands was also buffeted by opposing forces within it. Rabbinic culture and authority may have reached its apogee during the Prague career of Ezekiel Landau (1755–1793)—during which time he served as chief rabbi and head of Prague’s yeshiva and rabbinic court, and enjoyed unchallenged legal and spiritual authority throughout much of Central Europe—but these decades were not free of controversy and communal strife. Traditional Jewish culture and social hierarchies were challenged from within from several directions: the repercussions of the Sabbatian messianic movement (both moderate and radical); Polish Hasidism; signs of a growing distance of urban Jews from traditional Jewish practice; and, perhaps most significant, the program of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah.

Chapter 3 (Unequal Mobility: Jews, State, and Society in an Era of Contradictions, 1790–1860), written by Hillel J. Kieval, tells a story of ongoing social, cultural, and economic change which takes place, however, largely in the absence of encouragement from the state. As its title suggests, it is a tale of contradictions: between democratic revolution and political conservatism; traditional religious culture and steady secularization; disinterest on the part of the state in Jewish affairs, punctuated by moments of concern; and increasing social integration and mobility in the absence of formal, political equality. Its overarching argument is that it is only in the nineteenth century, with its combination of Jewish and state schools, and carried along by shopkeepers, master craftsmen, mothers, fathers, itinerant tutors, and incipient industrialists, that identification with the language, high culture, and civic values of the imperial state would expand to incorporate virtually all of the Jewish population. These social and cultural trends developed according to a timetable and at a pace that seemed at times immune to the politics of revolution and reaction that rattled state and society in the Bohemian Lands. Well before the formal emancipation of 1867, the state, the Jewish community, the schools, and the economy will have combined to produce modern Jewish subjects—fluent in the languages and high culture of the state, attuned to the political concerns of their neighbors, and skilled at navigating avenues to social mobility and advancement.

The seven decades that stretched from 1790 to 1860 were undoubtedly ones marked by hesitancy and indecision on the part of Habsburg, Bohemian, and Moravian officials—uncertain about what the political status of Jews ought to be, what rights they should possess, and what their cultural profile might look like. The same, however, cannot be said of Jewish society itself. The Jewish communities of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia might continue to be divided between religious traditionalists and reformists of various stripes (including those who rejected rabbinic authority altogether), but the basic patterns of cultural integration had been put in place. These were not going to be reversed, though they would undergo shifts in emphasis and direction. Crucially for the women and men whose mental universes had been altered by the profound cultural and educational transformations of the period, their expectations for social mobility—for greater integration into Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian society—also grew.

Ultimately, the Revolutions of 1848 produced uneven results for Jews in the Bohemian Lands. The constitutional document that was being considered by the revolutionary parliament in April would have established freedom of religion and conscience, the rights of Jews to acquire property and to practice any trade or occupation, and full equality under the law. The imposed Constitution of 1849, meanwhile, while much more reserved regarding Jewish rights, nevertheless proclaimed the equality of Jews and Christians in matters of public and private law. And although the constitution was revoked in December 1851, the principles of the free practice of religion and equality under the law (with some exceptions) appear to have been maintained in practice, with no new restrictions being placed on Jews.

When Jews in the Bohemian Lands were officially accorded the status of full citizenship in 1867, together with the rest of the Jews in Austria-Hungary a year later, they were more than prepared to assume the new status. Chapter 4 (Contested Equality: Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 1861–1917), written by Michal Frankl, Martina Niedhammer, and Ines Koeltzsch, begins with this crucial political transition. The chapter ends with World War I, just before the demise of the Habsburg monarchy, the imperial structure within which the lives of Jews in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia had taken shape since the Middle Ages. Not only was the world into which Jews were emancipated very different from that of the Josephinian era, or even 1848, but it continued to change at an unprecedented pace.

Migration and a rearrangement of Jewish spaces express the drama of this change. Jews, like non-Jews, migrated—yet in their case, mobility was linked to emancipation and the negotiation of the meanings of Jewishness. While traditional Jewish neighborhoods declined and shrank, other spaces took their place, part of the search for a new Jewish position in society. Jewish communities in small towns and in the countryside that used to be the focal points of Jewish life were caught in decline, in contrast to the new rising urban centers. Jewish Prague, still significant, also shifted: the former Jewish Quarter turned into a social and economic ghetto before it was razed in a massive urban renewal project, which exchanged its narrow streets for modern avenues and left standing only six synagogues, the Jewish Town Hall, and the larger part of the Old Jewish Cemetery. The new neighborhood of Královské Vinohrady (Königliche Weinberge) embodied the new spatial and architectonic forms of Jewish middle-class integration into society. Its grand new synagogue became a powerful symbol of the accommodation, ambition, and ascent of Prague Jews–yet the criticism it evoked also exposed the fragility of this newest phase of Jewish mobility.

In contrast to the conventional focus on linguistic identity and the position of Jews between Czechs and Germans, Frankl, Niedhammer, and Koeltzsch expand the view by exploring shifts in community, Jewish family, popular culture, and everyday life. In their reading, a Jewish cookbook or a book of popular stories can reveal as much about the change and the attempts to safeguard aspects of the Jewish tradition as the high-level political discourses. They note the special expectations projected on Jewish women, guardians of Jewish traditions and of Jewish family, in the context of reform and secularization, as well as—limited as they remained—conversion and intermarriage.

The social and cultural changes triggered by emancipation and modernization in the Bohemian Lands overlapped and intersected in numerous ways with the rise of nationalism and the growing intensity and brutalization of the nationality conflict between Germans and Czechs. The nationalist campaigns made it more difficult for Jews to navigate the everyday choices of emancipation and integration. Jewish schools in Bohemia and Moravia became targets of heated controversy, held up as promoters of German cultural hegemony; rarely were their attempts to protect Jewish cultural identity the focus of attention. By 1900 about three-quarters of the German-Jewish schools in Bohemia had closed, partly as the result of political pressure.

A question that framed much of the political discussion regarding Jews in the Bohemian Lands during this period concerned the nature of their emancipation: Were Jews simply being accorded civil rights as individuals, or were they being emancipated into one or another national community? In the midst of nationalist controversies, Jews often found themselves to be targets of both Czech and German nationalist critiques. Czech national liberals, by and large, supported Jewish emancipation as a matter of principle but strongly criticized Jews for their supposedly German linguistic and political loyalties. This position implied that national identity was a cultural choice and that Jews were welcomed to become members of the Czech nation. As with other groups, Jews could not participate in society outside of a nationalist framework—even as they strove for social acceptance, they simply could not avoid being identified nationally in terms of language and action. In this way, both the German- and Czech-Jewish integration projects originally made a case for inclusive, liberal nationalism.

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, writers, journalists, and politicians began to argue the opposite, denying the possibility of Jewish membership in the Czech nation. The last years of the century witnessed a crisis in Czech-Jewish relations: Antisemitism moved from the margins to the center of political discourse; Czechs rioted against Jews in Bohemia (1897) and Moravia (1899); and the trials against Leopold Hilsner, a Jew from Polná, (1899 and 1900), on the charge of ritual murder, had a traumatic effect on Jewish political and social self-confidence. Jews in the Bohemian Lands responded in several ways to the intensified conflict and hardened rhetoric. Czech-Jewish activists searched for new political allies and also adopted a more assertive approach to antisemitism. Jewish students and young professionals experimented during these years with another form of national orientation: Jewish nationalism, notably the cultural Zionism of the Bar Kochba Association, which promoted Jewish cultural renewal along with independence from both Czech and German nationalist struggles and succeeded in attracting numerous Jewish intellectual figures in Bohemia and Moravia both before and after World War I. Our authors note how strikingly similar the reformed Czech-Jewish and Zionist reactions to this crisis were. In both cases activists broke with traditional political alliances, promoted mutual assistance and a robust defense against antisemitism, and put forth a positive, self-assured vision of Jewish culture.

Jewish modernity in the Bohemian