The Czechs in a Nutshell

When the BBC and a number of other public broadcasters joined forces several decades ago to produce a large-scale documentary about the history of European Jewry, the opening sequence was quite telling: Abba Eban, the formidable Israeli statesman who appeared as the documentary’s narrator, was sitting in front of a maceva, a tomb at the Jewish cemetery in Prague’s Josefov ghetto.

Thus, Prague, and in a wider context Bohemia and Moravia, were rightfully acknowledged as one of the Ashkenazi diaspora’s major cultural centres in Europe.

The Jews’ history in what’s now the Czech Republic began almost 1,000 years ago. Actually, one of the oldest documents about Prague that is preserved was written by the Jewish merchant Abraham ben Jakob, who travelled from Spain to Bohemia sometime around 966. “The city named Fraga is built of stone, and it is the largest trading place in the whole region,” ben Jakob wrote to attract his compatriots.

Some years after ben Jakob’s visit, a Jewish settlement (which in the mid-1200s turned into a regular ghetto behind walls) was established in the Old Town’s northern part, right at the Vltava’s bend. In the following centuries similar settlements-cum-ghettos popped up nearly all over Bohemia and Moravia. Still, more than 150 Jewish cemeteries, many of them devastated by a half century of neglect, and numerous dilapidated synagogues that are slowly being reconstructed (the Bolsheviks, with their usual sensitivity, let local collective farms use some of them as warehouses) give solid evidence of the Jews’ millennium-long presence in cities and towns throughout this country.

As it has everywhere else in Europe, also the Czech Ashkenazi diaspora has witnessed times of both prosperity and persecution.

In the ghettos, the Jews had self-government, but since they were regarded as “direct subjects” of the king, he was allowed in practice to do what he wanted with them. Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612), for instance, constantly pressed the wealthy Jewish banker Mordechai Maizel to lend him money, which the emperor never returned. Maizel, however, discreetly used the debt to make life easier for his fellow believers, among them Rabbi Löw, the famous Talmudist who, according to the legend, created the clay robot Golem.

Twice, in 1541 and 1744, the entire Jewish population was expelled from Bohemia and Moravia, and they also suffered cruel pogroms, although they were fewer than the wild pogroms that frequently hit the Jews in the Russian czardom.

Life changed for the better in the 1790s, when the “enlightened” Emperor Josef II introduced a set of progressive reforms (that’s why Prague’s ghetto is called Josefov). Jews were allowed to move outside the ghettos, they were ordered to send their children to public schools and also allowed to take a surname and have a family. During the next century, the Czech Ashkenazi diaspora made a huge step towards emancipation. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart in October 1918, most of the 120,000 Jews who were living in Bohemia and Moravia easily reconciled with the fact that they had now become citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic.

The First Republic is commonly remembered as a period when the Czech Jewish community flourished. Although reality was probably less rosy, at least for the majority who spoke German and not Czech, Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia indubitably offered its Jewish citizens a more liberal atmosphere than Horthy’s Hungary, where Jews faced restricted admission to universities, or Catholic Poland, where anti-Semitism was rife. The Italian novelist Claudio Magris has a telling comparison that illustrates the Czech Jews’ strong assimilation. On the day when Nazi troops marched into Austria after the Anschluss in 1938, several hundred of Vienna’s Jews committed suicide in pure despair. In Czechoslovakia at that time, few Jews believed that their state would fail to protect them.

They were, unfortunately, wrong. Starting in October 1941, Czech citizens of Jewish origin were rounded up and transported to extermination camps in Poland. Many Bohemian Jews, especially children, were first sent to Terezín (Theresienstadt), about 60 kilometres north of Prague. Here, the Nazis turned the former garrison city into a “model” concentration camp, complete with its own orchestra and theatre, which was cynically presented in their propaganda. But ultimately, not even the Terezín prisoners escaped the gas chambers in Poland.

When the war ended in May 1945, 78,000 Czech Jews had been murdered (their names are meticulously written on the walls inside Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue). Holocaust’s horrors, combined with the Bolsheviks’ short-lived love for Israel, made Czechoslovakia in May 1948 one of its staunchest allies in Europe, and it was only thanks to weapons hastily delivered from Brno in Moravia that the young Jewish state managed to fend off the attacks from its Arab neighbours.