Hillel J. Kieval

The unforeseen consequences of cultural resistance: Haskalah and state-mandated reform in the Bohemian lands

This article seeks to interrogate the nature of Jewish cultural transformation in the Bohemian lands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What constellation of factors – involving absolutist intentions and reforms, the political culture of the imperial bureaucracy, rabbinic culture and institutions, and urban Jewish practices and aspirations – combined to produce a distinctively ‘Bohemian’ Haskalah? And how did conservative Jewish leaders express resistance to new patterns of behaviour and thought – and with what results? Prague and the Bohemian lands provide a kind of historical laboratory in which to observe both the power and the limits of traditional Jewish authority and of conservative responses to transformative change. Prague’s was not the reactionary conservatism of Hatam Sofer’s Hungary; its resistance operated, rather, as a succession of brakes on the pace and extent of change, an effort to maintain a strict separation between educational streams without standing in the way of state-mandated progress, an endeavour to marry Jewish Enlightenment to halakhic observance and respect for rabbinic authority. Ultimately, however, the conservative Jewish leadership was powerless to prevent far-reaching social change and significant transformations in the cultural tastes of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry. And its efforts to lay down a cordon sanitaire separating Jewish learning from secular education could not be long maintained.

Jews, Czechs and Germans in Bohemia Before 1914

The last years of the government of Eduard Taafe, following the Young Czech sweep in the 1891 elections to the Austrian Imperial Parliament (Reichsrat) witnessed the beginnings of a general radicalization in the political affairs of the Czech lands. The Young Czech triumph of May 1891 had, in fact, capped a decade of achievement for the liberal wing of the Czech national movement. The expansion of the Czech national school system in the 1870s and 1880s, the language reforms of 1880 and 1886 and the creation of a Czech university in Prague in 1882 had laid the foundations for an important shift in the cultural and political balance of power in the Czech lands of the Habsburg Monarchy.1

Masaryk and Czech Jewry: the Ambiguities of Friendship

The relationship of Thomas G. Masaryk to the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia revolved around two paradoxes. On the one hand, Masaryk enjoyed a reputation among both Jews and non-Jews as a staunch opponent of anti-Semitism, a relentless critic of the so-called ‘blood libel’, and a defender of Jewish political rights.1 Yet, as this essay will attempt to demonstrate, the record of Masaryk’s dealings with Jewish leaders, as well as his writings on Jews, leave little doubt that his attitudes were in fact highly ambiguous and, at times, overtly negative.

Imperial Embraces and Ethnic Challenges: The Politics of Jewish Identity in the Bohemian Lands

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century Czech nationalist politicians sharply criticized the cultural choices and political allegiances of the Jewish population of the Bohemian lands. The Jews’ linguistic practices, educational strategies, and voting patterns—the critics charged—demonstrated that they had taken sides in the increasingly heated struggle for power between Czech and German activists, lending their support to a presumed project for German linguistic and cultural hegemony. This article examines the origins of Jewish political culture in the Bohemian lands in the context of the late-Enlightenment imperial project that aimed to modernize Jewish institutions and create Jewish imperial subjects through education to the high culture of the state. This acculturation was assumed to require a German linguistic complexion, but its political ideology and loyalties were imperial—and liberal—not national. What ethnic politicians of the late nineteenth century were demanding of Jews in their midst amounted to a reduction of perspective, a shift from the imperial to the local and from state to nation. Many Jews in the Bohemian lands, in fact, met this demand, having learned the need to articulate individual and collective identity in national terms. The Czech Jewish movement was one result; so, too, was Prague Zionism.

A Word From The Editors

With this issue, we launch our joint editorship of the AJS Review. It is therefore an appropriate moment to share with our readers our hopes and expectations for the intellectual direction of the journal. Some of what follows has already been articulated in a statement published in the AJS Perspectives (Spring/Summer, 2003) shortly after we assumed our tasks. We feel it bears repeating here for the sake of those who may not have seen the original article.