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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.
Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the widely
held belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual
purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel were surprisingly
widespread in central and eastern Europe on either side of the turn
to the twentieth century. Well over one hundred accusations were
made against Jews in this period, and prosecutors and government
officials in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia broke with long
established precedent to bring six of these cases forward in
sensational public trials. In Blood Inscriptions Hillel J. Kieval
examines four cases—the prosecutions that took place at
Tiszaeszlár in Hungary (1882-83), Xanten in Germany (1891-92),
Polná in Austrian Bohemia (1899-1900), and Konitz, then Germany,
now in Poland (1900-1902)—to consider the means by which
discredited beliefs came to seem once again plausible. Kieval
explores how educated elites took up the accusations of Jewish
ritual murder and considers the roles played by government
bureaucracies, the journalistic establishment, forensic medicine,
and advanced legal practices in structuring the investigations and
trials. The prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists,
criminologists, and academic scholars of Judaism and other expert
witnesses all worked hard to establish their epistemological
authority as rationalists, Kieval contends. Far from being a
throwback to the Middle Ages, these ritual murder trials were in
all respects a product of post-Enlightenment politics and culture.
Harnessed to and disciplined by the rhetoric of modernity, they
were able to proceed precisely because they were framed by the
idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.
With a keen eye for revealing details, Hillel J. Kieval examines
the contours and distinctive features of Jewish experience in the
lands of Bohemia and Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), from
the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In the Czech
lands, Kieval writes, Jews have felt the need constantly to define
and articulate the nature of group identity, cultural loyalty,
memory, and social cohesiveness, and the period of "modernizing"
absolutism, which began in 1780, brought changes of enormous
significance. From that time forward, new relationships with
Gentile society and with the culture of the state blurred the
traditional outlines of community and individual identity. Kieval
navigates skillfully among histories and myths as well as
demography, biography, culture, and politics, illuminating the maze
of allegiances and alliances that have molded the Jewish experience
during these 200 years.
The Jewish history and culture of the Bohemian countries have been
enjoying growing interest for around two decades. This places the
region's historically multi-ethnic character at the center of
attention. Against this background, it is all the more surprising
that no innovative synthesis of this research has yet been
available. For the first time, this book, written by an
international team of authors, is taking up the challenge of
telling and analyzing the Jewish experience in the Bohemian
countries as an integral and inseparable part of the development of
Central Europe from the 16th century to the present day. It is just
as much about contacts of the Jewish population with their
non-Jewish neighbors as it is about the view of the province, that
is, of the rural regions and communities away from the major urban
centers of Prague, Brno and Ostrava.
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