History of the Jews in the Czech lands

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Czech Jews, Bohemian Jews, Moravian Jews

Židé v Českých zemích Juden der böhmischen Länder (יהדות בוהמיה (צ'כיה בעמישע יידן
Jews taking snuff in Prague, painting by Mírohorský, 1885
Total population
2,349[1]
Regions with significant populations
Languages
Czech, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Judeo-Czech
Religion
Judaism, Frankism, Jewish Brotherhoods
Related ethnic groups
Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Slovak Jews, Austrian Jews, German Jews, Hungarian Jews, Ukrainian Jews

The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, historically the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the modern Czech Republic (i.e. Bohemia, Moravia, and the southeast or Czech Silesia), goes back many centuries. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century.^[5] Jewish communities flourished here specifically in the 16th and 17th centuries, and again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local Jews were mostly murdered in the Holocaust, or exiled at various points. As of 2021, there were only about 2,300 Jews estimated to be living in the Czech Republic.

Jews are believed to have settled in Prague as early as the 10th century. The 16th century was a "golden age" for Jewry in Prague. One of the famous Jewish scholars of the time was Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal, who served as a leading rabbi in Prague for most of his life. He is buried at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, and his grave, with its tombstone intact, can still be visited. According to a popular legend, the body of Golem (created by the Maharal) lies in the attic of the Old New Synagogue where the genizah of Prague's community is kept.^[6] In 1708, Jews accounted for one-quarter of Prague's population.^[7]

As part of inter-war Czechoslovakia, and before that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Jews had a long association with this part of Europe.^[8] Throughout the last thousand years, over 600 Jewish communities have emerged in the Kingdom of Bohemia (including Moravia).^[9] According to the 1930 census, Czechoslovakia (including Subcarpathian Ruthenia) had a Jewish population of 356,830.^[10]

During the 1890s, most Jews were German-speaking and considered themselves Germans.^[11][12][13] By the 1930s, German-speaking Jews had been numerically overtaken by Czech-speaking Jews;^[14] Zionism also made inroads among the Jews of the periphery (Moravia and the Sudetenland).^[15] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of Jews came to Prague from small villages and towns in Bohemia, leading to the urbanization of Bohemian Jewish society.^[16] Of the 10 million inhabitants of pre-1938 Bohemia and Moravia, Jews composed only about 1% (117,551). Most Jews lived in large cities such as Prague (35,403 Jews, who made up 4.2% of the population), Brno (11,103, 4.2%), and Ostrava (6,865, 5.5%).^[17]

Antisemitism in the Czech lands was less prevalent than elsewhere, and was strongly opposed by the national founder and first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937),^[18][19] while secularism among both Jews and non-Jews facilitated integration.^[20] Nevertheless, there had been anti-Jewish rioting during the birth of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 and 1920.^[21] Following a steep decline in religious observance in the 19th century, most Bohemian Jews were ambivalent to religion,^[22] although this was less true in Moravia.^[23] The Jews of Bohemia had the highest rate of intermarriage in Europe:^[24] 43.8% married out of the faith, compared to 30% in Moravia.^[11]

In contrast to Slovak Jews, who were mostly deported by the First Slovak Republic directly to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other extermination camps, most Czech Jews were initially deported by the German occupiers with the help of local Czech Nazi collaborators to Theresienstadt concentration camp and only later killed. However, some Czech Jewish children were rescued by Kindertransport and escaped to the United Kingdom and other Allied countries. Some were reunited with their families after the war, while many lost parents and relatives to the concentration camps.^{[citation needed]}

It is estimated that of the 118,310 Jews living in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia upon the German invasion in 1939, 26,000 emigrated legally and illegally; 80,000 were murdered by the Nazis; and 10,000 survived the concentration camps.^[25]

Prague has the most vibrant Jewish community in the entire country. Several synagogues operate on a regular basis, there are three kindergartens, a Jewish day school, two retirement homes, five kosher restaurants, two mikvot, and a kosher hotel. Three different Jewish magazines are issued every month, and the Prague Jewish community officially has about 1,500 members, but the real number of Jews in the city is estimated to be much higher, between 7,000 and 15,000. Due to years of persecution by both the Nazis and the subsequent Stalinist regime of Klement Gottwald, however, most people do not feel comfortable being registered as such. In addition, the Czech Republic is one of the most secularized and atheistic countries in Europe.^[26]

There are ten small Jewish communities around the country (seven in Bohemia and three in Moravia), the largest one being in Prague, where close to 90% of all Czech Jews live. The umbrella organisation for Jewish communities and organisations in the country is the Federation of Jewish Communities (Federace židovských obcí, FŽO). Services are regularly held in Prague, Brno, Olomouc, Teplice, Liberec, Plzeň, and Karlovy Vary, and irregularly in some other cities.

• Czech Republic–Israel relations
• History of the Jews in Czechoslovakia
• List of Czech and Slovak Jews
• History of the Jews in Slovakia
• History of the Jews in Carpathian Ruthenia
• Ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia

• Čapková, Kateřina (2012). Czechs, Germans, Jews?: National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia. New York: Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-0-85745-475-1.
• Gruner, Wolf (2015). "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". In Gruner, Wolf; Osterloh, Jörg (eds.). The Greater German Reich and the Jews: Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935-1945. War and Genocide. Translated by Heise, Bernard. New York: Berghahn Books. pp. 99–135. ISBN 978-1-78238-444-1.
• Rothkirchen, Livia (2006). The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0803205024.

• Čapková, Kateřina; Kieval, Hillel J., eds. (2021). Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-9959-5.
• David, Zdenek V. (1996). "Hajek, Dubravius, and the Jews: A Contrast in Sixteenth-Century Czech Historiography". The Sixteenth Century Journal. 27 (4): 997–1013. doi:10.2307/2543905. ISSN 0361-0160. JSTOR 2543905.
• Gleixner, Johannes (2020). "Standard-bearers of Hussitism or Agents of Germanization?". Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present. De Gruyter. pp. 137–160. doi:10.1515/9783110664713-010. ISBN 978-3-11-066471-3. S2CID 216337230.
• Kieval, Hillel J. (1988). The making of Czech Jewry: national conflict and Jewish society in Bohemia, 1870-1918. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-504057-9.
• Kieval, Hillel J. (2000). Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-21410-1.
• Labendz, Jacob Ari (2017). "Synagogues for sale: Jewish-State mutuality in the communist Czech lands, 1945–1970". Jewish Culture and History. 18 (1): 54–78. doi:10.1080/1462169X.2017.1278832. S2CID 159614300.
• Sewering-Wollanek, Marlis; Belcher, Mark (2008). "The Rediscovery of the Jews: Czech History Books since 1989". Osteuropa. 58 (8/10): 289–299. ISSN 0030-6428. JSTOR 44934294.
• Szabó, Miloslav (2016). "Antijüdische Provokationen". S: I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. 3 (1): 132–135. ISSN 2408-9192.
• Vobecká, Jana (2013). Demographic Avant-Garde: Jews in Bohemia between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. Central European University Press. ISBN 978-615-5225-33-8.
• Wein, Martin (2015). History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-30127-6.

• The Jewish Virtual Library - Prague
• Chanukah celebration in prague, by Jewish community of prague
• Chabad Prague