Building Slovak Jewry: Communal Reorientation in Interwar Czechoslovakia

There was no Slovak Jewry before the creation of Slovakia from the former northern counties of the pre-World War One Kingdom of Hungary. The emergence of both is tied to conditions created by the movement from empire to nation-state following the Habsburg Monarchy's collapse. Both are phenomena of interwar state building. Jews in Slovakia remapped their belonging to the territory through postwar self-defense and economic adaptation to the new environment, the development of Jewish national political strategies for negotiating the Jewish relationship to the state and surrounding society, and a transformation of the built Jewish communal landscape. Slovak Jews defined themselves geographically rather than nationally, as belonging to the territory of Slovakia within the liberal Czechoslovak state and the specific set of opportunities and challenges that reality presented.