Arnošt Frischer and the Jewish Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Europe by Jan Láníček (review)

When Arnošt Frischer returned from his London exile to Ostrava, Moravia after World War II, the multiethnic city that had long been his home was changed beyond recognition. Thanks to the actions of the Germans and their accomplices, the Jews were already mostly gone: Ostrava’s community of 8,000 Jews had been reduced to about 700, and only 15 percent of the total prewar Czechoslovak Jewish community survived until liberation. The returning Czech authorities had wasted little time in organizing the expulsion of ethnic Germans and Hungarians from within the nation’s reconstituted borders. The Jews who remained in Czechoslovakia not only faced continuing antisemitism, but also serious questions about their status as rightful inhabitants of the postwar Czechoslovak state. Were the Jews members of the Czech or Slovak nations? What if they primarily spoke German or Hungarian? The Jews had worked hard to establish their right to be counted as Jews qua Jews in the 1921 and 1930 Czechoslovak censuses; yet the community that had suffered the most under the German occupation was suddenly not among the designated inhabitants of the country in the postwar settlement. How could such a situation arise? What Kafkaesque bureaucracy would place the Jews of Czechoslovakia in such a parlous position? And what was the response of Jewish leadership?

In Arnošt Frischer and the Jewish Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Europe, Jan Láníček has produced an important work that narrates and explains the history of Jewish identity and cultural politics in Czechoslovakia in the first half of the twentieth century. The politically precarious situation of the Jews after the war had much to do with the changing idea of Czechoslovak republicanism and nationalism in the interwar period, reflected inside the Jewish community through various political alignments: Zionist/Jewish nationalist, assimilationist, and Communist. Arnošt Frischer is Láníček’s main character, but that is mainly because Frischer was part of—or at least an observer and commentator on—nearly every major political activity undertaken by the Jews of Czechoslovakia from the establishment of the First Republic in October 1918 to the Communist coup in February 1948. Over the course of eight richly sourced chapters, Láníček narrates the struggles of Jewish leaders to navigate the shifting currents of Czechoslovak politics, and gives a deep scholarly account of the hardships (and occasional triumphs) of Czechoslovak Jews as they fought for a voice in the country’s constitutional and societal framework.

Chapter 1 is devoted to Frischer’s early life and the development of Zionist/Jewish nationalist politics in interwar Czechoslovakia. The book’s main themes emerge in chapter 2, with Frischer as a key figure in the formation of the Jewish Party, which advocated for Jewish minority rights within the broader constellation of ethnic communities residing in Czechoslovakia (German and Hungarian chief among them). One of the key demands for Jewish nationalists immediately after the establishment of the republic was the recognition of Jews in the census of 1921, a demand that was met—although, as Láníček writes, such efforts “created a potentially dangerous situation. The Jewish nationalists could be lumped together into the same category as the remaining minority groups . . . . The threat of being perceived as a disloyal minority became more tangible than before” (41). As Láníček later details in chapter 7, which focuses on Frischer’s role in the postwar reconstitution of Jewish life in Czechoslovakia, that is exactly what happened.

Following a chapter on Czech Jewish responses to Munich and the German occupation of the Sudetenland, chapters 4–6 all view the unfolding catastrophe in Europe from Frischer’s perspective in London, where he was a member of the government-in-exile and one of a team of Czech Jews working to help their coreligionists on the mainland. These chapters are Láníček’s most important, and...