Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (review)

With the book The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and the essays collected in this volume, Hillel J. Kieval has established himself as one of the most learned and perceptive historians of Jews in the Czech lands during the modern era. The nine chapters in the present volume represent revised and expanded versions of essays which appeared in various journals and collections published between 1985 and 1998. They focus on issues of cultural change, folk traditions, intellectual trends, and, above all, identity formation for Jews in the Czech lands, all set in the context of the evolving political and social systems from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The Making of Czech Jewry focused primarily on the issues of general political and cultural change and the development of Jewish national identity during the half century leading up to World War I. This volume complements nicely the earlier book, offering a longer chronological sweep and addressing additional issues, particularly regarding the construction of group culture and mythology and the thinking of various Czech Jewish intellectuals on issues of religion, Jewish vs. secular culture, and Jews’ relationship to modern nationalism. The essays in the current volume add up to more than the sum of the individual parts. Readers will find here an intelligent and thought-provoking introduction to the major patterns, issues, and crosscurrents in the cultural modernization of Jews in the Czech lands and the thinking of leading Jewish intellectuals about changes in general group culture and identity and Jews’ relations with the rest of society and government.

The first two chapters present the reader with a sound, clear overview of the general political, social, and cultural experience of Jews in Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia from the Middle Ages to 1918. Kieval describes sensitively the work of major Jewish religious leaders and intellectuals in articulating Jewish responses to the Enlightenment, the waning of the early modern corporate society, and the emergence of free modern social and political systems. Modernization for Jews in the Czech lands between the late eighteenth century and the economic and political crises of the 1840s brought a considerable amount of acculturation, strong tendencies toward assimilation, and the development of strong German cultural affinities. Bohemian and Moravian Jews, in Kieval’s account, were caught up in the same intellectual and cultural ferment as their Christian neighbors during the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century; and Jews were engaged as well in the broader effort to create a liberal public sphere and a popular culture of freedom, citizenship, and national belonging.

By the 1840s, Jews in the Czech lands had to confront the choice of creating bonds of national community with their Czech Christian neighbors, with Austria’s German- speaking population, or with other Jews as a distinct nationality. For the rest of the imperial era, as Kieval describes it, each option found its supporters among the Jews of the Czech lands, although each alternative had liabilities. Jewish support for the German option faded sharply after 1918 and the Czech option gained strength, but considerable conflicts and ambiguities remained in Jews’ group identities and their relations with their Czech neighbors. As Kieval persuasively shows, the Czechoslovak state offered Jews full civil and religious equality and conditions which encouraged them to identify nationally with their Czech and Slovak neighbors; but President Masaryk and others around him still saw Jews as a distinct people and favored a Jewish national and moral regeneration in the form of a Zionist movement.

Perhaps the most fascinating and original chapters in this volume are those devoted to careful cultural analyses of the creation of myths and traditions of national belonging by Czech and Jewish intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century, Prague’s Golem tradition, and the efforts of Czech Jewish intellectuals around 1900 to find a new understanding of Judaism to assist...