Jewish Money, Jesuit Censors, and the Habsburg Monarchy: Politics and Polemics in Early Modern Prague

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, a trial unfolded in the city of Prague that challenged the transnational philanthropic ties of Jews. Beginning as a dispute between a creditor from Ottoman Palestine and Prague’s chief rabbi, David Oppenheim, the affair soon took on interconfessional dimensions, engaging the proprietor of Prague’s coffeehouse, a Jesuit censor of Hebraica, and the agents of the Habsburg monarchy. The dispute’s unfolding in the legal arena offered opportunity for polemic and created a context in which claims about Jewish loyalty, belonging, and trustworthiness could be publicly interrogated in light of conversionary agendas and jurisdictional contests over the power—and control—of the printed word and of Jewish global networks.