What makes it unique in Bohemia—and, in fact, in the entire Czech Republic—is how amazingly well-preserved it is, along with the striking views obtainable from virtually any spot in town. The Krumlov Castle was established around and grew over the centuries to become one of the most significant castle complexes in Central Europe second only to Prague Castle.
Over 40 buildings and numerous gardens and courtyards comprise its grounds. Since the end of the communist era, intense revitalization of the town has brought it new wealth and vitality.
At the same time, the patterns of Jewish autonomy in the two provinces diverged. In Bohemia, Prague acted as the dominant force in communal affairs, at times representing all of Bohemian Jewry and at times competing with the rest of the province, which was organized as a single unit to serve as a counterweight to the dominant center. The power struggle between Prague and the Bohemian periphery stemmed in large part from the demographic effects of Habsburg Jewish policy.
Following the removal of Jews from the royal free towns and despite the two temporary expulsions of and , the Prague community expanded while the rest of Bohemian Jewry spread out in ever-widening circles in small towns and villages.
The only formal connection to Prague Jewry at this time was through the office of the chief rabbi, Simon Spira-Wedeles. The Landesjudenschaft consolidated its separate status during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when fire, plague, and political indecision reigned in Prague.
It was not until the second decade of the eighteenth century that David Oppenheim — managed to extend his authority over all of Bohemian Jewry, which by now had devolved into three chief rabbinates.
As chief rabbi of Prague from , Oppenheim assumed the two provincial rabbinical posts in and , and won the title of rosh yeshivah in From this point until , Bohemian Jewry retained a bifurcated communal structure—Prague on the one hand; the rest of Bohemia on the other—while the state recognized only the chief rabbi of Prague as the supreme religious authority.
In Moravia, Jewish autonomy operated along very different lines. Unlike Bohemia, there was no single urban center that retained a large, permanent, Jewish community. The first installment consisted of articles, or takanot. The person who translated the collection from Hebrew to German was the convert Alois Wiener, father of the famous Joseph von Sonnenfels. The Takanot medinat Mehrin amounted to nothing less than a body of constitutional law governing the lives of Moravian Jewry.
And, although Empress Maria Theresa r. Oppenheim, a native of Worms, followed the by-now typical pattern of serving first as Landesrabbiner of Moravia — before assuming the position of chief rabbi of Prague and rosh yeshivah.
A consummate politician and institution builder, he was also a great bibliophile. By the time of his death, his library numbered some 7, printed works and 1, manuscripts; it was later acquired by the Bodleian Library of Oxford.
He helped to rebuild a community ravaged by expulsion and natural disaster fire , and to reestablish Prague as the most prestigious Jewish community in Central Europe. At the same time, he amassed unrivaled political authority, becoming the undisputed spiritual head of Bohemian Jewry.
He railed against those, such as Naftali Herts Wessely author of the work Divre shalom ve-emet , who advocated raising secular studies to the level of the Torah or even higher. Rabbinic culture in the Bohemian lands changed significantly in the nineteenth century, reflecting less and less the traditional Judaism of Poland and Hungary and increasingly the influence of intellectual developments born of the Enlightenment, including Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums. The last Polish-born scholar to become chief rabbi of Prague was Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport — during the years to Though fully traditional in appearance and religious practice, and an opponent of religious reform , Rapoport was also a pioneering figure in modern Jewish studies.
Other leading rabbis of the period were even more fully identified with modernizing trends within Jewish culture and were usually graduates of modern seminaries and European universities.
While the last yeshiva in Bohemia shut its doors in , traditional rabbinic culture in Moravia had greater longevity. Emperor Joseph II r.
Separate patents were issued for each of the three Bohemian—Moravian territories: Bohemia in October ; Silesia in December ; and Moravia in February Though groundbreaking in their own right, the edicts represented but one part of a much larger package of reforming measures, among which also stood the application of religious toleration to Austrian Protestants, the partial liberation of the peasantry from its ties to feudal land, and the institution of compulsory elementary education.
He did not view the reforms as bequeathing any special advantages to Jews. The edicts resisted the temptation to undermine the status quo in the shop and the countryside, however, as they continued to bar Jews from owning rural property as well as from attaining the rank of master or citizen in the crafts.
The more far-reaching changes occasioned by the Toleranzpatente took place not in the area of economic activity but rather in the cultural and educational realm.
A major intent of the legislation was to extend compulsory education first adopted in to the Jewish community. Thus the state invited all of the Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia that were of sufficient size to set up government-supervised schools Normalschulen to instruct students in mathematics, geography, German language, history, and morality. Parents who lived in communities that could not afford to establish and maintain their own schools could send their children to non-Jewish establishments.
Meanwhile, the doors of universities and institutions of higher education were declared open for Jewish enrollment. Additionally, the Toleranzpatente eliminated the use of Hebrew and Yiddish in business records. In , the juridical autonomy of the Jewish community in civil and criminal matters was abolished. Legislation in required the adoption of regular family names rather than patronymics and German first names.
And in Jews became liable for service in the Austrian army. A systematic review of Jewish legislation in the so-called Judensystemalpatent acknowledged the extent to which Jews had been incorporated into state and society, but it was deliberately retrospective in its orientation. In reaction to the political upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the Habsburg state would propose no new, ameliorative legislation with regard to Jews before the s.
Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian Jews achieved full legal equality in a piecemeal fashion over a period of time that stretched from to The first year saw a loosening of the restrictions on the purchase and possession of real estate by Jews and on places where Jews could reside. Special Jewish taxes were abolished in , and the free practice of the Jewish religion was guaranteed in The imperial constitutional edict of gave Jews equality with Christians in matters of state and private law, and though the constitution was revoked in December , no new restrictions were placed on Jews.
The Jewish community was thereby transformed into a Cultusgemeinde religious community. Imperial decisions in removed the last remaining barriers to occupational choice and economic activity, to the movement of Jews throughout the monarchy, and to the ownership of most forms of real property. Finally, in , Jews living in the Austrian half of the monarchy received full legal equality. Moravian Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth century constituted a historical anomaly.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, there were 52 autonomous Jewish communities in the province that functioned—much like the Jewish Town in Prague—as distinct municipalities. These were supposed to be dissolved in and incorporated into neighboring Christian towns. Jewish religious communities were to be established in their place to deal with the confessional aspects of Jewish life. Following a spate of anti-Jewish violence in the s, however, the government permitted a certain number of Jewish communities to continue to exist as separate municipalities.
Twenty-five Jewish communities eventually were incorporated into the surrounding municipalities, but 27 remained autonomous municipalities and continued to exist down to the end of the Habsburg monarchy. They were not abolished by the Law Regulating the State of the Israelite Religious Communities or by the Moravian electoral reforms of — Because elections to both the provincial diets and the Austrian Reichsrat were conducted on the basis of electoral colleges, or curiae, and because the balance of power between Czechs and Germans in urban areas was often extremely close, the political Jewish communities politische Judengemeinde in Moravia took on an importance at election times that far exceeded their size.
In fact, because of their small size, the political Jewish communities ought to have been included in the rural curia in which Czechs dominated. The government in Vienna, however, eager to preserve German dominance in the Moravian Landtag, allowed the large majority of Jewish political communities 22 out of 27 to vote in the same curia as the much larger Christian towns in which they were located; the remaining five voted in the rural curia.
The Moravian Compromise of added a new complication to the political calculus of Jews. This solution retained the traditional curial system now expanded to five curiae , but it reorganized the urban, rural, and the new general curia along national lines.
Voters now had to register in a national—Czech or German—cadastre, or voting list, within their curia. Moravian Jews now faced the question of having to decide which national list to participate in.
In theory, Jews were to be included in the list of the majority of voters for a given town. Where Czechs were the majority, Jews would vote in the Czech cadastre, and vice versa. But the law also allowed individuals to switch their assignment if they could show that they had been registered on the wrong list.
Although they did not abolish this curious institution, the election laws of for the Moravian Landtag and for the Austrian Reichsrat seem to have put an end to the political influence that the politische Judengemeinden had exerted up to now.
The new laws effectively abolished the old curiae, instituted universal male suffrage, called for the inscription of voters in various national cadastres, and delimited electoral districts according to national majorities with provisions for minority representation in larger districts with mixed population. With these reforms, the political Jewish community—a curious hybrid of premodern Jewish autonomy and postemancipatory political intrigue—lost whatever power it once possessed.
Social and cultural relations between Jews and non-Jews in Bohemia and Moravia were carried out in multiple contexts and were constrained by a variety of factors. Jews engaged in political relations with city councils, lords, and monarchs later, with elected assemblies and political parties ; they encountered non-Jewish artisans, peasants, and merchants on a daily basis in economic interactions; and on many occasions had to endure hostile confrontations with crowds, individuals, and institutional forces.
These relations were structured by often overlapping expectations and systems of knowledge: popular wisdoms, church teachings, political expediency, ethnic mobilization and competition, and, not infrequently, mutual attraction.
To appease outraged international opinion, Hitler appointed former foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath to the post.
German officials manned departments analogous to cabinet ministries, while small German control offices were established locally. Jews were dismissed from the civil service and placed outside of the legal system. Political parties and trade unions were banned, and the press and radio were subjected to harsh censorship. Many Communist Party leaders fled to the Soviet Union. The population of the protectorate was mobilized for labor that would aid the German war effort, and special offices were organized to supervise the management of industries important to that effort.
Czechs were drafted to work in coal mines, the iron and steel industry, and armaments production; some young people were sent to Germany. Consumer goods production, much diminished, was largely directed toward supplying the German armed forces. The protectorate's population was subjected to strict rationing. German rule was moderate—at least by Nazi standards—during the first months of the occupation. Gestapo activities were directed mainly against Czech politicians and the intelligentsia.
The eventual goal of the German state under Nazi leadership was to eradicate Czech nationality through assimilation and deportation, and the extermination of the Czech intelligentsia; the intellectual elites and middle class made up a considerable number of the , people who passed through concentration camps and the , who died during German occupation. The Czech intellectual elites were to be removed not only from Czech territories but from Europe completely. The authors of Generalplan Ost believed it would be best if they emigrated overseas, as even in Siberia they were considered a threat to German rule.
Just like Jews, Poles, Serbs, and several other nations, Czechs were considered to be untermenschen by the Nazi state. The Czechs demonstrated against the occupation on 28 October , the 21st anniversary of Czechoslovak independence. The death on 15 November of a medical student, Jan Opletal , who had been wounded in the October violence, precipitated widespread student demonstrations, and the Reich retaliated.
Politicians were arrested en masse, as were an estimated 1, students and teachers. On 17 November, all universities and colleges in the protectorate were closed, nine student leaders were executed, and 1, were sent to concentration camp in Sachsenhausen within Nazi Germany; further arrests and executions of Czech students and professors were made later during the occupation.
During World War II , Hitler decided that Neurath wasn't treating the Czechs harshly enough and adopted a more radical policy in the protectorate. At the same time, Neurath was relieved of his day-to-day duties, so for all intents and purposes Heydrich replaced Neurath as Reichsprotektor. The Gestapo indulged in arrests and executions.
On 4 June , Heydrich died after being wounded by an assassin in Operation Anthropoid. In the German war effort was accelerated.
Most of the Czech population obeyed quietly up until the final months preceding the end of the war, when thousands were involved in the resistance movement. For the Czechs of the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, German occupation was a period of brutal oppression.
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