Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Prague's Jewish Heritage
The Jewish people from the Holy Land (today's Israel) were
dispersed by the Romans 2,000 years ago. Over the centuries,
their culture survived in enclaves
throughout the world: “The
Torah was their sanctuary which
no army could destroy.” Jews
first came to Prague in the 10th
century. The Jewish Quarter's
main intersection (Maiselova and
Široká streets) was the meet-
ing point of two medieval trade
routes.
During the Crusades in the
12th century, the pope declared
that Jews and Christians should not live together. Jews had
to wear yellow badges, and their quarter was walled in. It
became a ghetto. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Prague had
one of the biggest ghettos in Europe, with 11,000 inhabitants.
Within its six gates, Prague's Jewish Quarter was a gaggle of
200 wooden buildings. It was said that, “Jews nested rather
than dwelled.”
The “outcasts” of Christianity relied mainly on profits
from money lending (forbidden to Christians) and community
solidarity to survive. While their money bought them protec-
tion (the kings highly taxed Jewish communities), it was often
also a curse. Throughout Europe, when times got tough and
Christian debts to the Jewish community mounted, entire
Jewish communities were evicted or killed.
In the 1780s, Emperor Josef II, motivated more by eco-
nomic concerns than philanthropy, eased much of the dis-
crimination against Jews. In 1848, the Jewish Quarter's walls
were torn down, and the neighborhood—named Josefov in
honor of the emperor who provided this small measure of
tolerance—was incorporated as a district of the Old Town.
In 1897, ramshackle Josefov was razed and replaced by
a new modern town—the original 31 streets and 220 build-
ings became 10 streets and 83 buildings. This is what you'll
see today: an attractive neighborhood of pretty, mostly
Art Nouveau buildings, with a few surviving historic Jewish
structures. By the 1930s, Prague's Jewish community was
hugely successful, thanks largely to their ability to appreciate
talent—a rare quality in the small Central European countries
whose citizens, as the great Austrian novelist Robert Musil put
it, “were equal in their unwillingness to let one another get
ahead.”
Of the 120,000 Jews living in the area in 1939, just 10,000
survived the Holocaust to see liberation in 1945. Today, only a
few thousand Jews remain in Prague...but the legacy of their
ancestors lives on.
