Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
maraudingSwedesontheCharlesBridge,forwhichtheywonthelastingrespectofFerdin-
and III (1637-57).
JOSEF II AND REFORM
Things went into reverse again during the eighteenth century, until in 1744 Empress Maria
Theresa used the community as a scapegoat for her disastrous war against the Prussians,
and ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Prague. She allowed them to return in 1748,
though only after much pressure from the guilds. It was the enlightened
Emperor Joseph
II
(1780-90) who did most to lift the restrictions on Jews. His 1781 Edict of Tolerance
ended the dress codes, opened up education to all non-Catholics, and removed the gates
from the ghetto. In 1850, the community paid him homage by officially naming the ghetto
Josefov
, or Josefstadt.
The downside to Joseph's reforms was that he was hellbent on
Jewish assimilation
. The
use of Hebrew or Yiddish in business transactions was banned, and Jews were ordered
to Germanize their names (there were 109 names permitted for men and 35 for women).
However, it wasn't until the social upheavals of
1848
that Jews were given equal status
within the Empire and allowed officially to settle outside the confines of the ghetto - con-
cessions that were accompanied by a number of violent anti-Semitic protests on the part of
the Czechs.
FROM 1848 TO THE FIRST REPUBLIC
From 1848 the ghetto went into terminal
decline
. The more prosperous Jewish families
began to move to other districts of the city, leaving behind only the poorest Jews and
strictlyOrthodoxfamilies,whowererapidlyjoinedbythePragueunderclass:gypsies,beg-
gars,prostitutesandalcoholics.By1890,onlytwentypercentofJosefov'spopulationwere
Jewish,yetitwasstillthemostdenselypopulatedareainPrague,withastaggering186,000
people crammed into its streets. The ghetto had become a carbuncle in the centre of bour-
geois Prague, a source of disease and vice: in the words of Gustav Meyrink, a “demonic
underworld, a place of anguish, a beggarly and phantasmagorical quarter whose eeriness
seemed to have spread and led to paralysis.”
The ending of restrictions and the
destruction of the ghetto
, which began in 1893, in-
creased the pressure on Jews to assimilate, a process that brought with it its own set of
problems. Prague's Jews were split roughly half and half between predominantly German-
or Yiddish-speakers and Czech-speakers. Yet since some two-thirds of Prague's German
population were Jewish, and all Jews had been forced to take German names by Joseph II,
allJewswereseenbyCzechnationalistsasaGermanizinginfluence.Tensionsbetweenthe
country's German-speaking minority and the Czechs grew steadily worse in the run-up to
WorldWarI,andtheJewishcommunityfounditselfcaughtinthefiringline-“likepower-
