Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
For all his successes, though, Rudolf failed to heal the age-old rift between Protest-
ants and Catholics, and the end of his reign in 1612 saw those tensions again rise to
the forefront. The breaking point came in 1618 with the 'Second Defenestration of
Prague', when a group of Protestant noblemen stormed into a chamber at Prague
Castle and tossed two Catholic councillors and their secretary out the window. The
men survived - legend has it they fell onto a dung heap - but the damage was done.
The act sparked the Thirty Years' War - a precursor to WWI and WWII in the 20th
century - that ultimately consumed the whole of Europe and left Bohemia again in ru-
ins.
THE JEWS OF PRAGUE
Prague was for centuries a traditional centre of Jewish life and scholarship.
Jews first moved into a walled ghetto north of the Old Town Square in about the
13th century, in response to directives from Rome that Jews and Christians
should live separately. Subsequent centuries of repression and pogroms culmin-
ated in a threat from Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I (r 1526‒64) that was never
carried out - to throw all the Jews out of Bohemia.
Official attitudes changed under Emperor Rudolf II at the end of the 16th cen-
tury. Rudolf bestowed honour on the Jews and encouraged a flowering of Jew-
ish intellectual life. Mordechai Maisel, the mayor of the ghetto at the time, be-
came Rudolf's finance minister and the city's wealthiest citizen. Another major
figure was Judah Loew ben Bezalel (Rabbi Loew), a prominent theologian, chief
rabbi, student of the mystical teachings of the Cabbala, and nowadays best
known as the creator of the Golem (a kind of proto-robot made from the mud of
the Vltava).
When they helped to repel the Swedes on Charles Bridge in 1648, the Jews
won the favour of Ferdinand III to the extent he had the ghetto enlarged. But a
century later they were driven out of the city, only to be welcomed back later
when the residents missed their business.
In the 1780s, Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (r 1780‒90) outlawed many forms
of discrimination, and in the 19th century the Jews won the right to live wherever
