Languages of Community

The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands

Hillel J. Kieval

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780520214101
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520921160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

With a keen eye for revealing details, Hillel J. Kieval examines the contours and distinctive features of Jewish experience in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In the Czech lands, Kieval writes, Jews have felt the need constantly to define and articulate the nature of group identity, cultural loyalty, memory, and social cohesiveness, and the period of "modernizing" absolutism, which began in 1780, brought changes of enormous significance. From that time forward, new relationships with Gentile society and with the culture of the state blurred the traditional outlines of community and individual identity. Kieval navigates skillfully among histories and myths as well as demography, biography, culture, and politics, illuminating the maze of allegiances and alliances that have molded the Jewish experience during these 200 years.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Map
• Introduction: Language, Community, and Experience
• 1 Czech Landscape, Habsburg Crown: The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia to 1918
• 2 Caution’s Progress: Enlightenment and Tradition in Jewish Prague, 1780–1830
• 3 The Social Vision of Bohemian Jews: Intellectuals and Community in the 1840s
• 4 Pursuing the Golem of Prague: Jewish Culture and the Invention of a Tradition
• 5 On Myth, History, and National Belonging in the Nineteenth Century
• 6 Education and National Conflict: Germans, Czechs, and Jews
• 7 Jan Hus and the Prophets: Fashioning a Czech Judaism at the Turn of the Century
• 8 Death and the Nation: Ritual Murder as Political Discourse in the Czech Lands
• 9 Masaryk and Czech Jewry: The Ambiguities of Friendship
• Epilogue: A Sitting Room in Prague
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index