The Loschitz Family

Moravia in the Sixteenth Century: A Land of Contrasts

Sixteenth-century Moravia is a land of contrasts for Jews. Tolerated here, expelled there, always subject to the good will of a lord or municipal council, they nevertheless founded, in certain market towns, communities of remarkable stability. Loštice is one of them.

The mention of 1544 is not that of an isolated settlement but of an already organized presence, sufficiently visible to leave a trace in the seigniorial registers. Scarcely ten years pass before the creation of the cemetery in 1554 — the first sign of lasting rootedness, for no Jewish community invests in a place of burial without the intention of remaining there. The synagogue followed in 1571, and with it the possibility of a fully constituted liturgical life, endowed with the three pillars that rabbinic law deems indispensable to collective life: prayer, learning, and the care of the dead.

Political autonomy came to crown this edifice. From 1581 to 1850, the Judengemeinde of Loschitz remained independent of urban administration, equipped with its own institutions, its own responsibilities, and its own internal jurisdiction. This configuration was not rare in Moravia — the margravate granted Jews relative protection in exchange for fiscal contributions — but it conferred upon the community an institutional dignity that favored the formation of its elites. The families that grew up there learned to govern, to plead, to negotiate: skills that later migrations would render precious.

The Thirty Years' War tested this organization harshly. An act of 1630 counts twenty-one houses of Jewish property in Loštice; by 1650, only ten of them remained inhabited. The decades of conflict, forced displacement, and epidemics had decimated the population, without breaking the community. This rebound after the ordeal illustrates a virtue that Jewish tradition knows well by the name of azut — tenacity in the face of adversity — carried here not by a heroic individual but by a collective body that refused to disappear.

In the eighteenth century, the community regained its vitality. Merchants from Loštice regularly attended the Leipzig fairs, one of the major commercial centers of central Europe. This presence in the great circuits of exchange signals a prosperous community, turned outward, whose members knew how to forge business relationships with non-Jewish interlocutors across several hundred kilometers. Economic activity, far from reducing itself to mere survival, contributed to the dynamism of a vast commercial network whose profits fed the learned and charitable life of the community.

What strikes even more than the institutional organization of Loštice is the intellectual density of its community. For a town of modest dimensions, the number of learned figures who came from it or lived there is truly remarkable, and it is not unrelated to the value that Judaism places at the apex of its symbolic hierarchy: study, talmud Torah, considered as a religious act in itself as much as a moral imperative.

Rabbi Arje Jehuda ben Rechnitz embodies this tradition. A figure of authority within the community, he is the father of a son whose destiny illustrates in itself the mechanism of formation of Jewish surnames: Salomo Loschitz, Hebrew scholar, bears the name of his town like a sign and like a program. This onomastic phenomenon — the individual who becomes the representative of a place, to the point that the name of the place designates him himself — says something essential about the relationship of central European Jewish communities to belonging: one was from Loschitz as one could be from Frankfurt or Prague, and this name of belonging summed up an entire world of relations, references and obligations.

Lazar Flamm, another Hebrew scholar of Loštice, confirms that Salomo Loschitz was not an isolated case but the fruit of an environment that deliberately cultivated knowledge of texts. Alongside him, a succession of rabbis — Aron Moses Neuda, Abraham Neuda, Elias Karpeles, Ezriel Gunzig — attests to a community capable of attracting and training men whose halakhic authority radiated beyond local borders. The halakha — Jewish law in its daily application — remains alive only through the presence of masters capable of deciding the questions that each generation poses to tradition: Loštice had such masters, and their uninterrupted succession over several centuries is in itself testimony to the solidity of the community.

To this rabbinical tradition was added, in the nineteenth century, a new spirit brought by the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. Gustav Karpeles — born in Loštice in 1848, died in Berlin in 1909 — is its most emblematic figure. Historian of Jewish literature, editor-in-chief of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums for many years and founder of the Society for the Promotion of the Science of Judaism (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums), he embodies the passage from rabbinical erudition closed in on its texts to a science of Judaism open to modern philological and historical methods. His works on Hebrew literary history, in particular his Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur (1886), constituted for decades the reference work on the subject in German-speaking academic circles. In him, Loštice gave the Jewish world a mediator between two epochs, a man who believed that the science of heritage could also be an act of fidelity — perhaps the highest form of involvement in the collective life of his people.

Among all the figures that the Loštice community gave to Judaism, there is one whose influence was perhaps the most profound and the most lasting, precisely because it was exercised in the most intimate sphere: the home, daily prayer, the personal relationship with God. This figure is Fanny Neuda.

Born around 1819 in Loštice, wife of Rabbi Abraham Neuda, Fanny Neuda published in 1855 a collection of prayers in the German language intended for Jewish women: Stunden der Andacht — "Hours of Devotion". The work was not a mere compilation of liturgical formulas. It was a prayerbook conceived, written, and articulated by a woman for women, in their vernacular language, at a time when Hebrew liturgy remained inaccessible to most of them. This deliberate choice of German, far from betraying tradition, aimed at broadening its access: it was a matter of restoring to each Jewish woman the capacity to address God in a language she truly understood, rather than reciting formulas whose meaning escaped her.

The success of the work exceeded all expectations. Stunden der Andacht was reprinted many times during its author's lifetime and long after her death in 1894; it was translated into English under the title Hours of Devotion and enjoyed transatlantic distribution, reaching readers in England, the United States, and in English-speaking Jewish communities around the world. This extraordinary influence, originating from a small Moravian town of a few thousand inhabitants, speaks to something essential about the scope that a work can have when it answers to a real and long-ignored need.

What Fanny Neuda accomplished partook of a double virtue. On the one hand, piety — that constant orientation of inner life toward God, which characterizes Jewish devotion in its most personal form. On the other, care for others — that attention to the spiritual needs of those around her, that refusal to accept that half of the Jewish people should remain alienated from its own liturgical tradition. In this, Fanny Neuda participates in the collective Memory of Israel in a way that transcends her community of origin: she is part of the long history of women who, from the prophetess Miriam to the poet Rahel, carried the spiritual life of the Jewish people in spaces that men did not always occupy.

Her companion in letters from Loštice, Carola Groag, bears witness to the same literary fertility of a community that knew how to give women the means to express themselves — a notable fact for an era when this possibility remained rare, even in progressive Jewish circles.

The transformation of a place name into a hereditary family name constitutes one of the best-documented mechanisms of Central European Jewish onomastics. Before the edicts of Joseph II from 1787, which imposed fixed and hereditary surnames on the Jews of Habsburg lands, Jewish families identified themselves by their father's given name, by an occupational nickname, or, precisely, by the name of the place from which they came. This last procedure was all the more natural as the Jewish communities of Central Europe were in constant movement: one left a city, and in the host city, one remained "the Jew from Loschitz" until this designation of origin crystallized into a hereditary name passed down to children.

Salomo Loschitz perfectly illustrates this mechanism. Son of the rabbi Arje Jehuda ben Rechnitz, he was born in Loštice and bears its name — not as a family name inherited from his father, but as a marker of local belonging that crystallized into a patronym. This is significant: it shows that the process of name formation was still underway in the community itself, and not only in cities where migrants from Loštice would have settled.

Once fixed, the patronym Loschitz was capable of traveling. Jewish families from Moravia were embedded in commercial networks that covered hundreds of kilometers — the Leipzig fairs are the best-attested example. These repeated displacements created opportunities for permanent settlement in new cities, and with them, the dispersal of a local patronym toward unexpected horizons. The movement of Ashkenazi Jewish families toward northern Italy — Trieste, Venice, Lombardy — is a well-documented phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, facilitated first by merchant networks, then by the progressive integration of Habsburg territories and the increased mobility it permitted.

It is in this context that the entry on Samuele Schaerf takes on its full meaning. In his repertory I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, published in Florence in 1925, this scholar positively attests to the presence of the name Loschitz among Italian Israelite patronyms. The date is important: 1925, that is, less than twenty years before the destruction of the Loštice community. Schaerf's entry is thus a witness to a living lineage, whose bearers — inhabitants of the peninsula, presumably Ashkenazi in origin — had preserved in their name the memory of a Moravian town they had perhaps never seen. This type of memorial transmission — bearing a place without knowing it — is one of the deepest forms of the Jewish relationship to origin. It says that identity does not fade with distance, that a name is also a memory, an involuntary fidelity to a past that successive generations no longer lived but continue to name.

The history of a Jewish community in Central Europe cannot be written by disregarding its non-Jewish neighbors. The cohabitation between the Christian population and the Judengemeinde of Loštice was, over the long term, marked by a relative concord, in the sense that the two groups shared the same adversities — wars, epidemics, economic crises — without these systematically degenerating into antisemitic violence comparable to that experienced by neighboring Poland or Ukraine. Christians and Jews of Loštice lived together through periods of peace and prosperity, and suffered together during crises.

This pragmatic coexistence did not mean equality. The autonomy of the Judengemeinde, while guaranteeing a certain collective dignity, also reflected a legal segregation: Jews administered their own world because they were not fully admitted into the world of their neighbors. The twenty-one Jewish houses of 1630 probably formed a relatively delimited space in the town, and the autonomous political community that lasted from 1850 to 1919 was first and foremost a consequence of incomplete integration before being a privilege.

Nevertheless, trade wove bonds. The Jewish merchants of Loštice who frequented the Leipzig fairs encountered Christian partners on a footing of contractual equality, at least in the transaction. Buying and selling created a minimal but real sociability, founded on one's word and mutual trust — what Judaism designates by the term emet, truth in business. This daily practice of commercial honesty, far from being trivial, constituted one of the concrete forms by which a minority community preserved its reputation and survival in an environment that was not structurally favorable to it.

Municipal autonomy came to an end in 1919, a result of the political transformations that followed the First World War and the birth of the Czechoslovak Republic. This formal integration into the civic body of the new republic was experienced by many as an emancipation — but it occurred at a time when other forces in Europe were working to undo what the Enlightenment and liberal revolutions had built. The community of Loštice, whose history illustrates so well the virtues of collective commitment and dialogue with the non-Jewish world, was about to be swept away precisely by those who denied the legitimacy of this centuries-long effort.

The history of a community is inscribed in stone as much as in texts. In Loštice, two monuments still allow us today to touch upon the world from which the name Loschitz proceeded: the cemetery founded in 1554 and the synagogue built in 1805-1806.

The cemetery is the oldest. Four and a half centuries of uninterrupted presence can be read in its tombstones, some of which still bear traces of polychromy. No mass grave is listed there, which testifies to a community that was able, to the end, to honor its dead according to the prescriptions of halakha — a right that Judaism considers among the most fundamental, for it concerns the respect of the human person beyond death. The last known Jewish burial took place before 1942, the date that marks the deportation of the last Jews from the region. Managed today by the Jewish community of Olomouc, the site belongs to a network of memory broader than the town of Loštice alone.

The synagogue tells another story, that of the twentieth century in all its brutality and its belated recoveries. Built in 1805-1806, it was used by the Nazis as a warehouse during the occupation — an emblematic desecration of a sacred space converted into a logistics depot. After the war, it became a municipal museum in 1958, which preserved it from destruction while diverting it from its original purpose. Its restoration, completed and celebrated at a gala on October 5, 2014 — after ten years of work, the main phases of which were completed in 2011 — was entrusted to the Respect and Tolerance foundation. The synagogue now serves as a cultural and educational center, a space of memory and dialogue open to all.

This trajectory — place of prayer, warehouse, museum, educational center — sums up in itself the fate of Central European Judaism in the twentieth century: the violence of destruction, the survival of the building by accident or indifference, then the return of memorial consciousness that transforms a vestige into active testimony. That the foundation managing the restored synagogue chose to place itself under the banner of Respect and Tolerance is not an idle coincidence: it is precisely the virtue that Loštice, through its long coexistence, had best embodied.

The Jewish community of Loštice was extinguished during the Shoah. Documentary evidence converges: the last known burial in the cemetery took place before 1942, signaling the deportation or flight of the last members of a community four centuries old. What had withstood the Thirty Years' War, survived epidemics and economic crises, traversed emancipation and its ambiguities, was annihilated in a matter of months by the Nazi extermination machinery.

The violence of this rupture does not fade in a book of memory — it must be named there for what it is: the deliberate destruction of a world. But a book of memory must also say what survives. And what survives, in the case of the lineage Loschitz, is precisely the name. The proper nature of toponymic surnames is to detach themselves from the place they evoke and to outlive it. The families who had left Loštice in preceding centuries — for commerce, for study, for love or simply by the chances of life — had carried the name with them. Those who bore Loschitz in Trieste or Milan in 1942, those whom Schaerf had listed in 1925 in the registers of the Jews of Italy, represented a living branch of a tree whose Moravian roots had just been torn out.

This survival through the name is not merely an onomastic fact: it bears a significance that Judaism expresses through the concept of Zakhor — remember. Memory is not a simple sentimental duty; it is a religious obligation, a form of resistance to the forgetting imposed upon the dead. To bear the name Loschitz after 1942 is, without necessarily knowing it, to bear the memory of a community that was, that lived, that prayed, that studied, that traded, that prayed again, and that deserves to be named.

Schaerf's notice, written in 1925, takes on particular value in this light. It fixes, seventeen years before the catastrophe, the existence of a Loschitz lineage in Italy, at the very moment when the original homeland was about to be annihilated. This testimony prior to destruction constitutes one of the rare documented links between the Moravian town and its southern diaspora — a precious link, and fragile as all that remains when the rest has disappeared.

Salomo Loschitz (dates unknown, 16th–17th century) — Hebrew scholar born in Loštice, son of Rabbi Arje Jehuda ben Rechnitz. He bears the name of his town of origin, illustrating the mechanism by which a Moravian toponym was transformed into a hereditary patronym. An erudite trained in the Rabbinic tradition and in the study of Hebrew texts, he represents the first documented generation of learned men from the Loschitz community. His figure unites the two great vocations of the community: local rootedness and scholarly vocation.

Arje Jehuda ben Rechnitz (dates unknown) — Rabbi of Loštice, father of the scholar Salomo Loschitz. A halakhic authority within the community, he embodied the continuity of Rabbinic tradition in a town that maintained a succession of competent masters over several generations. His role as spiritual and juridical guide of the Judengemeinde testifies to the importance the community placed on expertise in Jewish law as the foundation of collective life.

Lazar Flamm (dates unknown) — Hebrew scholar from the Loštice community, he belongs to the same learned tradition as Salomo Loschitz. His presence in the lists of intellectual figures of the town confirms that the taste for Hebrew study was a durable and collective trait of the community, transmitted from generation to generation, and not the isolated feat of an exceptional individual.

Aron Moses Neuda (dates unknown) — Rabbi who served in Loštice, he belonged to the Neuda family which left a lasting mark on the intellectual and religious life of the community. As a local Rabbinic authority, he ensured the halakhic continuity of the community during a period of profound political and cultural transformations — that of the progressive emancipation of Jews in Habsburg lands.

Abraham Neuda (dates unknown) — Rabbi of Loštice, husband of Fanny Neuda. His Rabbinic authority provided the framework within which his wife could develop her literary and spiritual work. The community he led was open enough to allow a woman to publish a prayer book in her own name — a fact that was not taken for granted in 19th-century Rabbinic circles, and which says something about the intellectual climate of Loštice.

Fanny Neuda (c. 1819–1894) — Writer and spiritual author born in Loštice, wife of Rabbi Abraham Neuda. She published in 1855 Stunden der Andacht ("Hours of Devotion"), a collection of prayers in German intended for Jewish women, translated into English under the title Hours of Devotion and distributed throughout the German- and English-speaking Jewish world. Her work, reprinted for decades, responded to the spiritual needs of women deprived of access to Hebrew liturgy and constitutes one of the most lasting contributions of a native of Loštice to world Jewish culture.

Carola Groag (dates unknown, 19th–20th century) — Writer from the Loštice community, she testifies, alongside Fanny Neuda, to a remarkable fertility of female literary production in a town of modest size. Her presence in the lists of intellectual figures of the community confirms that women's access to literary expression was recognized and encouraged there, a notable fact for the time.

Gustav Karpeles (1848–1909) — Historian of Jewish literature, born in Loštice, died in Berlin. Editor-in-chief of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, he was one of the central figures of Wissenschaft des Judentums — the academic science of Judaism — in German-speaking circles of the late 19th century. His masterwork, Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur (1886), constituted for decades the standard reference in the history of Hebrew literature. Founder of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums, he embodies the transition from traditional Rabbinic erudition to modern historical and philological research, in which fidelity to heritage was combined with the methods of contemporary science.

Elias Karpeles (dates unknown) — Rabbi of Loštice, probably related to Gustav Karpeles. He represents the Rabbinic dimension of a family that embodied both Talmudic tradition and openness to Jewish Enlightenment. His presence in the succession of rabbis of the community attests to the continuity of local halakhic authority over several generations.

Ezriel Gunzig (dates unknown) — Rabbi who exercised his ministry in Loštice, he belongs to the long list of Rabbinic authorities who ensured, over the centuries, the permanence of the religious and juridical life of the community. His presence testifies to the attractiveness of Loštice as a rabbinical post in 19th-century Moravia.

The Great Book of the Loschitz lineage closes on what opened it: a place and a span of time. Loštice, 1544–1942: nearly four centuries of documented, organized, productive Jewish presence at the crossroads of rabbinic tradition and modern Enlightenment. Four centuries at the end of which a Moravian town name became a hereditary surname, traveled to Italy and other horizons, and continues to resonate in the registers of Jewish onomastics as a testimony to what was.

What this lineage expressed above all others is the virtue of study as an act of piety — talmud Torah in its broadest sense, embracing not only rabbinic exegesis but also the science of history, women's prayer, literature, honest commerce, and the art of transmission. From Salomo Loschitz, sixteenth-century Hebraist, to Gustav Karpeles, historian of Jewish literature who died in Berlin in 1909, passing through Fanny Neuda whose Hours of Devotion reached Jewish households in the English-speaking world, the community of Loštice constantly expressed the conviction that knowing, writing, and transmitting are religious acts as much as cultural ones. This conviction runs through the collective memory of Israel like a golden thread: from the revelation at Sinai to the Babylonian academies, from the printing houses of Amsterdam to the newspapers of Vienna, the People of the Book survived precisely because it always believed that words could carry the world.

The silences and gaps in this book are real. The details of the migrations that led a Loschitz family to Italy remain to be established. The bearers of the name after 1942 await their genealogists. But what the documentation already allows us to say is sufficient to affirm that the Loschitz lineage — from its Moravian cradle to the Italian diaspora, from rabbis to women writers, from communal autonomy to destruction — embodies, in its singularity, something universal in the Jewish experience: the capacity to make of a lost place a living name, and of a living name a memory that does not die.