Prague

Capital of Bohemia and a great metropolis of Central Europe, Prague is home to one of the oldest and most illustrious Jewish communities on the continent. Settled around the Josefov quarter, on the right bank of the Vltava, this thousand-year-old presence — attested as early as the tenth century — has bequeathed a heritage without equal: the Old-New Synagogue (Altneuschul, circa 1270), the oldest still in use in Europe; the old Jewish cemetery with its some twelve thousand entangled tombstones, layered for want of space across nearly twelve strata; and a whole ensemble of synagogues, from the Maisel to the Pinkas, from the Spanish to the Klausen. More than a mere medieval Jewry, Prague was a leading intellectual centre, where Talmudic scholarship, Kabbalah, the sciences and Hebrew printing came together. This first chapter situates the city as a crossroads of Europe's commercial and cultural routes, and announces the great stages this Great Book will traverse: the medieval origins and their trials, the golden age of the Rudolphine Renaissance, the alternation of privileges and expulsions, emancipation and the German-Jewish flowering, and finally the Shoah and the work of memory — the whole placed under the twofold register of History and Memory that founds Zakhor.

Jewish presence in Prague is attested as early as 965–966 by the merchant and traveler Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, who describes Jewish traders at the foot of the castle. A crossroads of routes linking the West to the East, the city attracts merchants and moneylenders, first settling near the Hradčany and later in the future Josefov. The community experienced violence very early on: the crusaders massacred part of the Jewish population in 1096, and the Easter pogrom of 1389 — one of the deadliest of the Middle Ages — claimed up to three thousand victims, mourned in an elegy by Avigdor Kara, himself a survivor. Despite everything, the community rebuilt itself and established lasting institutions: the Gothic-style Old-New Synagogue (around 1270) and the old Jewish cemetery, whose oldest preserved tombstone, that of Avigdor Kara, dates from 1439.

Under the reign of Emperor Rudolf II, who made Prague his capital, the community experienced a true golden age. The financier Mordechai Maisel, mayor of the Jewish town and patron, funded synagogues, paving, and charitable institutions, including the synagogue that bears his name (1592). This was the era of the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a major theologian and educator, to whom later tradition attributes the creation of the Golem, a clay statue brought to life to defend the Jews — an emblematic legend of the transmitted register. The astronomer and chronicler David Gans, in contact with Tycho Brahe and Kepler, illustrates the community's openness to the sciences. Prague also became a great center of Hebrew printing: as early as 1512, the workshop of Gershom Kohen published there the first Hebrew books printed north of the Alps.

During the Thirty Years' War, the Jews of Prague took part in the defense of the city against the Swedes in 1648; in recognition, the emperor confirmed their privileges and granted them a banner adorned with the Star of David and a "Swedish" hat, still visible at the Altneuschul today. In the 18th century, Prague was home to one of the largest Ashkenazi communities in Europe. Yet precariousness persisted: in 1744-1745, Empress Maria Theresa, suspecting the Jews of collusion with Prussia, ordered their expulsion from Prague and Bohemia; their return was permitted only in 1748, at the cost of heavy taxes. The so-called Familiants laws also limited the number of Jewish marriages allowed. Intellectual life remained intense, dominated by the chief rabbi Ezekiel Landau, the "Noda BiYehuda," a leading halakhic authority.

The Edict of Tolerance of Joseph II (1782) initiated a long process of emancipation, completed by the civic equality of 1867. In tribute to the reforming emperor, the Jewish quarter was renamed Josefov in 1850. The urban sanitation of the late century (1893-1913) led to the demolition of the old insalubrious ghetto, but preserved its historic synagogues and its cemetery. Prague then became an exceptional hub of German-Jewish culture: Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel and the "Prague Circle" wrote there a body of work marked by the minority condition, at the crossroads of the German, Czech and Jewish worlds. The city also witnessed the birth of a vigorous intellectual Zionism, around the Bar Kochba association and figures such as Hugo Bergmann.

The 1939 Nazi occupation shatters the community. The majority of the Jews of Bohemia-Moravia are deported via the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto-camp, near Prague, then to the killing centers: around 80,000 of them are murdered. A tragic paradox: the Nazi authorities gather in Prague an immense collection of ritual objects confiscated from the liquidated communities — the origin of the exceptional collections of the Jewish Museum of Prague, long presented under the contested narrative of a "museum of an extinct race." After the war, the small community survives with difficulty under the communist regime. The Pinkas Synagogue becomes a deeply moving memorial, its walls bearing the names of the 77,297 Jewish victims of the Czech lands. Since 1989, the community has been reborn and the Jewish Museum perpetuates this memory.

From the mention by Ibrahim ibn Yaqub to its contemporary rebirth, Prague distills a thousand years of Ashkenazi Jewish history: scholarship, patronage, legends — foremost among them the Golem — but also the litany of expulsions and the abyss of the Shoah. More than any other, the city reveals the interweaving of history and memory: its stones, its synagogues and its cemetery make of Josefov an open book, where the vanished community and the living community answer one another.