1 Martin J. Wein Ben Gurion University wein@bgumail.bgu.ac.il A ...

Martin J. Wein
Ben Gurion University
wein@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
A Response to Dimitri Shumsky’s Concept of Czecho-German Jews
Dimitri Shumsky’s 2004 article “Historiography, Nationalism and Bi-nationalism: Czecho-
German Jewry, Prague Zionists and Sources of Hugo Bergman’s Bi-national Approach” may
be considered a milestone in the field of Bohemian Lands’ Jewish history. 1 It seems that
finally a critical mass of scholarship has been built up in this field, to allow researchers to
open a wide academic discourse. Another pre-condition for the establishment of such a
general discourse on the history of Bohemian Lands’ Jews was probably the advancement of
critical theory in recent years in the whole field of Jewish history. In his outstanding analysis
of Bohemian Lands’ Jewish identity, and more specifically the affiliations of Prague Zionists,
Shumsky could rely both on a host of former research and on a wide variety of new theory.
Czecho-German Jews as the Community of “In-betweenness”
I will now quickly outline the central thesis of Shumsky’s landmark article, which was also
reflected in his paper “Czech Jews, German Jews, Czech-German Jews: Reframing the Social
and Cultural Jewish History in fin-de-siècle Prague”, given at the 2004 From Maharal to
Masaryk workshop. 2 Shumsky found that much of the academic writing on Bohemian and
specifically Prague Jewry implicitly took sides in a nationalist conflict raging in the city and
the province at the fin-de-siècle. The early 20 th century Prague polemic between
demographers over nationalist loyalties and lingual affiliations among the local population
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was thus unwittingly transplanted into the academic literature on Bohemian Jewish history,
which emerged since the 1960s. 3
The 1900 Austrian census was followed by a round of bitter polemics about
demography, which concentrated in Prague, the Bohemian capital, the stronghold of Czech
nationalism and the city with the leading Jewish community in the province. The importance
of the census results was heightened by the fact that Austria-Hungary never introduced the
general franchise, and in the absence of general elections, censuses served as the only
opportunity for the elites to touch base with the population. The main speakers of the 1900
census polemic were the German nationalist professor of demography at Prague University,
Heinrich Rauchberg (1860-1938) and the Czech nationalist head of the statistical department
at Prague City Hall, Jan Srb (b. 1862). One of their central points of contention was the
sensational about-face of Bohemian Jews to a majority Czech affiliation, after having
traditionally indicated German as their main language. In Shumsky’s view, this nationalist
polemic has been perpetuated in the historiography of Prague and Bohemian Lands’ Jews:
Gary Cohen and Scott Spector, for example, opted for a Rauchberg-like position and Jan
Havránek and Hillel Kieval’s analyses paralleled Srb’s view. Shumsky’s analysis further
found a striking analytical, methodological, rhetorical and structural similarity between the
arguments of the historical actors and of later historians. In other words, the historical
nationalist conflict had actually managed to subvert its own historiography. 4
As an alternative approach to the understanding of fin-de-siècle Prague Jews,
Shumsky developed the concept of Czecho-German Jews. Analyzing the biographies and
family backgrounds of three famous Prague Zionists of the time, Hugo Shmuel Bergman
(1883-1975), Hans Kohn (1891-1971) and Max Brod (1884-1968), he found that in their
cases Czech and German lingual and “cultural” elements intertwined into a syncretic identity
that typically questioned the nationalist Czech-German dichotomy. In fact, Shumsky argued,
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this syncretism was part of a specifically Jewish lifestyle. He also reminded us that even
Rauchberg and Srb had willingly admitted that Prague and Bohemian Jews were bilinguals
par excellence, a malleable community “in-between” the two rival camps of a split society. 5
In my response to Shumsky’s concept of Czecho-German Jews I will build on
Shumsky’s argument, yet go one step further. Whereas Shumsky’s approach powerfully
overrode the discourse and rhetoric of the Bohemian Lands’ nationalist conflict, it stopped
short of questioning another sharp fin-de-siècle dichotomy: that of Christians versus Jews. My
first argument will address the assumption of Jewish exceptionalism in terms of their
bilingualism and syncretism. My second point will inquire about the religious identity of
Prague Jews in the early 20 th century.
Czecho-German Jews in a Czecho-German Christian Environment
Hermine Hanel (1874-1944) was a Prague-born, German-speaking Christian-Jewish writer
and artist. Although part of the famous early 20 th century Prague German literary boom, she is
little known, since she was refused publication on account of her gender. She also left Prague
for Munich at a relatively young age, where she was eventually killed in an allied air raid in
World War II. In her autobiography, she painted a complex picture of Prague’s lingual
structure around the fin-de-siècle:
Prague society was too constrained for my tastes. Czechs and Germans lived in two
hostile camps. One knew each other from seeing each other, but one did not greet each
other. On the Na přikopě Street there were more Germans, in the Národní třída
boulevard, there were more Czechs promenading. Already among the pupils
nationalist hostility turned into brawls. There were daily fights between German
fraternity students, among whom there were also many Jews, and the Sokols [Czech:
lit. falcons, hawks – members of a nationalist Czech gymnastics association…]. The
3

Czech society was more open than the German one; it was still new and was interested
in integrating educated Germans into their social circles. But Germans who were
tolerant towards Czech-speakers were treated as traitors by their tribal peers
[Stammesgenossen]. I was never allowed to visit the Czech theater. […] The lower
classes were Czech-speaking […] whereas we educated Germans […] only learned a
bit of “kitchen Czech” [i.e. Czech to be spoken with the cook…] The German society
was separated into castes. The aristocracy, which tried to talk the Vienna German
dialect, lived in the Malá Strana borough and on the island. These aristocrats […]
ignored the bourgeois public […] The rising Czech movement rushed now […] to
transform Prague into a modern metropolis. 6
Hanel’s description of fin-de-siècle Prague mentioned four population groups in the city. The
lower classes of workers and servants were merely described as “Czech-speaking”, i.e.
probably speaking dialects, not standard language, which was the hallmark of nationalism.
The nationalist competition was waged between two middle class societies on the
promenades, among the fraternities and gymnastics clubs, in intellectual circles and in the
theaters: standard bilingual “Czech society” versus a largely standard monolingual “German
society”. The upper classes were for the most part German-speaking monolinguals, but of a
different kind; as a sign of their class and their loyalties they spoke Vienna dialect, not
standard “Theater German”, like the German-speaking bourgeoisie.
Hanel’s snapshot of a class-structured population morphing into one organized by
nationalism, also offers a glimpse at the dynamics. She called the aristocrats a “caste” – the
vestiges of an ancient, ossified system, living in the baroque palaces of the neighborhood in
the shadow of the castle and on the romantic little Kampa Island, like in a time warp. In
contrast, middle-class Czech nationalism was called a “movement”, and its Prague was
dynamic, modern and urban, the city of the future. Hanel’s surprise that pupils “already”
4

entered the nationalist bickering hints at two facts: middle-class nationalist society was
expanding downwards in terms of age, i.e. educational level, and – as public primary
education at that time already included poor children – in terms of class. This implies,
however, that nationalism and lingual affiliation were initially the central concerns primarily
for a relatively small part of society: the urban middle classes.
Robert Luft offered a fascinating historical analysis of the competition of nationalism
and bilingualism in the Bohemian Lands, according to which, the final victory of nationalism
was ironically hailed in by the Moravian Language Compromise of 1905. Prior to that, there
were still large groups in the Bohemian Lands, which refused to choose a nationalist
affiliation. First of all there were those above or below the nationalist bourgeoisie, especially
aristocrats and Social Democrats. In fact, there was one province of the Bohemian Lands that
was almost altogether unscathed of middle-class nationalism, namely industrial South East
Silesia, where dialects, multilingualism and lingual syncretism ruled supreme and even
survived the mass expulsions of the 1938-1948 period. Further, there were those with strong
religious identifications, such as priests, rural Catholic peasants and Jews, who could well do
without a nationalist affiliation. Finally, there were some government officials, who, like the
aristocracy, focused their loyalties on the state and refused to participate in the nationalist
conflict. 7
Luft found that even Habsburg censuses, which merely asked for one’s “language of
daily use”, featured evasive answers like “cannot be determined” or “both”, or else unlikely
languages from distant parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, e. g. Hungarian or Italian. Luft
also noticed that after 1905, and in accordance with the stipulations of the Moravian
Language Compromise, these cases were simply added to the local majorities. Non-
conformists were thus actually ascribed their language group! In spite of this imposition of a
nationalist affiliation, there does not seem to have been any public pressure to allow for an
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option of “unaffiliated” in the same way that people could declare themselves as being
“without religion”. Luft observed that the only successful attempt ever to break through the
rigid binarism of Czech versus German identification was the Jewish affiliation, which was
detached from lingual identity and became an alternative census option in interwar
Czechoslovakia. 8
Although the Jewish affiliation was not legally restricted to people of Jewish religion,
census administrators seem to have made sure that it would not turn into a Christian protest
choice. There were only single cases of Christians opting for this third alternative, while in
the interwar period in Moravia 49-52% and in Bohemia 15-20% of Jews by religion chose
that option. 9 We can only speculate if a “Christian” affiliation or a localized “Bohemian” or
“Moravian” census option might have attracted similar percentages in the Christian
population and thus somewhat neutralized the specter of nationalism.
It belongs to the ironies of history that in the Bohemian Lands bilingualism actually
continued to advance in the shadow of victorious nationalism. Bilingualism probably reached
its climax only in the 1930s, as Czech-speakers still more or less willingly learned standard
German, and a whole generation of Bohemian Lands’ German-speakers had been obliged to
acquire some basic standard Czech in the state schools. Maybe it was not a coincidence that
the Czech-German nationalist competition turned to expulsion as a tool of demographic
regulation exactly at this point.
The idea that Prague and Bohemian Jews were exceptional in their bilingualism and
Czech-German syncretism became a fixed feature of stereotyping and self-stereotyping, since
it served the purposes of nationalists of all colors. Czech and German Christian nationalists
could use it to deflect attention from the fact that large parts of their “natural” constituencies
were in fact no less dialectal, multilingual and malleable than their Jewish neighbors.
Bohemian Lands’ Zionists highlighted bilingualism as a specifically Jewish characteristic, in
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order to lift their own Jewish constituency out of its Christian context. It appears however,
that for the most part the Czecho-German Jews, Shumsky identified, lived in fact – and not
surprisingly – in an equally Czecho-German Christian environment.
Czecho-German Jews or Czecho-German Judeo-Christians?
Some of the quotes Shumsky used to argue for his concept of Czecho-German Jews were
scenes from Bergman’s childhood memories of the summers he spend with his family in a his
father’s home village Chraštice a little South of Prague. In these quotes, Bergman not only
remembers the Czech-speaking environment, his ostensibly German-speaking family blended
into with a surprising ease, but also a religious syncretism. The Praguers did not hesitate to
make the sign of the cross on their on the face and breast before eating with their Catholic
servants, and their children ran after the priest, when they saw him in the street to kiss his
hand, a custom spread throughout Catholic Europe. 10
An even more syncretic religious identity is evident in the diary of Berta Fanta (also
Berta Sohr, 1866-1918), a Prague Jewish intellectual, in whose fin-de-siècle salon Bergman,
Brod, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Felix Weltsch (1884-1964) were frequent guests. Fanta’s
private confessions give some idea of what the faith of Prague intellectuals looked like at the
time. In 1901, she summed up her commandments under the title “My Religion”. They
included the following:
- “don’t pray to the creator in human ways”
- “create your own world like he did”
- “treat your body and spirit with reason”
- “try to find beauty and art everywhere”
- “give your money to the poor [...] find the rich in spirit [...]”
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Even more tellingly, Fanta concluded her principles with the question: “How long will this
remain my religion?” 11
Berta’s daughter Else, Bergman’s later wife, claimed in her memories that Jewish
tradition had already vanished with her great grandparents. She further reported, how her
mother’s spiritual search as well as her study of philosophy at Prague University took her
from an interest in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s thought (1749-1832), to the philosophers
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Franz Clemens Brentano (1838-1917), and from the
influence of the notoriously anti-“Semitic” composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and the
reading of ancient Hindu scriptures to antroposophical thought. This intellectual-spiritual
drive seems to have been more than a unique personal journey. According to Else, her mother
barely managed to prevent her father from becoming a Muslim. 12
It seems that fin-de-siècle Central European urban intellectual appetite for anything
eccentric and exotic, mythical and spiritual knew no boundaries. Even Jewish tradition was
strange enough to be re-discovered as yet another Neo-Romantic fashion fetish. As a student,
Bergman chaired the Zionist fraternity Bar Kochba, which a few years later became the stage
for Martin Buber’s (1878-1965) extremely influential lectures “on Judaism” (1909-1911). 13
Paul Mendes-Flohr paraphrased Buber’s message to his Prague Zionist hosts as follows:
The deracinated [!] Jew of the West might be estranged from the Law and Rabbinical
learning, but he had not thereby necessarily vitiated his Judaism, for Judaism (and
undoubtedly this must have been Buber’s most intriguing message to his Prague
audience) was ultimately not a matter of formal articles of faith and prescribed ritual
practice, but rather of a specific spiritual sensibility.
Buber’s narcissist “racial” fantasies, which prominently featured a call of the Jewish “blood”,
were attractively dressed up in Orientalist attire. Buber had in fact first attained fame through
his early works dealing with Chasidism and ecstasy, which he had just completed when he
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came to Prague as a prophet of Judaism. Mendes-Flohr discovered, however, that at least part
of the Chasidic writings were almost certainly ghostwritten by Paula Buber (also P. Winkler,
Georg Munk, 1877-1958), Martin Buber’s wife. Paula was an accomplished writer
(publishing under the male pen name Georg Munk). She happened to be from a Catholic
Bavarian family and a very recent convert to Judaism. Paula had probably also been the one
who had introduced Martin to en vogue mysticism and Orientalism in the first place, as well
as the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Martin, in turn, had introduced Paula
to Zionism. The Bubers were a quite telling example for the degree of mutual penetration of
Christian, Jewish and other religions and philosophies in fin-de-siècle Central European
Judeo-Christian intellectual life. 14
Kieval pointedly observed that among the Prague Zionists, only Bergman had the
knowledge of traditional and modern Jewish culture to put his thinking into a Jewish context.
His peers were thus not so much re-inventing their Judaism, as inventing it. Bergman insisted
in vain that Bar Kochba members should acquire Hebrew and Yiddish. Realizing that living
Jewish tradition was hardly to be found in Prague, he established a traveling fund for
members to visit Galicia and Palestine. He himself traveled to Galicia in 1903. Yet, even
Bergman’s religious outlook was rather eclectic: he drew inspiration from Martin Buber’s
colorful thought, from Franz Rosenzweig’s (1886-1929) “Christian theology with inverted
valorizations” (Amos Funkenstein), from Christian and Indian thinkers, as well as from
anthroposophy. 15
One of the few other Prague Jewish intellectuals who acquired a relevant level of
Jewish education was Jiří Langer (also Mordechay Giorgo Langer, 1894-1943), who had
tellingly acquired much of it on his travels to Palestine and Galicia. From Galicia he returned
to Prague as a newborn Chasidic hozer betshuva, possibly serving as the model for the black
bug in the famous short story “The Metamorphosis” by his close friend Kafka. Langer was in
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fact the last Prague Hebrew author: he published a collection of homoerotic poems in the city
in 1929. After Prague’s Nazi German occupation, he fled from his home town to Fascist
Slovakia, and arrived in Palestine as an illegal immigrant in the fall of 1939. 16
There are strong indications that the sorry state of Jewish religious affairs among
Prague intellectuals of Jewish family backgrounds was typical for Bohemian Lands’ Jews as a
whole. First and foremost there was the sharp decline of Jewish religious education.
Originally, the secular Jospehinian German-Jewish primary schools, run by local Bohemian
and Moravian Jewish communities, were still supplemented with traditional religious schools,
the heder and yeshiva. These declined in the middle of the 19 th century and Jewish religious
education entered into the secular curriculum. Later, even that was basically dropped. Finally,
almost all German-Jewish schools were closed down in the wake of the 1897-1900 anti-
Jewish pogroms, trade boycotts and ritual murder trials in the Bohemian Lands, which had
incidentally also influenced the 1900 census results mentioned above. In Prague, between
1880 and 1914, merely 10-15% of Jewish youth received any Jewish religious education in
the city’s single, male-only “Talmud-Torah School”, which was in effect more of a Jewish
Sunday School. The devastating level of Jewish education also barred the access to Yiddish,
which was printed in Hebrew letters. The knowledge of local Judeo-German dialect had
accordingly vanished in the second part of the 19 th century. 17
Like in the case of nationalism versus bilingualism, it seems that the Neo-Romantic
emphasis on the Christian-Jewish, or “Aryan-Semitic” dichotomy and on Jewish
exceptionalism in fact pasted over a reverse process of increased syncretization on the
ground. The defensive battle of Christianity could use Jewish exceptionalism in its anti-
“Semitic” form as a means of claiming a Christian constituency in spite of the rapid
dissolution of Christian, specifically Catholic bonds of faith. Conversely, Zionism employed
Jewish exceptionalism to roll back the de facto Christianization and largely Christian-
10

mediated universalization, post-emancipatory Bohemian Lands’ Jews had undergone even
without individual baptism.
Another parallel between the fin-de-siècle nationalist and religious polarizations was
the ascription of Jewish religious identity. Like in the crackdown on nationalist indifference
through the 1905 Moravian Language Compromise, by means of the bureaucratic imposition
of lingual identity, religious affiliation from 1890 onwards was actually ascribed to Jews. In
that year a law was passed in Austria that forced Jews, who did not officially leave their
religion, to become members of their unified local Jewish community and pay their
membership fees under threat of legal measures. 18 What was ostensibly supposed to
strengthen Jewish community life after decades of emancipatory apathy and disorganization,
in fact proved a bureaucratic strait jacket. There are no indications that the community
members’ religious laxity and disinterest in Jewish tradition was somehow overcome through
the new law. The ease with which Jewish family links could later be reconstructed for the
Nazi genocides, however, was not at least due to that religious centralization and bureaucratic
enforcement of Jewish community membership, just as the obligatory lingual affiliation first
introduced in 1905 served as a basis for the 1938-1948 expulsions.
In view of both the degree of Christian and Christian-mediated influences and the lack
of Jewish education and commitment, Shumsky’s breakthrough concept of Czecho-German
Jews may need to be completed by yet another component that is all too often hidden by the
inherent blind spot of Jewish history: the prevalent non-Jewish religious identity. When we
talk about fin-de-siècle Jews in Prague and to some degree throughout the Bohemian Lands,
we may actually want to conceptualize them as Czecho-German Judeo-Christians.
1 Shumsky, Dimitry. "Historiografiya, leumiyut vedu-leumiyut: yahadut tcheho-germani, tsiyoney prag
vemekorot hagisha hadu-leumit shel Hugo Bermann." Zion 69, no. 1 (2004): 45-80.
2 Shumsky, Dimitri. "Czech Jews, German Jews, Czech-German Jews: Reframing the Social and Cultural Jewish
History in-fin-de-siècle Prague." Paper presented at the From the Maharal to Masaryk - International
Workshop on Czech Jewish History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 6 May, 2004.
3 Shumsky, "Historiografiya", 47-61.
11

4
Ibid.; demographers’ polemic writings include: Rauchberg, Heinrich. Der nationale Besitzstand in Böhmen.
Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1905; Srb, Jan. Obcovací řeč jako prostředek zesilujcí národní Državu
německou v zemích Koruny české zvlášť a v Rakousku vůbec. Praha: Královské hlavní město Praha, 1909;
academic literature includes: Cohen, Gary B. "Jews in German Society: Prague 1860-1914." Central European
History 10 (1977): 28-54; Cohen, Gary B. The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague 1861-1914.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; Havránek, Jan. "Social Classes, Nationality Ratios and
Demographic Trends." Historica 13 (1966): 199-202; Kieval, Hillel J. The Making of Czech Jewry - National
Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988;
Spector, Scott. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle.
Berkely et al.: University of California Press, 2000.
5
Shumsky, "Historiografiya", 61-67 (on Bergman, Kohn and Bord), and 54f, 58, 60, 63, 66, 78 (on special status
of Jews as „in-betweens“).
6
Iggers, Wilma A., ed. Frauenleben in Prag. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 2000, 195f, 217f [quotations], 221f.
7
Luft, Robert. "Nationale Utraquisten in Böhmen." Paper presented at the conference Allemands, Juifs et
Tchèquesà Prague 1890-1924, Montpellier 1994, 40-43, 46, 48f.
8
Ibid. 50.
9
E.g. Herman, Jan. "The development of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry 1918-1938." In Papers in Jewish
Demography, edited by U. O. Schmelz, P. Glikson and S. Della Pergola, 191-206. Jerusalem, 1969, 201.
10
Shumsky, "Historiografiya", 59, 67; compare also Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 100.
11
Iggers, Frauenleben in Prag, 165-166, 170, 183 [quotations] – Fanta’s diary needs to be read with some
doubt, since it was edited by her husband (179), but for our purposes it makes the point in any case; compare
also Fanta, Berta (geb. Sohr). Frauen in Bewegung, 24 July 2003 [cited 1 May, 2004]. Available from
http://www.onb.ac.at/ariadne/vfb/bio_fantaberta.htm.
12
Iggers, Frauenleben in Prag, 173f, 176, 192.
13
Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 99, 137 (quoting Robert Weltsch letter to Martin Buber, March 22, 1910,
Buber Archives, MS Var. 350/880: “[Buber’s first speech] placed our Zionist convictions on a truly solid-and
for many of us, entirely new-foundation, upon which we can build our work.”)
14
Mendes-Flohr, Paul. Divided passions: Jewish intellectuals and the experience of modernity. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1991, 87f [quotation], 88, 92f, 96-98; see also Buber, Martin. Die Geschichten des
Rabbi Nachman. Frankfurt am Main: Rutten and Loening, 1906; Buber, Martin. Die Legende des Baalschem.
Frankfurt am Main: Rutten and Loening, 1908; Buber, Martin. Ekstatische Konfessionen. Jena: E. Diederichs,
1909; Buber, Martin. At the turning; three addresses on Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952.
15
Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 101, 115f, 148-153; Rotenstreich, Nathan. "Samuel Hugo Bergman." In
Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM: Judaica Multimedia, Keter, 1997; Funkenstein, Amos. "The Dialectics of
Assimilation." Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 2 (1995): 1-14, 9 [quote].
16
Carmel, Tsevi. "Habachur hachasidi miprag." Bitsaron 3-4, no. 1 (1979 [5740]): 94-103; Dagan, Avigdor. "Jiri
Mordechai Langer." In Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM: Judaica Multimedia, Keter, 1997; Kafka, Franz.
Metamorphosis and other stories. Middlesex: Penguin, 1961; Langer, Mordechay Giorgo. Piyutim veshirey
yedidot. Prag: Dr. Yosef Plesh, 1929 [5689].
17
Cohen, "Jews in German Society", 39f; Kestenberg-Gladstein, Ruth. "The Jews between Czechs and Germans
in the Historic Lands, 1848-1918." In The Jews of Czechoslovakia, 21-71. New York, Philadelphia: The Jewish
Publication Society of America, Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, 1968, 49f; Kestenberg-
Gladstein, Ruth. Neuere Geschichte der Juden in den böhmischen Ländern (1770-1830). Tübingen, 1969, 357-
359; Rachamimov, Alon. "Between Czechs and Germans: Jewish Students in Prague 1876-1914 - The 1994
Erich Kulka Prize Lecture." Manuscript, 1994, 2.
18
Kestenberg-Gladstein, Ruth. "The Jews between Czechs and Germans in the Historic Lands, 1848-1918." In
The Jews of Czechoslovakia, 21-71. New York, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America,
Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, 1968, 48f.
12