Rabbis and Revolution

The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation

Michael Miller

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804776523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du peuple juif

The Habsburg province of Moravia straddled a complicated linguistic, cultural, and national space, where German, Slavic, and Jewish spheres overlapped, intermingled, and sometimes clashed. Situated in the heart of Central Europe, Moravia was exposed to major Jewish movements from the East and West, including Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), Hasidism, and religious reform. Moravia's rooted and thriving rabbinic culture helped moderate these movements and, in the case of Hasidism, keep it at bay.

During the Revolution of 1848, Moravia's Jews took an active part in the prolonged and ultimately successful struggle for Jewish emancipation in the Habsburg lands. The revolution ushered in a new age of freedom, but it also precipitated demographic, financial, and social transformations, disrupting entrenched patterns that had characterized Moravian Jewish life since the Middle Ages. These changes emerged precisely when the Czech-German conflict began to dominate public life, throwing Moravia's Jews into the middle of the increasingly virulent nationality conflict. For some, a cautious embrace of Zionism represented a way out of this conflict, but it also represented a continuation of Moravian Jewry's distinctive role as mediator—and often tamer—of the major ideological movements that pervaded Central Europe in the Age of Emancipation.

One

From P

emyslids to Habsburgs

Moravian Jewry in the “Land of Canaan”

During the Age of Emancipation, Moravian Jewry experienced the transformation—and disruption—of religious, communal, and demographic patterns that had become deeply entrenched as far back as the Middle Ages. I examine the development of these patterns here, beginning with the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Jews were first documented in Moravia, and continuing into the late eighteenth century, when Moravia had become an important center of Jewish learning. Moravia was also known as a place of Jewish suffering because of the harsh residential and occupational restrictions, onerous taxation, and, above all, the Familiants Laws. These restrictions helped shape Moravian Jewry's reputation—and self-image—as the most oppressed Jewish population in the Habsburg realm.

A center of rabbinic learning, Moravia was home to a constellation of renowned yeshivas that attracted students and rabbis from neighboring Bohemia, Hungary, Galicia, Lower Austria, and beyond. As an important node in the interconnected network of Central and Eastern European Jewish communities, Moravia's inhabitants were continuously exposed to religious, educational, and ideological trends, some finding greater reception than others. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, Sabbatianism (and then Frankism) made considerable inroads in Moravia, particularly in the communities of Holleschau, Prossnitz, and Kojetein. In the eighteenth century, however, Hasidism never found a foothold in Moravia, despite its considerable success in neighboring Galicia and Hungary. I examine these religious movements in greater detail, with an eye toward understanding why Sabbatianism and Frankism left their mark on Moravia, while Hasidism did not. As will be seen, the relative success or failure of these movements was related in part to the settlement patterns and demographic trends that developed from the eleventh century onward.

Moravia and Its Jews: Eleventh to Fifteenth Century

Moravia takes its name from the Morava River (known in German as the March), which originates in northwest Moravia, near today's Czech-Polish border, and flows southward along the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia and farther down, between Slovakia and Austria. The river lent its name to the Great Moravian Empire, which flourished in East-Central Europe from the ninth century until it was overrun by Magyar invaders in the tenth. Great Moravia was subsequently divided between the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdoms of Poland and Hungary, and the emerging Czech state. The territory of Moravia, which had once been at the heart of an empire, was subordinated to neighboring Bohemia, which came under the rule of the P

emyslid dynasty.¹

The P

emyslids ruled the Bohemian Lands (Bohemia and Moravia) from the eleventh century until the dawn of the fourteenth century, with Prague—Bohemia's largest town—serving as the seat of the new Czech state. Under the P

emyslids, the law of primogeniture reflected the relationship between Bohemia and Moravia, with the eldest son inheriting the dynastic seat in Prague and the younger sons inheriting the appanage seats in Moravia's three largest towns: Olmütz, Brünn, and Znaim. In 1182, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa intervened in P

emyslid affairs and raised Moravia to the status of a margravate (border province of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by a margrave), a status it would retain for the next seven centuries. The Margravate of Moravia was still part of the P

emyslid patrimony, but its new status made it a distinct administrative and political entity within the Bohemian Lands.

The Bohemian Lands became a hereditary kingdom in 1212, when Emperor Frederick II issued the Golden Bull of Sicily, affirming the kingship of P

emysl Otakar I and his successors. The Kingdom of Bohemia acquired a privileged position in relation to the Holy Roman Empire, and Otakar's grandson, P

emysl Otakar II (1253–1278), was even twice a candidate for the imperial throne. Under P

emyslid rule, Bohemia and Moravia experienced great economic prosperity, with the cultivation of additional agricultural land, the discovery of silver mines, the founding of new villages, and the transformation of existing towns into centers of crafts and commerce. These developments, which proved advantageous to the local Slavic-speaking population, also attracted many German speakers, who migrated to the Bohemian Lands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Many of these German speakers settled in Znaim, Brünn, Olmütz, Mährisch-Neustadt, and Iglau, which were all elevated to the privileged status of “royal town” in the course of the thirteenth century.

Jewish settlement in Bohemia and Moravia also dates back to the period of P

emyslid rule. Although Jews may have come to the region as far back as Roman times, the first documented references to Jewish communities in Bohemia (Prague, Eger, Leitmeritz) and Moravia (Brünn, Olmütz) come from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.² The Jews in these communities presumably arrived from other areas of the Holy Roman Empire, bringing Ashkenazic customs and the Yiddish language. In 1254, P

emysl Otakar II granted the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia a legal charter, which elaborated the juridical and economic terms of their residence in the Bohemian Lands. This document, which was based on Duke Frederick II's 1244 charter to the Jews of Austria, suggests that money lending was the basis of Jewish economic life in the Bohemian Lands at the time.³ In Moravia, this was particularly the case in Brünn and Olmütz, royal towns that were expanding into important commercial centers in Central Europe.

In medieval Hebrew sources, biblical names were often affixed to new areas of Jewish settlement, and the Bohemian Lands were no exception. Just as Germany became known as Ashkenaz (Genesis 10:3), Spain as Sefarad (Obadiah 20), and France as Tsarefat (I Kings 17:9), the Bohemian Lands also acquired a name of biblical origin. As early as the twelfth century, Hebrew sources refer to the Bohemian Lands as the Land of Canaan, a name that, at first glance, seems to conjure up the Promised Land. However, as the thirteenth-century Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela explained, this term had an altogether different connotation. “The Jews who live there call it the Land of Canaan,” he wrote, “because the inhabitants of this land sell their sons and daughters to all of the nations.”⁴ Benjamin was alluding to Noah's postdiluvian curse of Canaan (Genesis 9:25), when Canaan—one of Noah's grandsons—was cursed to be “the lowest of slaves to his brothers.” Indeed, the designation of the Bohemian Lands as Canaan may likely be traced to the same folk etymology that derives Slav from slave.

Medieval Hebrew sources refer to the Slavic language spoken in the Land of Canaan as “the language of Canaan” (leshon kena'an), and many Moravian Jews were apparently proficient in this language in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some Jews had Slavic names, such as Benesch, Czierno, and Mardusch,⁵ and a number of rabbis from the Bohemian Lands even used Slavic glosses in their scholarly works. The fact that two thirteenth-century rabbis—Abraham ben Azriel, author of the liturgical commentary Arugat ha-bosem (Spice garden), and his disciple, Isaac ben Moses, author of the halakhic compendium Or zaru'a (Hidden light)—made frequent use of Slavic terms indicates that Jews in the Bohemian Lands had an “active knowledge of the Czech language” in the P

emyslid period.⁶

P

emyslid rule came to an end in 1306, following the murder of the last of the dynastic line. Four years later, the Bohemian crown passed to John of Luxemburg, whose son Charles founded Prague's Charles University in 1348 and went on to become Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. Under the Luxemburgs, the estates system—which had been taking shape since P

emyslid times—became rooted in Bohemia and Moravia, giving the emerging estates (nobility, clergy, burghers) a greater degree of political power and autonomy in relation to the crown. As power shifted and devolved in the Bohemian Lands, many Jews settled in Moravia's noble-owned towns (e.g., Austerlitz, Nikolsburg) or clergyowned towns, especially those belonging to the bishop of Olmütz (e.g., Kremsier, Trebitsch).⁷

By the fifteenth century the Moravian estates had attained “almost complete autonomy” with respect to the other lands of the Bohemian crown, and as many scholars have pointed out, a distinct Moravian “territorial patriotism” (Landespatriotismus) began to emerge, especially among the estates.⁸ Moravian territorial patriotism developed under the marked influence of the Hussite Wars that ravaged Bohemia and—to a lesser extent—Moravia between 1420 and 1434. Based on the teachings of the martyred Jan Hus (1369–1415), the Hussite movement first and foremost pursued church reform, pitting religious reformers against the Catholic Church. At the same time, the religious conflict exacerbated social and national tensions, which unfolded differently in Bohemia and Moravia. In Bohemia, Hussitism made its strongest inroads among the Czech-speaking burghers, leading many nineteenth-century Czech historians, such as Franti

ek Palacký, to portray it as a forerunner of modern Czech nationalism. Anti-Hussite crusaders wreaked tremendous havoc on Bohemia's towns, and the Hussite Wars ended with the secularization of church lands and the elimination of the clergy from Bohemian politics. In Moravia, in contrast, Hussitism found its greatest support among the upper nobility, who tended to have a moderating effect on the movement. The warring factions in Moravia reached an early compromise; church lands were never secularized, and Moravia was spared the wanton destruction that afflicted Bohemia. By the end of the Hussite Wars, the Moravian estates enjoyed a more deeply rooted autonomy than before, and they became the standard-bearers of a territorial patriotism that underscored Moravia's distinctness from neighboring Bohemia.

Moravia's nobility emerged from the Hussite Wars in a stronger position, but the Jews of Moravia (and elsewhere) emerged tainted by their association with the Hussite heresy. Because Hussitism was deeply rooted in the Old Testament, some contemporary rabbis viewed the religious movement with “guarded sympathy” and many Roman Catholics denounced it as a Judaizing sect.⁹ Jews were repeatedly accused of supplying arms to the Hussites, and Catholic rulers used this accusation as a pretext for persecuting the Jews in their midst. In 1421, the Jews of Vienna were imprisoned, tortured, forcibly converted, and burned at the stake, in part because of the alleged “confederation between Jews and Hussites.”¹⁰ The Wiener Gesera (Viennese persecution), as this event has come to be known, was followed by other persecutions, such as the expulsion of Jews from Bavaria in 1422, and—more significant here—the expulsion of Jews from Iglau (in Moravia) in 1426. The Iglau expulsion ushered in a period of expulsions that would completely transform Jewish settlement patterns in Moravia.

Expulsion from Royal Free Towns in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Iglau was the first royal free town to expel its Jews and the only one to do so during the Hussite Wars. Margrave Albrecht V, who had received Iglau in 1424 as a dowry gift from his father-in-law, Siegmund, was charged with protecting it from the Hussites. In 1426, he acceded to the demands of the Iglau burghers to expel the Jews because of their alleged association with the Taborites, the most radical followers of Jan Hus. The close proximity of Jews and Christians in Iglau, it was argued, constituted a grave danger to the Christian population, which was at risk of being exposed to heretical ideas. The expulsion from Iglau set a precedent that was followed by Albrecht's 15-year-old son and successor, Ladislaus Posthumus, who expelled the Jews of Brünn, Znaim, Olmütz, and Mährisch-Neustadt in 1454, the first year of his reign. The young Ladislaus was heavily influenced by John Capistrano, a vitriolic Franciscan preacher sent to the Slavic lands by Pope Nicholas to shore up the Catholic Church in the wake of the recent scourge of heresy. Capistrano's blistering sermons against the Hussite heresy, which led to his canonization in 1690, were equaled in zeal and vitriol only by his Jew baiting, which gained him the epithet “Flagellator of the Jews.” During his sojourns in Moravia in 1451 and 1454, he incited the populace against the Jews and encouraged the local rulers to banish them.¹¹

Although often justified in religious terms, the expulsions also testified to the sharp economic tensions between Christians and Jews at the time. All three expulsion decrees from 1454 (the Jews of Olmütz and Mährisch-Neustadt were expelled with one decree) complained of the “depravity and grievance” (Verterbnuss und beswerung) that the Jews inflicted—or might inflict—on the Christian burghers through their business practices and general presence.¹² According to the Brünn decree, the local burghers demanded expulsion “because they would suffer great impoverishment and damage were this [expulsion] not to be undertaken.”¹³ In Brünn, Znaim, Olmütz, and Mährisch-Neustadt, the burghers were released from their debts and given title ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Language, Place Names, and Currency
• Introduction
• 1. From Přemyslids to Habsburgs: Moravian Jewry in the “Land of Canaan”
• 2. Rabbinic Enlightenment: Mordecai Benet and the Moravian Haskalah, 1789–1829
• 3. Nehemias Trebitsch and the Decline of the Moravian Chief Rabbinate, 1832–1842
• 4. Locking Antlers: Hirsch Fassel, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and the Forging of a New Rabbinic Ideal
• 5. Conflict and Revolution: Samson Raphael Hirsch and the Politics of Leadership, 1847–1849
• 6. On the Altar of Freedom: Moravian Jewry and the Revolution of 1848
• 7. Emancipation and Its Aftershocks: The Reorganization of Moravian Jewry
• 8. Drifting Rabbis, Shifting Centers, and the Burgeoning Czech-German Conflict
• Appendix 1. Moravia's Fifty-Two Jewish Communities, 1798–1848
• Appendix 2. Moravian Jewish Communities Established After 1848
• Appendix 3. Jewish Population in Moravia and Austrian Silesia, 1754–1921
• Abbreviations Used Only in Notes and Bibliography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index