To Tell Their Children: Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior

University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Greenblatt, Rachel L., 1968– author.

To tell their children : Jewish communal memory in early modern Prague / Rachel L. Greenblatt.

pages cm—(Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8602-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Jews—Czech Republic—Prague—Historiography.    2. Collective memory—Czech Republic—Prague.    3. Prague (Czech Republic)—Historiography.    I. Title.    II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

DS135.C96P65  2013

943.71'2004924—dc23

2013021462

Typeset by Newgen in 10.5/14 Galliard

ISBN 978-0-8047-8881-6 (e-book)

To Tell Their Children

Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague

Rachel L. Greenblatt

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

In memory of

Robert Lee Greenblatt

Who is the man who is eager for life, loving its days, that he may see good.—Psalms 34:13

and

David Applebaum and Naava Applebaum

Who will ascend the mountain of the Lord?

Who may stand in His holy place? One who is clean of hands and pure of heart.—Psalms 24:3–4

Contents

Illustrations

Note on Transliterations and Names

Acknowledgments

Introduction. That Children Will Rise Up to Tell Their Children

1. Metropolis of Jews’ Streets Shapes of Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

2. Death Entered into Our Window Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

3. A Remembrance for Me and My Descendants Autobiographical Writing and Familial Commemoration

4. Established the Day Authorship, Communal Authority, and Local Traditions

5. That a Future Generation Will Know Narrating History in Book, Tale, and Song

6. In the Language People Understand Print and Manuscript; Vernacular and Sacred; Women and Men

Conclusion. No Need to Name It All: Toward a History of Forgetting

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Antonín Langweil, cardboard model of nineteenth-century Prague

Figure 1.2. The autonomous towns of Prague

Figure 1.3. Ḥamisha Ḥumshei Torah, Megillot, Haftarot. Prague: Gershom ben Solomon Kohen with sons Mordecai and Solomon, 1530

Figure 1.4. Zaks parokhet, 1602

Figure 1.5. Gravestone of Ḥanokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes

Figure 1.6. Glass commissioned for the Prague burial society, 1786/87

Figure 1.7. The same glass, viewed from a different angle, 1786/87

Figure 1.8. Months in the Hebrew calendar with Gregorian equivalents

Figure 2.1. Gravestone of Avigdor Kara, d. 1439

Figure 2.2. Gravestone of Hendl, daughter of Evril Gronim and wife of Jacob Bassevi, d. 1628

Figure 2.3. Page from the Altneuschul Memorbuch, ca. 1500

Figure 2.4. Page from the Altneuschul Memorbuch for Gadil ben Azriel Shamash, d. 1707

Figure 2.5. Gravestone of Neḥama, wife of Shalom Uri, d. 1576

Figure 2.6. From a hazkarah for Ḥanokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes

Figure 2.7. Parokhet donated by Mori Bischitz in memory of his wife, Reizl bat Moses Plohn

Figure 2.8. Gravestone of Rebekah bat Meir Tikotin, d. 1605

Figure 2.9. Gravestone of Jonah ben Meir Puria Pfefferkorn, d. 1536

Figure 2.10. Prague Castle, All Saints’ Chapel, entrance to Vladislav Hall

Figure 2.11. Gravestone of Zalman ben Moses Ḥayyat, d. 1628

Figure 2.12. Torah curtain from Kriegshaber, Bavaria, 1723/24

Figure 3.1. Joseph Tein, Megillat hakela′im (copied 1840)

Figure 3.2. Family megillah of the Yampels-Segal family, 1721, showing how the family megillah was rolled like other sacred parchment scrolls

Figure 5.1. Prague Castle from the east, across the Vltava River

Figure 5.2. View of Prague, looking south from the Letná. 1591 engraving by Joris Hoefnagel and Franz Hogenberg

Figure 5.3. Marian column, in the center of Prague’s Old Town Square, ca. early twentieth century

Figure 6.1. Title page of Sefer be′er sheva

Figure 7.1. Pinkas hazkarat neshamot of the Maisel Synagogue, nineteenth century, showing the needle used by the cantor to mark where he finished his weekly recitation of the hazkarot, so that the following week’s cantor would know where to begin

Note on Transliterations and Names

In translating Hebrew and Yiddish words into Latin characters, I have sought, for the most part, to follow the guidelines outlined in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Hebrew words are transliterated according to contemporary Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, surely not that used by Jewish residents of early modern Prague, but most familiar to contemporary readers. In other contexts, I have sought to reproduce Yiddish pronunciations. For that reason, a single word, such as the plural or construct form of megillah might be transliterated in different ways depending on the language of the text from which it is taken, for example, "Megillat eivah for a Hebrew text and Megillas eivah" for a Yiddish version of the same basic text.

Places and families in Prague often had different names in Hebrew, Yiddish, Czech, and German, and orthography was not consistent even within a single language. I have tried to use the most familiar forms of names where possible.

Jews in early modern Prague were often known by multiple variations of their names, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and/or German, Czech, Latin versions. All had a patronymic: men known as son of, rendered here as the Hebrew ben, as in Solomon ben David, and women as daughter of, bat, as Dinah bat Jacob. This Hebrew version of the name has generally been preferred throughout the book, although various sources also use less formal Yiddish variants, or European versions.

Acknowledgments

If it takes a village to raise a child, this book has required its own virtual bustling town, a far-flung network of friends and colleagues near and far. It started, in a sense, on the unimpressive banks of the Grasse River in Massena, New York, where my immediate paternal ancestors are interred in a small Jewish cemetery, fenced in at the back of a slightly larger Catholic burial ground, trees blocking the river just ahead. Here, on the outskirts of a village where some twenty or so immigrant Jewish families once lived differently indeed from the Jews of early modern Prague, my father, grandfather, and great-uncle took me from grave to grave, explaining who was who and telling their stories, planting in me the notion that a cemetery is a site of memory, long before I had any concrete notion that such a thing as a site of memory existed in any scholarly sense.

My debts to Richard I. Cohen cannot be adequately put in words; I can, I think, aspire only to provide students, colleagues, and friends even a small portion of what he has shared with me. Israel J. Yuval read closely and asked important questions. Hillel J. Kieval and Chava Turniansky likewise contributed immeasurable time and expertise. Michael Heyd helped frame key issues early on. A deep, genuine, warm commitment to undergraduate teaching among the members of the History Department at Cornell University in the late 1980s, and particularly the support and encouragement of Walter LaFeber, paved my way in innumerable and fundamental ways, as did teachers and friends at the Pardes Institute, and Matan—the Sadie Rennert Women’s Institute for Torah Study, both in Jerusalem. This book has profited greatly from conversations and exchanges, references, and corrections received from additional teachers, formal and informal, colleagues, and friends, including (but not, by any means, limited to) Elisheva Baumgarten, Ann Blair, Robert Bonfil, Chava Buchwalter, Elisheva Carlebach, Joseph M. Davis, Yaacov Deutsch, Maria Diemling, Yacov Guggenheim, Louise Hecht, Elliott Horowitz, Yosef Kaplan, Otto Dov Kulka, Robert Liberles of blessed memory, Howard Louthan, Pawel Maciejko, Vivian B. Mann, Michael Miller, Gabriel Motzkin, Lucia Raspe, Elchanan Reiner, Moshe Rosman, Jiřina Šedinová, Bernard Septimus, Ruth Simpson, Pavel Sládek, Moshe Sluhovsky, Joshua Teplitsky, Magda Teter, Vladimir Urbánek, Scott Ury, Rebekka Voß, and Ruth Wisse. I am grateful to reading groups that pushed me at key moments: to Menahem Ben-Sasson, Israel Bartal, and to members of forums at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that each led for several years; to Gregg Gardner, Jane Kanarek, Yehuda Kurzer, and Claire Sufrin; and to students in Harvard seminars who read chapters of this book in manuscript.

Alexandr Putík and Olga Sixtová of the Jewish Museum in Prague provided assistance essential to my research. My deepest gratitude to them as to their colleagues Vlastimila Hamačková, Daniel Polakovič, Arno Pařik, and others, who gave unstintingly of their time and expertise, providing materials, references, and explanations.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the librarians of the Judaica Reading Room of what was, at the time, the Jewish National and University Library, now the National Library of Israel, at Givat Ram, Jerusalem—Elona Avinezer, Alisa Allon, Zipora Ben Abou, and Ruth Flint—who, alongside their consistently kind, cheerful, and wise assistants, adjusted their own work space and habits to accommodate this working, nursing mother. Nehama Ze′ev, Margalit Zarum, and Shoshana Fital made it possible for me to be in the reading room day in and day out, confident my children’s lives were enriched in my absence. I thank the many colleagues with whom I shared ideas, work hours, and coffee breaks and am especially grateful to Dena Ordan, instrumental in fostering a cooperative environment in the reading room through innumerable acts of thoughtful kindness. Thanks as well to all the staff in the library, to Abraham David and Yael Okun of the Institute for Microfilmed Manuscripts, Hadassah Assouline at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, and, at Harvard University, Charles Berlin and staff of the Judaica Division, Houghton Library curators including Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and research librarians.

I am grateful as well for financial support, over many years, from the American Jewish League for Israel, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and that university’s Erich Kulka and Bernard and Naomi Pridan Prizes, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and, in addition, its Ephraim Urbach Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (now the Foundation for Jewish Culture), the Prof. Drs. Margarita and Moshe Pazi Prize for Study of Czech Jewry, the Posen Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities for an NEH Summer Stipend, and Harvard University funds for research, publications, and faculty leave.

For insights and prodding in the process of rewriting, I am grateful to the late Jeannette Hopkins, to her niece Carol Gray, and to an anonymous reader for Stanford University Press. I am grateful to Norris Pope, formerly of Stanford University Press, for his early enthusiasm and to his colleagues, including Emma Harper, Stacy Wagner, Judith Hibbard, and Fran Andersen, for consistent attention to detail and open communication.

I would also like to thank Olga Ungar for assistance in the arduous task of assembling illustrations and am especially grateful for the efforts exerted in providing images by Kateřina Krylová of the City of Prague Museum and Jakub Hauser of the Jewish Museum in Prague, and by their colleagues, and for the support of the latter’s director, Leo Pavlát. Thanks as well to Mary Davis and Michael Van Zandt Collins for preparation of the bibliography and to Eva Gurevich for editorial assistance.

Within my bustling virtual town, family of course has a special place. I thank my parents, Samuel and Judith Shapiro Greenblatt, for whom family, education, love of history, and preservation of traditions have always been of central importance. The values and lessons instilled in their home have—to the extent I have succeeded in what I have set out to do—formed this book’s very foundation stones. My parents taught respect for the dead and their memory, but never at the expense of the living; an allegiance to memories always subservient to the need to live our lives in the present and to move forward into the future. My gratitude as well to my brother and sister, Daniel Greenblatt and Miriam Greenblatt Weidberg, and their families. Members of the next generation, Gabriel and Michal, assumed that a binder labeled To Tell the Children (as they read it) must be about them, and indeed, it is, in more ways, I imagine, than they will be able to understand for some time to come. To them and to James B. Appelbaum, my partner and peerless proofreader, thank you.

Decades after trailing family members around a tiny burial plot in a remote corner of world Jewry, and in the midst of research for this book, I stood on Har Hamenuḥot, contemporary Jerusalem’s main Jewish cemetery. A trembling rendition of "el malei raḥamim," a traditional prayer for the dead, pierced the air on this, the anniversary of a terrorist attack on a coffee shop that had torn away the lives being commemorated that day. I was drawn into the words, fleetingly believing that the dead would, in fact, find rest under wings of the Divine Presence, if we just prayed hard enough—and was then suddenly outside the scene, thinking of how these very words were those used by Jews of early modern Prague to remember their dead, in circumstances so different, and so similar. Continuity and change, the bread and butter of the historian, but brought into sharp, living relief. Indeed, several lives cut short before their time, during the years I worked on this project, were linked with mine in a variety of ways, from deep connections to fleeting but significant moments. With its completion I remember those to whom it is dedicated as well as Karen Levine, Malka Korman, Ellen Appelbaum Trauben, Liora Elias Bar-Levav, Rivká Matitya, and Robert Liberles. May their memories be as blessings and may their many merits in this world lend support in some fashion to their orphaned children. In dedicating this book to the memory of three whose deaths, from cruel violence or wretched disease, yanked me from my ivory cocoon at the very heights—and depths—of research and writing, reminding me, viscerally, of the real, living, human pain felt hundreds of years ago by those Prague Jews whose surviving words I sought to understand, I gesture, so I hope, toward the ongoing search for appropriate modes of remembrance.

Introduction

That Children Will Rise Up to Tell Their Children

I myself have written and published [this chronicle] so that future generations will know, until the last generation, children will be born and rise up to tell their children (Psalms 78:6), inhabitants of the holy community of Prague, in the country of Bohemia, that we had enemies with cunning plots. . . . And the children of Israel raised up their eyes and cried out to the Lord of their fathers . . . and our Lord did not forsake us, and granted us grace before our lord, His majesty, and [granted grace] to all Israel in all the places they inhabit. . . .¹

Judah Leib ben (son of) Joshua, secretary to Prague’s chief rabbi, Aaron Simon Spira-Wedeles, wrote these lines after surviving, during the summer of 1648, a Swedish siege on his native Prague, one of the final stand-offs of the Thirty Years’ War. They are part of his introduction to Milḥama beshalom (War for Peace), a chronicle recording those dramatic events. Judah Leib expressed wonder at his own existence and strove to ensure that future generations would appreciate their past. The emphasis the Prague functionary placed on gratitude to God and public recognition of His wonders is central to many early modern explanations of why one would record or remember a particular event. History ultimately mattered, in part, because—and when—it gave evidence of God’s continued providence over Jews and Jewish communities.

The ability to transmit complex memories—and thus to bridge the chasm of death—distinguishes humans from other members of the animal kingdom. Grandparents tell young children about life when they were young; archaeologists use carbon dating to determine details about civilizations gone for thousands of years. The world’s three major monotheistic religions are historical in nature, their foundational narratives based on particular developments in human time. Indeed, Christian history so dominates western ways of understanding our place in time that every other event deemed worthy of remembrance is accorded a place on a historical spectrum since, or before, the birth of Jesus, even by those who hold no stock in the notion of salvation by his death. To varying degrees, adherents of these belief systems interweave deep concern with their own local histories with this fundamental, historical understanding of their place in the universe. In times of conflict and transition, as the Protestant Reformation and English Civil War, the calendar itself, with its mix of religious, political, and legal commemorations, has been mightily contested.²

For traditional Jews, an ahistorical connection with biblical past and messianic future helped shape an identity distinct from majority cultures. Especially in the Torah-centered intellectual realm, a man could be in direct dialogue with sages of earlier ages (for a woman, this process was more difficult and generally less direct); words on a page of rabbinic exegesis or biblical text were in conversation with their readers’ discussion of a legal point and also served to shape responses to contemporary events. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem became a personally remembered event, equated with the exodus from Egypt: Moses sang a song that would never be forgotten—when I left Egypt / Jeremiah mourned and cried out in grief—when I left Jerusalem, a current that could, in theory, run counter to a Jew’s distinguishing current circumstances from past realities.³ A line of reasoning in modern scholarship holding that Jews did not, in fact, engage historical memory on such a wide variety of levels, that no room remained for more particular, postbiblical historical concerns is based in part on the path-breaking work of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). For him, direct transmission of recollections from generation to generation helped form a society’s or a family’s collective memory (a term opposed, in its own time, to self-focused Freudian memory), which was the polar opposite of historical writing, a later reconstruction of lost memories.⁴ Pierre Nora, in his editor’s introduction to Realms of Memory, a monumental anthology covering the history of French collective memory, likewise envisioned a lost golden age of organically transmitted, unself-conscious memories wholly opposed to historical writing.⁵

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi brought Halbwachs’s categories to Jewish history, where the deep concern with history of the biblical period gave way, in his view, to distinct apathy toward postbiblical Jewish history.⁶ Yerushalmi closely examined Jewish historical writing, especially of the sixteenth century, but laid only bare outlines of additional modes for transmission of collective memory that, to his view, superseded historical writing and represented distinctly ahistorical ways of viewing the past.⁷ At the same time, others called into question Halbwachs’s complete polarity between collective memory and historical writing, suggesting complex interactions between the two, rather than absolute opposition. And, several studies of particular instances of Jewish historical writing and collective memory demonstrated limitations in Yerushalmi’s similar characterization of Jewish historical thinking.⁸ Standing on the shoulders of these latter scholars, To Tell Their Children presents a case study of Jewish memory in early modern Prague, a concrete model of premodern Jewish memory in a single locale, showing precisely how memories were shaped and recorded, how ideas took on physical and literary forms.

For historian Amos Funkenstein, the prevalence of sentiments like those expressed by Judah Leib ben Joshua among premodern Jewish writers, which Funkenstein referred to as an incessant astonishment at one’s own existence, constitutes one of the central themes of Jewish historical reasoning over the course of centuries. Put differently, he wrote, Jewish culture never took itself for granted.⁹ Some modern scholarship has failed to take account of early modern Jews’ concern with their local historical circumstances precisely because the forms the preservation of such local history took, the way God’s immediate providence was recorded, varied greatly and often did not look like history to a contemporary viewer. Yet the particular forms in which the Jews of early modern Prague (ca. 1580–1730) recorded their own history depended a great deal on changing circumstances that had little to do with historical reasoning, including material comfort, fashion in architecture and textiles, and the presence or absence of intellectual circles and scientific activity on a wider scale. Milḥama beshalom is but one example of an early modern Jew recording and disseminating information about recent events, for the historical record, in a form—a short chronicle focused on a single set of events—that has not been widely considered in discussions of pre-Enlightenment Jewish historical writing. Prague’s Jews also used even less known formats, like Yiddish historical songs and familial rescue tales, to preserve their own histories. They also perpetuated the memory of their dead on gravestones, in synagogue liturgy, and on ritual objects.

In Prague, as throughout Christendom, the affirmation of God’s continued providence over the Jews always carried also an implicit refutation of the Christian claim that God had rejected the Jews as his chosen Israel, as made clear by their forsaken state. Jewish life in medieval Europe had been characterized by ongoing polemic with the Christians among whom they lived, who viewed themselves as having already, in ancient times, superseded the Jews as God’s chosen Israel, while any remaining Jews were simply blind to God’s true revelation. Judah Leib’s statement that God did not forsake us before our lord, means God showed our earthly ruler, Emperor Ferdinand II (known as ardent in his Catholicism), that He still protects us, the Jews. About a century earlier, Elijah Capsali (ca. 1490–ca. 1555), a rabbi and historian from Candia, Crete, a Venetian possession, had written in his historical work, Seder Eliyahu zuta:

But my reasons for this composition and the benefits that accrue from it are twofold. . . . The first is to teach man wisdom and understanding in hearing the stories of the kings . . . The second is that all the people of the earth might know that the Lord is God, and that God judges on earth. For when he who looks fears, and glancing over my stories . . . accepts the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, then [shall he] know that the eyes of the Lord scan the whole earth, beholding evil and good . . . He looks over the gentiles as well, to raise this nation up and to cast that one down . . .¹⁰

Judah Leib thus echoed a theme expressed earlier by the more famous Capsali, and others, in viewing history as vindicating the Jews and demonstrating God’s protection of them. In defining historical writing, modern scholars sometimes seek impartiality, and such religious sensibilities as Capsali and Judah Leib expressed may seem to negate the possibility of the objectivity a historian should have. But that view is anachronistic.

Alongside gratitude at their own continued existence coupled with celebration of God’s providence, grief and mourning also drove Prague’s Jews to commemorate the recent past for future generations. Mourning might be expressed on a gravestone for an individual who died of natural causes or in liturgical laments for tragic loss of life, as in fire, war, or anti-Jewish rioting. Communal leaders could also be moved by political pragmatism, usually joined with genuine gratitude, to construct commemorative liturgies celebrating the protection of the local ruler against physical danger and expressing loyalty to him and his regime. A paterfamilias might likewise record a narrative that defended the family name against accusations or denunciations.

Whatever the impetus, when moved to pass a story or memory on to future generations, a Prague Jew, like any author, needed to find an appropriate form in which to record it. Today, if a person feels the story of her own life is worth telling, or might reap profits, she is well aware of the genre of autobiography and the kinds of stories readers might expect to find there. But what would such a person do had she never read an autobiography? The shapes the memories of Prague Jews took on depended greatly on the literary and artistic genres that were known to them and those that developed over time in Prague and elsewhere in its environs. Cultural and material conditions, gender, socioeconomic status, and the still-evolving role of print technology all played roles as well. A twenty-first-century author is much more likely to write and publish an autobiography if he has a rags-to-riches, or addiction-to-sobriety, story to tell than if he worked diligently in his middle-class suburban high school and competitive college to eventually become a successful lawyer or banker. The literary forms that are common and familiar help shape what kinds of memories will be preserved. Likewise, in early modern Prague, the literary and artistic genres available for the preservation of memories, and the ways those genres developed over time, helped shape which memories would be preserved and how.

To Tell Their Children is an investigation of these manifold ways in which Prague’s early modern Jews recorded their own past. In its most intimate, perhaps most instinctual form, memory can serve as a bridge between the living and the dead, a way to maintain ties with those who are no more. (In Prague, as in many premodern communities, the dead continued to perform important functions in society.)¹¹ Gravestones, ritual objects, and a weekly liturgy for the dead helped to create this bridge and to keep the dead actively involved in the daily activities of the living. As aesthetic sensibilities changed, beginning toward the end of the sixteenth century, gravestones and other memorials became more elaborate, placing more emphasis on the many qualities and achievements of the dead and somewhat obfuscating the interactions between them and the living. As individuals’ life stories came to occupy a greater place in commemorations of them, families also sought to preserve and perpetuate stories of living members, especially patriarchs. These stories found their way into the introductions to published books and also appeared as freestanding, handwritten tales of deliverance that established a familial Purim day, based on the biblical Purim. In addition to celebrating rescue, these tales justified the author-protagonist’s actions and defended his family name.

Communal officials acted similarly at times, creating liturgies for local annual commemorations for the community as a whole that celebrated rescue from existential threat, real or perceived, while at the same time promoting a specific political line. The particular ways in which such liturgies were written depended in part on both local traditions and the existence, or lack thereof, of a reasonably functional communal authority. When the financial pressures of a state at war, or the social stress of a regime eagerly promoting Catholic renewal—together with the internal bickering both situations could exacerbate—mounted too large, local commemorations became less original and less self-confident. The recording of historical events outside the ceremonial context followed a similar path. Just one major Hebrew historical chronicle was published in early modern Prague, David Gans’s Ẓemaḥ David (Sprout of David / Branch of David), in 1592.¹² Later events were recorded in the introductions to some of the special liturgies and in more specialized historical writing like Milḥama beshalom. Another genre also appeared, the Yiddish historical song, a report of recent events meant primarily to spread news among surrounding Jewish communities. These changes developed hand in hand with gradual transformations in gender roles and in the relationships between print and manuscript publication, between writing in the sacred and vernacular tongues. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Prague’s Jewish community had changed enormously, and the ways in which its members recorded their history had evolved as well.

All this took place within a community firmly entrenched in a set of traditions and way of life that saw itself as continuous over the past centuries and more, a community governed internally by a legal system that had developed over thousands of years. In diet, calendar, language, and dress, Prague’s Jews, several thousand in number by the end of the sixteenth century, set themselves apart from local cultures and identified with Jews worldwide, while simultaneously adopting and adapting local norms.¹³ The local commemorative liturgies they composed, like the fixed aspects of liturgy shared with Jews worldwide, emphasized their identity with that dispersed people, as with their shared biblical past and messianic future. At the same time, Prague Jews’ integration of their own recent past with the larger picture of Jewish history, be it in liturgical commemoration or historical writing, showed how confidently they viewed their own existence as equally valuable members of that ancient tradition, whose lives were likewise equally meaningful. Their own stories were woven into it. They understood that their own additions were particular to this community—that itself was widely accepted in other realms where local custom dictated variations in liturgy or other practice—but at the same time these variations were always part of a larger whole. Gans’s historical writing likewise confidently viewed the history of Prague’s Jews as the natural continuation of the history of all Jews.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, Prague’s population had grown to approximately forty thousand, of whom about a quarter were Jews, while the diversity of its religious life had constricted radically, at least in public, to Catholics and Jews only. The political cohesion of its always fractious Jewish community had been broken down even further. Yet, at the same time, the uses and varieties of print continued to increase—including its expansion in the vernacular Yiddish—as growing participation of women and different socioeconomic classes of men in reading and writing helped reshape their places in the Jewish world. In addition, throughout Jewish Europe—perhaps first among the descendants of Iberian Jews now living in Amsterdam and elsewhere in western Europe—sacral affairs and religious authority became more decidedly concentrated within the synagogue and in the ritual realm, while other aspects of Jewish life pulled themselves loose, gradually and unevenly, from religious authority.¹⁴ The Jews of Prague produced literature of smaller scale and often of lesser quality, and at the same time history became more specialized. Later historians, in their search for predecessors, have not always looked into all the corners of early modern life where historical memory once expressed itself.

An important center for European Jewry throughout the seventeenth century, by the early eighteenth, Prague was home to one of the most populous Jewish communities in Europe, a fitting site for the present case study of early modern memory.¹⁵ An examination of one particular Jewish community can make no claim to Jewish Prague’s unique or, to the contrary, representative nature as regards communal memory; by constructing a single community’s portrait, I intend to raise questions about others. The study’s period of focus opens around 1583, when Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1611) moved his capital to Prague from Vienna, and the city and its Jewish community flourished. In order to concentrate on a traditional Jewish community, one seeing itself as beholden to the framework of normative rabbinic law, it closes on the brink of eighteenth-century Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), with the tenure as chief rabbi of David Oppenheim (1703–1736), an avid bibliophile and collector of rare manuscripts and ephemera alike.

Thanks to Oppenheim’s collecting activities, rare exemplars of printed booklets have been preserved, his collection now housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. In the mid-nineteenth century, more scholars in Prague began to collect objects and documents important to the community’s history, spurred on decades later by implementation of a radical plan for urban sanitization and revitalization during which, starting in 1896, most of the Jewish Quarter was leveled and entirely rebuilt, just six of the original synagogues left standing.¹⁶ Today’s surviving historical record has much to do with decisions made in those years, including the 1906 opening, thanks in large part to the efforts of Salomon Hugo Lieben, of the city’s Jewish museum, among the earliest of a wave of such institutions in Europe.¹⁷ Under the German occupation of World War II, a collaboration of sorts between museum workers and Nazi authorities created a Central Jewish Museum under continued Jewish operation that successfully preserved the museum’s holdings and added to them additional collections of Jewish art and ritual objects from throughout Bohemia and Moravia, even as deportations of workers continued.¹⁸ In 1950, the holdings and buildings were nationalized and became the State Jewish Museum. Returned to the Jewish community in 1994, the Jewish Museum in Prague is still the central address for study of the community’s history and now houses a rich collection of manuscripts, printed material, ritual objects, and additional materials. Ongoing publications of its exhibition catalogs are among the most important new resources for the study of early modern Prague Jewry.¹⁹

Lieben and fellow scholars also engaged, from the late nineteenth century until 1938, in research regarding the history of Prague’s Jews, including studies of Hebrew and Yiddish texts in which the Jews of premodern Prague recorded their own history, a line of inquiry continued decades later by Prague literary scholar Jiřina Šedinová, and most recently by some of her students.²⁰ Lieben’s and Šedinová’s works, together with those of Otto Muneles and Milada Vilímková on the Old Jewish Cemetery and Jewish Quarter in Prague, and additional publications of the museum’s collections, form important building blocks for the current study.²¹ Likewise, prewar historians, foremost among them Tobias Jakobovits, who along with Josef