Vol. 48 No. 4 1981 - page 556

556
PARTISAN REVIEW
and through the Balkans from the east, a Slavic legacy discernible in
Hebrew writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries . The second
and larger migration ofJews from Bavaria and Franconia (attending
the call of the Premyslid dynasty for German colonists) settled into
the ghetto of Prague, quickly establishing a lively and enthusiastic
connection with Czech language and culture which endured
throughout the Middle Ages, as the given names and patronymics of
many medieval Jews and the Bohemian folk motifs of synagogue
tapestries and Torah vestments demonstrate.
The Czechs were far less inhospitable to the Jews among them
than were other sectors of the European dispersion. Jews were infre–
quently slaughtered (the pogrom of 1389 being a horrendous ex–
ception) or expelled from their homes . Although, as elsewhere in
Europe, they were considered as an asset of the crown and restricted
in their freedom of movement , they were invited by Otakar II to set–
tle within his borders and enjoy economic advantages generally de–
nied them elsewhere. Even if only briefly, the Jews were considered
the legal equals of their Czech neighbors , a benefaction recollected
in their literature, in their use of the Czech language to annotate
their texts and to communicate among each other and with the gen–
eral populace . Their earliest artifacts date from the sixth century,
and they built a synagogue within the city boundaries of Prague to
mark the way station of the great caravan routes which Jews tra–
versed between east and west. Upon those earliest foundations , the
Jewish community built first the
Alt Synagoge,
presumably destroyed
by fire in 1316, and latterly the splendid early Gothic synagogue,
known as the
Alt-Neu Synagoge,
completed before 1350 when Jews
were prohibited from further synagogue construction and enduring
to the present day , a unique example of architectural syncretism,
wholly reminiscent of German Gothic and yet condensed and inti–
mate as the Hasidic
klaus
would be.
IftheJews throughout the Middle Ages were the
tertium quid
be–
tween German and Czech, subject to the shifting moods of political
and economic interest, their situation changed dramatically, but not
happily, in the aftermath of their liberation under Maria Theresa
and Joseph II of Austria. The Hapsburgs, determined to Germanize
their Czech majority by bringing it under the tighter rein of German–
speaking administrators, rescinded the restrictions which until
then had governed Jewish life, abolishing the ghetto, permitting in–
ternal migration, and allowing Jews to establish new families at will.
The Austrian constitution which was promulgated after the revolu-
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