ARTHUR A. COHEN
557
tion of 1848 concluded a long chapter in the history of official anti–
Semitism.
Emperor Joseph II had begun even before 1848. In Johann
Bauer's amusing phrase, the Emperor had commenced in 1781 "to
solve the Jewish question in the light of rationalist principles." The
Josephine reforms no longer obliged Jews to wear the yellow star;
Jews were permitted to learn crafts and pursue higher education; to
own land and to serve in the Emperor's army. Jews were permitted
freedom of religious practice and of migration within the empire.
However, since the motive of these reforms was the more efficient
and tightfisted control of his realm, the Emperor's reforms were es–
sentially repressive in that they promoted not the flourishing of the
Jewish community but its assimilation and ultimate disappearance.
Every Jew was required to adopt a German surname to comple–
ment his Hebrew patronymic, and knowledge of the German lan–
guage became mandatory in order to practice a craft or profession;
Jewish businessmen were obliged to keep their account books in
German to facilitate regulation and tax inspection; finally a
numerus
clausus
was established on the number of Jewish families allowed in
the countryside and in Prague, the establishment of new families be–
ing restricted to the oldest son, and migration from countryside to
city was permitted only when a place fell vacant and property quali–
fications had been satisfied.
Jewish "emancipation" was completed during the early part of
the reign of Franz Joseph. The Prague ghetto was abolished in 1850,
being incorporated with the rest of the city under the name ofJ osef–
stadt in memory of its liberal benefactor. At that time there were
8,500 Jews in Prague as against a Christian population of 115,000.
The Czech majority was linguistically and culturally a persecuted
population ; the country was being delivered by the Emperor to the
Germans. The Jews made an unfortunate, but unavoidable, deci–
sion to Germanize, which resulted in the enmity of the Czechs and
the contempt of the Germans.
It
could not be helped . The joining of the Jew to the elitist Ger–
man had been encouraged and then decreed, and when the Jews left
the ghetto, acquired German language, attended German schools,
were required by law to matriculate in the German universities of
the Czech lands, it could not have been anticipated that the belea–
guered Czechs would be reborn . But the Germanizing policies of
Joseph II produced a reaction which led to a renaissance of the Czech
national movement. Prague gradually became again a Czech city,
