Muzeum umění Olomouc, Denisova 47
The 25 (later 27) political Jewish communities were an important outcome of the failed revolutions of 1848/49 and the accompanying anti-Jewish violence in Moravia. These Jewish townships, which were established by the Gubernium in 1850, developed from the premodern kehillah (like their religious counterparts, the jüdische Cultusgemeinden). Yet, they were part of the reform of non-religious communal administration which made the elected leaderships and administrations of communities, from villages to large cities, a central aspect of the modern state and society. With the exception of Galicia (until the 1860s) and Eisenstadt in Burgenland and Hohenems in Vorarlberg, the Moravian political Jewish communities represent a unique case of Jewish political autonomy. While most of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) contemporaries and historians emphasized for various reasons the very paradox of the existence of these political Jewish communities, their backwardness (“reminders of the ghetto period”) and/or their instrumentalization in the Czech-German political conflict in Moravia, we so far know little about their specific histories, everyday political practices and their elected officials. Moreover, these towns dramatically changed in course of the legal emancipation in 1867 and the following mass migration of Jews into the newly established Jewish communities in larger cities in Moravia and above all to Vienna. However, most of these communities remained in existence until the beginning of the First Czechoslovak Republic, despite the fact that Jews represented only a minority of their population and their representatives.
The first goal of the workshop is to reexamine the history of the political Jewish communities in the context of the political, social and cultural transformations of Moravian (Jewish and non-Jewish) society in the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. How did these communities function? How important was the ethnicity for their political and social fabric and their day-to-day operation? How did they fit within the modernisation patterns in the Habsburg monarchy? What was the motivation of their Jewish officials, and how did it change in course of the decline of Jewish inhabitants in the townships? What effect had the specific Jewish character of these townships on the formulations and politics of Jewish identity?
Most of the research up to date did not use the original paper trail of these communities as it survived in Czech archives, similarly to other communal fonds, or did so only in a limited way. The second goal of the workshop is to bring researchers and local archivists into conversation and to encourage the research in these neglected collections. Moreover, since the political Jewish communities were unique administrative, communal structures, we want to explore how such specifics were reflected in their surviving archival fonds. In another words, these collections can tell us a lot about how Jews appropriated and advanced modern self-administrative practices and how they interacted with the modern state. The organizers of the workshop thus wish to stimulate new research on the political Jewish communities in Moravia, this almost forgotten chapter in the modern history of Moravia as well as of modern European Jewish history.
Suggested Topics
- Jewish autonomy in the premodern and modern age
- Case studies on the topography, population, agenda, institutions (German-Jewish schools) and officials of the Moravian political Jewish communities as well as the relationships between them and the religious Jewish communities
- the general history of Moravian local self-govermment and the relationships between the political Jewish communities and Christian towns in the age of modern nationalism
- Demographic change, the decline of the old and the establishment of new Jewish communities in Moravia
- Contemporary perceptions of the political Jewish communities by Jews and non-Jews in- and outside Moravia
- Comparative or case studies on Galicia, Eisenstadt (Burgenland) and Hohenems (Vorarlberg)
- All of the above topics from the perspective of archival science and the structure and content of the surviving archival fonds
Organizers
Michal Frankl and Jarka Vitámvásová, both Yerusha project, Jewish Museum Prague
Marie Crhová, the Kurt and Ursula Schubert's Centre of Jewish Studies at the University of Olomouc
Ines Koeltzsch, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
Michael Miller, Central European University, Budapest
Contacts
Ines Koeltzsch, koeltzsch@mua.cas.cz
Jarka Vitámvásová, jarka.vitamvasova@jewishmuseum.cz
