Abstract
This article focuses on the wartime experience of an intermarried family in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It examines the intermarried couple Marie and Jiří Klouda, their ...daughters, Helena and Mariana, and their closest relatives among the Eisner and Klouda families. Using a microhistorical perspective, this study focuses on the experiences and strategies of particular individuals and their social circles to understand their responses to shifting circumstances. Although I focus on these two families, my questions pertain to the significance of non-Jewish friends and relatives for Jews during the Holocaust. In short, what difference did these social and familial bonds make to Jewish family members? The study shows that familial and social bonds had tangible outcomes in terms of facilitating important, lifesaving contacts and favors within the forced Jewish societies in the Terezín ghetto and Prague. Prewar professional, familial, and cultural networks, and the social capital they embodied, carried over into the lives of Jews forced into Terezín and into the ghettoized society in Prague. Family and friends provided significant material and emotional support for each other. This support was especially important in a family like the Eisners-Kloudas, which experienced multiple forms of victimization during the war. During the Holocaust, non-Jewish relatives and friends could not stop the processes of genocide, but they could mitigate the effects of dispossession, isolation, deprivation, and deportation.
This article examines the ways in which Czech filmmakers have shaped the memory of the Holocaust in the Bohemian lands. It does so through an analysis of four films: Distant Journey (1949), Romeo, ...Juliet, and Darkness (1959), The Death of Beautiful Deer (1986), and Protector (2009). The narratives of all of these films center on a mixed couple or an intermarried family, a site where the fate of Jews and non-Jews intersected during the Holocaust. These films thus constitute productive sites for the investigation of the representation of Jews and non-Jews' relations during the war. I argue that in the immediate postwar period, filmmakers asked probing and difficult questions about Czech complicity and defiance under German occupation. Before long, however, the mixed couple became a staging ground for narratives that privileged Czech victimization and used references to the Holocaust primarily to allude to German genocidal intent against Czechs. As such, the Jewish experience was marginalized as a historical event in favor of the 'real' Czech history of the war. Analyzing the films as manifestations of historical memory, I show that these narratives serve not only to silence Czech complicity in the social death of Jews during the war, but also to legitimize the violent un-mixing of German- and Czech-speakers after World War II. This narrative of parallel victimization of Jews and Czechs was first developed in the immediate aftermath of the war, and despite the monumental political changes experienced by the country, it has become entrenched in Czech historical memory until today.
This article examines Zionists’ politics of belonging in interwar Czechoslovakia. It shows that the Jewish sports and gymnastics organization Maccabi was a vehicle for Zionists’ efforts to construct ...Jews’ belonging as individuals and as a collective in the new, multinational state. While Jews’ civic equality was formally guaranteed by the Czechoslovak constitution, actual, social and civic equality depended on a broader, public identification of Jews as legitimately belonging in Czechoslovakia. For Zionists, making Jews insiders, individuals that were respected as equal and loyal citizens, was contingent on Jews’ simultaneous belonging to a Jewish national and a Czechoslovak civic collective. Drawing on the ideal of the Zionist “new Jew” and on local traditions for minority nationalism, activists sought to create a symbiosis between Zionism and Czechoslovak patriotism in the 1920s and 30s.
This article examines Zionists' politics of belonging in interwar Czechoslovakia. It shows that the Jewish sports and gymnastics organization Maccabi was a vehicle for Zionists' efforts to construct ...Jews' belonging as individuals and as a collective in the new, multinational state. While Jews' civic equality was formally guaranteed by the Czechoslovak constitution, actual, social and civic equality depended on a broader, public identification of Jews as legitimately belonging in Czechoslovakia. For Zionists, making Jews insiders, individuals that were respected as equal and loyal citizens, was contingent on Jews' simultaneous belonging to a Jewish national and a Czechoslovak civic collective. Drawing on the ideal of the Zionist “new Jew” and on local traditions for minority nationalism, activists sought to create a symbiosis between Zionism and Czechoslovak patriotism in the 1920s and 30s.
This article explores how perceptions of Jewish power shaped the negotiations between Czechoslovak leaders and Jewish minority representatives at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. In the ...aftermath of the First World War, Prague-based Zionists embarked on a mission to convince Czechoslovak elites that attacks on Jews were detrimental to the internal stability of the new state and to Czechoslovak interests abroad. As Edvard Beneš, the head of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, worked to cultivate an image of the new state as more "Western" and "civilised" than other successor states - a strategy meant to garner international support for Czechoslovak territorial demands and its projected absorption of large minority populations - Jewish activists encouraged his uncertainty with regard to Jews' influence on Western audiences and statesmen. They did so in order to convince him to accept their demands for special protection clauses for the new country's Jews. The paper thus shows that the unprecedented victimisation of Jews and the upsurge in antisemitism during and after the war coexisted with a new bold and public Jewish activism. Yet, Jewish leaders did not in the end have the ability to convince Beneš and his colleagues to give in to international Jewish demands for special protection. Instead, they sought to cultivate a strategic alliance between the state's Czech elite and the Jewish minority which centred on the claim that Czechoslovakia was a particularly welcoming and tolerant place for Jews, an image that would evolve into a significant component of the myth of Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy in Eastern Europe.
This dissertation examines the efforts of Jewish nationalists to end Jews' social marginalization from non-Jewish society in the Bohemian Lands between the world wars. Through the 1920s and 1930s, ...the Jewish nationalist movement sought to transform Czechoslovakia's multivalent Jewish societies into a unified ethno-national community. By creating a Jewish nation, a process challenged by the significant socio-cultural differences dividing the country's Jews, Jewish nationalists believed that they could restore Jews' respectability and recast the relationship between Jews and non-Jews as one of mutual respect and harmonious coexistence. The dissertation explores Jewish nationalists' struggle to make Jews at home in Czechoslovakia by investigating a series of Zionist projects and institutions: the creation of an alliance between Jews and the state; the census and the making of Jewish statistics; the transformation of the formal Jewish communities from religious institutions to national ones; Jewish schools; and the Jewish nationalist sports movement. Exploring a Jewry on the crossroads between east and west, the dissertation delves into broader questions of the impact of nationalism on the modern Jewish experience. Within the paradoxical context of a multinational nation-state like Czechoslovakia, Zionists adopted a strategy which sought integration through national distinctiveness, a response embodying elements of both west and east European Jewish culture. The study thus complicates the history of Zionism by showing that alongside the Palestine-oriented German and Polish factions, there were significant ideological alternatives within which ideas of Jewish Diaspora nationalism co-existed with mainstream Zionism. Moreover, the study points to the continuities in the relationship between Jews and the state. As in the time of empire, Jews cultivated partnerships with the political elite, a strategy developed to balance the interest of the state and its Jewish minority. In the interwar years, Jewish activists thus looked to the state for assistance in transforming Jewish society. This dissertation seeks to broaden our understanding of Jewish responses to nationalism, the relationship between Jews and the modern state, and more broadly, about the complex ways in which marginalized groups seek to attain respectability and assert their demands for equality within modern societies.
Dissertation Abstract
“Making Jews at Home: Jewish Nationalism in the Bohemian Lands, 1918-1938.”
Tatjana Lichtenstein
Doctor of Philosophy, 2009
Department of History, University of Toronto
This ...dissertation examines the efforts of Jewish nationalists to end Jews’ social marginalization from non-Jewish society in the Bohemian Lands between the world wars. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish nationalist movement sought to transform Czechoslovakia’s multivalent Jewish societies into a unified ethno-national community. By creating a Jewish nation, a process challenged by the significant socio-cultural differences dividing the country’s Jews, Jewish nationalists believed that they could restore Jews’ respectability and recast the relationship between Jews and non-Jews as one of mutual respect and harmonious coexistence. The dissertation explores Jewish nationalists’ struggle to make Jews at home in Czechoslovakia by investigating a series of Zionist projects and institutions: the creation of an alliance between Jews and the state; the census and the making of Jewish statistics; the transformation of the formal Jewish communities from religious institutions to national ones; Jewish schools; and the Jewish nationalist sports movement.
Exploring a Jewry on the crossroads between east and west, the dissertation delves into broader questions of the impact of nationalism on the modern Jewish experience. Within the paradoxical context of a multinational nation-state like Czechoslovakia, Zionists adopted a strategy which sought integration through national distinctiveness, a response embodying elements of both west and east European Jewish culture. The study thus complicates the history of Zionism by showing that alongside the Palestine-oriented German and Polish factions, there were significant ideological alternatives within which ideas of Jewish Diaspora nationalism co-existed with mainstream Zionism. Moreover, the study points to the continuities in the relationship between Jews and the state. As in the time of empire, Jews cultivated partnerships with the political elite, a strategy developed to balance the interest of the state and its Jewish minority. In the interwar years, Jewish activists thus looked to the state for assistance in transforming Jewish society. This dissertation seeks to broaden our understanding of Jewish responses to nationalism, the relationship between Jews and the modern state, and more broadly, about the complex ways in which marginalized groups seek to attain respectability and assert their demands for equality within modern societies.
