by Peter Demetz
The Jewish Town within the mighty walls protecting the town on the right bank has its own variegated legends of origin, but traces of the original synagogue have been destroyed by incessant reconstruction. The oldest part of the town was possibly established by families of Byzantine origins (though evidence is missing) who moved across the river after 1142 and built a few wooden houses and the “Old School” (synagogue) on the corner of Kozí and Vzeská streets, but by 1346 the Church of the Holy Spirit was built on an adjacent lot, creating a line of demarcation, unique in medieval Jewish communities; in the place of the Old School, after many devastations and fires, stands a “Spanish” synagogue in late-nineteenth-century “Moorish style” which serves today as a museum of Jewish art.
The actual core of the town was created by Jews from elsewhere, especially from Germany, who built their own “Old New School” and settled along the Breite Gasse (Široká) from which narrow streets fanned out; their original houses and the Old School formed a branch of a settlement that thinned out toward the river (Hampejz Street became the red-light district of Gothic Prague). Historians of art and visitors from all over the world admire the Old New School, the oldest synagogue of Central Europe that has survived terrible catastrophes of nature and history nearly unchanged; though many ages and generations contributed different elements and ornamental shapes to it, including a few added by purist architects in 1863, the synagogue retains in full the somber solemnity of its Gothic structure, one of the earliest in Bohemia. Historians of architecture believe that the building was shaped according to Burgundian concepts and, possibly, after the example of earlier synagogues at Worms and Regensburg; it is possible, recent researchers have come to believe, that skilled artisans who were busy nearby putting finishing touches on the Gothic compound of the convent of St. Francis lent a helping hand with a few decorative details (Jews were excluded from the highly organized building trades). One must remember that these two most magnificent monuments of early Gothic architecture in Prague, the Old New School and the convent of St. Francis, Jewish and Christian, both completed during the reign of King Pemysl Otakar II, stand close by—about twelve minutes’ walk apart.
It would be difficult to reconstruct how the inhabitants of the medieval Jewish town felt about being in Bohemia, but an old story, recently rediscovered and brilliantly interpreted by Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein, suggests that many were conscious, however diffusely, of coming from Ashkenazi Germany by imperial privilege. The story was possibly long current in oral tradition, absorbing many international fairy-tale motifs; it was written down and published in 1705 in Jewish-German by Bella Hurwitz and Rahel Rausnitz, the first Jewish women writers of Prague, under the title Ein schein Meisse (A Nice Story). The plot is not easy to follow because of its many delightful twists and turns, but the gist is that a spirited and clever young Jew from Frankfurt pleases the emperor and is sent to Prague to establish a community there. His happy end is, of course, delayed for quite a while, and the narrative actually starts at the time when “there were only four Jewish merchants in Prague before Jews were living there,” three of them bad, the fourth honest and rich yet, unfortunately, dependent in his business on the dishonest three, who were more mobile and traveled back and forth between Prague and Frankfurt. One day he decides that he wants to do business in Frankfurt himself, puts his gold pieces in a tin bottle, and rides off with the other three to the Frankfurt fair, where they all take lodgings in an inn highly recommended by the evil trio; the innkeeper, in cahoots with them, takes the gold pieces and fills the bottle with wine. When the rich merchant discovers that he has been robbed, he appeals for justice to the imperial court, but he cannot produce witnesses and the impudent innkeeper starts to ask for money because he considers that his name has been stained by an unfair accusation.
In the evening, one of the emperor’s advisers, worried about the investigation, rides through Frankfurt, overhears three young Jewish men discussing the now famous case, and one of the lads, Gumpricht, suggesting that the tin bottle should be cut in half to see if any traces of gold remain. The adviser reports this to the emperor, the litigants are brought to court again, and inside the bottle not only traces of gold but three gold pieces are found. The three evil merchants and the innkeeper are instantly beheaded, and the emperor (asking why, if Jews are so clever, so few of them live in Prague) showers young Gumpricht with gifts and sends him off to live in Prague. Yet there is another difficulty to overcome. Gumpricht wants to marry, for he has heard about a beautiful girl in Bumsle (or, rather, Jung-Bunzlau/Mladá Boleslav) but, after a marriage is promised and planned, he runs into trouble with an envious imperial adviser who wagers to woo and win the girl for himself and declares the bet a matter of life and death. The father protects the young daughter, but the adviser bribes the “Shabbesgoyte,” the Christian servant girl who works for the family on the Sabbath, and she brings him the daughter’s velvet shoes, with pearls, and tells him about a wart on the girl’s shoulder. At the court, the imperial adviser boasts about the shoes and talks about what else he knows. Then suddenly a young woman dressed like a princess appears and addresses him familiarly in public; he declares that he has never seen her before. But she is no less ingenious than her fiance Gumpricht and asks the adviser how he can know about the wart on her shoulder if he does not know her at all; the man is instantly hanged by order of the emperor. Gumpricht and the young woman marry immediately, the emperor gives them gold and pearls and signs a privilege that enables them and a few friends, and friends of friends, to settle in Prague, build a synagogue, and appoint a rabbi. It is, the commentator writes, a story not of need and loneliness, as is Salomon Kohn’s later (1847) story of Jews coming to Prague from Muscovy, but of ingenuity rewarded, even if much is wrong historically, given that Jews settled in Frankfurt about a hundred years after they had established a community in Prague. It is not chronology that is at stake but a legal claim for an emperor’s privilege.
Later oral tradition may not have been aware of the legal complexities and niceties of early ducal and royal privileges, but the early Jewish community had ample reason to be thankful to King Pemysl Otakar II, whose Statuta judaeorum of 1262 clearly defined the legal norms pertaining to Jewish community life. In his father’s and his own time, the Jewish Town and the small Jewish communities in Bohemia enjoyed a moment of peace and intellectual creativity, rare before and after. The Statuta, derived from similar documents issued by the Austrian duke Frederick of Babenberg in 1244, fully respects the religious and civil self-administration of the Jewish community and sets forth in exact detail the legal procedures to be followed in their business affairs, essentially consisting of granting cash credit to consumers, including, on certain conditions, the nobility. Jewish civil affairs were to be handled by a Jewish judge, not a Christian town functionary, and appeals were to be directed to the High Chancellor or the king himself. Jews were permitted to transport their dead from place to place for interment without paying a fee, and if a public official should illegally extort money from them, in the way robbers do, he would be punished by the king. Synagogues were protected by law, and whoever violently entered and vandalized a Jewish cemetery would be sentenced to death and his property forfeited to the royal chamber. Jews were not to be harmed bodily; if a Christian killed a Jew, he would be punished according to the law, again forfeiting his property to the king; if he wounded a Jew, he had to pay to the king twelve measures of gold, to the victim twelve measures of silver and medical expenses; if he attacked a Jew but no blood was spilled, he had to pay four measures of gold to the king and four measures of silver to the victim—if he could not pay, his hand would be cut off (si vero pecuniam habere non poterit, per detruncacionem manus satisfaciat pro commisso).
Other paragraphs of the Statuta regulated the legal and commercial aspects of taking pawns for cash credit, plus interest; while a few commentators suggest that the king was eager to protect this Jewish business in order to be able to extort monies himself more easily
, King Otakar cannot be accused of violating his own decree, in contrast to his son Václav II, who readily blackmailed the Jewish community when it was opportune. Jews, the Statuta asserted, were permitted to accept any object as security except bloody clothing or church vestments, and Christians were not allowed to force Jews to appear before a court on Jewish holidays. If a Jew was put on trial, whether for commercial or other reasons, it was not sufficient to have only a Christian witness, for Christian and Jewish witnesses were needed; if a Christian accused a Jew of falsely evaluating a pawn, the Jew could clear himself by taking an oath (the wording of which was not prescribed); and if a Jew lost pawns by fire, violence, or robbery, he could clear himself by taking an oath and free himself of future responsibilities.
It is perhaps most important that Otakar’s Statuta firmly defended Jews against blood libel and stated that Jews resident on royal lands could not be accused of using human blood, for, it said, Jews have no use for blood generally ( … ab omni prorsus sanguine se Judei contineant universi). Six witnesses, three Christian and three Jewish, would be needed to sustain an accusation of that kind, but if they could not prove their allegation, the Christians would be punished and not without justification. Otakar was judicious in quoting papal opinions about blood libel, but in many practical respects his Statuta ran counter to the more severe anti-Jewish policies of the church as defined by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and in the decrees of Cardinal Guido of Lucino, who in 1267 demanded that they be followed in Vienna and Salzburg, as well as in Prague. Thus in his Jewish policies the king differed from the church hierarchy, whose claims he otherwise fully respected. A scribe who copied the Statuta in the sixteenth century added a little note about Otakar, saying, “Either you were a Jew yourself or you had Jewish friends” (nebo jsi žid byl, a nebos tidy páteli jmiti musil). The same comment was made much later about T. G. Masaryk, first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, when he argued against blood libel and defended his Jewish fellow citizens against a rising tide of anti-Semitism in a series of famous essays in 1899—1900.
In recent times, the intellectual traditions of the early Prague Jewish community have been rather indiscriminately identified with the speculations of the Kabbalah, but the flowering of Jewish scholarship on Prague in the age of the later Pemyslids, above all Václav I and Otakar II, was characterized by a predominance of lucid legal commentaries of the Talmud, defining the ritual, familial, communal, and economic rules of Jewish experience. The first learned Jews of Prague belonged to the Tosafists of Western Europe, who, after Rashi and his descendants, continued working on “additions” (Tosafot, or metacommentaries) to the inherited Talmud commentaries. They all were a part of a concatenation of schools stretching from Paris and Troyes through Speyer, Worms, and Regensburg to Prague and Vienna. By 1200, Jewish scholarship was firmly established in Prague, even before the Old New School was built; Isaac ben Jacob-ha Laban, Isaac ben Mordechai, and Abraham ben Azriel, author of Arugat ha-Bosem (The Spice Garden), a scholarly encyclopedia of Jewish knowledge, were well known to their colleagues in France and Germany; intellectual contact between the schools of Regensburg and Prague was particularly close.
One of the renowned Tosafists of the European community was Isaac ben Moses, whose restless life is not easy to reconstruct. We know that he was born in Bohemia or Prague and spent much of his youth in Bohemia (I am following Roman Jakobson’s biographical sketch), studied with famous Prague scholars, above all Abraham ben Azriel, but, being very poor, moved around the Tosafists’ schools, continued to study in Rhenish communities and in Paris, spent a good deal of time in Regensburg and Würzburg, and returned to Prague, where he possibly did some teaching; when a number of Otakar’s officials moved to Vienna, he moved there too, and taught and died there in the 1250s. He was an international scholar who enjoyed the privilege of studying with the most erudite Tosafists of his time; he conceived of his major work, Or Zaru’a (Light Sown), a compendium of legal comments that is in effect a rich encyclopedia of Jewish life, before 1224 and was still working on it in the mid-1240s.
Medieval Tosafists asserted the tradition of authority and yet questioned interpretative legacies in a continuous sequence of assumptions and arguments. Later Tosafists, among them scholars of the Prague school, were particularly concerned with the hermeneutic process of developing legal interpretations which, in turn, were to be questioned by other interpretations; but if asked about a specific legal problem they did not hesitate to state their judgment unequivocally. Isaac ben Moses’s Or Zaru’a concentrates, in its first part, on rules of purity and impurity, the temple service, and marriage and divorce; the second part deals with feast and holy days, and the third and fourth with questions of civil and criminal law. On rare occasions, as for instance in the introduction, Isaac ben Moses indulges in theological speculations, uses gematria, a cryptic way of dealing with letter combinations, and tells us a spectral story (a dead man appears, with flowers picked in paradise, at the entrance of the synagogue and tells people about the beyond), but these motifs and ideas merely confirm that he studied loyally with Rabbi Jehuda-he-Hasid of Regensburg, a scholar of speculative and ascetic inclinations, and imported what he had learned there to Prague. It may be more characteristic of the peaceful epoch in Bohemian-Jewish experience that Isaac ben Moses felt justified in deciding that it was permitted to sell weapons to Christian soldiers because they defended and did not kill Jews (he might have been thinking of the soldiers of the Pfemyslids); “and if they go to fight in other countries, they do so to defend us against our enemies so that the enemy cannot invade our homeland. It is legal for us to sell weapons to our soldiers, for they want to protect us, and it is possible to assume that they are not going to kill Jews” in those other countries. Elsewhere, in response to a question about marriage laws, Isaac ben Moses can be harsh, utterly rejecting more lenient views, as in the case of a girl baptized by force during the Frankfurt pogroms of 1241 who had been promised in marriage but, after what happens, is abandoned by her husband-to-be, who marries another woman and refuses to divorce when the girl returns to the religion of her forefathers. Three rabbis had suggested that the man should divorce and fulfill his first promise, but Isaac ben Moses strongly responded that forced baptism amounted to a kind of rape and the man was not bound to divorce in order to marry his unfortunate fiancée.
The Pemyslid and Czech loyalties of Isaac ben Moses are a matter not of speculation but of fascinating philological evidence which has been discussed for nearly a hundred and fifty years now. When speaking of Bohemia and the Czech language (or perhaps other West Slavic languages), Isaac ben Moses and other Tosafists of his time use the terms “Canaan” and “Canaanite”; he proudly speaks of “our kingdom of Canaan” and “Canaanite,” and Czech glosses, together with a few French and German words, are numerous in his manuscript. Abraham ben Azriel used “Canaanite,” or Czech, examples to explicate different questions of grammar and syntax, and Isaac ben Moses, in his glosses on terms of rabbinical Hebrew, prefers to cite things of daily life, for instance led (ice), blecha (flea), jahody (berries), or motouz (thread). In one of his most brilliant essays Roman Jakobson has suggested that these Czech glosses belong among the earliest traces of the Czech vernacular in written literature, but it is more difficult to accept his more general conclusion that the “Canaanite” glosses offer incontrovertible proof that the Prague Jews had adopted the Czech vernacular as their idiom of communication within their town, whatever language they used earlier or later. I fully understand the reasons why Jakobson, writing during World War II, wished to argue against older German-Jewish scholars who were infected, he thought, by what he rather hastily called Pan-German ideas and therefore could not imagine Prague Jews as early speakers of Czech. But it is a dubious assumption that continued use of Jewish-German, or daitch, a medieval German idiom much enriched by Hebrew (only later called Yiddish), binds fourteenth-century Jewish speakers to a later Germany. It is another question entirely whether Jakobson
’s argument was not really directed against Czech nationalists, who always very much disliked the idea that Yiddish, in its early shape, was spoken in Slavic Prague. The Pemyslid dynasty was Christian and Czech, but their state was not so entirely, at least not in the sense of later nationalists who cultivated ideas of exclusion and “cleansing.” Learned glosses are one thing, the idiom(s) actually spoken within a community another, and I am not fearful of the idea of Prague Jews, learned in sacred Hebrew, speaking daitch or Czech or any language they wished in a town where many idioms were heard and many cultures thrived.
Czech Saints, Italian Rhetoricians, and German Poets
The real, not fictional, medieval women whose names and distinct lives have been preserved in the history of Prague are all of the Pemyslid family and deeply committed to the spirit of the church. Ludmila educated Duke Václav in the tradition of the Slavic priests who had baptized her; Princess Mlada, sister of Boleslav I, established a Benedictine convent at Prague Castle (after 973) and served as its first abbess; Princess Anežka (Agnes), sister of King Václav I and aunt of Otakar II, moves both in pious legends and on the sober scene of history (the life and death of Blažena, allegedly her sister and suspected of heresy in the Italian Inquisition, is another story entirely).
Anežka, born in 1211, was the third and youngest of King Pemysl Otakar I’s daughters from his second marriage, and from early on her father used her as a pawn in traditional intrigues about political betrothals and prearranged diplomatic marriages, projected and canceled as the power plays required. When she was three years old, she was promised to a Silesian prince; as a girl she was sent to the Cistercian convent at Trebnitz (now Polish), but when her fiancé died, she was returned to her family and then farmed out again for nearly two years to the Bohemian convent at Doxany, where she learned how to read. (The magnificent Book of Hours which she used there is now in the Morgan Library in New York.) Again, her father called her back because ten-year-old Heinrich, son of Emperor Frederick II, was to be her next suitor; after this convent childhood, she was sent to the Babenbergs’ lively court at Vienna to be educated as queen or perhaps empress. The trouble was that her gracious host, Duke Leopold VI, in the best Viennese manner elegantly undercut her father’s plans and married off his own daughter Margarete to Heinrich; the enraged king of Bohemia wanted to attack Vienna, and Anežka had to come home again. The next suitor-to-be was Henry III, king of England (the negotiations dragged on for years, mostly about the dowry); when Emperor Frederick II himself wanted to marry Anežka, first in 1228 and then again in 1231, she turned him down (Pope Gregory IX may have strengthened her resolve).
