by Peter Demetz
The young readers of Moses Mendelssohn were inevitably philosophical adversaries of the mystical believers, and yet their principal difficulties were with the older generation of traditionalists, or their fathers. In an age of advancing secular education, many of that generation feared for the legacy of Judaism and yet much admired their learned sons, who studied medicine, theology, and philosophy, wrote and published poems and essays in different languages, and declared that the Prague Jews, a nation among other nations, should know more about their neighbors and about the gentile world. It was the renowned Jeitteles family who came to support these innovative Enlightenment ideas more strongly than any other. Jonas Jeitteles went to study medicine at Halle and Leipzig, even before Joseph II’s patents of tolerance, and as chief physician of the community defended vaccination against smallpox, inoculating four hundred patients, including his own daughter, with remarkable success. His older son, Baruch, published a timely pamphlet against the Frankists as well as treatises on Moses Mendelssohn in Hebrew and in German, but it was Baruch’s son Ignaz, whom the historian Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein has called “the first modern Prague Jew.”
Ignaz Jeitteles was educated in Prague’s best secular schools and at the university and, versatile in his languages, contributed to the short-lived Prague journal Jüdisch-Deutsche Monatsschrift (Jewish-German Monthly, 1802), in which German texts were printed in Hebrew letters, following the example of Moses Mendelssohn, and published after 1806 in the Dessau journal Sulamith (German, published in German lettering). Going to Vienna, he made a good deal of money in commerce and continued there to write on history, statistics, and philosophy; later in life, when he parted ways with Judaism, he edited his famous Ästhetisches Lexikon (1835—37); in 1838 he was honored by the University of Jena with a doctorate in philosophy. The story of his life and his writings, which were never collected, symbolically reflects the career of many Jewish Prague and Bohemian writers who, whether they remained loyal to their religion or not, moved from the narrow streets of their hometown (increasingly involved in German-Czech conflicts) to imperial and liberal Vienna, at least until the time when Dr. Karl Lueger, a selective anti-Semite, long opposed by the emperor, took over municipal politics there. By the late 1880s, Prague’s intellectual Jewish migration shifted to Berlin, metropolis of publishing, lively stock exchange of new ideas, and dominated by the liberal Freisinnige Partei, strong in the city government.
Perhaps of greater importance, the changing writing practices of Ignaz Jeitteles and his friends reveal an age of cultural transitions in which Prague’s Jewish-German literature, so famous later, begins hesitatingly to form itself; even before the revolution of 1848, it constituted a first body of writings that were continued for more than three generations. A radical process of transformation, set into motion by Joseph II’s policies and Prague’s students of Moses Mendelssohn, accelerated in 1867 when Bohemian Jews were on the way to full citizenship in the Austrian monarchy, and it affected the languages of communication used inside the Jewish community and outside it. It also changed the way in which literary and scholarly communications appeared in print. To simplify one of the most complex Central European linguistic questions, it is probably appropriate to say that in eighteenth-century Prague, and long before, the language of communal and intimate communication among Jews was the old “Jewish-German” (later a branch of Yiddish), brought by Ashkenazi Jews from medieval western and southern Germany and over the passing centuries enriched by Hebrew, Latin, and ultimately Czech elements; the language of scholarship and ritual was Hebrew, accessible to educated males, while the underprivileged women, if they wanted to read, had to do with Jewish-German texts printed in an alphabet of simplified Hebrew letters (often called Weiberdeutsch, or Women’s German, typography).
Young early-nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals in Prague, following the examples of Moses Mendelssohn, developed a new practice in writing in eighteenth-century literary High German printed in Hebrew letters (for the learned elite), while the less privileged continued to read Jewish-German in Weiberdeutsch lettering, which Moses Mendelssohn and later Zionists considered undignified. Transition was not easy; and in the 1790s Isaac Landau argued that it was in the essential interest of the Enlightenment to reach out for a wider audience and to continue publishing Jewish-German texts printed in the traditional way. Yet the young students of the Enlightenment insisted on literary German (as written in Leipzig and Berlin) printed in Hebrew typography; only slowly did they begin to write in German and print in German letters. Ignaz Jeitteles’s poem in praise of Emperor Franz I, written and printed in German in Prague in 1804 by the publisher Gottlieb Haase, may have been the first signal of what linguistic choices were to be made in the future; and the Galerie der Sippurim (Gallery of the Sippurim), an anthology of stories incorporating old Prague tales, was written by Jewish writers of the 1840s and first published by Wolf Pascheles in 1847. They amply documented that, to a new group of Prague Jewish readers, German texts printed in German had become more easily accessible; Hebrew remained the idiom of ritual, and Jewish-German receded even among the privileged members of the community. Subsequent editions of the Sippurim indicate by their increasing number of annotations of Hebrew and Yiddish terms that the new reader, enchanted by German Bildung, was quietly losing an understanding of the older idioms.
There was at least one young Prague Jew, however, Siegfried Kapper, who decided to write and publish his poetry in Czech (1846), but Czech liberal opinion did not cherish the idea of a Jew appropriating Czech for poetic purposes. A German literature written by Jews was continuously developing, but Czech distrust of “Germanizing” Jews delayed the full emergence of a Jewish-Czech literature for at least a generation, if not more.
Stormy Interlude: The Strikes of 1844
There are many reasons why industrialization developed in Prague so slowly. The nobles who owned land, forests, and money preferred to invest in coal, iron, and, somewhat later, sugar refineries in the countryside; the middle classes of any language usually lacked capital and interest in technological innovations; and the Jewish entrepreneurs, essential to Prague’s industrialization, at least until 1848 faced too many rules, prohibitions, and regulations. In industrial production, Prague was definitely behind the German areas of northern Bohemia (which quickly made up for the lost Silesian textile plants) or the leading city of Moravia, Brno (Brünn), infamous as the Manchester of the Hapsburg monarchy. By 1840, Brno had at least 10,000 workers out of 45,000 inhabitants (a century later, when the Nazis came, there still existed in Brno a genuine German proletariat of the left); Prague had only 5,000, at most, out of more than 100,000 citizens. As early as 1791, when the first industrial exhibition was held in Prague to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II, the silks of Joachim Lederer and the fashionable corsets of Messrs. Popper and Fränkel received special awards; Jewish entrepreneurs invested in the cottonprinting industry, which was freed of guild restrictions early, or took over smaller firms ruined by foreign competition. By 1830, two steam engines were functioning in Prague’s suburbs, and two years later the first machines to print cotton. But famous travelers usually ignored these new factories in Karlin, Libe, and Smichov. At about the same time, the English engineer Edward Thomas established, at the fringes of Libe, the first machine shop to provide or to repair steam engines for the local market. Technology began to invade towns and communications; early in the 1830s, the steamer Bohemia, first of its kind and built by the industrialist Vojtch (Adalbert) Lanna and the English John Andrews, chugged north along the Vltava River, and people began to discuss the opening of a railway line connecting Prague and Vienna via Olomouc. It was opened in 1845, and was of some importance in the revolutionary events three years later.
The first riots and strikes of working people in Prague in the summer of 1844 were directed against the mostly Jewish early industrialists, and they combined a Chartist rage against the new machines with traditional anti-Semitism. Social historians discuss these events
with much discretion; the Prague proletariat does not appear in Hegelian splendor. These riots were sudden explosions of desperate anger; they were triggered on June 15, in the mill yard of Porges and Sons, where it was announced without warning that (because of the efficiency of the new printing presses) wages would be lowered. Over the weekend, the workers promptly elected a delegation of ten, which presented their demands that the old wages be restituted and work proceed without the machines; and when the demands were turned down, they were repeated a day later. The strike was led by one Josef Ulbrich (who had earlier organized a mutual-aid association among his friends), rapidly spread to five other factories, all owned by Jews, and on June 18 the strikers systematically smashed machines at the Porges, Epstein, Brandeis, and Dormitzer works. The army moved in when the strikers demonstrated at the residence of the imperial governor, and when the working people marched to the Old Town to pillage Jewish shops and to attack the merchants, they were dispersed by troops, not a shot being fired (yet). On June 24, over five hundred cotton printers were arrested and let go later, possibly because the magistrate did not want the riot to spread.
The situation was unstable; 20,000 workers employed to complete the eastern branch of the railway line to Olomouc had difficulties with the subcontractors and foremen, who submitted false reports that reduced wages. In early July a group of brickyard and construction workers rioted at the Karlín Viaduct demanding higher pay. They were immediately transferred to other work sites, but they came back on Monday, marching together with other workers from down the line, one thousand strong, and on July 8 reached Libe at the Hospital Gate, where army grenadiers blocked their path. The men tried to push their way through the gate, bricks were thrown at the soldiers, who nervously opened fire (mostly into the air but hitting onlookers in the windows of nearby houses). Five people were killed, including a little girl in the embrace of her nurse, eleven soldiers were wounded, and a troop of hussars cleared the gate by evening. Two days of anti-Jewish rioting in the Old Town followed, and General Alfred Prince Windischgrätz, in charge of the Prague military, had his chance to show that he was ready to suppress disorder by force. Four years later his artillery was to bombard Prague and defeat the revolution.
Revolution and Counterrevolution: 1848-49
Early in January 1848, spring expectations stirred the wintry Prague air. Prominent nobility met in their salons in the Minor Town, and, across the river, young law and medical students, budding philosophers, and a few radical artisans huddled together in the usual pubs to drink beer and to develop plans for great changes, especially at Petr Faster’s inn on what was later called Wenceslas Square. Elsewhere, at the Golden Scale (now 3 Havelská Street), the innkeeper had reserved a small room under the roof for the Repeal Club, whose members sympathized with the Irish opposition to English rule and were fond of new if somewhat confused ideas. In an age of close police surveillance, precise information from restless Italy, Hungary, and France was not easy to come by: the telegraph served the authorities, the new railroad line from Prague to Vienna made a detour overnight, and the only foreign newspaper available to a few subscribers was the mildly liberal Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. At 10 a.m., when coffeehouses were full of people waiting for the latest issue of this Augsburg newspaper (one per coffeehouse), the owner of the place made a dash to the post office in the Minor Town to pick up his copy and hastened back clutching the paper in his hands. Josef Václav Fri, later a young radical, usually set up a chair on the billiard table in his favorite café, U Rytíe (At the Knight), and by 11:30 a.m. read the paper from his elevation to the assembled guests, including informers. News about revolutionary changes in Italy and the demise of the monarchy on February 24 in France reached Prague on February 29; it quickly spread among fashionable people gathered at a masked ball at the Theater of the Estates and from there all over town. There was suddenly much curiosity and hope; supporters of the ancien régime were fearful of how events would affect Vienna, and others felt it was high time to act in some way or other, rather than to talk. Strangely enough, even the opposition of whatever kind looked to Vienna, hoping that the Viennese authorities could be convinced to permit change in an orderly way, and it turned out that in the spring days of 1848 revolutionary Vienna was really far ahead of Prague.
The first initiative was taken by representatives of the Estates, long experienced in watching changes of policy in Vienna, yet by now incapable of pushing innovative demands energetically. A meeting was called by Count Albert Nostitz and Count Friedrich Deym to discuss the possibility of recommending to Vienna that a gathering of the Estates, extended by members of Prague’s patriciate, be called. The petition had to go through channels, of course, never reached the proper people in Vienna, and the Prague citizens did not know for a long time that the nobles had at least tried. It was the hour of the young radicals of the Repeal Club and other discussion groups. On March 8, posters unauthorized by the police appeared all over town admonishing the citizens to shake off their lethargy, to commit themselves to the cause “of a patriotism of intelligence and morality” (a formulation of genius), and to attend, on March 11 at 6 p.m., an open meeting at the St. Wenceslas Bath in the New Town to consider urgent questions of political reform. The organizers of the meeting were mostly young people, but there was also the popular innkeeper Petr Faster, a number of artisans, a tailor and a coppersmith, as well as the gifted writer Karel Sabina, later turned by the police into an informer.
The organizers had diligently worked on a petition of twenty paragraphs to be read at the meeting and then submitted to the emperor. After a long period of political silence, the petition touched on the most urgent and various demands of the moment (freedom of the press and of association, municipal self-rule, an assembly to represent citizens and peasants), with a brave quotation from the French socialist Louis Blanc about the “organization of labor and wages” (the first socialist demand to be heard in Prague). Very little was said about questions of nationality and language, except the rather modest wish that Czech be used in the schools. It was a text noble in spirit yet innocent of legal and administrative sophistication; fully aware of these shortcomings, the young people asked Dr. František August Brauner, a noted liberal who had defended the Polish revolution, to edit it for another scheduled meeting. It was the first step in surrendering radical intentions to a middle-class intelligentsia concerned, above all, with the history of the Bohemian crown and issues of nationality, and it was not the last.
The experienced lawyer Dr. Brauner changed the unruly and rather pragmatic text of the petition into a formal document of historical, national, and liberal aspirations. His revisions demanded the administrative restoration of the Bohemian crown lands, including Moravia and Silesia, a common diet, and the complete equality of the Czech and German nations in all Bohemian schools and offices. Some problems were under-played; peasants were to be freed from serfdom by paying an indemnity to their landowners, but issues of wages and labor were not mentioned at all; a national guard was to be established to protect law, order, and property. While Brauner was busy working on the text, the authorities and the radicals tiptoed around each other, anxious to avoid violence, and on the rainy evening of March 11, about eight hundred people arrived at the appointed place—Czechs and Germans, many young people, and a few police informers. Members of the nobility were distinctly absent; even Brauner, whose text was to be presented, called in sick, and other Czech notables, including the historian Palacký and the journalist Karel Havlíek preferred not to attend; there was not a single woman among the men.
The meeting was presided over by the innkeeper Faster, of the Zlatá Husa (Golden Goose), but actually run by Alois Pravoslav Trojan, a young lawyer with good contacts in Prague industry. The first item on the agenda was a reading of Brauner’s version of the petition, in Czech and then in German: the radicals, to save some of the original demands, suggested changes from the floor, especially about labor and wages. No final vote was taken, but a committee of
twenty was appointed to handle the final version of the petition to be voted upon later. This St. Wenceslas Committee, as it was called, was inclusive rather than all radical. There were shopkeepers and artisans, a liberal Jewish banker, and, for the Repeal Club, the Czech Vilém Gau and the German student Ludwig Ruppert. A prominent lawyer, Dr. Adolf Maria Pinkas, was asked to work on version no. 3. The chair did not want to continue discussions, and by nine o’clock the orderly meeting was over; since it was raining, Prague’s inns and cafés were livelier than ever that evening; police informers handed their reports to the burgomaster, the chief of police, and the governor, Count Rudolf Stadion.
The following days were full of meetings, rumors, and unrest. The St. Wenceslas Committee went into session the very next day, Sunday, March 12, elected Count Deym as president, and entrusted the writing of the ultimate version of the petition to a subcommittee of three, headed by Dr. Pinkas. Workers demonstrated in front of bakeries against the high price of bread, students prepared to hold their own grand meeting, and the burgomaster, eager to sabotage the committee, gathered forty rich and conservative members of the German Casino to present their own counterpetition. They recognized, however, almost immediately, that they would be totally isolated, and since they could not fight the St. Wenceslas Committee, they asked for permission to join it (all too readily granted). By March 14, the radicals had decided that they were going to present the urtext after all rather than the still more diluted and submissive Pinkas version (no. 3), and while discussions about the text were going back and forth, travelers from Vienna arriving on the evening train brought astonishing news about what happened there.
