Early Modern Pinkassim as a Source for the Study of the Governance and Internal Politics of the Jewish Communities in Bohemia and Moravia: Project Presentation

In this paper, two members of the research team would like to present an ongoing project focused on a group of communal pinkassim from Early Modern Bohemia. Starting in January 2017, our project will be financed for three years by the Research Grant Agency of the Czech Republic. We intend to examine, analyze and interpret a group of these official record-books which were kept by various bodies of authority of the Jewish communities. The group under examination consists of the oldest (17^th- to 18^th-century) pinkassim from Bohemia kept in the Archives of the Jewish Museum in Prague and State Regional Archives in Kolín: record books of five of the Prague synagogues (Klausen, Zigeuner, Pinkas, Grossenhof and Hoch) and community and synagogue record books from Golčův Jeníkov, Nové Sedliště, Volyně and Kolín. The Bohemian pinkassim have never been systematically studied and they are almost absent from the master-narrative of the history of the Czech Jews, although they offer unique insights into Jewish everyday life, religious practice, economy etc. We intend to present the results of our preliminary investigation of the corpus of the Bohemian pinkassim, delineate the main areas of research of Jewish culture for which the pinkassim are relevant and theorize the “pinkas” in the context of the Jewish book-culture. Our project as well as the proposed paper intend to attract the attention of more historians to these important sources.