Between Integration and Separation: Jewish Urban Spaces in the Bohemian Lands, 1848–1921

Granting of equal civil rights led to a great Jewish migration in the Habsburg monarchy in the second half of the 19th century. New Jewish settlements were established in many towns where Jews were allowed to immigrate only after 1848/1860. Existing Jewish ghettos were declining in number of inhabitants. On the one hand, Jewish migrants strived to cross ghetto borders and to integrate into urban economy, politics, society and culture. On the other hand, they established new communities and new Jewish religious and national institutions in their new home. It is even possible to trace Jewish settlement clusters in these localities which sometimes strikingly remind something like a new Jewish ghetto. Furthermore, old ghettos did not dissolve right after 1848/1860, but continued to exist for a long time. Only after the World War I, the borders of Jewish ghettos in the Bohemian lands faded out.

This lecture focuses on the tension between striving for integration on the one hand and for preserving Jewish identity on the other hand. An analysis based on combination of census data and old maps allows to reconstruct Jewish migration strategies, dynamics of fading out of ghetto borders or creating new Jewish settlement clusters.

Thorough analysis of association membership allows also to recognise different groups within the Jewish minority in the selected towns, especially to identify progressive German-liberals, proponents of orthodoxy and Zionists. This also enables to trace different tendency of these groups to integrate and to acculturate into the urban society or to create Jewish settlement clusters and to isolate inside it like in a new ghetto.