MAKING JEWS AT HOME JEWISH NATIONALISM IN THE BOHEMIAN LANDS, 1918-1938 By Tatjana Lichtenstein A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Tatjana Lichtenstein (2009) 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 ii 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. iii Acknowledgements At the end of this particular journey, it is a pleasure to be able to thank the many people and institutions that I am indebted to. My first thanks go to my dissertation advisor Derek J. Penslar. From the outset, his encouragement and expectations have shaped this project. His patience, empathy, warmth, and generosity provided solid ground for me in what was at times a challenging process. I was also fortunate to have a dissertation committee who never tired of being supportive and encouraging, offering up more of their time than I could ever have hoped for. To Lynne Viola, Paul R. Magocsi, and Doris L. Bergen, I offer up my most sincere thanks. Hillel J. Kieval kindly agreed to serve as the project’s external appraiser and I am grateful for his time and support. The University of Toronto, in particular its Jewish Studies Program, has generously supported this project. I have had the honour of receiving a Connaught Scholarship; the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Fellowship in Jewish Studies; the Naim S. Mahlab Graduate Scholarship; the Liebe Sharon Wilensky Lesk Graduate Scholarship in Jewish Studies; and the Arthur Vaile Memorial Graduate Prize in Jewish Studies. My project was further supported by a grant from the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University. In the early stages of my research, the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture hosted me in Leipzig. I would also like to thank the archivists and librarians who helped me navigate their collections. In Prague, I am grateful to Alena Jellinková and Vlastimila Hamačková of the Jewish Museum in Prague; Vlasta Měšťánková, Vladimír Waage, and Jiří Křesťan of the National Archives; Jindřiška Baušteinová of the National Library; and Vojtech Scheinost of the Tyrš Museum for Physical Education and Sport. The staff at the periodical section at the iv University Library in Olomouc provided an excellent working environment. From the early stages of this project, Kateřina Čapková provided invaluable advice and encouragement. In Israel, Roni Dror of the Joseph Yekutieli Maccabi Sports Archive provided me with exceptional working conditions. I am also grateful to Rochelle Rubinstein at the Central Zionist Archives for her advice. Martin J. Wein shared generously his knowledge of the CZA collections. In New York, I would like to thank the staff at the Leo Baeck Institute. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová kindly shared her work with me. Back in Toronto, my well-being was sustained by my colleague and friend Steve Jobbitt to whom I am grateful for his friendship and intellectual generosity. Veronika Ambros, Kate Bell, Barbara Di Lella, Marion Harris, Valerie Hebert, Ina Rosen, Lisa Todd, Ruti Ungar, Petrine Kjær Wolfsberg, and Wendy and David Ernst have provided invaluable intellectual and human support. I could never have completed this project without the support of my parents Olga and Jiří Lichtenstein. As far back as I can remember, they have encouraged me to pursue my interest in history even when it took me far away from them and when it came at the price of a more permanent physical distance between us. While their immigrant experience might have equipped them to understand better the choices I have made, I know that, at times, that same experience makes our separation even more painful. Nevertheless, they have taken a great interest in my work. Over the last few years, my father has worked tirelessly in libraries and archives in Prague retrieving and cataloguing materials for this dissertation. I am grateful to them for their support. Finally, I want to thank my partner Chris Ernst. If it wasn’t for his intellectual curiosity and rigor, his willingness to spend countless hours discussing ideas and sentence v structures, and to fill in for me on Huxley’s walks, I would not have been able to complete this project. Over the past years, our companionship has sustained me and I am grateful to him for his love and patience. vi Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vii Introduction Making Jews at Home 1 Chapter 1 Neutral Loyalty: The Making of an Alliance between Jews and Czechs in New Europe 18 Chapter 2 Mapping Jews: Statistics, Social Science, and the Construction of Czechoslovak Jewry 72 Chapter 3 Crisis and Renewal: The Modernization of Jewish Communities in the Interwar Years 124 Chapter 4 Josefov or Zion? Zionism as Diaspora Nationalism 186 Chapter 5 Makabi in Czechoslovakia: Sport as a Rite of Citizenship 236 Conclusion 301 Bibliography 306 vii Introduction Making Jews at Home In today’s Prague, tourists and locals eager to explore the city’s Jewish past trek through the synagogues and streets of Josefov in the inner city. Many also venture further afield to the Strašnice neighbourhood to visit Franz Kafka’s grave in the New Jewish Cemetery. Next to the cemetery is another area, known as Hagibor. Besides a Jewish retirement home, little remains to suggest to the visitor that this was once a Jewish space. The name Hagibor has insinuated itself into the city’s topography, all but divested of its Jewish origins. The area is also home to a tennis club and Radio Free Europe’s new headquarters, housed in an edifice known in Czech as “Hagibor Office Building.” However, the fact that Hagibor is Hebrew for “the hero” escapes most, as does the history of the area’s Jewish institutions. During World War II, the sporting ground served as an internment camp for Jews married to non- Jews, as well as a site for forced labour. Before that it was used as a playground for Jewish children excluded from the city’s public spaces by German racial laws. Its origin as a Jewish space, however, dates back before the war to the early 1920s, when Hagibor was synonymous with the well-known Jewish nationalist sports club, Hagibor Praha/Prag. Hagibor was part of a network of Jewish nationalist institutions that developed in the Bohemian Lands, and across the rest of Czechoslovakia, in the interwar years. Their emergence signalled the arrival of Jewish nationalism as a cultural and political force in Jewish life. Indeed, in the Bohemian Lands, the Zionist movement cultivated a substantial infrastructure of social, cultural, and political institutions that balanced an attachment to a 1 2 Jewish homeland in Palestine with a strong commitment to the regeneration of Jewish national life in the Diaspora. This study explores the Zionist nation building project in the Bohemian Lands. National communities had to be constructed. Zionists, like other nation makers, worked hard to create and maintain institutions, such as schools and sports clubs—a stateless nation’s ‘territory’—through which the Jewish nation was to come to life. These were strategies for mass mobilization that Jewish activists shared with other minority activists in East Central Europe. The dissertation examines Jewish nationalists’ efforts to make Jews at home in Czechoslovakia, an undertaking that involved both the creation of a Jewish nation and making Jews comfortable in the new state. It does so 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.