Jana Vobecká, Demographic Avant-Garde: Jews in Bohemia Between the Enlightenment and the Shoah

Abstract

In her book, Vobecka covers the demographic experience of the Jewish population of Bohemia for around two-hundred years from roughly the mid-eighteenth century. As the intriguing title suggests, the book utilises what the author considers to be something of a novel concept within demography—namely the notion of an avantgarde. This is set up in the sense that the Jews of Bohemia appear to have been at the very forefront of what would be considered ‘modern’ demographic change— lower mortality, lower fertility, later marriage, higher rates of divorce, even an ‘ageing society’—all well before industrialisation. Chapter Two was invaluable as an introduction to the historical context for those who may be ignorant of Bohemian history, let alone the changing legal, economic and social status of its Jew population. The chapter actually seemed to embrace the challenge of distilling down a good seven centuries worth of the Jewish experience in Bohemia into seventeen pages of text. Of course, while the chapter can only be a cursory overview, but—in conjunction with the following chapter on data sources— it certainly gives the reader the necessary ‘toolkit’ to understand the context of the project at hand and its significance. Chapter One, which outlines the theoretical framework to the study, was especially well written. The intended audience for the book is not only demographers, but also ‘those with a keen interest in social history, the history of Central Europe, Jewish history and modernization’. By outlining the debate of the relevance of the demographic transition as a theory (or as an empirical observation) in tandem with alternative approaches and other attempts with such clarity, Vobecka not only succeeds in inviting scholars from other disciplines into ‘our’ demographic world, but also clearly sets out just why her history of Bohemian Jews is so important to our own understanding of the demographic transition(s). The book is, in principle, a guided walk through the economic, social, and especially demographic ‘lived experience’ of Jews in Bohemia. At first glance, one