Lectures, murder, and a phony terrorist: managing “Jewish power and danger” in 1960s communist Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The Slánský Affair of 1952 introduced a specific matrix of ideas about Jewish power and the danger that Jews posed to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. These ideas, with roots in earlier discourses, conditioned Jewish–state relations for decades, providing party-state officials and even Jewish functionaries with a language for articulating demands of the government and a framework for understanding the place of Jewish citizens in the socialist nation. Inter- and intra-ministerial conflicts reveal that differences in purview and philosophy often led officials to prioritise different aspects of the Jewish power–danger matrix. The paternalistic responsibility to protect domestic Jewry from the negative influences of foreign “Zionists” frequently clashed with the objective of appeasing Western Jewry, whose influence in the US Czechoslovak communists overestimated. While the latter consideration – and others – often moved the Ministry of Culture to advocate in favour of the Czechoslovak Jewish communities, the former concern – taken remarkably seriously – led the secret police to oppose them at every turn, often in the most conspiratorial of ways. To that end, this article introduces new information and perspective on the murder of Charles Jordan in 1967 and its repercussions and political uses in the years that followed.