Popularizing knowledge, censoring opinion? The access to print in the Bohemian Lands (1770–1815)

Abstract

In the Habsburg Empire, members of both ‘religions of the book’ – Christians and Jews – gained increased access to the printed word towards the end of the eighteenth century. This paper examines the period between the Seven Years War and the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, focusing on the role the printed word began to play in the Bohemian Lands, especially Prague, and how print culture affected mainly the Christian majority on its way to a modern secular society. It first examines the enormous meaning the printed word had for both Christianity and Judaism and the ways in which the increasing production and consumption of printed texts from about 1770 also implied damaging the ‘aura’ of the Scripture and its traditional custodians. It then sketches the factors and institutions responsible for the growth of an enlightened reading public. The optimistic discourse that circulated in bookshops, libraries, newspapers, reading circles and so on supported a rational, non-exclusive consensus even on quite controversial questions such as the integration of the Jews into the self-representation of society and its history. However, it is also argued on the basis of a previously unknown anti-Jewish pamphlet (1812) from Prague that this development was frustrated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the weak impact of the Enlightenment, by the ‘national defeat’ in the wars against France and by economic modernization, state bankruptcy and the resulting existential insecurity. Not only state authorities, but also the exponents of the Enlightenment and the Haskalah themselves seem to have changed their view of the public sphere: it came to represent not just a marketplace of progressive ideas but, on the contrary, a growing threat to peaceful political, social and ethnic relations.