The unforeseen consequences of cultural resistance: Haskalah and state-mandated reform in the Bohemian lands

Abstract

This article seeks to interrogate the nature of Jewish cultural transformation in the Bohemian lands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What constellation of factors – involving absolutist intentions and reforms, the political culture of the imperial bureaucracy, rabbinic culture and institutions, and urban Jewish practices and aspirations – combined to produce a distinctively ‘Bohemian’ Haskalah? And how did conservative Jewish leaders express resistance to new patterns of behaviour and thought – and with what results? Prague and the Bohemian lands provide a kind of historical laboratory in which to observe both the power and the limits of traditional Jewish authority and of conservative responses to transformative change. Prague’s was not the reactionary conservatism of Hatam Sofer’s Hungary; its resistance operated, rather, as a succession of brakes on the pace and extent of change, an effort to maintain a strict separation between educational streams without standing in the way of state-mandated progress, an endeavour to marry Jewish Enlightenment to halakhic observance and respect for rabbinic authority. Ultimately, however, the conservative Jewish leadership was powerless to prevent far-reaching social change and significant transformations in the cultural tastes of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry. And its efforts to lay down a cordon sanitaire separating Jewish learning from secular education could not be long maintained.