Abstract
Assessing the phenomenon of the First Czechoslovak Republic from any point of view is not easy. On the one hand, you must avoid a view of adoration while on the other not succumb to the temptation of ahistorical criticism, i.e., looking at the socio-political reality of that time through the prism of the present.
In preparing this work, I believed the best way to get at the essence of this remarkable and still inspiring state was synchronous comparative analysis. In the views of the First Republic passed on by surviving Jews, we found both illusion and sober rationalism.
This is entirely understandable. Most of the survivors experienced their childhood during the First Czechoslovak Republic, surrounded by a loving and helping family that was entirely or in large part murdered during the war.
The time before the Shoah was thus necessarily bathed in the sun, and then replaced by profound darkness. However, the older survivors also noted the imperfections of the First Republic, its social problems and, of course, latent anti-Semitism.
We would certainly not be able to apply the currently widespread narrative of a model-democratic First Republic to the first raw years after the war. It is quite logical that a newly-born state in the middle of an extremely turbulent Central Europe could not cope with the anti-Semitic wave that gradually hit all of Europe.
This wave had its origins as far back as in 1916, when stereotypes about the devastating migration of Jews from the East ("Ostjudengefahr") pervaded Europe. Especially in the final months of the war, when almost everyone was longing for peace, people still had notions that Jews were the ones who had unleashed the war and the Bolshevik revolution (1917) and had benefited from them.
After the war, stereotypes appeared in nation states portraying Jews as unreliable citizens who betrayed the Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, Austrian, German or Romanian interests during and after the war. The allegedly devastating Jewish influence was also associated with post-war shortages and high prices, housing shortages, unemployment, unprecedented poverty and epidemics.
Although the dawn of the Republic had not yet been burdened by pogroms, on the 3rd and 4th of December, 1918, there was an outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred in Holešov. The end of 1918 and May and September of 1919 were similarly turbulent.
Pogroms also broke out in Central and Western Slovakia. This series of hostility, provoked and fueled mainly by the agrarian and national democratic press of that time, did not end until the Prague November pogrom in 1920.
However, even more than thirty years after the Velvet Revolution (1989), many historians do not mention these upheavals at all, or consider them merely to be spontaneous actions taken by the populace against high prices and moneylenders. One aspect particular to Czechoslovak society was the speed in which anti-Semitism in the Czech lands was suppressed.
Once the post-war situation calmed down, Czech Jews were on the same footing as their non-Jewish fellow citizens. More complicated, however, was the situation in Slovakia, where the law was often violated during the first years of the state's existence.
Of course, this would decontextualize the narrative of an essentially democratic Czech (Czechoslovak) nation. The explanation for the suppression of anti-Semitism had to be sought in the foreign policy position of Czechoslovakia and its dependence on the Allies, something of which the sober political representation was well aware.
Pre-war production levels were reached relatively quickly (1923), while neighboring countries were still reeling from inflation. Confident Czechoslovakia, claiming a place among the victorious nations, could thus enjoy two decades of relative happiness, albeit with a number of nationalist and social swings, during which anti-Semitism escalated again.
Despite these setbacks, the First Republic maintained a democratic regime within its borders until its bitter end in September 1938. The foreign policy efforts of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and (from 1935) President, Edvard Beneš, were also an extraordinary achievement, but they could not prevent the fall of democratic Europe.
Marginal anti-Jewish hatred that was never enshrined in legislation has put Czechoslovakia in a positive light in the view of contemporary historiographers. According to them, among the nation-states created on the ruins of Austria-Hungary, it was Czechoslovakia that took the most liberal attitude towards the Jewish population.
Above all, however, it must be stated that this relationship was formed within a certain legislative framework, different from the frameworks of other states created on the ruins of both the Austrian and Hungarian monarchies. The Czechoslovak state distanced itself from the nationalist Czech-German and Czech attempts to introduce numerus clausus, attempts that repeatedly sprang up during the First Republic.
The recognition of Jewish nationality in 1921 was also unprecedented, although it had its pragmatic basis (a numerical weakening of the German and Hungarian minorities), along with the acceptance by many authorities of a number of political and cultural demands of the Czechoslovak Zionist movement (with the exception of specific minorities). Of course, like any human endeavor, the First Republic had a number of shortcomings.
Nevertheless, despite the deteriorating economic, social and political situation in connection with the global economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it remained a state that tolerated cultural/political emigration from Germany and Austria. Nationalism and its component, anti-Semitism, only fully escalated during the Second Republic, when anti-Semitic legislation also reached a high level of sophistication.
The First Republic was thus a time of intense hope full of optimism from the builders of a new state, which was to surpass old Austria in all respects. At the same time, however, it gradually became a time of social and political concern.
The book, however, has not only tried to describe where the structured Jewish minority in the Czech lands started out at the beginning of this new state, but also how the community itself perceived these socio-political conditions. In addition to the voice of prominent Czech Jews, we have also documented the voices of Shoah survivors who remembered Czechoslovakia after World War II.
In general, and particularly after the war, Czechoslovakia stood out only after a comparison with the events in other nation-states. The book devoted much space to the national Jewish identity of Zionists and the assimilating identity of Czech Jews.
After the establishment of Czechoslovakia, concerns prevailed among those who preferred the German (or Hungarian) language and culture. In addition, they saw no progress in the new state as opposed to the monarchy, and their sincere Austrianism and respect for the monarch as the supposed protector of the Jews became a mental burden in the new Europe.
Moreover, the newborn state turned to the policies of victorious France and England. The proper relations quickly established with Germany and Austria resulted from the political and economic pragmatism of the Czechoslovak political leaders, not from any continuation of former ties with Germany.
On the contrary. The motto of the young republic was to de-Austrify and democratize.
Masaryk was at first viewed by German-Jewish society as a traitor to the homeland. It was only later that his image was seen in a more positive light looking back on the Hilsner Affair (1899-1900).
One of the greatest achievements of young Czechoslovakia thus became the fact that Austro-German (pro-Hungarian) Jews eventually accepted the state as their own, despite finding themselves within borders that did not express their own free will. On the other hand, the Zionist movement, which understood Jews as a nation, established a successful dialogue with the future Czechoslovak political representation before the end of the First World War, which continued successfully even after the establishment of the state.
Despite their high loyalty to the monarchy on the eve of the war and certainly under the influence of growing anti-Semitism, the Zionists adopted the Czech narrative of a rotten, immoral and militaristic Austria. Austria was not only to blame for everything in the Czech Republic, but also for all the Jewish misfortune when it placed its Jewish citizens among hostile Czechs and Germans.
Despite sharp criticism of all anti-Semitic excesses, from the beginning the Zionist movement presented itself and behaved as a movement loyal to the state. In the Czech-German dispute they were pro-Czech, and in the 1930s unconditionally supported Czechoslovak democracy.
The fact that only a minority of young nationally conscious Jews left for the Zionist homeland (Palestine) also contributed to this, while other Zionists sought to connect their Czechoslovak home with the future Jewish state. Although they supported it materially, they did not consider relocating to Palestine.
Compared to the Zionist movement, the rival Czech-Jewish movement welcomed the new state with great hopes that were dashed by a wave of post-war pogroms, which allegedly imprinted the Republic with an Oriental character (!). Even after the First World War, the loyal Czech-Jewish representation steadfastly rejected the international protection of Czechoslovak Jews.
Nevertheless, in the first months after the coup, the prevailing view among the Czech-Jews, as they began to call themselves, was that their homeland was the Czech lands, not the entire territory of the new state.