Languages of Community The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands [Hardcover]

With a keen eye for revealing details, Hillel J. Kieval examines the contours and distinctive features of Jewish experience in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In the Czech lands, Kieval writes, Jews have felt the need constantly to define and articulate the nature of group identity, cultural loyalty, memory, and social cohesiveness, and the period of modernizing absolutism, which began in 1780, brought changes of enormous significance. From that time forward, new relationships with Gentile society and with the culture of the state blurred the traditional outlines of community and individual identity. Kieval navigates skillfully among histories and myths as well as demography, biography, culture, and politics, illuminating the maze of allegiances and alliances that have molded the Jewish experience during these 200 years.

Hillel J. Kievalis Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author ofThe Making of Czech Jewry(1988) andBlood Inscriptions,a forthcoming study of the modern ritual murder trial.

An engaging and highly nuanced portrait of one of European Jewry's most interesting but least known communities. . . . Kieval has a masterful command of a century and a half of Czech Jewish history, which he brings to bear in a sophisticated manner. David Sorkin, author ofMoses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment

Uniformly erudite, yet readable and lively. . . . The book will be widely read not only by historians of modern Jewry but by all those interested in the tortured and difficult path of this part of Europe towards the creation of a plural and civil society. Antony Polonsky, editor ofPolin: Studies in Polish Jewry