Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands

This chapter explores Hillel J. Kieval's book, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Kieval's Languages of Community demonstrates that the development of the community of Czech Jews in the period before the First World War was fraught with intense struggles against emerging Czech nationalism. In these interlinked essays, Kieval's primary emphasis is on the way in which the conflicts over language shaped the identities of the Czech Jews—a persuasive emphasis given the centrality of language in the definition of nationalisms in the Habsburg Empire. The fact that German was the primary spoken and written language of urban Jews was a particular irritant to Czech nationalists, who in the nineteenth century were seeking to turn Czech into the language of a new national culture. Like other Jews in the multi-ethnic empire, Czech Jews were caught between the German culture of the regime and the culture of their indigenous environment. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Czech Jewish movement emerged which favoured the adoption of the Czech language and culture. But Kieval argues that this movement had only modest success, which was limited primarily to the abolition of German Jewish schools in the villages.