Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (11 page)
Read Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City Online
Authors: Peter Demetz
BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
13.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
In the evening, one of the emperor’s advisers, worried about the investigation, rides through Frankfurt, overhears three young Jewish men discussing the now famous case, and one of the lads, Gumpricht, suggesting that the tin bottle should be cut in half to see if any traces of gold remain. The adviser reports this to the emperor, the litigants are brought to court again, and inside the bottle not only traces of gold but three gold pieces are found. The three evil merchants and the innkeeper are instantly beheaded, and the emperor (asking why, if Jews are so clever, so few of
them live in Prague) showers young Gumpricht with gifts and sends him off to live in Prague. Yet there is another difficulty to overcome. Gumpricht wants to marry, for he has heard about a beautiful girl in Bumsle (or, rather, Jung-Bunzlau/Mladá Boleslav) but, after a marriage is promised and planned, he runs into trouble with an envious imperial adviser who wagers to woo and win the girl for himself and declares the bet a matter of life and death. The father protects the young daughter, but the adviser bribes the “Shabbesgoyte,” the Christian servant girl who works for the family on the Sabbath, and she brings him the daughter’s velvet shoes, with pearls, and tells him about a wart on the girl’s shoulder. At the court, the imperial adviser boasts about the shoes and talks about what else he knows. Then suddenly a young woman dressed like a princess appears and addresses him familiarly in public; he declares that he has never seen her before. But she is no less ingenious than her fiance Gumpricht and asks the adviser how he can know about the wart on her shoulder if he does not know her at all; the man is instantly hanged by order of the emperor. Gumpricht and the young woman marry immediately, the emperor gives them gold and pearls and signs a privilege that enables them and a few friends, and friends of friends, to settle in Prague, build a synagogue, and appoint a rabbi. It is, the commentator writes, a story not of need and loneliness, as is Salomon Kohn’s later (1847) story of Jews coming to Prague from Muscovy, but of ingenuity rewarded, even if much is wrong historically, given that Jews settled in Frankfurt about a hundred years after they had established a community in Prague. It is not chronology that is at stake but a legal claim for an emperor’s privilege.
them live in Prague) showers young Gumpricht with gifts and sends him off to live in Prague. Yet there is another difficulty to overcome. Gumpricht wants to marry, for he has heard about a beautiful girl in Bumsle (or, rather, Jung-Bunzlau/Mladá Boleslav) but, after a marriage is promised and planned, he runs into trouble with an envious imperial adviser who wagers to woo and win the girl for himself and declares the bet a matter of life and death. The father protects the young daughter, but the adviser bribes the “Shabbesgoyte,” the Christian servant girl who works for the family on the Sabbath, and she brings him the daughter’s velvet shoes, with pearls, and tells him about a wart on the girl’s shoulder. At the court, the imperial adviser boasts about the shoes and talks about what else he knows. Then suddenly a young woman dressed like a princess appears and addresses him familiarly in public; he declares that he has never seen her before. But she is no less ingenious than her fiance Gumpricht and asks the adviser how he can know about the wart on her shoulder if he does not know her at all; the man is instantly hanged by order of the emperor. Gumpricht and the young woman marry immediately, the emperor gives them gold and pearls and signs a privilege that enables them and a few friends, and friends of friends, to settle in Prague, build a synagogue, and appoint a rabbi. It is, the commentator writes, a story not of need and loneliness, as is Salomon Kohn’s later (1847) story of Jews coming to Prague from Muscovy, but of ingenuity rewarded, even if much is wrong historically, given that Jews settled in Frankfurt about a hundred years after they had established a community in Prague. It is not chronology that is at stake but a legal claim for an emperor’s privilege.
Later oral tradition may not have been aware of the legal complexities and niceties of early ducal and royal privileges, but the early Jewish community had ample reason to be thankful to King P
emysl Otakar II, whose
Statuta judaeorum
of 1262 clearly defined the legal norms pertaining to Jewish community life. In his father’s and his own time, the Jewish Town and the small Jewish communities in Bohemia enjoyed a moment of peace and intellectual creativity, rare before and after. The
Statuta,
derived from similar documents issued by the Austrian duke Frederick of Babenberg in 1244, fully respects the religious and civil self-administration of the Jewish community and sets forth in exact detail the legal procedures to be followed in their business affairs, essentially consisting of granting cash credit to consumers, including, on certain conditions, the nobility. Jewish civil affairs were to be handled by a Jewish judge, not a Christian town functionary, and appeals were to be directed to the High Chancellor or the king himself. Jews were permitted to transport their dead from place
to place for interment without paying a fee, and if a public official should illegally extort money from them, in the way robbers do, he would be punished by the king. Synagogues were protected by law, and whoever violently entered and vandalized a Jewish cemetery would be sentenced to death and his property forfeited to the royal chamber. Jews were not to be harmed bodily; if a Christian killed a Jew, he would be punished according to the law, again forfeiting his property to the king; if he wounded a Jew, he had to pay to the king twelve measures of gold, to the victim twelve measures of silver and medical expenses; if he attacked a Jew but no blood was spilled, he had to pay four measures of gold to the king and four measures of silver to the victim—if he could not pay, his hand would be cut off
(si vero pecuniam habere non poterit, per detruncacionem manus satisfaciat pro commisso).
emysl Otakar II, whoseStatuta judaeorum
of 1262 clearly defined the legal norms pertaining to Jewish community life. In his father’s and his own time, the Jewish Town and the small Jewish communities in Bohemia enjoyed a moment of peace and intellectual creativity, rare before and after. The
Statuta,
derived from similar documents issued by the Austrian duke Frederick of Babenberg in 1244, fully respects the religious and civil self-administration of the Jewish community and sets forth in exact detail the legal procedures to be followed in their business affairs, essentially consisting of granting cash credit to consumers, including, on certain conditions, the nobility. Jewish civil affairs were to be handled by a Jewish judge, not a Christian town functionary, and appeals were to be directed to the High Chancellor or the king himself. Jews were permitted to transport their dead from place
to place for interment without paying a fee, and if a public official should illegally extort money from them, in the way robbers do, he would be punished by the king. Synagogues were protected by law, and whoever violently entered and vandalized a Jewish cemetery would be sentenced to death and his property forfeited to the royal chamber. Jews were not to be harmed bodily; if a Christian killed a Jew, he would be punished according to the law, again forfeiting his property to the king; if he wounded a Jew, he had to pay to the king twelve measures of gold, to the victim twelve measures of silver and medical expenses; if he attacked a Jew but no blood was spilled, he had to pay four measures of gold to the king and four measures of silver to the victim—if he could not pay, his hand would be cut off
(si vero pecuniam habere non poterit, per detruncacionem manus satisfaciat pro commisso).
Other paragraphs of the
Statuta
regulated the legal and commercial aspects of taking pawns for cash credit, plus interest; while a few commentators suggest that the king was eager to protect this Jewish business in order to be able to extort monies himself more easily, King Otakar cannot be accused of violating his own decree, in contrast to his son Václav II, who readily blackmailed the Jewish community when it was opportune. Jews, the
Statuta
asserted, were permitted to accept any object as security except bloody clothing or church vestments, and Christians were not allowed to force Jews to appear before a court on Jewish holidays. If a Jew was put on trial, whether for commercial or other reasons, it was not sufficient to have only a Christian witness, for Christian and Jewish witnesses were needed; if a Christian accused a Jew of falsely evaluating a pawn, the Jew could clear himself by taking an oath (the wording of which was not prescribed); and if a Jew lost pawns by fire, violence, or robbery, he could clear himself by taking an oath and free himself of future responsibilities.
Statuta
regulated the legal and commercial aspects of taking pawns for cash credit, plus interest; while a few commentators suggest that the king was eager to protect this Jewish business in order to be able to extort monies himself more easily, King Otakar cannot be accused of violating his own decree, in contrast to his son Václav II, who readily blackmailed the Jewish community when it was opportune. Jews, the
Statuta
asserted, were permitted to accept any object as security except bloody clothing or church vestments, and Christians were not allowed to force Jews to appear before a court on Jewish holidays. If a Jew was put on trial, whether for commercial or other reasons, it was not sufficient to have only a Christian witness, for Christian and Jewish witnesses were needed; if a Christian accused a Jew of falsely evaluating a pawn, the Jew could clear himself by taking an oath (the wording of which was not prescribed); and if a Jew lost pawns by fire, violence, or robbery, he could clear himself by taking an oath and free himself of future responsibilities.
It is perhaps most important that Otakar’s
Statuta
firmly defended Jews against blood libel and stated that Jews resident on royal lands could not be accused of using human blood, for, it said, Jews have no use for blood generally ( …
ab omni prorsus sanguine se Judei contineant universi).
Six witnesses, three Christian and three Jewish, would be needed to sustain an accusation of that kind, but if they could not prove their allegation, the Christians would be punished and not without justification. Otakar was judicious in quoting papal opinions about blood libel, but in many practical respects his
Statuta
ran counter to the more severe anti-Jewish policies of the church as defined by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and in the decrees of Cardinal Guido of Lucino, who in 1267 demanded
that they be followed in Vienna and Salzburg, as well as in Prague. Thus in his Jewish policies the king differed from the church hierarchy, whose claims he otherwise fully respected. A scribe who copied the
Statuta
in the sixteenth century added a little note about Otakar, saying, “Either you were a Jew yourself or you had Jewish friends”
(nebo jsi žid byl, a nebos tidy p
áteli jmiti musil).
The same comment was made much later about T. G. Masaryk, first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, when he argued against blood libel and defended his Jewish fellow citizens against a rising tide of anti-Semitism in a series of famous essays in 1899—1900.
Statuta
firmly defended Jews against blood libel and stated that Jews resident on royal lands could not be accused of using human blood, for, it said, Jews have no use for blood generally ( …
ab omni prorsus sanguine se Judei contineant universi).
Six witnesses, three Christian and three Jewish, would be needed to sustain an accusation of that kind, but if they could not prove their allegation, the Christians would be punished and not without justification. Otakar was judicious in quoting papal opinions about blood libel, but in many practical respects his
Statuta
ran counter to the more severe anti-Jewish policies of the church as defined by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and in the decrees of Cardinal Guido of Lucino, who in 1267 demanded
that they be followed in Vienna and Salzburg, as well as in Prague. Thus in his Jewish policies the king differed from the church hierarchy, whose claims he otherwise fully respected. A scribe who copied the
Statuta
in the sixteenth century added a little note about Otakar, saying, “Either you were a Jew yourself or you had Jewish friends”
(nebo jsi žid byl, a nebos tidy p
áteli jmiti musil).The same comment was made much later about T. G. Masaryk, first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, when he argued against blood libel and defended his Jewish fellow citizens against a rising tide of anti-Semitism in a series of famous essays in 1899—1900.
In recent times, the intellectual traditions of the early Prague Jewish community have been rather indiscriminately identified with the speculations of the Kabbalah, but the flowering of Jewish scholarship on Prague in the age of the later P
emyslids, above all Václav I and Otakar II, was characterized by a predominance of lucid legal commentaries of the Talmud, defining the ritual, familial, communal, and economic rules of Jewish experience. The first learned Jews of Prague belonged to the Tosafists of Western Europe, who, after Rashi and his descendants, continued working on “additions” (Tosafot, or metacommentaries) to the inherited Talmud commentaries. They all were a part of a concatenation of schools stretching from Paris and Troyes through Speyer, Worms, and Regensburg to Prague and Vienna. By 1200, Jewish scholarship was firmly established in Prague, even before the Old New School was built; Isaac ben Jacob-ha Laban, Isaac ben Mordechai, and Abraham ben Azriel, author of
Arugat ha-Bosem (The Spice Garden),
a scholarly encyclopedia of Jewish knowledge, were well known to their colleagues in France and Germany; intellectual contact between the schools of Regensburg and Prague was particularly close.
emyslids, above all Václav I and Otakar II, was characterized by a predominance of lucid legal commentaries of the Talmud, defining the ritual, familial, communal, and economic rules of Jewish experience. The first learned Jews of Prague belonged to the Tosafists of Western Europe, who, after Rashi and his descendants, continued working on “additions” (Tosafot, or metacommentaries) to the inherited Talmud commentaries. They all were a part of a concatenation of schools stretching from Paris and Troyes through Speyer, Worms, and Regensburg to Prague and Vienna. By 1200, Jewish scholarship was firmly established in Prague, even before the Old New School was built; Isaac ben Jacob-ha Laban, Isaac ben Mordechai, and Abraham ben Azriel, author ofArugat ha-Bosem (The Spice Garden),
a scholarly encyclopedia of Jewish knowledge, were well known to their colleagues in France and Germany; intellectual contact between the schools of Regensburg and Prague was particularly close.
One of the renowned Tosafists of the European community was Isaac ben Moses, whose restless life is not easy to reconstruct. We know that he was born in Bohemia or Prague and spent much of his youth in Bohemia (I am following Roman Jakobson’s biographical sketch), studied with famous Prague scholars, above all Abraham ben Azriel, but, being very poor, moved around the Tosafists’ schools, continued to study in Rhenish communities and in Paris, spent a good deal of time in Regensburg and Würzburg, and returned to Prague, where he possibly did some teaching; when a number of Otakar’s officials moved to Vienna, he moved there too, and taught and died there in the 1250s. He was an international scholar who enjoyed the privilege of studying with the most erudite Tosafists of his time; he conceived of his major work,
Or Zaru’a (Light Sown),
a compendium of legal comments that is in effect a rich encyclopedia of Jewish life, before 1224 and was still working on it in the mid-1240s.
Or Zaru’a (Light Sown),
a compendium of legal comments that is in effect a rich encyclopedia of Jewish life, before 1224 and was still working on it in the mid-1240s.
Medieval Tosafists asserted the tradition of authority and yet questioned interpretative legacies in a continuous sequence of assumptions and arguments. Later Tosafists, among them scholars of the Prague school, were particularly concerned with the hermeneutic process of developing legal interpretations which, in turn, were to be questioned by other interpretations; but if asked about a specific legal problem they did not hesitate to state their judgment unequivocally. Isaac ben Moses’s
Or Zaru’a
concentrates, in its first part, on rules of purity and impurity, the temple service, and marriage and divorce; the second part deals with feast and holy days, and the third and fourth with questions of civil and criminal law. On rare occasions, as for instance in the introduction, Isaac ben Moses indulges in theological speculations, uses
gematria,
a cryptic way of dealing with letter combinations, and tells us a spectral story (a dead man appears, with flowers picked in paradise, at the entrance of the synagogue and tells people about the beyond), but these motifs and ideas merely confirm that he studied loyally with Rabbi Jehuda-he-Hasid of Regensburg, a scholar of speculative and ascetic inclinations, and imported what he had learned there to Prague. It may be more characteristic of the peaceful epoch in Bohemian-Jewish experience that Isaac ben Moses felt justified in deciding that it was permitted to sell weapons to Christian soldiers because they defended and did not kill Jews (he might have been thinking of the soldiers of the Pfemyslids); “and if they go to fight in other countries, they do so to defend us against our enemies so that the enemy cannot invade our homeland. It is legal for us to sell weapons to our soldiers, for they want to protect us, and it is possible to assume that they are not going to kill Jews” in those other countries. Elsewhere, in response to a question about marriage laws, Isaac ben Moses can be harsh, utterly rejecting more lenient views, as in the case of a girl baptized by force during the Frankfurt pogroms of 1241 who had been promised in marriage but, after what happens, is abandoned by her husband-to-be, who marries another woman and refuses to divorce when the girl returns to the religion of her forefathers. Three rabbis had suggested that the man should divorce and fulfill his first promise, but Isaac ben Moses strongly responded that forced baptism amounted to a kind of rape and the man was not bound to divorce in order to marry his unfortunate fiancée.
Or Zaru’a
concentrates, in its first part, on rules of purity and impurity, the temple service, and marriage and divorce; the second part deals with feast and holy days, and the third and fourth with questions of civil and criminal law. On rare occasions, as for instance in the introduction, Isaac ben Moses indulges in theological speculations, uses
gematria,
a cryptic way of dealing with letter combinations, and tells us a spectral story (a dead man appears, with flowers picked in paradise, at the entrance of the synagogue and tells people about the beyond), but these motifs and ideas merely confirm that he studied loyally with Rabbi Jehuda-he-Hasid of Regensburg, a scholar of speculative and ascetic inclinations, and imported what he had learned there to Prague. It may be more characteristic of the peaceful epoch in Bohemian-Jewish experience that Isaac ben Moses felt justified in deciding that it was permitted to sell weapons to Christian soldiers because they defended and did not kill Jews (he might have been thinking of the soldiers of the Pfemyslids); “and if they go to fight in other countries, they do so to defend us against our enemies so that the enemy cannot invade our homeland. It is legal for us to sell weapons to our soldiers, for they want to protect us, and it is possible to assume that they are not going to kill Jews” in those other countries. Elsewhere, in response to a question about marriage laws, Isaac ben Moses can be harsh, utterly rejecting more lenient views, as in the case of a girl baptized by force during the Frankfurt pogroms of 1241 who had been promised in marriage but, after what happens, is abandoned by her husband-to-be, who marries another woman and refuses to divorce when the girl returns to the religion of her forefathers. Three rabbis had suggested that the man should divorce and fulfill his first promise, but Isaac ben Moses strongly responded that forced baptism amounted to a kind of rape and the man was not bound to divorce in order to marry his unfortunate fiancée.
Other books
Dancer's Lament: Path to Ascendancy Book 1 by Ian C Esslemont
At His Warning: The Billionaire's Beck and Call, Part 8 by Delilah Fawkes
Harlow: A Military Bad Boy Romance: The Bradford Brothers by Conners, Juliana
The Black Joke by Farley Mowat
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
Coffin Island by Will Berkeley
Long Way Home by Carolyn Gray by Carolyn Gray
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Pompeii by Mary Beard
La genealogía de la moral by Friedrich Nietzsche
