After World War I and during the formation of Czechoslovakia, a wave of anti-Jewish rioting and violence was unleashed against Jews and their property, especially stores. [1] [2]
After World War I and during the formation of Czechoslovakia, a wave of anti-Jewish rioting and violence was unleashed against Jews and their property, especially stores. [1] [2]
The main accusations leveled against Jews in Slovakia were that they were Hungarian-speakers and agents of the hated Hungarian state, from which Slovakia was trying to break free. [3] In Bohemia and Moravia, many Jews had supported the Habsburgs, especially early on in the war, arousing the hatred of Czech patriots. Also, Jews were blamed for profiteering and black marketing during the wartime shortages. [4] [5] Another cause of the violence was the breakdown in Habsburg authority and weakness of the new Czechoslovak state, which had not yet established a monopoly on violence. [6] Riots between Czechs and Germans also occurred. [7]
In Slovakia, violence occurred in November 1918. In Považská Bystrica (near Žilina), David Büchler's general store was robbed and destroyed on 5 November, causing damage of 300,000 Czechoslovak crowns (US$8,880 in 1920). Bands of former soldiers roamed the countryside looking for shops to rob, most of which belonged to Jews due to pre-existing economic patterns. [2]
In December 1918, the most severe pogroms occurred in Bohemia and Moravia. The worst was in Holešov on 3–4 December. Jewish-owned houses and shops were robbed, the synagogue and community offices were vandalized, and two Jews were murdered. Eventually the army intervened. [6]
While the violence was ongoing, Edvard Beneš, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and other Czechoslovak politicians at the Paris Peace Conference portrayed Czechoslovakia as a liberal and tolerant country, relatively free of the antisemitism that plagued neighboring countries. [8] A Czech Agrarian newspaper claimed that the violence was engineered by "Judeo-Germans ... organizing and hiring provocateurs" in order to ruin Czechoslovakia's reputation abroad. [5] In 1919, the international Zionist activist Chaim Weizmann expressed concern about the violence, noting that it was "in complete contrast to the avowed Czech policy in Paris, and also to the public utterance of Minister Beneš". [9]
The violence continued from the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy to the Paris peace treaties signed in 1919 and 1920. It was not nearly as severe as in Poland and Ukraine, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered. [1] [10] After 1920, the violence died down. Interwar Czechoslovakia was the safest and least antisemitic country in central Europe for Jews, and it was the only one to retain a democratic government into the mid-1930s. [11]
Many Czech historians have presented the violence as an aberration on the otherwise tolerant and democratic First Czechoslovak Republic. Zdeňek Fišer called Holešov the "last pogrom" and the end of a dark era. Others, including Michal Frankl and Miloslav Szabó, have placed the violence within a Czech nationalist discourse that excluded Jews from the Czechoslovak national community. According to American historian Michael Miller, the violence has been forgotten because it clashes with the Czechoslovak myth. [6]
Czechoslovakia was a landlocked state in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland became part of Nazi Germany, while the country lost further territories to Hungary and Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, the state ceased to exist, as Slovakia proclaimed its independence and Carpathian Ruthenia became part of Hungary, while in the remainder of the Czech Lands, the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed. In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš formed a government-in-exile and sought recognition from the Allies.
Moravia is a historical region in the east of the Czech Republic and one of three historical Czech lands, with Bohemia and Czech Silesia.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was a Czechoslovak statesman, political activist and philosopher who served as the first president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935. He is regarded as the founding father of Czechoslovakia.
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was a partially-annexed territory of Nazi Germany that was established on 16 March 1939 after the German occupation of the Czech lands. The protectorate's population was mostly ethnic Czech.
The First Czechoslovak Republic, often colloquially referred to as the First Republic, was the first Czechoslovak state that existed from 1918 to 1938, a union of ethnic Czechs and Slovaks. The country was commonly called Czechoslovakia, a compound of Czech and Slovak; which gradually became the most widely used name for its successor states. It was composed of former territories of Austria-Hungary, inheriting different systems of administration from the formerly Austrian and Hungarian territories.
The history of the Jews in Slovakia goes back to the 11th century, when the first Jews settled in the area.
The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, historically the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the modern Czech Republic, goes back many centuries. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century. Jewish communities flourished here specifically in the 16th and 17th centuries, and again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local Jews were mostly murdered in the Holocaust, or exiled at various points. As of 2021, there were only about 2,300 Jews estimated to be living in the Czech Republic.
Livia Rothkirchen was a Czechoslovak-born Israeli historian and archivist. She was the author of several books about the Holocaust, including The Destruction of Slovak Jewry (1961), the first authoritative description of the deportation and murder of the Jews of Slovakia.
Czechoslovak National Council was an organization founded by Czech and Slovak émigrés during World War I to liberate their homeland from Austria-Hungary. During the closing weeks of the war, the Czechoslovak National Council was formally upgraded to a provisional government and its members were designated to hold top offices in the First Czechoslovak Republic.
The Holocaust in Slovakia was the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews in the Slovak State, a client state of Nazi Germany, during World War II. Out of 89,000 Jews in the country in 1940, an estimated 69,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia resulted in the deportation, dispossession, and murder of most of the pre-World War II population of Jews in the Czech lands that were annexed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.
Arijský boj was a pro-Nazi Czech-language weekly tabloid newspaper published between May 1940 and May 1945 in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Inspired by the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, the newspaper made antisemitism its main theme and was also critical of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Denunciations published by the newspaper contributed to the isolation of Jews during the first years of the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia.
Czechs, Slovaks and the Jews, 1938–48: Beyond Idealisation and Condemnation (2013) is a book by the Czech historian Jan Láníček which addresses relations between Czechs, Slovaks, and Jews from the Munich Agreement to the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état which installed a Communist government. The book focuses especially on the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and its attitudes and actions with regards to the Jews who had been trapped in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation.
Arnošt Frischer (1887–1954) was a Czechoslovak Jewish politician who represented the Jewish community to the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Much more so than other Jews, Frischer sympathized with the Czech National Social Party's aims of ethnic homogenization in postwar Czechoslovakia.
The Partisan Congress riots were attacks on Jews in Bratislava and other cities and towns in the autonomous Slovak region of Czechoslovakia between 1 and 6 August 1946. Nineteen people were injured, four seriously, in Bratislava alone.
Jan Láníček is a Czech historian who studies Czechoslovak Jewish history in the twentieth century and the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. He graduated from Palacký University Olomouc (2006) and received his doctorate from the University of Southampton (2011). He is currently a lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the co-editor of the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies. He was the Vice-President (NSW) of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies.
Postwar anti-Jewish violence in Slovakia resulted in at least 36 deaths of Jews and more than 100 injuries between 1945 and 1948, according to research by the Polish historian Anna Cichopek. Overall, it was significantly less severe than in Poland. The causes of the violence included antisemitism and conflict over the restitution of property stolen from Jews during the Holocaust in Slovakia.
The Czechoslovak myth is a narrative that Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1938 was a tolerant and liberal democratic country, oriented towards Western Europe, and free of antisemitism compared to other countries in Central Europe and Eastern Europe. For example, the country was described as "a welcoming and tolerant place for Jews," and an "island of democracy in Eastern Europe".
Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (2016) is a book by Tatjana Lichtenstein published by Indiana University Press. It discusses the rise of Zionism among Jews living in the First Czechoslovak Republic. Lichtenstein also challenges the Czechoslovak myth of exceptionalism by chronicling the constant accusations faced by Jews that they lacked national patriotism towards Czechoslovakia. The book received positive reviews.