Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (10 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

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A wise Czech historian has suggested that Otakar’s achievements as reformer of the law, innovative administrator, and chivalric protector of law and order were far more important than his ephemeral military exploits. Otakar’s administrative and legal initiatives quickened rather than triggered historical developments that had emerged during the rule of his immediate predecessors. These developments included the shift from a feudal to a money economy; internal colonization, with Czech farmers fanning out to grounds never tilled before; and the arrival, in significant numbers, of German farmers, artisans, and merchants, invited by monasteries and by royal power to cultivate new lands and establish new towns to increase the tax base. A chronicle tells us how Otakar withdrew one day to study the corpus of Bohemian and other laws, to identify bad rules, do away with useless decrees, and “transform bad habits into better ones.” The presence at his court of Italian notaries and legal experts would suggest that he wanted to follow the splendid administrative example of Emperor Frederick II, without challenging the church, of course, or, at any rate, to apply in his realm administrative and legal norms that had been useful elsewhere—as, for instance, the ones concerning Jews which Otakar lifted, without many changes, from legal documents of the Babenberg duke Frederick the Belligerent. P
emysl Otakar II was unable to protect Prague against recurrent floods, fires, and miserable winters of rising food prices, but he kept away foreign invaders, who respectfully called him
rex ferreus,
the iron king; disciplined predatory nobles; shielded burghers and farmers from exploitation; and made valiant attempts to stabilize the currency and the marketplace by controlling weights and measures. He was the richest ruler in Central Europe, and his income from taxes,
regalia,
and the newly organized Bohemian silver mines was apparently close to one hundred thousand measures of silver per year.
In spite of his innovative administrative ideas, Otakar followed the traditions of early medieval princes in conducting his royal business, and spent much time on horseback, riding with his retinue of knights and notaries and sometimes with the queen, from castle to castle and from town to town rather than luxuriating in his Prague residence. He ruled from Prague but he governed on the spot, be it at his favorite Bohemian castle of Zvikov or in Vienna or Graz. Yet it is clear that he, being of a pious bent of mind, insisted on regularly spending Christmas and Easter, and the feasts of the Bohemian saints, at his Prague castle. His architectural plans were based on strategic and administrative considerations rather than aesthetic or antiquarian ideas, in a style perhaps more characteristic of Charles IV one hundred years later: at a time when Mongol
invasions threatened from the east, massive defense systems of walls, moats, and towers were essential to defend towns; and Otakar not only enlarged the royal residence at the castle but built up the Hrad
any fortifications. He continued the initiatives of his father, who, by 1231, had begun to surround the settlements on the right riverbank with defensive walls and high towers, though they excluded a few neighborhoods (for example, the old German neighborhood at St. Peter) and cut others in half, the church within the wall and the others outside. About 1235 Otakar’s father had invited South German colonists to establish an autonomous little settlement, under the supervision of Eberhard, master of the royal mint, around the Church of St. Gallus near the core of the right-bank settlement; King P
emysl Otakar II suddenly one day in the spring of 1257 expelled the inhabitants of most of the
suburbium
under the castle and dispersed them in neighboring hamlets while North German colonists were invited to take their place; he surrounded their new settlement with a system of walls and moats. In the late 1270s, then, the Prague region consisted, apart from many hamlets and villages, of this strongly fortified New Town (later it was called the Minor Town, or Malá Strana) in the shadow of the castle; the Old Town on the opposite side of the river, which included the Jewish community and the German neighborhood of St. Gallus (the still older German settlement at St. Peter remaining
extra muros);
the Vyšehrad, with its own suburb; and Prague Castle itself, made impregnable by the king who was to die luckless on the plains of the Moravian-Austrian border.
Traveling Jewish merchants were doing business in the Prague and Bohemian regions in the ninth and tenth centuries—coming and going in caravans, selling spices, silk, and other luxury goods to barons, clerics of the upper hierarchy, and the court, and exporting from the Slavic east slaves, weapons, leather goods, and beeswax to Mediterranean and Oriental countries. The most reliable evidence concerning the business activities of Jewish merchants, preeminent among their competitors, can be found in a document called the “Raffelstetten Customs Ordinance” of about 905, which regulated traffic between eastern Franconia, Bohemia, and the greater Moravian realm. In the Prague region, Jewish families may have settled in different spots on both sides of the river in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries; legal documents issued (c. 1080) by Vratislav II
guaranteed judicial privileges to resident Italians and Germans, and to Jews as well, and they were confirmed by Sob
slav II nearly a hundred years later. Dean Cosmas mentions a rich Jew named Podiva, who bought himself a castle, but he does not say whether he did so before or after becoming a Christian; he also reports that in 1091 the noble Wirpirk, wife of the P
emyslid Prince Konrad of Brno (Brünn) in Moravia, in a dramatic scene told the duke of Prague to desist from attacking and plundering Moravia—it was entirely unnecessary, she suggested, because he could find all the gold he needed in the treasuries of Prague Jews and other merchants; their property was his anyway, and she gave him, in case he did not know, the address of these merchants at the vicus
Vyšegradensis,
a Jewish neighborhood close to Vyšehrad Castle.
Life abruptly changed for the Jews of Central Europe, not only those in the Prague region, when a ragtag army of crusaders, perhaps twenty thousand strong, ready to start a war against the infidels right then and there, in the year 1096 marched from northern France through Germany and Bohemia, plundering (with the enthusiastic help of the townsfolk), setting fire to Jewish neighborhoods, baptizing by force and killing those who resisted. At Mainz a thousand Jews were killed, it is said, and in Prague, while the duke was absent in Poland, the bishop tried to prevent the worst and told the crusaders that they were committing a sin in the eyes of God. Two years later, in 1098, the Jews wanted to leave, and provoked the duke’s ire because they tried to take their belongings with them; and for many years, as Cosmas attests, the church authorities were disturbed because Jews baptized by force loyally returned to the beliefs and laws of their forefathers.
The Jewish community of Prague is possibly younger than that of Cologne (which goes back to Roman times), Mainz (first mentioned in 900), or Regensburg (981), but older than the Jewish communities of Frankfurt, Vienna, and Berlin, the last for long nothing more than a Slavic fishing village. In discussion of the early topography of what became Prague, a certain dearth of historical evidence, especially for the earlier centuries, combines with wishful thinking; it cannot be otherwise. Thus most historians assume that groups of Jewish families congregated in two or three different neighborhoods. Originally, Prague Jews lived and moved freely among their fellow citizens, and built dwellings close to the trade routes, on the left bank under the castle, and, as Wirpirk’s speech confirmed, on the right bank at the
vicus Vyšegradensis;
a third group, it is suggested, was settled by 1067 at St. Martin’s Újezd, a narrow thoroughfare in a rather swampy spot near today’s Charvátova and Spálená
streets on the right bank; south of this small settlement the Jewish Garden, the oldest cemetery, was located. Tradition has it that the earliest Jews in Prague settled on the left bank; the Sázava chronicler reports that their synagogue (close to a place where later the Knights of St. John settled) burned down in 1142, when the Moravians once again attacked the Prague P
emyslids, and it is believed that they consequently decided, as did so many people at that time, to move across the river. A “Jewish Town” began to take shape on the right bank, rapidly growing with the arrival of Jewish families from southern Germany, following the eastward movement of German colonization or, after the bloody pogroms of 1096, wanting to go further east on their own.
The Jewish Town within the mighty walls protecting the town on the right bank has its own variegated legends of origin, but traces of the original synagogue have been destroyed by incessant reconstruction. The oldest part of the town was possibly established by families of Byzantine origins (though evidence is missing) who moved across the river after 1142 and built a few wooden houses and the “Old School” (synagogue) on the corner of Kozí and V
ze
ská streets, but by 1346 the Church of the Holy Spirit was built on an adjacent lot, creating a line of demarcation, unique in medieval Jewish communities; in the place of the Old School, after many devastations and fires, stands a “Spanish” synagogue in late-nineteenth-century “Moorish style” which serves today as a museum of Jewish art.
The actual core of the town was created by Jews from elsewhere, especially from Germany, who built their own “Old New School” and settled along the Breite Gasse (Široká) from which narrow streets fanned out; their original houses and the Old School formed a branch of a settlement that thinned out toward the river (Hampejz Street became the red-light district of Gothic Prague). Historians of art and visitors from all over the world admire the Old New School, the oldest synagogue of Central Europe that has survived terrible catastrophes of nature and history nearly unchanged; though many ages and generations contributed different elements and ornamental shapes to it, including a few added by purist architects in 1863, the synagogue retains in full the somber solemnity of its Gothic structure, one of the earliest in Bohemia. Historians of architecture believe that the building was shaped according to Burgundian concepts and, possibly, after the example of earlier synagogues at Worms and Regensburg; it is possible, recent researchers have come to believe, that skilled artisans who were busy nearby putting finishing touches on the Gothic compound of the convent of St. Francis lent a helping hand
with a few decorative details (Jews were excluded from the highly organized building trades). One must remember that these two most magnificent monuments of early Gothic architecture in Prague, the Old New School and the convent of St. Francis, Jewish and Christian, both completed during the reign of King P
emysl Otakar II, stand close by—about twelve minutes’ walk apart.
It would be difficult to reconstruct how the inhabitants of the medieval Jewish town felt about being in Bohemia, but an old story, recently rediscovered and brilliantly interpreted by Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein, suggests that many were conscious, however diffusely, of coming from Ashkenazi Germany by imperial privilege. The story was possibly long current in oral tradition, absorbing many international fairy-tale motifs; it was written down and published in 1705 in Jewish-German by Bella Hurwitz and Rahel Rausnitz, the first Jewish women writers of Prague, under the title
Ein schein Meisse (A Nice Story).
The plot is not easy to follow because of its many delightful twists and turns, but the gist is that a spirited and clever young Jew from Frankfurt pleases the emperor and is sent to Prague to establish a community there. His happy end is, of course, delayed for quite a while, and the narrative actually starts at the time when “there were only four Jewish merchants in Prague before Jews were living there,” three of them bad, the fourth honest and rich yet, unfortunately, dependent in his business on the dishonest three, who were more mobile and traveled back and forth between Prague and Frankfurt. One day he decides that he wants to do business in Frankfurt himself, puts his gold pieces in a tin bottle, and rides off with the other three to the Frankfurt fair, where they all take lodgings in an inn highly recommended by the evil trio; the innkeeper, in cahoots with them, takes the gold pieces and fills the bottle with wine. When the rich merchant discovers that he has been robbed, he appeals for justice to the imperial court, but he cannot produce witnesses and the impudent innkeeper starts to ask for money because he considers that his name has been stained by an unfair accusation.

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