Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (46 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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Kelley was his own worst enemy. The emperor had strictly forbidden dueling (what duels there were usually took place on the hospital fields, outside the Po
í
Gate), but hot-blooded Kelley killed an officer in a duel, was intercepted by imperial agents while trying to escape to southern Bohemia, and imprisoned at K
ivoklát Castle. Rudolf’s agents were ready to question him, under torture, about his tinctures, the drink of eternal youth, and the strange numbers in symmetric arrangements found among his papers (the results of the angelic séances, now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford). He tried to escape but fell from the window and shattered his leg on the rocks below; when he was released for medical treatment, he had to borrow money to survive. In 1596, Emperor Rudolf renewed the mandate against him, and Kelley was imprisoned at the castle Most (Brüx), in northern Bohemia. Again he wanted to escape, but the cripple (the leg had been amputated) took another fall from on high, possibly into the carriage in which his son wanted to spirit him away, and he hurt his other leg. Facing a long prison sentence, perhaps for life, he
took poison (he was a trained apothecary) and died. It is a matter of historical record that his unfortunate family was deprived of all property, and his son John Adam was last heard of in Most twenty years later, when he made himself a public nuisance.
But there were others. Among Kelley’s guests in Bohemia was the Polish alchemist Michael Sedziwój, or Sendivogius, who impressed his contemporaries as a man of integrity, though he accumulated enormous debts for which he was imprisoned when he could not pay. Kelley tried to keep him in the provinces in order to have the Prague scene for himself, but Sendivogius, who gave himself the air of belonging to a noble family, traveled a good deal between Cracow and Prague and, in the name of alchemy, explored the chemical properties of sulfur and mercury; the scientific results were published from his papers. Emperor Rudolf liked him and made him a
Hofrat;
when Sendivogius, on one of his trips from Prague to Poland, was ambushed by an importunate Moravian knight who wanted to know how to make gold, the emperor imposed a heavy fine on the eager Moravian. Sendivogius much suffered from the envy of his German competitors, but he remained employed by Ferdinand II and probably died in Poland in 1636. His
Novum Lumen Chymicum (The
New
Alchemical
Light
) was in its twelfth edition as late as 1702.
Prague’s Jewish community in the mid-sixteenth century, caught between the interests of the Estates and those of the king, again faced near extinction but within a generation consolidated its economic energy and intellectual power, and in the last decade of the century entered on what was called its “Golden Age.” King Ferdinand I had been educated at the Spanish court shortly before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, but the Bohemian Estates, fearing competition, were far more eager to get rid of the Jews than he. In the 1530s and 1540s, the Prague citizens, especially of the well-to-do Old Town, were less than tolerant, and Christian merchants and craftsmen busily accused the Jews of illegally dealing with coins, spying for the Turks, and being responsible for the fire of 1541 which destroyed much of the Minor Town and Hrad
any, including the state archives (the Estates needed the ancient documents there to defend their old privileges against the king). Under torture, a Jew arrested on
charges of arson confessed to the crime; during the spring session of 1541 the Estates demanded the immediate expulsion of the Jews from Bohemia, and pogroms spread through the countryside. They were barely avoided in Prague, and the king ultimately granted the demands of the Estates. Jews had to leave immediately.
Many Jews went to Poland and others settled in nearby Moravia under the protection of the local gentry, who felt independent of Prague or Vienna. It was a time of brutal trouble; many Jews were robbed on their way by villagers, or killed by soldiers accompanying them to the frontiers. Yet economic considerations prevailed again: important Jewish families received letters of exemption enabling them to order their business affairs, while others were allowed, for the same reasons, to return to Prague at least for a short time. To the despair of many, letters of exemption were bought at high prices, but the Hapsburgs’ economic needs in their war against the German Protestants forced the king within a few years to rescind the expulsion mandate, at least for the few Jews still living in Prague and in the country; Jewish merchants were important for delivering provisions for the armies. The king reversed himself once again as soon as economic pressure ceased. Mordecai Zemach Kohen, publisher and Jewish community leader, courageously went directly to Rome at the head of a Prague delegation to ask Pope Pius IV to intervene (he did, in a way), but legal uncertainties continued for years after the death of Ferdinand I.
Finally, on April 4, 1567, Maximilian II, Ferdinand’s son, revoked all the expulsion orders, confirmed the Jews’ ancient privileges in Bohemia, and on a cloudless summer day of 1571 walked “in all his glory and power,” accompanied by his wife, Maria (daughter of Emperor Charles V), and the nobles of the realm, “through the jubilant streets of the Jewish Town of Prague to show his royal favor.” The Jewish privileges were also confirmed by Rudolf II in 1577 and by his brother Matthias in 1611. Rudolf also protected the self-rule of the Jewish Town by a number of legal measures: he made it incumbent on the imperial judge, not the Prague town authorities, to function as highest legal adviser in Jewish matters, exempted the Jews from paying fees to the townships (rather than to the crown), and went on to protect the community against continuing attacks by the Christian guilds. In his time eight to ten thousand people may have resided in the Jewish quarter, more than ever before, and it was proudly praised as “the mother-in-Israel,” the most populous Jewish community in the Diaspora.
The richest and most eminent man of Prague’s Jewish community
was Mordecai Maisel, and many fairy tales were told about the magical origins of his wealth. Maisel came from an old Prague family that had resided in the Jewish Town for two centuries or more, and he was deeply concerned with the well-being of all its members; politically skilled and with excellent contacts at court and internationally, he did much to consolidate community developments after 1567, and we are told that his residence in Prague attracted many other Jewish families to settle there again.
He was the right man to be in charge of Prague’s Jewish community in the age of Rudolf II, who made him his privileged
Hofjude
, and over the course of the centuries he was always remembered as a farsighted and honest benefactor, humble and extremely generous. He made loans, interest-free, to the Jewish poor, gave financial support to suffering communities elsewhere, and, in Prague, built a magnificent Jewish town hall (still standing and in use), a hospital for the old and the sick, a synagogue, ritual baths, and schools, and he supported private scholars who did not yet have a community appointment. Actually, he provided much of the financing of Rudolf’s war against the Turks, and Rudolf decreed that Maisel would be free to do with his money and his properties exactly as he liked in his last will and testament. But the truth was that Rudolf could not resist the lure of cash: a few days after Maisel’s death, he reneged on his formal assurances, had Maisel’s house searched, and immediately impounded what was found in the name of the crown. It was a Prague scandal that in reports of correspondents and embassies reverberated throughout Europe.
The intellectual golden age of the Jewish community did not dawn overnight but was long anticipated by a learned consortium of scholars who, by 1512, began publishing Hebrew books of prayers, blessings, and commentaries for the first time north of the Alps (sharing financial responsibility for their projects); and their activities were continued by Gershom ben Salomon ha-Kohen, who came to Prague from Verona and, after 1527, and by imperial privilege, began publishing the most elaborate volumes, among them his renowned
Story of Passover
with its sixty woodcuts (reproduced as late as 1960 in Jerusalem and in New York); one of Gershom’s sons (the one who traveled to Rome to see the pope) revived this publishing business after the expulsion, and the family continued to print for hundreds of years. The rabbis of Prague were all eminently learned men who, far from being backwoods provincials, had been studying in yeshivot in Germany, Egypt, or Poland before settling in Prague and, at times, going on to Verona, Venice, or Cracow. It is easily forgotten that
Rudolf’s Prague had many centers of higher learning—the scholars at court, the Utraquist university of old, the new Jesuit school at St. Clemens, and the yeshivot of the Jewish community—yet it has to be said that they were more often than not isolated on their islands of religions; it was difficult to transcend the late medieval boundaries, and the exceptions are all the more glorious.
Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (later called the august Maharal) is better known to the world as a magician who created the mysterious golem rather than as the most original and intense mind of the Jewish community of Prague. The many attractive legends have done little to define his noble and lonely achievements, which rest on his many books and commentaries, among them
Netivot Olam
, on ethical questions;
Tiferet Yisrael
, on the Commandments; or
Be’er ha-Golah,
on the dignity of the Torah (published in Prague in 1598). We have come to accept, perhaps too easily, that Rabbi Loew symbolically incarnates mystical and Kabbalistic Prague. Actually, he was not born in Prague; many scholars believe that he came from Worms (not from Polish Pozna
, which has also been suggested) and he was born in 1520 (rather than 1512, as others assume). He never said anything about his early training and his teachers, whom he intensely disliked, and it is assumed that he studied for a long time at Polish yeshivot. He may have come to Prague to marry Pearl, after a long engagement, but we know for certain that he was rabbi of Mikulov (Nikolsburg) and chief rabbi of all Moravian Jews for twenty years (1553-73), though there was nothing mystical about the town or his activities there. On the contrary, he was well known as a superior administrator and legal expert, who unified the statutes of the Moravian Jewish community, introduced new tax reforms, regulated the election of the country elders, all the time insisting on the dignity of religious services (no conversation allowed), and challenged many by rejecting wine for religious services that had been handled or produced by gentiles (in the midst of the Moravian vineyards, certainly a tough demand).
Rabbi Judah Loew returned to Prague when he was more than sixty years old, teaching at the “Klaus,” a school built and privately financed by Mordecai Maisel. He seems to have been respected in the community but was not given an official appointment; informally, he established groups for the study of the Mishnah and was called to draft the statutes of the Hevra Kaddisha, the lay group that prepares the dead for burial. On the Sabbath of Repentance in 1583, he was asked to preach at the Old New Synagogue, but his stern views did not endear him to the elders, who rejected him as a candidate for the office of chief rabbi of Prague.
He left the town, served three years as chief rabbi of Pozna
, and though he may have returned to Prague to continue teaching, the Prague elders rejected him again, after a sermon on the great Sabbath before Passover in 1589; again he left for Poland and returned to Prague only in 1597; after some delay he was finally appointed chief rabbi, being eighty years old. He served for nearly ten years, died on August 17, 1609, and was buried at the old cemetery, where his grave has attracted much attention through the centuries. Judah Loew’s wife, Pearl, who gave him many daughters and a son who died early, followed him after ten years and was buried at his side. Their daughters, in turn, were the mothers of many distinguished scholars and rabbis: learned Vögele married Isaac Katz, who became chief rabbi of Moravia; Gittel, the third daughter, married Rabbi Samson Brandeis—she and her husband may have been distant forebears of Adolf and Frederika, who were born in Prague but left after the revolution of 1848 for Indiana and Kentucky, where their son Louis Brandeis was born, the U.S. Supreme Court justice, after whom Brandeis University was named.
In the view of his contemporaries, Rabbi Judah Loew was an intransigent scholar who, after twenty-five years and more in Moravia and Poland, became firmly devoted to necessary reforms of ritual and pedagogy. He was a radical conservative, if not a fundamentalist, whose harshness offended Prague’s elders, more comfortable with inherited attitudes rarely questioned. His conservative ideas and communitarian engagement made him dear to the later Hasidim, and in the twentieth century he is seen through their eyes by his great defender Gershom Sholem. Rabbi Loew’s disgust with wine handled by gentiles was but one highly characteristic symptom of his severity; he was similarly unwilling to tolerate his colleagues’ habits of accepting gifts for fulfilling ritual duties or of appointing rabbis with the support of outside authorities (he believed it was a matter for the Jewish community and the community alone). His reform plans, above all, included changes in education; teaching, as the later Czech pedagogue Comenius demanded, should take into account the age and the grasp of the young people, and Rabbi Loew energetically argued against “pilpul,” long dominant in Prague, which gave the highest rewards to sophisticated casuistry in handling commentaries and metacommentaries, appreciating cleverness rather than wisdom, and disregarding the fundamental sources. As if inspired by the tenets of the Renaissance, Rabbi Loew demanded an immediate return to the sources—that is, to the Torah, the central text revealed to the Jewish people, and in Talmudic writing to the Haggadah, to those narrative texts
that had been unfortunately neglected by the legal inquiry of the Tosafists and especially the pilpul teachers.

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