about our cause – or at least not unfavourably. That helped us a great deal politically.’156 As to which nation the Jews belong, he asserts that they belong to their own nation, not to the Czech nation, which must be identified with the Czech Reformation. So Jews, by definition cannot be Czech nationalists themselves, ideologically, in their own skins. Likewise, he himself was sympathetic to the Jewish cause, although he was not part of it. Even on the Hilsner issue, he was not initially preoccupied with Hilsner’s guilt, which he early assumed had been dealt with by the court. Rather he was troubled by the blood libel, an ancient superstition, the absurdity and calumny of which he sought to expose. Nationalism, for him, was a concept that preoccupied him. Throughout his writing and career as a politician/statesman, he focused on this ism as a bulwark of democracy, which respects the innate sense of national feeling157. This, for him, demanded refinement, qualification, and even compromise. Self-identification is not only a matter of externally imposed fate, but also a matter of inner will and commitment, although the element of imposition from the outside is also crucial. Situations are experienced both from within, and also witnessed from the outside. The question of who we are does not permit of a single, unshifting response. We are not only concerned with the definition of a nation in itself, nor just with the attachment of the individual to that entity. But, by extension, we must go on to try to delineate the sensibility of the individual in both attaching himself to that sympathy and then attempting to put its aspirations into practice in the real world. The analysis must apply to individuals, to groups to societies, and to nations too. That is why we must proceed dialectically and cautiously, taking into account all the factors that touch on the matter. Such is the case with self-identification, and with any option of group loyalty.
156) Karel Čapek, President Masaryk Tells his Story. New York, 1971, pp. 187-190. 157) T.G. Masaryk, Das neue Europa. Berlin, 1991. Originally published in 1920 (written in 1918).
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6. RELIGION OR CULTURE? LOYALTY OPTIONS FOR BOHEMIAN JEWRY After the Enlightenment It is a very complex task to assess the place of Jews, both as individuals and as community, within the cultural structure of Bohemia/ Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic/Central Europe. It is also a burning and controversial decision to adopt the term Central Europe, although it is a necessary one, as there is no other of equal accuracy158. The distinguished Czech, expatriate novelist, Milan Kundera, has dealt famously and passionately with this terminology and its implications, in his essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe.”159 In his attempt to pinpoint the usage of this nomenclature, Kundera accepts that the notion of Central Europe has been primarily bound up with the Habsburg monarchy, 1526-1918. But, even more significantly, this area does, for him, exist as a reality, although more in ‘the imagination of those who have adopted the term than it does on land ’. And even more, as a strange and unexpected characteristic of this imagined reality, so much, amongst many other aspects of its being, the object of nostalgic yearnings, there is the Jewish presence pervading this space; the writers, the composers, the quintessential creative force therein, right up until the liquidation of that force together with the population that contained it, with the Holocaust. For Kundera here, it was Central Europe that attempted, if in vain, to stand up against Russian might, that is, to stand up against the pressure of mighty Eastern Europe. This threatened space constituted the multicultural, multi-ethnic, polyglot, generally multilateral resistance against the tyranny of a huge but monolithic, bland object imposed on a cowed population. In his words, it was ‘…a reduced model of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule; the greatest variety within the 158) See Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community. University of California Press, 2000, for an extensive discussion of the issues raised here. 159) First published in The New York Review of Books, 26.4.1984, and reprinted in a somewhat different form in Gale Stokes ed. From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945, pp. 217-223.
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smallest space’, that is to say, the precise antithesis of the Soviet model, which pursued the smallest variety within the largest space. So, following on from this reading of the situation, the outcome of WWII in Central Europe does not only present an attack on the political status of this population, it was also an attack on their civilization. The deeper meaning of the attempted and continuing resistance in the struggle is the sense that their identity has to be protected, or in other terms, in order to preserve their Westernness. The Jewish presence was especially significant: ‘No other part of the world has been so deeply marked by the influence of Jewish genius. Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the twentieth century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe. They were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its spiritual unity.’ They were indeed a small nation, ‘…the only one of all the small nations of all time which has survived empires and the devastating march of History.’ That is Europe, once united by religion, an imposed Christianity, then with the decay of that force, by culture. Now, it has been devastated and swamped by the Soviet conquest, the force totally in negation of European culture.
The changing situation of “Czechoslovakia” Going back some decades from that position, nothing effected a more radical transformation in the region than the transition from Empire to Republic. Now what had become the Republic of Czechoslovakia was responsible in law and by international recognition, that is on the part of the victorious allies in WWI, for control of its own affairs and legislation. It was the USA that took the lead in staking out a definition of human rights, and these individual rights had to be translated into national rights. President Woodrow Wilson, in his famous “fourteen points” to the US Congress, on 19 January 1918, articulated as one of the war aims of the Allied Powers ‘the free right of self-determination for all nations’160. A memorandum from the newly established “Jewish 160) See the account by Aharon Moshe Rabinowicz, “The Jewish Minority”, The Jews of Czechoslovakia. JPS, 1968, pp. 154-265.
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