T.G. Masaryk and the Jewish Question

Miloš Pojar

Originally published in Czech as T. G. Masaryk a židovství, Prague: Academia, 2016

Czech edition reviewed by Dr. Otto Dov Kulka

(Prof. em. Hebrew University of Jerusalem),

Dr. Martin Kučera (Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Published by Charles University, Karolinum Press

Ovocný trh 5/560, Prague 1, Czech Republic

Translation Gerald Turner

Editor Richard Vašek

Cover and design by Zdeněk Ziegler

Typesetting by Karolinum Press

First English edition

For their generous support of this English translation, Karolinum would like to thank the Forum 2000 Foundation, Avraham Harshalom, David Hercky, Hugo Marom, Rita Spiegel, and the Israel-Czech Republic Friendship Association.

Cover illustration: T.G. Masaryk on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

Text © Miloš Pojar – heirs, 2019

© Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR, 2019

Preface © Shlomo Avineri, 2019

Afterword © Petr Pithart, 2019

Translation © Gerald Turner, 2019

Photographs © Archiv Ústavu T.G. Masaryka (cover, nr. 1–20, 22);

Archiv Národního muzea (nr. 21)

eISBN 978-80-246-4365-6 (epub)

eISBN 978-80-246-4364-9 (mobi)

eISBN 978-80-246-3880-5 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-3879-9 (pbk)

Contents

1. Preface (Shlomo Avineri)

2. 1. CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, STUDIES; UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA (1850–1882)

3. 2. MASARYK’S STUDY OF THE JEWISH QUESTION (1882–1914)

4. Jews in the Czech lands from the mid-19th century to 1914

5. Masaryk’s arrival in Prague

6. 3. MASARYK AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION; MARX AND MASARYK; THE JEWISH QUESTION

7. Marx and Judaism

8. Marx and his critique of Judaism

9. Masaryk and social issues

10. Masaryk’s critique of Marx’s views on the Jewish question

11. 4. MASARYK AND RELIGION

12. 5. MASARYK AND ANTI-SEMITISM; THE HILSNER AFFAIR

13. Anti-Semitism in Austria and the Czech lands in the second half of the 19th century

14. The Hilsner affair

15. 6. MASARYK AND THE CZECH JEWISH MOVEMENT

16. The status of Jews in the Czech lands post-1650

17. Laws concerning Jews in the reign of Joseph II

18. Jewish emancipation

19. Assimilation

20. 7. MASARYK AND ZIONISM TO 1918

21. 8. MASARYK AND THE JEWS DURING THE FIRST REPUBLIC

22. The First Czechoslovak Republic

23. Jews in the First Republic

24. T.G. Masaryk and the Zionists

25. T.G. Masaryk and the Czecho-Jews

26. The Friday group

27. 9. MASARYK’S VISIT TO PALESTINE IN 1927

28. Conclusion

29. 10. MASARYK AND NOTABLE JEWS

30. ILLUSTRATIONS

31. AFTERWORD: CONVERGING DESTINIES IN THE THOUGHT AND LIFE OF MILOŠ POJAR (Petr Pithart)

32. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Preface

SHLOMO AVINERI

Kde domov můj? (Where is my home?) – the hauntingly beautiful opening line of the Czech national anthem – could be seen also as encapsulating the challenges facing Jewish people in the Czech lands in the second half of the 19th century. Political equality granted to Jews in the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy in 1867 ran parallel with the emergence of the Czech national movement. In the cauldron of the changing realities in the multi-ethnic empire, the very identity of the Jewish community was thrown into the dramatic, new and unprecedented context of the struggle between German and Czech speakers that totally transformed their social and cultural existence: now the Josephine Toleranzpatent could not adequately address challenges which were no longer issues of merely religious tolerance.

The main virtue of Miloš Pojar’s T.G. Masaryk and the Jewish Question is in weaving Masaryk’s life story integrally into the history of the Czech national movement both in the waning years of Habsburgian rule and the first Czechoslovak Republic. In a memorable comment Pojar states that Masaryk’s leadership redeemed Czech nationalism from serious strains of anti-Semitism and re-formed it in the mold of a humanistic, tolerant and inclusive movement, eventually making post-1918 Czechoslovakia into the only post-Habsburgian successor state which not only established a consolidated democracy but whose ideology, policies and institutions were free from anti-Jewish discrimination which marred, in one way or another, its inter-war neighboring countries.

This was a remarkable achievement, as the beginnings were not auspicious. Masaryk was initially burdened with two sets of legacies which made Czech relations with the Jews in their midst problematic. By Masaryk’s own admission, the countryside in which he was born was infused with anti-Semitic prejudices, encouraged by the church and society in general. But beyond this, Masaryk also encountered a Czech national movement which looked with skepticism if not enmity on the Jewish population and saw it as part of the German-language hegemony fostered by the Austrian authorities against which it was fighting to assert its own identity and culture.

The reasons for these suspicions against the Jews were rooted in the circumstances of Jewish emancipation after 1848. While many members of the Jewish intelligentsia participated in the Czech revolution of 1848, for many Jewish people the road to equality went through integration into the hegemonic German-speaking culture, especially in the cities with their mixed German-Czech populations. For many Czech nationalists this led to opposition to Jewish emancipation and occasionally turned anti-German demonstrations into anti-Jewish pogroms.

Masaryk’s road away from these prejudices was not immediate. The first step took place when he moved from the countryside to Brno and later Vienna and came in touch with members of the educated Jewish bourgeoisie, in whose households he occasionally served as a tutor; some of his university teachers were also Jewish. It was there that he realized that the issue of Jewish equal rights was immanently linked to the future of society in general and had to be de-coupled from the theological heritage of the Christian approach to Judaism as a religion: it was a civil and moral challenge, not a religious disagreement.

Unsurprisingly, during his Brno and Vienna student days, when Masaryk developed his views on the Czech national movement, some of his first publications focused on polemics against Ernest Renan’s views on Judaism and Gobineau’s racist ideas. On a theoretical level he sometimes agreed with Renan but argued that they were irrelevant to the issue of Jewish rights in modern society. He recognized that the Jews have national characteristics which may be different from those of the majority population, but they have a right to maintain and preserve them: the principle of emancipation leads to self-determination, and in Masaryk’s’ vision of a tolerant Habsburg empire the Jews deserved to be integrated: the Herderian cultural principles apply to them as to all other groups. As for Gobineau’s theories of race, Masaryk argued that there are no “pure races” and this applied to the Jews as to any other group.

With Masaryk’s appointment, first as a Privatdozent in Vienna and then as a professor of philosophy in Prague, his views gained a pulpit which he used not only in his lectures but also in his numerous publications, both scholarly and popular.

These views were integrated into his first major work on Marxism, which addressed not only Marx’s philosophy but was also a response to the Austro-Marxists who tried to square their Marxist principles with the reality of the multiethnic Habsburg empire and especially the challenges of a multilingual proletariat in some of its major urban centers, as in Vienna and Brno, where ethnicity and class could not be easily separated from each other.

Masaryk recognized Marx’s immense contribution to social and economic thinking, yet he differed from him on a major premise: materialism. He recognized the enormous importance of economic factors in human history and social analysis, but insisted that there were other interests apart from them which cannot be ignored and cannot be reduced to merely economic considerations. Masaryk’s book became one of the first seminal, positive-yet-critical assessments of Marxism in general and tried to present a kind of socialism based on a broader ethical and cultural foundation.

Masaryk’s extensive study of Marx confronted him also with Marx’s notorious essay On the Jewish Question which equates Judaism with capitalism. Quite interestingly and significantly, Masaryk strongly disagrees with this position for a number of reasons. Sarcastically he admits the force of Marx’s rhetoric, but writes that it is poor on social analysis and exhibits ignorance on the reality of Jewish life: not all Jews are capitalists, says Masaryk, pointing out that in Poland, Galicia and Russia most Jews are poor and there is a vast Jewish proletariat in Eastern Europe.

Yet Masaryk’s critique of Marx’s essay goes deeper: Marx, according to him totally ignores the fact that there are national dimensions in Jewish life, that Jewish identity is not just religious. By ignoring the national aspect of the Jewish question Marx thus is unable to adequately address the issue. Regardless of the complex historical relationship between Judaism and Christianity, the fact of the matter is, according to Masaryk, that in recent times the emergence of Zionism suggests that Jews are returning to history, and the fact that so many Jews support socialism is another indication of their positive role in contemporary society. Writing in this vein in the late 1890s provides extraordinary insight into the novel dimensions of Jewish life at the turn of the century, and the fact that it comes in the context of a polemic with Marx is quite significant.

But Pojar rightly points out that all these writings were, after all, basically academic: the great defining moment in Masaryk’s contribution to changing the discourse of Czech nationalism away from the anti-Semitic tones which characterized it at the time came with the Hilsner Affair in 1899, when a Jewish man was accused in Polná with the ritual murder of a Christian young woman. It was his public role in denouncing the Polná blood libel that identified Masaryk’s name with a courageous battle against anti-Semitism. That the Polná Affair took place at the time the Dreyfus Affair shook French politics helped cast Masaryk in a role comparable to that of Emile Zola.

Initially Masaryk was reluctant to get involved in what appeared a messy and nasty provincial murder case, and his first responses – when asked by Jewish students to raise his voice – were tentative and focused on some of the questionable forensic details used falsely to condemn the Jewish defendant. Yet when the murder case became transmogrified into accusations of ritual murder which were supported by the Czech press and some of the Czech student organizations, Masaryk realized – as he wrote – that this was not just a question of the fate of an individual but a battle for the soul of the Czech national movement.

It was not an easy position to take. His lectures were disturbed by radical Czech nationalist students; his pamphlet on the trial was banned by the authorities because it questioned the decisions of the court which condemned Hilsner to death; his lectures at the university were temporarily suspended and some of the Czech papers accused him of treason and being a lackey of the Jews and the paid agent of Jewish capitalists.

But because the issue – a blood libel in the relatively liberal and tolerant Habsburg monarchy at the threshold of the 20th century – gained international press coverage, Masaryk’s name became known across Europe and also in the United States, where Jewish organizations got involved in Hilsner’s defense. Shrewdly Masaryk later commented that his fame as the defender of an innocent Jewish victim of a medieval anti-Jewish myth helped the Czechoslovak national case during World War I as many Jewish newspapers and financiers supported the movement in recognition of his role in the Polná case.

Hilsner’s verdict was not overturned, though Emperor Franz Joseph commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. But the visibility of the public debate initiated by Masaryk helped to change the discourse within the Czech national movement, and Masaryk’s subsequent election to the Vienna parliament underlined the significant change in the direction of Czech nationalism towards a tolerant approach to the Jewish question which then became the foundation of the new Czechoslovak Republic.

Pojar’s description portrays the confluence of Masaryk’s intellectual and moral authority in shaping the policies of Czechoslovakia regarding its Jewish population after 1918. This was not free from structural problems originating in the legacy of the Czech national movement and was certainly further exacerbated by the differences between the highly secularized and urbanized Jews in the Czech lands and the mainly Orthodox Jewish communities in Slovakia and Sub-Carpathia, many of them living among the rural and religiously conservative Catholic population; the political forces opposed to Masaryk’s approach were not negligible.

Pojar does not overlook some of the internal tensions in Masaryk’s own position. His valiant stand in the Hilsner Affair was paradoxically accompanied by some of the ambiguities inherent in his general theoretical approach to the core issues of nationalism. On the one hand, his Herderian background led him to view the Jews as a nation, not just a religious community, hence encompassing self-determination, part of which meant that they were entitled to the preservation of their distinct culture. This led Masaryk to a sympathetic understanding of Zionism, especially in its cultural version as expressed by Ahad Ha’am and Aharon David Gordon. On the other hand, this also caused him to maintain that Jews could not easily become members of the Czech nation, and his support of equal rights for the Jews did not agree with the premises of those Jews who saw in assimilation – especially radical assimilation – an ultimate and desirable goal. It is for these reasons that he viewed Zionism not leading primarily to emigration to Palestine but as a vehicle for a Jewish cultural renaissance within Europe generally and, after 1918, as a distinct ethnic group within a pluralist Czechoslovak democratic republic. It was not an easy position to take, and neither Jewish assimilationists nor Zionists were wholly happy with such a differentiated position; nor were radical Czech nationalists.

These ambiguities appeared to be evident also during his visit to Palestine in 1927 – the only European head of state or major statesman to visit the country during the inter-war period. In Jewish and Zionist memory this came to be viewed as an historical event, to be feted and recalled for decades to come, as testified by the numerous streets and squares called after him in contemporary Israel, as well as in the symbolism involved in naming a kibbutz – Kfar Masaryk – in honor of his visit.

But the event itself – he visited Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Rishon le-Zion, the first kibbutz as well as a kibbutz founded by immigrants from Czechoslovakia – for all the enthusiastic reception granted to Masaryk by the Jewish community, was a much more complex affair.

The visit was part of what can be called a traditional Grand Tour of the Orient: it started in Egypt, for whose culture Masaryk always had deep respect and admiration; in Palestine he was hosted by the British High Commissioner and met with the leadership of the Moslem Arab community, headed by the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini. He lodged mainly in Christian hostels, primarily Franciscan establishments, and visited the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and around the Sea of Galilee – and made sure that these aspects of his visit would be publicized.

Yet there is no doubt that his most extensive exposure was to the Jewish community of the country, and his visits to the Jewish National Library – then headed by the Czech-born philosopher Hugo Bergmann – and the nascent Hebrew University were the most visible aspects of his interest in Jewish matters and his fundamental support for Zionism; so was his deep interest in the kibbutz idea. But the visit also brought to the surface – in private communications, not in public statements – the very ambiguities which characterized his complex approach to Jewish phenomena. While admiring the progress – economic, scientific and cultural – Zionism brought to the country, he was somewhat pessimistic whether the Jewish immigrants would be able to find an understanding and a modus vivendi with the Arab majority population. He was equally skeptical that the Jews could become a majority in the country, without which their political aims could not be achieved. Not surprisingly, his visit to Palestine – symbolic and significant as it certainly was – strengthened his support for the cultural, rather than political aspects, of the Zionist project. Just as in the Czech case, so in the Jewish case, Masaryk was centered much more on the cultural rather than the purely political. While Pojar does not say so, in both cases he eventually turned out to be wrong, though because of reasons totally outside of his control.

Masaryk was a true son of the liberal legacies of the 19th century; the 20th century turned out to be much more cruel. Yet both the Czech nation and the Zionist project survived, but not without paying a heavy price for their respective achievements.

***

Let me end on a personal note.

I grew up in Herzliya, at that time a small agricultural village north of Tel Aviv. In the critical and difficult months of the Israel War of Independence in early 1948, the first serious arms the Jewish self-defense force (the Haganna) received were supplied by Czechoslovakia, and they were crucial in saving the Jewish community from the Arab onslaught. I was at that time a high school student, a member of the Youth Brigades of the Haganna, and when the first deliveries arrived at an abandoned airstrip near Herzliya, I was among the teenagers called up to help unload them. For us, members of the small and beleaguered Yishuv – the Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine – these were historical moments, and I still remember the thrill we felt in unloading and unpacking the machine guns and rifles flown in by Czechoslovak military pilots.

Many decades later, in June 1990, I was a member of an international group of observers to monitor the first free post-Communist elections in Czechoslovakia. The delegation included Madeleine Albright, and her presence added a symbolic dimension to the historical occasion, which to me was combined with the memories of the Czech arms deliveries to the nascent Israel on 1948. That my ancestors came from Moravian Třebíč, where they had found refuge in the 18th century after being expelled from Vienna, added a further historically significant dimension.

More than one circle was thus closed for me. And to the perennial question of “Where is my home?” the only adequate answer is that it is both the world at large and one’s own land: tertium non datur. Masaryk with his humanist patriotism would in all probability agree.

Shlomo Avineri

(Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of The Making of Modern Zionism and Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State)

1. Childhood, youth, studies; University of Vienna (1850–1882)

…all my life I’ve gone out of my way not to be unjust to Jews. Talks with T.G. Masaryk, 1927–1931

T.G. Masaryk was born on 7 March 1850 at Hodonín, one of the centres of Moravian Slovakia (Slovácko). At the time of his birth 65 Jewish families (215 Jews) were resident in Hodonín. They were mostly merchants, innkeepers, artisans, as well as a physician, a cantor and a teacher, and belonged to the better-off section of the population. A synagogue had existed in Hodonín since 1863 and a Jewish school building stood alongside it. When the school was abolished Jewish children attended the public German school.[1]

The history of the Jews in Hodonín is documented since the first quarter of the 17th century but dates back much earlier. The cemetery in Hodonín was founded in 1620 and closed down in the 1970s under the Communist regime. The estate of Hodonín had been owned since 1762 by the Empress Maria Theresa, who had already expelled the Jews from the town in 1744 and abolished their community.

By 1753, after they were permitted to return, there were 109 Jewish families in Hodonín, and by 1783, during the reign of Emperor Joseph II, a further 13 families had moved there. By 1910 the Jewish inhabitants numbered 976.[2]

Masaryk’s father hailed from Kopčany, not far from Holič,[3] which is located in Slovakia, east of the river Morava. The Holič estate had been purchased in 1749 by Francis of Lorraine, the husband of Empress Maria Theresa. Thus both estates, Holič and Hodonín, became in turn the property of the imperial family. There were Jewish communities in both Kopčany and Holič.

For several generations the family of Masaryk’s mother were settled in Hustopeče[4], where the Jewish community had been revived in the mid-19th century. The reconstructed original Jewish synagogue still stands, but the cemetery was closed down in the 1980s.[5]

In course of time Masaryk’s parents moved with their children from Hodonín to Mutěnice and then back to Hodonín. The family then lived from 1856 to 1862 in Čejkovice, and then in Čejč in 1864.[6]

Jewish communities existed in two other towns in Slovácko, namely, Břeclav and Strážnice. The latter community was older, dating from the beginning of the 15th century; by the middle of the 19th century Jews represented 10% of the population and resided in eighty of the houses.

Masaryk started to attend school in Hodonín, but soon after transferred to the village schools in Čejkovice and then Čejč. From 1861 to 1863 he attended the Piarist two-year Realschule in Hustopeče and in 1865 he passed the entrance examination for the prima grade at the Piarist Gymnasium at Strážnice. That same year he was admitted to the sekunda grade at the German Gymnasium in Brno

As a child Masaryk had ample opportunity to encounter Jewish families, including those settled in the villages and those in the larger settlements such as Hodonín, and Strážnice.

Masaryk described his impressions from his first encounters -with the Jewish community in his autobiographical fragment “Náš pan Fixl” (Our Mr Fixl): “In the fifties (of the last century – it sounds so bygone and distant) every little Slovak in the Hodonín district was inculcated with anti-Semitism, by the family, by the school, by the church and by society as a whole. Our mother forbade us to have contact with the Lechners, telling us that Jews need Christian blood, the blood of children. I therefore always gave the Lechners’ house a wide berth, as did all the boys I was friendly with in Čejkovice. I would always be hearing admonitions against the Jews in sermons and also at school. When he was in a very good mood the curate would ask the schoolmaster to play the “Jewish one” – an imitation of Jewish praying, in the style of some hackneyed old song. We lived next door to the schoolmaster and when the curate paid him a visit I would wait on them, so I got to hear that “Jewish one”. In the manner of rural music lovers, the curate would mumble some text purporting to be Jewish: “taiterl-taitrrl-tai-terlai” – and he himself would laugh his head off at it!

The supersitition about Christian blood also took hold of me so that every time I happened by chance to find myself close to some Jew – I never deliberately came close to any of them – I’d eye their fingers to see if some blood remained sticking to them. I kept that stupid habit up for a long time.

And yet I liked Mr Fixl in those days, ‘Our Mr Fixl’ as we used to call him at home. Only now as I reminisce do I realise that our family’s anti-Semitism conceded one absolutely philo-Semitic exception; but as a child I didn’t realise that Mr Fixl was also a Jew. Mr Fixl was a door-to-door pedlar from Hodonín; Mother bought cloth from him and house linen of every kind. Mr Fixl would call on us from time to time and we would all look forward to his arrival; he would spread out piles of his wares in front of us, telling us where each one came from, from which factory, and to whom he had already sold of bit of that or that, and how much; he would tell us all the latest lively and interesting news from Hodonín and the surrounding villages. And naturally in the process he would let drop a bit of gossip – in strict confidence, of course. And in the end I would always be given a bit of pencil (which we called plevajz). In short we were very fond of Mr Fixl. And he was ‘our’ Mr Fixl.

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