Helga Embacher, Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Hanns Haas, Charlotte Natmessnig (Hrsg.): Sonderband 5. Vom Zerfall der Grossreiche zur Europäischen Union – Integrationsmodelle im 20. Jahrhundert (2000)
Von der alten zur neuen Ordnung - Marsha Rozenblit: The Crisis of National Identity: Jews and the Collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy
Marsha L. Rozenblit Reconstructing Identity in Czechoslovakia All Jews in the former Habsburg Monarchy faced a crisis in late 1918 and early 1919. Not only did they need to craft a new political loyalty, which they did with varying degrees of success, but they had to construct a new national identity as well. The task was easiest for the Zionists of Bohemia and Moravia, committed as they were to a definition of the Jews as a nation, and living as they did in a multinational state. These Jewish nationalists simply asserted that Jews formed a nation, one of the nations of Czechoslovakia. Thus they could simply transfer their old tripartite identity to the new state. Now they could be Czechoslovaks politically, German or Czech culturally, and members of the Jewish nation. They felt that their construction of Jewish identity worked perfectly for the new circumstances. Energized by the creation of Czechoslovakia, Zionists felt confident that they would now finally win Jewish national rights. By the end of October 1918 Zionists in Prague established a Jewish National Council (Jüdischer Nationalrat) to work for the recognition of the Jewish nation and national minority rights in Czechoslovakia.” Aware of the limits of what they could realistically achieve, these Prague Zionists did not seek the apparatus of full-blown national autonomy - Jewish voting curias and Jewish delegations in the government - long desired by Austrian Zionists, but simply “minority rights in the national/cultural sphere”.’* In the weeks and months that followed, the Zionists felt that Zionism and its version of Jewish identity had triumphed. They felt vindicated by growing support for Jewish nationalism among Jews in Moravia and Silesia. Jewish National Committees (Jüdische Volksräte) sprang up in many cities in Moravia and Silesia and affiliated with the Prague-based Jewish National Council for Czechoslovakia. Moreover, in Moravia and Silesia even the Kultusgemeinden, traditionally opposed to Jewish nationalism, declared their support for it.’9 The Jewish National Council felt that its ideology provided the most viable identity for Jews in Czechoslovakia. After all, Jewish national identity rendered the Jews neutral in the nationality conflict between Czechs and Germans or Slovaks and Magyars and enabled them to be patriotic citizens of the state, speakers of ” CZA, Z3/217, L6/366, M e m o , Zionistischer Distriktsverband für Böhmen, (23 October 1918). 18 CZA, Z3/217, Leo Hermann to Ludwig S i n ger, (3 December 1918); L6/366, J ew i sh National Council, Prague, to Copenhagen Zionist office, n. d., but certainly (November 1918) ; CZA, L6/366, telegram of Jewish National Council to Czech government in Paris,(18 November 1918); Selbstwehr: (8 November 1918), p. 2. 59 CZA, L6/366, Report on the national movement in M o ra v i a , n. d., but probably (November 1918); Z3/217, Max Brod to Leo Hermann, (4 November 1918); Selbstwehr: (8 November 1918), p I, (22 November 1918), p. 5, (29 November 1918), pp. 3- 4, (6 December 1918), pp. 4-5, (13 December 1918), p. 2, (3 January 1919), p. 7, (10 January 1919) , p. 6, (7 February 1919), p. 7, (14 February 1919), p. 7. 50
