Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town
- Book Reviews,
by Cathleen M. Giustino
Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town: Ghetto-Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900 FROM THE PUBLISHER "In 1887 the middle-class Czechs dominating Prague's City Hall announced that they had selected Alfred Hurtig's "End of the Ghetto" Plan to be the blueprint for the large scale destruction and reconstruction of the city's former Jewish ghetto. The creation and implementation of the plan was carried out in the name of sanitation. Of the roughly 260 buildings standing inside the old ghetto's borders in 1887 only seven (including six out of an original nine synagogues) remained after the urban-renewal project was near completion before the start of World War I. In order to fund the ambitious project, the managers of municipal Prague borrowed an enormous sum of money. They also expelled the area's impoverished residents from their homes so that ghetto-clearance could be realized, and they did so without making an effort to secure new affordable housing for these people." "This book examines the local social and ethnic interest-group struggles that fueled the creation of the "End of the Ghetto" Plan and its costly metamorphosis from paper to built reality. It shows that members of the middle class who held nineteenth-century liberal values shrewdly used municipal power in order to pursue their group interests, sometimes at the expense of outsiders. Giustino shows how, through their implementation of ghetto clearance, these middle-class liberals contributed to the persistence of anti-Semitism in one local Central European setting. Together these two results suggest possible continuities between nineteenth-century politics and twentieth-century authoritarianism." Based upon a rich array of documents, some of them never before presented in English, the book includes records from Prague's municipal governments, the Jewish Religious Commune, and professional associations.
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