“Patience; the day will come when the Jews can be devoured again. Then shots will again crack merrily in the hunting grounds. Only then the Germans will probably be joined by Czech beaters and hunters. The circle will narrow, and our poor Bohemian [Jewish] rabbits will scurry back and forth in bewilderment.”
These words, written by Theodor Herzl, read like a warning from the eve of Kristallnacht. But Theodor Herzl did not write these words in 1938. He published them in his Zionist weekly, Die Welt, on November 5, 1897, forty-one years almost to the day before Nazi mobs burned the synagogues of Germany and Austria.
Herzl was not writing about Germany at all. He was writing about Bohemia, and about a tragedy that almost nobody remembers today.
In 1897, Bohemia, the western heart of today’s Czech Republic, was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was ruled from Vienna and home to two peoples who could not stand each other. The Czechs were the majority, but the Germans ran the cities, the universities and the government offices, and they intended to keep it that way. Through the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Czechs demanded the right to run their own local affairs and to have Czech recognized as an official language, equal to German, in the courts, the schools and the government offices. For the Germans, this was not a debate about grammar. It was a war over who owned Bohemia.
Caught in the middle were the Jews. Most Bohemian Jews spoke German, sent their children to German schools and considered themselves “Germans in every respect.” Herzl described them with a mix of tenderness and despair: “The Jews of German culture, whose youth and early manhood came during the reign of liberal ideas, attached themselves to the German nation with all the ardor of their hearts. They dearly loved their German-ness and rendered devoted and faithful service to the German people as well as to the idea of civil liberty.”
One Prague family tells the whole story. Hermann Kafka grew up in a poor Czech-speaking village in southern Bohemia. When he moved to Prague and opened a shop, he sent his son to German schools, the road to success in a city run by Germans. The bet paid off beyond his wildest dreams. His son, Franz, who was fourteen years old in 1897, became one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. But Franz’s three sisters, Elli, Valli and Ottla, were all murdered in the Holocaust.
In April 1897, the Austrian prime minister, Count Kasimir Badeni, issued a new language law. Every government official in Bohemia would now have to answer citizens in whichever language they used, Czech or German, and by 1901 every official would have to speak both. Nearly every educated Czech already spoke German, but few Germans had ever bothered to learn Czech. Overnight, German officials faced losing their jobs to Czechs. The Germans exploded in fury, and the uproar brought down Badeni’s government.
In their rage, the Germans turned on their most loyal allies, the Jews. “In times of strife and suffering they clung closely to the German nation, too closely, as it seems. Then, suddenly, they began to be shaken off. Suddenly they were called parasites who were sucking the host dry.”
Even the Jews’ liberal friends had despised them all along. Franz Schmeykal, the leader of Bohemia’s German liberals, “publicly denied that the German Jews were Germans. At best, when it came to making payments and casting ballots, he was prepared to recognize them as a necessary evil.” The Jews’ money and votes were welcome. They were not. Herzl’s verdict was merciless: “Poor, foolish German Jews! Love’s labor has been completely lost.”
And the Czechs? To them, the Jews were simply Germans. Czech nationalists launched an economic boycott under the slogan Svůj k svému, “each to his own,” which targeted and financially ruined Jewish shopkeepers in the villages. Some Jews tried switching sides, and by 1900 most Bohemian Jews were listing Czech as their mother tongue. It made no difference. Just as Herzl predicted, the Czechs joined the hunt. Czech crowds rampaged through the streets of Prague, looting and attacking the city’s Jewish minorities, until the authorities were forced to declare martial law.
“All at once they were no longer Germans but Jews,” wrote Herzl. “It was a transformation without any transition, abrupt like an awakening from a dream… So everything up to then had been a mistake, the whole pattern of their life had been based on a cardinal error, all their sacrifices had been in vain and all their loyalty futile.” The Jews of Bohemia gave their hearts to the Germans, and the Germans called them parasites. The Czechs hated them for that same devotion and torched their shops.
What were these Jews supposed to do? Work even harder to prove they were loyal Germans? Abandon the Germans and become Czechs? Every door they knocked on was slammed in their faces.
Moab and Midian
More than three thousand years earlier, two other nations who could not stand each other found one thing they could agree on. As the people of Israel camped on the plains east of the Jordan River:
The commentator Rashi is amazed by this alliance. “But were not Midian and Moab enemies of each other?” he asks. “But out of fear of Israel, they made peace between them.” Hatred of Israel accomplished what nothing else could. It turned bitter enemies into partners.
Together, Moab and Midian hired the prophet Bilaam to curse Israel. But God put other words in his mouth. Standing on a mountaintop overlooking the tents of Israel, the man paid to destroy them declared:
In my book, Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption, I explore a remarkable reading of this verse by 19th century biblical scholar, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin. Most readers hear Bilaam’s words as a simple description: Israel is a people apart. But Rabbi Berlin read the Hebrew, hen am levadad yishkon, u’vagoyim lo yitchashav, as two halves of a law. The first half is a promise: “a people that dwells alone will dwell.” As long as Israel lives as its own nation, it will live in peace and security. The second half is a warning: “and among the nations, they will not be reckoned.” The moment Jews try to mix in and become part of the nations around them, they will be held in no regard at all.
Bilaam was not just describing the Jewish people. He was revealing the iron rule of Jewish history.
After Joseph died, the Israelites in Egypt tried to blend in with their neighbors. “They thought that since they were in exile, it was proper not to remain separate from them. But the opposite happened: the Egyptians separated themselves from Israel.”.
Every other minority in history has won acceptance by blending in. The Jewish people are the exception. The harder we try to fit in with our host nations, the harder those nations push us away.
That is the story of Prague in 1897. The Jews who tried to be Germans were “shaken off” by the Germans. The Jews who tried to be Czechs were attacked by the Czechs. Like Moab and Midian, the Germans and the Czechs agreed on nothing, except that the Jews did not belong to either of them. And they were right. The Jews were never meant to belong to either side. They were a people that dwells alone.
So what should the Jews of Bohemia have done? What Herzl begged them to do. Three months before “The Hunt in Bohemia,” in August 1897, he gathered Jews from across the world in Basel, Switzerland, for the First Zionist Congress and declared that the Jews were a nation that needed a land of its own. Stop knocking on other people’s doors, he told the Jews of Bohemia. Build a house of your own. “Why don’t you finally accept the facts as they are and save yourselves from a situation which grows worse and more miserable by the day?”
The Jews of Bohemia never woke from their dream. On March 15, 1939, forty-two years after Herzl’s warning, German troops marched into Prague. The day Herzl warned of arrived, the day “when the Jews can be devoured again.” In the Bohemian town of Terezín, the Nazis built the ghetto of Theresienstadt, and the grandchildren of the Jews who had loved their German-ness with all the ardor of their hearts were herded inside, and from there to the death camps of the east. Ottla Kafka, Franz’s youngest sister, was one of them.
The Jews of Prague have heirs today. One of them is Dana Nessel, the attorney general of Michigan.
In late August, she stood before a gathering of Jewish Democrats and told them what their Jewish values required. “We have a moral imperative, to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.” Jews, she said, must be ready “to sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity”. She even held up Queen Esther as her model: “It is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path.” Esther risked her life to save the Jewish people. Nessel was asking Jews to sacrifice them.
Nessel was so afraid of her own party’s radical activists that she skipped the Michigan Democratic convention rather than face harassment over Israel. Weeks later, she endorsed Abdul El-Sayed for the Senate, a man who excused an attack on a Michigan synagogue with “hurt people do hurt people,” and praised him as the candidate who would protect “our physical security, our safety.” She is a Bohemian rabbit, running straight toward the hunters.
Nessel is only the most painful example of a much larger story. American Jews are being hunted from both sides. On the progressive Left, Jews are privileged oppressors and Zionists are colonizers, unwelcome on campus and increasingly unwelcome in the Democratic Party. On the woke Right, Tucker Carlson brands American Jews who support Israel as Israel’s “informal employees in the United States,” foreign agents who take their orders from Jerusalem, and he has given a friendly platform to Nick Fuentes, who openly praises Hitler. The two camps despise each other. Ideological enemies who agree on nothing else agree on this: the Jews are not really Americans.
Moab and Midian have made peace again.
And American Jews are responding exactly as the Jews of Prague did. Progressive Jews are certain that the Left will accept them, if only they condemn Israel loudly enough. Some conservative Jews are just as certain that the Right is safe, and that Tucker Carlson is a passing fringe.
Hated by the Left. Hunted by the Right. Where do American Jews belong?
In Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption, Rabbi Elie Mischel shows how the Bible foresaw this moment, from Pharaoh’s Egypt to Haman’s Persia to the campuses and podcasts of today, and why the answer has always been the same.
The Jews of Prague were neither Germans nor Czechs. American Jews are neither the Left nor the Right. We are Jews, members of an ancient nation with our own land, our own language and our own destiny. Being hated from both sides is painful. But being a people that dwells alone is not a curse. It is the blessing God forced out of the mouth of the man hired to curse us.
The rabbits of Bohemia had nowhere to run.
We do. The hunters are gathering again, from the Left and from the Right, and the circle is narrowing. But this time, the Jewish people have a home of our own. Not with Moab, and not with Midian.
In Jerusalem.
