In anticipation of Czechoslovakia's 1930 population census, one observer, writing in the Zionist Jüdische Volksstimme, assessed the importance of this statistical event for the Jewish nationalist movement:

In response to the widespread belief that Jews were indifferent to questions of national belonging or assumed opportunist identities, Zionists looked to the census to harden the boundaries of the Jewish nation in Czechoslovakia. Paradoxically, and in contrast to what Zionists had hoped to accomplish, statistics served to prescribe Jews racial particularity and to solidify the notion that Jews had flexible national identities.

Determined to create order out of the perceived chaos of Jews' fluid loyalties and multivalent linguistic and cultural identities, Zionists looked to statistics as a vehicle for the construction of a Jewish nation in Czechoslovakia.Footnote ² Although Zionists insisted that they represented one of the country's nations, their claim was problematized by Jews' apparent lack of a shared national language. In a context in which nationhood was understood as ethnic sameness expressed in a shared language, Zionists responded by advancing the belief that the Jewish nation was a community of origin with a distinct sociology. In the hands of Zionist activists, the census's summarizing and homogenizing categories in general, and its creation and enumeration of ethnic collectives in particular, facilitated the construction of a Jewish nation in Czechoslovakia.Footnote ³ Unsure of their ability to mobilize Jews for Jewish nationalism, Zionists worked to de-legitimize Jews' choices of national belonging other than Jewish in the censuses. They did so not only by attributing such “wrong” choices to national indifference or opportunism, but also by insisting that ethnic origin, rather than language or consciousness, determined Jews' nationality. However, by divesting Jewish nationhood from any particular language, social scientists' work facilitated the notion that Jews' language behavior was flexible, making Jews targets for rival, mutually exclusive demands for their linguistic loyalty. Seeking to overcome their own concerns about Jews' indifference to nation, Zionists ascribed Jews national sameness based on ethnic origin. They thereby contributed to the increasingly racialized understandings of Jewishness in the interwar years.

In using statistics as an instrument of political assertion and nation-building, Zionists adopted an important mode of governance and legitimization developed by the modern state. Since the mid nineteenth century, social sciences in general and statistics in particular have played an important role in the state's management of its population and resources. Statistical practices have made territories and their inhabitants legible to the administrative centers often far from their objects in geography and culture.Footnote ⁴ This process of mapping, however, rather than depicting an objective reality, as its practitioners trusted, reflected the way in which technocrats imagined the landscapes, economic and social networks, and communities they were studying. Although these statistical practices were first developed by states eager to control and extract resources from within their borders, the authority of numbers to convey “facts” became useful to other groups competing for power. For the disenfranchised, statistics was also a language of social contestation. As Jacqueline Urla suggests, statistics and social sciences became a way in which marginalized groups made themselves visible, enabling them to articulate their differences and to make claims upon the state and its resources.Footnote ⁵ In interwar Czechoslovakia, Jewish nationalists turned to statistics in order to establish themselves as a political force. Having failed to secure national political representation and uncertain of their political weight within Jewish society, Zionists used statistics and social science both to construct a Jewish nation and to present themselves as this nation's natural leaders. Eager to portray the country's Jews as a loyal and useful minority, these activists spun narratives that cast Jews as an integrative and stabilizing force in Czechoslovakia. In this way, they hoped to counter the voices questioning Jews' commitment to the new state.

In turning to statistics, Zionists from the Bohemian Lands tapped into a well-established tradition among Jewish activists in Europe of using social science as a form of resistance to dominant discourses about Jews. Historians have shown how Jewish activists employed statistics and social science to diagnose and treat the Jewish question. Whether they perceived the problem to be of a socioeconomic, cultural, medical, political, or national nature, the discourses they created were often simultaneously self-critical and apologetic.Footnote ⁶ Zionist experts, for example, confirmed claims that Jews held fluid, insincere national loyalties, a common complaint by observers critical of Jews' emancipation. To Zionists, however, this was not an innate flaw but a result of Jews' historic loss of nationhood. Much like other nation-builders, Zionists proposed nationalism as the cure. In other words, they sought to remedy the Jewish condition by analyzing the source of the perceived crisis in Jewish life, meanwhile insisting on Jews' amenability and equality. By drawing on the power of numbers and science, Jewish experts sought to establish their narratives as authoritative and to shape the ways in which Jews and non-Jews alike understood Jewish society. By the late nineteenth century, Jewish nationalists were at the forefront in the collection and publication of statistical knowledge about Jews as a national community. As Mitchell Hart shows, Zionists believed that statistical and scientific knowledge about Jews was an integral part of the process of national regeneration and the knowledge itself a vehicle for nation-building.Footnote ⁷

This article demonstrates how Zionists navigated the tumultuous waters of postwar politics. Drawing simultaneously on local discourses on national belonging and on the concepts and terminology of Jewish social sciences, they constructed new and useable narratives about Jews' past, present, and future. In interwar Czechoslovakia, statistics allowed Zionist activists to articulate legitimate differences between Jews and other nations, as well as to make Jews legible as an integral part of the country's ethnographical topography.

The essay begins with an exploration of the political significance of statistics in interwar Czechoslovakia by examining the postwar Jewish nationalist leadership's efforts to secure Jews' statistical visibility among the country's other nations. Although posing confidently as the Jewish nation's natural representatives when negotiating with the state authorities in Prague, Zionists were unsure about Jews' commitment to Jewish nationalism. Thus, ironically, in preparation for the census, Zionists promoted declarations of Jewish national belonging as an expression of neutrality. Suspecting that national indifference and opportunism was rife among the country's Jews, Zionists appealed to the uncommitted, the fence-sitters, and side-switchers to play it safe and to opt for neutrality. In the study's second half, I turn to the way in which Zionist experts interpreted and used the statistical knowledge generated by the census. A central figure among these activists was the statistician and politician František Friedmann. Well known in Prague's Zionist circles, Friedmann played an important role in interpreting the census for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike. He did so in a way that rationalized Jews' allegedly shifting loyalties, legitimized Zionists' political aspirations, and disseminated an image of Jews as a social body uniquely at home in Czechoslovakia.

Before I begin, let me note that unlike some studies on Jews and statistics in Czechoslovakia, I do not read the census results as evidence of individuals' or groups' sense of national belonging, national identification, or support for Jewish nationalism.Footnote ⁸ The anti-Zionist Jewish Conservative Party in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, for example, claimed to have convinced a majority of the region's Jews to claim Jewish nationality in the 1921 census. This, they claimed, was a sign of loyalty to the state and hence not an expression of a commitment to Jewish nationalism or nationhood.Footnote ⁹ As this essay shows, the 1921 and 1930 census results were contested by contemporary observers, activists, and respondents not only because of the definitions employed and the categories included and excluded, but also because of the census's highly politicized execution. Indeed, individuals' choices were likely shaped by a multiplicity of social, cultural, political, and legal considerations, as well as by a general uncertainty as to the consequences of one's answer to the question about national belonging. People's nationality, for example, determined which schools their children belonged to, what language they could use in correspondence with public offices, their chances for citizenship, and their access to government contracts and employment.

Furthermore, it is unclear to what degree census commissioners influenced or overruled individuals' answers and even to what extent individuals and communities were actually visited by census commissioners, considering that the censuses took place in the winter months.Footnote ¹⁰ One observer, the scholar Emanuel Rádl, who was highly critical of the political weight and scientific authority awarded the census, pointed to the ways in which census commissioners adopted their own criteria for determining the accuracy of individuals' statement of national belonging. Even though the regulations stated that mother tongue was the primary ethnic marker and that commissioners should verify whether the respondent was answering truthfully, census takers routinely, according to Rádl's witness, employed other methods:

From the outset, lay and expert observers alike considered Jews' national identification as distinct from their language, making Jews' perceived national loyalties the subject of intense public scrutiny.Footnote ¹² In short, although the census results were intended to provide reliable evidence of the population's national composition, for present-day historians, using the data in this manner represents something of a Gordian knot. For this study, the importance of the census lies primarily in the meaning with which it was invested by activists, politicians, and social scientists rather than as a reflection of social reality.

Statistics in the Service of Nation-builders

As the Jewish National Council, a group of Prague-based Zionist leaders, celebrated the Czechoslovak Constitution's formal, yet implicit, recognition of Jewish nationality in February 1920, it soon became clear that the struggle for national rights for Jews was far from over.Footnote ¹³ As a newly emerged political faction, Zionists were keen to legitimize their self-proclaimed position as the natural representatives of the country's Jews.Footnote ¹⁴ Although Zionists gained political representation in the 1919 municipal elections, they failed to secure national representation in the 1920 parliamentary elections, despite receiving a substantial number of votes.Footnote ¹⁵ To these Jewish leaders, the census' inclusion of the category Jewish nationality was of crucial importance. Not only would the census make Jews visible as one nation among others, but it would also add legitimacy to the Jewish national program. Jewish leaders hoped, in light of the electoral disappointment, that the Jewish nation's statistical representation would establish Jews as a community with valid demands for resources and representation. Much like their peers among the country's other national minorities, Jewish activists were especially keen to secure state funding for their schools. In other words, if Jewish nationalists were to cement their position as leaders of the country's Jews, the census, imbedded with the authority of both science and state sponsorship, was to make their community visible and deserving. This visibility was important in establishing Jewish nationhood as a social fact. Furthermore, it would assist Zionists in documenting Jews' loyalty to the new Czechoslovak order, a central tenet of their political program.

Soon after the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the newly founded State Statistical Bureau began preparations for the country's first census. This statistical event was defined in important ways by its Habsburg legacy.Footnote ¹⁶ According to Czech nationalists, the Austrian censuses' use of the category of everyday language as a marker of nationality favored the dominant German population at the expense of the socially weaker Czechs. The latter were “forced” to use or declare German as their everyday language, thereby unjustly diminishing the Czech population's language rights and weakening their demands for Czech schools.Footnote ¹⁷ To the Czech activists, who imagined their nation as a community of origin, mother tongue defined an individual's true national belonging. Thus, the Austrian experience, according to the prominent Czech demographer Antonín Boháč, had galvanized a consensus among Czech nationalists that in the new postwar census, mother tongue, “the most objective and stable marker of ethnic belonging,” was to act as a sign of national belonging, thereby replacing everyday language.Footnote ¹⁸

Nevertheless, despite this alleged consensus among the Czech statisticians and politicians, once they found themselves on the other side of the table, so to speak, and in search of a statistical majority, considerable disagreement erupted among the members of the Statistical Council. Although some called for individuals' subjective choice of nationality, others wanted objective criteria to govern national identification, either by listing nationality and language as separate categories or by making nationality dependent on corresponding ethnic evidence. In the end, a narrow majority decided on the procedure where “nationality is understood as ethnic belonging for which the main external marker is mother tongue.”Footnote ¹⁹

Although the Czech authorities claimed that the census “would provide correct, accurate, and honest information about the character of the population,” there was significant uncertainty as to the census results' ability to document a significant Czech and Slovak majority, a desired result that would help silence the voices pointing to the injustices of the postwar order.Footnote ²⁰ This insecurity among Czech leaders as to Czechoslovaks' numerical strength made them receptive to demands that the census include special regulations for determining the nationality of the country's Jewish population. Czech statistical experts agreed that Jews, despite having “lost their national language,” shared physical, socioeconomic, and religious characteristics constituting a distinct, although particular, ethnic group. There was disagreement on the Statistical Council, however, whether this particularity should find expression in the census.Footnote ²¹ Some members looked to the August 1919 census in Slovakia, which had asked for respondents' nationality rather than language and, for the first time, allowed Jews to opt for Jewish nationality. The census results revealed a significant decline in the number of Hungarians in Slovakia, a result welcomed by the new authorities. Subsequently, the reduction in the Hungarian population was in part explained by census commissioners' claims that the majority of the region's Jews had opted for Jewish nationality.Footnote ²² Thus, the council members were aware that including Jewish nationality had the potential for influencing the balance of power between the country's national groups. In the end, Jews were awarded an exemption from the general rule ascribing nationality according to mother tongue as the census regulations added that “Jews can declare Jewish nationality.”Footnote ²³ Jews could choose either Jewish nationality or a nationality according to mother tongue. For the purposes of the census, religion was to act as the objective marker of Jewish ethnicity.Footnote ²⁴

The Jewish National Council actively sought to influence the census makers in order to secure the exemption for the country's Jews. In late October 1920, just days before the Statistical Council was to publish the census guidelines, the Jewish national leadership submitted a memorandum to the government warning that failure to consider Jews' particularity would produce “unwelcome results.”Footnote ²⁵ Opposing what they perceived to be the dominant view on the Statistical Council—namely, that the census should register individuals' mother tongue rather than nationality—Jewish leaders noted that such a procedure “might falsely strengthen certain nationalities with members of the Jewish nationality whose mother tongue is one of these nationalities.”Footnote ²⁶ Leaving no doubt as to what groups might benefit, they suggested that a question about language would “strengthen the domination (država) of the Hungarian and German nationalities.”Footnote ²⁷ Drawing on the Czech nationalist trope of old Austria's manipulative and denationalizing census practices, Jewish nationalists pointed out that polling language rather than nationality would make the census scientifically inaccurate by erasing the Jewish nation statistically. Furthermore, contrary to the guarantees made just months earlier in the Constitution, the proposal to register language would count Jews as members of other ethnic communities.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, they proposed, in order to ensure “satisfactory results,” that the census ought to include questions about both nationality and mother tongue. Aware of the census makers' disagreement regarding objective markers or subjective choice of nationality, the activists insisted that Jewish nationality could be defined objectively by ethnic origin (kmenová příslušnost) and subjectively by national consciousness (uvědomění národní).Footnote ²⁹ Thus, only by asking directly about national belonging in the census, the Jewish National Council concluded, would it be possible for “the majority of people of Jewish origin who identify as Jewish nationals” to express their true national belonging.Footnote ³⁰ A few days later, the census regulations were passed defining nationality according to mother tongue but explicitly exempting Jews from this general rule. The Jewish National Council's demands had been met.

Historians who have pondered the question of the Czech leaders' receptiveness to Zionists' demands point to both ideological and pragmatic answers. Hillel J. Kieval and Kateřina Čapková alike argue that Tomaš G. Masaryk's active support for the Jewish nationalist program played an important part in ensuring Jews' inclusion as both a religious and national community in the census. However, as Kieval, Čapková, and other scholars have noted, there were also more immediate and pragmatic motives at play.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, considering the importance of the census results, such ideological sympathies were only likely to gain a political life if the government perceived them as enhancing the Czech and Slovak cause, in this case minimizing the numbers of Germans and Hungarians in relation to the “Czechoslovak” majority. In the postwar period, both Czech and German nationalists believed that Jews made up a significant part of the German population in the Bohemian Lands. Some German leaders feared that including Jewish nationality would harm their minority language and nationality rights as German-speaking Jews “withdrew” from the German nationality.Footnote ³² As language rights were dependent on minority language speakers constituting 20 percent or more of a jurisdiction's total population, German nationalists worried about their ability to obtain rights in communities with a Czech majority. In Slovakia, observers assumed, separating Jews' nationality from language would further shrink the region's Hungarian population. Likewise, Czech leaders believed that recognizing Jewish nationality would significantly diminish the number of Germans and Hungarians.Footnote ³³ The potential for “withdrawing Jews from the German numbers” was, according to Heinrich Rauchberg, decisive for the Council's Czech members in opting to register nationality rather than mother tongue so “that Jews could be separated from Germans.”Footnote ³⁴

As time passed and the country's second census came around in 1930, some Czech politicians began to doubt whether Jews' exemption diminished German or Czech numbers in the Bohemian Lands. They considered polling language, rather than national communities, and defining Hebrew and Yiddish as Jewish national languages.Footnote ³⁵ Responding to the Jewish National Council's letter protesting this initiative, President Masaryk's office noted, “that the inclusion of the Jewish nationality in 1921 was the outcome of the fact that in that census nationality was to be defined according to language. Thus, for political reasons, namely in order to weaken the Hungarian and German communities (Maďarstvo a Němectvo) Jews were exempted from this general rule.” Arguing that this “creation of a new sixth nationality” had also decreased the numbers of “Czechoslovaks,” the letter continued, “the fact that Czech nationalist members of the Statistical Council initiated the proposed changes reflects that the anticipated political gains were overestimated.”Footnote ³⁶ However, despite the heated public debate on the proposed changes, the 1921 census regulations regarding nationality remained more or less in place.Footnote ³⁷ Although the presidential office might have felt secure about Jews' “Czechoslovak” identity in the Bohemian Lands, some Czech nationalist circles were less so.Footnote ³⁸ Acting on the perception that Jews' preferred language was German or Hungarian, Czech nationalists opposed the proposed changes, fearing that it would weaken the Czechoslovak position.Footnote ³⁹

Jewish Nationalists and the Census

The Zionist leadership was as adamant about the importance of the statistical representation of the Jewish nationality in 1930 as it had been in the immediate postwar period. To them, the inclusion of Jewish nationality as a census option and the statistical evidence documenting Jews' identifications were central to countering damaging and threatening accusations about Jews' disloyal behaviors. Although the census both produced and revealed shifts in national belonging among Jews, for Zionists, the evidence served as the raw material through which Jews' behavior could be explained, perhaps corrected, and the damaging optics neutralized.

Nevertheless, wary of Jews' alleged indifference and opportunism, Zionists did not demand a firm national commitment from Jews. Presuming that Jews lacked commitment to the Zionist program or sincere national feelings, Zionists encouraged them to opt for Jewish nationality in order to signal neutrality. In their addresses to the Jewish public preceding both the 1921 and the 1930 census, Jewish leaders stressed that opting for Jewish nationality would send a clear signal of Jews' commitment to neutrality in the struggle between the other nationalities in Czechoslovakia. Although they assured their readers of the legality of this option and the secrecy of their choice, Jewish leaders also emphasized the effects of “unwelcome results” whose publication, they warned, would fuel anti-Semitism.Footnote ⁴⁰ One author noted that the intense politicization of the census only heightened the importance of Jews considering the consequences of their statement of national belonging. “Everybody is trying to recruit Jews for themselves today,” and, the author warned, if Jews fail to opt for neutrality, “in the same way, they will all [my emphasis] turn against the Jews accusing them of siding with their enemies.”Footnote ⁴¹ The current climate, Zionists cautioned, was indeed not one in which Jews could afford indifference nor opportunist loyalty to any other nation but the Jewish one.Footnote ⁴²

The link between Jewish nationality and neutrality was not only made by Zionist advocates. Traditional religious Jewish leaders also encouraged their flocks to opt for Jewish nationality as an expression of neutrality, loyalty to the state, and rejection of nationalist politics. In Slovakia, census commissioners agreed that Jews had chosen Jewish nationality in order not to commit to any one stance in times of political and social uncertainty.Footnote ⁴³ Almost a decade later, neutrality remained a central theme in the Zionist campaigns preceding the country's second census.Footnote ⁴⁴

Despite the census makers' claims that the census was registering objective ethnic markers, nationalist groups acted to persuade individuals of their so-called true nationality much as they would in an election campaign. Zionists were no exception. In their press, choosing Jewish nationality and casting a vote for the Jewish Party were presented as similar events through which Jews could demonstrate their “commitment to neutrality in the nationality conflict” and loyalty to the new order.Footnote ⁴⁵ Because the almost 80,000 votes that were cast for the Jewish Party in the April 1920 elections had not gained the Zionist movement any seats in parliament, the Zionist press urged its readers to make the census another forceful public statement of Jews' unity. Jews' solidarity, they suggested, would make it impossible for the authorities to ignore the interests of this “sizeable minority.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, for the Zionist leadership the census was, as the recent local and national elections had been, an opportunity to assert their popularity and efficacy as leaders of a unified and significant constituency in the new national democratic order.

Although the inclusion of Jewish nationality in the census was central to the Zionist movement's political position of loyalty to the state, the statistical representation of a Jewish ethnic collective was a crucial step in establishing the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood. As the public debate preceding the two censuses showed, the notion that Jews constituted both a religious and a national minority was a contested one.Footnote ⁴⁷ Zionists and their opponents alike were well aware of the importance of the census in establishing the existence of a Jewish nation as a social fact. In the week following the 1921 census, Otto Bondy writing in the Czech-Jewish weekly Progress (Rozvoj), lamented:

Czech-Jews, who promoted Jews' use of Czech language and integration into Czech society, believed that the recognition of Jewish nationality was detrimental to Jews, excluding them from the Czechoslovak community. Zionists, in contrast, were convinced that nationality status was the first step in revolutionizing the relations between Jews and non-Jews.Footnote ⁴⁹ Depicting the country's Jews as a community of origin or race, a notion supported by the widespread belief that Jews were culturally and racially different from non-Jews, Zionists positioned Jews as equal to the country's other national groups similarly defined as ethnic communities.Footnote ⁵⁰ In a series of articles on the results of the first census, Gustav Fleischmann, a Zionist activist and top bureaucrat in Prague's Jewish community, analyzed the success of Jewish nationalism by comparing the numbers of ethnic Jews, i.e., Jews by religion (Israelites), to the number of Jewish nationals in each locality across the Bohemian Lands.Footnote ⁵¹ Using religion to demark the real Jewish nation, Fleischmann focused on the reasons for the discrepancy between the numbers in the two columns. By suggesting that Jews' choice of nationality other than Jewish was the result of intimidation, conformity, or indifference, Fleischmann depicted inconsistency between ethnic and national identities as untruthful and opportunist.Footnote ⁵² “Either out of habit or fear,” he argued, “many Jews who are both subjectively and objectively Jewish nationals chose to declare their nationality according to language.”Footnote ⁵³

The blurring of boundaries between religious and national Jewish communities, thereby ascribing ethnic national belonging to all Jews, was a common practice among Zionists. Like many of their Czech and German nationalist peers, Zionists believed that their nation was a “community of blood.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Individuals fancying themselves as part of a nation different from their ethnic community simply suffered from a sort of false consciousness.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although Jewish nationalists paid lip service to the importance of both national consciousness and ethnic origin in determining nationality, in practice, they believed that the only “true” and “real” national option for Jews was that which corresponded to their race.Footnote ⁵⁶ In a parliamentary speech criticizing the proposed changes to the 1930 census, the Zionist MP Ludvík Singer described his constituency as “the country's 350,000 [sic] Jews, of which 180,000 identify as Jews nationally.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Similarly, in a lecture presented to the Society for the Study of the Minorities Question, Emil Margulies, another prominent Zionist and leader of the Jewish Party, discussed the issues facing “the 365,000 Jews that live here, the fellow citizens of Jewish nationality in this state,” likewise referring to the approximate number of Jews as defined by religion as constituting the country's Jewish nation.Footnote ⁵⁸ As the natural representatives of this ethnic community, Zionists presented themselves as a leadership with influence across the country. They could ensure that Jews in the eastern and western regions alike acted as an integrative force, unified in their loyalty to their ethnonational community and by extension to the Czechoslovak state.

To Zionists, the right to declare Jewish nationhood was a benchmark for the state's commitment to Jews' individual, as well as collective rights. Individual Jews' civil equality had to include their right to express their ethnic national belonging as it did, according to Zionists, for the country's non-Jewish citizens.Footnote ⁵⁹ Furthermore, as one of the country's national minorities, Jews expected to be entitled to state support for schools and other national institutions, as well as representation in political and administrative bodies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Zionist activists made sure, however, that they differed in one important way from other minority nationalists in their attitude toward the census.

In the aftermath of both the 1921 and the 1930 census, some national minority activists denounced the results as fake, citing systematic abuse and misconstruction by census commissioners determined to increase the number of “Czechoslovaks.”Footnote ⁶¹ Similar criticisms were also raised in an article in the main Czech-language Zionist weekly Jewish News (Židovské zprávy) shortly after the first census. “The census results regarding nationality will in no way reflect the truth that much we can already say with confidence,” the author stated. Recounting several instances where the Jewish National Council was called on to intervene when Jews were not allowed to declare Jewish nationality, the author accused the census officials of systematic manipulation of people's answers, even hinting that the abuse was sanctioned by the authorities.Footnote ⁶² However, aside from this initial criticism, the Zionist press embraced the event itself and the statistical material that it produced. They thereby consciously set themselves apart from other minority nationalists. Uncertain of Jews' choices in the census, the Jewish National Council continued its strategy of cultivating an alliance between itself and the Czech authorities. After all, the government had been forthcoming in meeting Jewish nationalists' demands regarding the census design. In return, they were now expected to fulfill their role as a loyal partner of the state's Czech elite.

The belief that Jews had “lost their national language” was at the root of the contested nature of Jews' nationality status. Even though Jews were considered a separate ethnic group, census makers allowed for Jews alone to adopt a national identity different from their perceived ethnicity. By privileging mother tongue as the primary ethnic marker, the Statistical Council had sought to ensure that the census would uncover what they believed to be individuals' authentic national belonging. Nevertheless, Jews were allowed both “backward-looking” and “forward-looking” national identification.Footnote ⁶³ Thus, according to the census regulations, their national flexibility was defined by their ethnic origin, whereas their national identification depended on their adoption of another nation's language. In other words, outside observers considered Jews' language use a political or opportunistic choice rather than an integral part of Jewish identity. These critics made change or continuity a sign of Jews' political loyalties. So as Germans and Czechs had competed for Jews' allegiance during the last decades of Austria-Hungary, in Czechoslovakia Jews' formalized national flexibility ensured that the contest continued.Footnote ⁶⁴ As one Jewish nationalist author commented, “Czechs and Germans of every political orientation […] are preoccupied with the question how they can enlarge their own numbers at the expense of the other nation, they both agree that the Jews are the only ones that can enlarge their numbers (Volkszahl).”Footnote ⁶⁵ Although Zionist leaders were eager to demonstrate the existence of a Jewish nation through the census results, they also understood the precariousness of the exemption made for Jews in the census regulations. Furthermore, they continued to harbor doubts about Jews' willingness to commit to Jewish nationalism. In anticipation of both censuses, the Jewish National Council called on Jews to opt for Jewish nationality if not for any other reason than “to withdraw” from the contest between Czechs and Germans, thereby refusing “to become the foot soldiers (trabanty) of other nationalities.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The lack of a national Jewish language complicated Zionists' attempts to position Jews as a deserving national minority. Such minorities were entitled to public resources for national institutions, most importantly schools.Footnote ⁶⁷ Perhaps more significantly, this perceived linguistic deficiency created particular demands on Jews' behavior and served as ammunition for voices critical of Jewish nationalism. In a context in which nationhood was understood to be linked to a shared language and in which Jews were widely believed to be nationally indifferent and opportunist, Jewish nationalists had to turn to other markers of nationhood, such as shared origin, ethnic sameness, and territorial unity, in order to construct the Jewish nation.

The Creation of Czechoslovakia's Jewish Nation

Once the census results became available, they revealed Jews' divergent linguistic and national loyalties. Although just over half of the country's Jews opted for Jewish nationality, thousands appeared statistically among other nationalities. Jewish and non-Jewish observers alike interpreted the multiplicity of Jews' identifications as revealing uncertainty, opportunism, and indifference. Zionist activists such as Gustav Fleischmann, František Friedmann, and Hugo Gold, quickly stepped in to take on the role of interpreting the results for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. Armed with the authority of numbers and social science, these activists worked to make Jews legible as a distinct nation whose religious, cultural, and linguistic heterogeneity only momentarily obscured their collective sameness. Furthermore, while Zionist leaders assured the new authorities of Jews' loyalty to the state, Jewish experts documented the Jewish national minority's potential to act as an integrative force in Czechoslovakia. Jews were, they imagined, alongside the Czechoslovaks, one of two national communities uniting the newly amalgamated territories.

One of the most prolific Jewish experts in the Bohemian Lands was the Zionist activist and writer František Friedmann. As a law student at Charles University, Friedmann, then in his early twenties, became involved in Prague Zionist circles in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Soon, he served as an editor and contributor to Jewish News and as a member of the Jewish National Council.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the 1930s, Friedmann acted as a representative of the Jewish Party on Prague's Municipal Council and was involved in the Zionist sports movement as the chair of the local club Hagibor.Footnote ⁶⁹ From the outset, Friedmann showed a keen interest in Jewish statistics and sociology, and he gradually established himself as the local Jewish statistician par excellence.Footnote ⁷⁰ He wrote extensively on Jewish statistics in Czechoslovakia, and although he did not shy away from pointing his numerical guns at Jewish opponents and non-Jewish critics, he was particularly preoccupied with what he believed was the uniquely complex composition of Czechoslovak Jewry.Footnote ⁷¹

Friedmann hypothesized that because of their unique historical experience, on the crossroads between East and West, the Jews of Czechoslovakia formed a microcosm through which scientists could study Diaspora Jewry as a whole. His studies of Czechoslovak Jews led him to believe, in contrast to some Zionist writers, that territorial relocation was not necessary for the future of the Jewish nation. In fact, to Friedmann, Czechoslovakia was, with its bridging and blending of so-called Eastern and Western Jewries, the Promised Land. Although Friedmann's relationship to the Zionist movement became strained in the 1930s, he remained both a committed Jewish nationalist and a central figure in Prague Jewish society as the editor of the Bulletin of the Jewish Religious Community in Prague (Věstník pražské židovské náboženské obce). During the German occupation, he continued his involvement although now under radically different conditions.Footnote ⁷² In the summer of 1943, he became the head of Prague's Council of Elders, the German-appointed Jewish leadership. Friedmann, who was married to an “Aryan” woman, Hana Friedmannová, survived the war in Prague alongside a handful of other Jews “with Aryan family ties.”Footnote ⁷³ Only a few weeks after liberation, he passed away at the age of 48, leaving behind Hana and their two children.Footnote ⁷⁴ As a passionate expert-activist, Friedmann's work was emblematic of Jewish social science in the interwar period.

Even though the 1921 census was brimming with evidence of Jews' diverse linguistic and national identifications, Friedmann was not discouraged. Like his colleague Gustav Fleischmann, Friedmann compared the number of Jews by religion (Israelites) to the number of Jews by nationality. Region by region, he documented the size of the Jewish national minority and assessed the degree of Jews' so-called true national consciousness. In his hands, the 1921 census's counting of 79,777 Jews (Israelites) in Bohemia, 45,306 in Moravia-Silesia, 135,918 in Slovakia, and 93,341 in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, recorded Jewish nationhood as a social fact.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although only 15 percent of Jews in Bohemia chose Jewish nationality in the 1921 census, more than 47 percent did so in Moravia-Silesia, 54 percent in Slovakia, and almost 87 percent in Subcarpathian Ruthenia.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, in the eastern regions, Jews opted overwhelmingly for Jewish nationality, whereas in the western ones, fewer Jews chose Jewish as their national belonging.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Bohemia, for example, 50 percent of Jews chose Czechoslovak nationality and 35 percent German. To Friedmann, the census results reflected the uniquely complex character of Czechoslovak Jewry consisting of what social scientists believed were two distinct types: modernized western Jews and traditional eastern Jewish communities.

In Friedmann's view, the Jews of Bohemia constituted a typical western Jewry characterized by secularization, assimilation, and a somewhat eroded sense of Jewish national consciousness.Footnote ⁷⁸ He identified Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia as “transitional” types.Footnote ⁷⁹ If assimilation had undermined Jewish national culture and identity in some areas, the majority of communities here had withstood such pressures and retained a sense of Jewish national belonging.Footnote ⁸⁰ In making his contrast to the communities in the Bohemian Lands and Slovakia, however, Friedmann imagined that the Jews of Subcarpathian Ruthenia constituted an authentic Jewish national community complete with a national language (Hebrew) and distinct Jewish customs, beliefs, and world view.Footnote ⁸¹ The socioeconomic backwardness and traditionalism of these Jews and the region as such, Friedmann believed, had left their organic national life intact. As evidence, he pointed to the more than 85 percent of the region's Jews that declared Jewish nationality “spontaneously and without any propaganda [campaigns]” in the country's first census.Footnote ⁸² Despite the loud proclamations of local, religious Jewish leaders that they had promoted Jewish nationality as a sign of loyalty to the state and a confirmation of Jews' indifference to all questions of national belonging—a badge of honor for the observant Jew—Zionists interpreted the results as evidence of Jews' national awareness.

In Friedmann's view, the authentic Jewish national life found in Subcarpathian Ruthenia was not only a result of traditionalism and underdevelopment. The density of the community, comprising more than 15 percent of the province's population, created large and compact Jewish communities nurturing a vibrant and organic Jewish life. The correlation between the density of Jews' ethnic community and their level of Jewish national consciousness was observed by Jewish and non-Jewish experts alike as a feature of Jews' particular sociology.Footnote ⁸³ In Bohemia, Friedmann noted in an article on the region's Jewry, the movement of Jews from the countryside to the region's cities, first and foremost to Prague, “has made it possible for Bohemian Jews to preserve their unique national character to a much greater degree than Jewish societies in other countries where Jews make up a similar percentage of the overall population.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, eastern and western Jewries alike were governed by a particular sociology which, albeit different on the surface, reflected an underlying sameness.Footnote ⁸⁵

It was with the same air of scientific authority that Friedmann challenged the accusations of disloyalty leveled against Jews by nationalists of every stripe. He coined a social scientific term “fluctuation” (fluktuace) to explain a process whereby Jews opportunistically adopted and switched national identities, a phenomenon he distinguished from assimilation.Footnote ⁸⁶ Friedmann described as “renegades” Jews who adopted so-called foreign nationalities, in his mind a national identity different than their real Jewish one. He used “fluctuation” to describe Jews' exchange of one foreign nationality for another in opportune moments such as when the Habsburg Empire collapsed. Then, he postulated, Magyar Jews became Slovak and German ones Czech.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the polemical pamphlet Mravnost či Oportunita? Friedmann denounced Czech-Jews' efforts to expand their activities promoting Czech among Jews in Moravia as encouraging fluctuation. Claiming that Czech-Jews were making “German” Jews adopt “Czech” nationality in the wake of the new political order, Friedmann attacked the Czech-Jewish campaign for urging a superficial and insincere reorientation among Jews. These activities harmed Czech, as well as Jewish, interests by encouraging Jews to fake a Czech national commitment.Footnote ⁸⁸

The term and its use embodied the way in which politics and social science were intertwined in Friedmann's work. On the one hand, its reference to national side-switching, indifference, and opportunism cast Czech-Jews as promoting immorality and behavior that fuelled anti-Semitism. At the same time, Friedmann's admittance that fluctuation took place among Jews and his denunciation of such opportunism gave the impression that Zionists were both honest and ready to put an end to Jews' deceptive behavior. On the other hand, Friedmann made use of this social scientific term to neutralize the incriminating effects that the perception of Jews' opportunism and national insincerity had.Footnote ⁸⁹ When addressing scholarly audiences, Friedmann depicted fluctuation as a result of state policies that had encouraged Jews to abandon their ethnic nationality and to adopt that of the dominant group.Footnote ⁹⁰ Friedmann thereby presented Jews' fluctuation as an outcome of their recent historical experience with “denationalization,” rather than an enduring aspect of Jews' collective character.Footnote ⁹¹ The term's scientific appearance both disguised its political origin and strengthened the position of Zionists by presenting their ideological stance as objectively moral in contrast to the deviance of fluctuation allegedly practiced by groups such as Czech-Jews, as well as opportunist and indifferent Jewish individuals.

The statistical exposure of a significant lack of overlap between the country's ethnic and national Jewish communities was somewhat problematic for Zionists. Nevertheless, the collection and reproduction of statistical data about Jews facilitated the notion that Jews' collectively constituted a distinct social body governed by a particular sociology. The typology of eastern and western Jewry, which Friedmann borrowed from Jewish sociology, in turn provided him with an interpretative framework that ordered and explained the cultural variations among Jews. The current diversity was, to Friedmann, a temporary deviation from the natural state of ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic sameness, which he imagined Jewish nationhood to be.

Like his colleagues among Czech and German experts, Friedmann was seeking order in the seeming chaos of divergent cultures, languages, and loyalties in the newly unified territories. By elevating ethnic origin to the most important aspect of identity, Friedmann sought to unify the country's Jewish communities through a process of internal homogenization and external differentiation. Friedmann thereby divested Jews discursively from their local environments, loyalties, and identifications and marginalized the importance of other categories of identification among Jews. What mattered to Friedmann was not the intense rivalry between different Hasidic dynasties or the profound divisions between Neolog and Orthodox communities, between Prague, Košice, and Mukačevo Jews, nor was he interested in Jews' other, overlapping, and at times conflicting, identifications defined by place, language, class, or gender.Footnote ⁹² Friedmann sought a homogenous and legible ethnic whole, not the chaos of individuals' identities and loyalties. In Czechoslovakia, the ethnification of individuals and communities was forcefully expressed in the census design. Census makers explicitly prescribed a set of legitimate ethnic identities and forbade answers that stated multiple nationalities or spatial identities, thereby formally marginalizing and erasing the significance of other forms of identification.Footnote ⁹³ In this way, statistics produced ethnic groups. Although Jews could formally choose nationality, the census categories and definitions prescribed Jews ethnic distinctiveness. Not only did numbers and officially sanctioned categories make Jews visible as one ethnonational community, but they also lent this image objectivity and truth. Regardless of the voices that claimed that Jews opted for Jewish nationality as a sign of neutrality, religious traditionalism, loyalty to the state, and national indifference, Zionists interpreted individuals' choice of Jewish nationality as expressions of national commitment. If statistics revealed Jews' sociological distinctiveness, a characteristic of a real nation, as some argued, then the way in which Zionists made use of them was intended to inscribe Jews as one among other nations. Statistics were a tool meant to strengthen Zionists' demand for recognition and equality.

In the same way that the narratives of shared origin bound the image of Czechoslovak Jewry, writers also constructed the territorial boundaries of the country's Jewish nation. In their works, Friedmann and other authors chronicled well-established historical networks of scholarship and kinship among the Jewish communities in the Bohemian Lands, Slovakia, and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. They presented the Jewish community in the Bohemian Lands as a “historical reservoir” from which Jewish migrants ventured out, strengthening Jewries in the neighboring regions.Footnote ⁹⁴ Indeed, challenging the notion allegedly spread by “Magyar Jews” that Jews in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia were “the descendants of Judaized Chazars who colonized Hungary with the Magyars,” Friedmann argued that Jewish settlement in this region was much more recent and of a different character. “There was not a substantial community here until the eighteenth century,” Friedmann insisted, “[when] Northern Hungary became the destination for Jews from the Bohemian Lands. The community leaders, especially, originated in our region.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, Friedmann constructed a narrative that not only established cultural affinity and kinship between the newly amalgamated territories, but also claimed that these regions were in fact a historical entity whose boundaries and integrative networks Magyar nationalists had attempted to dismantle. Eager to distinguish Jews from “colonizers” like the Germans and Hungarians, he suggested that the historical ties between the Jews in the country's various regions attested to their integrative qualities.Footnote ⁹⁶ While the German and Hungarian national minorities pulled Czechoslovakia apart, the Jewish and the Czechoslovak nations' cultural and physical cohesion, straddling the country from east to west, north to south, attested to the authenticity and true character of Czechoslovakia's borders. This was no “artificial operation” as some critics of the postwar order claimed.Footnote ⁹⁷

In constructing this narrative, Friedmann created a Jewish version of the Czechoslovakist trope of the Great Moravian state as the first Czechoslovakia. He did so in order to make Jews' tribal unity and historical continuity legible to his readers. According to Czechoslovakist ideology, Czechs and Slovaks traced their shared origin and linguistic sameness to Great Moravia, a national and political unity that was destroyed by the more powerful Hungarian “invaders.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The Czechoslovak nation's unity was disrupted territorially, historically, and linguistically, according to this discourse, by external forces. Nevertheless, the two tribes' affinity was maintained by cultural exchanges in which the Czechs, as the more developed branch of the Czechoslovak nation, sustained the Slovaks.Footnote ⁹⁹ Similarly, Friedmann constructed a narrative in which Moravia was the place of origin of Czechoslovakia's Jews. In his view, the affinity between western and eastern Jewries was sustained by a continuous influx of Western cultural and intellectual elites to the east. Friedmann thereby employed familiar and legitimate narratives from the Czech context to make Jews' essential sameness legible to a wider readership.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Although Jews' constructed ethnic sameness created firm boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, the belief that Czechoslovak Jewry constituted a uniquely complex branch of the Jewish nation was an equally important part of the way in which Zionists imagined their nation. Local narratives of Jews' cultural coherence and achievements, the longevity of the communities, as well as their importance to the local environment, formed a significant part of the scholarly endeavors and publishing projects of Jewish activists. These efforts were perhaps most prominently embodied in the Zionist activist, historian, and publisher Hugo Gold's multivolume book project on Bohemian and Moravian Jews published between 1929 and 1934.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Characteristically, these works constructed a “Moravian Jewry” and a “Bohemian Jewry” by projecting backwards notions of ethnic community. The books thereby created homogenous Jewish societies whose physical boundaries corresponded to those of the formerly Austrian provinces that now made up Czechoslovakia's regions. Through these narratives of ethnic sameness, historical continuity, and territorial belonging, Zionists imagined their community as one whose physical boundaries coincided with those of Czechoslovakia.