Two pomegranates grace the front cover of Jana Vobecká's recently published study on Bohemian Jewry during the nineteenth and the first half of twentieth century. Known as Jewish symbols of fertility and also of adherence to religious law, they serve as a poetic introduction to something one would generally suppose to be a rather dry topic: the demographic behavior of the Jews in Bohemia. But reading Vobecká's inspiring book, one quickly becomes aware that dealing with demographic questions might be very fruitful, not only from a social-historical perspective, but also from a cultural-historical view.
The book's overarching concern is to depict the Jews of Bohemia as demographic forerunners, a certain kind of avant-garde that is reflected in the title of the study. By exploring population censuses and vital statistics, the author analyzes how Bohemian Jews became one of the first representatives of demographic transition in Europe. This process is characterized by a population shift from high fertility and mortality to one of intentionally restricted fertility and low mortality. As Vobecká points out, demographers are accustomed to explaining this phenomenon in terms of industrialization and increasing economic wealth (xv). But this assumption fails in the case of the Jews of Bohemia because they entered the process of demographic transition long before the industrial and economic change started. Therefore, other criteria must have been crucial.
Vobecká identifies among these criteria a general ideological shift in lifestyle of Bohemian Jewry and specific regional circumstances. She argues that the Jews of Bohemia were not only eager to participate in gentile culture by the turn of the nineteenth century, but also prepared to abandon strict religious observance that would have been an impediment to the limitation of family size. Moreover, the settlement pattern of Bohemian Jewry was different from those in other Central and Eastern European regions. Bohemian Jews lived in small, scattered villages that were too mediocre in size and level of education to become cultural and religious centers. Thus, Prague served as the only Jewish “think tank” in Bohemia, from which new ideas and religious trends, such as liturgical and educational reforms, could easily spread over the whole country. Eventually, a lot of humiliating restrictions on freedom of movement and commerce disappeared during the Revolution of 1848—a fact that boosted the already initiated process of demographic transition.
By comparing various Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Europe, the author highlights the groundbreaking demographic behavior of Bohemian Jewry. It should be observed that Italy (and especially its Jewish population) often showed similar trends. As the Jewish communities both in Bohemia and in Italy occupied a kind of intermediate position between West and East, respectively Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewry, one could ask if there were any other common social patterns—one of many interesting aspects providing further food for thought.
Regarding the Jewish history of Bohemia itself, Vobecká's study enables us to better understand certain relations between internal Jewish and external gentile social developments. Her findings on religious affiliations of Bohemian Jews around the turn of the twentieth century strike me as particularly significant. Vobecká can demonstrate that the conversion numbers for Bohemian Jews were quite low. Thus, one may suppose that the fact that they were less orthodox than the Jewish majority in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe should not have driven them into turning away from Judaism; on the contrary, a modest liberal orientation, as was typical for Bohemia, may have prevented Bohemian Jewry as a whole from a radical break with its religious tradition.
Nevertheless, for me as a historian (and not a demographer), the author's reasoning sometimes appears a bit suggestive. This impression is not based on the quality and completeness of a heterogeneous set of data (something Vobecká manages carefully), but on the way the sources are interlinked with academic literature. This is especially the case when it comes to the infant mortality rate among Bohemian Jewry (chap. 8). The author already notes in the beginning that for several reasons, infant mortality among Jews had always been significantly lower than among Christians; later, she explains her own results with exactly the same patterns without considering that she is dealing with a completely different region and time period. It therefore seems that Vobecká is intermingling several geographical and chronological levels rather than pointing out continuities.
In conclusion, it becomes evident that the Jews of Bohemia were a certain demographic avant-garde, but the question of why they were “ready” for demographic transition so early is still not entirely clear (161). At least from a historical point of view, it can probably be answered only by focusing on the voices of the actors themselves and not just on quantitative data.
