An updated translation of a study originally published in 2005, this book is more an analysis of the national identity of Prague Jews than an overview of the issue of national identity of Bohemian Jews. In this volume, Kateřina Čapková seeks to revise the interpretation of Bohemian Jewry as a community between Czechs and Germans, which she considers a simplification. Thus, she analyzes the organized national movements of the Bohemian Jews: both the Czech Jewish and Zionist movements, which represented only a fraction of the Jewish population, and the German-speaking Jews, whom she recognizes did not constitute a movement equivalent to the other two between the wars.

In five topical chapters, Čapková first describes the features of the Jewish community in Prague and Bohemia and the Jews as a national minority in the First Czechoslovak Republic. She follows with detailed analysis of the varying interwar organizational history of German Jews, Czech Jews, and Zionists in three subsequent chapters. There is some repetition here because of the interaction of these organizations and similarities in their trajectories.

Čapková's analysis of Bohemia's German Jews begins with the role played by the reforms of Emperor Joseph II and the ideology of the Haskalah in their adoption of German culture, which was especially successful in Prague. Following a brief discussion of the German Jewish elite at the fin de siècle, Čapková examines German Jews during the interwar period through the B'nai B'rith, an elite Jewish organization, to which many Zionists, and even a few Czech Jews, belonged. She points out that German Jews were long interested in Zionism and in the 1930s, their cooperation with Zionists expanded. Čapková concludes that had a third census been held in the First Republic, the number of Jews identifying as German would have dropped, while the number identifying as Jewish and Czechoslovak would have increased.

Paralleling the development of the Czech-language school system, however, about 1880, increasing numbers of Jews declared Czech as their language of everyday usage, a trend that continued until World War II. Čapková analyzes the Czech Jewish movement beginning with the first organizations founded in the last decades of the nineteenth century, through the shift from opposing Jewish adherence to German culture in Czech-speaking parts of the country to focus on a new adversary, the Zionists, to promotion of total assimilation after 1918, despite a wave of antisemitism in the first years of Czechoslovakia. Čapková observes that the majority of Bohemian Jews “grew up conscious of belonging to the Czech nation without organizing in the Czech Jewish movement” (p. 143). The number of Czech Jews active in the movement declined in comparison to the prewar era, an observation that deserves more unpacking. The chapter also contains an interesting discussion of the failed attempts to expand Czech Jewish identity beyond Bohemia into Moravia and Slovakia (although not into Czechoslovakia's easternmost province, Subcarpathian Ruthenia). According to Czech-Jewish writer Kamil Neumann, both Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia represented a “piece of the Jewish Orient,” an issue that the author could have fruitfully elaborated upon. Čapková's discussion of the Czech Jews in the late 1930s is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Their decision following the Munich Conference (to help their adherents to the detriment of Jews of German or Jewish nationality was couched in terms of mission in the Czech nation) did nothing to help their situation in the wake of the Munich Conference.

In the chapter on Zionists, Čapková traces the history of Zionism in Bohemia from its origins in the late nineteenth century. The Zionist movement developed its organizational structure between the wars with its bastion in the German-speaking borderlands, Moravia, Sileisa, and Prague. Čapková traces the various strands of Zionism and their organization during the interwar era. Moreover, she argues that while the Czech-Jewish movement and Zionism represented competing conceptions of nationalism, their arguments still shared some similarities. Adherents of both shared similar experiences and thus constructed their narratives with the same “building blocks.” Their differences lay in emphasis and interpretation (p. 5). When during the Second Republic all of the Jews of Czechoslovakia were threatened, the Zionists were the best prepared for the new situation. They had dealt with German-Jewish refugees, had a broad organizational structure and broad support, contacts with people abroad, and the ideology of Jewish nationalism. Moreover, they exerted a certain influence on the granting of some visas to Palestine.

The author concludes that the legal framework and the national propaganda of the interwar Czechoslovak “nation”-state affected all of the Jewish national movements. Jewish organizations could count on state support. Jewish loyalty to the state influenced all national narratives, including those of German-speaking Jews, many of whom switched to the Czech language or became Zionists. The choices Jews made in joining the organizations she analyzes, in choosing a particular narrative, the author argues, was related to their social ties with both Jews and non-Jews. Moreover, parallel narratives permitted these Jews to switch national identities while making no changes in their daily lives. Finally, Jews could remain nationally indifferent or nationally polymorphous, not unlike other residents of Bohemia. The author asserts that antisemitism was less conspicuous in the Czech-speaking parts of the Bohemian lands than in the German-speaking borderlands, Slovakia, and Subcarpathian Ruthenia owing to the way the country was established and to the authority of first President Tomáš G. Masaryk. This may be correct, but the author has not proven it, she has merely claimed it.

Better editing would have improved this volume. The map in the introduction uses German place names, despite the author's use of Czech throughout the book. There is some inconsistency in the use of place names. Some sources are not adequately identified, for example, an undated quotation from the Sudetendeutsche Tages-Zeitung. Some assertions are vague, for example, “in general, the Czech-Jews took the side of the Czechs during the [First World] war.” What constituted the “Czech side”? Finally, it seems unlikely that all German activist parties—the German Christian Socialists come to mind—could count on a number of votes from German-speaking Jews.

Even if some of the author's analysis is not new, the volume is a useful addition to the historiography of the Prague Jews because of Čapková's detailed, careful discussion of theoretical positions of the various strands of modern Jewish identity in Bohemia.