History of the Habsgurg Jews

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Let us turn to the main subject of this chapter : the extent to which Jewry participated in the industrial revolution in the Bohemian Crownlands, and the extent to which it affected them. What of the earliest period ?

Bohemia and Moravia had even in the eighteenth century been the industrial heartland of the Habsburg realm, this in part because of the natural wealth of these provinces, in part because of their favorable position vis à vis the West¹⁹ And a single statistic suggests clearly why they became even more so in the early nineteenth century as the Theresian and Josephian reforms loosened the feudal regime : in these lands about 1800, there was only one noble for every 832 commoners, an exceedingly low ratio for eastern Europe.
In Austria’s Alpine lands, in contrast, the ratio was one noble to every 320 commoners ; in Galicia it was 1:68, and in Hungary, the gentry paradise, it was 1:20²⁰.
Because of the eviction of the Protestant nobility from Bohemia in the 1620s, there was late in the eighteenth century no gentry class in these crownlands, as there was to the east - and this had a practical consequence.
It meant that there was no one to fight tooth and claw for every inch of land, for every ancient privilege, no one to insist that the peasantry remain enserfed and illiterate on the land.
Feudalism in Bohemia had lain for two centuries with German-speaking magnates and the Counter-Reformational Church.
The new enlightened state proved its ability to handle these powers even in Maria Theresia's time, and under Joseph II it limited serfdom here far more effectively than anywhere in the East. From 1790 on, as a result, there existed a part-free labor force in these lands, and the gates for industrial development were open.

For Jews it was nonetheless inordinately difficult to participate in industrial enterprise.
The case history of Samuel Kolin of Prossnitz [Postejov] in Moravia tells clearly enough why²¹.
Kolin was a cloth-trader who came to that small-town Jewish settlement from Bohemia in 1752 in order to marry.
Moravia was the textile manufacturing center of the Habsburg realm.
Though Jews were barred from the larger cities, much of the retail trade in textiles was in their hands ; yet Kolin found the industry almost impenetrable.
Manufacturing and sales alike were tightly controlled and regulated by the Christian townsmen and their guilds.
Guild regulation, the expense of new machinery, and the weakness of the domestic market had proved and would prove over and again insuperable obstacles even for Christian entrepreneurs, not to speak of Jews despite much encouragement from the government.
Kolin tried to make his living by buying woolen cloth from wealthy importers, and then selling it by the piece to peddlers who would evade the sales monopoly of Christian shopkeepers by hawking the goods in the countryside from door to door.
But in 1758 Maria Theresia sought to help domestic textile manufacturers by forbidding Jews to peddle imports ; and in 1764 she placed a ban on textile imports.
By the time she relaxed the bans in 1774, the whole class of Jews who had lived on the woolens import trade was close to ruin, saved only by smuggling, which was made profitable by the paucity and poor quality of the domestic products.
Kolin himself went bankrupt a first time in 1779, and a second time in 1789 after Joseph II reimposed the ban on foreign products and placed dozens of other regulations on his trade.

Such was the fate in the eighteenth century of the lesser Jews of Bohemia and Moravia.
In general they were condemned to eke out a living by trading goods or dealing in money, forced by the residence restrictions to spend much of their lives traveling.
Even after Joseph commanded that they go into manufacturing, they were far too exposed both to every whim of a regulationist government and to the mean-minded complaints of Christian neighbors to do so.
Those among them who managed to escape the general misery were rare.
An astonishing continuity characterizes the professional profile of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry throughout the nineteenth century.
Commerce remained overwhelmingly dominant (though much less so than in Germany, where Jews were not permitted to engage in Handwerk²².
Important changes took place in the organization of Jewish commerce about 1800, especially in tobacco trading.
The establishment under a Jew, Israel Hönig, of the State Tobacco Monopoly in 1788 led to a notable bureaucratization of trade relationships among Bohemian Land village Jews²³.
Yet it seems notable that Simon Laemmel, the greatest banker among the Bohemian Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a figure not much changed from the Joachim Poppers of the late eighteenth²⁴.
Under Joseph II and after, when modern manufacturing actually began in Austria, some Jews in the Bohemian Crownlands began to get involved.
One was the son of Samuel Kolin, who bore the German name Veith Ehrenstamm.
In the middle 1780s this son responded to the disaster of his father's ruin by shifting from the Schnittwarenhandel (piece-ware trade) of his forebears into contracting with the army for provisions needed in Joseph II's second Turkish war.
It is not clear from the record why he did especially well, for he differed from the great military provisioners of the past in that he did not inherit his credit relationships.
He was a self-made man.
But as the Napoleonic wars drew on, he worked his way up from the bottom to become one of the most important Austrian contractors.
He seems to have dealt eventually in most anything the treasury could ask : in salt and tobacco, wine, grain, horses and carts for transport, food for the soldiers, liqueurs and shiny brasses for the officers.
But his specialty was uniforms.
By 1805-06 he was in some sort of partnership with Simon Laemmel, the leading Jewish banker of Prague mentioned above, and evidently enjoyed a near monopoly on providing uniforms for the army.
It was preparatory for this that in 1801 Ehrenstamm took the very modern step of purchasing a woolen cloth factory at Prossnitz from a Christian manufacturer.
Thenceforth he was involved not only in the purchasing of cloth but also in its production and in the sewing together of the uniforms themselves.
By the end of the wars he was immensely rich.
He owned a whole collection of industrial establishments and was able to entertain the neighborhood nobility in flamboyant style at his Prossnitz house.
His business even managed to survive (though not for long) the postwar depression which ruined many other Moravia manufacturers.

Though Ehrenstamm's case proves Moravian Jews could get into industry, there were few in that crownland who followed his example.
The Tolerance Patent of 1781 had explicitly opened manufacturing to the Jews.
Despite all the regulation, despite even the need for considerable capital and the perils of the trade, opportunities were available.
Even the Judeo-phobic literature of the time sometimes advised Jews to go into industry on the ground that only they had the zeal, the cleverness, the persistence, and the money sense needed for success²⁵.
Yet as one student of the problem has observed, the Jews in Moravia just did not seem interested in industry²⁶.
There were even wealthy Jewish businessmen of Moravia who won wealth and influence enough during the Napoleonic period to buy permission to live in Brno, the center of the woolens industry ; the Gomperzes and Auspitzes come to mind in this connection.
Yet until the 1840's they remained aloof from industry.

One reason for this was assuredly the fanatical opposition of the Christian guildsmen of the region, who controlled manufacturing.
And it seems well also to recall the distinctive cultural situation of the Moravian Jews.
Here, as noted elsewhere, the Jews were not spread out in villages as in Bohemia, nor were they concentrated in one huge city as in Prague.
Even in the early nineteenth century only one or two exceptionally rich families were allowed to live in Brno, Moravia's only significant city, where, as we have seen, they could encounter the likes of Jakob Frank.
Most were forced to live in tight small-town communities, and were consequently singularly exposed to the conformity normal in such places.
In addition the province had the unusually strong autonomous Jewish self-government system mentioned earlier.
The powers of the Moravian Landesoberrabbiner had been consolidated far more over the centuries than had those of the Prague chief rabbi.
They were formidable even after the Josephian legislation abolished the force of Jewish civic law.
In Veith Ehrenstamm's time, moreover, from 1789 until 1829 the Moravian Oberrabbiner was Mordekai Ben Abraham Banet, one of the foremost neo-conservative defenders of Jewish-tradition in central Europe, a famous Talmudist Banet high-handedly kept his flock in order.
He fulminated against those who fled to Vienna, growled even at those who spent too much time studying Christian learning.
Moravian Jewry's failure to change profession and to go into manufacturing may attest to the strength of such cultural factors as well as the economic factors and hostility of the entrenched Christian bourgeois world to Jews²⁷.

In Bohemia there was a much greater Jewish response to Joseph II's pressure to go into manufacturing.
Here the start of industrialization centered not on woolens production, as in Moravia, but on cotton²⁸.
For decades before 1800 Christian businessmen had been observing the miracles of the cotton industry in England.
In the 1770's the Austrian Government had made cotton-manufacturing a free trade, exempt from the guild regulations that continued to dominate the older woolens industry.
Christian manufacturers, most notably the former serf Johann Josef Leitenberger (1730-1803) and his son Franz (17??-1825), had in 1799 imported the first English Watter-frames and mule-jennies to Austria ; and in the Napoleonic period (especially after 1806 when British manufactures were on the whole cut out from the continent), these Austrian entrepreneurs drew on Balkan cotton to make the production of cotton cloth one of the Empire's leading industries.

The Christian cotton industrialists, however, operated primarily in the towns of northern Bohemia, near the Saxon frontier.
In Prague it was above all Jews who made this new industry grow.
Another case history will illustrate the phenomenon. Moses Porges was born in 1781 into a humble Jewish family that produced rosewater in the Prague ghetto ; his brother Juda (later called Leopold) was born in 1784²⁹.
When they first went into business shortly before 1800, Moses dealt in linen goods, Juda spirits, and they wholly lacked capital.
Yet by 1808 they had opened a small calico and chintz printing shop in a dark cellar in the unsanitary old center of Prague.
Textile-printing was more important than it now sounds.
Until the decisive spread of mechanical spinning in the 1830’s and 1840’s, most of the actual spinning and weaving of textiles took place on a piecework basis in cottages.
The dyeing and printing were the parts of textile production most suited to the factory, and they became the locus of modern innovations in the industry as a whole.
The Porgeses were innovators.
By 1819 their establishment was quite large.
In 1830 they opened the first great mechanical cotton printery at the Prague industrial suburb, Smichow, a plant so splendid that the Kaiser visited it in 1833.
By 1835 they were employing 569 workers ; by 1843, 700.
Their factory was then the third largest in Bohemia and they had other plants as well.

The first known Jewish cotton printing plant at Prague was established in the Karlin [Karolinenthal] suburb in the 1790’s by a Koppelmann Porges.
Whether he was related to Moses and Juda is unknown, but by 1820 his plant also was among the largest in the crownland.
Meanwhile in 1802 Aaron Beer Pribrarn and Moses Jerusalem, wealthy Grosshändler, had entered the industry, as had Meir Dormitzer, the wealthy descendent of a famous early-eighteenth-century Jewish scholar ; so also members of the Epstein and Mauthner families, and of the Taussig, Bunzl, Brandeis, Wehle, Lederer, Lippmann and Schick families, all of them eminent in Prague.
A convenient statistic reveals that by 1807 Bohemia had 58 linen, cotton, and calico "factories" of which 15 (all recently established and near Prague) were Jewish owned^3o.

It seems legitimate to attribute this vigorous expression of Jewish modernism at Prague, along with the others mentioned earlier, in part to the city's latitudinarian rabbinical leadership.
But it is useful to reflect also on the record of Frankism, for late in the eighteenth century the members of the sect in another city, Warsaw, did similar things.
They turned from their "earlier aspiration for ennoblement and became leaders of the economic modernization of the city-and of Poland³¹.
So pronounced was their group coherence (maintained by significant endogamy) and their dominance in the "bourgeois" professions of the city (that is, law, education, and manufacturing) that they can be held up as a fine example of how a "religious ethic" leads to modern capitalism.
Given the strength of Frankism in Prague about 1800, this record is more than suggestive, especially since it is known that Moses and Juda Porges were the sons of a Frankist, and that they themselves visited the Frankist court at Offenbach in the final years of the eighteenth century just when another Porges was establishing the first Jewish cotton-printing establishment in Prague.

The Prague Frankists did not follow exactly the same path as those of Warsaw.
These people had not converted out of Judaism as had the Warsaw Frankists.
After the fiasco of 1800 they did nurture a memory of their earlier religious deviation, and may have for a time practiced endogamy, but in general they could and did reabsorb into the mainstream of Prague Jewry.
By the end of the nineteenth century their descendants were so averse to the group's tradition that they tried to destroy whatever documents remained of what had happened, to root out Frankism even as a memory.³²
Nonetheless circumstance indicates that at the beginnings of the Jewish involvement in Prague's industrial growth, Frankism, with its loosening attitude towards Jewish Tradition, played a role.

The entry of Jews into industry in the Bohemian lands, and especially their entry into the Prague cotton industry, is important to any assessment of their record here under Metternich, for it had social consequences.
The Prague cotton industry was the "take-off sector" of sorts of the industrial revolution in Bohemia during the Vormärz.
By 1835 there were 117 cotton-processing establishments in the crownland, of which 15 of the largest were in Prague and owned by Jews.
The industry by now produced annually 1,400,000 pieces of cloth (at lengths of 30-50 ells), of which 800,000 lengths were produced in Prague³³.
Not unnaturally, therefore, here as in Vienna, the leaders of this industry were able to enter the ranks of the imperial bourgeoisie and to win a considerable acceptance³⁴.
By the 1840’s the Porges brothers and their partner Moses Jerusalem had been ennobled by the Kaiser and were among the leaders of Prague's new bourgeois society.
No less socially prominent were the Donnitzers, Epsteins, Mauthners, and Wehles.
Some rich Jews, for example Moritz Zdekauer, had felt it requisite to leave Judaism in order to attain their new social position ; but this was patently not demanded of them by the Prague upper bourgeoisie (or by people like Schoeller elsewhere in the Bohemian Lands), for the very leader of Prague's industrial bourgeoisie through forty years was Leopold von Laemmel, the son of the great Napoleonic era banker, Simon Laemmel, who had been ennobled in 1821.
The Laemmels did not convert.³⁵
Even in Brno, it may be mentioned, the Jewish banker, Philip Gomperz, won a considerable acceptance in upper bourgeois circles during the Franciscan period, though most of his co-religionaries were barred by law from residence in the city.³⁶
In this period, moreover, there occurred a massive shift in relationships between Vienna and Prague that contributed to the acceptance of Jews in bourgeois society.
Above all there was a demographic change.
In 1790, Prague, with 73,000 civilian inhabitants, was still a considerable town even against Vienna's 200,000.
But whereas by 1850 Vienna had doubled to 400,000, Prague in 1820 had only 81,000 inhabitants, and in 1850, 115,599³⁷.
This demographic lag was compounded by the increase in political centralism, characteristic of the regime, and by an expansion of Vienna's financial power.
In effect, the more the industrial revolution intruded into the Empire, the more the Vienna bankers -the capitalists- gained leverage in provincial affairs.
The decline of Prague relative to the capital did not become final until after 1848 ; but for practical purposes even in the Vormärz Bohemia's capital was in international perspective no more than a provincial Austrian town.
On the level of the new upper bourgeoisie one may see the new relationship especially clearly.
Starting with Simon Laemmel and Philip Gomperz in Napoleon's time, virtually all the great Bohemian trading and banking firms opened offices in Vienna.
In the 1840’s the Prague manufacturers followed suit, first opening factory outlets, then building new factories in the capital suburbs.
Few of them moved finally away from Prague ; but in general sufficient duality of foothold developed so as to ensure that the new social values of upper bourgeois Vienna prevailed also in upper bourgeois Prague³⁸.

The bourgeois successes of the Prague Jewish industrialists had noxious effects for the whole of Bohemian Jewry, because they awoke jealousies, and above all those of the city's workers.
In Bohemia, as further west in Europe, the industrial revolution produced a whole new stratum of workers within the social system.³⁹
There is small mystery why by the early 1840’s this stratum was showing its discontents.
All over Europe during the early industrial revolution, working conditions were awful, and the Bohemian lands were no exception.
Wages were pathetically low.
Fifteen and fourteen-hour workdays were the norm ; the work-week comprised six or more days.
Worker health and relaxation were of little matter to the factory-owners, whose prime concern was maximal profit, whose rule was exploitation.
With the advent of mechanization in the thirties, moreover, employers began to oust adult workers in favor of children, who were cheaper, and as a result unemployment developed⁴⁰.
In the forties such new machines as the perrotin in the cotton-printing industry put whole classes of workers out of jobs. The year 1843 witnessed a large-scale strike at Brno.

The following year, 1844, was one of labor unrest all over Germany, and saw major troubles affect Bohemia.
The spark, so far as one can determine from the surviving records, was a worker uprising in Prussian Silesia in early June -the uprising that inspired Gerhard Hauptmann's "Die Weber".
In mid-June, despite the sealed frontier, labor trouble erupted in Prague.
Later in the month and in July it spread to the northern textile regions.
Everywhere, as in Silesia, the workers seemed interested above all in destroying machines.
In Prague, the workers expressed a hatred not just of machines, but also of Jews.

In 1844 the authorities called out troops in defense of property.
The strikes were all suppressed.
But the Judeophobia lasted on. In the late forties, as bad harvest followed bad harvest all over Europe, strikes and attacks on Jewish grain-dealers ceased to be unusual at all in central Bohemia.
There was an "objective" explanation : there was near famine in the land, and the grain commerce was in Jewish hands.
When the burgher revolution broke out in March 1848, the danger of renewed labor trouble was immediately in everyone's mind.
One of the explicit purposes of the new "national guard" in the capital was to exert control over the "proletariat", and indeed the workers soon began to demonstrate.
In the first days of May, urged on by a flood of anti-Jewish pamphlet literature, large-scale Judeophobic riots affected Prague starting with attacks on the Jewish-owned factories.
Later on, especially in June when the Prague workers formed the backbone of the so-called "Whitsun" uprising occasioned by the Slavic Congress, the Judeophobic motif abated.
Periodically during the summer and fall, however, as the imperial army took command first in Bohemia and then in other lands, new anti-Jewish disturbances occurred⁴¹.

A main reason for the Prague worker Judeophobia of this period was a singularly direct relation between bad work conditions and Jews.
In Prague the strikes began in 1844, because the Porges brothers introduced the perrotin at their factory in Smichow, and then arbitrarily lowered wages.
And the disturbances affected primarily the city's Jewish-dominated cotton-printing industry.
There was also an ideological motif, however.

Let us pose the matter as follows.
Although by then a worker class of sorts was clearly in formation in Bohemia, socialism as a modern ideological movement borne by the worker class was equally clearly not present.
Even the proletariat in western Europe, far more developed and experienced than in Bohemia, conspicuously lacked what Marxists call "consciousness".
Particularly in 1844, workers all over central Europe almost simultaneously went on strike or destroyed machines.
The governing classes immediately deduced that there was an international organized conspiracy of some sort or "Communism" behind it all ; yet in fact neither the courts of the time nor a century of diligent historical research has brought any such conspiratorial organization to light.
It was the impact of hard times on a community of wretchedness created by similar industrialist exploitation that produced the common types of worker protest simultaneously in so many different places.
"Communism" didn't yet exist, although the strike waves demonstrated that the workers needed something like it⁴².

May one not guess that this need for "Communism", that is, for ideology and organization, explains in some part the Judeophobia of the Bohemian workers in the 1840’s?
The people knew very well they wanted something, yet had no name for it ; they knew perfectly that the machine was their enemy, but had no general explanation why.
Because of the Austrian police regime, they had no contact with the early socialists of the west.
In the resultant ideological void it was entirely natural that these workers should have grasped hold of the exceptional feature of the Prague industrial complex - its Jewishness - and given voice to their bitterness in traditional religious terms. Their Jew-hatred was the ideological "pre-socialism" of the nascent and naive Prague working class.

© 1989 William O. McCagg Jr., Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis