Standard-bearers of Hussitism or Agents of Germanization?

In 1932, the “Svaz Čechů-židů v Ceskoslovenské republice” (Union of Czech-Jews in the Czechoslovak Republic) published a small booklet on the history of its movement. The text opened with the common ground of Jews and Czechs in the Bohemian land: both were heirs of the Czech reformation, struggling against Catholic Habsburg rule and its attempts at Germanization. Even more than the Czechs, the author claimed, the Jews had to overcome German influences to find their place within the nation. In the end, he concluded, they succeeded, and the democratic and tolerant Czechoslovak republic exemplified this successful Czech-Jewish trajectory. It was strikingly obvious to the author that, although heavily referencing the Czech reformation as an overall concept of the national history, this path did not end in the emergence of a Protestant nation, but in an entirely new religious and national entity.1 In a similar vein, František Žilka (1871– 1944), a prominent Czech Protestant clergyman, praised the republic’s founding president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850– 1937), calling him the embodiment of the religious foundations of the Czechoslovak state. Guiding Žilka’s religious vision was “humanity,” an idea at once Protestant and universal.2 Only by being religious in this way could a nation succeed.3