Main entry:

Giustino, Cathleen M.

Title & Author:

Tearing down Prague's Jewish town : ghetto clearance and the legacy of middle-class ethnic politics around 1900 / Cathleen M. Giustino.

Publication:

Boulder : East European Monographs ; New York : Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2003.

Description:

xiv, 425 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.

Series:

East European monographs ; 618

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 405-425).
1. "Finis Ghetto" -- pt. I. State and Party Structures Framing Ghetto Clearance -- 2. Delimiting Municipal Autonomy and Local Citizenship -- 3. The Doors of the Local Oligarchy -- pt. II. Narrowing Czech Middle-Class Differences and Ghetto Clearance -- 4. The Language and Measures of Progress -- 5. Ghetto in the Sense of Slum -- 6. Streets and Sanctity in the Sanitation Zone -- 7. Ghetto in the Sense of Religious Segregation -- 8. Liberal Principles, Czech Identity, and God's Law -- pt. III. Widening Czech Middle-Class Differences and Ghetto Clearance -- 9. The Prague Compromise of 1896 and Counter-Liberal Challenge -- 10. Lower-Middle-Class Hardship, Municipal Social Welfare, and Anti-Jewish Hostility -- 11. The Public of Historic Preservation and Its Alternatives -- 12. The Re-Ghettoization of Prague's Jews.

Summary:

"In 1887 the middle-class Czechs dominating Prague's City Hall announced that they had selected Alfred Hurtig's "End of the Ghetto" Plan to be the blueprint for the large scale destruction and reconstruction of the city's former Jewish ghetto. The creation and implementation of the plan was carried out in the name of sanitation. Of the roughly 260 buildings standing inside the old ghetto's borders in 1887 only seven (including six out of an original nine synagogues) remained after the urban-renewal project was near completion before the start of World War I. In order to fund the ambitious project, the managers of municipal Prague borrowed an enormous sum of money. They also expelled the area's impoverished residents from their homes so that ghetto-clearance could be realized, and they did so without making an effort to secure new affordable housing for these people." "This book examines the local social and ethnic interest-group struggles that fueled the creation of the "End of the Ghetto" Plan and its costly metamorphosis from paper to built reality. It shows that members of the middle class who held nineteenth-century liberal values shrewdly used municipal power in order to pursue their group interests, sometimes at the expense of outsiders. Giustino shows how, through their implementation of ghetto clearance, these middle-class who held nineteenth-century liberal values shrewdly used municipal power in order to pursue their group interests, sometimes at the expense of outsiders. Giustino shows how, through their implementation of ghetto clearance, these middle-class liberals contributed to the persistence of anti-Semitism in one local Central European setting. Together these two results suggest possible continuities between nineteenth-century politics and twentieth-century authoritarianism."
"Based upon a rich array of documents, some of them never before presented in English, the book includes records from Prague's municipal governments, the Jewish Religious Commune, and professional associations."--Jacket.

Resources:
Book review (H-Net)

ISBN:

0880335165
9780880335164

Subject:

Jews Czech Republic Prague History.
Middle class Czech Republic Prague History.
Urban renewal Czech Republic Prague History.
Juifs République tchèque Prague Histoire.
Rénovation urbaine République tchèque Prague Histoire.
Ethnic relations.
Jews.
Middle class.
Urban renewal.
Stadtplanung
Antisemitismus
Getto
Kommunalpolitik
Getto's.
Stadsvernieuwing.
Antisemitisme.
Judar historia Tjeckien Prag sekelskiftet 1900.
Prag sociala förhållanden sekelskiftet 1900.
Judiska getton historia sekelskiftet 1900.
Prague (Czech Republic) Ethnic relations.
Czech Republic Prague.
Prague (Czech Republic : Ghetto)
Prag.

Form/genre:

History.

Added entries:

East European monographs ; 618.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 233125
Call No.: NA1033.P6 P74 2003
Status: Available