Ephemeral Texts and Material Memory: Prague Processions of the Early Eighteenth Century and Local Jewish Historical Imagination

• In Event: Jewish History and Jewish Historical Imagination

Abstract

The visitor entering Prague’s Altneuschul today, as for the past several hundred years, encounters, alongside furniture for prayer, silver ritual objects and velvet textiles, a black and gold wooden pole, several narrower poles with similarly barbershop-striped decorations hanging off of it, planted at one corner of the “Alemar,”—the desk for reading the Torah, here surrounded by metal grillwork—and reaching far above eye level. Tracing the pole upwards, one finds, at the top, a very large, red banner, lined with golden fringes, embroidered with Hebrew script in gold surrouding a Star of David with a hat at its center, the symbol of the Prague Jewish town. This banner, and another much like it housed in the Maisel Synagogue, were taken out to the street approximately once in a generation, when they took pride of place as Prague’s Jews staged a procession in honor of the birth of an heir to the Habsburg throne. The may narrow poles were each held by a single man, many of whom were necessary to lift the entire apparatus. The events are recorded in rich detail German-language festival books, produced by Jews or with Jewish involvement. Yet these texts appear to have made little impact on Jewish memory in Prague prior to being mined by nineteenth-century historians. The banners, on the other hand, must have constituted a perennial material reminder of moments in which great cultural pride was expressed. Scholar Alexandr Putík of Prague has studied in great detail the origins of the banners, showing how local collective memory and archival records clash on related questions. In this paper, I look the way such collective memory and alternative documenti

author

• Rachel Greenblatt, Harvard Divinity School / University of Connecticut Humanities Institute