In this analysis of the life of Arnost Frischer, an influential Jewish nationalist activist, Jan Lánícek reflects upon how the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia dealt with the challenges that arose from their volatile relationship with the state authorities in the first half of the 20th century. The Jews in the Bohemian Lands experienced several political regimes in the period from 1918 to the late 1940s: the Habsburg Empire, the first democratic Czechoslovak republic, the post-Munich authoritarian Czecho-Slovak republic, the Nazi regime, renewed Czechoslovak democracy and the Communist regime. Frischer's involvement in local and central politics affords us invaluable insights into the relations and negotiations between the Jewish activists and these diverse political authorities in the Bohemian Lands. Vital coverage is also given to the relatively under-researched subject of the Jewish responses to the Nazi persecution and the attempts of the exiled Jewish leadership to alleviate the plight of the Jews in occupied Europe.
The case study of Frischer and Czechoslovakia provides an important paradigm for understanding modern Jewish politics in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making this a book of great significance to all students and scholars interested in Jewish history and Modern European history.
This comprehensive biography of Arnost Frischer (1887-1954), one of the leading Zionists in Czechoslovakia and a member of the Czechoslovak National Council (the exiled parliament) in London during the Second World War, provides a unique insight into the history of the Jews of the Czech lands and independent Czechoslovakia. It shows how this relatively small community responded to the rise of Czech nationalism and the worsening international climate of the 1930s. It is essential reading for all those interested in the response of Jews in Central Europe to the rise of German Nazism and to its ever-intensifying campaign against European Jewry culminating in the Holocaust.
