A new monothematic issue of the journal Judaica Bohemiae (Vol. 53/2018, 1) was published at the beginning of July 2018. It is focused on a particularly interesting topic from the history of Moravian Jews in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which has previously not been sufficiently explored – Jewish political communities in Moravia. The volume includes a selection of extended papers from the workshop “Remnants of the Past or Laboratories of Modernity? The Political Jewish Communities in Moravia after 1848 and their Archival Sources”. This academic event was organized by the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Masaryk Institute and Archive at the Academy of Sciences in co-operation with the Kurt and Ursula Schubert Centre for Jewish Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc in May 2016. The first three papers, by Ines Koeltzsch (Migration als Herausforderung. Die politischen Judengemeinden in Mähren und ihr ,Niedergang‘ um 1900), Peter Urbanitsch (Die Politischen Israelitengemeinden in Mähren: Entstehung und legistische Grundlagen, ihre politische Rolle im Nationalitätenstreit, Trennung ihrer säkularen und religiösen Aufgabenbereiche) and Daniel Baránek (Die religiöse Funktion Politischer Israelitengemeinden) provide new insights on important questions relating to these themes – namely, Jewish mass migration and its contemporary discourse, the mixed administrative and religious functions of the Jewish political communities, and the final split between the latter and the religious communities. The fourth paper, by Milan Řepa (Assailants on the Bench for the Accused: Cases of Violence against Jews at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries at the Regional Criminal Courts in Brno and Uherské Hradiště), examines the Jewish political communities within the broader historical context of the widespread acts of individual and collective violence that were committed against Jews in Moravia after 1900. In the ‘Documents’ section, Pavel Kocman provides a valuable contribution to the methodology and results of the Yerusha project with an overview of archival sources and literature relating to the topic of Jewish political communities in Moravia. In addition, David Nehyba shows the potential and limits of future research by focusing on the example of the fragmented archival collections relating to the history of the Jewish political communities in Schaffa (Šafov) and Mißlitz (Miroslav) in the State District Archives in Znojmo.
In the ‘Reports’ section, Marie Crhová provides information about the conference Reframing Jewish Life: Moravian Jewry at the turn of the 19th and the 20 th Centuries, which was held in Olomouc in October 2017, and Pavel Sládek and Eva Doležalová inform about a discussion panel on the history of Jews in the Bohemian lands at the 11th Congress of Czech Historians, which was held in Olomouc in September 2017. The final section of the journal contains a review by Pavel Kocman of Georg Gaugusch’s book Wer einmal war L-R. Das jüdische Großbürgertum Wiens 1800–1938 (Wien: Amalthea Signum Verlag 2016).