A new issue of the journal Judaica Bohemiae (Vol. 58/2023) came out at the end of December 2023 as a collaboration between the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Subtitled Jews and Non-Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: Attitudes, Strategies, Policies, and Practices, it opens with an introduction by the guest editor Magda Veselská, who puts forward its concept and content. The authors of the main studies combine micro-history, focusing on specific stories and circumstances, with an account of official processes and procedures. This approach creates a picture of the dynamic living conditions in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which had a direct impact and influence on the fate of the Jews who lived there. The studies are based largely on primary research and on specific sources that have previously been underused as a way of gaining knowledge about this topic. As such, they represent an initial exploration of new topics and material in a way that suggests further possibilities and directions for subsequent research.

The opening study by Magda Veselská (The Interaction of Jews and the Society of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: Attitudes, Forms and Dynamics) highlights public attitudes towards the persecution of Jews as formulated in letters to President Emil Hácha and characterizes the personal and political views of the country’s highest official, who was in a position to influence public opinion with the weight of his office. With the aid of examples, it goes on to demonstrate the attitudes towards Jews as expressed actively in denunciations to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police force, as well as the forms of interaction that were based on close co-operation between Jews and non-Jews in the Protectorate that could have led to the punishment of both parties involved.

In the next study, Pavla Plachá focuses on female citizens of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia who were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbrück, the central concentration camp for women in Nazi Germany (Jewish Women from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the Nazi Concentration Camp Ravensbrück). Through the use of examples, it points to the kinds of activities or alleged transgressions that could have landed Jewish women in the camp, as well as the kinds of interactions with Jews that could have led to the punishment of non-Jewish women. The paper also explores how, after the war, the Jewish survivors and their non-Jewish fellow inmates mutually reflected on their experiences of incarceration in the camp.

The attitude of Catholic Church representatives towards the persecution of Jews from the 1930s onwards is examined in a study by Stanislava Vodičková (The Catholic Church and Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia). The author describes the position of the Roman Catholic Church in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Regarding the attitudes of the clergy and laity, she gives examples from both sides of the spectrum, namely sympathetic and hateful, but her focus is primarily on early forms of aid to Jews, which the Catholic Church shielded. Drawing on the example of Pater Ferdinand Hrouda, a parish priest at St. Nicholas Church in Prague’s Malá Strana district, the author illustrates one of the few strategies that helped Jews leave Czechoslovakia, later the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and may have increased their chances of gaining asylum abroad – namely, getting a baptism certificate as proof of conversion to Christianity.

Another strategy, to which at least several hundred Protectorate Jews resorted – particularly after the launch of mass deportations to concentration and extermination camps in the autumn of 1941 – was to challenge or attenuate the “racial classification” of Jews under the so-called Nuremberg Laws by means of proposals for repudiating their marital origin or paternity. In her study on this topic, Tatjana Lichtenstein, using extant court files, provides several examples that illustrate the diverse cases that came before both the Protectorate and the German courts (Contested Paternity: Seeking Reprieve from Anti-Jewish Persecution in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia).

A study by Jan Dvořák (The “Jewish Department” of the Police Headquarters in Prague and its Role in the “Solution to the Jewish Question” in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) describes the activities of a separate “Jewish department” at the Police Headquarters Prague, which was established shortly after the occupation. This department was mainly responsible for punishing people who had failed to comply with the anti-Jewish regulations in Prague, where the largest number of Protectorate Jews lived. Dvořák outlines the activities and powers of the department’s employees in connection with the increasing number of anti-Jewish regulations and with the gradual unfolding of the “final solution to the Jewish question”. He explains the officials’ contacts and co-operation with the Gestapo and the German Security Service, and, on the basis of specific examples of persecution, describes the methods employed in their work.

In the Reports section, Ivana Cahová gives an account of a project undertaken in 2020–22 by the Kurt and Ursula Schubert Center for Jewish Studies in co-operation with the Department of Geoinformatics of Palacký University in Olomouc and the Olomouc Museum of Art. The outputs of the project included a specialized interactive map of Jewish Cultural and Intellectual History of Olomouc, accessible in a smartphone application, and a specialized map Development of the Jewish Settlement of Olomouc. Geographic and Socioeconomic Structure of the Jewish Population in the Period of 1180–2021, visualizing data from archival research on the development of the Jewish settlement of Olomouc.

The final section of the journal contains reviews of the following books: Martha Keil – Peter Rauscher – Sabine Ullmann, Juden und Krieg in der Frühen Neuzeit (Pavel Kocman), Hillel J. Kieval, Blood Inscriptions. Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder at Europe’s Fin de Siècle (Matthias Melcher), Mark Ludwig, Our Will to Live. The Terezín Music Critiques of Viktor Ullmann (Jiřina Šedinová) and Adolf Ornstein – Vilma Iggers – Karl Abeles, Sto let jedné židovské rodiny na českém venkově, edited by Kateřina Čapková (Vojtěch Kessler).