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The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, historically the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the modern Czech Republic (i.e. Bohemia, Moravia, and the southeast or Czech Silesia), goes back many centuries. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century. [5]
For the Czechs of the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, German occupation was a period of brutal oppression. The Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia (117,551 according to the 1930 census) was virtually annihilated. Many Jews emigrated after 1939; approximately 78,000 were killed. By 1945, some 14,000 Jews remained alive in the Czech lands. [5]
Over time, many Jews in Bohemia switched to Czech, which was the majority by the 1910 census, but German remained preferred by Jews living in Moravia and Czech Silesia. [4] Following the end of World War I in 1918, Bohemia and Moravia – including the border Sudetenland , which had an ethnic-German majority – became part of the new country ...
Map shows the main fortress and the Small Fortress (right) on opposite sides of the Eger River. On 24 November 1941, the first trainload of deportees arrived at the Sudeten barracks in Theresienstadt; they were 342 young Jewish men whose task was to prepare the town for the arrival of thousands of other Jews beginning 30 November.
The Jewish Town Hall in Prague's Jewish Quarter.. The history of the Jews in Prague, the capital of today's Czech Republic, relates to one of Europe's oldest recorded and most well-known Jewish communities (in Hebrew, Kehilla), first mentioned by the Sephardi-Jewish traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub in 965 CE.
As a result, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia lost about 38% of their combined area to Germany, with some 3.2 million German and 750,000 Czech inhabitants. Hungary, in turn, received 11,882 km 2 (4,588 sq mi) in southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian Ruthenia; according to a 1941 census, about 86.5% of the population in this territory was Hungarian.
But Bohemian Germans favored creating a Greater Germany out of various German-speaking territories. The Bohemian Germans soon withdrew from the committee, signaling the Czech-German conflict that would characterize subsequent history. Palacky proposed Austro-Slavism as the creed of the Czech national movement.
In 1969, the Czech lands (including Bohemia) were given autonomy within Czechoslovakia as the Czech Socialist Republic. In 1990, the name was changed to the Czech Republic, which became a separate state in 1993 with the breakup of Czechoslovakia. [7] Until 1948, Bohemia was an administrative unit of Czechoslovakia as one of its "lands" (země). [8]