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A Noisy and Noisome Marketplace: The Jewish Tandelmarkt in Prague

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2019

Michael L. Miller
Michael L. Miller*
Affiliation:
Central European University
*
michaelxmiller@gmail.com
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Abstract

The Jewish Tandelmarkt in Prague's Old Town was a nonresidential Jewish exclave, situated outside of Prague's Jewish Town. This thriving marketplace afforded Jewish merchants and peddlers an opportunity to ply their wares in the Old Town, but it also left them unprotected in the face of physical and verbal attacks. This article examines memoirs, travelogues, guidebooks, newspapers, novels, and visual images to understand how the Tandelmarkt (junk market) functioned in various discourses about Prague Jewry, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jews were vulnerable and exposed in the Tandelmarkt, but the centrality and visibility of this marketplace also allowed non-Jews to observe their “exotic” Jewish neighbors. A nineteenth-century novelist described the Tandelmarkt as a “theater” where passersby could “lose themselves” for half an hour in its disarray and commotion. At times it was a theater of violence, where Jews fell victim to attack. It was also a theater of emancipation, where Jews could show their Christian neighbors that they were capable of self-improvement and change.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , April 2019 , pp. 105 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2019 

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References

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32. Ibid., 62–63; Kestenberg-Gladstein, Heraus aus der “Gasse,” 65.

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34. Schram, “Elkele und Eleonore,” Die Neuzeit, November 14, 1862, 549.

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36. Prospect des Marckt oder Platzes in der Alt Stadt Prag gegen den Thein anzusehen; Prospect des so genannten Kleinen Ringes oder Platzes in der Alt-Stadt Prag; and Prospect gegen der Carmelitter-Kirch zu S. Gallen und danneben befindlichen Juden Tandel-Markt in der Alt-Stadt Prag. J. G. Ringlin also engraved a general overview of Prague: Prag, Gesamtansicht von der Neustätter Seiten aus dem Weingebürge anzusehen. All of these engravings can be found online at http://www.deutschefotothek.de/.

37. Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 28–66.

38. Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 9; Tomáš Pěkný, Historie Židů v Čechách a na Moravě (Prague: Sefer, 2001), 302.

39. Gottlieb Bondy and Franz Dworský, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien von 906 bis 1620, vol. 2 (Prague, 1906), 719–20.

40. Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 24.

41. Ibid., 25.

42. Ibid., 25–26.

43. S. H. Lieben, “Briefe von 1744–1748 über die Austreibung der Juden aus Prag,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der Čechoslovakischen Republik 4 (1932): 366; Stefan Plaggenborg, “Maria Theresia und die böhmischen Juden,” Bohemia 39 (1998): 11.

44. Miniaturgemälde von Prag (Prague, 1853), 87–88; Legis Glückselig, Illustrirter Wegweiser durch Prag (Prague: Carl Wilhelm Medau, 1853), 83; Roubík, “Drei Beiträge,” 365.

45. Joseph Schiffner, Gallerie der interessantesten und merkwürdigsten Personen Böhmens (Prague, 1804), 340. Thanks to Michael K. Silber for bringing this to my attention.

46. Leininger, Auszug aus dem Ghetto, 248. On the Hep Hep riots, see Stefan Rohrbacher, “The ‘Hep Hep’ Riots of 1819: Anti-Jewish Ideology, Agitation, and Violence,” in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. Christhard Hoffman, Werner Bermann, and Helmut Walser-Smith (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 23–42.

47. Roubík, “Drei Beiträge,” 364, 368.

48. Ibid., 367.

49. Jindřich Toman, “Making Sense of a Ruin: Nineteenth-Century Gentile Images of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” Bohemia 52, no. 1 (2012): 109.

50. Ibid., 108–22. German-language authors began writing about the Old Jewish Cemetery in the 1830s–1840s; Czech-language authors only in the 1880s–1890s.

51. Roubík, “Drei Beiträge,” 341.

52. Ibid., 352.

53. Christoph Stölzl, “Zur Geschichte der böhmischen Juden in der Epoche des modernen Nationalismus,” Bohemia 14, no. 1 (1973): 203–4.

54. Roubík, “Drei Beiträge,” 362; Leininger, Auszug aus dem Ghetto, 359–66.

55. Leininger, Auszug aus dem Ghetto, 372–73.

56. On the workers’ riots in June 1844, see Arnošt Klima, “Die Arbeiterunruhen in Böhmen 1844,” in Demokratische und soziale Protestbewegungen in Mitteleuropa, 1815–1848/49, ed. Helmut Reinalter (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 230–64; Stanley Z. Pech, The Czech Revolution of 1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 18–20; Martina Niedhammer, Nur eine “Geld-Emancipation”? Loyalitäten und Lebenswelten des Prager jüdischen Großbürgertums 1800–1867 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 56–58.

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58. [Ferdinand von Schirnding], Das Judenthum in Oesterreich und die böhmischen Unruhen (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1845), 138–39.

59. Ibid., 146.

60. Roubík, “Drei Beiträge,” 363–64; Cathleen M. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2003), 161.

61. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town, 161.

62. Roubík, “Drei Beiträge,” 369–70, 381; Leininger, Auszug aus dem Ghetto, 385–87.

63. Oesterreichisches Central-Organ fuer Glaubensfreiheit, Cultur, Geschichte und Literatur des Judenthums (1848): 114–15; “Das Jahr 1848,” Prager Tagblatt, May 1, 1898, 4; Leininger, Auszug aus dem Ghetto, 404.

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66. M. Teller, “Bitte und Vorschlag an den israelitischen Handelsstand Prags, zu allernächst an die Kleinhändler des Tandelmarks,” Oesterreichisches Central-Organ fuer Glaubensfreiheit, Cultur, Geschichte und Literatur des Judenthums (1848): 107.

67. I have borrowed and adapted this concept from Kenneth Stow, Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

68. Roubík, “Drei Beiträge,” 389.

69. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town, 165.

70. Ibid., 169.

71. Ibid., 94.

72. Brod, Lev, “Před 100 lety zmizel židovský tandlmark v Praze,” Věstník židovské obce náboženské v Praze 12, no. 15 (April 14, 1950): 176Google Scholar. Brod dates the “disappearance” of the Jewish Tandelmarkt to 1850.

73. White, July Holiday, 132.

74. Světlá, Karolina, Upomínky (Prague: L. Mazáč, 1931), 224–25Google Scholar. Thanks to Jindřich Toman for bringing this to my attention.