Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-class Ethnic Politics Around 1900

In 1887 the middle-class Czechs dominating Prague's City Hall announced that they had a plan for the large-scale destruction and reconstruction of the city's former Jewish ghetto. The plan, involving the razing of nearly all of the roughly 260 buildings inside the ghetto, was carried out in the name of sanitation. To fund this ambitious project, city officials borrowed a vast sum of money. They also expelled the area's impoverished residents from their homes without making any effort to secure new affordable housing for them.

This book examines the social and ethnic interest-group struggles that fueled this project, suggesting possible continuities between nineteenth-century politics and twentieth-century authoritarianism. Giustino shows how middle class officials who held nineteenth-century liberal values shrewdly used municipal power to pursue their group interests, sometimes at the expense of outsiders, and in the process, contributed to persistent anti-Semitism.