Prague's Jewish community was first moved into a walled ghetto in the 13th century.
In 1780 Emperor Joseph II outlawed many forms of discrimination, and in 1848 the ghetto walls were torn down and the Jewish quarter was made a borough of Prague, named Josefov in honor of the emperor.
The Nazis wiped out over 3/4 of the city's Jews, and later the Communist regime slowly strangled what was left of Jewish cultural life. The 'State Jewish Museum' is an umbrella word for what's left of the Jewish quarter- a few synagogues, a ceremonial hall and the powerfully melancholy Old Cemetery.
Ironically, the Nazis spared these to be a 'museum of an extinguished race', which have survived instead as a memorial to seven centuries of oppression.
The restored Spanish synagogue, named for its striking Moorish interior, is now a museum and concert hall.
Founded in the early 15th century, this is Europe's oldest surviving Jewish cemetery,
Some 12,000 crumbling stones (some brought from other, long-gone cemeteries) are heaped together, but beneath them are about 100,000 graves, piled in layers because of space limitations.
Most stones contain the name of the deceased and his/her father, the date of death (and sometimes of burial), and poetic texts.
Elaborate markers from the 17th and 18th centuries have bas relief and sculpture, some of it indicating the deceased's occupation and lineage.
The oldest standing stone is from 1439, Avigdor Karo, a court poet to King Wenceslas IV.
The place, even though closed since 1787, has a palpable sense of mourning.
St. James Church (Kostel Sv Jakuba), begun in the 14th century, got a Baroque makeover in the 18th century. Its splendid pipe organ and famous acoustics have given the place a fine reputation.
The concert times are irregular so we missed our chance to hear it this morning.
Back through the Old Town Square... a plaque there contains the list of 27 Czech Protestant nobles beheaded in the Square in the year 1621 after the Battle of the White Mountain.
Tempting treats abound around the Square. We watch the cook wind the the potato chip maker making fresh potatoes into - you guessed it, on-a-stick.
The Charles bridge was begun by Charles IV and completed about 1400. Since 1946 for pedestrian traffic only, it has lots of activity, an army of tourists, hawkers and buskers, and lots of Baroque statuary. And the views from the bridge are grand.
Frank Kafka is a son of Prague; he lived here all his life, haunting the city and haunted by it. One could look at his novel,The Trial, as a metaphysical geography of his town, whose alleys and passageways break down the boundaries between outer and inner, private and personal.
Kafka was born in 1883 in an apartment beside St. Nicholas Church and as a boy lived around Josefov and Old Town Square. After earning a law degree he took his first job as an insurance clerk where he toiled on the 5th floor from 1908 to 1922. Kafka regarded his job as drudgery and it gave him experience with the entanglements of bureaucracy that now go by the name --Kafkaesque
The last place he lived with his parents 1913-1914 and the setting for his horrific parable, Metaporphosis, was a top floor flat facing Old Town Square.
Kafka came into his maturity as a German-speaking Jew in anti-semitic Prague, that is, a minority twice over. He is credited with prophetic powers because he predicted through his novels The Trial and The Castle, the totalitarian regimes that arose after his death, especially that of the Soviet Union, with its arbitrary, insane, crushing-Kafkaesque-bureaucratic apparatus for killing.
In the cleverly designed museum devoted to Kafka with many moving images, attendees are encouraged to enter into Kafka's strange world, to which now you have a peek.
(Some of the text here is thanks to writers from Lonely Planet and The Atlantic.)
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