Migration as a Challenge: The Jewish Political Communities in Moravia and their 'Decline' around 1900

The author deals with the fundamental demographic changes to the Moravian Jewish Political Communities in the course of (trans-)regional migration and with their public reflections, primarily in Zionist debates at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The first part follows the trajectories of migration and the numerical decline of the Jewish population in the Jewish political communities while emphasizing the dynamics and diversity of this migration process. In the second part, the author reconstructs the discussions about the Jewish political communities, which were seen by Zionists for a brief time around 1900 as a nucleus of modern Jewish political autonomy. A few years later, however, these communities mainly came to symbolize the general decline of Jewish religious and cultural life in Moravia, as the discussions in the weekly Judische Volksstimme show. These debates also reveal reflections on migration, its consequences, and the call for migration management in Moravia, for example through the planned immigration of Eastern European Jews. Notwithstanding these debates, the Jewish political communities were relatively quickly dissolved after the First World War because of the fundamentally changed demographic reality, and because they had lost their legitimacy as alleged symbols of German politics. Migration and nationalism, therefore, led to a loss of knowledge about these unique forms of Jewish political autonomy, which was only partly restored after the Shoah.