Jewish Money, Jesuit Censors, and the Habsburg Monarchy: Politics and Polemics in Early Modern Prague

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, a trial unfolded in the city of Prague that challenged the transnational philanthropic ties of Jews. Beginning as a dispute between a creditor from Ottoman Palestine and Prague's chief rabbi, David Oppenheim, the affair soon took on interconfessional dimensions, engaging the proprietor of Prague's coffeehouse, a Jesuit censor of Hebraica, and the agents of the Habsburg monarchy. The dispute's unfolding in the legal arena offered opportunity for polemic and created a context in which claims about Jewish loyalty, belonging, and trustworthiness could be publicly interrogated in light of conversionary agendas and jurisdictional contests over the power-and control-of the printed word and of Jewish global networks.