The Czechoslovak attorney general has filed criminal charges against the weekly publication Politika for printing a list of prominent Jews in contemporary Czech culture.
While it has not yet been decided whether to arrest Politika’s editor, Josef Tomas, he agreed to suspend publication of the weekly until the investigation is concluded.
That is welcome news for the Jewish community here, which has long complained that the paper resembled Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda organ.
Politika’s publisher is set to go on trial this week for other charges of inciting racial hatred.
And the yearlong investigation of the publication has had other ramifications. A police investigator, Ilja Pravda, who concluded in November that the weekly was not anti-Semitic, was demoted when his superiors decided to continue the inquiry.
But it was Politika’s latest, and for the time being final, issue that sparked outrage across Czechoslovakia, which will separate on Jan. 1 into separate Czech and Slovak republics.
Under the headline, “Partial List of Jews and Half-breeds in the Current Culture of the Czech Republic,” Politika listed the names of 168 people working in the arts.
Attorney General Jiri Setina charged that the list aimed to split society three weeks before the formation of the new Czech state.
Among those with no actual Jewish ancestry on the list was former Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, a longtime dissident writer, who the paper has previously described as a puppet of Jews and Freemasons.
Havel used a Dec. 10 news conference to speak out against the country’s increased anti-Semitic atmosphere, which lent itself to such a publication.
“These are strange, nervous times,” he said, also using the word “alarming” to describe the country’s atmosphere as it approaches its division.
Havel, who is expected to be elected president of the new Czech state, likened the publication to those which appeared in the part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, which the Nazis annexed in March 1939.
He also said it was “exactly what used to be written” in 1930s Germany and led to concentration camps. “It is as if the word `intellectual’ has again become an insult.”
Tomas, the weekly’s editor, introduced the list with an article attacking “Slavs from around the Jordan River” for “having made Prague their second-in- importance world center” and for “displaying everywhere their characteristic physiognomies.”
“Dense Czechs carelessly tolerate Jewish plundering,” Tomas wrote.
Like Havel, Jewish communal leaders said they heard echoes of the Nazi era.
Jiri Danicek, president, and Tomas Kraus, secretary-general of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Czech Republic, issued a statement in which they recalled that such “lists of people to be liquidated” used to be published by pro-Nazi newspapers in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under Adolf Hitler.
“But in a democratic, legal state, such as the new Czech republic ought to be, it must be clearly stated where the limits of freedom of expression are and where infringement of the rights of individuals and groups begins.
“From this point of view, the handling of this case by the judiciary will be important not only for the case itself and not only for Jews,” they said.
Several cultural organizations put out a joint declaration in which they accused Politika of discrediting the country’s democracy and openly taking up the traditions of Der Sturmer.
The signatories included the Pen Club, Union of Fine Arts, Community of Dramatic Artists, Association of Radio Authors, Union of Composers and Concert Artists, Czech Writers Association, Union of Translators, Society of Musicians and Musicologists and the Czech Film and Television Union.
One member of the Czech cultural elite on the list said he was honored by the inclusion.
In an article under the heading “Politika Knows” in the daily Lidove Noviny, Rudolf Pella, an actor and translator of English literature, admitted to having sung Yiddish songs, as well as to liking garlic, seen by the anti-Semitic weekly as a Jewish habit.
Pella, the scion of Protestant pastors, said the only Jews in his family are relatives of his wife. He noted that the secret police in the former Communist regime considered him to be Jewish, and speculated that the list in Politika came from the same source.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
