Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/422

In Slovakia economic and social conditions were still more favorable for the Jews, for there, as in all Hungary, the Jews were the vanguard of Magyarization, a fate which only a man well versed in the complicated internal politics of the defunct monarchy can understand.

At any rate, the Magyar government is sued liquor licenses almost exclusively to the Jews and backed their candidates for autonomous corporations and parliament.

Karel Kálal, the best informed man in Bohemia on Slovak things and a man who cannot be called prejudiced against the Jews, charges them with evil economic influences, especially usury, practiced by the innkeepers or liquor dealers.

Jews in Slovakia controlled the money market, for in 1905 there were only 21 Slovak financial institutions as against 133 Jewish-Magyar. In Magyar journalism there were in 1905 about 90 Jews active in Budapest; out of 40 book publishers, 30 were Jews; out of 60 book sellers, 40 Jews; out of 38 second-hand book stores, 32 Jewish. The proportion has not changed since.

In agriculture the Jews have the upper hand in Slovakia, both as owners and as renters of large estates. Commerce and industry has been and still is almost exclusively in their hands. The Slovaks, who are largely small farmers and agricultural laborers, were compelled before the world war to migrate across the ocean by reason of lack of land and work. As against that native-born Jews in Slovakia were strengthened in numbers by heavy immigration of Galician Jews, whose low cultural lever exerted an evil influence.

In big industry and commerce Jews to some extent made up for their noxious influence in other respects by giving employment in their factories and shops to the laborer. As dealer and manufacturer, the Jew in Slovakia has never been, and is not now, a worse employer than the Christian; but he is a better expert, with greater patience and courtesy for his customers, with a better knowledge of their psychology. What the anti-semites call Jewish immorality is merely commercial efficiency, which we so greatly praise in Americans.

Kálal in his instructive book “Slovakia and the Slovaks”, written in 1905, places the blame for the decadence of the Slovak nation on Jews, Magyrization and country squires who turned Magyars and received as a reward official posts. Some of the blame should go to the educated Slovaks who to some extent abandoned their people. They did not furnish an example of national pride and self-sacrifice to the Jews of Slovakia. It is, of course, necessary in this connection to keep in mind Magyar oppression of which a stranger can form no adequate conception.

If the Jews in Slovakia as a whole have not furthered Slovak interests, in the Bohemian lands their economic activity has helped the Czechs in spite of claims to the contrary; it furnished employment to the workingmen, prevented emigration and played a fair game even where the Jews politically sided with the Germans. It is true, however, that Jewish employers since the eighth decade of the last century no longer served German denationalizing efforts.

They were also good instructors of their Christian neighbors in commercial and industrial enterprise; their modern agricultural methods, especially in Southern Bohemia, have been a real blessing to Czech farmers, in the judgment of Dr. Alfred Mayer, a young expert in political economy.

Statistics as to the number and increase of Jews in the Bohemian lands are of considerable interest. In Silesia their number has tripled in the course of half a century, just as in the entire Austrian half of the former Dual Monarchy. But in Bohemia and Moravia it has not kept pace with the growth of the population ever since the middle of the last century, and in the last two decades their number has actually decreased.

In 1857 they formed 1.82% of the population of Bohemia, in 1900 only 1.47%; in Moravia 2.21% in 1857 and only 1.82% in 1910. After 1910 the decrease was even more startling. Even in Silesia the increase of Jews is below the general increase of the population. This is to some small extent acounted for by change of religion, to a much larger extent by migration to other parts of the former empire, especially Vienna, and by smaller birth rate, a phenomenon general among families of the middle classes.

From the national or language point of view figures on the Jewish population are as follows: In Slovakia only about 12,000 Jews adhered to the Slovaks. In Bohemia