Creating Jewish Space: German-Jewish Schools in Moravia

In 1911 malt factory owner Ignatz Briess of Olmütz/Olomouc wrote a memoir to explain the nature of Jewish life in small town Moravia before the Revolution of 1848 to his children and grandchildren. He related that he had attended a German-JewishTrivialschule, a German-language elementary school run by the Jewish community for Jewish children, in his home town of Prerau/Přerov in the late 1830s and early 1840s. At the school, the children had two to three hours of German subjects every morning; and at the end of every year, the state school inspector, a local priest, examined them on their studies. At the same time, Briess learned Hebrew, Bible, and Talmud in thecheder, the traditional Jewish school, for seven more hours every day. Thecheder, he remarked, was just like those inHalbasien, that is, Galicia, or Eastern Europe. Despite his reference to Karl Emil Franzos's negative evaluation of Galician Jewish life, Briess described the chaotic conditions in thechederpositively and with considerable warmth. His father, a grain dealer and manager of a noble estate who had studied at the famous Pressburg yeshiva in Hungary and who read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Kant in his spare time, made sure that his son received a thorough Jewish education. The memoir, a nostalgic evocation of a vanished world, describes a Jewish community that was deeply pious, enmeshed in the world of Jewish religious tradition yet also influenced by secular, German-language culture, much of it expressed in Jewish terms. At his bar mitzvah in 1846, Briess gave adroschoh(a traditional learned discourse) for which the traditional rabbi helped him prepare, and a “German sermon,” on which he worked with hisTrivialschuleteacher.