women who married illegally were subject to physical punishment and
expulsion. Nobles or towns that violated this law were subject to a fine of
1,000 florins, payable to the imperial treasury.
The impact of this law on Jews in the Czech Lands reflected the limits of
Habsburg absolutism. Jews in Bohemia and Moravia were able to mollify its
harshness. In Bohemia, the law was most easily enforced and regulated in
Prague, where most Bohemian Jews lived. In response, Jews in Bohemia who
were not firstborn evaded the law by settling in small outlying villages. By
1750, Jews lived in 800 different places in Bohemia, 600 of which had 100 or
fewer Jews. In Moravia, the impact of the law was mitigated by magnate
owners of private towns, who sheltered their Jewish subjects. By 1754,
29,000 Jews lived in Bohemia and 20,000 Jews in Moravia.
The differences between Bohemia and Moravia with respect to implement-
ing the Familiants Law paralleled the differences between Jewish communal
organization in the two states. In Bohemia, the Prague Jewish community was
dominant and represented all Jews in Bohemia. As more and more Jews relo-
cated to outlying communities, they attempted to throw off the yoke of
Prague Jewry. The focal point of this tension was the authority of the Prague
chief rabbi. David Oppenheim was appointed chief rabbi of Prague in 1702
and to provincial rabbinic posts in 1713 and 1715. The state appointed
Oppenheim as Landesrabbinerfor Bohemian Jewry, and Kreisrabbinerpositions
for provincial communities, the Kreisrabbinerbeing subordinate to the chief
rabbi in Prague. In Moravia, the lack of a towering center like Prague fostered
greater intercommunal cohesion and cooperation. The Moravian Jewish
Council (Va’ad Mehren) emerged during the seventeenth century as a supra-
communal governing body for all Moravian Jews, and was recognized as such
by the state.
The rationalist aim of the Familiants Law appears more vividly when seen
in connection with Charles’s policy in neighboring Hungary. Hungarian Jewry
was minuscule at the end of the seventeenth century. Jews lived mainly in a
handful of magnate-controlled market towns in western Hungary, where the
local authorities governed their Jewish and other non-Catholic subjects with
the harshness typical of the Counter-Reformation era. The Jewish community
of Buda, which had thrived during the century and a half under Ottoman rule,
had been expelled immediately following the Habsburg reconquest of Buda in
1686, although this edict was not enforced until 1749 owing to the interven-
tion of Habsburg military leaders stationed in Buda. In addition, in 1718
Charles gave three Jews in Buda special permits to remain.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, Charles faced the difficult
challenge of repopulating central Hungary, which had become an under-
populated wasteland following the Ottoman retreat. In order to repopulate
the region, Charles offered loyal magnate families large tracts of land. The
118 World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750