The Jewish Town, the Maharal, and Rudolf's Court

Prague's Jewish quarter holds the Old New Synagogue, built around 1270 and in use ever since, which makes it the oldest active synagogue in Europe, and a cemetery where restricted ground forced burials to be layered over each other twelve deep. The community's history includes the Easter pogrom of 1389, in which much of it was killed, and long periods of relative security under emperors who valued its taxes and its printers.

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal, was its most famous rabbi in the sixteenth century, a scholar of law and of the inner meaning of the tradition who wrote on education and on the relation of Israel to the nations. The golem legend attached to his name much later, in the nineteenth century, and there is no sign of it in his own writings or in his contemporaries: the story is a modern creation grown from earlier and vaguer traditions about the animation of a figure of clay, and it now overshadows a substantial body of thought.

At the same period Rudolf II moved the imperial court to Prague and filled it with astronomers, alchemists and collectors. Tycho Brahe brought his observations there and Johannes Kepler inherited them, working out from the orbit of Mars that planetary paths are ellipses. John Dee and Edward Kelley came seeking patronage for their conversations with angels and were eventually expelled. The court paid for it all, and it left the city with a reputation for the occult that its tourist trade has never let go.