A new issue of the journal Judaica Bohemiae (Vol. 56/2021, 2) came out at the end of December 2021. It starts with a study by Janusz Spyra (‘Court Jews’ [‘Hofjuden’] in Remote Areas of Silesia: A Contribution to the Seventeenth-Century History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands), which deals with the activities of the so-called ‘court Jews’ in the service of Silesian princes in the 17th century, thus expanding on previous historical research, which focuses solely on the court Jews who served the Habsburg rulers. The next paper by Andrea Jelínková (The Haskalah in Brno [Brünn]? Enlightenment Works Produced by the Moravian Hebrew Printing Press) examines and clarifies the hitherto unknown circumstances surrounding the publication of haskalic literature in Brno at the end of the 18th century. This is followed by a material study by Lenka Blechová (Jews in the Lesser Town of Prague during the Transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period. Houses, Period Contexts and the Malostranský Family) which, on the basis of extensive archival research, focuses on the coexistence of the Jewish and Christian population in the Lesser Town (Malá Strana) of Prague in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and reconstructs the familial and commercial ties of the Jews who lived there.

In the Reports section, Pavel Kocman discusses an international conference on the Holocaust Documentation Centre in Moravia, held in Brno at the end of June 2021, the aim of which was to start a discussion about the planned founding of a museum of Jewish history in Moravia.

The final section of the journal contains reviews of the following books: Adam Teller, Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (reviewed by Pavel Kocman), Marie Crhová (ed.), Reframing Jewish Life: Moravian Jewry in the Modern Period (reviewed by Marcin Wodziński), Daniel Mahla, Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion: From Prewar Europe to the State of Israel (reviewed by Daniel Baránek) and a Czech edition of Ariana Neumann’s When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains (Pod svícnem tma. Hledání příběhu mého otce; reviewed by Petr Brod).