The Rise and Fall of Archbishop Kohn: Czechs, Germans, and Jews in Turn-of-the-Century Moravia

This article uses the career of Theodor Kohn (1845-1915), archbishop of Olmütz/Olomouc between 1892 and 1904, to examine various trends in the last decades of the Habsburg empire: the burgeoning Czech-German conflict, the brewing social crisis within the Catholic Church, the rising tide of anti-Semitism, and the countervailing force of Jewish national pride. Drawing on a wide range of literary, publicist, and archival sources, Michael L. Miller shows how Archbishop Kohn's Jewish ancestry served as a lightening rod for various disenfranchised, disillusioned, and disheartened groups in the Bohemian Lands of the Habsburg empire. Even Jews latched onto this “Jewish archbishop,” first as a symbol of “racial aptitude,“ then as a cautionary tale about the futility of assimilation. Kohn himself endowed his quintessentially “Jewish” name with Christian significance, viewing it as the source of his suffering—albeit a suffering that he cherished as the cross he had to bear.