The Czech Republic, as it is with many nations in Europe, is filled with many gems worth visiting when on a Jewish vacation. Some of them you only discover when you join a heritage tour. Take the old town of Slaný for instance. A former royal town in Bohemia, Slaný has a wonderfully preserved medieval city centre. It has many historical buildings, a large square, ancient lanes and medieval fortifications. A market settlement was established in the early Middle Ages by the King of Bohemia, probably in the 11th century. He also created an important trade route leading from Prague to Saxony, which was intersected by other inland routes. The name Slaný menas “salty“. Salt was probably sold here during annual markets. It is safe to assume that Jewish merchants and peddlers have visited Slaný during those annual markets. They came via commerical routes in the early Middle Ages, immediately after the 11th century, as it was elsewhere in the Czech Kingdom. Some of them may have settled in the town permanently during the early Middle Ages. The oldest report on the Jewish settlement of Slaný, however, dates back to the first half of the 14th century. The "Jew from Slaný" is mentioned as a house owner in Valentinská Street in the Old Town of Prague. In 1444, a Jew named Isaac sold his house in Slaný to a pitch maker named Martin. Two years later, the same Jew Isaac sells another of his real estates to another local resident, to a broadcloth maker by the name of Janek. From the same year comes the proof of a sale of more real estate when "a Jew Josef sold a house to burgher Petrus Sulka". However, the town burghers disapproved of the Jews‘ presence in the city because the Jewish traders presented competition. In 1458, King George of Poděbrady issued a decree that no Jew could spend more than one night in the city. Upon entering the city, the Jew also has to pay a fee of 1 silver coin. The Gothic City gate of Prague, demolished in 1841, supposedly had a sculpture or a depiction of a Jew holding a coin. Jews had to enter and exit the town only through this gate. "If a foreign Jew came to Slaný, he had to pay a gate fee, and after he had settled his affairs, he would leave the city immediately, and could stay in nearby Lidice, where a cottage called the “Jew House“ still recalls the time here," writes Hugo Gold in his opus magnum “The Jews and Jewish Communities of Bohemia in Past and Present“ ("Die Juden und Judengemeinden Böhmens in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart"). There is a chapter about Slaný and the surrounding area, which was written by Mr. Richard Fanta, a local patriot and a leader of the Slaný Jewish Community. The book was published in 1934 and up until today serves as a priceless source of information on Jews of Bohemia and Moravia that have vanished in the Holocaust not even a decade after. But there is more to the Jews of Slaný than their early records, as we will discover in Part 2.
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