ABSTRACT
Dr. Ludwig August Frankl, an Austrian-Jewish poet and intellectual was born in Chrast, Bohemia, in today's Czech Republic. He published the impressions of his travels in Eretz Israel and other Oriental countries in two books: Nach Jerusalem and Nach Agypten. Nach Jerusalem was popular and was printed in several editions. Frankl records in detail the community's expenditures. The establishment of a chief rabbinate in effect preceded the full reform of Jewish communal affairs. Frankl's works are an important, yet still underestimated source of information on the demography, economic condition and institutional organization of the Jewish communities in the East in the nineteenth century. Since 1840, European Jews took an ever-increasing interest in the fate of their brethren in Islamic countries. According to the demographic statistics provided by Frankl, the Istanbul community included 38,400 Jews, comprising 14,800 men and 23,600 women.
