ABSTRACT
Imagine a time and a place where fathers have lost their power; where they represent not authority but the abdication of authority; where the space occupied by fathers is replaced by another powerful belief system—such as science. Such was the situation in Prague, at least among younger Prague Jews, at the close of the nineteenth century. Their fathers had moved far from the organized religious belief system of their grandfathers. Religion had lost its centrality in their life, and their own children came to see the power of all patriarchy as weak. Their model was the weakened patriarchal religion that their fathers had westernized, modernized, and reformed, weak in terms of the religious authority to which they now demanded they defer. Not quite of the “old world” and yet not quite integrated into the new, these fathers were marked by their accents, their table manners, their physical difference.
