Viktor Vohryzek

The Czech writer and physician Viktor Vohryzek combined a commitment to Jewish assimilation into an emerging Czech nation with a belief in the continued relevance of Jewish religious and ethical traditions. Trained as physician, Vohryzek worked as a doctor among poor and working-class Czechs in the Bohemian city of Pardubice. He also became an activist and publicist on behalf of the progressive-nationalist Czech politics associated with Czechoslovakia’s future founder and leader Tomáš Masaryk—a politics that aimed to modernize and unify Czech society before ultimately throwing off Austrian rule. Amid intra-Jewish debates in the Czech lands pitting German-oriented, Czech-oriented, and Zionist Jewish positions against one another, Vohryzek took a leading role as a voice for assimilation to Czech culture in the journals Rozvoj and Českožidovské listy, but he also urged Jews to reform rather than abandon Judaism and suggested that the indispensable core of the Jewish inheritance was an ethical system he called Mosaism. Vohryzek also produced a number of literary translations from German, Yiddish, and English literature into Czech.