Jewish Quarter (Josefov)

Prague's Jewish Quarter is the remains of a world that was deliberately erased — twice. Jews settled here as early as the 10th century, and by the 13th century they were confined within a walled ghetto. For six hundred years, this tiny enclave produced scholars, rabbis, merchants, and legends. Then, between 1893 and 1913, the city demolished most of it in a misguided modernization campaign modeled on Haussmann's Paris. Of the original ghetto, only six synagogues, the Old Jewish Cemetery, and the Town Hall survived.

The second erasure was far more devastating. The Nazis murdered approximately 80,000 Czech and Moravian Jews during the Holocaust. In a cruel twist, Hitler ordered the quarter's artifacts preserved — he wanted to create a "museum of an extinct race." The result is that Josefov's synagogues now house one of the world's most important collections of Judaica, saved by the very regime that murdered the community that created them.

The Old-New Synagogue, built around 1270, is the oldest functioning synagogue in Europe. Its steep Gothic gable has sheltered continuous Jewish worship for over 750 years. According to legend, the attic holds the remains of the Golem — a clay creature brought to life by Rabbi Loew in the 16th century to protect the Jewish community from persecution.

The Old Jewish Cemetery is unlike anything else in Europe. Because Jews were forbidden from burying their dead outside the ghetto walls, bodies were stacked up to twelve layers deep over three centuries. Around 12,000 headstones jostle for space above ground, tilting at wild angles — the visible tip of an estimated 100,000 burials beneath.