The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, which include the modern Czech Republic as well as Bohemia, Czech Silesia and Moravia, goes back many centuries. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century. As of 2021, there were approximately 2,300 Jews living in the Czech Republic. Jewish Prague Jews are believed to have settled in Prague as early as the 10th century. The 16th century was a golden age for Jewry in Prague. One of the famous Jewish scholars of the time was Judah Loew ben Bezalel known as the Maharal, who served as a leading rabbi in Prague for most of his life. He is buried at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, and his grave with its tombstone intact, can still be visited. According to a popular legend, it is said that the body of Golem (created by the Maharal) lies in the attic of the Old New Synagogue where the genizah of Prague's community is kept. In 1708, Jews accounted for one-quarter of Prague’s population. Austro-Hungarian Empire As part of the original Czechoslovakia, and before that the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Jews had a long association with this part of Europe. Throughout the last thousand years, over 600 Jewish communities have emerged in the Kingdom of Bohemia. According to the 1930 census, Czechoslovakia (including Subcarpathian Ruthenia) had a Jewish population of 356,830. First Czechoslovak Republic During the 1890s, most Jews were German-speaking and considered themselves Germans. By the 1930s, German-speaking Jews had been numerically overtaken by assimilated Jews speaking Czech; Zionism also made inroads among the Jews of the periphery (Moravia and the Sudetenland). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, thousands of Jews came to Prague from small villages and towns in Bohemia, leading to the urbanization of Bohemian Jewish society. Of the 10 million inhabitants of pre-1938 Bohemia and Moravia, Jews composed only about 1% (117,551). Most Jews lived in large cities such as Prague (35,403 Jews, who made up 4.2% of the population), Brno (11,103, 4.2%), and Ostrava (6,865, 5.5%). Antisemitism in the Czech lands was lower than elsewhere and strongly opposed by the national founder and first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), while secularism among both Jews and non-Jews facilitated integration. Nevertheless, there had been anti-Jewish rioting during the birth of the Czechoslovak republic in 1918 and 1920. Following a steep