Josefov is what remains of a Jewish town that stood here for some eight hundred years. Jews were confined to this stretch of the Old Town from the thirteenth century, and by the nineteenth it was the poorest and densest ground in Prague. Between 1893 and the 1910s the city demolished almost all of it as a slum clearance, replacing crooked lanes with the wide Art Nouveau apartment blocks that stand today. Six synagogues, the old cemetery and the town hall were kept. The name comes from Emperor Joseph II, whose reforms in the 1780s began lifting the restrictions.
The Old-New Synagogue has been in use since about 1270, which makes it the oldest working synagogue in Europe, and its twin-nave Gothic hall is smaller and plainer than everything around it. Next door, the cemetery is the quarter's hardest place to shake: forbidden to expand, the community buried upward instead, and roughly twelve thousand headstones now lean into one another over layers of graves. In the Pinkas Synagogue the walls carry 77,297 hand-painted names.