Josefov is what is left of a Jewish town that stood here for eight hundred years, and three things in it are the reason people come. The old cemetery is the hardest to shake: forbidden to expand, it holds roughly twelve thousand headstones leaning into one another over layers of graves. 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 plainer than anything around it. In the Pinkas Synagogue the walls carry 77,297 hand-painted names.
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 cleared almost all of it, and the wide Art Nouveau apartment blocks you walk between now stand where the crooked lanes were. Six synagogues, the cemetery and the town hall were kept. The name comes from Emperor Joseph II, whose reforms in the 1780s began lifting the restrictions.