Charles IV became King of Bohemia in 1346 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. In between, in 1348, he was short of cash. He probably handed a jeweled gold crown to a moneylender named Muscho as collateral, something the lender could keep if the loan went unpaid. Muscho was Jewish, and lending money was one of the few trades the city let Jews do. The crown is in New York now, in a show the Journal's Diane Cole reviewed on Thursday, Oct. 15.
The show is Sacred Splendor: Jewish Ritual Art and Christian Treasures From St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, at the Jewish Museum through Feb. 7, 2027. It holds 182 objects. Sixty are reliquaries from the cathedral's treasury, the largest group ever shown outside Europe. Beside them sit Jewish spice boxes, Torah shields and marriage rings. The two sets look alike, and that's the point. Christians and Jews lived in the same city, apart, and drew from the same eye.
They also used the same hands. Jews were barred from the guilds that controlled stone, paint and gold. So Christian masons built the Altneuschul, finished in 1270 and still the oldest working synagogue in Europe. A carved column top from the synagogue matches one from a Prague convent. The same workshop made both. Christian illuminators painted the borders of a Hebrew Bible and a Christian prayer book in the 1470s, and the flowers match too.
What people bury
The hardest room holds three hoards. In the 1340s, during the Black Death, Christians blamed Jews for the plague and attacked them. Families buried what they had, rings and beakers, coins and belt buckles, and ran. Nobody came back for them. Builders found the hoards by chance centuries later, one as recently as 1998. The crown came from one of these, in Środa Śląska, in what is now Poland. Near the exit, a 1606 panorama of Prague names St. Vitus and leaves the Jewish quarter unlabeled. Cole says the whole show puts the missing names back.
Our read
We file this under Behavioral, with a nod to history. Two money lessons sit in those glass cases. First, credit is old, and so is collateral. A king with an empire still needed a lender, and the lender needed something he could hold. Second, a hoard is what people bury when they can't trust the system around them. Those families did the sensible thing with what they had. It still didn't come back to them, because no one who knew where it was survived to say.
Here's the connection to your own plan. Most households have a small hoard, a safe-deposit box, a drawer of papers, a password list, the deed, a coin collection. What matters is whether a second person knows where it is and can get in. This week, make one check. Open your plan's document list and confirm the location of each item is written down, and that your executor or a trusted adult has the key or the code. A buried crown kept its value for centuries and fed nobody. We'd rather your umbrella be where the family can find it before the sky turns.