Moses Dobruška

How could a man born in the Brno Jewish ghetto find himself at the very centre of the French Revolution? How did he end up alongside Georges Danton before the Revolutionary Tribunal and finish under the guillotine? Moses Dobruska is one of the most remarkable, yet forgotten, figures in Czech history. He was a descendant of an influential Jewish family, a follower of the mysterious Frankist movement, a Freemason, a merchant, a nobleman, and a political thinker.

His life led him from Brno via Vienna to revolutionary Paris, where he became both a witness to and a participant in the events that changed the modern world. After more than a year of archival research, journalist and political scientist Vladimír Vokál reconstructs Dobruska's incredible fate while also uncovering his almost forgotten work, Philosophie sociale.

The book shows that this Moravian was not just an adventurer and a victim of the revolutionary terror, but also an original thinker who was ahead of his time and may have influenced the emergence of modern sociology and political philosophy. This story, full of disguises, political intrigue, secret societies, revolutionary passions, and bold ideas, proves that the path from a Moravian ghetto could indeed lead into the textbooks of European history. The book offers a captivating combination of detective investigation, intellectual history, and the grand history of the French Revolution. It is the story of a man who spent his whole life searching for his own identity—and in doing so, was perhaps ahead of his time.