Talk:Charles Louis Fleischmann

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography
???	This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

Ohio Unassessed

	Ohio portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Ohio, which collaborates on Ohio-related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to current discussions.OhioWikipedia:WikiProject OhioTemplate:WikiProject OhioOhio
???	This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Misclassification as Czech-American

I seriously doubt that Mr. Fleischmann would have identified himself as a Czech. He originated from an overwhelmingly German-speaking area of what was then called Oesterreiches Ostschlesien (Austrian East Silesia, from the town of Jaegerndorf. Prior to the WWII, ethnic Czechs constituted only a small minority in the region. It was only after the ethnic cleansing of the Sudentenland by the Communists following the defeat of Germany in WWII, with its attendant wholesale expulsion of the German residents from this region, that it became a Czech-speaking region.

I believe that the fact that this area was incorporated into Czechoslovakia during the post-1918 breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has lead to the mis-classification of Mr. Fleischmann, who died in 1897, as a Czech, a designation that I believe he would have found quite inexplicable and artificial. Austrian? Yes. Czech? No. I have therefore removed links designating Mr. Fleischmann a Czech, as they tend more to reflect an artificial, modern-biased perspective of the history of this region.

Additionally, I see no evidence of Jewish ancestry mentioned in the article. Perhaps he was, as Jaegerndorf had a thriving Jewish community at that time. However one should be cautious in jumping to conclusions based purely on a name: Fleischmann is a name of Germanic origin held both Jews and non-Jews alike. Certainly his given names of Charles Louis (presumably anglicized: originally Karl Ludwig?) offers no support for the contention that Mr. Fleishmann is Jewish. This point should be better clarified if someone has more information. Nor do I see any evidence that Mr. Fleischmann was of Hungarian descent. I have therefore removed these links from the main article as well, in the interest of accuracy.

Certainly, if anyone has evidence to support any of these assertions, the article should be edited thusly and these links they should be re-inserted, but until such time as supporting evidence is added to the article I have removed them.

NDM (talk) 06:53, 25 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]