(1895–1974), publisher, editor, and historian. Born in Vienna, Hugo Gold took over the publishing house of his uncle Max Hickl, the Jüdischer Buch- und Kunstverlag, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (from 1932 also in Prague), following Hickl’s death in 1924. For a time, Gold also edited the newspaper Jüdische Volksstimme (Jewish People’s Voice).
When Gold saw that many small Jewish communities in the country were struggling, he made his main ambition the publishing of their history. The first such book that he edited and published was the massive volume Die Juden und Judengemeinden Mährens in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (The Jews and Jewish Communities of Moravia in Past and Present; 1929). Other volumes followed on Bratislava (1932) and Bohemia (1934), the latter with some articles in Czech.
Gold also edited the historical journal Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in der Tschechoslowakei (Journal of the History of the Jews in Czechoslovakia; 1930–1934, 1938). In 1940, he moved to Tel Aviv, where he was able to found a new publishing house, ‘Olamenu. He continued to publish in German what had become memorial volumes, while expanding his reach to the former Habsburg monarchy as a whole. Gold himself wrote a brief history of the Jews in Vienna, Geschichte der Juden in Wien (1966), and edited works on Bucovina (two vols., 1958–1962), Burgenland (1970), and Austria, emphasizing rural communities (1971). Gold’s last such book, which he compiled himself, was, like his first, on Moravia (1974). He also published and edited a new historical journal, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden (Journal of the History of the Jews; 1964–1974). Among his other publications were memorial volumes for the historian Nathan M. Gelber (1963; largely in Hebrew) and the writer Max Brod (1969).
Hugo Gold, ed., Geschichte der Juden in Österreich (Tel Aviv, 1971), pref. and p. 146; Wilma Abeles Iggers, ed., The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: A Historical Reader (Detroit, 1992), p. 391.