At 81, Alexander Fried looks his absolute sartorial best as he leans back into his chair at Prague's historic intellectual haven Café Louvre on Národní street, and reflects.

He's caught in a moment, reliving a Prague that once was. As he squints out the window at the rush-hour traffic on the street below, he says somewhat absent-mindedly how "during Kafka's time, this was formerly known as Josef Street. Did you know that?"

The seemingly ageless scholar churns out facts and figures so fast and with such outspokenness that it's almost shocking. But Fried confesses to another passion just as rewarding as his lifelong pursuit of knowledge.

"I'm a Jew chaser, actually. Fewer things give me greater pleasure in this life than meeting a Jewish person on the street who doesn't know a single thing about our heritage except all the negative stuff," says the former history professor and proud citizen of Prague, Mariánské Lázně, and Tel Aviv. "I travel the entire world, you know, and I never get tired of seeing how their eyes light up when I regale them with just a few secrets from our ancient past. It's a feeling more precious than gold."

These days, the married father of two spends most of his time traveling around Europe and Israel on speaking engagements or visiting his lawyer son in St. Petersburg, Russia. Fried steadfastly believes his life's mission is to share with a disenchanted European youth — not to mention Holocaust deniers of various stripes — the horrors of 20th-century European fascism.

He proudly evangelizes the unique contribution Jews made to the Continent's cultural and religious development and thereby the entire world, before World War II, when over 70 percent of European Jewry was decimated by Nazi Germany.

"Before the war, TGM [Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk] used to go around, criticizing those Jews who used to assimilate into their communities, dropping all traces of Judaism from their lives," Fried explains. "Masaryk used to call them idiots to their faces, I kid you not! He used to tell them that if only these Jews knew what kind of a treasure they were giving up by adopting the ways of the mainstream, they wouldn't even dare."

The theme of assimilation is a constant refrain during the discussion. A specialist in the European Reformation and Renaissance periods, Fried even has a name for assimilating Jews who intermarry and want nothing to do with their traditional identity, shirking more than five and a half millennia of collective past. He calls them EJIs — Embarrassed Jewish Individuals.

Fried knows his arguments, especially as regards prewar Czechoslovakia. He received his first doctorate from Vienna University as a young exile in 1952 after having submitted a 386-page dissertation on the former president of the First Czechoslovak Republic.

It angers this self-termed "cultural Zionist" that much of what the world thinks about Jews has mostly to do with money and influence. "Jews didn't choose to be moneylenders nor get into the trades. Christian Europe is responsible for that. They pushed the Jews into professions and into ghettos that Jews didn't want to be in. All those things that the world stereotypes Jews for, it's not because Jews wanted it that way. Jews since 70 AD — since the destruction of their last kingdom in the Holy Land — were doctors, scientists and philosophers. We were advisers to kings and popes and governors and rulers. And let's not forget the Jewish heritage: the Bible, the Ten Commandments, Jewish values, Jesus and Mohammed. ... I can go on."

In 1967, Fried's younger brother Ferdinand, a successful pharmaceutical industry entrepreneur in Montreal, called him up in Brussels, where Fried had been looking for work, and invited him for a visit to Canada.

"I was afraid to go because I hardly spoke a word of English back then. Sure, I understood French rather well and was getting along just fine in Belgium, but Ferdinand suggested I might want to try lecturing at the French universities in Quebec. I was still in my 40s, a young man. I really had nothing to lose, so I guess it was the right time in my life for a change. I've always been lucky, you know. Nine times during the war my life was saved, I counted them. So I didn't think my luck had run out yet."

Indeed, it hadn't.

After a brief sojourn in Montreal, an offer came through in April 1968 from Toronto to head up the Farband, a Yiddish community organization in the city. "I spoke Yiddish fluently, and the truth was that I really needed a job. They set me up over there with an apartment and dishes and the works, and the next thing you know, former professor Fried was running a Jewish organization in Toronto for 7,000 Canadian dollars a year! Go figure!"

After a year, Fried proved himself far more than a simple administrator and won an offer from Prince of Wales College in the Canadian seaside idyll of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to head its nascent history department. Soon Fried found himself on a flight bound for the then-backwater of the Maritimes to head up a department of 80 professors and more than 3,000 students. "Mostly Irish, Scottish and English. I was one of a handful of Jews on the island," he recalls, calling the period between 1968 and 1971 three of the best years of his life.

"They asked me what I wanted to earn, so I asked them 'How about the same as I was earning in Toronto?' The man who helped me land the position, Syd Silverman, laughed and told me that it was unbecoming of a department chair to make so little. So they offered me $14,000 a year and I nearly fainted because I thought I'd won the lottery."

Fried describes his mother tongue as Slovak, but speaks 10 languages well. "I lecture in either of seven languages: English, French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak or German. But I also can communicate easily in Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Italian."

With such fluency, Fried could live practically anywhere, yet he's chosen Prague as home, he says, because the city "was the first place where I'd had my greatest love affair. It's also the most beautiful city I know. And you wouldn't believe the similarities between the national histories of Czechs and Jews — it's so unbelievable. When the Hussites lost the Battle of White Mountain in the 1620s, many Hussites converted to Judaism rather than become Catholics. Few people know that."

Before returning to his routine of organizing lectures and meetings, something he seems barely to have slowed down on since his days in academia, Fried offers his unique insights on three questions:

What is the greatest threat facing the world today?

"Fundamentalism, extremism and the Iranian nuclear threat ... those people — those calling for the destruction of the world, of America, of Jews — they're even worse than the Nazis. And you want to know why? It's because they have an antecedent. After seeing what fascism in Europe tried to achieve in the '40s, and to still be professing such views in the 21st century ... at the rate we're going, what will we be by the 22nd century?"

What is Czech society's most rewarding cultural treasure?

"There is no better city in the world for opera than Prague. And I also love talking to people, learning from them, hearing what they have to say about things. My hobby is logos, Latin for 'the word.' We Jews are observers by nature, and we're the traditional interpreters of letters. I experience the world through the people I chat with, and thank goodness my wife is very open-minded and understanding. She doesn't want to stop me from experiencing it either, so I try to travel as often as possible."

What still surprises Fried after all his experiences and study?