Hungary: The Trap of Loyalty: Antisemitism on the Eve of the Holocaust (original) (raw)
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, Hungarian historian Miklós Szabó discussed the problem of prejudice and antisemitism in an interview published on the pages of Hírmondó, the Hungarian samizdat-an illegal under ground journal opposed to the socialist regime. He opined that Hungarian society should react to the so-called Jewish issue in two ways: first, it should not discriminate in any way against those who are or want to be assimilated; second, it has to make it pos si ble for Jews to express their Jewish identity if they wish to do so.1 Szabó correctly noticed that there had been significant changes in the self-definition of Hungary's Jews by the late 1960s. But what exactly did these new Jewish identities encompass, and how should Hungarian society put Szabó's ideas into practice? My study maps the discourses surrounding this shift in identity among Hungary's Jews, the largest Jewish community in East Central Eu rope after the Shoah. After two postwar emigration waves-in 1945-1948 and after the failed revolution of 1956-the Hungarian Jewish Community numbered more than 100,000 people,2 even though the majority were highly assimilated. I argue that the dif erent responses to the "Jewish Question" from among this still sizable Jewish population were not only connected to prob lems of minority politics but were also indicative of key questions about the nature of the future Hungarian democracy and the dif er ent groups within the then-forming Hungarian opposition and proto-parties. Thus, the arguments put forward by the under ground Jewish formations discussed in this chapter engaged in debate not only with the socialist regime but also with its opposition. The "Jewish Question" thus became deeply embedded in the broader structural and ideological po liti cal issues of Hungary.
From Yellow Star to Red Star: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Communism, and the Jews of Hungary (PoLAR, 1995)
Popular Hungarian myths of the Jew as "Other" have proved to be both durable and flexible. Hungarians of Jewish background are still culturally constructed as foreigners in Hungary, despite their historical efforts to assimilate—e.g., through compliance with linguistic citizenship requirements in the eighteenth century—and their self-censorship of Jewish identity, whether in religious or ethnic form, in the years since World War II. Pre-war constructions of the Jew as capitalist—which were of diminished utility during the communist era, when Jewishness was linked with communism itself—have resurfaced with the transition to a market economy. The flexibility of these constructions has served to maintain not only anti-Semitism in Hungarian popular discourse, but of Jewishness itself as an element of identity within Hungarian society, an identity that is seen as being mutually exclusive in relation to Hungarian-ness. Contemporary ethnonationalist popular discourse thus publicly legitimizes anti-Semitism. In it, Hungarian-ness is linked to a myth of the rural peasantry which, in the context of the borders drawn after World War II, encompasses ethnic Hungarians beyond the physical borders of the nation. Jewishness, on the other hand, is linked to urbanism, specifically to Budapest, a national space that in the context of Jewishness is nonetheless foreign.
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The early 1880s were both difficult and extraordinary from the point of view of Hungarian Jewry. Political antisemitism had been present for half a decade, but it became violent and influential during these years, though only for these years. In other words, this was a time of crisis within the ‘Golden Era’ of the Hungarian Jewry, as some researchers of Hungarian Jews call the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 1867–1918. [1] Besides antisemitism ‘normal’ political debate took place in parliament simultaneously, namely that related to the bill on Jewish–Christian marriages, which was also decisive from a Jewish point of view. The ‘antisemitic wave’ started with the attempts to establish a nation-wide movement, the Central Association of Non-Jewish Hungarians, following the example of Wilhelm Marr’s Antisemitenliga in Germany. [2] This period of virulent antisemitic activity culminated in the events related to the infamous Tiszaeszlár blood libel case, including a series of riot...
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Since the Second World War anti-Semitism has been an official taboo in Western society. Simultaneously, great effort has been exercised to research this pathological phenomenon and to explain it to society. These efforts have been both nominally effective and productive.Nevertheless, there is a trending new anti-Semitism which not only breaches the taboo but which the taboo helps to spread. This can only mean that our present understanding and the corresponding strategies that have been employed against anti-Semitism must be rethought.