What do you think?
Rate this book
The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology
The Jews of Hungary is the first comprehensive history in any language of the unique Jewish community that has lived in the Carpathian Basin for eighteen centuries, from Roman times to the present. Noted historian and anthropologist Raphael Patai, himself a native of Hungary, tells in this pioneering study the fascinating story of the struggles, achievements, and setbacks that marked the flow of history for the Hungarian Jews. He traces their seminal role in Hungarian politics, finance, industry, science, medicine, arts, and literature, and their surprisingly rich contributions to Jewish scholarship and religious leadership both inside Hungary and in the Western world.
In the early centuries of their history Hungarian Jews left no written works, so Patai had to piece together a picture of their life up to the sixteenth century based on documents and reports written by non-Jewish Hungarians and visitors from abroad. Once Hungarian Jewish literary activity began, the sources covering the life and work of the Jews rapidly increased in richness. Patai made full use of the wealth of information contained in the monumental eighteen-volume series of the Hungarian Jewish Archives and the other abundant primary sources available in Latin, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Turkish, the languages in vogue in various periods among the Jews of Hungary. In his presentation of the modern period he also examined the literary reflection of Hungarian Jewish life in the works of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarian novelists, poets, dramatists, and
journalists.
Patai's main focus within the overall history of the Hungarian Jews is their culture and their psychology. Convinced that what is most characteristic of a people is the culture which endows its existence with specific coloration, he devotes special attention to the manifestations of Hungarian Jewish talent in the various cultural fields, most significantly literature, the arts, and scholarship. Based on the available statistical data Patai shows that from the nineteenth century, in all fields of Hungarian culture, Jews played leading roles not duplicated in any other country.
Patai also shows that in the Hungarian Jewish culture a specific set of psychological motivations had a highly significant function. The Hungarian national character trait of emphatic patriotism was present in an even more fervent form in the Hungarian Jewish mind. Despite their centuries-old struggle against anti-Semitism, and especially from the nineteenth century on, Hungarian Jews remained convinced that they were one hundred percent Hungarians, differing in nothing but denominational variation from the Catholic and Protestant Hungarians. This mindset kept them apart and isolated from the Jewries of the Western world until overtaken by the tragedy of the Holocaust in the closing months of World War II.
In the early centuries of their history Hungarian Jews left no written works, so Patai had to piece together a picture of their life up to the sixteenth century based on documents and reports written by non-Jewish Hungarians and visitors from abroad. Once Hungarian Jewish literary activity began, the sources covering the life and work of the Jews rapidly increased in richness. Patai made full use of the wealth of information contained in the monumental eighteen-volume series of the Hungarian Jewish Archives and the other abundant primary sources available in Latin, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Turkish, the languages in vogue in various periods among the Jews of Hungary. In his presentation of the modern period he also examined the literary reflection of Hungarian Jewish life in the works of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarian novelists, poets, dramatists, and
journalists.
Patai's main focus within the overall history of the Hungarian Jews is their culture and their psychology. Convinced that what is most characteristic of a people is the culture which endows its existence with specific coloration, he devotes special attention to the manifestations of Hungarian Jewish talent in the various cultural fields, most significantly literature, the arts, and scholarship. Based on the available statistical data Patai shows that from the nineteenth century, in all fields of Hungarian culture, Jews played leading roles not duplicated in any other country.
Patai also shows that in the Hungarian Jewish culture a specific set of psychological motivations had a highly significant function. The Hungarian national character trait of emphatic patriotism was present in an even more fervent form in the Hungarian Jewish mind. Despite their centuries-old struggle against anti-Semitism, and especially from the nineteenth century on, Hungarian Jews remained convinced that they were one hundred percent Hungarians, differing in nothing but denominational variation from the Catholic and Protestant Hungarians. This mindset kept them apart and isolated from the Jewries of the Western world until overtaken by the tragedy of the Holocaust in the closing months of World War II.
736 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1996
14 people are currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Raphael Patai
84 books24 followersRaphael Patai (Hebrew רפאל פטאי; born Ervin György Patai, was a Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer, historian, Orientalist and anthropologist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 4, 2024
The story starts sometime during the Roman Empire, when after having conquered Judea around 70 A.D., the Romans brought back Jewish slaves and spread them around their Empire.
There are traces of Jewish presence on Hungarian land (e.g. tombstones with the inscription of the Latin word “Judaea” = a Jewess) dating from second or third century A.D., long before the Magyar (Hungarian) tribes even conquered their future land in the 9th century A.D.
Under King István I, (997-1038 A.D.) and his successors, all the Magyars were converted to Christianity, often by force. No attempts were made to convert the local Jews.
During the Middle Ages, the Jews were always discriminated against and considered second class “subjects” of the King and completely dependent upon his whims.
Jews were despised. Patai relates the countless original documents he found in Hungarian archives of the Middle Ages where Jewish individuals were referred to as that “perfidious” Jew so and so.
They had to wear a distinctive garb, such as a tall conical hat, a red cape and a large yellow badge, meant in part to humiliate, and in part to make them recognizable from afar.
They were only allowed to work in finance and as moneylenders, which made them very useful to the constantly warring monarchs in need of funds.
They were also subject to special “toleration” taxes.
In the 14th century, Jews all over Europe were accused of having caused the “Black Death” by poisoning the wells.
In 1360, Jews were officially expelled from Hungary and they moved to nearby Austria, Bohemia and Poland.
Four years later, they were allowed to return, ostensibly because the King’s coffers were depleted.
In 1494, there was another blood libel against the Jews. A Christian child disappeared, Jews were accused having killed her for her blood, and twelve Jewish men and two Jewish women were burned at the stake.
In 1526, the Jews were expelled from Pressburg/Poszony (today Bratislava) and Sopron.
In 1526, the Ottoman Empire occupied the Eastern and Central part of Hungary, including what is today Budapest.
The Western part remained under the rule of the Hungarian kings and was called “Royal Hungary”.
Royal Hungary saw some more blood libels against the Jews, one in 1529, one in 1536 and another one in 1661.
Meanwhile in Ottoman occupied Hungary, the Jews were allowed to travel freely throughout the entire Ottoman Empire. They were allowed to trade and they prospered.
In 1686, the Habsburg kings defeated the Ottomans and reunited Hungary with the Habsburg Empire.
During the reconquest of Buda (today’s Budapest), half of the city’s Jews got massacred and the other half got taken captive by the Habsburgers.
The Muslim rule of the Ottomans in Hungary had lasted for 160 years.
A few decades after the defeat of the Ottomans, the Habsburg kings allowed the Jews to come back to Buda.
Maria Theresia ruled as the Empress of Austria and the Queen of Hungary from 1740 until 1780.
In 1746 she imposed a new toleration tax on “her” Jews.
In 1764 there was another blood libel against the Jews in Hungary.
Patai writes that in the 18th century, under influence of the Enlightenment, the condition of the Jews improved somewhat.
This fostered scholarly and entrepreneurial activity in the Jewish communities.
Maria Theresa’s heir, Joseph II, undertook a series of modernization, centralization and Germanization programs. He was considered an “enlightened absolute monarch”.
In 1783, he passed edicts which considerably improved the living conditions of the Jews in the Habsburg Empire.
E.g. he allowed Jews to settle in all the cities that had been prohibited to them before
19th Century:
Thanks to the liberalization of Hungarian society, many Jews started to acquire leading positions in the arts, literature, journalism, medicine, law, industry, trade and finance.
The liberalization of society also led to a religious schism among Hungarian Jews between those who wanted to modernize the Jewish religion, the Neologs (the equivalent of Reform Jews in the U.S.), and those who followed the guidance of the renowned Rabbi of Pressburg/Poszony (today Bratislava), Rabbi Moses Sofer-Schreiber a.k.a the Chatam Sofer (1762-1839), who declared: ”Innovation is forbidden by the Torah” and who thus remained Orthodox Jews.
The Neologs were predominant in the large cities such as Budapest and Szeget, while the majority of the Jews in the Provinces remained Orthodox.
The Orthodox community was not a monolithic group. They ranged from Orthodox to Ultra-orthodox to Hassidim, especially in Northeastern Hungary.
The large Neolog synagogue in Budapest, the Dohány Synagogue, was completed in 1859.
The 1800s were a time of increasing Hungarian patriotism, culminating in the 1848 revolution.
Hungary was at that time still under the rule of the Austrian Habsburg Empire.
Hungarian nationalism became a way to both maintain Hungary’s special status vis-à-vis Austria and to maintain supremacy over the parts of the country in which the majority was not Magyar.
The political leadership used the Hungarian language as a tool to increase Hungarian patriotism.
At that time, Hungarian was only spoken by the peasantry.
The Hungarian nobility, which comprised 5% of the population, spoke German.
This linguistic nationalism was avidly adopted by the Jewish population in Hungary.
The Rabbis preached patriotism and faithfulness to the king and the authorities.
The Jewish communities hoped that by showing their fervent patriotism they eventually would gain equal rights with the Christian Hungarians.
The 1848 Revolution:
The year 1848 saw a tide of revolutions against established authority sweep Europe and Hungary followed suit with an attempted uprising against the Austrian Habsburg overlords.
Just before the revolution, in the Diet (Parliament) assembly in Pressburg, the revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth proposed a law that would allow for the total emancipation of the Jews.
When news of the proposal leaked out, a pogrom broke out against the Jews of Pressburg.
Within a day the pogroms spread to other cities in Hungary.
The law had to be postponed, but despite the antisemitic outbursts, when time came to enlist in the revolutionary army, the Jews of Hungary participated wholeheartedly and enthusiastically.
The Jewish congregations, associations and individuals also made generous financial contributions towards the revolution.
The young emperor, Franz Joseph, applied for help from the Russian Czar. The Russian army defeated the revolutionaries in 1849.
In 1867, the Habsburgers granted Hungary complete internal independence, while foreign relations and the military remained under common control with Austria.
Emperor Franz Joseph was crowned king of Hungary.
The Habsburg Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
That same year, on November 25, 1867, the Jewish Emancipation Bill was finally passed in Hungary. It gave Hungarian Jews full citizenship and equal rights.
Antisemitism reared its ugly head again in the town of Tiszaeslar in 1882, when a fourteen-year- old Catholic girl committed suicide by throwing herself in the Tisza river.
The townspeople accused Jews of ritual murder, the police arrested a dozen of them and tortured them into confessions.
The trial, however, exposed that the accusations were totally unfounded, and the suspects were released.
After the acquittals, violence broke out against Jews in Budapest and several other cities.
Zionism:
Zionism, the idea of creating a sovereign State for Jews in Palestine (the millennia old Jewish homeland) as a solution for the age-old problem of antisemitism in Europe, started spreading among European Jews around that time.
Even though its founder, Theodor Herzl, was born and educated in Budapest, the idea did not become popular among Hungarian Jews until much later, after the Holocaust.
Hungarian Jews were extremely patriotic and felt they were 100% Magyars, but with the only difference that they had a different faith than the Christian Magyars.
The Golden Age: 1885-1918:
With the drastic improvement of the Hungarian economy, starting in 1885, antisemitism abated.
This started a “golden age” for Hungarian Jewry, which lasted until the end of WWI in 1918.
In 1895, Hungarian Jews finally achieved full equality with their Christian compatriots.
The 1895 law, called Recepció, recognized Judaism as one of the legally recognized religions of Hungary.
Hungarian Jews, mostly those belonging to the Neolog congregations in Budapest and other large cities, became successful in industry, commerce, finance, education, medicine, law, the arts, literature, sciences, politics and even athletics.
Many of those successful Jews assimilated, and even converted to Christianity and married Christians.
Patai writes:
“The late nineteenth century was the time of great transformation of Hungary as a whole from a traditional, feudal, agriculture- based economy to an urbanized, commercial-industrial economy, to which Jews contributed greatly.”
WWI (1914-1918) and the Trianon Peace Treaty:
In 1914 WWI broke out.
Austria-Hungary fought along Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (The Central Powers) against France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and later the U.S.(the Allies)
The very patriotic Jewish soldiers once again fought valiantly in the Hungarian army.
At the end, this war brought about a complete reshaping of Central Europe, with the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the emergence of nation states.
Hungary fared worst of all the Central Powers who were defeated in WWI.
93% of its armed forces were either killed or wounded and it lost 71% of its historical territory.
As a result of the redrawing of the borders by the Allied Forces in the Trianon Peace Treaty, 30% of all Magyars came under Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Yugoslavian and Austrian rule, including 48% of Magyar Jews.
Communist Coup 1919 and the White Terror:
In 1919, there was a Communist coup in Hungary, led by the Communist party. It declared the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. The Hungarian national army, led by Mikós Horthy, defeated the Communists after only four months.
Horthy became Regent of Hungary until the October 1944 putsch by Szálasi.
Because some Jews had participated in the short-lived Communist revolution, “the Jews” became associated with Communism and this increased the antisemitic activities in Hungary even more.
The Communist coup was followed by the “White Terror”. In the eyes of the army, Jews were identified with Communists and cleansing the country of Communists meant liquidating the Jews.
Army detachments swept through towns murdering or “executing” Jews. The anti-Jewish attacks continued until June 1921, when the leadership of the Catholic Church spoke out against it.
In 1920, the Hungarian Parliament passed the first antisemitic law since the emancipation of the Jews only a few generations ago.
That law limited Jewish admission to university to only 5% of the Jewish population. (The Numerus Clausus Law.)
The passing of that law encouraged antisemitic attacks through 1921, 1922 and 1923.
As a result, a large number of Hungarian Jews emigrated to Palestine and Western European countries.
The interwar years saw a further increase in antisemitism.
Jews were accused of responsibility for the unjust peace treaty of 1918 (just like in Germany) and for the 1919 “Judeo Bolshevism.”
Jews were accused of exploitation of the country, both as “Capitalists” and as “Bolsheviks”.
In 1927, brutal pogroms broke out against Jewish students in Budapest and against Jews in Transylvania, Rumania.
WWII and the Holocaust:
In 1933 Hitler rose to power in Germany.
As a consequence, fascist parties in Hungary gained strength.
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria.
In 1938, the Hungarian Parliament passed two Jewish Laws, severely limiting Jews from participating in the economy and acquiring property.
On November 20, 1940, Hungary joined the tripartite pact agreed to by Germany, Italy and Japan.
On August 2, 1941, the Third Jewish Law was promulgated in Hungary.
It forbade intermarriage or extra marital relations among Jews and non-Jews, to “protect the race”.
By the summer 1942, some 50,000 Jewish men were drafted in the non-combatant and unarmed labor battalions of the Hungarian army.
They worked in road repairs, railroad building, trench digging, fortification building and clearing of mines.
They were forced to do this in inhumane conditions and were treated cruelly by their commanders.
In the winter of 1942-1943 some 44,000 Jewish labor service men perished on the Eastern front.
Many died from typhus or other diseases, many were shot by their Hungarian commanders and many more died when blown up while clearing mines. Some were taken prisoners by the Red Army and disappeared in Russian POW camps.
Only 7,000 returned to Hungary.
By January 1944, Hungary knew they were losing the war and the Hungarian government was looking for ways to ally themselves with the Allied Forces.
The Germans got wind of this and occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944.
A new, pro German government was formed.
Adolf Eichmann, head of section in the German Reich Head Security Office, was sent to Hungary to implement the “Final Solution” of the Jews.
Between March 29 and mid-April 1944, the Hungarian Council of Ministers issued a series of anti-Jewish decrees, ordering them to wear a yellow star and expropriating them from all their possessions.
Meanwhile a plan was hatched between the German army, Eichmann and the Hungarian Gendarmerie for the concentration of all Jews in ghettos and their removal by deportation.
A highly confidential order was issued to all the Hungarian prefects, mayors, gendarmerie commanders and other officials, informing them that the country had decided to clean the country of Jews within a short amount of time.
Starting on April 13, 1944, Jews from the provinces were evacuated with great brutality by the Hungarian police and gendarmerie and concentrated in ghettos all over the country.
On May 15, 1944, the deportations from the ghettos to Auschwitz, Poland, had started.
Within eight weeks, a total of 458,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces were sent to their death.
On July 2, pleas and threats from the Allied Forces, coupled with military successes of the Allies on both the Eastern and Western fronts and the heavy allied raids of Budapest, induced Horthy to order to stop the preparations for the deportation of Budapest Jews.
Horthy prepared an armistice agreement with Russia, but on October 15,1944, the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross party made a putsch and their leader, Szálazi, became Prime Minister.
In the few months that remained before the total occupation of Budapest by the Red Army in January 1945, the Arrow Cross murdered as many Jews as they could.
On the night of October 15, Arrow Cross groups slaughtered several hundred Jews who were concentrated in the ghetto houses of Budapest.
Many were herded onto the Danube bridges and shot into the river.
Similar slaughters took place in the countryside as well.
While the Red Army started the siege of Budapest, the Arrow Cross intensified the looting and killing of Jews, mostly women and the elderly.
In the last two months before the Russian occupation of Budapest, the Arrow Cross shot some 15,000 Jews into the icy waters of the Danube or in the streets of the city.
In total, about 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
It is estimated that about 116,000 of Hungarian Jews survived the Holocaust, the great majority in Budapest.
Patai writes that the rulers of Hungary were as much responsible for the Hungarian Jewish genocide as were Eichmann and his SS.
The Hungarian army, gendarmerie, police and Arrow Cross members all actively participated in the murders, while the Hungarian population at large stood by in total indifference and only helped Jews in some exceptional cases.
Patai also assigns blame to the Catholic Church, which remained silent.
He also blames the Allied Forces, who were asked to bomb Auschwitz and the rail lines leading to it, but who responded that they could not spare planes for bombing “secondary targets”, while they were able to send large numbers of bombers to destroy Dresden, a target of no military value at all.
And finally, Patai berates the Jewish Hungarian leadership for their naïve belief that “it can’t happen here”.
Hungary was liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945.
By the winter of 1947-1948, the Hungarian Communists had taken over the government.
Communist Rule 1948-1989:
What followed were five years of Stalinist terror, until his death in 1953.
The internal security police, AVO, arrested, imprisoned and tortured thousands of people.
As far as the remaining Jews were concerned, their status as equal citizens was restored, but the antisemitism of the population did not just disappear.
Mere weeks after liberation, there were brutal attacks in a dozen cities on Jews who had survived and there were anti-Jewish statements by political leaders.
In several places, the blood libel was resuscitated.
The Hungarians who had stolen the deported Jews’ property refused to give it back.
During the years 1945-1957, almost 28,000 Hungarian Jews emigrated to Israel and another 28,000 to Western Europe and the U.S. In total, 25% of the remaining Hungarian Jews emigrated.
From the Communist takeover of Hungary until 1958, the authorities forbade the mentioning of the genocide.
The official line was that what had happened before the Russian liberation of Hungary was that Fascists had persecuted anti-fascists.
No mention of Jews was allowed.
The Holocaust was in effect erased in Communist Hungary (as in all other Soviet-controlled countries).
At the same time, an anti-Zionist campaign was launched, not only in Hungary but in all the countries in the Soviet orbit.
A new generation of Hungarian Jews grew up without knowing anything about their Jewish past.
All traces of Jewish presence in Hungary’s history were erased.
In October 1956, there was a popular uprising against the Communist regime.
200,000 Hungarians, including 20,000 Jews, took advantage of the confusion and mayhem to flee the country.
On November 4, 1956, the Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed the revolution.
In 1989, the Communist regime in Hungary came to an end.
Since then, there has been a small Jewish cultural revival in Budapest.
There are traces of Jewish presence on Hungarian land (e.g. tombstones with the inscription of the Latin word “Judaea” = a Jewess) dating from second or third century A.D., long before the Magyar (Hungarian) tribes even conquered their future land in the 9th century A.D.
Under King István I, (997-1038 A.D.) and his successors, all the Magyars were converted to Christianity, often by force. No attempts were made to convert the local Jews.
During the Middle Ages, the Jews were always discriminated against and considered second class “subjects” of the King and completely dependent upon his whims.
Jews were despised. Patai relates the countless original documents he found in Hungarian archives of the Middle Ages where Jewish individuals were referred to as that “perfidious” Jew so and so.
They had to wear a distinctive garb, such as a tall conical hat, a red cape and a large yellow badge, meant in part to humiliate, and in part to make them recognizable from afar.
They were only allowed to work in finance and as moneylenders, which made them very useful to the constantly warring monarchs in need of funds.
They were also subject to special “toleration” taxes.
In the 14th century, Jews all over Europe were accused of having caused the “Black Death” by poisoning the wells.
In 1360, Jews were officially expelled from Hungary and they moved to nearby Austria, Bohemia and Poland.
Four years later, they were allowed to return, ostensibly because the King’s coffers were depleted.
In 1494, there was another blood libel against the Jews. A Christian child disappeared, Jews were accused having killed her for her blood, and twelve Jewish men and two Jewish women were burned at the stake.
In 1526, the Jews were expelled from Pressburg/Poszony (today Bratislava) and Sopron.
In 1526, the Ottoman Empire occupied the Eastern and Central part of Hungary, including what is today Budapest.
The Western part remained under the rule of the Hungarian kings and was called “Royal Hungary”.
Royal Hungary saw some more blood libels against the Jews, one in 1529, one in 1536 and another one in 1661.
Meanwhile in Ottoman occupied Hungary, the Jews were allowed to travel freely throughout the entire Ottoman Empire. They were allowed to trade and they prospered.
In 1686, the Habsburg kings defeated the Ottomans and reunited Hungary with the Habsburg Empire.
During the reconquest of Buda (today’s Budapest), half of the city’s Jews got massacred and the other half got taken captive by the Habsburgers.
The Muslim rule of the Ottomans in Hungary had lasted for 160 years.
A few decades after the defeat of the Ottomans, the Habsburg kings allowed the Jews to come back to Buda.
Maria Theresia ruled as the Empress of Austria and the Queen of Hungary from 1740 until 1780.
In 1746 she imposed a new toleration tax on “her” Jews.
In 1764 there was another blood libel against the Jews in Hungary.
Patai writes that in the 18th century, under influence of the Enlightenment, the condition of the Jews improved somewhat.
This fostered scholarly and entrepreneurial activity in the Jewish communities.
Maria Theresa’s heir, Joseph II, undertook a series of modernization, centralization and Germanization programs. He was considered an “enlightened absolute monarch”.
In 1783, he passed edicts which considerably improved the living conditions of the Jews in the Habsburg Empire.
E.g. he allowed Jews to settle in all the cities that had been prohibited to them before
19th Century:
Thanks to the liberalization of Hungarian society, many Jews started to acquire leading positions in the arts, literature, journalism, medicine, law, industry, trade and finance.
The liberalization of society also led to a religious schism among Hungarian Jews between those who wanted to modernize the Jewish religion, the Neologs (the equivalent of Reform Jews in the U.S.), and those who followed the guidance of the renowned Rabbi of Pressburg/Poszony (today Bratislava), Rabbi Moses Sofer-Schreiber a.k.a the Chatam Sofer (1762-1839), who declared: ”Innovation is forbidden by the Torah” and who thus remained Orthodox Jews.
The Neologs were predominant in the large cities such as Budapest and Szeget, while the majority of the Jews in the Provinces remained Orthodox.
The Orthodox community was not a monolithic group. They ranged from Orthodox to Ultra-orthodox to Hassidim, especially in Northeastern Hungary.
The large Neolog synagogue in Budapest, the Dohány Synagogue, was completed in 1859.
The 1800s were a time of increasing Hungarian patriotism, culminating in the 1848 revolution.
Hungary was at that time still under the rule of the Austrian Habsburg Empire.
Hungarian nationalism became a way to both maintain Hungary’s special status vis-à-vis Austria and to maintain supremacy over the parts of the country in which the majority was not Magyar.
The political leadership used the Hungarian language as a tool to increase Hungarian patriotism.
At that time, Hungarian was only spoken by the peasantry.
The Hungarian nobility, which comprised 5% of the population, spoke German.
This linguistic nationalism was avidly adopted by the Jewish population in Hungary.
The Rabbis preached patriotism and faithfulness to the king and the authorities.
The Jewish communities hoped that by showing their fervent patriotism they eventually would gain equal rights with the Christian Hungarians.
The 1848 Revolution:
The year 1848 saw a tide of revolutions against established authority sweep Europe and Hungary followed suit with an attempted uprising against the Austrian Habsburg overlords.
Just before the revolution, in the Diet (Parliament) assembly in Pressburg, the revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth proposed a law that would allow for the total emancipation of the Jews.
When news of the proposal leaked out, a pogrom broke out against the Jews of Pressburg.
Within a day the pogroms spread to other cities in Hungary.
The law had to be postponed, but despite the antisemitic outbursts, when time came to enlist in the revolutionary army, the Jews of Hungary participated wholeheartedly and enthusiastically.
The Jewish congregations, associations and individuals also made generous financial contributions towards the revolution.
The young emperor, Franz Joseph, applied for help from the Russian Czar. The Russian army defeated the revolutionaries in 1849.
In 1867, the Habsburgers granted Hungary complete internal independence, while foreign relations and the military remained under common control with Austria.
Emperor Franz Joseph was crowned king of Hungary.
The Habsburg Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
That same year, on November 25, 1867, the Jewish Emancipation Bill was finally passed in Hungary. It gave Hungarian Jews full citizenship and equal rights.
Antisemitism reared its ugly head again in the town of Tiszaeslar in 1882, when a fourteen-year- old Catholic girl committed suicide by throwing herself in the Tisza river.
The townspeople accused Jews of ritual murder, the police arrested a dozen of them and tortured them into confessions.
The trial, however, exposed that the accusations were totally unfounded, and the suspects were released.
After the acquittals, violence broke out against Jews in Budapest and several other cities.
Zionism:
Zionism, the idea of creating a sovereign State for Jews in Palestine (the millennia old Jewish homeland) as a solution for the age-old problem of antisemitism in Europe, started spreading among European Jews around that time.
Even though its founder, Theodor Herzl, was born and educated in Budapest, the idea did not become popular among Hungarian Jews until much later, after the Holocaust.
Hungarian Jews were extremely patriotic and felt they were 100% Magyars, but with the only difference that they had a different faith than the Christian Magyars.
The Golden Age: 1885-1918:
With the drastic improvement of the Hungarian economy, starting in 1885, antisemitism abated.
This started a “golden age” for Hungarian Jewry, which lasted until the end of WWI in 1918.
In 1895, Hungarian Jews finally achieved full equality with their Christian compatriots.
The 1895 law, called Recepció, recognized Judaism as one of the legally recognized religions of Hungary.
Hungarian Jews, mostly those belonging to the Neolog congregations in Budapest and other large cities, became successful in industry, commerce, finance, education, medicine, law, the arts, literature, sciences, politics and even athletics.
Many of those successful Jews assimilated, and even converted to Christianity and married Christians.
Patai writes:
“The late nineteenth century was the time of great transformation of Hungary as a whole from a traditional, feudal, agriculture- based economy to an urbanized, commercial-industrial economy, to which Jews contributed greatly.”
WWI (1914-1918) and the Trianon Peace Treaty:
In 1914 WWI broke out.
Austria-Hungary fought along Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (The Central Powers) against France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and later the U.S.(the Allies)
The very patriotic Jewish soldiers once again fought valiantly in the Hungarian army.
At the end, this war brought about a complete reshaping of Central Europe, with the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the emergence of nation states.
Hungary fared worst of all the Central Powers who were defeated in WWI.
93% of its armed forces were either killed or wounded and it lost 71% of its historical territory.
As a result of the redrawing of the borders by the Allied Forces in the Trianon Peace Treaty, 30% of all Magyars came under Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Yugoslavian and Austrian rule, including 48% of Magyar Jews.
Communist Coup 1919 and the White Terror:
In 1919, there was a Communist coup in Hungary, led by the Communist party. It declared the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. The Hungarian national army, led by Mikós Horthy, defeated the Communists after only four months.
Horthy became Regent of Hungary until the October 1944 putsch by Szálasi.
Because some Jews had participated in the short-lived Communist revolution, “the Jews” became associated with Communism and this increased the antisemitic activities in Hungary even more.
The Communist coup was followed by the “White Terror”. In the eyes of the army, Jews were identified with Communists and cleansing the country of Communists meant liquidating the Jews.
Army detachments swept through towns murdering or “executing” Jews. The anti-Jewish attacks continued until June 1921, when the leadership of the Catholic Church spoke out against it.
In 1920, the Hungarian Parliament passed the first antisemitic law since the emancipation of the Jews only a few generations ago.
That law limited Jewish admission to university to only 5% of the Jewish population. (The Numerus Clausus Law.)
The passing of that law encouraged antisemitic attacks through 1921, 1922 and 1923.
As a result, a large number of Hungarian Jews emigrated to Palestine and Western European countries.
The interwar years saw a further increase in antisemitism.
Jews were accused of responsibility for the unjust peace treaty of 1918 (just like in Germany) and for the 1919 “Judeo Bolshevism.”
Jews were accused of exploitation of the country, both as “Capitalists” and as “Bolsheviks”.
In 1927, brutal pogroms broke out against Jewish students in Budapest and against Jews in Transylvania, Rumania.
WWII and the Holocaust:
In 1933 Hitler rose to power in Germany.
As a consequence, fascist parties in Hungary gained strength.
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria.
In 1938, the Hungarian Parliament passed two Jewish Laws, severely limiting Jews from participating in the economy and acquiring property.
On November 20, 1940, Hungary joined the tripartite pact agreed to by Germany, Italy and Japan.
On August 2, 1941, the Third Jewish Law was promulgated in Hungary.
It forbade intermarriage or extra marital relations among Jews and non-Jews, to “protect the race”.
By the summer 1942, some 50,000 Jewish men were drafted in the non-combatant and unarmed labor battalions of the Hungarian army.
They worked in road repairs, railroad building, trench digging, fortification building and clearing of mines.
They were forced to do this in inhumane conditions and were treated cruelly by their commanders.
In the winter of 1942-1943 some 44,000 Jewish labor service men perished on the Eastern front.
Many died from typhus or other diseases, many were shot by their Hungarian commanders and many more died when blown up while clearing mines. Some were taken prisoners by the Red Army and disappeared in Russian POW camps.
Only 7,000 returned to Hungary.
By January 1944, Hungary knew they were losing the war and the Hungarian government was looking for ways to ally themselves with the Allied Forces.
The Germans got wind of this and occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944.
A new, pro German government was formed.
Adolf Eichmann, head of section in the German Reich Head Security Office, was sent to Hungary to implement the “Final Solution” of the Jews.
Between March 29 and mid-April 1944, the Hungarian Council of Ministers issued a series of anti-Jewish decrees, ordering them to wear a yellow star and expropriating them from all their possessions.
Meanwhile a plan was hatched between the German army, Eichmann and the Hungarian Gendarmerie for the concentration of all Jews in ghettos and their removal by deportation.
A highly confidential order was issued to all the Hungarian prefects, mayors, gendarmerie commanders and other officials, informing them that the country had decided to clean the country of Jews within a short amount of time.
Starting on April 13, 1944, Jews from the provinces were evacuated with great brutality by the Hungarian police and gendarmerie and concentrated in ghettos all over the country.
On May 15, 1944, the deportations from the ghettos to Auschwitz, Poland, had started.
Within eight weeks, a total of 458,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces were sent to their death.
On July 2, pleas and threats from the Allied Forces, coupled with military successes of the Allies on both the Eastern and Western fronts and the heavy allied raids of Budapest, induced Horthy to order to stop the preparations for the deportation of Budapest Jews.
Horthy prepared an armistice agreement with Russia, but on October 15,1944, the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross party made a putsch and their leader, Szálazi, became Prime Minister.
In the few months that remained before the total occupation of Budapest by the Red Army in January 1945, the Arrow Cross murdered as many Jews as they could.
On the night of October 15, Arrow Cross groups slaughtered several hundred Jews who were concentrated in the ghetto houses of Budapest.
Many were herded onto the Danube bridges and shot into the river.
Similar slaughters took place in the countryside as well.
While the Red Army started the siege of Budapest, the Arrow Cross intensified the looting and killing of Jews, mostly women and the elderly.
In the last two months before the Russian occupation of Budapest, the Arrow Cross shot some 15,000 Jews into the icy waters of the Danube or in the streets of the city.
In total, about 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
It is estimated that about 116,000 of Hungarian Jews survived the Holocaust, the great majority in Budapest.
Patai writes that the rulers of Hungary were as much responsible for the Hungarian Jewish genocide as were Eichmann and his SS.
The Hungarian army, gendarmerie, police and Arrow Cross members all actively participated in the murders, while the Hungarian population at large stood by in total indifference and only helped Jews in some exceptional cases.
Patai also assigns blame to the Catholic Church, which remained silent.
He also blames the Allied Forces, who were asked to bomb Auschwitz and the rail lines leading to it, but who responded that they could not spare planes for bombing “secondary targets”, while they were able to send large numbers of bombers to destroy Dresden, a target of no military value at all.
And finally, Patai berates the Jewish Hungarian leadership for their naïve belief that “it can’t happen here”.
Hungary was liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945.
By the winter of 1947-1948, the Hungarian Communists had taken over the government.
Communist Rule 1948-1989:
What followed were five years of Stalinist terror, until his death in 1953.
The internal security police, AVO, arrested, imprisoned and tortured thousands of people.
As far as the remaining Jews were concerned, their status as equal citizens was restored, but the antisemitism of the population did not just disappear.
Mere weeks after liberation, there were brutal attacks in a dozen cities on Jews who had survived and there were anti-Jewish statements by political leaders.
In several places, the blood libel was resuscitated.
The Hungarians who had stolen the deported Jews’ property refused to give it back.
During the years 1945-1957, almost 28,000 Hungarian Jews emigrated to Israel and another 28,000 to Western Europe and the U.S. In total, 25% of the remaining Hungarian Jews emigrated.
From the Communist takeover of Hungary until 1958, the authorities forbade the mentioning of the genocide.
The official line was that what had happened before the Russian liberation of Hungary was that Fascists had persecuted anti-fascists.
No mention of Jews was allowed.
The Holocaust was in effect erased in Communist Hungary (as in all other Soviet-controlled countries).
At the same time, an anti-Zionist campaign was launched, not only in Hungary but in all the countries in the Soviet orbit.
A new generation of Hungarian Jews grew up without knowing anything about their Jewish past.
All traces of Jewish presence in Hungary’s history were erased.
In October 1956, there was a popular uprising against the Communist regime.
200,000 Hungarians, including 20,000 Jews, took advantage of the confusion and mayhem to flee the country.
On November 4, 1956, the Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed the revolution.
In 1989, the Communist regime in Hungary came to an end.
Since then, there has been a small Jewish cultural revival in Budapest.
April 28, 2022
An authority - perhaps THE authoritative work - on Jewish Hungary gives a complete account of the Jews living in Hungary from the earliest times.
Of particular interest to me was the late nineteenth century period where my ancestors were involved in the grain trade and lived what I imagine was a very comfortable middle-class life. But I was also interested in finding out more about how long the Jewish community had existed in Buda and Pest. It seems that after 1683 the Habsburgs chased them out but after 1783 they were allowed to settle in the cities again. So it’s possible that Armin Basch (born 1811) and perhaps even his father were born in Budapest. Similarly it is possible that Wolf Mendelbaum - my 5xgreat grandfather, mentioned as father of the bride on Josef Schlesinger and Caroline’s wedding certificate 1832 - was born in Buda.
Of particular interest to me was the late nineteenth century period where my ancestors were involved in the grain trade and lived what I imagine was a very comfortable middle-class life. But I was also interested in finding out more about how long the Jewish community had existed in Buda and Pest. It seems that after 1683 the Habsburgs chased them out but after 1783 they were allowed to settle in the cities again. So it’s possible that Armin Basch (born 1811) and perhaps even his father were born in Budapest. Similarly it is possible that Wolf Mendelbaum - my 5xgreat grandfather, mentioned as father of the bride on Josef Schlesinger and Caroline’s wedding certificate 1832 - was born in Buda.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews