BETWEEN ASSIMILATION AND CATASTROPHE HUNGARIAN JEWISH INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSES IN THE SHADOW OF NAZISM

Transcription

1 BETWEEN ASSIMILATION AND CATASTROPHE HUNGARIAN JEWISH INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSES IN THE SHADOW OF NAZISM Ferenc Laczó A DISSERTATION in History Presented to the Faculties of the Central European University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Budapest, Hungary 2010 Supervisor of Dissertation

2 COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright of this text rests exclusively with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or in part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged at the Library of the Central European University. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must be part of any such copies made. Further copies may not be made without the written permission of the Author. I hereby declare that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institution and no materials previously written or published by any other person unless otherwise noted.

3 Abstract The dissertation is based on detailed empirical coverage of three publications, the IMIT yearbooks, the journal Libanon and the Ararát yearbooks that provide a representative sample of Hungarian Jewish scholarly and intellectual discourses in the second half of the Horthy era until right before the Hungarian Holocaust of In the course of the introduction, besides clarifying the subject, aim and scope of the work, a brief overview of modern Hungarian Jewish history is provided and the challenge of writing Hungarian Jewish intellectual history is explained and contextualized. Next to discussing the general characteristics of these three publications and providing overviews of their main contents, the six empirical chapters offer thematic analyses of Hungarian Jewish identity options, the ways internal and external relations were conceived, of alternative models of Jewish culture and assertions of defining values, of political-ideological platforms as well as of various stances on historicity and formulations of historical narratives. These chapters in turn clarify the differences between seven identity options (patriotic, nationalistic as well as five takes on dual identity labeled combined, mixed, primarily Jewish, formally dual and internally conflictual), analyze declarations of five different values as fundamental and fundamentally Jewish (ethics, truth, intellect and culture, life, adaptation and loyalty) and tackle five interpretations of the relevance of historicity stretching from stressing the completely ahistorical to emphasizing the thoroughly historical character of Jewry. Further chapters compare assimilationist - integrationist, interculturalist, particularist, universalist - essentialist and völkisch (népi) models of Jewish culture as well as semiliberal, conservative, corporatist, Zionist and religious revivalist political platforms. The dissertation also explores how authors included in this representative sample of the Jewish Hungarian Jewish scholarly elite interpreted the historical situation in the increasingly desperate years under scrutiny by studying the way historical consciousness worked, how the crisis of Jewry was narrated and what historical analogies were used until the unprecedented nature of the ongoing Judeocide was realized. The dissertation also aims to show the ways in which these discourses transformed in the dramatic years under consideration where the primary focus is on attempts to formulate more inclusive Jewish platforms.

4 Acknowledgements This dissertation grew out of my longstanding interest in the history of modern Hungarian and Hungarian Jewish intellectual discourses. This interest was gradually triggered by the desire to understand contemporary scholarly and public exchanges and controversies. Admittedly, they often seem politically charged and are hindered by various forms of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Experiencing such problems and often also a lack of empathy made me want to study divergent historical narratives, different communities of memory, various cultural conceptions and political platforms, to try to compare and, ultimately, to connect them to each other. I ended up focusing on what I see as a relevant historical segment of these more broadly relevant public issues. Even though completing the empirical research on the scale needed for a dissertation requires patience and perseverance through many mostly lonely hours, any dissertation is the result of many influences and much benevolence. Mine is certainly no exception. Therefore, I would like to thank, above all, my supervisor Viktor Karády, who has remained confident in me even when my work was progressing slower than expected and even when I had to seriously rethink my aims and sharpen my focus. He also kindly asked me to participate in an international, comparative research project which enabled me to let my thinking as well as this dissertation mature over the course of some additional years. I am very grateful to Balázs Trencsényi, who has served as a source of inspiration for many young intellectual historians in East Central Europe with his dedication and broad horizons. At the Department of History of the Central European University, I would like to thank László Kontler and Matthias Riedl who have helped me with recommendation letters, besides much else, and Karl Hall and Susan Zimmermann who have given me sound and useful advice. I have similarly benefited from the helpfulness of librarians, mostly those working at the National Széchényi Library and at the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library, both in Budapest. Péter Bencsik (at Aetas), Gábor Egry (at Múltunk) and Attila Novák (at Szombat) have generously agreed to edit and publish my articles in Hungarian that drew on elements of this dissertation project and thus helped me clarify my ideas and improve my writing. I could always count on the friendly support of many of my fellow doctoral student and I would like to particularly single out (in strict alphabetical order and with the danger in mind of

5 forgetting some similarly important colleagues of mine) Maria Falina, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Bogdan Iacob, Gábor Kármán, Zsófia Lóránd, Vladimir Petrović, Katalin Stráner, Márton Zászkaliczky and Marko Zubak. Among my Hungarian peers, I would also like to thank Máté Rigó and Tamás Scheibner in particular (who both studied at CEU at some point). I am extremely grateful to my parents, grandmother, my siblings and Vera for putting up with me all these years and being patient enough to see this project grow into its final shape. It is to Vera in particular that I would like to dedicate this work.

6 Table of Contents Introduction... 1 I. The Subject, Aims and Scope of the Dissertation... 1 II. The Challenge of Jewish Intellectual History III. Modern Hungarian Jewish History and the Jewish Question Chapter II The IMIT Yearbooks ( ). Characteristics, Aims, Story I. The Basic Characteristics of IMIT II. Aims of the Analysis III. IMIT in the Horthy Era IV. The Aims of the Yearbooks in the Mirror of Self-Interpretations Chapter III Discourses of Collective Identity I. Hungarian Jewish Identity Options II. Jewish Traditions and the Scholarly Position Chapter IV On the Historicity, Values and Roles of Jewry I. Jewish Values and the Question of Historicity II. Jewish Contributions Chapter V A History of the Present I. Various Descriptions of the Age II. Discourse on Zionism and Palestine III. Germany and Nazism in IMIT Chapter VI Models of Culture and Historical Changes. The Hungarian Jewish Journal Libanon ( ) I. Introduction II. Models of Jewish Culture III. The Reflection of Historical Changes IV. Conclusion Chapter VII Political Platforms and Narratives of Crisis. The Ararát Yearbooks ( )

7 I. Introduction II. A Contested Plan III. Assessments of the Current Situation and Plans for the Future IV. Fragments of Historical Narratives Conclusions Bibliography

8 Introduction I. The Subject, Aims and Scope of the Dissertation This dissertation offers a series of linked case studies on the discourse of a broad segment of the Hungarian Jewish intellectual elite who might be called Jewish Hungarian Jewish. 1 Each of the three case studies aims to explore a decisively important historical period, the time between assimilation and catastrophe, namely the 1930s and early 1940s. More concretely, the dissertation features detailed and comprehensive coverage of three centrally important and explicitly Jewish printed organs, namely the yearbooks of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (Israelite Hungarian Literary Society, or IMIT) that released its new series of fifteen extensive volumes between 1929 and 1943 (Chapter II to V), the journal Libanon that appeared altogether thirty-four times between 1936 and 1943 (Chapter VI) and the Ararát yearbooks, six of which were published from the year the Second World War broke out until the catastrophic year of 1944 when the large majority of Hungarian Jews were killed (Chapter VII). Drawing on close reading of these rich and diverse, though still relatively little known and hardly studied documents of Hungarian Jewish intellectual activities, this dissertation sets two main goals: on the descriptive level, it ambitions to provide a relatively detailed and balanced summary presentation of their main contents. On the analytical level, it 1 Here I am adopting the useful, if at first hearing perhaps somewhat awkward sounding qualification of Stanisław Krajewski who called himself a Polish Polish Jew to stress that he was a Polish Jew who was also a Pole and to thereby distinguish himself from Jewish Polish Jews. See Stanisław Krajewski, Poland and the Jews. Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2005). Thus, the expression Jewish Hungarian Jews is meant to imply that they were both Hungarian Jews and Jewish and thus different from Hungarian Hungarian Jews (who might also be labeled Hungarian Jewish Hungarians). While the expression is somewhat cumbersome, I consider its analytical import to compensate for this. 1

9 offers a critical discussion of a number of important questions in modern Hungarian Jewish history as they were reflected in these three extended published sources. The research topics that shall be addressed in the course of later chapters include, first, the specificities and evolution of Hungarian Jewish collective identity discourses with a focus on various formulations of dual (Jewish and Hungarian) identity. Second, various interpretations of internal differences and external relations of Jewry and the ways they were increasingly transformed in the years of legal discrimination in Hungary (that started to take more and more severe forms after 1938) are explored. Third, competing conceptions or models of Jewish culture and claims made about Jewish specificities are under scrutiny. Fourth, the spectrum of Hungarian Jewish political ideas, particularly in the age of exclusion is mapped and, last but not least, alternative historical narratives almost all of which aimed to account for the crisis of the Jewish community as whole, or at least certain aspects of it are interpreted. These five topics, which could be broadly labeled identity, relations, culture, politics and history, are all highly complex and deserve separate analyses in their own right. In this thesis, I will restrict myself to a thorough analysis of the ways in which they were dealt in these three primary sources, providing, where necessary, references to broader discussions. In other words, the chief goal of this study is to discuss these complex and rather controversial questions in a historically sensitive and synchronically pluralistic manner. In practice, this means that a picture of rich inner Jewish pluralism shall be painted (through exploring multiple identity options, various models of culture, differing narratives of crisis, etc.) and important discursive changes in the relatively short, but dramatic period of time under analysis will be regularly noted and illustrated on concrete examples. Thus, a 2

10 dynamic and colorful presentation of Hungarian Jewish intellectual discourses just prior to the Shoah ought to emerge that avoids all forms of essentialization and the potential trap of too strong a focus on single discursive traditions (whether or not such focuses directly imply identity choices, political agendas, cultural preferences or conceptions of history on the part of their authors). Thus, instead of offering a seemingly all-encompassing, but necessarily selective explanation of central positions and main trends, my aim is rather to approach Jewish authors hermeneutically (or more simply: emphatically, but not uncritically) and to identify implicit disagreements and explicit debates (which, admittedly, took place much more rarely) between them. Having noted the centrality of diachronic shifts and synchronic diversity to my study, I ought to explain what this study is not in order to better clarify my specific focus. I neither study the Hungarian Holocaust of 1944, nor what led to it, nor do I directly address the looming question of Hungarian anti-semitism, both of which have generated a pool of sound publications by now. 2 Nor do I venture into literary history where others have already completed some significant works: the analysis of fiction is absent from the pages of this dissertation. 3 Perhaps most importantly, I do not analyze so called non-jewish Jews, i.e. a 2 Here the works of Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide The Holocaust in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), Szabolcs Szita, A zsidók üldöztetése Budapesten, (Budapest: Magyar Auschwitz Alapítvány, 1994), László Karsai, Holokauszt (Budapest: Pannonica, 2001), Judit Molnár, Zsidósors 1944-ben az V. (szegedi) csendőrkerületben (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1995) and Götz Aly and Christian Gerlach, Das letzte Kapitel. Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden (Stuttgart: DVA, 2004) on the one hand and (particularly for the postwar period) those of András Kovács, A másik szeme. Zsidók és antiszemiták a háború utáni Magyarországon (Budapest: Gondolat, 2008) and Éva Standeisky, Antiszemitizmusok (Budapest: Argumentum, 2007) on the other need to be mentioned. The works by János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon. Politikai eszmetörténet (Budapest: Osiris, 2001) and Paul A. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary. Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006) have broader focuses, but are relevant in this context too. The extended Chapter VIII of Gyurgyák s work on Hungarian radical right-wing and anti-semitic directions and movements is the most detailed empirical study of these phenomena to date. 3 Studies of East Central European intellectuals often focus on literary authors. They have undoubtedly played major roles in national movements and could possess a level of symbolic-political capital rarely matched elsewhere. The study of literary cults has been flourishing in Hungary for some decades now with authors such 3

11 substantial part of Jewish intellectuals, 4 some of whom were conservative and many of whom ought to be qualified as liberals and men of the left, but all of whom were completely unaffiliated with or simply not participating in Jewish Hungarian Jewish intellectual initiatives. 5 They are not subjects of this dissertation, even though admittedly several such authors happen to be much better known and are more often included in mainstream canons of Hungarian intellectual history than the ones who shall be in the focus of the explorations below. 6 Much rather than renegotiating some of the details of such canons, my aims is to enrich this canon and therefore I want to address a still little known area: the intellectual discourse of the increasingly legally discriminated and persecuted Jewish Hungarian Jewish scholars and opinion makers, their ideas and plans, hopes and concerns. Some of them might as Péter Dávidházi, István Margócsy and József Takáts publishing important works in this vein. See, József Takáts (ed.), Az irodalmi kultuszkutatás kézikönyve (Budapest: Kijárat, 2003). On specifically Hungarian Jewish topics, the focus of Tamás Ungvári s monograph on the Jewish question is almost entirely a literary one (at the expense of neglecting the political and social historical aspects of the topic). The question of Hungarian Jewish literature and literary form are in the center of the recent dissertation (about to be published in Hungarian and French) of Clara Royer. On the complex question of Hungarian-Jewish literature, there is also an older, but still relevant collection: Petra Török (ed.), A határ és a határolt. Töprengések a magyar-zsidó irodalom létformáiról (Budapest: Országos Rabbiképző Intézet Yahalom Zsidó Művelődéstörténeti Kutatócsoportja, 1997). I ought to add that many practitioners of intellectual history in Hungary happen to be literary scholars. 4 When most broadly defined, the category could include converts and even some individuals whose parents or grandparents converted and raised them as Christians, but who were nevertheless often identified as somehow still or even as essentially Jewish. By recognizing this fact, one does not necessary consider it acceptable. In this instance, the descriptive and the normative levels ought to be strictly separated. 5 Thus, these initiatives arguably created and maintained a subculture, not only within Hungarian culture or within Jewry at large, but also (more narrowly) within Hungarian Jewry. 6 Such intellectuals have received ample attention and some excellent treatments too. See György Poszler, Szerb Antal (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1973), Győző Ferencz, Radnóti Miklós élete és költészete: kritikai életrajz (Budapest: Osiris, 2005), and Krisztina Mikó, Halász Gábor (Budapest: Balassi, 1995). There are those who were born Christian, but in whose case the question of their Jewishness is nevertheless a significant public issue, see in particular the recent, but diametrically opposed interpretations of Oszkár Jászi. György Litván, Jászi Oszkár (Budapest: Osiris, 2003). János Pelle, Jászi Oszkár: Életrajzi, eszme és kortörténeti esszé (Budapest: XX. Század Intézet, 2001). Pelle considers the personal Jewish question of Jászi and its public version in his times to have played a major role, while Litván believed the matter hardly merited much attention. On György (or Georg) Lukács alone there are many books even in international languages. See the brief but informative work George Lichtheim, Lukács (London: Fontana / Collins, 1970). On the Hungarian (mostly Jewish) intellectual emigration, see Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought. Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991). See also the new work, dealing more with natural scientists, of Tibor Frank, Double Exile. The Migration of Hungarian-Jewish Professionals Through Germany to the United States (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). For some ideas on recent negotiations of Hungarian intellectual canons in the vein of intellectual history, please see my next subchapter. 4

12 have feared the worst, but the Hungarian Jewish catastrophe of 1944 was certainly not preordained and, what is more, it seemed like it might be avoided until the last stages of the Second World War. 7 There is no doubt that these horrible experiences left deep scars on all of them. It ought to be noted that many of the contributors to these three publications survived the war years and some of them continued to live for decades afterwards even if they could not (or, as in some cases and at least for a while, did not want to) address Jewish themes in communist-ruled Hungary. 8 In spite of significant improvements in the conditions of studying Jewish issues and a good deal of respectable scholarly accomplishments since 1989, the lack of strong institutional backing to study modern Hungarian Jewish history and rather scarce opportunities to receive funding for such research projects locally have remained to constitute serious obstacles. Consequently, in-depth studies on several crucial aspects of Hungarian Jewish thought are still missing and the memory of Jewish Hungarian Jewish scholars arguably has continued to be marginalized in particular. This study hopes to revive the memory of several relatively little remembered authors and thereby fill an obvious and major gap in Hungarian Jewish scholarship through a empirically rich and analytically sound discussion of how committed Jewish intellectuals wrote and reacted to changes in Hungary when they had to act in the shadow of Nazism and were in word and deed increasingly qualified as enemies of their own state? In short, the dissertation aims to be the study of the 7 As shall be shown, both the ongoing Holocaust and the simultaneous hoping for the survival of Hungarian Jewry left unmistakable discursive traces in 1942 and The latter arguably primarily through a new wave of emphasizing Hungarian national attachments and the positive exceptionality of Hungary in an anti-semitic continent. 8 To mention only some of these authors whose names and writings will often reappear in the course of this dissertation: József Turóczi-Trostler passed away in 1962 at 74, Fülöp Grünwald in 1964 at 77, Imre Benoschofsky in 1970 at 67, Jenő Zsoldos in 1972 at 76, Imre Keszi in 1974 at 64, Aladár Komlós in 1980 at 88, István Hahn in 1984 at 71, while Sándor Scheiber died in 1985 at 72. Their postwar stories (when explicitly Jewish subjects were largely tabooed in the public realm) remain to be written. 5

13 1930s and early 1940s from the Jewish intellectual point of view. What matters, above all, from this perspective is how leading Jewish Hungarian Jewish intellectuals interpreted their historical, political and cultural situation that I broadly and rather unassumingly decided to call, aiming to avoid the projection of any historical teleology, between assimilation and catastrophe. The relevant questions in this vein are what did they define as their most urgent scholarly and cultural tasks, how did they perceive the drastic ongoing changes and in what ways did they aim to react to them (or remain as uninfluenced by them as possible)? The decade and a half under analysis starts at the beginning of the Great Depression with the launching of the new IMIT yearbook series right upon the refoundation of the Society. As is well known, this short period of time brought many unexpected and increasingly severe negative developments for Hungarian Jews which ultimately led to an unprecedented catastrophe. At the same time, Hungarian Jewish printed culture thrived in the 1930s, culminating in dozens of simultaneous initiatives in the mid-1930s. In broad terms, this flourishing was due to two major factors: to the (largely though not exclusively externally imposed) crisis of Hungarian national identification after 1919 and to the rich plurality and diversity of perspectives internal to Jewry. Arguably, the ideology of Jewish assimilationism, much more powerfully expressed towards the Hungarian nation than towards surrounding nations of the East Central Europe as well as some spectacular accomplishments in the frame of the social contract of assimilation legitimated and fortified the dominance of an increasingly conservative and growingly anachronistic form of liberalism. On the other hand, its prevalence in the political, scholarly and artistic realms 6

14 alienated large segments of the younger generations from the Jewish community as such. 9 This mainstream Jewish and thus, in some ways highly specific form of Hungarian nationalism was also responsible for the high levels of quiescence. Their Jewishness might have been an important frame of activities for Jews in Hungary in terms of group belonging (i.e. national acculturation might have taken place in primarily Jewish settings) but contentwise it often seemed to offer comparatively little. 10 As many have already remarked, in the Dualist times, compared to the size of the (internally split) community, the level of specifically Jewish cultural production of Hungarian Jews was relatively small. The fundamental challenges and often drastic changes for the worse that the inter-war period brought in Hungary, alongside reception of new trends from outside the country led to much more intense forms of soul searching. There was a new and relatively open negotiation among Hungarian Jews splintered into various subcultures. The discourse of Jewish Hungarian Jewish intellectual elite also revealed many signs of marked inner differences. Established organs presented alternative perspectives and competed to (re)define the mainstream, some organs were re-launched and many newly established at this time. In 9 The high level of Hungarian Jewish assimilationism is a prominent theme in the recently released YIVO Encyclopedia which also offers contrasts and comparisons with other eastern European countries. See Gershon David Hundert (chief ed.), The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008). 10 The level of Jewish cultural activities in Hungary left much to be desired, also (or rather especially) in the eyes of those actively involved in it. In terms of journals, Ben Chananja, edited by Leopold Lőw, written in German and published in Szeged between 1858 and 1867 was the first of its kind, but although it rather ironically, occasionally propagated Hungarianization at times, it was not published in Hungarian. See the study of Viktória Bányai, A magyar zsidó sajtó előzményei és kezdetei. At Last accesss: Jan 19, After the compromise, Lőw s pathbreaking initiative was not followed by other ventures until the early 1880s or, more precisely, after the beginning of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel trial. This was the time when Egyenlőség and Magyar Zsidó Szemle emerged. As already noted, IMIT was established in the 1890s, while the other two organs under consideration here only appeared in the second half of the 1930s. Another notable publication, Múlt és Jövő began appearing in the time of the Dual Monarchy (it was first released as an almanac in 1911) and continued until the years of the Second World War (in spite of József Patai s emigration to the Yishuv). Overall, however, the Dual Monarchy saw relatively few Hungarian Jewish initiatives: Sándor Scheiber lists fifty-three Hungarian Jewish periodicals being released in 1936 (not all of which were in Hungarian), compared to the mere twelve thirty years earlier. See Sándor Scheiber, Magyar zsidó hírlapok és folyóiratok bibliográfiája (Budapest: MTA Judaisztikai Kutatócsoport, 1993),

15 short, in the most severe moment of crisis, various Hungarian Jewish conceptions were contesting and renegotiating some of the most basic contours of Jewish life. It should be emphasized here that Hungarian Jewish materials were released long into the war years. This phenomenon is unique in its extent and is all the more unusual when the fact that Hungary was fighting on the Axis side in the Second World War is taken into account. Since Hungarian oppression was severe but not all-encompassing even in the war years and the Hungarian Holocaust of 1944 came as the final chapter of the Judeocide, the genocide of European Jewry, Hungarian Jews could still maintain some, if only few of their recurrent publications until late 1943 or even early Another notable feature of the Hungarian Jewish intellectual elite, in the context of the international relevance of this research, is that their rather pronounced Hungarian national identification notwithstanding, they were also in some ways part of the larger German cultural sphere. 11 While certain members of this intellectual elite showed particular fondness for this cultural affiliation, a kind of bilingualism was the norm also much more widely an intriguing phenomenon which to date received very little scholarly attention. It goes without saying that such strong German connections and attachments acquired entirely new relevance and tragic coloring with the Nazi Machtergreifung of early 1933 and the ensuing persecution of German Jews. 12 Hungarian Jews were close observers of the unfolding German Jewish tragedy, who could both stand frighteningly close to the watershed events but could, though decreasingly so, pretend to live on an island of relative safety. Whether they hoped to survive the 11 An important work (of two volumes) was recently released on the history of the German Jewish press. Eleonora Lappin and Michael Nagel (eds.), Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte: Dokumente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen = The German-Jewish Press and Jewish History: Documents, Representations, Interrelations (Bremen: Edition Lumiere, 2008). 12 On the German Jewish press under the Nazis, Katrin Diehl has published an important scholarly monograph, see Katrin Diehl, Die jüdische Presse im Dritten Reich. Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Fremdbestimmung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997). 8

16 unprecedented anti-jewish and ultimately all-european onslaught or grew to despair in the face of terrible and worsening news (and sometimes both could be the case) prior to the Hungarian catastrophe of 1944, Hungarian Jews did leave many still understudied, though partly published documents that reflect this historical process. 13 I have chosen the three case studies from among a number of possible options with several criteria in mind, the main one being their representative nature in different areas. 14 The IMIT yearbooks were a chief forum of established, mainstream Hungarian Jewish scholarly discourse, 15 Libanon of up-to-date insights, cultural conceptions and new plans and Ararát of political ideas, historical narratives (usually of crises) and literary 13 For a similar perspective on the Polish Jewish inter-war, see Katrin Steffen, Jüdische Polonitaet. Ethicitaet und Nation im Spiegel der polnischsprachigen jüdischen Presse, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). 14 Other journals that could have been included but either did not quite fit the comparison or were studied elsewhere are Egyenlőség and Múlt és Jövő. The politically central organ of Neolog Jewry, Egyenlőség, stopped appearing in 1938, which would have excluded the final and the most tension-ridden years of the period under consideration. On the earlier heydays of this liberal but highly combative organ Miklós Konrád has recently published empirical studies. See, for instance, Miklós Konrád, A neológ zsidóság útkeresése a századfordulón in Századok, 2005/6., pp See also the important memoirs of Lajos Szabolcsi, Két emberöltő: Az Egyenlőség évtizedei, (Budapest: MTA Judaisztikai Kutatócsoport, 1993). Múlt és Jövő, a secular cultural Zionist venture was already the subject of an extensive recent study by the chief editor of its revived (post-1988) version, János Kőbányai who wrote a dissertation about it at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Hungarian under the supervision of Michael K. Silber. 15 An alternative to the IMIT yearbooks would have been Magyar Zsidó Szemle, a crucial Jewish studies periodical in Hungarian (though it also published materials in Hebrew and occasionally German). Magyar Zsidó Szemle was started in 1884 and served as an officially organ of the Rabbinical Seminary after Prior to its current series that was started in 2004, Magyar Zsidó Szemle released a total of 65 volumes. I decided against studying it (and in favor of the IMIT yearbooks) mainly for the reason that its discussions tended to be more technical and thus of less interest for wider publics. At the same time, many of its contributors also appear in the IMIT yearbooks, resulting in a highly significant amount of overlapping content. I counted 25 authors who both published in Magyar Zsidó Szemle between 1927 and 1941 and appear in the main text of my chapters on the IMIT yearbooks (Ernő Ballagi, Lajos Blau, Sándor Büchler, Imre Csetényi, Dénes Friedman, Izidor Goldberger, Zsigmond Groszmann, Henrik Guttmann, Mihály Guttmann, István Hahn, Bernát Heller, Ármin Kecskeméti, Arnold Kiss, Bertalan Kohlbach, Ottó Komlós, Sámuel Krausz, Ernő Munkácsi, Sándor Scheiber, Samu Szemere, Pál Takács, Pál Vidor, Pál Weisz, Adolf Wertheimer, Salamon Widder, Ernő Winkler). Magyar Zsidó Szemle was slightly shorter than the IMIT yearbooks: it was released between 1927 and 1941 on altogether 4322 pages, with much more variation as issues of the individual volumes could amount to anything between 84 (as in 1938) and 516 pages (as in 1931) at this time. It was edited by Lajos Blau, Simon Hevesi and Dénes Friedman, once also by Miksa Weisz, from the 1930s Simon Hevesi served as chief editor and was helped by Sámuel Lőwinger, Mihály Guttmann, Ferenc Hevesi and Henrik Guttmann. In the volumes of 1927 and 1932 Lajos Blau made by far most contributions (in 1930, he made 22, while no one else made more than one). The three main sections of Magyar Zsidó Szemle were titled Society, Scholarship and Literature, but some of its issues also included Homiletics, Pedagogy, Sources and Chronics. 9

17 compositions. Moreover, all three periodicals cover more or less the entire period under consideration here, thus allowing me to trace the discoursive shifts towards the peak of the crisis. Although the length of original source materials differs between the three chosen cases, these three were still the most comparable in terms of volume, as well as in terms of evenness and reliability of publication. Finally, while some of the other journals have been dealt with elsewhere, the in-depth study of these three offers fresh empirical evidence, adding to our knowledge of interwar Hungarian Jewish discourses. The IMIT yearbooks (IMIT évkönyvek in original), whose pages and more than 200 scholarly articles constitute the main body of four consecutive empirical chapters, was the annual publication of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society). These fifteen yearbooks consist mainly of lecture transcripts (which in their turn were attended by audiences of several hundred people) that were delivered with the aim of presenting and popularizing scholarly topics and findings. The IMIT yearbooks focused on Jewish historical and cultural themes, featuring mainly two kinds of articles: on Hungarian Jewish topics and on topics of general Jewish concern. IMIT started its new series in 1929 and continued to appear until 1943, which makes it a veritable treasury of in-depth information about Hungarian Jewish scholarship in the inter-war period, also before the onslaught of increasingly stricter and more encompassing discrimination. Libanon was a precious new periodical offering reflections on Jewish culture and several programmatic articles. Its contents also reflected historical developments in revealing ways. Initially, the journal was edited by teachers of the Jewish Gymnasium in Pest and began appearing three years after the Nazi regime was established but still shortly before the first general anti-jewish law was adopted in Hungary (i.e. more severe than the specifically 10

18 education-related numerus clauses of 1920). Since it could continue as the official organ of the Jewish Museum in the 1940s, Libanon was released all the way until the end of Ararát was series of yearbooks that first appeared when the general Hungarian legal discrimination against Jews was already in place. Ararát was released during the years of the Second World War with the help of the Association of Israelite Women of Pest and for charitable purposes. It was even published, one last time, for the catastrophic year of Ararát features a number of intriguing Jewish literary and political pieces, making it one of the prime examples of Hungarian Jewish intellectual courage and resistance in these years. While the five main themes of the analysis (the Jewish Hungarian Jewish discourse on Jewish identity, relations, culture, politics and history) are the red threads that run through the study, the themes of the individual chapters vary in accordance with the specific contents of the sources. In the case of IMIT, I devote an introductory chapter to describe the profile of the association which published the yearbooks and narrate the story of the yearbooks in the period under scrutiny. This introductory chapter, which also presents an overview of the ways in which the publishers and authors of IMIT understood its position and intentions, is followed by three empirical chapters dealing with the contents of the yearbooks. Chapter III is a study on collective identity discourses exploring Hungarian Jewish identity options and the evaluation of main modern Jewish traditions. It also attempts to reveal the contours of the dominant Jewish scholarly position. Chapter IV, titled On the Historicity, Values and Roles of Jewry, aims to unpack the rather abstract discourse on Jewish specificities, central values and historicity through thematic clustering of the relevant articles. It also analyzes the chief form of apologetic discourse, namely the one on Jewish contributions. Chapter V scrutinizes the history of the present in the discourse of this central 11

19 forum of Hungarian Jewish scholarship, comparing various descriptions of the present and tracing their evolution. The history of the present is also addressed through the examples of two more concrete discussions: of developments in Palestine and the Zionist movement and of German culture and might, Nazism, the Second World War and, ultimately, the genocide of European Jewry. The subject of Chapter VI is the journal Libanon. Following the structure introduced with IMIT, I first present the keycharacteristics of this source. The main aims of this chapter are, first, to understand the formulations of various models of Jewish culture and account for the diversity of foundational ideas of this text-based Jewish subculture and, second, to explore the impact of time and tremendous historical changes on Hungarian Jewish perspectives as it transpires through this rather unique source. Unlike the IMIT yearbooks, which show only more gradual changes of content, Libanon reveals some highly significant shifts that are worthy of detailed attention. Chapter VII is reserved for the discussion of the Ararát yearbooks, and begins with an analysis of the elaborate but contested ideas and plans of Aladár Komlós to define Hungarian Jewish literature and and develop its literary history. The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the various political-ideological platforms and divergent historical narratives, most of them tracing the origins of the contemporary crisis. Finally, the concluding chapter summarizes and brings together the findings of the six empirical chapters and suggests future directions of inquiry. 12

20 II. The Challenge of Jewish Intellectual History Having briefly introduced the theme, aims and sources, as well as the potential relevance and chapter structure of the dissertation, let me devote some pages to a historiographical sketch of recent developments surrounding the Hungarian Jewish historical theme, in order to contextualise my intellectual historical approach. The aim of this brief subchapter is to highlight the recent revival of Hungarian Jewish historiography, its achievements, as well as the areas that still remain to be explored. 16 It also outlines the general contours of local intellectual historical scholarship and explains the relatively novel nature of my efforts to bring these two developments together. Finally, it suggests some ways in which the intellectual historical approach, meticulously engaging the rich and underexplored source base, could contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Hungarian Jewish history in the modern period as a whole. As noted, contemporary Hungarian Jewish historiography is marked by a surge in the number of novel works exploring this previously understudied area, but also by some notable gaps in scholarship. Relative neglect of some potentially fruitful approaches stands out as a problem in its own right. This has much to do with the fact that in the postwar period all the way until 1989, the discussion on Hungarian Jewish topics, including Hungarian Jewish history, was minimal. Most attempts to address this vital aspect of 16 The gaps in Hungarian scholarship on this topic stand out especially if we compare intellectual historical publications on Hungarian Jewish themes with similar works on German Jewish topics. Among works that could be of particular interest for the Hungarian context (although the list is by no means exhaustive), I would single out the collection of insightful articles by Steven Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (London and New York: Macmillan and New York University Press, 1996) and David N. Myers, Resisting History. Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003). See also the forthcoming monograph of Malachi Haim Hacohen, Jacob and Esau Between Nation and Empire: The Central European Jewish Intelligentsia, (2011),as well as the comparative works by Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2005) and David Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000). 13