István Deák and Hungarian Jewish History

One of the perks of being a student of István Deák was learning lesser-known aspects of European history that were unfamiliar, at times even to other historians. Case in point: during the question-and-answer session of a conference panel dealing with the Habsburg Monarchy, in which (coincidentally perhaps) none of the papers presented dealt with Hungary, a member of the audience who was a Deák trainee noted the “distinctly Cisleithanian” bias of the session. The chair of the panel, an expert in Russian and European history but not Habsburg history, paused the ongoing discussion to inquire: “Cisleithanian?” I, along with the other Deák disciples in attendance, casually explained this apparently arcane term for the Austrian side of the monarchy. Years later, I had a similar experience regarding the title of my book on the Jews of Budapest, Transleithanian Paradise.1The privilege of studying with István Deák and belonging forever after to the cohort of Deák students transcends exposure to the taxonomy and terminology of Habsburg history. Our beloved Doktorvater guided us through the labyrinth of one of the more complex and convoluted regions of Europe, whose history often stubbornly refused to conform to the basic paradigms of European history; inter alia, East versus West, modern versus premodern, and change versus continuity. The mishmosh of tradition and backwardness (conventionally associated with Eastern Europe) with progress and change (conventionally associated with Western Europe) compelled us to look beyond Whig interpretations of European history and to construct instead a more complex blend of change and continuity. To cite one example: the notion that the assault by liberalism on hereditary privilege necessarily went hand in hand with the decline of the nobility was belied by its Hungarian incarnation, where Hungarian nobles were the harbingers and most ardent champions of liberalism—as István Deák showed in his magisterial study of Lajos Kossuth.2 The Hungarian/Habsburg context liberated us from an entrenched paradigm and challenged us to understand both nobility and liberalism in a more fluid historical framework and context.For those of us who studied Hungarian and Habsburg Jewish History with István, moreover, his insistence on engaging complexity was no less indispensable and liberating, not least of all in the study of Jewish emancipation. One of the topics that István and I discussed at length was the evolving symbiotic relationship between Hungarian Jews and the Hungarian nobility. I entered these discussions with an understanding of Jewish emancipation defined by the experiences of Jews in France and Germany. That is, I understood Jewish emancipation and de-emancipation in Hungary largely in terms of a series of legal pronouncements: Joseph II’s Toleranzpatent [Patent of Tolerance], Law XXVIII of 1840 that removed many occupational and residential restrictions on Jews; the short-lived Emancipation Edict of 1849 and the Emancipation Edict of 1868; the Reception Law of 1895 that placed Judaism on equal footing with other religions; and the anti-Jewish laws of the 1920s and 1930s that ultimately undid all of the above. Foregrounding these legal acts, notwithstanding their significance and impact, meant trying to force a round Hungarian Jewish history into the square European Jewish history of emancipation.Instead, István helped me situate Hungarian Jewry’s path to civic equality in the broader framework of the complex relationship between Jews and the state in Hungary. This meant, first and foremost, recognizing that it is impossible, or at least wholly inadequate, to understand the notion of Jews in Hungary being granted civic equality by the state without understanding that “the state” in the Hungarian context meant the preeminent political role of the Hungarian nobility. Understanding the relationship between Jews and the state thus meant unraveling the evolving symbiotic relationship between Jewry and nobility in Hungary, particularly the relationship between Jews and their magnate patrons. After all, on a fundamental level, Jewish settlement in Hungary relied initially on the permission and protection of the Hungarian magnates to settle in market towns like Óbuda and Pápa. Later, it relied on the nobility’s ability and willingness to overrule local restrictions on Jewish settlement in royal free cities like Pest, Debrecen, and Székesfehérvár (István’s home town). Ultimately, the dramatic expansion and development of Hungarian Jewry during the nineteenth century was symptomatic of an ever more intricate noble-Jewish symbiosis that started as a series of commercial relationships between individual Jews and their magnate benefactor, and eventually matured into Jews becoming full citizens of a noble-dominated Hungarian state and embraced by a nobility-fashioned Magyar nemzet [nation].All of this instilled an enterprising student not only with a more nuanced understanding of emancipation, in Hungary and elsewhere, but also a useful framework within which to understand the identities of Hungarian Jews and, among other things, a clearer way to situate the often elusive Neolog Judaism in the framework of Jewish identities elsewhere in the Jewish world. Simply put, Neolog does not fit comfortably within the more well-known American-Jewish or German-Jewish spectra of religious identities. It is neither Reform, nor Conservative, nor Positive-Historical, nor Neo-Orthodox. In a Hungarian framework, one in which Jews often emulated the nobles rather than a largely nonexistent non-Jewish middle class, Neolog makes better sense. In the same way noble proponents of liberalism blended a thirst for political and social innovation with a firm defense of traditional hereditary privilege, so too Neolog advocated changes but insisted on rooting them all in a traditional framework of precedent and custom. This unselfconscious straddling of the old and the new was facilitated by a Magyar nationalism that defined membership in the Magyar nation largely by linguistic acculturation—a Magyar-speaking Jew, regardless of religious outlook and practice, was a Magyar of the Jewish persuasion. The notion that somehow Jews could not be Magyars, entrenched elsewhere through much of the nineteenth century, gained traction in Hungary only post-Trianon, when the noble-Jewish symbiosis crashed on the shores of a war, a revolution, and a traumatic truncation of the Kingdom of Hungary into “rump” Hungary.

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