Losing Ground? Hungarian Jewish Business Elites Facing the Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

• In Event: Violence, Virtue, and VATERLAND: Hungarian Jewish Responses to the Long Great War

Abstract

While antisemitic narratives often blamed Hungarian Jews for the dismemberment of historical Hungary after 1918, the actual economic losses and benefits that the Jewish population of the country endured due to the territorial changes is a less explored territory. This paper investigates how the disintegration of the Monarchy affected the business networks and assets of Hungarian Jewish businessmen, and how they attempted to retain their prewar influence in interwar East Central Europe of economically protectionist nation-states. Furthermore, the presentation also raises the question to what extent the explicit political discrimination of Jews in Hungary and the administrative discrimination of Jews in Transylvania went hand in hand with the economic pushback of Jewish investors in the two countries after 1918.

The devaluation of currencies coupled with political instability and the breakdown of prewar trading networks undermined the value of companies, factories and mines, which impeded the convertibility of prewar fortunes into postwar assets. My focus will be on Transylvania, and the negotiations of Ferenc Chorin and Henrik Fellner, two major investors in the region, with Western business partners as well as the representatives of the Romanian state administration to save their assets in Transylvania from nationalization. Through the analysis of the papers of Chorin’s Salgó Corporation, I investigate how the businessmen avoided the liquidation of their property by forming a nominally Romanian company in which the management remained in the hands of Budapest-based business groups.

In addition, I will explore attempts at recreating a united East Central Europe through the forging of economic ties between the successor states of the Monarchy. More specifically, I will be analyzing Chorin’s initiative to establish a Hungarian-Romanian chamber of commerce amidst rising Hungarian irredentism and Romanian economic protectionism. While politically the rapprochement between the two hostile countries was impossible, their economic interests required commercial cooperation, and Jewish investors in Hungary and Romania played a key role in forging ties between the two countries. Far from completely losing ground in Romania, I analyze how sovereignty change in Transylvania created new economic opportunities for the Hungarian Jewish business elite of the region.

author

• Mate Rigo, Cornell University